From thin affiliates to THICK affiliates!

[nite]

Performing a search on Google for "Panda Update" yields no shortage of results.

However, because of the details of the Panda Update, some very high-quality sites were lumped together with the content farms. And to add insult to injury, most of these small businesses are responsible for their own SEO on their sites and have no idea how to fix it!

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/panda...#ixzz1XEIJJuT0

Supposedly, one thing Google was going to address with Panda 2.2 is the issue of scraper sites – websites that republish other people's content on their own site, usually making money from Google AdSense in the process – outranking content originators. As Frank Watson noted, "Google created the mechanism that clogs its own data centers and overwhelms its own spam battlers."

Read more: http://searchenginewatch.com/article...te-Version-2.2

And if you are an affiliate, you are most likely republishing content (such as product titles, product descriptions, links to product images, etc.) from a parent site. And if this is all the content you have on your domain (or shopping site), then panda probably kicked your ass.

One of the most important steps in improving your site's ranking in Google search results is to ensure that it contains plenty of rich information that includes relevant keywords, used appropriately, that indicate the subject matter of your content.

However, some webmasters attempt to improve their page's ranking and attract visitors by creating pages with many words but little or no authentic content. Google will take action against domains that try to rank more highly by just showing scraped or other auto-generated pages that don't add any value to users. Examples include:

Thin affiliate sites: These sites collect pay-per-click (PPC) revenue by sending visitors to the sites of affiliate programs, while providing little or no value-added content or service to the user. These sites usually have no original content and may be cookie-cutter sites or templates with no unique content.

Doorway pages: Pages created just for search engines

Auto-generated content: Content generated programatically. Often this will consist of random paragraphs of text that make no sense to the reader but that may contain search keywords.

Scraped content: Some webmasters make use of content taken from other, more reputable sites on the assumption that increasing the volume of web pages with random, irrelevant content is a good long-term strategy. Purely scraped content, even from high-quality sources, may not provide any added value to your users without additional useful services or content provided by your site. It's worthwhile to take the time to create original content that sets your site apart. This will keep your visitors coming back and will provide useful search results.

There is no problem in being an affiliate as long as you create some added value for your users and produce valuable content that gives a user a reason to visit your site. For example, you could create product reviews, ratings, and product comparisons.

If your site has been removed from our search results, review our Webmaster Guidelines for more information. Once you've made your changes and are confident that your site no longer violates our guidelines, submit your site for reconsideration.

http://www.google.com/support/webmas...y?answer=66361

So, as an amateur programmer, I ask myself what we could do in retaliation to Panda. And I'm trying to gather ideas from the Prosperent community here.

1. The fact is that Google wants content -- relevant content -- unique content -- enriching content, and they get pissed and will kicked your domain in the balls if you don't have that.

2. If we are going to offer products from Prosperent, then we have to supplement product information with several things: rss feeds, articles, youtube videos, and much more. I say "much more" because I'm sure there are several power-hitter affiliates with Prosperent that already had these things on their shopping sites yet they still got chewed up by the Panda.

3. Product Reviews would be nice, but once again, we're setting the stage to get chewed up by Panda again in the future once the "reviews" appear on thousands of Prosperent API sites.

4. We need something unique, such as doing "ROBOTS = NOINDEX, FOLLOW" on search result pages, and then on individual item pages, we do "ROBOTS = INDEX, NOFOLLOW" ; On individual item pages, we can syndicate related content based upon the word frequency in the description (after filtering out common words). We can also syndicate information pertaining to the item brand, or even to related individual words of the product itself . The point here is that we're gathering data from around the internet that is related (in word) to the individual product. In other words, such "content-rich" information would be available on the individual product page. (Think Mashup).

5. We need to get more friendly with social applications. I see one reason for Google's increased weight to social media as a reaction to Facebook's "Like" button.

6. A possible alternative (in the meantime) would be to begin blogging -- yup, write unique content on your own blog (because Google loves unique content) and put up a few Performance Ads. Actually, this is a method that I strongly recommend. Now, while I detest Wordpress, having a blog attached to your Prosperent API site might be a good idea. Or if you just love blogging and want to pay nothing for it, then perhaps setting up an account on blogger might be a good idea with a few Performance Ads?

Basically, folks, anything the Prosperent team "gives" to us in the API is going to get duplicated thousands of times and it will eventually wear itself out. So, I'm just looking for a few ideas that will guide the scope of my (and others) amateur programming.

