1) “Set It and Forget It” Is Dead

If you have any intentions of sitting back and earning from a site that is constantly stagnant, you’re taking a major risk this year. We’re all guilty of this, and I personally have about 5 of these kinds of sites. They’ve been ranked well for years and I wouldn’t even know what else to add to them. However, this is now a dangerous way to live. We’re no longer in a day of age with “Google Dances” and SERP updates that happen once per quarter. Now, they happen once per day.

In fact, I can nearly guarantee you that your SERP rankings will not last much longer…that is, if they still exist at all.

While I can basically agree with algorithmic updates that punish “stagnant” sites, it also makes life miserable on affiliate marketers for the aforementioned reason: some websites simply are “done” or have hit a glass ceiling in terms of content, due to their niche. There are some topics that are finite, and the websites you’ve created for them are going to be a thorn in your side these days. However, that’s too bad — if you don’t update a page regularly, and it will lose rankings.

So, how do you keep up with managing multiple sites and hundreds of single-page promotions when you have to update ALL of them regularly and babysit ALL of them to make sure they’re still retaining their rankings on a search engine whose SERPs update every 24 hours?

The only resolve is to keep building backlinks, and that is by far the most unfavorable part of being an internet marketer — but I’m sure I didn’t have to tell you that ;)

2) Text-Heavy Sites Are Still Favored

I’m not sure if it’s just me, but when I got demolished by Google Panda, something else also happened. My websites that were basically “guides” or had lots of text — including Pixelrage.net — received gigantic boosts. Over a few days, one of my sites reported a 75% increase in visits, even though nothing significant was done to it. It was a text-heavy site. All of my other text-heavy sites were getting 25%+ boosts as well, while my affiliate storefronts were reporting a ‘red’ 60-75%.

I personally think that article writing (on your own site) is where it’s at. Google favors content, but it has to be good content. I hate that cliche phase that goes something like “provide good, helpful content” but I can’t escape it here, because I believe it really is true this time around.

3) Google Ignores Brand New Websites

Google, what’s gotten into you? You’ve changed, man. Just try launching a brand new website (as I recently did for a new local web design service) and see, first-hand, how hard it is to even show up as a blip on Google’s radar.

Try gradual link building. Write press releases. Start and professionally maintain a few social networking accounts, and encourage your friends to ‘Like’ them all. Keep adding content on the site’s blog. And guess what, you still won’t rank — not even on page 20.

As usual, Yahoo and Bing act as they should — within a couple days, I was at least on page 8-10 of both for a few relevant terms.

I truly feel sorry for any new business (that is, one that doesn’t have a venture capital firm handing them a few million for an AdWords budget) who is trying to get their business off the ground and ranking for at least a 4 or 5 word long-tail term. They simply won’t rank these days, and you’ll have to rely on off-line tactics and social networking almost entirely, unless you’re going for Yahoo/Bing rankings which still favor meager backlinks and keyword repetition.

4) Google Hates Affiliate Marketers

This isn’t my opinion, it’s the biggest topic wherever internet marketing is spoken of. The 2011 Google Panda algorithm targeted “thin affiliates,” and “content farms” and plagiarists. Its reiteration in January 2012 polished off an alarming number of affiliate storefronts (as in your eBay Partner Network site that ran 50 pages with eBay feeds and 150 words per page — hope you gave them a proper burial ceremony).

Things are getting far worse for affiliate marketers. Beyond the fact that Google executives (including the CEO himself) have made public statements about affiliate marketing being an “unnecessary step in the sales funnel” and other grossly disregarding comments to hard working people in the industry, Google is implementing new features in SERPs that are burying organic results further down: larger AdWords results with phone numbers, email subscription fields and “sitelinks,” or Google Shopping results with thumbnail images and Youtube video thumbnails.

Google is purposely making it hard on affiliates — especially “nobodies” like you and me, who aren’t listed on the stock exchange. You know, the people who promote products that we never see, package or ship. Oh well, it was a good run while it lasted.

AdWords is becoming Google. By that, I mean, the only way to truly make it on Google these days is to pay for it, and AdWords is only affordable to 6-figure companies (more so, 7-figure ones). That doesn’t include you and your product reviews…but you already knew that. Expect this trend to continue. Chatter from Google spokespeople have shown that Google firmly believes that the company that cannot afford to be on AdWords isn’t worthy of being listed whatsoever.

