REVENEWS -- Nov 7 -- Google has become increasingly concerned with user experience, and now consider any affiliate pages with the sole purpose of driving traffic to a merchant as low quality. Updates this year sent many affiliate marketers back to the drawing board. There's another update coming in the next few days. "Advertisers who may be providing a poor experience on their site will notice that their traffic across the content network decreases as a result of this change." If there's nothing to do on a landing page but click on an affiliate link, you can be sure that they'll be coming down on that sooner or later. What's an affiliate marketer to do? 1. Link direct. as long as the merchant is ok with it, Google has no problem with affiliates advertising on behalf of merchants. 2. Add Value. Do something that says, "this site has something to offer other than a link to a merchant." Privacy policies, contact information, unique content, and user signups. Read Google's landing page quality guidelines for some clues about what they're looking for. FULL ARTICLE @ RVENEWS
Mark Brooks: and I hope they figure out a way to clamp down on splogs and site scrapers in the process.