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Google? Spam? Ads? No... No Conflict of Interest Here...
mahesh2k:
Would also help if those companies who encourage affiliate deals started to police their rules for being accepted as member of that club.
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I do agree there are some poor affiliate products, networks and marketers which are misguiding the traffic. But hey, that's what business is and it is taken from offline world tactics now to online. Nothing new about it.
affiliate marketing drops in gray area of online/offline marketing. No matter how much rule you impose there will be a way out. Take case of amazon for example, it makes more money as marketers are literally spamming amazon links on personal blogs and sites/forum. If amazon starts to decline affiliates for quality or some random rules of marketing way, then they'll not profit from it. Want example ? target.com is good example of this case. Many non-US affiliates promote products which are purchased by US customers on amazon, if target.com denies non-us affiliates then they risk for less profit. If you add affiliate marketing to equation, things become gray hat, PPC which is also a gray hat technique gets added into it. As per rule you can't use amazon url or direct merchant URL in PPC but many do that and are profiting from it.
What we want today is - any site with quality content, enough social vote (backlinks,tweets) and fair amount of ads or affiliate links on that site(to let that site pay bills). These type of sites have no threat to quality of search rankings. But if you start to automate content with spinner, backlinks with spam and profile creation, slap affiliate only pages and if this type of site ranks higher over the previous one then we have a garbage in google search result. :down:
Bamse:
Goal should probably not be set higher than "less garbage" because cat and mouse game will continue regardless of Google hiring 500 more people to clean up.
PC Tools is not hiding anything because there is full acceptance of the method http://www.pctools.com/partners/affiliates/ FAQ is even worse. No mention of providing user any info what is going on, of course not because as soon as people become aware they start to think. Doubts are a risk. Does not mean affiliate logic is wrong or should be avoided but when arrangement is so automated it stinks.
Q: What sort of assistance do you provide to your Affiliates?
A: We can provide copy and content for your site, images, banner ads, links, testimonials, reviews, articles, HTML emails and more. You will also have a dedicated Account Manager who will provide you assistance and advice to ensure you get the most success out of partnering with us.
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mahesh2k:
but when arrangement is so automated it stinks.
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Exactly.
By the way do check out tools like XRummer, scrapebox and similar tools that build backlinks for users at cost of 50$ or so. These tools are adding garbage to any random blog or forum. And there are affiliate networks or brands that support those methods (indirectly).
JavaJones:
One of the things I need to find is technical info on various laptops.
Try find a manual or upgrade information for a Dell or Toshiba laptop (or any other laptop manufacturer).
I chose those two because they both publish information about their computers beyond the usual user manual (including service manuals).
The results of any search you make in Google ALWAYS come up with the same websites trying to sell freely available stolen information - and often they don't actually have the information you need on the page you are looking at - it is just spam filler to get a result from the search engine.
Conspicuous by their absence are the manufacturer's websites.
Why is that google NEVER EVER points you at a manufacturer's web site in the top ten results even when you put that manufacturer's name as the first search item - and doesn't even do a particuarly good job when you use site:.... to sepcify the site to search manually.
I think advertising and incompetence are rapidly making google's results unusable.
One simple innovation would be to have a thumbs up and a thumbs down link in the search results page for each link so that rubbish can easily be reported*. Bad sites could quickly be identified - and maybe they could then ban those people from the Google Ads system too - oh but that would affect the bottom line so there is no chance of that happening!
* Yes I know this could be abused but there could be safeguards introduced.
-Carol Haynes (January 22, 2011, 07:48 AM)
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I'm curious if you have any better luck with Bing, or even Yippy, DuckDuckGo or other alternative search engines. I guess my question would be, is this a problem unique to Google, or is it a problem of modern search systems on the Internet as a whole?
As for Paypal-like authentication schemes, it becomes a question of privacy and anonymity online. This is a subject I am somewhat no the fence about because spam, malware, etc. do a lot of harm and a fully authenticated and known-identity Internet system would solve a lot of that, but at the same time the Internet is a tremendous tool for the oppressed to gain a voice, and that can only happen when anonymity is possible. Granted Google don't have to be the ones providing it, but it should be available I think. It's a hard question, but I don't think stronger authentication for Google account signup is necessarily the answer. Maybe one could sign up for a Gmail account free, but then using more services like search engine result tuning (that would be incorporated into their rankings, as you say) would require further authentication. That way people can sign up for Gmail accounts easily, but not as easily game the results.
- Oshyan
Carol Haynes:
The account system would only used for people who choose to use services - not the search engine. Giving reactions to bad search results could be restricted to confirmed registered users - that way any abuse of the reporting system could be followed up.
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