In late 2009 Google Adwords began banning my ad campaigns for my affiliate marketing sites. It really crippled my income as I was relying primarily on Google Adwords to promote my affiliate sites. At the time my merchant managers thought I was crazy and Google gave very vague explanations for why they dropped my campaigns. The affiliate sites that were dropped from the Adwords Campaign were in my opinion, very high quality as far as affiliate sites go. I don’t get into cheesy get-rich-quick schemes. Instead, I try to provide high quality information to my visitors regarding automotive type products and services.
PPC Blog posted a good article on Affiliates and Google Adwords in 2010, and proved that I wasn’t crazy. Apparently Google removed some 30,000 different advertisers campaigns. Ouch!
Anyways, the article provides some useful information on what Affiliates can do to earn Google’s trust. Though Google will not spell it out for you (just as in SEO), it really all comes down to what is best for the end user. Geordie does a good job of summarizing this at the end of the article with this statement:
“It’s not what you think is “enough for Google”. It’s about unique site features actual users would give a crap about. If your site was removed from the web, would anybody notice? Would anybody care? If you didn’t own your site, would you visit it or buy anything off of it? Why would you recommend your site to a friend?”