SEO vs farmers
 

This is an interesting article.

What say you?

For years, people have been talking about the death of the affiliate market, and I have to say: Google looks like it's making major efforts to kill it dead.

There are a lot of folks out there that I have to wonder how this will affect 'em. I mean, if aggregators get dinged, what happens to someone like FreeOnes? Or the IAFD?

Re: SEO vs farmers
 

Google hasnt killed it people like 12clicks and DeeCash almost have.
Add some companies have discovered profitability in making their own traffic as well as some successful affiliates have discovered making content to match to their own traffic.

Traffic has been and always will be a "soup" or a mix of combinations.
Chasing the SEO algorithm will prove to be a major challenge if thats the only ingredient you use for your soup.

Google is changing theirs every 2 weeks or less to both eliminate the gaming of the system as well as to remain on top. Bing certainly has been coming on strong and over the years MS has proven to be stubborn in trying to gain market share.

Usually they just buy the company but I dont see that happening with google.

Those that know enough about traffic in general are in high demand and I think SEO is only a tiny portion of the entire game.

Re: SEO vs farmers
 

The Google changes only really touch affiliates if they are doing nothing but pasting up the same galleries from the same sponsors, and adding nothing to them.

What Google will not say (because they risk anti-trust action) is that they spotted certain features of "content farms" that they can key on that will hurt a few selected companies. They aren't out there whacking all sorts of information sites, only certain types of "farms" that were created not to give information to users, but rather to attract Google traffic.

I don't think they whacked affiliates in the least - only a select few abusers who were really trying to take advantage.

Re: SEO vs farmers
 

That's exactly why I haven't invested a ton of time on blog networks. Some are doing very well with them, but they're highly dependent on Google for the majority of their traffic.

You just never know when Google may decide that certain types of blogs are polluting their SERPs and it's bye-bye traffic. Just ask any long term Link List owner about that, they'll cry you a river.

Re: SEO vs farmers
 

changes in the seo landscape are the least of the problems of the affiliate market in the adult world. scamming the consumer and a broken economic model are the real issues there.

that said, if your business model revolves around providing no real original content or anything that otherwise proves useful to the surfer for the purpose of simply funneling traffic to someone else for pay....well, you might wanna rethink your long term strategy.

butt loads of RSS feeds, landing pages and pretty much anything that sends the surfer to something they weren't expecting is on the google hit list. and they are going after it aggressively.

as for what IS working for SEO and traffic generation....well, anyone who really knows isn't going to tell you until it becomes worthless....at least not for free.

i've prided myself for being self sustaining for traffic. there are three things i'll share that have always been true. first off, by the time everyone else has figured out what you've been doing, you best have your next plan rolled out. two, learn to love data. data is your friend. build, experiment, tweak and analyze. and finally, don't share recipes. ;)

in the link above, there is one very solid truth about what to do for SEO RIGHT NOW. and that is provide a nice clean website with original very desirable content. do that and the seo will work itself out as THAT is exactly what both google and bing are trying to tune to target.