Many affilitate marketing guys have been effected by the recent Google Quality Score change. Most have suffered from it. I see the point Google is trying to make. It is logical. But the ones being hurt are the little guys.
Recently I Googled “Circuit City”. Only two sponsored links appeared. One was directly to the Circuit City website. The other was labeled “Circuit City – The Top 6 Websites on Circuit City”. The link lead here to a Circuit City landing page on Digg4It.com. What was it? A page filled with Google Adwords. See below:

So while the little guys with niche sites are being hurt, it is “just wonderful” (sarcasm) to see spammy, Adsense-filled arbitrage sites are still thriving. It appears in the case of Digg4It they have enough content to fool AdWords Quality Score. And by quality I mean scraping search engine results, and parsing out the links so just the content stays. The only way out of that page is “Back” button or through an Adsense Advertisment.

Next I tried advertising a page with actual relevant Circuit City content on Google Adwords for the term “Circuit City”. A page that I would find useful for Circuit City information. It came back as “Inactive For Search”, telling me to increase my bid to $10.00.

Google, wtf?

[tags]Google, Google Quality, Google AdWords, Google AdSense, Spam, Affiliate, Affiliates, Marketing[/tags]