Google (and Twitter) Slaps Again
While I was laid up with my poison ivy it seems to have been a pretty “violent” week in the Internet Marketing world.
You may have heard of this but I didn’t until this weekend and I thought I’d let you know in case you hadn’t heard it.
Google “Slaps” Again
Last week, Google “slapped” again — which means they changed their computer algorithm; the set of computer instructions.
From what I can gather from my research, Google decided to seriously dis affiliate marketers; although it potentially can harm anybody so pay attention to this.
The way Google did that is they took away “points” from pages that have affiliate links on the page.
On a simple level, when Google calculates the “value” of a page, like their Quality Score, they have a set of rules in their computer program.
When they go through a page they look for matches to their rules and if they find a match to a rule they add or subtract “points” to the page’s “score”.
When they’re done they have a final score of the page.
If the score is below their minimum then they are not “happy” and give a low score and you’d be lucky to find the page in their search results. (this is bad because it can be very hard to get a devalued page back, frequently it is easier to “throw it away” and make another one)
If it is above the minimum you’re okay and get some Google Love, although you want to have the highest score possible as the higher score generally means more love (that is, higher search position and more traffic).
So what this latest algorithm change did was look on the page and see if there are any affiliate links on the page and, if so, they subtract points.
This means that, particularly for affiliate marketers, a lot of pages drop below the minimum and fell drastically in the search results (maybe even fell off the results).
Note: even if you have a full featured site/blog and not a site with just affiliate links or a page with a lot of affiliate links or you didn’t get “slapped” this may still impact you and you shouldn’t ignore this.
What can you do?
My research showed that it seems that what Google “punished” was raw or “naked” affiliate links; cloaked or redirected links weren’t affected — YET!
A raw link might look like www.SomebodysWebSite.com/aff_id=123456.
A cloaked link might look like www.MyWebSite.com/Recommends/SomebodysProduct
Obviously, if you have raw links you should change them to cloaked links; see below for some PHP and HTML code you can use to cloak your links (no instructions though but leave a comment if you need help).
This may be temporary though as Google usually takes small steps so they may punish you in the future for other affiliate links.
That is something that can be dealt with but I can’t go into it now,
Twitter Slaps Too
Twitter also did bit of a slap; you might have noticed your “Followers” and “Following” number changed, possibly drastically.
A little while ago Twitter started looking closely at the Twitter accounts and suspended a number of accounts that they felt might be “spam accounts”.
This review has been going on for a while but the other day Twitter got rid of a lot accounts and recalculated the number of people following you and the number of people you are following.
They’ve cleaned out the clutter so to speak and adjusted everyone’s numbers.
There is nothing to do and really things will ultimately be better but it may have shocked you to see you numbers dropped and wondered why.
Leave me a comments, I’m lonely 
Talk soon,
David
The “Shameless” (but “Ethical”) Marketer
http://www.Twitter.com/DavidHusnian
http://www.8-8-8Sale.com
http://www.MusicForInternetMarketers.com
http://www.SecretsOfGoogleAdwords.com
http://www.MadMondaySale.com
http://www.2ForTuesdaySale.com
O.Y. Need to learn how to use Twitter, well look at http://www.FromTheDeskOfDavid.com/Recommends/TwitterSalvationSystem and help building a larger Twitter list look at http://www.FromTheDeskOfDavid.com/Recommends/TwitterListBuilder
O.O.Y. I almost forgot to give you the link redirection code at http://www.FromTheDeskOfDavid.com/FreeStuff/RedirectionCode.zip
[...] And David Hussain’s [...]
Hi Dave, Thanks for letting us know about twitter. I did notice that my number of followers dropped quite a lot and wondered if it was something i had done.
Great content, I’ll be back soon.
Regards, Barry
Barry,
Welcome and thanks!
A big drop in followers is exactly why I started to look into it also.
Some people had a big drop in people they were following but I didn’t because I am not a believer in just following everyone who follows you.
I’d have had 3-4 times the followers if I did that but having spammers and people who just follow everyone doesn’t serve my followers or myself so I don’t do it.
David
[...] I think we’ve seen some of the beginning of that when Google serious devalue pages with affiliate links. [...]
Yep – bigger then life
First site I checked, and have been working on for a few months, had 3 keywords in the top half of page #1 – not no more.. down to page 7 and 8 sense a couple days ago.
The next 2 only lost a little ground and one seemed unaffected. Still got a few more to check but I’m just going to sit back and watch for a week to measure the damage and figure out where to start over.
Dawn,
Fortunately the short-term fix is easy, cloak your affiliate links.
Then you can go back and deal with the long-term fix.
Good luck,
David