If you’ve been keeping up with my posts lately, you’ve noticed a strong anti-Google sentiment, fear over being a full-time affiliate marketer in this wonderful new year, and overall gloom over what appears to be Google’s all-out tirade against affiliate marketing as we know it.

Anyway, one of my websites which predictably pulled in about $3,000 per month for years through eBay Partner Network has been almost entirely de-indexed, has lost 70% of its traffic and is earning somewhere around $200/month. This was due to the site being completely pulled from four distinct keyword terms, of which I ranked #1 for. As for my site itself, it has a little over 500 pages — each of which has around 200 words of personally-written copy that wasn’t spun, nor keyword saturated. Page titles are clear and concise, and not spammy.

Google Page 1, Position 1…For EVERYTHING.

I’ve spent a lot of time analyzing SERPs for the keywords I’ve lost, and am trying to make sense of why Google decided to give several of my competitors ‘top of page 1′ status after cutting my head off. It was right around that time when I noticed a disturbing trend. One company dominated about 10 different major converting keywords, ranging from premium to long-tail. Page 1, #1 organic for every single one, even the insanely competitive one-word keywords.

How is this possible? It can’t be possible that this just happened without something scummy. And boy, was I right.

Let me just explain this niche to you: say that we’re in a niche called “widgets,” where widgets is a very big, expensive item that sells constantly and is a huge part of industry. My competitor is achieving Google page 1, #1 for “widget, widgets, widgets for sale, widget sale, buy widgets, sell widgets, cheap widgets, best widgets, used widgets, new widgets” etc. etc. etc., even though they hadn’t had those results a month ago. When I say the list goes on and on, I mean, it goes on and ON and ON for the amount of #1 organic SERPs they have achieved. I’ve even noticed that they rank #1 AdWords as well as #1 and #2 Google page 1 organic for some of these terms, dominating the entire fold of the page.

Scamming Backlinks & Getting Away With Murder

I went to one of my favorite old websites from yesteryear — BacklinkWatch.com — and did a little research on this company’s domain name. It turns out they now have a little under *13,500 QUALITY BACKLINKS* with exact keyword anchor text pointing from tens of thousands of relevant, quality websites in our niche. However, almost every single one has the same anchor text – the same one-keyword term. HMM.

I visited about two dozen of the backlinking sites that BacklinkWatch displayed, and looked to find the link. It was at that point where I saw the scheme in its full glory.

This competitor set up a web hosting service where small, local businesses in our niche around the US could host their website with them. One of the requirements a line of forced text like “Hosted by {keywordterm}” where {keywordterm} was the big one that we all wanted to rank for in our industry. That term, of course, pointed back to their site. What a total bloody sham. I was floored that they weren’t banned from almighty Google, the almighty champion of truth and justice in the search world.

Google Thinks This Is Helpful, Quality Material?

Before I continue further, I spent a good 10 minutes going through this competitor’s website. They’re a simple classifieds website using a VERY old content management system, 1997-ish graphic design, no search engine friendly URLs, and **NOT A SINGLE SENTENCE** of text on any of their pages. Actually, the website has no text whatsoever, and search engines must be working entirely off of backlinks to even figure out what the hell this site is about.

Regardless, the company has a Facebook page with 150,000+ fans, their Facebook ad pops up on my Facebook wall almost every damn time I log in, they’re AdWords #1 for every keyword under the sun at all times of the day (in other words, they are most certainly a big business) and due to the scummy gray-hat tactic they’ve pulled, they’ve made it impossible for me to ever achieve Google page 1, #1 as I have had for the past four years. When you take my hard work, my money, and my livelihood through cheating, I’m not going to sit back and let it go.

Immediately, I visited Google’s spam report form. I reported the site for running a “web ring” of farmed links through the ruse of a web hosting service, which vaulted the company to page 1, position 1 for over 12 major industry keyword terms (and I sent Google the list of keywords).

This isn’t the first time I’ve ever done this — years ago, I once noticed another scummy site in this same industry who achieved tens of thousands of backlinks by creating his own iframe-based web ring. He owned over 25 domain names  in the industry with garbage doorway pages and inter-linked them all to one website, which in turn hit the top of Google page 1 and got cemented there. I reported it, and about three of four months later, noticed the site fell back around page 10 for the keywords it previously had page 1, position 1 rankings for.

While I like the fact that Google is most likely reading these spam reports and doing something about it, the major issue is that they have to be sent in the first place. Google obviously had no problem torching my affiliate site, which continues to have a bounce rate under 28%, an average 4-5 minute length of stay and a large number of return visitors AND visitors who search the internet for my exact domain name (which I’d assume is a major determinant of BEING A BRAND NAME).

