INSIGHT
IF IT AIN’T
BROKE...
Successful thin affiliates and destination brands need to understand why
certain strategies have worked – and it’s probably nothing to do with
Google organic search, says Nick Garner.
IN BUSINESS THEY SAY you either
grow or you die. So as an affiliate
you’re probably already thinking
about your next move and how you
can expand.
Following the theme of this
month’s issue, I want to look at
the big initiatives that sit behind
destination affiliate brands and
thin affiliate brands. I’m going to
examine how these sites work and
what the implications are for you
and the next steps you take with your
affiliate businesses.
As a rule of thumb, the less you rely
on Google organic-search traffic the
better. That’s why big brands work
hard to get players into the habit of
returning to the same affiliate site.
Those players will then jump off
into new operators and join them,
oifhopefully generating fresh revenue
streams for the affiliate brand.
If a big, rich affiliate can come up
with an effective retention mechanism,
that can be good business for them.
Sometimes these big initiatives make
sense but most of the time for most
of the affiliate population, they are a
path to trouble. If you get distracted
by a big retention project and you
stop focusing on profitable traffic, you
could lose your rankings and go broke.
What is a thin affiliate?
Google has a thorough definition of
a thin affiliate: “Pages with product
affiliate links on which the product
descriptions and reviews are copied
directly from the original merchant
without any original content or added
value. Pages of product affiliation
“Add up all these thin sites and you’re
talking about tens of thousands of
them cluttering up the internet”
where the majority of the site is made
for affiliation and contains a limited
amount of original content or added
value for users.”
Does that sound like ou? In
igaming there is a proliferation of
review websites that carry ‘same-as’
content and lists of bonuses. A typical
webmaster strategy is to create groups
of sites, each slightly different from
the other, in the hope that a couple of
them will rank well. Add up all these
thin sites and you’re talking about tens
of thousands of them cluttering up
the internet.
If thin affiliate sites are so awful,
then, why do they rank? I believe
that, when it comes to organic search
results, Google ranks sites in order
of popularity for a given key phrase
within a given country territory. So
when you look for comparison phrases
on bonuses or free bets (players know
that one operator is much like another
and if there is ‘free money’ being given
away, they want some of it), these thin
affiliate websites proliferate.
iGB Affiliate Issue 71 OCT/NOV 2018
43