Relying on search engines, whether paid or organic, for your income can be risky business. As the cliches go, the rules are always changing, you can get “slapped” at any time, and you can see even a large, long built up income drop to nothing overnight.
It’s also a necessary evil for many online business models, in particular affiliate marketing. So rather than run from the risk, we have to do what we can to mitigate it.
2010 saw Google continue the tightening of it’s restrictions and definitions for quality in both paid and organic search listings. It’s even getting kinda scary.
I’ve had a smart friend get an Adwords campaign slapped simply because of the niche he’s in… (perfect website, high quality score etc, just a niche that Google doesn’t like, so it’s out.)
I’ve heard stories of sites getting knocked out of the organic search listings because (learned after much consulting and high level communication between the parties) Google didn’t like their business model (long sales letter, exit popups, big claims etc)…
And more.
This will only continue in 2011, and we must be prepared.
Google Thugs Stompin' Yo' Ass
So in the spirit of preparation, here are 5 things that we’ll be doing, and 5 that you should be doing to lower the likelihood of having your business negatively affected by a Google beatdown in the coming year.
1. Principle: Quality
The obvious has to come first here. We have to realize that any time Google makes an algorithm change or any search update, they have one thing in mind. They are trying to increase the quality of what’s in their search index. They might have some funny ways of determining what is and what isn’t quality, but that’s always their goal.
So to avoid beatdowns, you have to seek quality with your niche sites. We’re going to look at what quality means more specifically below, but in general it means being a source of value for the searcher. It means being valuable with your content, being valuable with your layout, being valuable with your promotional methods, and so on. It means thinking “what would someone who was trying to game the system do?” and doing the opposite. If you can keep that principle in mind, you’ll be well placed for continued success in the search engines in 2011.
2. Unique Content
Yeah, there’s no “duplicate content” penalty – I’ve written about that as much as anyone. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to the idea that unique content is something the search engines (and real people) want to see. It’s plainly spelled out in the guidelines at Google. And with all the effort that goes into testing things in the search engines, trying to make guesses and estimations about what Google wants, we can too easily overlook what they blatantly tell us they want. Unique content is one of those wants.
This doesn’t mean there’s no place for automating content, but if you’re still putting up sites for affiliate marketing or Adsense that have nothing unique on them, you may as well not even bother. Those golden days are gone and we all need to accept it. You need unique material, valuable to the searchers you’re trying to serve if you want to achieve any success with the search engines OR your readers.
3. Affiliate Links
Google doesn’t hate affiliate marketing, but they do hate what they call “bridge pages”.
If you haven’t heard, Google defines a “bridge page” as a page that’s sole purpose is to direct visitors to another page that they should have landed on originally.
As you can imagine, affiliate “landing pages” can quite easily become exactly this… with their sole function being to direct the visitor to another page: your merchant’s page.
So how do you stop your niche sites from being classified as “bridge sites” and your landing pages from being “bridge pages”? There are a couple of things.
First, if you’re creating unique content, you’re part of the way there. If the landing page, your blog post or whatever it is about the product you’re trying to sell has unique information that gives value to the readers, it’s one tick in the “NOT Bridge Page” column. If there’s something the readers can gain from your page that they won’t gain from the merchant’s sales page, you’re on the right track.
The second thing you need to control is your affiliate links. If you have one blog post (landing page, same thing) with 5 or 10 links to the same URL (affiliate link or not, incidentally) it starts to look like your sole focus is to push people to that URL. It looks unnatural. It’s a bridge page.
So practically, this means not having too many affiliate links/banners in any one post. If you’ve got more than 3, and there’s too many for the amount of content you have, it’s probably too much. You might not get slapped for it, but you’re walking on a tight rope.
Also, and this is one I only learned of recently (and it made me REALLY feel like an idiot)…
This little article was what opened my eyes to the reality that whenever you put an affiliate link on your page, you should make it a no-follow link. That means you should add the code: rel=”nofollow” to your link code so it looks like this:
<a href=”http://andrewhansen.name” rel=”nofollow”>Andrew Hansen</a>
The theory is that if you’re willingly passing page rank to another site via an affiliate link (that is, without using no follow), you are technically accepting “paid links” (that is, paid text links) on your site… which is of course, a no no. A penalty worthy “no no” too.