After all, Google’s prerogative dictates that they should simply promote the ‘source’ of those products (Amazon.com, eBay.com, BestBuy.com, Walmart.com) and not the pathways that lead to them (your “bestbooks.net” website, etc.). Perhaps all internet marketing efforts are now considered fluff, meaning that you better start changing your strategy and business objectives immediately, or you’ll wake up to a flat-lined Google Analytics chart and no lunch money.

5) “Portal Networks” Still Do Well

By “portal networks,” I’m talking about websites where you can create a “page” off of the site and promote your own content and articles: Squidoo, Hubpages and the like. These sites still do well, even with affiliate marketing. It’s because they’re big brands, with monumental amounts of backlinks, hundreds of thousands of nicely inter-linked pages and lots of new content being created daily by registered users.

Unlike creating a brand new website these days, creating a Squidoo lens or a Hubpages Hub results in your work getting indexed within the hour (or at least 24 hours), and getting ranked for something, even though it’s on page 3+ or so. This simply won’t happen for a brand new website on Google these days.

6) Long-Tail Is the New Short-Tail

Remember the days of targeting a long-tail keyword because it was more probable to rank for that term? Those days are quickly diminishing, thanks to the fact that there’s simply so much favoritism for big businesses and “product source” businesses who actually run the affiliate programs.

Most long-tail terms in 2012 are now well known by industries of all kinds. It’s because most (if not all) big businesses today have already employed internet marketing and social networking firms to find all of the relevant long-tail terms so that the company can throw down a nice AdWords budget into it.

Most of the time, these marketing companies don’t even do anything manually, they just run an automated paid service like DART which seek out and buys keywords based on their probability of success, running on a $X,XXX/day budget. How on earth can you compete with that? You can’t — you lose.

Remember: Google likes big brands, so, brands will get favoritism even for long-tail terms these days, even though they don’t have to sit around for 8 hours building strategic keywords and pointing them back to their site. Google just waved a magic wand at them, and they got a nice, cemented position at the top of page 1. Your affiliate storefront will never receive “brand” status because it will never set off the proper signals that will help it achieve that status in Google’s algorithm. How on earth can you compete with that? You can’t — you lose.

7) Google Still Can’t Do Its Job Correctly

I really hope you’re all checking your websites’ rankings AND paying attention to who is competing with you, because there’s more garbage than ever in Google search results.

It’s ironic how perfectly helpful and actionable websites went bankrupt overnight with Google Panda, yet, the algorithm had no problem ranking garbage websites with spun content and meager amounts of low-quality backlinks on page 1 of results for important terms. Try it out yourself — spend 10 minutes today just searching for keywords you’ve tried to rank for, and count the number of crap sites and cheaters who have wound up on page 1.

So far, I’ve seen things like ‘three-keyword-domains.info’ appearing — looking past the terribly unorthodox two-dashed domain name, the site itself has spun content and a design that looks like it came from 15 years ago, I see 1-3 page sites written in poor English (I actually do WHOIS checks on these sites’ domains and they are typically from Asia) which spout nonsense about products and shill affiliate links, I see old websites run by big businesses in niche industries who never cared to upgrade their 1997 .ASP website (but yet they still enjoy Google page 1, position 1) regardless of the fact that their sites have NO content and are a navigational nightmare, I see blatant, ugly keyword stuffing in homepage titles and META descriptions that have gotten top-of-Google rankings…the list goes on and on.

Sometimes I become so obsessed with these bad results that I’m compelled to figure out WHY they are there. I do background checks on them — I look at where their backlinks are coming from (nearly 100% of the time, they’re from article sites and no-name web directories…COME ON GOOGLE, are you still stuck in 2004? Do your damn job correctly).

As I’ve mentioned recently, I found one of my competitors cheating their way to the top of Google by running a “web hosting” service for people in the industry and forcing them to point a keyword-loaded link back to their website. This effectively gave them Google 1/1 results for over a dozen major keywords – several of which were one-word keywords (kind of like “diamonds” or “cars”) and the remainder of which were high-converting long-tail terms.

