It happens regularly. Someone finds out how easy it is to get listed in Google product search, they submit an affiliate feed or site, list products with misleading prices, or just generally spam for popular product types. There’s got to be a way to kill those listings, right?
Absolutely. They even make it easy. Just go to base.google.com, search for the product, find the listing and click the “Report Listing” link.
| Affiliates | Posting is not permitted for the promotion of affiliate sites or products sold through an affiliate marketing relationship. This includes item pages that are made up primarily of advertisements, or pages where advisements obstruct the view of the item. |
Well, that makes it pretty clear that affiliate links are not allowed. But it doesn’t go into the reasoning. For that, you need to rewind your SEO memory about 3 years.
During a recent IM conversation, a friend suddenly made the connection between great SERPs and total domination. He had some of the top five organic results for several phrases, but realized that there were some that didn’t return onebox results and others that shop.com was spamming to take all of the top 3 onebox results. He realized that having the top two organic plus top 3 onebox would give him the top FIVE slots of free traffic. This suddenly opened his eyes as to what domination meant.
Brian Mark is a forum regular around the web and a speaker at Search Engine Strategies. He has worked at ToolBarn.com since 1999, taking the online retailer of power tools from a few orders per week to an Internet Retailer Top 500 company.