After I read this we went and changed all our affiliate links to no-follows. I’m not even finished yet, I’m supposed to be doing it instead of writing this post, but it’s extremely boring 
4. Build Your Links Properly
At any one time, Google could decide that a bunch of the links you had to your site, no longer hold any weight. This is not to say they will “punish” you for getting a particular link, but if they devalue a link or links that you have, your site drops in link popularity relative to others in the SERPS and your site’s rankings drop too. It may as well be a penalty because that’s the effect it will have.
Theoretically, any kind of link you’ve got coming to your site, Google could decide tomorrow that it’s not worth as much as it was previously, and your rankings could drop. So how do you avoid this? You have lots of different links from lots of different places.
If your link profile is diversified, it’s harder for the slapping of any particular kind of link to affect your rankings. If any particular kind of links (let’s say it’s social bookmarking, or social content sites, or blog comments, etc) suddenly drop in value but only 10% of your link profile is made up by those links, you won’t be as badly affected.
Whatever you do for your link building, just mix it up. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Build links in lots of different ways and you’ll find small algorithm changes to influence your rankings less and less. Which brings us to…
5. Diversify In General
In online business, there are unfortunately few things you can put your faith in. Search engines can change, traffic sources can die, affiliate programs can end, people with a certain interest can move on, etc.
For this reason, and if you’re looking for a long term income from your business, it’s just wise to spread your income sources out. If you’re making ALL your money from paid search and your account gets closed, you’re in trouble. If you have all your sites hosted at one server and that server gets attacked, you’re in trouble. If you’re making all you’re money from your email list and your autoresponder service has some catastrophe and your leads disappear, you’re in trouble.
The point is, we can all take time to diversify things in our business a little. If we do only SEO, we can throw some PPC into the mix. If we usually don’t build lists with our affiliate sites, we could start a couple in case all of our sites one day get slapped. If you normally always build your affiliates sites one way, make some that are slightly different so that if one particular element of a site comes to be not liked by Google, you’re still ok.
Whatever variable you could think of that could, in any situation, come to be a liability, alter that variable in some of your income activities and you’ll insulate yourself from potential problems. It’s not always the most profitable thing to do in the short term, but if (like buying insurance) it means that when worse comes to worst, you don’t lose everything, it’s a worthy investment.
Following these 5 actions will put you far ahead of the curve when it comes to your affiliate marketing and your online business in general. Take the small amount of time necessary to do them now, to avoid the much greater long term pain of a nasty beatdown.
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Fully agree Andrew. Great post!
Interesting note about no-following your affiliate links…
Thanks for the “no follow” tip. I wasn’t aware of that either. I agree with you about diversifying your business as I had an adwords account closed this year by Google.
yeah – WOW!, number three sounds like some tedious work, especially for some people like myself who have some datafeed stores.
All good advice Andrew but I wonder about changing all links to nofollow. It occurs to me that Google could decide that all nofollow links are probably affiliate links and penalize on that basis.
What about using a link to a folder with php redirects to all affiliate links and using robots.txt to noindex that folder?
Excellent post. If you use the gocodes plugin there is an option to nofollow your links! I also nofollow mine as I was aware of this! Diversity is essential! I recently set up a 3rd hosting account and never add google analytics to sites anymore. Your just leaving a trail if they don’t like one of your sites. The fact is google hire people with the sole purpose of keeping their search engine of high quality. It is these individual’s job to point out to the engineers sites that should be removed. I know because that’s my job
Definitely a great post to read ! .. I have learned the hard way to “never throw all your eggs into one basket”.. Diversify !
Hi
A lot of valuable information.
Thanks for sharing
Thanks Andrew for this great post! I definitely have noticed changes with Google lately. My AdWords account got banned in 2009 because of affiliate campaigns I was running and in October one of my sites was de-indexed with no explanation. Since I had more than 5 affiliate links to Amazon on each page I assume that might have been the reason. I’m currently reworking the site to get it indexed again.
