same with no bidding on the top generics, I still remember interflora’s “you can no longer bid on the word ‘flowers’ ” meglomania a couple of years ago.. still makes me smile even now that a company can be so dumb.

I do make sure I contact the merchant and tell them just why I’m no longer promoting their program though so suggest we all do the same when encountering compulsory negatives, don’t just pull links, make sure you email them saying exactly why in a courteous and professional way of course.. no need to fall out with anyone, just make your views and reasons known and that you are moving all your traffic to merchant x now as they have no restrictions in place.

in time only a few dumb/uneducated merchants will try it on and only a few dumb/ueducated affiliates will wear it.

Unless they control all positions in the SERPs

And that works, I done a test on google with the term “Pc World Ayr” and got 8 out of 10 positions, including the first 5.

Back to the point, At the moment I’m controlling the message that visitors looking for PC World in Ayr see. I can change that message to be negative towards a merchant, but that wouldn’t make money. If I WAS evil I could out rank them for the first 30 positions and then sell the rankings to them, or they pay for me to go away, might be worth looking into if they continue to get crazy with restrictions

This is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard

You mentioned about page content. Funnily enough, I don’t think my merchant was happy that I even mentioned their brand in the page, as it was helping my rankings. Here’s a quote from one of their emails…

“It is unfortunate that my previous explanation of NO bidding on trademarked terms on ANY site or use of trademarked terms was somehow unclear. Each time we search our terms and see that your sites used those terms, links, and affiliations to draw extraordinary traffic, it is a conflict of interest.”

I did have a film producer once threaten me with legal action for using a domain name he thought he should own. Luckily the studio realised I was actually helping to promote their movie and said to ignore him. He hated that, but everyone else was happy

However, someone searching for “coke”. Can and should be able to see ads like

Pepsi - Cool and Rereshing
blah blah blah
pepsiblah.com

This not only isn’t deceptive it’s standard operating procedure.

And as far as the study goes that people blindly click the first ad, well, I call utter bollox on it. People click on what catches their eye, which is your ad-copy in these cases.

Yes, the first ad they see is obviously going to get the most attention, but that’s been proven over and over that the no.1 spot isn’t always the best.

I was ranking well (not PPC) in the SERPs for the name of a popular diet. Was generating thousands of dollars each month for said diet.

Then they decide to boot me out of the affiliate programme, without even bothering to explain why. So I contact them and they tell me it’s because I have their brand name in the URL.

So my site was still receiving thousands of visitors a day, all searching for this particular diet, and yet I wasn’t allowed to send them to the merchant’s site.

Net result - the visitor would land on my site looking for this diet, and I would have to direct them to a competitor, “try this diet instead” kind of thing.

They lost out on sales, and thousands of their potential customers just got directed to another merchant instead. And they were happy with that? Pathetic.