To Add Insult to Injury

After this entire fiasco today, I couldn’t help but notice something else in SERPs, at the bottom of Google page 1 for a very competitive term. Another guy had registered something to the effect of “widgetsforsale.org” (where “widgets for sale” is in fact a very highly converting, highly valuable term to rank for) and the site was nothing but a one-page doorway pointing to another site. I reported that one, too :)

Algorithms like Google Panda were supposed to stop scum. Instead, they stop honest, hard working affiliates and let scum go through the cracks. If you want to take a conspiracy theorist’s stance, consider the monumental Google AdWords expenditures that this competitor has, and factor that in to the “how the hell is Google letting them cheat organics in such a blatant manner?” There are a lot of conspiracies over how Google gives behind-the-scenes “support” to big AdWords spenders, but I’ll let you chew on that one with a Google search. Actually, make it a Yahoo or Bing one.

Recently, I’ve completed a new website advertising my local-area internet marketing & design services, and plan to make 90% of my promotions be offline and hyper-local. The days of counting on search results are truly over. I have no faith in Google – it is a money hungry organization that is about as capable of doing a proper job as your local DMV or tax collector’s office. I can’t have faith in Yahoo or Bing — even though I find it to still be far more simple to rank in both, I don’t have much certainty as to their futures as search engines (especially Yahoo).

Even though the majority of my websites are still going strong, this massive blow I’ve recenetly suffered was more than enough of a warning to me. Affiliate storefronts had a good run — we’ll talk to our grandchildren about them, one day.

1) Google is against you.

Take the direct quote of Google’s Frederick Vallaeys in response to the work of affiliate marketers: it is “…just an unnecessary step in the sales funnel.” Google has taken numerous steps to show their extreme favoritism to brands, and their very apparent efforts to bury affiliate marketing efforts in search results.

Starting in 2010, the search engine launched “extended brand results” listing actual brand names as links at the top of SERPs. The “Vince” update of 2009 tied two search queries (i.e., a user searching for “hdtv” and then searching for “sony” meant that Sony would receive a “vote” for the term “hdtv”), giving household-name brands — already established and known for a certain product category — another feather in their cap. Later that year, brands received an additional bonus in AdWords, where “sitelinks” would appear under an ad, pushing down the remainder of the page further.

Summer of 2011 showed the most definitive all-out attack against affiliate marketing, with the “Google Panda” update — a change that subsequently ended numerous small business owners’ careers overnight by removing their websites for certain keyword results from Google’s index entirely, and replacing those positions with big brands.

Later in 2011 was the inception of Google+ and “+1,” a social sharing tool that gives heavy bonuses and favoritism to big brands, who already have thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of followers who are able to +1 a new blog post by the droves within immediate time periods. Most recently, January 2012 saw an algorithm update to combat “excessive ads above the fold” on a website. Guess who runs ads above a fold? Hint: not brands.

If you thought you could simply go by the old adage “if you can’t beat em, join em,” think again — your affiliate storefront will NEVER achieve “brand” status. The brand signals that exist within Google’s algorithm know of the links pointing outward toward online storefronts that package and ship the products you’re promoting, identifying you as a “middleman” and therefore an “…unnecessary step in the sales funnel,” as Mr. Vallaeys puts it.

Although you probably don’t need more convincing about Google’s extreme bias against affiliate marketers and toward big brand name corporations, a simple glance at your flat-lined Google Analytics charts have probably clued you in at some point that your reliance on eBay Partner Network and Amazon Associate-driven websites are about as effective as attempting to make a new resurrection of the Million Dollar Homepage.

One more thing: when you lose a major keyword ranking, get dropped backward by several pages on Google and see that you’ve been replaced by big brands — don’t hold a shred of hope about re-gaining that page 1, position 1-3 position ever again. Sophisticated algorithmic signals have already given your ‘affiliate’ labeled site a brand new pair of cement shoes.

If you don’t want to believe me, check out this example of how Google torches affiliates.

2. Google is AdWords.

You might remember Google, it was a search engine that displayed organic results under a couple paid ads. Before it became completely filled with AdWords ads within the fold, it was possible to compete in search rankings for long-tail terms to get your affiliate sites some search attention.

However, a full computer screen’s worth of most Google page 1 SERPs is now entirely infested with AdWords, complete with a yellow box featured ad, subsequent ads and sidebar ads.

These days, the cost of appearing anywhere within an eyeball’s view for even a long term AdWords keyword is entirely unaffordable to the at-home internet marketer – give or take a few clicks per day. Google is now a place for the 1% to throw around their $2,000+/day budget to fight each other in an unreasonably expensive environment for the fight to remain on top. Perhaps you’ve taken your measly budget and used it for things more important, like lunch.

Besides…who on Earth would even spend a dollar on AdWords for an affiliate storefront? As anyone knows, it is *impossible* to track true conversions for an affiliate storefront, since you’ll never know how a thing about which clicks to your site led to sales on eBay or Amazon’s end. Spending money on AdWords for an affiliate storefront is like buying Pick 6 Lotto tickets every week and hoping for something to happen. It’s just AdWords 101.

3) Google’s “shopping results” in SERPs have ended your business.

