Pixelrage.net

December 2011 came and went, and to my dismay, it was the worst month of affiliate sales in my recent career thanks to the severe loss of search engine rankings due to Google’s brand favoritism.

It’s no secret that Google openly hates affiliate marketers and favors big brands, and that Google isn’t even a search engine anymore but a gigantic carnival of yellowbox AdWords ads, unfairly advantaged page-1 product suggestions, price comparisons with thumbnail images, and once you scroll *wayyy* down past all of it, you’ll see organic results dominated by big brand Fortune 100 and 500 companies; but it doesn’t really start to hurt until you see your bottom line.

(By bottom line, I’m talking about the graph on my eBay Partner Network dashboard, which took a nose-dive).

In fact, December 2011 was a crushing blow for me. It was the absolute worst month of 2011 in regard to eBay affiliate earnings. If you looked at my reports from 2006-present, you’d see that December has always netted around 3x the average of what I make per month, per year. It’s amazing what a de-ranking of certain keywords will do. Just moving from position 3 to position 5 on page 1 is enough to make me lose $500/month. $500/month is a lot to me. But, how about losing page 1, position 3  and going to page 4?

As I wrote previously, Google torched one of my biggest affiliate storefronts and it was a virtual ‘mortal wound’ to my earnings, of which I’m still trying to recover from by working from 8 AM – 1 AM every day on new campaigns and ideas. You can’t help but to feel as though it’s pointless, since even the search results for what used to be considered “long tail keywords” are dominated by big brands and wrapped in a shitload of paid ads that clouds what used to be a clean search engine interface.

What I find funny is that a second of my oldest affiliate storefronts — totaling about 500 pages of content and eBay feeds — enjoyed a long period of Google success due to low competition for a certain keyword. Now, that site was just recently de-ranked about 8 positions, and a big nation-wide brand now takes its place. The said brand has a website that looks like it was built in HTML and ASP back in 1997, with search engine un-friendly URLs and well over 100 links on its home page. But hey, it’s a big brand – so it deserves precedence over my vastly more helpful and content-filled website. At least, that’s what Google thinks.

The Sinking Ship Known As the Affiliate Storefront

Never before have I been so overwhelmed with fear about my career path. It seems like the old tried and true formula of “creating great content” that was SEO’ed properly and discreetly with helpful articles and good backlinks was all you needed to get predictable earnings, within a given range, every month for years. Then came Google Panda, a bastard of an algorithm that puts some websites before more deserving ones for the sole reason of being a “brand” (whatever that word equates to in algorithmic terms) and also being a company who can afford to pay hundreds of dollars per day on AdWords (that’s probably the definition of a “brand”).

As upsetting and negative as this all looks, I strangely see it as a calling. It makes me think that I’ve been doing the wrong thing for a long time – and that is, relying on 3rd party programs like eBay and Amazon, being a slave to unreasonable, conspiracy-laden search engines like G$$gle, and working harder than necessary to keep having to “prove” that my site is helpful and joining the fray of “cheaters” by “building backlinks.”

It’s insane. Just think about it.

With an affiliate store, you’re basically on a sinking dinghy in waters filled with battleships and aircraft carriers with corporate logos on them. It’s over. Your last resolve goes back to the phrase, “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” Be a brand name…that is. (Or, however that’s done, in algorithmic terms).

Thankfully, my strategy of never putting all of my eggs into one basket paid off – other channels, especially Squidoo, have been doing better than ever. Why? Because I’m building pages off of a brand, and Google favors brands.

So, instead of running a store powered by affiliate feeds and being punished by Google because you’re not physically selling products or owning the end-result site yourself, why not create your own local classified or auction site and keep 100% of the profit? Buy a good aftermarket domain for a couple thousand bucks, build a new WordPress site on it, hire a plugin developer, and slowly make the transition.

You’ll thank yourself later this year, which is probably when the rest of your ship will be underwater.