Google direct linking? Dead or Alive

[Sharksfan]

(Disclaimer - I am a n00b, I googled extensively both on- and off-site for this. Flame away

I've read extensively about direct linking on Google. Then I realized I was sitting on my ass not doing a damn thing and I decided to get some action going.

I currently have 3 affiliate marketing type test/learning things underway. It was 4 but one was a failure and I pulled the plug already.

One of these three is a regular landing page + review + affiliate offer kind of site. I have adwords generating traffic for it - nothing spectacular yet. Still tweaking that one.

Another is an organic SEO type review site - I got a great domain name and I know a lot about the niche. So that's all fine and dandy.

The third attempt was going to be direct linking off of google adwords to offers on various networks (CB, etc). I picked one and got the affiliate link. I think took one of my many domains I have at GoDaddy and masked/redirected it to the offer.

My ads right now for this are sitting in "Pending Review" at Google. Not sure if they'll be approved.

Several of the things I said actually recommended doing this instead of how I have it above:

1.) Find an organic site not doing adwords ads
2.) Set that site as the display/destination URL
3.) Edit the individual keyword URL's to go to the affiliate link

I haven't done that yet - is that necessary to get direct linking to work at this point in time?

 

[papajohn56]

Direct linking will get you a very low quality score, and it also puts you in the "affiliate auction", meaning one ad for the same domain will be run at a time, so if other affiliates are running the same domain, you're up against them

 

[Sharksfan]

Understood.

One of the things I am attempting is to use a cheap throwaway domain to determine what - if anything - has an effective pull for affiliate offers. If I throw 200 clicks at something and it doesn't convert at all I'll know before I build a site.

All of this is in the learning experience bucket. I may learn I'm an asshat. Again.

 

[DreamMachine]

I've never had success with direct linking on google. As mentioned, google will force you to put the offer page as the display URL and they will only display 1 ad on the search page so if there are 4 other affiliates promoting the offer, you ads only get shown 1/4 the time.

I wouldn't say you automatically get a bad QS with direct linking, but I would say you're at the mercy of whoever designed the offer lander and they are not usually designed for keyword SEO in mind. Most of the CPA offers I've seen are graphics rich, keyword poor. I've acutally got a QS 7 off the bat with direct linking before, but it was a clickbank offer which had the seemingly standard pages and pages of text and good keyword density.

So I wouldn't say it's dead, but I would say that there are probably easier ways of making monies online.

 

[bb_wolfe]

This works for a short while, but is profitable.

Domain on unique IP
P202 instance on domain
In the ad dest url, use combination direct links to targeted pages on the domain and direct link URLs in P202. Since it's the same root domain, and things are pretty mixed up (use keyword variables to customize the page/pull RSS or whatever you want) you can go for 3-4 weeks without the ad being stopped. Not gonna make you a killing nor is anything really trackable for any substantial a/b testing, but if you need a hundo or so a day, it works.