Radical Ways That the Table Could Turn

We all want the good old days back, but they simply won’t unless something radical happens. We can only hope for the gradual demise of Google — a company that is already making headlines for shady practices in privacy, and grasping at straws by heavily promoting forcing and giving blatant favoritism to Google+ and other company-owned entities in its own search results.

It’s a company that is no longer focusing on search engine results, but search engine profit margins. It is actively pursuing the success of the 1%, because they feed into the success of AdWord’s bottom line which make Google shareholders happy.

What is the definition of a search engine, today? A service that provides relevant results to the end user? Or a service that provides profitable results to the search engine?

If the general population simply figured out how to change their browser’s home page to Bing, or stop using the damn adjective “Google” when describing the act of “looking something up,” this day would come closer.

Just think about when the “indestructible” IE started to lose steam and Firefox started heading uphill. I’m not sure about you, but when I talk to my non-internet marketer friends about Google and its menagerie of AdWords filth, they immediately come back with a “yeah! I did notice that, it’s all ads, and they all take you to something you weren’t expecting.” Hmm.

Another bright future would be the complete death of search engines. Imagine a time where you simply relied on social networks to find a product or service? Where search engines became today’s “link directories” — an ancient internet fixture that once worked, but is no longer relevant? A place where search wasn’t dominated by favoritism for those who could “pay their way” to the top, but sites that were truly good, helpful and gave people what they wanted without having to be a Fortune 500?

Surviving 2012 As An Affiliate Marketer

With all of the violent changes I’m seeing in affiliate marketing, I can honestly say that the best way to make it as an affiliate marketer in 2012 is if:

1. You put a lot of time and energy into actually having a clientele list: a big email list, a big Facebook Page with engaged visitors, etc. [Why? Because it doesn't rely on search engines!]
2. You rely a lot on big brand portal sites like Squidoo and Hubpages which get favoritism because of their size, backlinks and never-ending activity, or:
3. You tear down your affiliate storefronts and turn them into online guides of information about the products you’re trying to sell, and promote those products through a link or button instead of a product feed, which is going to get mauled by Google Panda.

Valid alternatives are to transform your business into something that doesn’t rely on the internet at all — something local, where you can become your town’s household name for whatever services you can provide.

Although I don’t believe in the 2012 apocalypse, I fully believe in the 2012 affiliate marketing apocalypse. I’m already packing my bags and getting ready to jump ship. Google has already made affiliate marketing become miserable, and it’s about to get a LOT worse.

If you’ve been keeping up with my posts lately, you’ve noticed a strong anti-Google sentiment, fear over being a full-time affiliate marketer in this wonderful new year, and overall gloom over what appears to be Google’s all-out tirade against affiliate marketing as we know it.

Anyway, one of my websites which predictably pulled in about $3,000 per month for years through eBay Partner Network has been almost entirely de-indexed, has lost 70% of its traffic and is earning somewhere around $200/month. This was due to the site being completely pulled from four distinct keyword terms, of which I ranked #1 for. As for my site itself, it has a little over 500 pages — each of which has around 200 words of personally-written copy that wasn’t spun, nor keyword saturated. Page titles are clear and concise, and not spammy.

Google Page 1, Position 1…For EVERYTHING.

I’ve spent a lot of time analyzing SERPs for the keywords I’ve lost, and am trying to make sense of why Google decided to give several of my competitors ‘top of page 1′ status after cutting my head off. It was right around that time when I noticed a disturbing trend. One company dominated about 10 different major converting keywords, ranging from premium to long-tail. Page 1, #1 organic for every single one, even the insanely competitive one-word keywords.

How is this possible? It can’t be possible that this just happened without something scummy. And boy, was I right.

Let me just explain this niche to you: say that we’re in a niche called “widgets,” where widgets is a very big, expensive item that sells constantly and is a huge part of industry. My competitor is achieving Google page 1, #1 for “widget, widgets, widgets for sale, widget sale, buy widgets, sell widgets, cheap widgets, best widgets, used widgets, new widgets” etc. etc. etc., even though they hadn’t had those results a month ago. When I say the list goes on and on, I mean, it goes on and ON and ON for the amount of #1 organic SERPs they have achieved. I’ve even noticed that they rank #1 AdWords as well as #1 and #2 Google page 1 organic for some of these terms, dominating the entire fold of the page.

