Affiliate marketing and SEO is an arms race more or less. Of course, Google obviously has no problem with people making money online or through marketing. It’s just that once people figured out that there was big money in getting your site ranked for lucrative search terms, people started looking for ways to get their sites placed highly with minimal investment of effort or a very high return on investment (ROI).

Traditionally, Google tried to keep a hands off approach to search results, opting to let the algorithm do all the heavy lifting and filtering out or penalizing spam sites. With a multi-billion dollar advertising business at stake, naturally you get an arms race. In recent years Google has stepped up its efforts for more frequent indexing and smarter algorithms along with human oversight.

One recent example was the EMD update. This change hit so-called mini-sites that target really specific niches really hard. A lot of people were targeting low traffic words by creating a mini site with 5-20 pages of unique target that would bring in anywhere from several to several hundred dollars a month. Even with little traffic and little revenue, the process could be repeated and scaled for substantial income.

Unfortunately, the EMD update raised the bar, making it hard for really content poor sites or sites that used bad SEO strategies to make any money. In fact, there was a lot of noise about many people suddenly losing traffic to these mini-sites to the point that many either pulled out of the field altogether or scaled back their efforts. Of course, there are still people making niche sites and profiting nicely. In short, there’s only one way to find out.