Google Panda impact on affiliate marketing


For long enough if you had a web site and a basic knowledge of SEO you could probably make a decent living promoting products through affiliate marketing.  Since Google has become a major force on the web things have become a lot more complicated.  Now you have to be aware of how Google reacts to your whole website in order to survive.

If you understand the new order you can accommodate the changes into your marketing efforts and continue to profit from marketing on the web.  Google is only making changes like Panda in order to give its customers a better experience when using its search engines.  After all the reason Google is the most used search engine is down to the fact that it gives in most cases the most accurate results.  Google is wanting to provide the best user experience for its customers and it is intent on doing this even if this leads to many websites seeing a dramatic drop in traffic.  The fact is that some major websites did see major traffic drops after the introduction of the Panda algorithm.  This happened because Google changed its criteria from evaluating a site on a page by page basis  to looking at the overall site.  If a website was considered to have poor user experience Google downgraded  it;  which is why, in many instances, there was such a massive drop in traffic.  This of course had a huge financial impact for those sites which Panda hit hard.  

Understanding how Panda affects your internet marketing is crucial to maintaining your web presence. Firstly it is all based on what should be your aim anyway.  That  is to give your visitors a good experience when they visit you.  So if after using Google to search for a relevant website they click on a link which takes them to your site and they immediately press the back button to return to the search engine then Google will note this.   So how long someone now stays on your site is now a relevant factor for Google.  After all if someone browses a site for ten or fifteen minutes rather than five seconds they must have found something relevant in most cases.  

Article marketing until the advent of Panda was always been seen as a sure fire method of gaining ranking.   By placing links in articles back to your website you would in the past have improved your ranking through back linking.  Now Google is looking closer at articles that are nothing more than regurgitated tracts carrying little value or merit.  In the past it was possible to create twenty articles around a product you were promoting and by spreading it around various article marketing sites obtain ranking on various long tailed keywords you were targeting.

Whilst everything seems to come back to keywords eventually Google is now clever enough to distinguish between keyword optimised articles and topic based articles.  An article which is loaded with three or four long tailed keywords will now be penalised whereas in the past this would have been perfectly acceptable.  So now you have to be more topic based in promoting your website.  The ‘how to cure your whatever’  type of  website is going to have a tough time.  Now it is necessary to have more than information on a subject which isn’t solely based on stuffing keywords on whatever your affiliate program is trying to sell and giving the user more of what they want which is good helpful authoritative advice.

Working out how to live with Panda is something that many affiliate marketers are already doing.  As Google only updates its Panda settings for a website every four weeks or so tinkering at the edges on a day by day basis to see if you can fool Google will no longer work.  Again as Panda looks at the whole website when giving the website a score it is important to make changes that will improve your rating in that respect to increase your traffic and profits.

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