You mentioned having not more than 3 affiliate links per page. So if I have 500 words of unique content and 3 affiliate links on the page that should be ok?
I’m also masking my links using the pretty links plugin. Do you know if Google can still identify these “internal” links as affiliate links?
@Shane: You mention that you don’t use Google Analytics. What tracking do you use instead?
Thanks so much, Andrew, for your good words of wisdom and advice. I recently had Google do its nasty on me, and I still don’t know why. Doesn’t matter – they just do it. So this article is right on and so is the “little article” that you add about the nofollow. We just started doing that, too, to all of our affiliate links.
Good stuff, Andrew. Thanks!
Thanks Andrew. My site plummeted in Google a few weeks ago and I certainly don’t have nofollows or less than 4 affiliate links on my pages. Am going to change it now.
I found a wordpress plugin that turns your links into nofollow. Has worked well on my site.
http://de77.com/php/nofollower
Hey Andrew
Great content here as usual, I think you are bang on with the quality point you make, Google’s main aim is quality so the best way to avoid annoying them is to provide quality!
Cheers
Matt Carter
Hey Andrew,
Very interesting post and thanks. I’ve been around a short time but long enough to see some of Google’s changes. Not a pretty site for those that have been “slapped” around.
All 5 points you made make perfect sense. Right from the begining I’ve always heard “You need quality and unique content” but I haven’t seen it explained this way.
I just recently heard you should be using the rel=”no follow” for your links but never applied. I guess I will change them now. Really, why pass PR and link juice to sites that don”t need it. Keep it on your sites.
Taking your premise of keeping links down to 3 in posts, I have to wonder if having too many adds in the sidebar might become a problem, esp. if showing on each page.
Ingo: I noticed you did not have a response yet from Shane. I would suggest Clicky that I found on Yoast’s blog here, there is a free version.: http://yoast.com/clicky-tracking-wordpress/
But of course, he also wrote Google Analytics and offers it. So, I wonder why the alarm raised by Shane. (Not to anyway deny in any way he knows of what he speaks – but if the ‘Big Dogs’ haven’t sound off yet – I’m wondering if more trouble is coming?)
Google is a fickle bitch, and she always keeps on the edge of paranoia!
Hey Andrew,
good advice, as always mate!
the links in your blogroll can also apparently be considered by Google as “paid links” if they don’t have the “nofollow” tag, I had a pr0 penatly that seemed to be caused by this some time ago –
http://blogtactics.com/google-pagerank-0-penalty-solution/
so I came up with a plugin to get around it –
http://blogtactics.com/nofollow-blog-link-plugin/
hope this helps.
Matt Garrett
Andrew thanks for this. I have experienced being sent down. I had one site on page 2 and 3 and once in a while it was on page 1. It is now on page 70 and has been for more than 12 days. I have lots of content, much of it unique. I will go back and no follow my links. What I don’t understand is how some websites with limited content sometimes only one or two posts can make it to page 1 and stay there.
Thanks for taking the time to present this very wise counsel Andrew.
Hi Andrew,
Like Concrete Fire Pits I too have had several affiliate sites recently go from Page 1 rankings to absolutely nowhere and thats with rewritten content. Its so frustrating.
I am now going to start the mind numbing job of changing all the links on my 28 sites to nofollow – aaaagggghhhh!!!
Out of interest do you know if addiing the nofollow addition in the Custom field link box is sufficient rather than go into the html coding? Would be interseted to know
Cheers
As always – priceless info Andrew – Thanks
Jonathan
Hey Jonathan,
Unfortunately I don’t know what the “no follow” in custom field link does. Hehe.
Glad you liked the post.
Thanks Andrew, Great replys
Nigel
thanks for the tip andrew
What a fantastic post, thank you very much for this. I never knew that about bridge sites Satellite sites as I know them) but it was really good to know. Thanks
I always appreciate your SEO tips Andrew. So now I’m off to make some changes.
Good advice, I was kind of aware of the nofollow thing, but not how important it can actually be. Thanks to the comments above who shared their favorite plugins to help manage their links, that was helpful, people.