If you’ve searched for a product and saw a SERP featuring a horizontal thumbnail image bar of products from different retailers with prices, you’ve probably noticed your imminent doom. Another nail in the coffin of any affiliate storefront: shopping results exhibit extreme favoritism to online retailers lucky enough to have muscled their way into Google Shopping, in a price comparison war against each other that takes place far above your current ranking.

The fact about these shopping price comparisons in SERPs is that they are nearly eliminating your chances of ever appearing for the keywords that trigger them. Due to the fact that the first 1/4 to 1/3 of a SERP is mostly AdWords, followed by one of these shopping results snippets that contain eye-enticing thumbnail images that break up an otherwise texty SERP, there’s barely any reason for the user to scroll down to get into organic results at all.

Since you’re nothing more than a middleman posting links to an actual supplier, you’ll never be able to appear on shopping results. Worse yet, the clutter of AdWords and product comparisons is enough to push organic results on to page 2 of results. This, above all else, is contributing to the extinction of the affiliate storefront.

So, What Now?

The changes I’ve seen, especially on Google, have really put an extreme perspective on my own personal business plans. It’s no longer worth investing time, money or energy in an affiliate storefront because they’re becoming extinct. In fact, affiliate marketing in general should be regarded as a past-time rather than a full-time job.

We’re embarking on a Google search engine experience that is entirely suited toward Big Business, where big AdWords spenders rule. If you won’t [cant] compete due to the extreme budget needed to join the existing fray, you’re left behind to hope for the best in organic, which is no longer a valid strategy in 2012.

As for Yahoo and Bing, the potential selling of Yahoo as rumored last year should be enough to make you realize that your measly Yahoo rankings are also not to be counted on — their days are numbered if anything should ever happen to the search engine.

Become A Brand

This truly is the only way to stay alive these days: brands, as defined by search engines, are most likely websites that have real shopping carts and checkout systems. They supply products themselves, instead of shilling affiliate links to real storefronts. They have real company names, not “exact keyword domains.” They have Facebook and Twitter accounts with real followers who actually interact with and care about the products being sold. They get real backlinks — not garbage links that their own webmaster scrounges for, since no affiliate storefront will ever have a successful, ongoing natural link portfolio.

Think about something you can sell or provide, and think fast. These days, you never know when the next iteration of Google Panda will re-appear and torch your remaining search rankings. Use your existing affiliate sites as 301-redirect fodder to give your new sites a boost in rankings, and start branding away!

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.

If you’re in the same boat as me, then this is what you’ve been seeing lately for your affiliate storefront sites:

I’m not sure what’s scarier – the fact that ranking anywhere on Google for a decent organic keyword is becoming nearly impossible to achieve or maintain, or that most of your affiliate marketing income comes from two search engines who have the most uncertain of futures.

Bing is barely hanging on by a thread; and Yahoo, who is being mulled over by both Google and Microsoft — and I think we all know which of the two will be the victor — is now a could of uncertainty. Personally, nobody I know uses Bing nor Yahoo, so, that has to at least be a general representation of internet users. After all, I haven’t heard anyone say “I’m gonna Bing that right now.”

Since Google is nothing more than a scrapbook of paid ads dominated by companies who have $2,000/day AdWords budgets (I worked for one of these), as well as unfair price comparison listings in SERPS that highly favor big brands (let’s face it, when you finally scroll down and find actual search results on page 1, those are all favoring big brands too), the outlook for our own affiliate stores is so dismal that I can’t even imagine what can be done to ever survive the loss of Yahoo…or worse yet, both Yahoo and Bing.

Sometimes I think about what the internet will look like in 2020. My guess is that we’ll be talking about how ‘back in the day, the average person used to be able to run their own websites and make money off of it.’ At least, that’s the future outcome of what will happen with a Google monopoly. Don’t just take my opinion – check out what SEO Book said, too.

The death of Yahoo would be the 2nd devastation for affiliate marketers (the 1st being Google Panda). For years, we’ve been angry at Google’s big brand favoritism and have been saying “well, at least I still have my Yahoo rankings,” since older tactics still work well on that search engine. So, what’s plan B?

Is it time to stop relying on search engines, and start relying on Facebook Pages and community-based advertising? I think so. Looks like a big, bad storm is coming.

Maybe it’s time to rethink being an affiliate marketer altogether – and think about providing a service, or starting a genuine local business. Affiliate marketing is dying – it just is, and search engines like Google are making sure of it. I’m not talking about giving up, I’m talking about growing some legs and evolving to survive.

I really think it’s time to make SEO take the backseat in your overall budgeting of time, and start making offline and social promotions be your fallback. Once Yahoo falls – and it looks like it’s inevitable at this point – there are going to be a lot of affiliate marketers being forced into doing what they absolutely hate: going back to office slavery work.

So, what will be your Yahoo substitution? Better come up with one…real quick.

