In my last post here at Blog Subway, I looked at ways to keep things squeaky clean and tidy when it comes to running one of these blog hosts. I already looked at keeping spammers out and making sure existing blogs didn’t link out to paid blog farms as ways of averting the host domain getting penalized for the actions of uncaring blog owners.

In this instalment, I’m going to look at another aspect of blogging that the search engines frown upon and that’s creating thin affiliate sites. Thin affiliate sites (or blogs) are those that are built with a single page or two that contain nothing but a bunch of ads linking to some affiliate offer or product site. These can be to online stores, such as Amazon, or auctions such as eBay or smaller affiliate stores that sell a variety of products and services.

Blogs that are made this was are seen as being of no real value to the search engine index, therefore they do not add to the user search experience and are not fit to be indexed. Penalization swiftly follows in the form of sandboxing or de-indexing to preserve the integrity of the search engine index.

Whether this practice places the hosting domain at risk of similar action is not known, but for administrators, it would be in your best interests to nip this practice in the bud by deactivating any obvious thin affiliate sites, or at least contacting the owners of the blogs and get them to add some relevant content to make the blog more worthwhile.

For blog owners, one way to do that is to write some reviews of the products you are promoting, thereby adding value to your blog should a visitor find it via a search engine. At least they get to read something useful about the products that are being thrust in their faces when they land on your blog. Even better is to write the reviews as blog posts and link to a deep page that displays the related affiliate ads. This gives your blog far more legitimacy in the eyes of the search engines and you will be rewarded by being given the chance to rank well for some of your keyword terms, which will bring you more traffic and sales.

All for the sake of doing a little research and work to bring your blogs up to scratch. Try it, it works!

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Blog Subway