There is no doubt that this year Google has turned up the heat on affiliate sites. Affiliates sites have been hit hard with 2 updates during Feb and late April / May this year. Many thought this was the end of the onslaught but this has been proved not to be the case with more reports of sites being hit during June. So what is the state of play so far? How are the updates affecting affiliate sites?
Firstly it seems new sites are harder to index than ever before for competitive key phrases, whilst new sites targeting uncompetitive key phrases still seem easy to index.
Many new sites that are fully indexed are not generating any long tail traffic. This seems to be part of the so called May Day update. It looks like the existing Google Sandbox has been extended with sites needing to generate far more trust before Google will rank the site’s long tail key phrases.
Many established aged sites scraping products from merchants using well known affiliates type scripts have been wiped out the index. In the past it has become clear that Google does indeed target affiliate scripts. What is worrying about recent events is that even sites using bespoke scripts have been hit.
There also is no doubt that users are also using Google search options such as latest, last 24 hours and past 4 days etc which again will affect affiliate traffic.
To get a better understanding of how to combat the Google updates then perhaps we should take a look at sites that have increased their traffic during recent updates. Big brand type sites with 500+ pages of quality content with a steady flow of new content added daily it seems are thriving!
My advice at this stage would be simply to build quality sites. Move away from building thin affiliate sites with exact match domains in favour of big brand type sites. Make your site unique so keep away from standard affiliate templates plus of course well known affiliate scripts.