Comments on: Ben Moskel: The Rebirth of Affiliate Marketing?

By: Cheryl MacNaughton

Cheryl MacNaughton — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 00:40:07 +0000

I have found out the hard way about pleasing the Bots for PPC. Some of the content has to be in image format because the bots are not intelligent enough to know what the site is really about. They make calculated guesses and that can put your site into Slap’s ville even when it does not deserve it. The PPC World is evolving and staying on top of all the requirements is almost a full time job.

By: Zen

Zen — Fri, 14 May 2010 20:37:58 +0000

My account has been ‘under review’, ‘suspended’, ‘complained’ and whatnot according to G. The funny thing is, the websites of merchants of the products I WAS promoting had at least a PR of 4 and were highly ranked for some very popular keywords.

They were legitimate products which I have had not one single refund of, and they certainly do not contain any taboo words like ‘Google’ or ‘Cash’.

I think a big part of what determines if your account is legal(according to the Big G’s law) or not depends greatly on luck and the employee who is reviewing your campaigns.

My account is currently under suspension (again) and I wonder if miracles will happen like the previous times?

One question here – Can I track sales conversion using php on Yahoo and Bing if the buy page is on the merchants’ websites and not mine? Do they have a ‘destination url’ and ‘display url’ like adwords?

By: Steve Juth

Steve Juth — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 16:11:38 +0000

Well said. I agree. No one outside of Google seems to know all of the parameters involved here. And I’m sure this is often the case within Google.

Here is an interesting post from someone who had their account banned for doing SEO research via AdWords:

http://www.dotcult.com/adwords-account-banned-for-keyword-research

Linking to other sites to test keywords is an interesting and effective practice for testing, but even here one needs to be careful. We have to remember that Google’s human editorial review department is watching things more closely these days. It’s not about trying to get past some bot or algorithm, as many affiliates have tried to do in the past.

And who knows if this will improve anytime soon. The fact that Google’s phone support will now often send you back to their website for AdWords help and then automatically hang up (which they did not do in the past) is not very encouraging.

By: RagsToRich

RagsToRich — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 20:02:43 +0000

What I’m getting from this article plus the comments here is that no-one really has a clue what the regulations are re: AdWords and affiliate sites….

Which seems a poor reflection on google more than anything else.

By: Anthony Luth

Anthony Luth — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 23:47:31 +0000

Great post. I agree that affiliate marketing is not dead for I have had some success in the past few months. I am still new and learned a lot from this post.

I liked the points you made about finding sub-niches as well as a USP. That will definitely help.

I agree that the only way to make it is to buckle down and get good at copywriting, knowing your visitors, and adding value. And if you can afford to buy traffic, you have to get good at that too.

All in all, thanks for the insight Perry.

Anthony