Liz Gazer is the Affiliate Account Manager for Rugman.com a merchant offering an affiliate program through Commission Junction. We recently exchanged emails concerning the impact search engines are having on merchants and affiliates by removing publisher sites that use datafeeds. Our email exchanges are provided below.

In terms of full disclosure, The Tweedy Group, is an active affiliate in Rugman.com's program, and on a personal note I'm still a bit bummed that the site we created to expand our relationship with Rugman.com -- Oriental Rug Discounts -- is now absent from Google. This is just one of many sites we created in the past few months which seem to have gone missing on major search engines.

Since this is not necessarily a new topic in affiliate arena but rather a situation that can be linked to past industry concerns about affiliate links being removed by search engines I hoping to hear from you so that we can share your insights, experience, and opinions.

Personally I’m a bit concern by recent actions CJ has taken to add additional domains for serving and tracking that I believe is an attempt to minimize actions search engines might take against their ad serving even though CJ notes the additions were “to allow for future system growth and functionality, Commission Junction is expanding the number of domains we use to serve ads and track clicks.”

The question then is do you believe the affiliate datafeed model is dead and there an underlying topic we should be concerned about?

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Hey Liz,

Thanks for your email, and for following up on our oldie.

Unfortunately, it's more difficult to get a site indexed in the major
search engines when back-end links mirror existing site content of an
advertiser that is running an affiliate program like the site we created for our relationship http://www.oriental-rug-discounts.com. Therefore, I've decided to move away from data feeds.

I'll examine other ways in which we might work together.

Many thanks,

Todd

Hey Todd -

You're very right - unfortunately the big SE's have been giving these
datafeed guys a hard time of recent - chewing them up and spitting them
out so to speak, and I know it.

Still, many of our affiliates simply prefer to use the feeds regardless,
so we are giving them what they have been asking for. Not to mention
that we began building the datafeed system before any of this issue even
came into play.

It will be interesting to see how the affiliate marketing industry
evolves in the next few years with all these SE algorithms changing all
over the place - one minute they index you the next minute they don't.
Keeps us on our toes now doesn't it? :)

Do you have a publisher site at all or are you doing strictly PPC
campaigns? If you've got a publisher site I'd love to be a part of that.
If not, keep me posted on any potential partnerships that may come to
mind. Don't forget about us - we won't forget about you! :)

Cheers,
Liz

Good Wednesday morning Todd,

I've reviewed your rug site and I remember it now. Your people have done a great job on it... what a shame the SE's won't index it the way you'd hoped. At least you know you're not alone.

I'm hearing more and more about this problem in recent weeks... it's
really come at a bad time for us what with the launch of our new
datafeed site and all, but what are curveballs if not to strengthen our
character, right? :)

I'm not sure yet how we're going to handle this issue the SE's have
created for us, but it's evident our serious datafeed affiliates will
have to work on devising new business models soon if they haven't begun
to already - and there are a lot of them out there. Nonetheless, Rugman
plans to support those changes in any way we can.

Re: using my comments in a blog - should I be flattered? (haha) You have
my full permission of course.

All the best,
Liz