JLH Design Blog

Okay, Google has been caching my home page daily, which is nice, but now I feel obligated to give it something to see everyday…

The Windup

More and more I am seeing sites that have suffered in the search results which are heavily laden with affiliate links. After further review, they are not just affiliate links but usually affiliate content as well. You know the kind, the millions and millions of travel affiliate sites that set up spammy looking names like cheap-florida-hotels.cheap-travel-and-viagra.com. Oh people come up with cute foolish names like the -30 penalty or the -950 penalty, but they are all the same; My site used to rank, and today it doesn’t. In other words Google used to like it but now figured out that your site actually suffers from MSSA.

The Delivery

I’m not going to tell all you affiliate marketers out there how to do your job, there’s a place for you in this world. Feel free to spend your time registering your domain, finding a good cheap host*, designing a template, and injecting your affiliate product descriptions. But when Google figures out that your content is available on 949 other sites already, don’t be surprised that it ends up #950 or even not in the index. Now here’s where most of these sites fail in this game in that they then worry about why their site is missing from the index. They’ll spend countless hours on the forums** asking why, rearrange the feeds, mess with their H1 & H2 headers, change page titles, all for the relentless pursuit of trying to get Google to index junk that they already have many copies of.

The Pros

Your affiliate site isn’t alone, actually there are millions out there, and some people are making millions doing it. The difference however is that the real pros don’t sweat over one little site falling apart, they take the shot-gun approach and just throw up hundreds of copies of the same stuff, in different order, with different themes, different styles, a few lines of text changed here and there. Some, if not all of the sites eventually get banned, but the real Pro doesn’t care because they’ve moved on to another couple hundreds sites already. They make hay when the sun shines and covert their customers while the site gets visitors and then abandon it after it doesn’t.

The Amateur

Now the amateur affiliate webmaster does the exact same thing as the Pro, but they only do it with one site, and when that one site inevitably fails they waste their time trying to figure out why. You see, there is nothing separating you supposed-white-hatters from the black-hatters except scale and the fact that the black-hatters have figured out what the important thing to worry about is, enjoying your rankings while you have them.

Copying affiliate descriptions and sending your visitor to another site for conversion is just as much spam if you’ve got 1 or 10,000 sites, no matter how well intentioned you are. Just because your heart and soul into your one site doesn’t make it any more valuable to the search engine than the script written one by the real Pro.

The Answer

Instead of mimicking the black-hatter in every way except scale, which will only doom you to failure, why not actually adopt a white-hat approach and design and write an actual website? You may feel all white-hatty because you don’t cloak, don’t hide text, don’t buy links, etc, but copying freely distributed content is anything but pure white-hat. Oh it may be completely legal and ethical, but of little value. Anything you copy from a database or product description that is available anywhere else on the Internet is worthless and to be avoided. Actually sit down and write your own copy, inject it with affiliate links (nofollowed of course, you good little Cuttlets)

Adam Lasnik ( freaky favicon and all) has hinted many times over that you should always ask yourself if your site adds to the Internet. Rehashing and rearranging in a different font, and with different CSS Styles that you spend hours on does not count as value, its only presentation.

That’s enough for now, but be aware that the web is getting full and we don’t need any more sites with cheap hotels already available elsewhere or “reviews” telling me which books I should buy*, and neither does Google, which is why they are pruning the index of them.

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