In essence, it comes down to this. Amazon.com didn't lost out during the Panda update -- they're winning. So, what are THEY doing on their site? Well, they have lots of user reviews (unique content), they removed user reviews from the API (prevent duplicate content from affiliate sites), they feature related items, they reduced the number of hourly API calls (to prevent their affiliates from competing against their parent site), and loads of domains around the internet link to individual products on Amazon. Also all the Amazon results cluttering up the Google search result page don't link to search results on Amazon ... rather, all the items I see on Google link directly and ONLY to the individual product itself.

[cbass99]

The bigest problem we have as Affiliate marketers right now is the Huge focus that the Panda Algo has on the Brand. Have a look at the SERPS for product related queries. It's the usual suspects that are dominating. Amazon, Ebay, Nextag, Like.com, TheFind.com, Pronto.com etc.

And none of those aggregator sites is particularly "thick"

[$imon]

I've been discussing some MFP ideas with a few people recently.

I certainly want to attempt the quality over quantity method. The logic to this being fairly simple. I'd rather have 5 quality sites that produce $20 each a month than 100 crap sites doing $1 each a month before getting nuked. (This is obviously just an example of figures).

Even just one site could be enough to make a nice monthly sum. The route I want to go down is fairly simple. I still want to look like a MFP site with products, pictures, descriptions, prices etc. But I want to add in my own unique descriptions which probably only need to be a few lines and then every now and again I could probably manually throw a fake review in there too for some more unique content.

I know this sounds like a massive ballache, and it probably is. But if you take a solid domain name, and gradually increase the products / content then it's got to be worth the effort. I think there are certain SEO aspects of this that can still be automated (not saying any more on that) so if I can get X amount of products done per day I can slowly and naturally build an optimized MFP site with content that Google will like.

That's just me writing down some of my thoughts for now anyway.

[312k1t]

To $imon:

One month ago I wrote one complex solution in PHP (with Zend Framework), which has a lots of features, which you described above.

Like a Manual/Auto adding products (products are saved in database), Edit/Write own descriptions, Adding product reviews + next other features).

Creating websites with this system is much slower than MFPmu, but you can create site with more unique content, when you have time.

If I find some time I will place it to the Marketplace with some tutorials.

[$imon]

Sounds interesting mate. If you have anything live at the moment running feel free to PM me an example / details.

[AcidRaZor]

"shopping comparison" is what jumped out at me in this one. And *plugging my own stuff* if you buy one my my templates (I'll be releasing more soon hopefully), you'd be running a nice comparison site much like thenetpool. Imagine what reviews/ratings would do for you when you add that onto it. And since products will carry static ID's, you can add on unique content to a product description as you like, even make up your own "related items" or "clients who bought this also bought this" type stuff.

[$imon]

Well yes a powerful system for reviews and ratings will certainly give some much needed extra content to the automated style of sites.

[nite]

Hmmmm... perhaps I can program an extension hook to a free forum platform (such as Simple Machines) in such a manner as to "inject" Prosperent content from the API as a forum post. In this manner, I won't reinvent the wheel and I can take advantage of the search functions, user registrations, and content creation from posts offered by a forum platform. In other words, I would have the forum platform handle all transactions with mySQL. I would "piggy back" information from the API as a new forum post. In addition, a forum platform like SMF would scale nicely. Wordpress scales POORLY and chokes at around 30,000 - 40,000 entries. Forums on the other hand can handle hundreds of thousands of entries without bogging down the server.

At this point, it would be a matter of developing a template so that the forum engine would look like a content review & content creation site regarding the topic at hand, which would be the Prosperent product name.

Anyone have anything to add to this?

[prosperent brian]

This: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/ecommerce...ent-how-to-win is also a good resource for this thread. From what is being reported, it only take a sentence or two of unique content to set yourself apart. It would definitely be worthwhile to take some solid performing products and spending a few minutes on a custom description for each. In many cases the merchants description sucks anyway.

[$imon]

This: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/ecommerce...ent-how-to-win is also a good resource for this thread. From what is being reported, it only take a sentence or two of unique content to set yourself apart. It would definitely be worthwhile to take some solid performing products and spending a few minutes on a custom description for each. In many cases the merchants description sucks anyway.

That's the basis of what I was thinking for content. Just need to get creative with a few bits and bobs.