Comments on: Bingo Sites Clamp Down On Third Party Link Building Affiliates

By: Anthony

Anthony — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 09:29:25 +0000

Easy enough to remedy, rank for the brand and promote the competitors.. this won’t last long at all.

By: Lisa

Lisa — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 16:01:54 +0000

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.

By: Morris

Morris — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 17:53:21 +0000

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.

By: Tom

Tom — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 15:56:00 +0000

“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.

By: Trevor

Trevor — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 21:08:41 +0000

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.