The Micro Affiliate

As a follow on from my last post about having one of my Adwords accounts shut down by Google, this post brought some new light to whats going:

I am rarely one for conspiracy theories or donning tinfoil hats but a word of warning, a lot of this post is conjecture. With that disclaimer out of the way, I would like to discuss a trend that I have noticed with the paid side of Google AdWords. I wrote recently about Google flushing out affiliates that use AdWords. A lot of people didn’t agree with me yet Google published an update just days afterward to it’s “website types to avoid” document about the exact topic. A lot of commenters made the very valid point that Google owns and operates it’s very own affiliate network.

The biggest revelation that was drawn from this and the subsequent thread over on WebmasterWorld was that Google was flushing out even the “highest quality” affiliates. They were even flushing out direct linking affiliates that were advertising with the parent merchants consent. I wont go into the rights and wrongs of all this, it’s been done to death on the WMW thread already and I do not want to discuss the whole Google Vs Affiliates topic again either. What I do want to point out is what happened next….

Interesting theory, will keep an eye out on how it pans out.

As for my situation, my older accounts seem to be in order, as are other accounts in my MCC.. Will be keeping an eye on that too. While throwing my campaigns at anything but Google.