So where many sites failed to gain direct advertising dollars they simply turned to the readily available CPC text ads (either Google's AdSense or Baidu's Content Ads)... but after years of complaints from advertisers about the quality of the ad network publishers, or issues around the click behavior Search Engines are having to respond by refining their partner programs. So does this mean the death of smaller, more niche publishers? Maybe, maybe not.... largely, it will depend on their ability to find alternative revenues and I suggest this could be the start of an china marketing companies affiliate marketing Renaissance in China.
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I have been a vocal champion of a new affiliate marketing era in China. Not the old ad network model simply offering a CPS ad banner to random publishers that simply want to fill all their ad units but for a new ad network that will establish programs that target/recruit publishers based on criteria for achieving specific actions/outcomes. I am not advocating dropping in a Commission Junction or Trade Doubler platform and we now have a new affiliate marketing industry- these don't fit this local Chinese market but if you could take some of the ideas from these systems (transparency, reporting etc) and localize them with Chinese Affiliate Managers then I am quite excited about the possibilities of developing a new approach in cost per sales/lead models.
So, just as the first batch of Baidu's publishers are cut, I expect this scope of the adjustment may be further expanded. In the words of Cai Hu, general manager of Baidu Alliance, "this policy adjustment does not target a specific industry, as the websites Baidu stopped cooperation with are not high-valued sites, and the only sector affected is its profit-sharing cooperation". Given this will no doubt be causing a great deal of concern with smaller publishers relying on CPC revenues, I expect much more inquiry into the new generation of Chinese Affiliate platforms such as the U2Mee Affiliate platform.
Search Engine Optimization or SEO has been around ever since the Google's potential as a gold mine became known. That's actually not too long ago but at the pace the internet and the World Wide Web develops, it's as though it is already part of history long past. In fact things evolve so quickly in the cyber world that SEO now has variations such as Latent Semantic Indexing or LSI. Where SEO can improve website ranking in search engines through the proper use and number of keywords in web content, LSI is a variation which combats search engines defences against too "keyword stuffed" websites by using synonyms or words with similar meanings to the actual keywords.
This, too, in efforts to improve website ranking. It's all about the ranking, isn't it? Getting as much attention as possible does in turn lead to more web traffic, which in turn makes more possibilities or chances of making profits through whatever means the webmaster wants. The key is to first have the visitors there, the web traffic. Well, if you've been using SEO for a while now to do the same for your website, you might want to look again. Simple SEO, as mentioned above, might have the opposite of your desired effect.
If you haven't caught on to the LSI rush, now is the time. The crude rudiment of SEO alone can no longer improve website ranking like it did in its earlier days. As for LSI, it's a simple concept. If for example your keyword was 'cat,' you can make it appear in web content a small number of times per x number of words in the article, meanwhile also putting in 'feline' or 'pet' in the article. It's a pretty straightforward approach to negating the negative effects of keyword stuffing.