Bingo Sites Clamp Down On Third Party Link Building Affiliates
Posted under: Interesting changes are afoot in the bingo affiliate world with the announcement from two affiliate networks about third party link building. The rule changes have essentially been put into immediate effect by Ignite Bingo, who run Costa Bingo, and Joy of Bingo who are responsible for Wink Bingo and the new site Tasty Bingo.
The gist of the announcement is given below:
As of this date affiliates are not permitted to acquire any links for [Bingo Site] terms from third party sites for the purpose of deep linking to their own [Bingo Site] review and information pages. Any affiliate found to have broken this term from this day onward will have any affiliate commissions withheld. The brand owner has made this move in order to guarantee the quality of reader experience when a user searches for their branded terms in search engines.
As I understand it the sites in question aren’t happy about paying commission to affiliates who perhaps are paying for trademark name links in order to inflate their positions in SERPS. Bingo is a competitive area and ranking for a “brand name”, even in the top few places can be beneficial to an affiliate’s monthly earnings.
In some ways the decision is understandable but the brand doesn’t control Google or how the search results appear or the quality of reader experience. Any brand owner would love the right things in the right order on SERPS but sometimes it just doesn’t happen. Perhaps the solution is a better SEO strategy from the brand?
Or if an affiliate is acquiring backlinks through payment then Google should be the ones to deal with it (paid links). Perhaps the fact that some affiliate sites rank for “brand name” (and above it in the case of Tasty Bingo) means that the search engine is happy with the link building processes that have gone on or they feel the site is genuinely worthy of that spot?
This puts the merchant in a bit of a pickle.
Firstly how can they determine what Google ranks and where and really is it up to them to decide who goes where? And secondly how is the acquiring of third party links going to be monitored? Also does acquiring mean getting a free link because someone has read your comments and wants to genuinely link back to you?
Another issue is what if the affiliate says “no” to the terms and switches links to a competitor site in protest (i.e. they rank for Site A but tell their users to go to Site B)?. That possibly raises potential legal issues but the fact is that the affiliate will still be ranking in SERPS for the brand. If they kick off the affiliate will they have more problems to deal with? If they don’t take action are they paying out commission they don’t feel they should be to an affiliate who perhaps isn’t working with them in partnership or “adding value”?
The eventual result will be a bit of a shake up in the bingo affiliate arena.
One merchant unveiling the new terms seemed to me to be a “reaction”, but a second following 24 hours later suggests that this issue is going to transcend across more brands over the coming weeks and months.
I’d expect many operators to now extend their own SEO and link building work so as to outrank affiliates under brand terms and generics, something which many are already trying to do. This no doubt costs them money and perhaps that will mean commissions will be cut to accommodate? It could well be that some operators start to become a bit more selective about who they work with, especially when it comes to their own independent networks.
It’ll be interesting to see if these term changes have any impact on SERPS, affiliate/merchant relationships and which bingo operators affiliates work with over the coming months.
Personally I sympathise with the bingo brands, but don’t think the strategy employed is really going to change anything. Monitoring and proving if an affiliate has acquired links is going to be difficult. Even if you ask affiliates to stop doing something they will try and find ways around it. That said affiliates paying for links run the risk of eventually being caught out so perhaps natural equilibrium will eventually win through?
Interesting article Jason, it has never been my intention to outrank a site for its own brand name ever. The last thing i want to do is bite the hand that feeds me.
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“The brand owner has made this move in order to guarantee the quality of reader experience when a user searches for their branded terms in search engines.”
So essentially these types of brands rely on their SEO affiliates when they launch their unheard of, zero credibility “brand” to populate the SERPs with pages and reviews of their site to ensure their large reach launch campaigns don’t lose traction!!!
Then once they have their brand traction they try to dictate to those affiliates that fed them at the start ?? Don’t lose sight of how these “new brands” get going in the first place.
These brands shouldn’t have their cake and eat it.
Also how short sighted? A 1st page of Google filled up with inventory feeding back to your brand is better than a 1st page of Google with bad reviews of your brand and competitor links alongside those positions….or worse, their main competitor brands ranking.
The day merchants stop seo’ing and ppc’ing on their competitor brand terms is the day when affiliates should have to play by the same rules.
I was quite disappointed when I read this first email regarding this, and I was completely unaware that Ignite had followed. It’s certainly going to going to be a knock for many of the smaller portals that receive most of their traffic from the newer brands – where the SERPs are usually more of an even playing field.
In the case of Tasty, it would have made more sense to engage the affiliates for some SEO help – as they obviously lack the moves to have their own brand at number one. A dofollow link for a bonus CPA or something along those lines.
I also wonder whether this has happened to Tasty Bingo because they launched the site some time before the affiliate program. So most brands anticipated a launch much like Wink Bingo and wanted to dominate the high rankings. As they couldn’t track conversions (or maybe didn’t even send traffic), there was no way to gauge the potential performance of the brand and they just kept on link-building and writing content to maintain those high rankings. In terms of how Tasty will monitor links – my hope is that they will only investigate those brands that climb above them in the SERPs.
I can also see how it actually benefit certain brands. I know of one portal (and I’m sure there are others) with a network of 300+ sites that, surely, wouldn’t be considered “third party” sites. So while everyone else will (in theory) end their link building on these terms, portals like this will have free reign.
Completely and utterly pointless exercise. What good will they gain. A portal will never outrank the actual site. The bingo site will always dominate positions 1-3 anything that happens below positions 1-3 is going to happen regardless of these rule change so just give the affiliates the one small joy they have and let them battle it out. I would have just tried to talk to affiliates about how they advertise the brand on their site. That would mean less work and a better relationship as you would only ever have to manage a few affiliates at a time.
If anything it will just alienate affiliates and have a detrimental affects. Furthermore it’s annoying that affiliates are putting money in the pockets of people who were once portals themselves only for them to start this kind of approach, as former affiliates i think it’s a reckless move.
They’ll be telling us what to eat next.
Easy enough to remedy, rank for the brand and promote the competitors.. this won’t last long at all.