Pixelrage.net

Google Caffeine, the new roll-out of Google’s indexing system, was released exactly two weeks ago this very day. It resulted in immediate bitching from every corner of the affiliate marketing world, claiming favoritism for big business and the death of affiliate stores as we know it. Others simply freaked out over massive traffic dips and loss of rankings. The most puzzling part is deciding whether it’s due to Caffeine, or the natural dip in internet activity over the summer…or both?

It’s important for any SEO in the USA to keep one thing in mind – it may be the beginning of our summer, but it’s not the case elsewhere in the world. I’m keeping a close eye on forum posts from Europe, Asia & elsewhere – it seems like everyone has a general complaint about Caffeine in one way or another. Especially affiliates. There goes the summer traffic hypothesis.

As for me? I was hit hard – I’m running over a dozen sites, and nearly every one of them has gotten a severe hit in traffic – even my 10 year old video site. Take a look at just a few sites. Yeah, ouch:

In taking a closer look at Caffeine, it appears to have been refined greatly (check out this article from Mashable on the subject). Reliance on old SEO practices have less weight and bow down to relevancy, which comes from assumptions due to social networking trends; accuracy, which comes from keywords (that includes synonyms!) and newness – think “late breaking news,” the Associated Press will probably get serious love from that aspect. There are even speculations that exact-name domains mean more with the new update (i.e., Cars.com ranking for “cars”).

Does Google Caffeine Hate Affiliate Marketers?

The biggest complaint amongst affiliate marketers is that the new system favors big brands rather than small affiliates. Whether that’s true or not, I really don’t know and reserve judgment…however, if you’re running a “thin affiliate” site, then you’re more than likely going to feel a lot of pain. Affiliate sites with little or no content are getting hit worse than ever – just visit any internet marketing forum and read the hysteria to see what I mean.

Things will only get worse for affiliate marketers on Google, especially if it puts a heavier weight on social networking activity. How the hell are you supposed to advertise your eBay affiliate store on social networks? It’s going to be a nearly wasted effort, because nobody is going to want to bookmark or suggest your used carburetor affiliate site to anyone else. The rules of advertising article, video, blog and service sites do not apply to affiliate stores. If your affiliate store is mostly hand-written content as its focus, that may be a different story.

Continued Worries with Google’s Algorithm

There’s no doubt about it, I’m worried about what’s happening to Google. Some sites simply can’t get new content on a regular basis, nor would they “fit” with social networking…so, they should be punished for it? This is still unknown. In the meantime, I’m going to keep pushing my efforts on Yahoo and Bing. The traffic is less, but it’s more predictable and neither are known to roll out indexing updates to the extremes that Google takes them.

It certainly doesn’t help to get hit with summer lag on top of this fiasco, either! It’s a good thing I don’t rely solely on affiliate marketing income to pay the bills. How has Caffeine affected your online efforts?