Is This the 11th Hour for Thin Affiliate Sites
December 19th, 2007 by Michael Gray in GoogleIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Read my top posts or learn more about Michael Gray. Want more frequent updates follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!
While some people realized affiliate marketing has has slowly been changing for some time now many others missed the memo, or are on are sailing a ship of blissful ignorance up a famous river in Africa. For those few people I hope the announcement of Google Knols last week serves as a wakeup call.
For people who are spammin’ and jammin’ and able to crank out autogen sites by the dozen before breakfast this doesn’t apply, but to the rest of you who only dip your big toe in the pool of darkness, the times they are changing and the window of opportunity is closing.
The sandbox/trustbox change signaled a shift in Google’s algo towards more established trustworthy sites. Unless you happen to be old enough to be a self referencing authority, MFA sites with minimal content (like About.com) aren’t going to cut the mustard anymore. IMHO Google tends to favor larger sites with good (easily crawlable) site architecture. Lots of good content provides lots of places to get deep links which is the profile Google seems to want to see.
Sites like Wikipedia have been the hallmark of this type of content for a very long time. New comers to the game include Seth Godin’s Squidoo, and more recently Jason Calacanis Mahalo. To be honest I’m not a big fan of the “search result” pages of Mahalo, but the “how to” sections have great content, and have been getting lots of attention and links, especially from the social sites and bloggers.
In the coming months smaller publishers are going to have more competition from more and more larger publishers. Instead of the default one Wikipedia listing to contend with, you’ll now have one Wikipedia, one knol, and maybe a squidoo or Mahalo listing as well. Unless you start building good linkable content that builds your link equity it’s going to become more and more difficult to rank.
Google is shaping the web in the image it desires. To the extent that this means there is more good quality content is a good thing. However to the point that Google has shifted from gate keeper of information to creative director of editorial content is a slippery slope, and isn’t a change you can afford to ignore.
Sphere It
December 19th, 2007 at 10:57 am
I love your mention of About.com being a MFA site. I am not sure how they get away with all those subdomains.
December 19th, 2007 at 7:33 pm
So I am thinking this may end up being a good thing. A lot of spam gets eliminated. The really smart spammers move deeper into niches and to compete and maybe start to create “content”, whatever that means, leading to a better experience for all. Of course the flipside is that Knol starts to build critical mass and suddenly a huge amount of traffic starts staying inside the Google’s pages. And then we all start working for Google which I guess to some degree many of us already do.
December 19th, 2007 at 9:00 pm
>Knol starts to build critical mass and suddenly a huge amount of traffic starts staying inside the Google’s pages.
Ding we have a winner!
December 20th, 2007 at 1:17 am
Google should severely penalize affiliate based sites that manipulate keywords and SEO techniques resulting in “bad” search results. For example a keyword search for “reviews” should come up with review sites and not some stupid affiliate based site.
This wastes a lot of resources. Affiliate sites that rely heavily on search engine placement should be watched!
December 20th, 2007 at 4:46 am
If Google Knols has the effect that this post thinks it will, that will be a very good thing. It remains to be seen whether Google will be able to police it. This is like keeping the fox in the chicken coop.
December 20th, 2007 at 12:13 pm
Everyone seems to be welcoming our Google overlords.
Except that one day when you have given everything you have to Google and you realize you can’t get your content, personal data, units of knowledge, or whatever else they take from us OUT of the box and move it anywhere you like - you’re pretty much locked into what you once thought was a good system, all in the name of “good for the user”.
December 20th, 2007 at 1:05 pm
Great post, Michael! For those of us that manage SEO programs for large corporate entities, it is crucial to communicate the importance of engaging and informative content. The deep-link and rich-content profile that you speak of extends beyond just the small-time affiliate.
It will eventually apply to companies with strong brands and a solid offline profile. As a matter of fact, it is already happening in some verticals.
December 20th, 2007 at 3:16 pm
Any bets on if the outbound Knol links will be no-follow?
December 27th, 2007 at 11:28 pm
@Andy (Hawaii): Google groups outbound links are nofollow. Knol will likely be too.
@Wolfie - If google’s results do end up being a constant mix of squidoo, wikipedia, knol and mahalo, people will abandon google to start their searches on those sites. Already myself and others key in searches like “keyword” + wikipedia to find out what the wiki has to say. (Nice qualifier tip to add to your keyword list builders, if you guys are paying attention.) Soon people will shift their homepage to Wikipedia from Google, or as I just did with IE7, add wikipedia as a search tool.
The problem for Google, besides losing market share, is that these results would again favour the rich getting richer. People like Seth who creatd massive text-UGC sites, or the guys at Youtube. Independent publishers will get squeezed. And at the end of the day, the quality of the results will worsen, as you’ll only see general-type content lacking the depth niche experts could give you. I dread the day where you’ll have to host content on the big UGC to rank.