Can affiliate sites rank well on Google?

On browsing Google Webster forum, one senses the feeling that many SEO webmasters contributing there are biased against affiliate sites. It seems as if a hate wave against affiliate sites is sweeping across Google forum. Affiliate sites have been accused of having thin content or scam and lot worse things.

Every affiliate site owner who posts his/her problem on Google webmaster has been intimidated, harasses and dismissed off by a cabal of SEO contributors prowling the forums as experts. Site owners have been wrongly accused of having worthless sites or just focusing on ads. Many of them also had to hear snide remarks from this cabal.

The common theme running in this forum is that every affiliate site is branded as a think affiliate site which means that the sites has little or no original content and is solely intended for purpose of redirecting visitors to product pages. These expert contributors make judgments almost immediately and without ant proper research. In fact they try their best to convince the website owner and other members of the public to stay from affiliate model of business.

Google has stated that it doesn't encourage think affiliates sites. Google has never gone against record on affiliate model of business. The fact of the matter is that not every affiliate site is a think affiliate site. There are thousands of sites & blogs which provide original and useful content for their readers. Placing affiliate links on a website is legitimate because let's admit it, not everybody can blog for fun. One needs to make money also!

Yes, there are countless affiliate sites whose sole purpose is to mislead people in to buying products and services. Many of them have scam like practices but is that valid enough reason to tarnish a model of business in which millions of people are engaged very deeply and not all of them are scam artists.

But isn't it Google job and responsibility to weed out such individual sites from its search rankings instead of placing embargo on all affiliate sites as many Google forum contributors blatantly try to suggest as Google's standard procedure.

In spite of all this negativity, there have been very heartwarming stories also. One particular site related to fashion saw massive drop in rankings for many of keywords. The concerned site was still ranking for m any keywords. The site also had affiliate links.

The site was branded as a think affiliate site. The site has decent quality content, in fact lot better than other sites with thriving business.

Even though site got affected for some keywords and was still getting traffic form other keywords, contributors at the forum attributed the loss of rankings to it been an affiliate site.

Despite the site owner's protestations that the site had good content, a cabal of contributors insisted that site was a thin affiliate site.

The site owner, to his credit, persisted with his efforts and rectified many errors as pointed to by some well meaning contributors in Google webmaster forum. The business model remained same and the website soon got the lost rankings and traffic back!

This amply proves that Google likes sites with good content and it doesn't matter what your business model is like.

Therefore, even an affiliate site can do well in Google search results if it sticks to Google guidelines!