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What's all this about thin affiliates?

Make Money Online In a "leaked" document reportedly coming from Google, the big G gave guidelines to human spam-busters on how to classify affiliate sites as thin or not.

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Internet Business Opportunity A "thin affiliate" is basically one that creates pages with the sole intention of ranking well and directing traffic to an affiliated merchant site, without adding anything unique to the World Wide Web.

Joint ventures are very easy to create. There are plenty of web sites that offer people the opportunity to post their business propositions online for other to see and consider. Many developers and marketers check out JV opportunities weekly looking for the next big product. For instance, many web developers use affiliate sites to sell quality products to the masses that offer huge commissions. Affiliate sites such as Clickbank, Commission Junction and even Amazon help small web developers sell their merchant's items.

Free Money It seems that the algorithms at Google HQ are no longer the only ranking factors involved in where your pages end up in the search results. Now, human beings are scouring the Internet looking for sites to penalise.

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Work At Home Business Some have called it a hoax, others have seen it as the end of affiliate marketing, but if you actually read this report, you will hopefully see what I see:

Here at Leadbay, we want to continue to inform people about the opportunities that working with our industry leading business will bring for them. As the UK%š first and largest lead generation business, there is a great potential for affiliates to be able to build a substantial income stream by bringing our financial services solution to their customers. The financial services market is still a massively growing online business area and Leadbay is ideally placed to help affiliates take advantage of this.

Free Online Affiliate Program (a) Affiliate sites are here to stay
(b) If you do things right, you will end up with less competition from other affiliate marketers (since so many will ignore this report and continue to churn out thin sites created with little or no focus on the visitor).

Auction Coin Money Paper This report was apparently given out to people chosen to work for "Google's spam department" as "Raters" - maybe they should be called ratters ;o).

Franchise Business Opportunity That's right, Google apparently has hired people around the world to do web searches, look at the results in Google, and identify those sites that Google should penalize for Spam.

Best Free Online Affiliate With Google doing such weird stuff lately, and some affiliate sites disappearing without trace, things are starting to make sense.

Blogging Money Thebillivard This "leaked" report details what the raters should look out for, what to label as spam, and what not to label as spam. I am sure that you agree, whether this document is real or not, it is certainly something we should all look at carefully.

Best Home Based Business Below, I have highlighted the main points of the report. I hope to show you exactly what you need to do to stay on the right side of these "Raters" and of course Google itself.

Affiliate Marketing Program Before we begin, I just want to say that I don't think any of this is new. I think that what Google is trying to achieve here is what they have always tried to achieve - relevant quality results without spam. I think that Google's filters only go so far, and Google realise this. There is nothing as reliable as a human for determining quality, so hiring people to search out spam was the next logical step forward.

Money Site Thebillivard Com OK, let's look the main points.

Online Business Opportunity (a) the first thing Google instructs its raters to do is read and learn the Google Webmaster Guidelines.

Pay Per Click Affiliate You can read the full guidelines here:

Cnn Money Http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

Business Opportunity Lead Let's have a quick look and see what Google have to say about what makes a site good.

Affiliate Program Directory Summary of Google's Webmaster Guidelines:

Making Money Program Under the section Design and Content Guidelines, there are some useful tips on how you link the pages of your site together.

Work From Home Business GOOGLE: "Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link."

Internet Marketing Affiliate This should make sense. If a page has no links to it, the search engines cannot find it. In addition, links pointing to pages help that page rank well (because of the influence of link text).

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GOOGLE: "Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages."

Internet Home Business A sitemap is there to help users, but the search engines use them to find new pages. When you add a new page to your site, add a link on the sitemap, and the search engines will find it. If you want the spiders coming back to your sitemap frequently, consider adding an RSS feed to your sitemap. Last week I mentioned some software that makes adding a feed to your site very simple, so there is no excuse for not using the technology available to you.

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GOOGLE: "Create a useful, information-rich site and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content."

Unclaimed Money Here we have a reference to content. Quality content is the way forward. Page generators that create 1000s of pages with no unique content are struggling to survive.

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GOOGLE: "Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it."

Ppc Affiliate Program An invitation to use primary and secondary keywords.

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GOOGLE: "Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images."

Income Opportunity Home Based An indication here how highly Google ranks keywords, especially in text links. For a well-optimized site, I do not recommend using fancy image navigation buttons built with JavaScript. Good old-fashioned text links will help your site get indexed better, and rank higher.

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GOOGLE: "Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive and accurate. "

Money Gram Reading between the lines - don't stuff keywords. Write these tags naturally and with ALT tags, make sure they reflect the image (since these tags are used by blind visitors). The title tag is very important, so do use your primary keyword in the title. However, be careful with ALT tags. Keyword stuffing is likely to result in a penalty.

