It’s almost “money season” online and that means Google has to start tweaking the ranking algorithms again. This one potentially could have a huge impact on affiliate marketers this holiday season but right now it is too early to tell.
And the “advantage” of something like this rolling out now – in Aug/Sep – is that surfers will get used to it and perhaps some “banner” blindness will set in.
What the heck am I talking about? This:
Today we’ve launched a change to our ranking algorithm that will make it much easier for users to find a large number of results from a single site. For queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain, like [exhibitions at amnh], we’ll now show more results from the relevant site (source: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/08/showing-more-results-from-domain.html)

To be fair, Google is reacting to Microsoft’s Bing search engine here and has been testing this new multi-listing for a while…
And it looks all innocent when you’re searching for information about the exhibits at the American Museum of Natural History. But what about when you’re looking for an HP printer or a Dyson vacuum?
You can click on the image and see that above the fold, only Google shopping and hp.com URLs are being displayed.
What about Amazon.com? Or your niche website selling HP printers? Pushed down in the results.
Now, there are multiple forms of this listing display and I’ve tried to show both examples.
With the AMNH case you had AMNH.org sites taking up the SERPs *and* you had a directory listing at the main AMNH.org result.
All this takes up valuable screen real estate and despite all the social and web 2.0 properties out there, most users hate to scroll if they aren’t really engaged in the content above the fold.
We can craft all sorts of evil conspiracy theories about Google doing this to drive up Adwords revenue but that doesn’t really help.
What you need to do is start monitoring the SERPs for your sites and for related brand/product affiliate sites. The Google May Day update had an effect on search results for long tail keywords and this modification is addressing the shortest tail brand-category type pages.
The best information will come from watching your traffic deltas in cases where Google is now favoring a brand name website.
If you were ranking for brand-category type keywords like (‘dyson vacuum cleaners’) before you want to take special note of shifts in the rankings and how this is impacting your long tail traffic to things like your page on the Dyson DC 25 Ball Vacuum Cleaner.
If you see dramatic changes then it’s time to consider more advanced SEO techniques like third level push and variants to get more juice to the interior product pages and perhaps give up on the category.
This is a grossly simplified piece of advice – the bottom line is that you’ll have to revisit your internal linking and your link building and (re)focus on what you can reliably rank for given Google’s changes.
As Cosmo says in Fairly Odd Parents… “good times… good times…”


Russell Brunson bought out Frank Kern and Ed Dale’s original Underachiever Formula website and product and is relaunching the thing tonight.
Keith “protein shakes” Baxter just published a really nice blog post about
Back in the day Corey Rudl did a bunch of testing and proclaimed that on average it took 7 “touches” before most people would buy from you online.
If I had a broad brush I could paint the internet marketing world – and the entire marketing world in general – in two colors:


Before I get started let me make one thing clear…