Affiliate Links on Landing Page - Quality Score Issues?

[shezboy]

I read a few bits from various sources about what you can and can't do when it comes to having affiliate links on your landing page when using AdWords to send traffic to that landing page.

Does anyone know from experience how using aff links on your landing pages directly affects your quality score with AdWords and the affects on the CPC that you're expected to pay?

Will Google make you pay more for having aff links on your landing pages or not? Are there any aff programs that it dislikes more than others or are there some it won't let you use with AdWords?

Thanks,

Shez

 

[Zwielicht]

Adwords only requires you to pay money whenever you ad is clicked. They do not charge you extra for landing pages with affiliate links. As for the affiliate links themselves, if the affiliate links do not add any value to the landing page, this is a violation of Adwords' TOS.

 

[theKpages]

Google seems to be dis-liking affiliates more and more lately. Your best bet is finding an affiliate network that knows how to track your sales by domain referrer so you don't have to use any affiliate links, cloaking or redirects which don't help. Google follows those if they think there's a reason to whether you add the no follow tag or not.

If you must use affiliate links they should be stored in a file on another domain but that's another subject. Try and think and act as-if you are the merchant instead of the affiliate. Google has no problem with e-commerce merchants so that's what your site should look like.

Regal Assets had their adsense account suspended because Google didn't like something about their domain. They were using php to remove the affiliate id's once the page was opened but I don't know if that was the problem or not. Then they suspended the adsense accounts of every Regal Assets affiliate they could find...even if they weren't directly linking to their site.

 

[Zwielicht]

Google seems to be dis-liking affiliates more and more lately

Google doesn't like affiliates because of all the spam they used to create (and still do create) on gmail and their search engine. Also, if they're not making Google money, then Google doesn't like them.

 

[shezboy]

 

[waitier]

Firstly I'm not seeing the first campaign running as impressions and avg position isn't displayed. Idk but you seem to be displaying different sets of data.

Secondly, it just seems like you're promoting your plugin (nothing against it as it's a unique idea) as you could've done the same by not placing any outbound links on the page.

Thirdly, you could have tested it by using a redirector using example.com/out/affiliatelink either 301 or 302 it, and see if there's any difference.

More testing: Place a high authority outbound link like techcrunch or about.com or whatever and see if it makes any difference. Then, another set of test, place a bunch of affiliate links apart from just amazon, like cj and more.

There are just too many variables that could happen and you only tested it with your plugin just doesn't seem like a test at all. Just sayin'

 

[Daniel Thomas]

From my experience affiliate links don't influence the CPC in adwords. As long as the content in the landing page is relevant to the text-ads and keywords you shouldn't have a problem with affiliate links. In my case I am using 1 affiliate link in a posts with over 300 words.
btw, the 1st screenshot is for a campaign that didn't go live at all. As far as I know, Google doesn't calculate the CPC until the campaign goes live.