A few years ago Google first “slapped” thin affiliate sites with low quality scores, and now, webmasters are complaining again because their “high quality” review sites just got “slapped”.

What do I mean by “slapped”? A Quality Score of 10 being reduced to 1. That’s a slap right in the wallet, because what use to cost $0.50 a click, not is $20.00.

Ouch.

First things first, many “experts” are claiming that finally the time has come when Google is going to “stamp out” affiliate marketing because it isn’t a real business. Hold on now … not a real business? Really? Then why, might I ask, does Google OWN an affiliate network?!?!

They don’t hate affiliates, they just hate the lazy ones.

Fact: This issue is with AdWords not the Organic listings.

Testing Results: Of the dozens of affiliate review sites I have, not one of them was slapped in AdWords. Not one.

I also had the opportunity to review sites that did get slapped, and you know what? All of them were awful. They weren’t high quality, they didn’t add value, and they looked like they were built with a content scrapper tool. If you are serious about affiliate market, then get serious about it.

Every program I do my #1 goal is to have a better site than the merchant. Why? Because I know that if my site looks better and performs better, they will want to buy it.

Note: This issue has nothing to do with “cloaked links” or “redirects” according to my testing.