What is your experience/thoughts regarding affiliate programs?
I don’t think Google is directly targeting affiliate sites just because the CEOs woke up one morning with steam coming out of his ears and decided on a whim to destroy every small affiliate business on the planet. Google is targeting all low-grade sites. And the fact is that most affiliate sites add zero value to the internet as a resource. I’m also a www.revglue.com affiliate.
Whenever I train Affiliate Managers to find affiliates via the search engines, one of the things I tell them is “if it is a professional looking website, it is likely to be a merchant; if it is an amateur-looking website, with no content and a lousy logo, it is likely to be an affiliate site”. In 90% of cases, it turns out to be true. If only affiliates put more effort into their websites and provided the “high quality, unique writing”, they wouldn’t get a poor rating from Googlebot.
I have dozens of content websites, on which I may sweat on for six hours to write one book review, and they are doing better than ever in the SERPs. They are affiliate sites.