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How To Deal With Google’s New Display Link Policy

Posted by Zoul on April 1, 2008 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Hey folks how are we doing today? Today’s April 1st and you know what that means right!? Well it’s April fools day, the day where we run around pulling pranks on people. I don’t entirely know the rules, i think the pranking stops at noon..? but i’m not too sure about that. Anyways that’s not why i’m writing this post. I’m writing because Google will officially enforce the new url display policy when doing ppc marketing. The new rule is that your display url must be the same as the destination url. Meaning that if your destination url is TrainingMonkeys.com then your display url must be TrainingMonkeys.com and not anything else (like GetYourFreeMonkey.com… or something along those lines).

Why is this a bummer, why do i care?

Uh very simple big G (Google) doesn’t really like affiliate marketers that are lazy and just provide a link to a merchant. The whole ideology behind google’s search engine is to make sure that the user’s able to get the best possible information for the queries inputed in the search box. That means google wants quality content in order to satisfy its users. Now what many marketers including myself have been doing is simply buying ad space on the search engine in order to refer potential buyers to the merchant’s website. We’re not adding value, we’re just helping the buyer find a site that he or she were going to find anyways.
Because of google’s smart pricing options you can only advertise a certain keyword per website. Meaning if the merchant of TrainingMonkeys.com bids on the term "how to train a monkey", you as an affiliate will have to bid higher than the merchant in order to have your ad seen by others. This method can become quite costly and that is why some of us (me included) would just make up a url in order to bypass the smart pricing issue.

Google has had enough of that it seems and is cracking down on direct linking affiliates. That’s why they came up with their new policies. That really sucks for me as well as other marketers but it’s a great move by google because they continue to force us to become better marketers. There are many many ways to market via google and google just wants you to be able to provide relevant content. Content that’s good enough to satisfy the user. I just read a post by John Jonas explaining in depth what to do to deal with this new policy. He welcomes ppc marketers to learn and improve themselves.

You can read his article here:http://www.jonasblog.com/2008/03/dealing-with-googles-new-rules.html .

Enjoy!