1. Say goodbye to comfort. Some of those cemented rankings you’ve been enjoying for years are probably now gone. If so, you’re scrambling to figure out how to get them back and make up for the loss of hundreds of dollars per month. The reality of it is that you can’t use any of the SEO tactics you knew and loved anymore, and it will probably take a long period of time to get those rankings back.
2. Google screwed up. Google Panda certainly was not without flaw. Type in some search queries that your sites rank for (especially ones you no longer rank for), and you’ll see that pages 1 & 2 still are peppered with garbage websites that have two dashes in the domain name and are full of spun content. Like everyone else, you’ll probably think about why your site, which is so much more worthy, is now on page 7. So much for the algorithmic upgrade punishing the same old scumbags who have been annoying both users and fellow marketers for years.
3. The rich get richer. More than ever, big brands dominate page 1, 1-5 for generic 2 and 3-keyword terms. Why? It’s because the new algorithm favors social sharing, and these days, most big companies hire advertising agencies for thousands of dollars a month to manage and analyze social campaigns. These services also engage in heavy link building both online and offline. I know, because I project managed one at my last job. Your personal Twitter, Facebook Page and bookmarking efforts pale in comparison, and they always will. And, who will get more +1 button clicks on Google? A famous brand name site, or some newcomer with a freshly built website who’s trying to work it up?
4. SERPs differ depending on where you are. Strangely enough, your site might be ranking at the top of page 1 of Google for a certain term when you search for it at home, but not in your neighboring area. Or across the country. Call your friends, ask them to search for a term and then have them tell you where your site is ranking over there – you’ll see. This has made life very hard on those who need to know their SERP position status. The old notion of “awesome, I’m ranking on page 1 #2 for “best used cars” in my country!” is out the window.
5. The way your site ranks is correlated to how it performs. Several years ago, webmasters wondered if Google was beginning to rank sites based on the sort of thing we see in Google Analytics: bounce rate per keyword, average time spent, etc. We can now pretty much confirm that this is happening in the current day.
6. Be paranoid, be very paranoid. By tomorrow, you can lose that wonderful ranking you currently have, and it will come without warning and without reason. You’ll notice when you log into Analytics and see that dreaded red percentage, followed up by a trough in your dashboard chart. The worst part of all is that there’s no textbook quick fix like there used to be. You can shuffle around your page titles and keyword densities all day, but it will be in vain.
7. Oh yeah, there’s Yahoo and Bing, too. Remember those? They’ve changed algorithms as well – I’ve noticed some sharp decreases in rankings to the two other giants who never seem to grace the headlines of SEO news sites. “Well, at least I’m still ranking #1 on Yahoo” – NOT!

The What & Why of What Happened to SEO

What I personally see happening is a shift toward websites that are just truly awesome and have a LOT of constant work put into them. Kind of like the upper 5% of every niche getting its rightful place on page 1 for their intended term. However, in order to get there, you’re going to need a lot of help from tens of thousands of strangers sharing and +1′ing your stuff.

If you’ve spent all of these years running 20 sites that run themselves, you’re one foot in the grave.

We’ve moved away from bookmarking our own sites on Digg and Delicious to begging others to share our stuff on Facebook and Google+. Our level of personal control in link building is mortally wounded. Google knows where you are, what you’re doing and how you’re attempting to manipulate your own sites. So, unless you have 5 dozen friends around the country who will help you promote your site naturally on a fairly regular basis, you’re going to just have to make awesome sites that people will want to share.

It seems like a natural progression. The internet has so many websites. For too long, people like us have been gaming them (i.e. personal link building). Now, it’s really up to the general public and the way they naturally interact with your site. For that, I have to say, I’m pretty happy.

What’s alarming is that there is no immediate solution to fixing a ‘sandbox’ or lost ranking situation. It’s just devastating. This is why you can no longer mass produce websites. Yet, at the same time, you can no longer just rely on one niche. Hopefully you have a lot of time on your hands.

This really is the age of branding – it’s the age of “Hotels.com,” not of “BestCheapHotels.info.” Become well known, and people will associate your site with your niche, bypassing much of the heartache known as SEO.

This is also the age of paranoia in internet marketing. You should feel paranoid about that site you never update anymore, which is miraculously still ranking pretty highly. You should feel paranoid about your sites not having social campaigns, or no +1′s. You should feel paranoid about those old affiliate sites you’ve been running – because affiliate storefronts are harder than ever to rank…especially if they fall within topics where article writing and social sharing is nearly impossible.

It seems like the best way to survive is to choose the most successful sites out of your entire portfolio and put your heart and soul into them. Unless you truly have time or assistance, bid the rest farewell. Make it a daily obligation to socially market these one or two sites, write articles and encourage activity. It’s called survival…

What Got Hit the Most

1. Affiliate storefronts (especially eBay & Amazon): Wow, did these get massacred. Some of them, which were enjoying top-of-page-one visibility for certain two-word keywords for years are now on page 2 or 3 of Google and getting no traffic at all for those terms. The fallout from this was pretty evident on my EPN dashboard. Overall, I suffered a 55% loss of earnings in June. Yeah, 55%. To me, that is thousands of dollars lost per month, overnight.
   Considering that I’m a full time affiliate marketer and this money is a major part of what goes toward earning my living (like food, utilities, etc.), I’m sweating hard right now. It didn’t ease my pain to read about yet another state — California — making headline news when they signed the nexus law last week. 

