Funny though that the link showed up in the top results. That says a lot about the merchants knowledge about search. Reminds me of my RN post from last summer.

Anyhow, the Google Coop and Google Base stuff is a whole different beast. Its still a virtually untapped market although some of my predictions from one year ago become already reality and then some. Its a whole topic to blog about by itself hehe.

It was my impression from the question that the person wanted to intentionally get their affiliate links included in the organic results.

I’ve had some links that go through .htaccess get indexed high myself and change them out when I discover them.

Several months ago, I was contacted by a company where I was an affiliate – my affiliate link (affiliatetip.com/company) that was redirected through .htaccess had become the #3 result in Google.

Completely unintentional, and it looked bad in the SERPs, as there was no meta info – just the link.

Think about Google Coop for example and Google Base where you have things like “Subscribe Links”, Custom Refinements, Events and activities, products (Froogle) etc.

Using affiliate links there would add your affiliate links to the search engine and even shows up in the top search results, if you are lucky or if people subscribe to your stuff. I actually do not see anything wrong with that, because you provide a value added service and it is for the most part working on Opt-in basis, meaning users have to get interested in what you are doing and subscribe to it first, before they get exposed to most of your content (with exceptions).

What do you think?

Build a big enough ball of content this way and you’ll build a review site.

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I guess the BH way would be to get a content page indexed, then iframe or swap it for an aff link.

But we’re all white hat, aren’t we?

And we’d never do something like that…