Forum Moderators: martinibuster
No more indexible link text from your links, can no longer modify links, PPC links only from the keyword link.
Why would they want to do that?
I think their going to leave in droves.
Worse for CJ - the Merchants are looking around asking "what's in it for us?"
cju.cj.com/advertisers/branding/trademark_best.html
and that seems like the biggest thing it may affect - making it more difficult to get top rankings for TMs in the SERPs, which for affiliates are golden. Bigger sites with lots of internal link text will make it through best if all links to merchants go to JavaScript.
Organic TM search referrals must power a tremendous amount of sales for CJ, maybe much more than they realize, coupon sites are built from them and for most any merchant it seem like you are easily a top-5 to 20 affiliate if you can rank top-5 for variations of the brand terms just from pulling SEO referrals.
Take out all that brand traffic that affiliates snag and affiliate programs for some merchants might look like really bad investments.
If they go through with this, Shopping.com, BizRate, Y! Shopping, Amazon, PriceGrabber, etc... win big time. CJ's Price Runner potentially has a lot less competition from CJ affiliates. Most merchants either have no idea how it works or don't give a $hit but are much better off having affiliates rank for thier brand instead of Amazon who charges around 15% of sales but keeps the customer info & just passes along the order.
And watch conversion rates plummet. Ranking for "brand name product" is one of my biggest strengths in the engines. If they think I won't STILL rank for their brand and simply throw the traffic to a competitor, they're sadly mistaken.
If it is to stop affiliates from competing with merchants for brand and product terms, CJ should lose a fortune and the Shopping.com's, Ebays & Amazons of the net should see a surge in revenue.
If it is to roll out behavioral targeting in the affiliate network, it will increase revenue from the plain content sites becuse it will serve up relevant ads based on people's surfing behavior. That is great if you are a CNN or about.com because you can trun worthless ROS inventory to gold, or at least silver.
If behavioral targeting is rolled out on coupon sites, product comparison sites, or anything else that is promoting a specific product or merchant, it will probably wreck havoc on the presentation and the mix of links and content on the site...
Seems like it is all just speculation floating around at the moment.
