I’ve heard a lot of stories about how some high traffic affiliate sites have been kicked out of the programs they’re promoting, because they outrank the merchant site in the search engines and I think that stinks. Well, now it’s happened to me.

For the past 2 months, I’ve been getting phone calls from a New York based telephone number. Sometimes I’ve been getting these calls 4-5 times a day and when I pick up the phone, there’s no-one on the other end. Odd, and annoying. So finally, I blocked the number and the calls stopped.

Today, a letter showed up in my mailbox from a company I’m an affiliate of, stating that I’ve been kicked out of their affiliate program… because several pages of mine that link to their products are in the top 20 on Google for the same search terms used to find their products.

W. T. F. ???

A company ‘firing’ an affiliate because they do well in the search engines… for keywords and terms the company can’t even get into the top 100 for?

Ok, now I’m mad. I wasn’t trying to manipulate the search engines. In fact, I had forgotten about those pages… because the products weren’t selling anyway - probably because when someone clicked on the links on my pages the merchant site is so fucked up it’s not converting that traffic into buyers. The site is a nightmare since they changed it.

So today I downloaded the database (the site is run with wordpress), did a search and replace of any links leading to their affiliate program with another program and re-uploaded.

Problem solved, for me, but NOT for THEM.

On Monday, I’m scanning the letter I recieved from this company and sending it off to the Google gods along with a formal abuse report - stating that this company is strongarming affiliates and webmasters in an effort to manipulate the search results in their favor.

Over the weekend, I’m contacting some people I know who have been kicked out of this program and will try to get them on board as well.

This could be grounds for a lawsuit so I will not mention the name of the company or it’s site, but I’d love to be a fly on the wall at Google HQ when this fiasco comes to light.

Jesus: “Paul, You’ve been kicked out of XYZ affiliate program cuz after repeated demands to remove ABC.php page that ranks higher than ours for the same product name from google, you have not complied.”

Fuck you, XYZ.

I don’t have much time right now to be writing a long predictions post or epic story about how the face of online interaction will change in the year ahead, so I’ll just say this:

Happy New Year!

So while the rest of the web2.0 crowd is trying to define communities, I looked up communities on Wikipedia:

A community is a social group of organisms sharing an environment, normally with shared interests. In human communities, intent, belief, resources, preferences, needs, risks and a number of other conditions may be present and common, affecting the identity of the participants and their degree of cohesiveness.

That sounds about right to me.

I guess the others would like to have first crack at re-defining what a community is, so they can better define themselves and where they fit in.

I don’t make my personal political views known for a number of reasons, the main one being that I think politics is too self serving for the politicians themselves and not enough about serving the people who support them.

So here are some vague political statements. Very political of me, I know:

Why I love living in Canada: Because we’re known around the world as peacekeepers. We’re known as one of the best countries in the world to live in because of our apparent ability to remain neutral when conflict arises.

Why I hate living in Canada: Because we’re so close to this type of thing and it’s wrath. How long will it be before we’re looked at as guilty by association, or worse, viewed as guilty because of our neutrality?

Don’t expect me to make very many political posts in the future. I already feel inhibited about letting my views be known. Have for a long time.

Is there somewhere I can live on this planet where I won’t feel inhibited any more?

Check out the times (circled in red) of the twitter reports below about the current whitehouse fires.

Now it helps that Jim Long (twitter.com/newmediajim) is a journalist and camerman in the DC area who covers a lot at the whitehouse, but it also helps that he’s a rabid twitter user who happened to be on the whitehouse lawn at the time the firs broke out.

Where else can you get breaking news that quickly?

In your face twitter doubters!

whitehouse fire, twitter, cnn