Google is the affiliate

[pokeraussie]

This article was posted in another thread on PAL but it likely didn't get much attention.

Google's highly profitable secret war against small businesses and jobs | ZDNet

Interesting food for thought.

I think its fairly obvious that google is driving more traffic to its own properties. Once the company was publicly listed this was inevitable. What concerns me even more though is adwords seems to be getting displayed above the organic results and not just in the sidebar. This is happening for ALOT of SERPs that I am looking at anyway.

It's almost like google has said fuck it, what are you going to do about it, we have a monopoly in search, the other alternatives are rubbish, so you will still use us either way.

As an affiliate you're considered a thin affiliate if your site is covered with ads and you're light on content. Yet the adsense department advises that you take advantage of the maximum number of ad units to increase revenue. There are just so many double standards with google.

But until google has a serious competitor its hard to see how the next few years will get any better. Am I being overly pessimistic? Has affiliate marketing become less appealing to you?

[Sebastian]

Wasn't impressed with this article at all, although it's from a good source - Some quotes were simply taken out of context.

What Matt Cutts said was relative to how machine learning is used in Panda, ie they create different groups of sites based on Google Reviewer rating : so Wall Street Journal, Examiner, and the rest . The reviewer guidelines document didn't mention brand value at all as a factor. Additionally Google said that these ratings from Reviewers won't affect search results (in this context, not in the context of a manual review for penalty) . Common sense also tells you there would be too much user error to rely on random individuals. So a better idea for Google is to manually rate a huge amount of physical sites (and hire a lot of raters.... that's why the document leaked) and then extrapolate the user engagement / user behavior metrics from each group. *Then* the algorithm looks at your site and sees how your metrics correlate with those of well rated sites.

The other quote: "Affiliates are an unnecessary step in the sales funnel" was for Adwords, not for organic search.

The story that the G+ launch was a diversion to make war to affiliates is pretty laughable to me. I do agree they favor sites that have brand value, but affiliates sites can have brand value too.

As you said Google is an affiliate themselves, because it simply is a great business model. An affiliate site is just a website with ads. An ad is not a bullseye. What matters most is the quality of the website.

My 2 cents

[pokerworx]

Google is skynet. That is all.

[leporello]

Not sure if anyone else reads this SEO blog, but it's one my favourites. He always does awesome analysis of the patents acquired by google and potential impact on search:

2 recent related posts he wrote were:

How Human Evaluators Might Help Decide Upon Rankings for Search Results at Google

and

How Automated Evaluations Might Help Decide Upon Rankings for Search Results at Google

Anyway even his older stuff is worth reading imo as it provides some awesome insight into how the SEs might process stuff and potential ranking signals.