Why can’t I add my affiliate links?
| 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.
For those that have been doing SEO for products, there was a time that we remember all too well that Amazon and their affiliates covered pretty much the top 2 - 3 pages of the SERPs for virtually any product. This led to a poor user experience and ended up causing some distrust of the SERPs. After all, having most of the top 10 showing exactly the same offer doesn’t tend to give the variety that a searcher is really looking for. If I want to buy from Amazon, I know how to search their site and don’t need Google to do the same thing.
Now, when we’re talking about Base, Google took the stance that only the sellers can actually list things. This leads to the widest variety of offerings from the largest selection of merchants. How wide? I couldn’t personally tell you, but Brian Smith says this:
I estimate that there are currently about 30,000 merchants actively submitting feeds to Google Base.
Think of things this way : If Amazon has 30,000 affiliates (probably conservative) that all gave Google Base feeds, then they’ve got potentially 30,001 identical listings for every one of Amazon’s products. Google could quickly double the number of feeds by allowing affiliates, but the duplicate content would be a huge problem and would lessen the value in a hurry. This certainly isn’t going to increase the use of the service, and without users its not worth the load on their servers.
Google seems to have the end user in mind on this one for sure.
Comment by Michael | March 1st, 2007
Theres still a lot of affiliates in Base, check out listings from, these guys:
eu.decdna.net
imgtf.info
A different .info domain appears everyday, affiliate spamming is still an issue in base.