• by Shankar Gupta , January 11, 2005

Many affiliate marketers are so far managing to cope with Google's recent move to limit ads, say industry observers. While the new policy--which limits ads to one per merchant site--has only been in effect for about a week, it seems that affiliate marketers were prepared for the move. Affiliates who offer their own content pages have found ways to deal with it or have been unaffected by it.

"From what I'm seeing so far, affiliates are just working around the new policies," said Kellie Stevens, the founder and president of www.AffiliateFairPlay.com. "I don't think it's particularly unexpected," Stevens added. "I don't think most affiliates were taken by surprise by the policy change--it's been rumored for a while now."

But for others, especially those who just redirect traffic to retailers without providing unique content, the change might be more far-reaching. Hardest hit by the change would be affiliates who provide no unique content on their sites, said Fathom Executive Vice President, Matt McMahon. "There's a lot of marketers out there who employ affiliates to do their search engine management for them, so they don't have to worry about that," he said. "The affiliates who've been hired to blanket the search market, and push out the results of other advertisers who may also be relevant."

Last week, search giant Google told its advertisers that it would display only one ad per merchant site for the same keyword search. Google's Director of Product Management, Salar Kamangar, said that the move was entirely intended to improve their ad service. "We're not really looking to crack down on arbitrage," Kamangar said. "We really intended to focus on the quality of our advertising results."

The ad rank is now how Google will determine which ads are shown for a given site. Whereas before, multiple ads for a single merchant site could be shown for the same keyword search, now only one ad per display URL will be used. A sites' ad rank is determined by the ad's price-per-click and their click- through rate, Kamangar said.

Rumors were being floated in online forums like www.SearchEngineWatch.org and www.Webmasterworld.com and in the blogosphere that Google's new policy had a gaping loophole in it, since affiliate advertisers could simply create similar URLs under the same domain, which would allow them to post multiple ads for essentially the same pages. A Google spokesman denied that this would be a problem, and told MediaDailyNews that the search site checks for uniqueness of display and destination URLs using domain names, and that multiple URLs under the same domain name would still be considered duplicates.

Fathom CEO Chris Churchill predicted that the move would dramatically improve the consumer experience for Google, as well as the ad market for advertisers. "First of all, we think it's an excellent policy ... It takes away the free-for-all of 'anybody can bid'," Churchill said. "We're not trying to favor a restricted marketplace, but at the same time, it's been kind of a free-for-all."