Google loves to lecture us about value, good helpful content, and having informational articles on a website. And if you don’t write informational articles, Google penalizes those looking to profit from the search engine.
They even created documentation for webmasters: spelled it out in plain text for the slow learners.
Exampes of thin affiliates: The majority of the site is made for affiliation and contains a limited amount of original content or added value for users.
I listen to Google sometimes—they do say useful and valuable things. But aren’t I providing value to the user with money pages? Why should I grind out these informational articles like crazy just for volume?
Because smart executives sat down and thought: how else can we cut down gearhungry.com and carbibles.com? They’ve been sick of these money farms for a long time.
Ever since the content farm days when people wrote about tying a tie and delivering babies at home. And it was all written by a single freelancer for 3 dollars. It used to be content farms, now it’s affiliate farms—nothing new under the sun. Except the freelancer is now out of work.
Anyway. There are sites, algorithmic errors, or bugs in Google that are having their own party.
1. dodoburd.com — the entire site consists of money pages with walls of links, 100 on each. Maybe Google just threw up its hands at such nerve? The guy apparently doesn’t even know that algorithm updates are happening in Google. 632 pages, and all 632 have affiliate links—I checked manually via Netpeak Spider. BUT! It isn’t monetized only with Amazon; apparently having different affiliate networks matters. And the post thumbnails are really pretty.
2. coffeeorbust.com — a total classic affiliate site. It has everything from the banned list: massive comparison tables, affiliate links. 101 useful pages, 90 of which are monetized with Amazon. Algorithm flaw?
3. momlovesbest.com — not a Google bug, but an interesting example of a site that started churning out informational articles, and its dropped «best» pages started recovering!