Google's Secret Guidelines On Thin Affiliates

Are you creating pages without much content with the aim of collecting pay-per-click (PPC) revenue? Google's raters are taught to mark such pages as "Offensive", and gives examples.Google secret guidelines spend some time discussing different ways in which some affiliates display results from pay-per-click search engines, so if you're doing that, you'll definitely want to study this report carefully.Are you displaying ads disguised as search engine results? Google finds them offensive.Are you adding a dmoz.org feed to your site with the aim of earning PPC revenue? That's "offensive", too.Google says:"We differentiate between affiliates that produce extra service, value, or content, and those that simply are duplicates of other sites, set up to boost traffic to other sites and earn a commission for it. The former ones are not Offensive and should be rated on the merits to the query. The latter ones are Offensive..."Thin affiliate doorways are sites that usher people to a number of Affiliate programs, earning a commission for doing so, while providing little or no value-added content or service to the user. A site certainly has the right to try to earn income;we're attempting to identify sites that do nothing but act as a commission-earning middleman."Affiliate networks seen as warning signsTo Google, affiliate links such as qksrv.net, bfast.com and myaffiliateprogram.com - on the page or in redirects - "strongly suggest" that the site is a thin affiliate.Are you using an affiliate datafeed? To Google, that's another warning sign.However, if you offer a comparison of prices between different online merchants, you're OK, you're not a thin affiliate.Google provides an incredibly tough guideline, which hundreds of thousands of affiliate sites fail to meet.Google says:"Do not call a page affiliate spam when an affiliation is only incidental to the message and purpose of a website. To determine whether participation in affiliate programs is central or incidental to the site's existence, ask yourself this question: Would this site remain a coherent whole if the pages leading to the affiliate (merchant) were taken away?"That probably counts out most affiliate sites.In summary, if you want to be friends with Google, make sure you provide extra value or content.I've quoted only parts of the report. Any serious affiliate will want to study the whole thing carefully.You can read the full report on Henk's blog here...http://www.searchbistro.com/spamguide.docNote: A Google employee broke a non-disclosure agreement by revealing this report. I don't know how long it will stay online. You may want to do what I did - save a copy of it on your hard drive.Now we know what Google really thinks of affiliates. You've been warned.http://www.articlefeeder.com/Internet/Google_s_Secret_Guidelines_On_Thin_Affiliates.html