   EPN recently posted about Google Panda on its blog, and the comments from fellow EPN affiliates were very mixed. Across the board, I’d say that all of my affiliate storefront sites have gotten a 15-20% drop in visits and many of have lost the 2-word keyword top-of-page ranks that they’ve had for years.

2. Parked domains: Thanks to Google Panda, I’ve noticed that my domains over at Parked.com are literally earning a solid $0.00 on a daily basis, as the views are dropping like a rock. Since my domains aren’t monetizing themselves, I am now being very loose with my “cut list” and have trimmed down my domain portfolio significantly.
   At this point, I see no value in “exact match keyword domains” that have 3 words in them, so those are being trimmed. It all comes down to cutting expenses at this point, and holding on to domain names that are “hit or miss” isn’t in my strategy.
3. Many of my one-page resources that earned through CJ.com links have suffered severely, including Squidoo and Hubpages.
4. Any site that had a high ranking for a short-tail keyword were instantly butchered and are no longer ranking for those terms. They were all taken over by big-name websites in the SERPs. Many of them are big brand name sites. Here’s an example…one of my most successful Squidoo lenses of all time, “How to Create A Facebook Page,” was Google Page 1 #1 for about two years for the two word term “facebook page.” I even beat Facebook.com in ranking for that term. Now that Panda came along, my page is now Google Page 1 #9, completely unseen at the bottom of the page, even nailed down further thanks to a Google Image strip. My page is now outranked by Peter Jackson’s Facebook page and the British Monarchy’s Facebook page for the term “facebook page.” Seriously? This is a Google flaw.
5. Sites that I’ve neglected, including mini-sites. We all have them: the “well, it’s better than a parked page” websites that have 5 pages of personally-written content and AdSense ads, that have been cemented at the top of Google for an intended keyword. Those got knocked down to the bottom of the page. I didn’t expect any less out of these, so it’s not a shock.

What Got the Most Benefit

1. Content sites: And by “content sites,” I mean article sites with regular contextual additions, like this one. Pixelrage.net got a 40% jump in visits.
2. Sites with lots of backlinks: My oldest affiliate sites with the most backlinks are still staying alive and enjoying the same rankings, if not, even higher rankings for short-tail keyword terms, while the others with few backlinks suffered horribly.
3. Sites that got a lot of Facebook Likes & Tweets: Anything that has had a lot of social activity continued to prosper after Google Panda, and that especially went for my top Squidoo lenses like my HDTV lens. I’m expecting positive effects for that new Google+ button.

So?

Err, I guess, Google is favoring sites that get regular content. That’s all well and good for bloggers and magazine sites, but it sucks for anyone running a storefront. Especially an affiliate storefront. There’s only so much you can write about watches, barbecue grills or whatever else your niche EPN or Amazon store is about. Well, guess what – you’re now obliged to find a way. You’re also obliged to get those sites “social” on Facebook and Twitter. Like, right now. Good luck with that.

What this has taught me: many of us have been fools for a long time. Yeah, in 2007, I knew the whole strategy of mass-producing “Build A Niche Store” sites was destined for failure, but at the same time, I was making a LOT of money off of that strategy. While I didn’t join the fray of webmasters who had content-less sites, I was running a good 15 of them, many of them were “set it and forget it” sites with personally written content that was made for consumers that simply weren’t updated or added to for years. However, that’s no longer acceptable by Google’s standards, even though the sites themselves are helpful and still obviously effective for customers.

Now, it’s a mad dash to “make good” and figure out what to do to get my regularly predictable earnings back. This is scary.

It seems like this update wasn’t only there to combat content scrapers, but to hit not only thin affiliate sites but affiliate storefronts in general. Yes, some of my affiliate storefronts are still doing well. One finally hit the top of page 1 for a major converting term and is getting a lot of traffic from it. However, it is also kicking ass in terms of user behavior. So, it seems like whatever you’re looking at on your Google Analytics page is an indicator as to what Google already knows in its algorithm, and you’re being judged for it.

I feel that this is a catch-22 for affiliate storefront owners. You’re getting penalized because your site is what it is. However, you’re also supposed to add content to it regularly so that it is seen as providing “good content.” But if your content isn’t about “X for sale” or something related to the term you really want to rank for, then you’re going to rank for other broad terms about your product category that are non-converting. Being an affiliate marketer is endless frustration, between this aspect and the hours of your life wasted on chasing good backlinks. On top of that, you have to figure out how to make these storefronts go “social” when it just simply isn’t in their nature to be. It’s madness.

