Arbitrage Affiliates Punk’d by Google

I think it’s safe to say that we’ll all remember where we were when we heard the news. I was tapping away at my keyboard back on that fateful day of January 6, 2005 when an email hit my inbox with the ominous subject: Google AdWords Announcement: Affiliate Policy Change.

The announcement began “In January 2005, Google will incorporate a new affiliate advertising policy that is designed to provide a better user and advertiser experience.”

Fair enough, I figured. But I noticed that the statement didn’t include anything about the betterment of the affiliate experience, just the user and advertiser.

The Google notice continued, “With this new affiliate policy, we’ll only display one ad per search query for affiliates and parent companies sharing the same URL. This way, users will have a more diverse sampling of advertisements to choose from. As always, your ad will be displayed based on its Ad Rank for given searches, which is determined by a combination of your ad’s maximum cost-per-click (price) and click-through rate (performance).”

I felt my heart sink. Had the Four Horses of the Apocalypse arrived for affiliate marketing?

Complete article at http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/4929.asp