Google finally dropped the bombshell on affiliate marketers. Their was a lot of speculation in the affiliate marketing community if they would actually go through with it. Well, they finally did.

In case some of you reading this don't know what I'm talking about; Google no longer allows affiliates using adwords to send traffic directly to the merchants website. Affiliates will now have to send traffic to their own sites first. This is going to make a lot of affiliates angry because now they have to go through the extra work of creating web pages.

Personally, I welcome the change. Affiliates who don't want to take the time to set up their own web pages will stop using adwords. This in turn will make keyword cost cheaper and get your google ads a higher position.

Some people thought that Google would be losing money as a result of the new rule. I don't think so. The number of Google ads will decrease as some affiliate marketers leave, but the ads that remain will probably get clicked on more often than they did in the past. Which means more traffic for those webmasters..

One of the main reasons Google implemented the changes is so their adword results were more relevant. It doesn't make much sense for each ad to point to the same website from a searchers perspective. But, this could backfire on Google. Affiliates could simply create their own web pages and send visitors to the same site anyways.

I've been using adwords for about two years now and its interesting to see how things change as time rolls on.