I’ve truly learned one important lesson – stick to a minority of topics and really build them up. Brand them, build a community around them and keep adding stuff that community finds useful. When you have a branded site, you don’t have to care about an algorithm or whatever you’re ranking for. There’s a ton of sites out there that don’t rely on SEO rankings. I’m seeing the value in becoming a “household name” or just flat out “share-able” to the community you’re targeting.

I’ve begun taking down smaller affiliate sites. I already track what every site is making on a month-by-month basis and compare it to previous years, and if it’s not up to par – it’s gone.  I’m only one human being, and we’re in a day of age where one person can’t babysit multiple sites anymore. Time for a totally renewed strategy, even if that means putting more of your eggs in just one basket.

As for affiliate marketing, I see it being in choppy waters these days. One thing I hate is unpredictability. When I can look at my monthly earnings and know I’m going to make “at least $x,xxx,” I’m fine. When an algorithm comes out and clips that number dramatically, I start to consider going back to freelance work, rather than churning out content and new websites whose fates are uncertain.

If you’re logged into your Gmail (or Google Account) right now, do a search on Google for anything and you’ll now see the new +1 button appearing next to everything in the SERPs. Thankfully, it’s not a resurrection of that horribly executed feature where people could “vote up” a search result (remember that?) but something more involved. Those little +1 buttons will “sticky” a website to the top of your SERPs for the keyword you searched to find it. Much like its predecessor, the feature only exists if you log in to Google.

However, clicking that button is basically your first step into discovering “Circles,” a new part of the “Google Plus Project” that appears to be taking on Facebook itself. Yeah, another one of those social networking things Google is trying out that requires you to be logged in to Gmail…or your Google Account, or any of its ten bajillion services that most people can’t name more than five of.

The implications for Google Plus and the discerning internet marketer (that’s you) are heading toward your creation of cool, unique content that will do well in a social sharing atmosphere – not a machine-operated algorithmic one. Wait, did I just describe Google Wave? Or, umm, Google Buzz…yeah, that’s the other one.

The skepticism I have with Google Plus is that it’s yet another “side project” to join the fray that Google seems to have been experimenting with over the past few years. Should I, an already busy internet marketer, take yet even more time out of my regular schedule to build up a Google Plus account, master its in and outs, optimize my pages for Plus users and change my strategy to include Twitter, Facebook and now Plus? Or is this going the way of Google Buzz, of which nobody I’ve ever known has ever used more than once or twice?

I like Google Plus’ justifications that social networking is too impersonal, to the point where we “lump” everyone together as a “friend” although our definitions of “friend” range from “significant other” to “some guy I went to school with and say Happy Birthday to once a year.” If Google Plus remedies this, there is no doubt that Facebook will crank out another new update to perform a stalemate.

Don’t get me wrong, Google Plus and the whole “Circles” feature looks damn cool. I just don’t like how you have to be logged into your Google Account to get to it. I don’t like being on foreign computers and dropping a cookie to my Google Accounts login. Or forgetting to log out. Or having my email auto-saved to the login field when someone clicks it.

This is truly what I believe is the biggest downfall to these Google services – they’re all integrated through Google itself. You’re not just visiting www.whatever.com and logging in like you traditionally do. It’s like you’re using some kind of intranet where all of your most precious data is intertwined and accessable amongst each other. Who leaves their computer on all the time while logged in to Gmail, anyway? I use Gmail multiple times a day, and I log out after each session purely through force of habit. I rarely ever search Google while logged in to it.

I know a lot of people who use Gmail, but I also know a lot who don’t use it, and let’s face it – no Gmail account pretty much means no Google Accounts account, either. I find all of this to be overly sophisticated for the average lay person. I doubt they’re going to “get” it. Internet marketers will jump all over it, though.

If Google Plus does succeed, it will mean huge benefits for the ever growing tablet and smartphone user market – specifically Android, of which already has the Google Plus app. However, that’s considering that Facebook is going to sit still and do nothing about any of this, and I think we can predict the possibility of that happening.

Lastly, are you really willing to give up on using Facebook? If not, are you really willing to use Facebook and Google Plus? Seriously?

As of now, I have bad memories of Wave.

If you hadn’t heard of it already, “Google Panda,” yet another wacky code name for a new algorithmic update, has blessed/cursed our presence in mid June 2011. The premise of it sounds welcoming – its motive was to punish scrapers (read: lazy SEOs who rip off other people’s content or make elaborate RSS feed-driven websites about niche topics) in search listings.

The good news: cheaters like Mahalo.com got hit hard. The bad news: so did some of your websites. I hope you’ve been paying attention to your Google Analytics account.

The truth of the matter is that Google officially stated that the algorithm targeted “low quality websites.” But, the exact definition of what that term means is totally subjective to Google.

Maybe CNN.com didn’t get affected, but perhaps your gas grill eBay affiliate store did. Maybe that “one paragraph of original content per page” strategy you’ve had since 2007 is now defunct. Then again, ranking #3 in Google for “best gas grills” vs. ranking #7 for it could mean the loss of hundreds of dollars per month for any at-home affiliate marketer. Uh oh.

