Early this year, Google released their new policy. They were unhappy with several different urls all linking to the same site showing up in their sponsored advertising search results and said that they would only be showing one single url . The highest bidder with the best click through rate in the results would not only get pole position but the only listing.

Why did Google implement this policy? To stop duplication of ads leading to the same merchant when affiliates bid on the same keyword. This is to ensure a diversity of ads in the results and more probably although not stated by Google, to stop the pay per click ads losing their effectiveness. As each ad would now go through to a different url, one user would be more inclined to click through on more of the results listed. As a result, Google will also be removing the url which used to have to be included in each ad.

How does this affect the work from home affiliate? As there is now only one spot per url, then you will be bidding with all the other affiliates or even the merchant and you will need to have the most effective click through campaign to get a listing. Now more than ever the importance of landing pages will come into play. By creating redirection pages that have a different url to the affiliate link you can still bid on the same keywords and have a unique url. Now, if you can get the SEO of the page right and find other affiliates selling a competitor's product who will exchange links, or better yet still pay for a link on your landing page, then you could get your foot firmly planted in the door. The reason for this, is that many sites that before had a high SERPS for the affiliate links are now being pushed “off the radar”.

At NZPCS we have been experimenting with this over the last few months and the results are incredible. We expect a tapering off effect as more affiliates recognize the importance of creating landing pages. A whole new service industry will arise as a direct result of this and we are already seeing products being marketed that claim to achieve the goal of sub-diverting the effects of Google's new policy. In one experiment we conducted for a very competitive set of keywords, we achieved a result of one out of 125,000,000 results returned and also had our landing page show up in the same results; giving us twice the hits.

It's early days yet, but we believe this has opened a whole new opportunity to gain ground with, or in fact overtake, sites that had the advantage of years of linking campaigns. Probably the most important thing we discovered is the seeming ability to gain better results than pages that have correct html and alt tags. We deliberately avoided using alt tags, made a few html errors and faired better in the results than competitors' fault-free, flawless pages. We also wrote several keyword loaded articles and increased our SERPS in a few days, by playing around with Blogs and Google's Beta sitemaps.

How does this help the home business affiliate? Our opinion is that there is now a level playing field and those that start developing the techniques of using landing pages and keyword loaded articles will have a huge advantage over those that decide to battle it out for the most effective combination of bidding and ad click through ratios. With the removal of the compulsory showing of the url, visitors also won't be able to differentiate affiliate links from Merchant links, till they arrive at the url. This also makes for some very easy page layout for publishers with Adsense accounts