Affiliate Sites - Destiny or 950?

2 different sites, both affiliates, same result

[Gshaughn]

My client's site shared top 'insurance' related keyword positions in Google with another affiliate competitor for quite some time. We both suffer from the '950' symptoms (gone for high volume keywords, here today, gone for a week for medium volume keywords, and still holding some top spots for low volume keywords). Initially I thought GG had it out for affiliates and targeted us specifically, until reading about non-affilate sites that were affected. None of my non-affiliate clients suffered any loss of rankings, but all of my affiliate site clients did.

1) were the '950' changes put in effect to limit/remove affiliate sites from the index? 2) are sites affected by 950 because of a commonality both non-affiliate/affiliates share alike? 3) were any affiliate sites NOT affected? (I have noticed a couple in the SERPs - one with the form on their site, the other in a different program, but clearly an affiliate)

I contacted my competitor and we discussed each other's sites to try to find a commonality aside from both being in the same affiliate program. I wanted to share this information because it is a rough case study of 2 different sites that suffered the same 950 fate. Here are some interesting differences.

SITE A / SITE B
.org site / .com site
affiliate form on page / affiliate form iframed
no paid links / a lot of paid links (relevant & non-relevant)
registry acct. with multiple sites / one registry acct. w/ one site
content consumer focused / content sales-call to action focused
registered in 1994 / registered in 2003
in DMOZ / not in DMOZ
not in AdWords / in AdWords

Ultimately everyone wants to know why/how GG laid a 950 on them. I do too, but I am curious as to the motivation behind it, specifically if GG did this to target affiliates. For 2 different sites to have ranked so well in their own right to be hit in the same manner is interesting. What is the commonality beside being in the same affiliate program? If GG is targeting affiliates, by what means are they identifying them? Is this identification also affecting other non-affiliates negatively? Does GG have it out for affiliates? How were a few affiliates able to dodge this identification?

Any thoughts?

[Brett_Tabke]

I think Google answered this one:

[webmasterworld.com...]