Google Is Not A Threat For Affiliate Marketing

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For years, people have believed that with every new Google update, affiliate marketing would surely meet its death.

In 2010, many affiliate marketers stated they were seeing more and more brand web pages outranking their web pages in search results, even though those brands were barely related to that particular search query. Another major complaint included Google closing AdSense accounts because Google found websites they classified as bridge pages – pages that existed just to send web visitors to affiliate pages.

In January 2014, when Google posted a blog post notifying affiliates that if their websites do not add value those websites would be penalised, affiliate marketers saw that as a warning again that the end of affiliate marketing was coming.

In early 2015, Google started allowing merchants to start showing product reviews and price comparisons alongside their own products in search results. Many affiliate marketers believed this move made it harder for value-add affiliates to make a living as this feature encroached on all the things they did to add value: user reviews, price comparisons, attribute enhancements and all those things that happen at the end of the buying cycle.

Affiliate marketers might be panicking, yet is Google the real problem? In 2013, Amazon was passing Google as the top destination for shopping. In October 2015, a survey discovered that 44 per cent of online shoppers skip Google and head right to Amazon to search for products. Of all the survey respondents, 87 per cent said they prefer making purchases from the retailer who customises their shopping experience the best and 75 per cent said Amazon is the best at personalisation. A study in 2015 points out three things about consumers: consumers want retailers who make shopping easy, consumers want retailers who curate products, and consumers want control. Amazon meets these three desires – and has done so very well for years.