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?