In previous post I have talked about the proliferation of trash-content sites – typically sites with skinny content designed to make money by hosting PPC ads, or by making a percentage on affiliate relationships.
The web is awash with millions of these sites and pages. Few of them have any original content, and they play havoc with legitimate SEO work by hugely inflating the “results found” on major search engines. (This figure helps SEO marketers determine the relative strength of their site keywords.)
For instance, if you do a search on Google for “marketing” you get over a billion results found. How many of those contain legitimate and useful information on the subject of marketing?
Well, it seems Google in now taking some steps to rid its search results of some of the worst trash-content offenders by first targeting affiliates who create doorway pages or pages of no real value to visitors.
You can read the Google guidelines here, but the two sections which will impact affiliate marketers most are these:
– Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
– If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.
How Google will tweak its algorithms to identify pages that don’t “add value” is, as always with Google, something of a mystery.
While on the one hand legitimate marketers can look forward to a lot of trash-content pages being relegated to page 50 of results found, on the other they may want to take a close look at some of their own pages.
There are plenty of legitimate sites which have affiliate links on some of their pages. So while these new guidelines may effectively target trash-content pages, legitimate sites may also find some of their pages being dropped from search results.
The moral of the story is, if you want good organic search results, every page you put up should add value.
