Reseller has pulled out a post at WebmasterWorld linking to a Google Groups post by a Google Employee saying;

There are a few things to consider about our overall crawl and indexing pipeline. As part of some recent updates (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/bigdaddy/) we're taking a much closer look at affiliate links, linkfarms, duplicate content, and other factors as described in our webmaster quality guidelines.

As with the Florida update, when Google went after sites that were perceived as going against Google Quality Guidelines, some good & clean sites were hit in the cross fire. With this, the same has happened, and it will always happen.

So if you are suffering, you can try posting in the Google Group or emailing Google, as specified in the thread.

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

The Direct Marketing Association's (DMA) Internet Marketing Advisory Board announced a Best Practices for Online Advertising Networks and Affiliate Marketing.

The DMA list is a simple five rules, but important rules that set a generalized guildline for the Affiliate Marketing Industry … something sorely lacking.

The only rule I see as having possible difficulty in obtaining,is the full disclosure of their eligible sites. These Marketing firms keep their sites a virtual secret to stay on top of their game … not something they would readily share.

Don't cry foul! Be smarter with Google's Adsense Smart Pricing.

You can't blame Google for wanting to do right by their merchants, and try to get them the best qualified traffic possible. Google's attempt to deal with the arbitrage issue has caused some problems for their legit publishers as well.

I'm talking about Adsense Smart Pricing, which was Google's original answer to dealing with arbitrage junk-clicks. It's definitely having an effect in favor of the merchants, but guess what … it's got a wicked backlash to it that is hurting those White Hat Publishers as well. Opps!

The problem is that there are poor quality advertisers/merchants out there as well. And if your site happens to run in the same keyword set that those poor quality advertisers do, then you've got problems my friend.

What happens is the the consumer comes to your site, clicks the Google ad and lands on the crappy advertisers landing page … the consumer then bails on that crappy site immediately.

What's that mean for you? Means Google is going to punish you for sending that advertiser what they percieve as bad traffic, when you were not at fault at all. Oops! 

So, there is something you can do combat the evils of the bad advertiser syndrome.

Log into your AdSense account and then wander on over to the Adsense Setup area … look for the Competitive Ad Filter and click on to it. In the box of URLs to block, paste in a copy of this list of Bad Advertisers to be Blocked.

Do this and you'll made a big dent in the amount consumers fleeing from your Google links. Life will be good again!

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Are you interested in becoming an Affiliate Guild Member?
Affiliate Guild members can enjoy courses taught in the Affiliate Guild online school classes.
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Affiliate Guild members also enjoy our exclsuive Affiliate Guild Newsletter.

I was reading a few relevant tips from Darren at ProBlogger about some Do's and Dont's for professional business blogs. I wanted to pass on his wisdoms because I think that they're right on the money, no pun intended.

These are the same strategies I use on my blogs Affiliate Blogger, Affiliate Marketers and Affiliate Blog.

The topic was about what to do if you have viewers coming to your blog, but they never buy anything through you. The advice is sage:

Product relevancy and quality - unless the products you're promoting relate to the content/topic of your blogging you're wasting your time. Not only should they be relevant - they should be quality affiliate products. Don't get sucked into promoting something just because it relates to your site. Test it for yourself and if it's rubbish - stay clear. You can hurt your own reputation by recommending second rate products.

Traffic - the more people that see the promotions you run the better. While traffic isn't the only factor, it is certainly a big one. Work at drawing people to your blog and particularly to the pages that you are featuring affiliate promotions on.

Placement - affiliate links IN content tend to out perform promotions that you run in sidebars or banner ads. One genuine review of the product (see next point) seen by a handful of readers can be much more powerful than a banner at the top of your blog seen by many readers.

Your reputation and 'Sales Pitch' - I find that affiliate products work best for me on sites where I have a loyal readership of people who respect what I say and when I give genuine recommendation that show not only the positives of a product but the weaknesses in it. The way you promote the product is as influencial as almost anything else. Don't hype, don't lie and don't spin it.

There's a lot of chatter around the Net right now about the letters that Google is sending out to some of their AdSense publishers. The keywords here is "some" are getting them, while others are not.