Scamming Backlinks & Getting Away With Murder

I went to one of my favorite old websites from yesteryear — BacklinkWatch.com — and did a little research on this company’s domain name. It turns out they now have a little under *13,500 QUALITY BACKLINKS* with exact keyword anchor text pointing from tens of thousands of relevant, quality websites in our niche. However, almost every single one has the same anchor text – the same one-keyword term. HMM.

I visited about two dozen of the backlinking sites that BacklinkWatch displayed, and looked to find the link. It was at that point where I saw the scheme in its full glory.

This competitor set up a web hosting service where small, local businesses in our niche around the US could host their website with them. One of the requirements a line of forced text like “Hosted by {keywordterm}” where {keywordterm} was the big one that we all wanted to rank for in our industry. That term, of course, pointed back to their site. What a total bloody sham. I was floored that they weren’t banned from almighty Google, the almighty champion of truth and justice in the search world.

Google Thinks This Is Helpful, Quality Material?

Before I continue further, I spent a good 10 minutes going through this competitor’s website. They’re a simple classifieds website using a VERY old content management system, 1997-ish graphic design, no search engine friendly URLs, and **NOT A SINGLE SENTENCE** of text on any of their pages. Actually, the website has no text whatsoever, and search engines must be working entirely off of backlinks to even figure out what the hell this site is about.

Regardless, the company has a Facebook page with 150,000+ fans, their Facebook ad pops up on my Facebook wall almost every damn time I log in, they’re AdWords #1 for every keyword under the sun at all times of the day (in other words, they are most certainly a big business) and due to the scummy gray-hat tactic they’ve pulled, they’ve made it impossible for me to ever achieve Google page 1, #1 as I have had for the past four years. When you take my hard work, my money, and my livelihood through cheating, I’m not going to sit back and let it go.

Immediately, I visited Google’s spam report form. I reported the site for running a “web ring” of farmed links through the ruse of a web hosting service, which vaulted the company to page 1, position 1 for over 12 major industry keyword terms (and I sent Google the list of keywords).

This isn’t the first time I’ve ever done this — years ago, I once noticed another scummy site in this same industry who achieved tens of thousands of backlinks by creating his own iframe-based web ring. He owned over 25 domain names  in the industry with garbage doorway pages and inter-linked them all to one website, which in turn hit the top of Google page 1 and got cemented there. I reported it, and about three of four months later, noticed the site fell back around page 10 for the keywords it previously had page 1, position 1 rankings for.

While I like the fact that Google is most likely reading these spam reports and doing something about it, the major issue is that they have to be sent in the first place. Google obviously had no problem torching my affiliate site, which continues to have a bounce rate under 28%, an average 4-5 minute length of stay and a large number of return visitors AND visitors who search the internet for my exact domain name (which I’d assume is a major determinant of BEING A BRAND NAME).

To Add Insult to Injury

After this entire fiasco today, I couldn’t help but notice something else in SERPs, at the bottom of Google page 1 for a very competitive term. Another guy had registered something to the effect of “widgetsforsale.org” (where “widgets for sale” is in fact a very highly converting, highly valuable term to rank for) and the site was nothing but a one-page doorway pointing to another site. I reported that one, too :)

Algorithms like Google Panda were supposed to stop scum. Instead, they stop honest, hard working affiliates and let scum go through the cracks. If you want to take a conspiracy theorist’s stance, consider the monumental Google AdWords expenditures that this competitor has, and factor that in to the “how the hell is Google letting them cheat organics in such a blatant manner?” There are a lot of conspiracies over how Google gives behind-the-scenes “support” to big AdWords spenders, but I’ll let you chew on that one with a Google search. Actually, make it a Yahoo or Bing one.

Recently, I’ve completed a new website advertising my local-area internet marketing & design services, and plan to make 90% of my promotions be offline and hyper-local. The days of counting on search results are truly over. I have no faith in Google – it is a money hungry organization that is about as capable of doing a proper job as your local DMV or tax collector’s office. I can’t have faith in Yahoo or Bing — even though I find it to still be far more simple to rank in both, I don’t have much certainty as to their futures as search engines (especially Yahoo).

Even though the majority of my websites are still going strong, this massive blow I’ve recenetly suffered was more than enough of a warning to me. Affiliate storefronts had a good run — we’ll talk to our grandchildren about them, one day.

1) Google is against you.

