If you’re an affiliate marketer with Google adwords, the world hasn’t come to an end, but it sure has changed.Last week Google updated the way they rate web sites for thier Adwords program and many sites doing affiliate marketing simply had some or all of their campaigns frozen. The reason behind it is they see affiliate review sites as a bad user experience. This is where someone pays for the ad, and the landing page is a review of that product with an affiliate link going to something like a clickbank order page.

It looks to me like thier real goal is to improve what they refer to as the “user experience” by favoring sites that keep people on thier own site instead of tossing them off quickly to a landing page. There’s been a huge increase of people doing that and apparently Google is doing well enough to just freeze that kind of advertising. I’ve spoken to several people this has happened to and seen it firsthand. It took about a week to figure out exactly what happened as Google live support was vague and there isn’t any phone support unless you spend a gazillion dollars a year with them.

One friend spends $54,000 a year and couldn’t get anyone at Google to talk with him, only live chat support (and when he asked what to change to fix it they had no answers except to improve his “user experience”. It really amazes me there’s a company where you can spend that much every year and they won’t take a phone call. The stories of people being put out of business by this overnight are greatly exaggerated though. There’s plenty of other quality pay per clicks that will take your money. The real solution to this problem is to increase your Google Adwords score by keeping people on your site as long as possible and having as few external links as possible.

One note, this doesn’t seem to have anything to do with natural rankings with Google, just the paid listings. In the case of my friend, I advised instead of 500+ pages (and he has quality content, that’s not the problem) linking out at the bottom of each page, to point them to a sales page on that domain to keep them on the site. This should raise his Google adwords score when they see people aren’t clicking off the site after one page.

This is actually great news for Google competitors, because all the people I’ve spoken to about this are in a rush to diversify. For years it was easy for many to buy all their traffic in one place because Google has so much that the pay per clicks were often cheaper than the smaller guys. Also if you wanted an obscure keyword or phrase, usually you couldn’t buy enough of it anywhere else. It was a shock for some marketers who didn’t see it coming but I think it’s a good thing overall. Nobody should be that dependent on one company for anything.

Will review sites survive? Yes, they’ll advertise at other places who are happy to take thier money. It won’t be as easy or cheap though. One thing this update didn’t seem to address is places like The Rich Jerk (aka Kelly Felix) and the practice of sending keyword ads to a completely unrelated sales page with no content. I do hope they freeze ads that don’t even have the keyword they’re buying. The Rich Jerk book I bought long ago advocates cloaking so who knows if they’re doing that or not. My guess is their “Google user experience” allowed them to keep the listings just because nobody clicks off the sales landing page they’re sent to, even if it has nothing to do with the keyword ad they clicked on. I doubt that practice will last long if Google is this prepared to clean house for better quality.

I’m going to keep an eye on the competitors sales numbers for pay per clicks. It’ll be interesting to see just how much business gets transferred to them as a result of it. Have your Google adwords campaigns been affected? Please leave a comment.

Nick