I personally don't practice artbitrage, although I get it, clearly I can't speak from experience. What I'd rather do is point you in the direction of a few quality postings on the topic and let you get yourself educated.

Post to read are:
http://www.shoemoney.com/2007/05/19/adsense-arbitrage-just-the-facts/
http://www.jensense.com/archives/2007/05/google_adsense_16.html

That's it. You won't learn what arbitrage is, but if you're practicing it … get straight on what's going on.

You know back in January there were rumors afoot that Matt Cutts was inimating that he might be ready to try something different. Something other than being the poster boy of Google and the search engine optimization (SEO) community.

I was this quote from Matt's blog that raised the eyebrows…

"I love working at Google, but at some point my wife is going to wake up and smell the coffee. She’ll say 'Hey, we agreed we’d try this Google thing for four or five years, and then I’d get to pick what to do next. It’s been like eight years now! When do we move on to our next adventure?'"

But it's a month later and I haven't heard any more on this topic, and that's a good thing. Matt Cutts is all about ethical SEO methods, and he tries to make sure that search engine spammers aren't the ones getting the good results in Google. Although Matt and the BlackHat community hold a mutual respect for each other I think … at least, it seems that way to me.

Matt works for the quality group of Google, specializing in SEO issues. He is one of the co-inventors listed upon one of the most well-known patent filings from Google: "Information retrieval based on historical data". He wrote SafeSearch, Google's family filter. He was the first to publicly propose to use historical web site information to identify link spam.

Matt Cutt's blog is the semi-offical source for upcoming Google ranking updates. So, many of us are glad Matt's around to answer questions and give guidance. It's nice to have a guy who knows what he's talking about at the keyboard.

We don't need no stinking badges! Or do we?

Jim Kukral at BlogKits has come out with a new viral idea to help the blogging community gain integrity while still earning an income from blogging. They're offering a BlogHonor banner for free with the following pledge by the blogger:

Thank you for reading my blog. You're here because you've clicked on the "Blog Honor" badge on my blog.

What does Blog Honor mean? It means I have chosen to pledge to you the following:

I will endeavor to continue to bring you the highest quality content that I am capable of

I promise to attempt to disclose or clearly mark any content or advertisements or other monetization attempts that help me keep my blog operating

I pledge to never write "fake" blog content solely for the purpose of trying to generate revenue without complete and clear disclosure. With exception, my blog may exist for business purposes, therefore I use it to talk about products & services that relate to my business, thus assisting me in generating leads & sales for me indirectly
In return, I hope that you will continue to read my blog with the knowledge that I produce my blog out of a passion for the topic I write about, and not because I'm hoping to fool you into making money for myself.

Please note, I have nothing against generating revenue from my blog, in fact, your ongoing support of my sponsors and advertisers (text links, partner ads, etc…) helps me keep my blog operating so that I may endure to create better content for you.

I do appreciate your support. Continued thanks for your readership.

According to BlogKits, the reason for the honor badges is that … right now we are at a critical juncture in the blogging community, where we (bloggers) can either find ways to band together to keep our integrity intact, or continue to let blogging get a bad name.

Blog Honor Badges were conceived by Jim Kukral, publisher of ReveNews.com and founder of the BlogKits Affiliate Marketing Blogging Network. Badge Artwork conception and creation by Whitecapstudios, specialists in blog design.

The big question is how to enforce abuse of the honor badge … If you believe you've found a blog that isn't practicing what they preach, then send it to us with your comments at info at blogkits dot com. We'll investigate it when we can and if we believe the blog is not representing our core values, we'll ask them to remove it. Beyond that, what can we do? We're not the blog police.

Bloggers, if you want to display this banner on your blog, then you need to stop cloaking those affiliate links and hiding them inside your content areas. Even in this post, I have keywords lighting up that link to my other resources. Does it matter that they're affiliate links or not? What I'm seeing other bloggers do is post a visable and static message on their blog "This Blog contains Advertisements" or they're adding this tag as the first line of their post if the post contains monetization links. It seems to be the path taken by top-notch bloggers.

But, what I really want to know is … Jim, when are you going to get BlogKits live?!!

I have forum thread started on the topic of BlogHonor at 5 Star Affiliate Marketing Forums that you might want to join in.