Affiliate Landing Pages

How do you avoid being hit by quality score?

[vphoner]

Being an affiliate is a special animal, and google is penalizing affiliate pages. Anyone out there that has an affiliate page that sells products for the affiliate and uses google adwords and has NOT been shut down? If so, what are the things that you do that avoid your site from being of "low quality" by google.

Should we have affliate links on the landing page, or link to other pages on our site that have the affiliate links? Does this impact their quality score? Its hard to know. I called and they just say "add more unique content". Thats easier said than done when you are specifically selling products. Google claims that your affiliate site gives no more information than going to the parent site itself.

Well of course. Thats always been the way. The affiliate posts information on products and then they click through to the parent
to make the sale.

Any workarounds to this in regards to making your affiliate site acceptable to google?

I have heard things like adding "about us", "privacy" and other info helps.

One google rep said that after I make changes to get a new domain name. That does not seem to be a great idea, if you have a great domain name and have it established. I really hate what they have done and the situations they have put us in. (Especially affiliates).

[RockSolidWes]

1) Understand the mindset of your visitors. Make sure you provide something that they will be interested in. For your affiliate site, you will have to provide something that makes them interested. It is much harder to do this for very broad keywords (e.g. Ford). Are they interested in the car, president, foundation, performing art center, library, ect. -- try making your keyword list more refined and specific to your product you are selling.

2) Unique content can be external links. Or product comparisons. (If you are an affiliate for a book, show related books as well).

3) Have a menu bar navigation, with links to related products (but less related than a side-by-side comparisson as in Tip #2). This give people options and increases stickyness.

4) Ask your affiliate program for additional content. Many affiliates give content out to help publish. Put this on your website and edit it with links to the company and external links.

5) Go local. Make your site unique by adjusting it to a local crowd. Geo target and make the user feel special. (e.g. special deal for NY residents). I'd geo target by State and create 50 landing pages and write a little extra content unique for each states' opinion.

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It is going to take work, but try and make your site unique. come up with new angles and slants on the same products. I'm sure there are many more ways to accomplish this.

[vphoner]

Thanks for the advice. Actually my site is unique in the way I compare products and give reviews. But its not enough.

I saw a quote on another message board. It really sums it up and should be the mantra of those that think Google is now unpredictable, unfathomable, and unreliable. Here it is:

"I don't have the time and the patience right now to play keyword roulette on Google."

KEYWORD ROULETTE......or should we call it Russian Roulette.