Fear Of Pandas

Here are my two biggest concerns about Google Panda:

1. Is Google penalizing the right sites? Quite awhile back, I wrote about some scumbag who stole my image and ranked on Google Image Search page 1 for it (and yes, he’s still up there), even though mine was up for months but no longer appeared whatsoever after it was copied. How often do this happen with your content? Do you know? What if your plagiarizer is being seen as the “original” and you as the “copy?” So, what’s the probability of some really top-notch scraper taking and “claiming” your content before your web page matures enough to be seen as the original source, and how does it fit with Google Panda?
2. What does “low quality” mean? Does it mean anyone who is running an affiliate store? So, if this were true, then how is any affiliate store supposed to rank from scratch if its natural lack of content is already dooming it from the start? We all know how hard it is to rank affiliate stores through natural link building. Unless you’re getting REAL links (not crappy ones from Delicious.com), you’re basically up the creek these days.

Google Panda vs. Affiliate Sites?

I’ve read just about every article out there about the Panda scare from major marketing sites, and they all discuss ways to “think more like Google” and dodge the big bad Panda, but all of these articles talk about article sites, not affiliate sites. In this case, I’m just going to use my own common sense as an internet marketer. Here are my suggestions as to how an affiliate site can survive Panda:

1. Have other people build links to your site for you! Can I subtitle this “Stop wasting valuable time building garbage links that won’t help you” too? If you don’t have a Facebook Page (or Twitter account) for your affiliate site, now is the time to consider one. If you’re embarrassed at the prospect of going social with something as lowly as an eBay or Amazon affiliate site, then you’ve been slacking in regard to making that site serve a dual purpose as an information/product offering site. It probably looks too “affiliatey,” too. Start treating that site like a blog with regular news about the product you’re selling. The news you put on it better be super original and meaningful…otherwise, nobody is going to care about being your “fan” or sharing your links! If you think I’m suggesting this because I consider Facebook Page links as backlinks, then we’re not on the same level. Think of it this way: Facebook Page + lots of fans = lots of exposure. Lots of exposure = higher chances of your fans linking to your site via theirs. The Facebook Page links themselves are near meaningless, though.
2. Stop keyword stuffing, start writing legibly. Most affiliate sites fail on the internet because they truly suck. I’ve laughed at so many of them through the years. I think I have more respect for people who just slap on a product RSS feed without any text at all, because some of the text I’ve read was simply amusing. Whatever text you put on an affiliate site better be very relevant and effective enough to the exact kind of person you anticipate finding that exact page on a search engine.
3. Focus more on less websites. Stop biting off more than you can chew by making a new website every week, because you’re going to be working your ass off to promote them all as the months go by. Why not stick with the ones that you know are already profitable, and really build them up and make them top-notch? It beats owning 100 affiliate sites that all rank for 5-word long-tail keywords and get a handful of visitors per day. The work you can put into 1, 2 or 3 sites will show, and they’ll beat the work you’re putting into 105, 106 or 107 websites. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather have one website making $500/month, rather than having 250 websites making $2/month (just imagine the time wasted on WordPress updates…)
4. Most important tip ever…BUILD A BRAND NAME FOR YOUR SITE! Oh, how I want to stress this one above all else. Imagine a world where you don’t really have to care about search engines and their ridiculous algorithms. It’s a world where you manage a well-known brand, simply because you kick ass at what you do, you have a great domain name/logo/brand recognition, and have made a household name for yourself in your niche. It’s a place where you log in to Analytics and see that nearly half of your healthy traffic is coming from type-ins. What a great place to be.

It’s All About Bad Timing

What scares me the most about the timing of this Google Panda update is the fact that it happened in mid June. Personally speaking – of the dozen websites I’m running, practically all of them suffer in the third quarter, beginning as early as mid June. So, the panic sets in when you log in to your analytics panel to see that all of your sites’ traffic have dropped an average of 10%+ each, and you can’t attribute it to Google Panda or bad summer traffic.

In this case, it’s best to note the summer trends from June 2010 and 2009, if you’re lucky enough to have them. If you’re using Google Analytics, you can simply create a chart of all three years for a quick review. Also, take a good look at your earnings reports from these time periods, and compare them to June 2011. If things look pretty similar, it’s more than likely an issue with summer traffic. If not, then you better start reviewing individual keyword rankings, and even open up your browser to manually check and see where your sites are.

My most critical loss was losing Google page 1 #3 for “best watches.” I’m now somewhere on page 5. Talk about a traffic & earnings trough.

It all started with a big change in the layout of Google SERPs last week. The 7-pack got pulled apart with the actual map appearing on the right-hand column, which “follows” you as you scroll down, covering up AdWords ads as it moves along. “Pinpoints,” however, still remain where they were in the body area. That was just a part of the new layout, which some are calling the “O-Pack.”