Take the direct quote of Google’s Frederick Vallaeys in response to the work of affiliate marketers: it is “…just an unnecessary step in the sales funnel.” Google has taken numerous steps to show their extreme favoritism to brands, and their very apparent efforts to bury affiliate marketing efforts in search results.

Starting in 2010, the search engine launched “extended brand results” listing actual brand names as links at the top of SERPs. The “Vince” update of 2009 tied two search queries (i.e., a user searching for “hdtv” and then searching for “sony” meant that Sony would receive a “vote” for the term “hdtv”), giving household-name brands — already established and known for a certain product category — another feather in their cap. Later that year, brands received an additional bonus in AdWords, where “sitelinks” would appear under an ad, pushing down the remainder of the page further.

Summer of 2011 showed the most definitive all-out attack against affiliate marketing, with the “Google Panda” update — a change that subsequently ended numerous small business owners’ careers overnight by removing their websites for certain keyword results from Google’s index entirely, and replacing those positions with big brands.

Later in 2011 was the inception of Google+ and “+1,” a social sharing tool that gives heavy bonuses and favoritism to big brands, who already have thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of followers who are able to +1 a new blog post by the droves within immediate time periods. Most recently, January 2012 saw an algorithm update to combat “excessive ads above the fold” on a website. Guess who runs ads above a fold? Hint: not brands.

If you thought you could simply go by the old adage “if you can’t beat em, join em,” think again — your affiliate storefront will NEVER achieve “brand” status. The brand signals that exist within Google’s algorithm know of the links pointing outward toward online storefronts that package and ship the products you’re promoting, identifying you as a “middleman” and therefore an “…unnecessary step in the sales funnel,” as Mr. Vallaeys puts it.

Although you probably don’t need more convincing about Google’s extreme bias against affiliate marketers and toward big brand name corporations, a simple glance at your flat-lined Google Analytics charts have probably clued you in at some point that your reliance on eBay Partner Network and Amazon Associate-driven websites are about as effective as attempting to make a new resurrection of the Million Dollar Homepage.

One more thing: when you lose a major keyword ranking, get dropped backward by several pages on Google and see that you’ve been replaced by big brands — don’t hold a shred of hope about re-gaining that page 1, position 1-3 position ever again. Sophisticated algorithmic signals have already given your ‘affiliate’ labeled site a brand new pair of cement shoes.

If you don’t want to believe me, check out this example of how Google torches affiliates.

2. Google is AdWords.

You might remember Google, it was a search engine that displayed organic results under a couple paid ads. Before it became completely filled with AdWords ads within the fold, it was possible to compete in search rankings for long-tail terms to get your affiliate sites some search attention.

However, a full computer screen’s worth of most Google page 1 SERPs is now entirely infested with AdWords, complete with a yellow box featured ad, subsequent ads and sidebar ads.

These days, the cost of appearing anywhere within an eyeball’s view for even a long term AdWords keyword is entirely unaffordable to the at-home internet marketer – give or take a few clicks per day. Google is now a place for the 1% to throw around their $2,000+/day budget to fight each other in an unreasonably expensive environment for the fight to remain on top. Perhaps you’ve taken your measly budget and used it for things more important, like lunch.

Besides…who on Earth would even spend a dollar on AdWords for an affiliate storefront? As anyone knows, it is *impossible* to track true conversions for an affiliate storefront, since you’ll never know how a thing about which clicks to your site led to sales on eBay or Amazon’s end. Spending money on AdWords for an affiliate storefront is like buying Pick 6 Lotto tickets every week and hoping for something to happen. It’s just AdWords 101.

3) Google’s “shopping results” in SERPs have ended your business.

If you’ve searched for a product and saw a SERP featuring a horizontal thumbnail image bar of products from different retailers with prices, you’ve probably noticed your imminent doom. Another nail in the coffin of any affiliate storefront: shopping results exhibit extreme favoritism to online retailers lucky enough to have muscled their way into Google Shopping, in a price comparison war against each other that takes place far above your current ranking.

The fact about these shopping price comparisons in SERPs is that they are nearly eliminating your chances of ever appearing for the keywords that trigger them. Due to the fact that the first 1/4 to 1/3 of a SERP is mostly AdWords, followed by one of these shopping results snippets that contain eye-enticing thumbnail images that break up an otherwise texty SERP, there’s barely any reason for the user to scroll down to get into organic results at all.

