Google Quality Assessors Guidelines - a Serious Flaw?

[superclown2]

Rumour has it that Google quality assessors are instructed to detect which websites belong to 'true merchants', by checking for such things as shopping carts, return policies, etc. True merchants are deemed to be good, affiliates are bad. What is not addressed though is the fact that many 'true merchants' are also affiliates themselves.

A merchant (what we sometimes refer to as a 'Brand') may sell widgets, but not red widgets, oval widgets, or talking widgets. It can still sell these products as an affiliate however, using just a couple of hundred words of lightweight text, buried amongst reams of ads for it's own products, and survive a manual review, whereas a 'true affiliate' with many pages of clear, focussed information which is really useful to a searcher is labelled 'webspam' and penalised.

The result? A poorer quality experience for visitors, and greater difficulty for those searching for information; something there is a rising clamour about amongst webmasters.

The objective of the manual assesment programme is laudable, it is in all of our interests that people continue to use the Internet more and more for finding and purchasing products but the current guidelines have had the unfortunate side effect of encouraging merchants/brands to venture, as affiliates, into all sorts of vaguely related products that they do not have any real expertise in but which they can, nevertheless, dominate, to the disadvantage of visitors. Time for the guidelines to be looked at again, perhaps?

[tedster]

whereas a 'true affiliate' with many pages of clear, focussed information which is really useful to a searcher is labelled 'webspam' and penalised.

That's not the understanding I have. Google's contrasting phrase is a "thin affiliate", not a "true affiliate". Raters are also trained to understand that "not all affiliates are thin affiliates". I think that training is purposed to address the situation you describe.

[superclown2]

@Tedster; it probably is in theory but I don't see it working in practice.

Assessor's are, more or less, told that a merchant site cannot be a spammer (even though their affiliate content may be so thin it is invisible when turned sideways). Nowhere in that document is it spelt out that some merchants can be affiliates too.

The keyphrases I monitor are increasingly dominated by merchant/affiliates with the thinnest of content whilst good content sites are being penalised.

If the same quality tests were applied to these sites, as are applied to purely affiliate sites, the SERPs (at least for the keyphrases in question) would improve dramatically IMO.

[balibones]

Does anyone have examples of "merchant affiliates" outside of the health and wellness (e.g. supplements) space?

PS: One of the things we've done on our affiliate sites is to make sure they ALL have a TOS and Privacy Policy, as well as contact information (phone and address) that match our whois information. Ideally an affiliate wouldn't have people calling them, but a couple of phone calls a day and some spam-snail-mail is worth being more "trustworthy" in the eyes of quality raters and algorithms.

[Bewenched]

@superclown2
I've seen the same thing, I was searching for something in the automotive industry... was searching manufacturer name and part number the first three sites that came up in unpaid search results were very thin pages and they were all amazon affiliates.