Big directories now get serious Google real estate (rather, far more than they had in the past): just a simple search for service-based keywords is pulling up CitySearch, YellowPages, Super Pages and others (all of which I am a total hater of due to their inaccurate and sometimes very outdated listings…and I have utilized their enterprise services before with regret). The world needs more YellowPages clones, after all (sarcasm).

Generic keyword SERPs have taken on the most dramatic change: Google seems to like to offer top name-brands all the way at the top. Search for “computers” and you’ll see that Dell, Gateway, HP and Apple have a prime top position call-out, followed by Google-suggested stores like BestBuy, NewEgg and Tiger Direct.

Local searches show a newfound favoritism for Google Place Pages. Go ahead – search for a service-based keyword and put your ZIP code or local town after it, and you will most likely see local business listings on the map represented with thumbnail images that were pulled from the Place Page.

While some of these things are helpful for users, one thing is obvious – you have to scroll way below the fold, in most cases, to see organic results. And, I’m not talking about the obligatory Wikipedia page and Yelp/MerchantCircle/Amazon links. Lower organic results plus enhanced favoritism toward big directories and Google Place pages for big-name local businesses mean much less visibility for the little guy, but I didn’t have to tell you that.

Then, there were talks about site-specific algorithmic changes. That means individual sites get ranked for certain measures that might not affect other sites. Some started to debate the point in even bothering to follow Google guidelines and best practices anymore, with newfound feelings of “damned if I do, damned if I don’t.”

Beyond the SERP fiasco (my opinion), there’s the whole issue of Google Keyword Tool showing blatantly wrong and ridiculous results that some apparently believe are part of a Google-led conspiracy to drive more AdWords profits toward alternate keyword terms. While I recently published an article about Google Keyword Tool’s inaccuracies, I’m not the only one concerned about it as seen in this SEO Book article. Here’s another theory that Google nudges the algorithm for the holiday season. Yikes.

On October 31^st, Search Engine Land spoke of yet another high-level drop out in Google Inc., and the increasing migration of high value employees leaving the company and pursuing other avenues. Then, there were the failed projects. Remember Google Wave?

The blend of paranoia and frustration lead some to doubt the future of the SEO industry as a whole. Is Google making SEO obsolete?  If they were, I’d look at it rationally and hope that the change would bring forth more honesty and helpfulness in SERPs, for the good of an internet that favors sites that give value. You know, since we were forced to believe content is king, whereas backlinks always were. Personally, I don’t think I’ve ever spent more time finding what I was really looking for on Google. These days, I frequently hit page 2+ on a SERP, and still don’t find a result of value.

How much further is this going to go? I’m starting to feel the urge to put more emphasis on my Yahoo and Bing strategy. Or, perhaps, start putting the same emphasis I’ve always placed on Google toward Facebook.

It’s hard to even say what’s happening at Google – many of us in internet marketing have been disappointed with clutter: AdWords “yellowbox” ads (which are now purple), 7-packs and other things that keep pushing the real results further down the page (not to mention, garbage MFA and spun-content sites hitting page 1, and the occasional competitor still ranking high for running a link farm), but it looks like one of those “I must accept the things that I cannot change” scenarios.

While Google will do as it pleases with the way it behaves, it’s a factor of “survival of the fittest” for the rest of us trying to maintain that at-home income with our helpful content and legitimate SEO practices.

Earlier this Fall, Google ‘upgraded’ their keyword tool. Upon logging in, you no longer saw the classic layout that you were used to; rather, the interface looks more Google AdWords-ish. If you’re like me, the Google Keyword Tool was your #1 source of keyword research. As a daily user, I’ve become accustomed to its results for the niches I’m a part of. However, the upgrade is showing results that are drastically different than what the old tool used to show. This is where it helps to have a photographic memory.

I was further alarmed when I read this article raising the same exact concern. Looks like I wasn’t alone, here.

So, here’s a new conspiracy – is Google now suggesting keyword terms that they want to see more traffic being generated for by suggesting to the webmaster community, for the sole purpose of driving more AdWords buys of those keywords? I’m a big conspiracy theorist in general, so I don’t doubt this one.

What annoys me about the updated Google Keyword Tool: 1) I don’t believe the validity of most of the keywords appearing at the top of the list when I sort it by monthly volume, 2) the monthly trend reports are really out of whack compared to what I remember from the old Google Keyword Tool, 3) the results shown in the Google Keyword Tool don’t coincide with results found on Google Insights or even Google Instant (that drop-down box that suggests things as you type on Google.com, which many SEOs see as ‘revolutionary.’)

With all of that being said, I’m relying more on actual Google Analytics results for keyword terms, Squidoo lens keyword results (believe it or not, I’ve acquired many quality keywords from the analytics reports of individual Squidoo lenses!) and I do think there is a lot to be said about Google Instant showing a drop-down of the top 5 “suggestions” based on the first few letters you type in to the search box.

If only Google Keyword Tool behaved the way it used to, most internet marketers’ lives would be a lot easier. In the meantime, get used to having a lot of tabs open in your browser.