Don't miss a single post about Developing your Niche Store or Website! Subscribe today and start Making Money!
July 25, 2008
We all have them… Build a Niche Store websites that we put together with the hopes of earning passive income for years to come. We have built our sites for the visitors, based on what they were looking for in search engines and presented that information in a much easier to view and navigate structure. Guess what - Google cares not!
In a recent Q&A at the SMX Advanced, Matt Cutts gave some interesting insight into what the quality team at Google looks at when they consider the worthiness of a website. The first video is 25 minutes long and while the entire thing is very interesting and entertaining, the last 10-12 minutes drop bits and pieces on how they treat thin affiliate sites.
One of the most interesting analogies Matt provided was a comparison to Milli Vanilli (linked for you younger folks who don’t remember them) and how they betrayed the trust of the public after “faking it” with their singing. My take on what Matt says: If you provide a fake or mocked website - Google will no longer trust you to do the real thing!
Old Link - But Great Information
If you have time - download this pdf of the Google Quality Rater Guidelines and read it from end to end. If you don’t have time, skip right to page 33 and start reading about identifying thin affiliate websites. Here are a few keynotes from the document:
A thin affiliate is a page that exists to deliver a visitor to a page on another domain with a different owner. Keywords deliver visitors to the affiliate page, and links on the affiliate page deliver visitors to the second page, which is owned by a real merchant.
and further…
There is no value added (e.g. reviews, price comparison) on the page, and the value of the page is only in the link to the merchant’s site. You cannot complete a transaction from the thin affiliate’s site. Many large web retailers offer affiliate programs. Some of the most he most common examples are Amazon, eBay, Zappos, and Overstock.
There is one comment on this document that really tells us all we need to know, they even applied bold to the statement:
The important thing to remember is that if the scraped (copied) content is on the page removed and all that remains is ads, it is spam.
Where does this Leave BANS?
In a nutshell - if you are building Niche Websites that offer no unique value to the visitors other than scraped eBay RSS content… you are wasting your time! Google even went as far as changing several of their definitions in the Webmaster guidelines to clarify some of the info. BANS, when left as a out of the box, point - click - walk away from it website, falls right into the definition of Doorway Pages:
Doorway pages are typically large sets of poor-quality pages where each page is optimized for a specific keyword or phrase. In many cases, doorway pages are written to rank for a particular phrase and then funnel users to a single destination.
Next week, I am starting a new series of posts that will focus on creating just ONE website… that website will use WordPress and BANS together to create a valuable resource for visitors. The series is only 1 week long and we will walk through the Webmaster Guidelines step by step to build a Content Rich Website.
Do this yourself: Visit 5 of your own BANS sites and remove ALL content provided through the eBay feed… Menus, listings, links, ALL of it. Once done, if your site is still chuck full of great content, you likely have nothing to worry about! If not… tune in Monday!
Mark
12 Responses to “Thin Affiliate Websites are Dead”
Got something to say?
Posting tweet...
It seems to me that the their definition of a thin affiliate site applies directly to Google itself: It doesn’t have reviews, the only value is linking to other sites, you can’t complete the transaction there, if you take away the scraped content there’s only ads left.
Having said that, I make around half my BANS income from a single site: the one I have blogged on every day for over a year, the one that’s crammed with reviews and advice, the one I know something about.
Awesome post - it prompted me to write about this very subject this morning. Sometimes I feel like this is just stating the obvious - there is no free lunch online, contrary to the “hype” sold in most e-Books. If you want to be successful online for the long haul - you have to be willing to work for your money.
Great post-A little scarey but makes a hell of a lot of sense-looking forward to your next post on this subject.After looking at my sites they are empty dark holes with hardley any content-got some work to do on existing sites before i produce any more.
Well thin affiliate sites are dead only if google has a way of wiping them out with their algorithms. The good news is they don’t. Sure they could write an algorithm to wipe out affiliate sites but how does the algorithm know if it’s a thin affiliate site or not? Sure they could write an algorithm that could tell some thin affiliate sites but not 100% accurate then they’d have to apply that algorithm to billions of sites. Remember google only has so much processing power and resources. They could easily write an algorithm to detect the css patterns of BANS but that would also wipe out a load of fully sites that aren’t thin affiliates which isn’t in googles interests.
Personally I don’t believe it’s the end of BANS or thin affiliate sites, sure they have it in their guidelines but how they gonna police it? They can’t.
If you want to decrease the chances of your BANS site being de-indexed then remove the chance of you site getting a manual review. To do this remove your adsense. To be safe also remove the google analytics code unless you want google knowing everything about your site and sharing the analytics with anyone else it feels like.
Cheers,
Duane.
@ Duane -
Google is definitely not clearing house through the algorithim… they are doing it manually through some type of review process.
In all likelihood, you are probably correct in that they use the tools we employ, to make their jobs easier. Google webmaster tools, adsense, analytics, etc.
BANS is FAR from being a dead program… it is still very good and very useful t not only us, but our visitors as well. It is still one of the easiest ways to build an affiliate store onto a website and still makes me quite a bit of change each month.
I do however disagree about thin affiliate sites… Google and other engines WILL find a way to eliminate them from the serps at some point. If they are spending time manually removing them now, they will figure out how to do it automatically as well.
Mark
Mark, yeah they’ll find a way eventually of removing thin affiliate sites but not any time soon. Google really isn’t as clever as people are speculating. I’ve run many tests that prove wrong so much of the speculation that is going about.
Cheers,
Duane.
This is a great post - and a needed WAKEUP call for all those BANS people out there who want to keep the cash rolling in.
I work hard at keeping my site chock full of info thats beneficial to users. I’ve also designed the site so people can find what they need. It really is a service, designed to deliver the cheapest prices around.
Looking forward to your future posts!
Anthony.
iPhone Auctions Australia.
This doesn’t surprise me at all. I am not at the point where I can sustain myself AND my fiance by working online, but I’ve been involved long enough to know that there is a serious change going on in the affiliate marketing world.
Original, unique, and resourceful content is king. It is that simple. Whether you are putting together a geographically targeted restaurant-guide website, or blog about the resurgence of vinyl and the culture of vinyl records - you have to provide value to your readers, and regularly. It’s not to say that you have to be the first person to write about a particular topic, but make sure that your standpoint on that topic is unique to yourself and helpful to YOUR readers.
Out of the box niche sites simply don’t work anymore. When BANs or Xsite pro first came out I’m sure things were different - but think of how many people now use these programs, and are looking for an easy, quick dollar… I was one of them.
Mark is setting a great example of where the future is going. We need to be utilizing these great tools in an innovative fashion - be creative and think outside of the box. Saturation is the enemy, and Google is doing everything they can to reward the hardworking people, and penalize the scrapers - for the most part : )