One thing is certain, with Internet Marketing something is always changing and the Google SERPS are unpredictable. It is important to stay on top of changes and roll with the punches.

Some of you may have heard of recent issues that thousands of affiliates have had with BANS (Build A Niche Store) sites and similar affiliate marketing websites getting de-indexed completely or massively losing SERP position.  There was speculation that lack of original written content was the main reason for this. And for many I know this was true. Time and again Internet marketers do not understand the value of original website content in affiliate marketing.

Many affiliates literally just slap up affiliate sites, whether it’s BANS or Amazon, or other such sites with nothing but affiliate link pages and without any original content. As I have said before in The Importance of Quality Content, this is a really bad strategy and will kill your chances of ranking in the Google SERPS, if you even get indexed at all.

I too was hit with this issue on two BANS sites and it was important for me to correct these issues quickly as my BANS sites make money regularly and the best traffic comes from the search engines, especially Google.

These two sites rose steadily in the SERPS when first launched with regular link building and on-site SEO. A while ago, the two sites began dipping in and out of their high SERP positions on a regular basis, one day they were there, then they were gone. Then suddenly a few weeks ago the home pages were de-indexed all together and only some content pages showed up in SERPS for their keywords, an Internet marketing nightmare! So, I began to do some experimenting, which is your best friend in Internet marketing.

SERP Experiment

First, I added more content, though I knew this probably had nothing to do with the content since both sites have more content pages than auction/affiliate link pages and I add content on a regular basis, but I wanted to eliminate all possible factors.

Second, I built up more links via article marketing, some new forum postings and do-follow blog comments, to see if that would resolve the issues. Neither of those tests did anything to get my sites back in the SERPS.

I then I decided to do a test with the home page.

1. I removed the eBay auction listings (affiliate links) that I had listed below the welcome messages on the sites.

2. I added 2 more paragraphs of wording to the welcome message and a related image with the keywords in the alt tags and some internal links to relevant pages for the keywords that came up within the content of the welcome message.

Experiment Results – Exactly 4 days later:

Site #1 home page appeared on page 1 of SERPS without quotes and has been there for over 2 weeks, holding steady.

Site #2 home page appeared on page 2 of SERPS (higher than it was originally) without quotes and has been there for 2 weeks as well (Page 2 is not surprising since there are some big guns on page 1 that I am currently working to out rank).

Since I had eliminated all other factors the lesson here is obvious, affiliate links on the home page affect SERP position for affiliate sites.

While I have heard this before, it never had affected me until recently and so Google is obviously hitting hard not only on affiliate sites with little or no content but also on those sites that have affiliate links on the home page.

This just proves how important experimentation in Internet marketing really is. While many panic and follow hype instead of using common sense, checking results and testing.

A great example of this is the widespread and ongoing inaccurate hype about duplicate content and how it still manages to be a leading and misleading focus on many forum threads because people just do not check things out for themselves and therefore limit their success online.

About BANS

Contrary to what some haters in the Internet marketing world may say, BANS (Build a Niche Store) is not at fault, in fact, BANS is regularly making lots of money for many affiliates who optimize their sites correctly and bring in regular search engine traffic and now thanks to this experiment I am back on that track.

BANS is really great, because it is cheap and allows anyone without any coding knowledge to build unlimited numbers of great money making websites centered around the eBay affiliate program, as well as any affiliate programs of their choice. One of the best things about eBAy is they have over 10,000 products and so the possibilities and keywords are endless.

Many of the BANS bashers never take the time to actually do the work required for success, instead they think they can use the software to quickly put up some sites that are nothing but mirrors of eBay and start raking in big bucks overnight. Sorry, nothing is that easy in Internet marketing and making money online takes more effort than just buying software.

I highly recommend BANS and you can see my full review with screenshots at: Review of Build a Niche Store or Check out the BANS official Website.

What do you guys think? Have you been affected by recent SERP changes? Do you add content regularly to your affiliate sites?