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GOOGLE: "Check for broken links and correct HTML."

Advertising Affiliate Program Do you have any broken links in your site? These can cause problems. Additionally, you should verify your HTML using a service like HTML Validator. They actually have a free version.

Make Money At Home Http://www.htmlvalidator.com/

Homebased Business Opportunity Invalid HTML could be affecting your rankings.

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In the Technical Guidelines, there are a few good tips as well:

Money Investing GOOGLE: "Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as Javascript, cookies, session ID's, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site. "

Work At Home Based Business Speaks for itself really. A lot of new webmasters like to load their pages with fancy animations, scripts and eye-candy. Avoid them unless absolutely necessary.

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Here is an interesting point:

Making Money GOOGLE: "Once your site is online, submit it to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html. "

Home Based Mlm Business Many marketers including myself never submit sites at this URL. My advice here is to add a link from a page already in Google, and let Google find the site for itself. I don't think I have submitted a page at this URL for over 2 years, and my new sites get found within days, using this linking technique.

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GOOGLE: "Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!. "

Mad Money Since directories are highly valued by Google, try to get your site listed in them. These directories will provide a quick route to getting indexed, as well as provide valuable PR and link reputation for your site. The way Google probably sees directories listings is that if the site is there, it is quality (since places like DMoz are edited by humans).

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If you don't read all of the Google guidelines, you should at least print out the Quality Guidelines - Basic principles section.

Mortgage Affiliate Program GOOGLE: "Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users, or present different content to search engines than you display to users."

Microsoft Money Here is a clear warning to webmasters. Don't use tricks, and don't over-optimize your pages.

New Business Opportunity As I always say "if it makes you nervous, don't do it".

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Money Converter GOOGLE: "Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"

Affiliate Program Software Another bomb-shell for many:

Money Conversion GOOGLE: "Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighbourhoods" on the web as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links."

Best Home Business Opportunity This is a clear indication that Google does not like reciprocal links. In addition, there is a warning there that linking to a penalised site can cause your own site to get penalised. A site that is carefully controlling their linking, will be able to spot bad sites, and avoid penalties. A site that links to all and sundry wont, and are therefore likely to get into trouble.

Join Affiliate Program GOOGLE: "Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our terms of service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google."

Check And Money Order Cashing This guideline warns against software that automatically checks rankings or other automated tasks. If you are using a rank checker, make sure that software uses the Google API key (which Google introduced to help developers create Google-friendly software) which can then check Google safely. This API Key limits the number of automated queries the software can do, and keeps you within safe "Google limits".

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The Quality Guidelines - Specific recommendations sections should act as your checklist of things not to do. Here is the list:

Business Opportunity Affiliate Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
Don't employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.
Don't send automated queries to Google.
Don't load pages with irrelevant words.
Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.

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Keeping within Google's guidelines is so important if you want your site listed. I highly recommend you print out the entire set of guidelines and read them again and again until you are familiar with them.

Business Home Internet OK, back to the Google raters.

Internet Affiliate Program Google have told their raters to pay particular attention to:

Fast Money (b) "The distinction between pages designed for human viewers and those set up for search engine robots"

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Affiliate Affiliatelandmine (c) "The specific enumerated manipulative techniques for which sites may be 'punished' by Google"

Make Money From Home You can see a lot of pages in Google's index that have been setup purely for search engine robots, or pages that are designed to do nothing more than increase your rankings of other pages.

Free Home Based Business These are typically pages that hold no interest to human visitors, and are merely there to either manipulate your own rankings, or make revenue from Adsense (or affiliate programs).

Casino Affiliate Program Techniques here might include "hidden text", keyword stuffing, pages containing search engine results (like TE pages), pages that only contain RSS feeds and little else, cloaked pages and doorway pages.

Money Maker If your page is not interesting for a visitor, and is only setup to get Adsense clicks, or boost rankings of other pages, then these are the pages Google considers spam.

Online Internet Business Do this test:

Make Money Online With Remove all income generating code from a page (Adsense, affiliate links etc).

Money Market Account Then ask yourself this:

Best Business Opportunity "Is this page still of value to a human visitor?"

Debt Management Affiliate If you truthfully answer yes, then you are OK. If you answer no, then that page would be considered spam by a rater. Later in this course, we look at a more comprehensive checklist to see whether your pages are thin or not.

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To read more about how you can avoid being labelled as a "thin" affiliate, download your free copy of "Creating 'Fat' Affiliate Sites".
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