Of course, my favorite part of this post is the picture of the “Google thugs!” Hilarious (although the scary part is that sometimes it does feel that way).
Hi Andrew
As usual appreicate the good advice and heads up on the no follows. But I was a bit curious to see you were manually coding “no Follows” was there a reason why you aren’t using one of the no follow plugins to do the job? There are a couple that can be used for converting external links in posts.
Hey Rosemary,
No, there wasn’t a reason I was manually coding them… just that I didn’t know the plugins existed
Andrew
It is eesential to put the nofollow attribute in your outgoing links for on-page SEO purpose, so that you are not leaking some “link juice” from your pages. Unless you are doing it on purpose for quality sites you’d like to share some love with. But for affiliate links, you should always add it.
Thanks for your post Andrew.
Hi Andrew
I have just looked through all the comments and notice that you have not replied to any of them even though some of the comments definitely require some form of interaction.
I would be interested to learn why you appear top ignore the comments.Is it because:
It takes too much time
If you start replying to every comment you receive the whole thing will become unmanageable
You are not interested in the replies (Which I don’t believe)
Any others?
I think this article is first class. I have bought a number of your products. I think you are one of the ‘good guys’ in internet marketing..
We are surrounded now by sites such as Twitter and Facebook etc where interaction is the name of the game.
So my question is “Why aren’t you interacting?” to your captive audience.
Hey Mate,
I don’t ignore em. I just wait and answer them a bunch at a time
Better for productivity I find.
Andrew
Hi Andrew,
Thanks for this info. Google is very hard to predict. Putting all eggs in one basket can hurt you in the long run. Diversifying and being aware of what you can do is the best solution for long term success. Knowledge is power.
Terry Conti
Hi Andrew
Thanks for the tips. Do you think banner ads/graphics with an affiliate link should be nofollow or does that just apply to text links?
Gary
Hi Andrew,
Wow! Thank you for this post and thank you for the tips on Google! I have actually made my blog a do follow blog because I thought giving link love was a good thing for people that took the time to comment on my blog.
I do still want to do that, however I will take on your advice to make my affiliate links ‘no follow”. You have just given me a tedious task to do! Yuk!!
I think I will take up Matt’s link to his plugin and do a search for a plugin that will make the links my posts ‘no follow’.
Another job to add to the list.
However in saying that. I do completely agree with you on the unique content, quality and diversifying!!!
So much to learn and only so much time around the 3 year old!
Hope everything is going well.
Cheers
Jacinta
P.S Would love you to answer Gary’s question too! Should the no follow apply to picture banners, like the ones we would have in our side bars?
I did a search to learn more about the nofollow tag and found a good explanation here: http://www.jacknguyen.com/dofollow-nofollow-links-a-short-but-sweet-guide-for-everyone-else/, which came from this blog: http://ledfrog.com/blog/2010/03/what-is-the-rel-nofollow-tag/. The ledfrog.com blog also discussed the use of nofollow in blog comments and the Akismet plugin to filter link spam from blog comments.
The Jacknguyen blog referenced in my earlier comment suggested the use of a free Firefox plugin called SearchStatus. Once you upload this tool, you can set your preferences to highlight all the nofollow links on the page you’re on. This will turn all nofollow links pink so that you can easily review them.
Hi there Andrew, would you please send me an email, I want to urgently talk to you about something re firepow blog network?
Thanks
Colleen
Thanks for your 5 ways. Very interesting. I have a question. It works and at old domian?
Nice tips here, I think the no follow might be important to me and will change all my outgoing links to no follow.
great post. I experienced the panda drop in links in one of my sites recently in may 2011. I did some checks and found out that my website content was blatantly copied on several websites in the guitar niche.
Not only that, i did some checks on my competitors pages as well. To my surprise, their pages were also blatantly copied and pasted on other sites.
This is a big headache for me as there are simply too many sites to that requires tough action to shut these pirates down.
sign…
Nice share, are there any wordpress plugins out there that automatically put “no-follow” to amazon affiliate links ?