Since you’re nothing more than a middleman posting links to an actual supplier, you’ll never be able to appear on shopping results. Worse yet, the clutter of AdWords and product comparisons is enough to push organic results on to page 2 of results. This, above all else, is contributing to the extinction of the affiliate storefront.

So, What Now?

The changes I’ve seen, especially on Google, have really put an extreme perspective on my own personal business plans. It’s no longer worth investing time, money or energy in an affiliate storefront because they’re becoming extinct. In fact, affiliate marketing in general should be regarded as a past-time rather than a full-time job.

We’re embarking on a Google search engine experience that is entirely suited toward Big Business, where big AdWords spenders rule. If you won’t [cant] compete due to the extreme budget needed to join the existing fray, you’re left behind to hope for the best in organic, which is no longer a valid strategy in 2012.

As for Yahoo and Bing, the potential selling of Yahoo as rumored last year should be enough to make you realize that your measly Yahoo rankings are also not to be counted on — their days are numbered if anything should ever happen to the search engine.

Become A Brand

This truly is the only way to stay alive these days: brands, as defined by search engines, are most likely websites that have real shopping carts and checkout systems. They supply products themselves, instead of shilling affiliate links to real storefronts. They have real company names, not “exact keyword domains.” They have Facebook and Twitter accounts with real followers who actually interact with and care about the products being sold. They get real backlinks — not garbage links that their own webmaster scrounges for, since no affiliate storefront will ever have a successful, ongoing natural link portfolio.

Think about something you can sell or provide, and think fast. These days, you never know when the next iteration of Google Panda will re-appear and torch your remaining search rankings. Use your existing affiliate sites as 301-redirect fodder to give your new sites a boost in rankings, and start branding away!

In case you hadn’t noticed — and don’t worry if you didn’t [given the fact that today's search engine algorithms have effectively killed off domain parking] — your Parked.com account is gone. Actually, so is their website. It’s nothing more than a blank white screen with a line of text that says “For questions regarding Parked.com, please contact PartnerSupport@Parked.com” — gee, thanks guys…don’t let the screen door hit your ass on the way out.

I suppose the most angering part about it is that there was NO notification whatsoever about Parked.com closing down. Not a 30 day notice, let alone a last minute one. I had an account manager at Parked.com, of whom never mentioned a word about this.

Let’s not forget the other two issues: 1) the earnings I still had queued up from domain parking revenue which Parked.com STOLE, and 2) about 4 years of invaluable domain parking data I had for almost 500 domain names, which is all gone.

I spent a couple hours going through my domains and forwarding them over to Voodoo.com (it’s a new parking service), which is pretty much all that any of us ex-Parked.com users can do at this point.

I’m so out of the domain parking realm that I can’t even list off any other services, to be honest. Well, except SEDO, but I was tired of getting $0.02/month for running a couple hundred domains with them. If you know of any good domain hosts, please list them below!

Nothing screams “unprofessional” more than using an official company email address like “mycompany@aol.com” or “mycompany@gmail.com”. Sadly, I’ve seen this practice many times in previous jobs I’d had with small businesses.

If you own a website that sells products or services and has a publicly visible email account for customer service and inquiries, you better damn sure get your own “myname@mycompany.com” email address. Not only does it make you look like a real company, but it will give you a small amount of clout with search engines.

There’s only one problem — and that’s for the at-home affiliate marketer who runs 15 affiliate websites and can’t imagine the monumental task involved in using 15 email accounts on a regular, weekly basis. However, there’s a way you can use Google Apps for Business to get the job done, so that a single email account can manage and send on behalf of all 15 sites. Sweet!

Rather than making this be an article on my blog, I decided to create a Squidoo lens on the topic, and this tutorial for managing multiple email addresses for multiple websites is all you’ll need to get this done (and with the power of Gmail, too!)

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to set up a free Google Apps for Business account for every single website you own. You’ll set a rule to allow your main business account to act on behalf of the other websites. You’ll then forward all emails from the other websites’ email accounts to your main business account, and your main business account will automatically respond ON BEHALF of the original account it was sent to. Nice :)

This article was taken from Pixelrage.net – Ramblings of an Internet Marketer

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