I admit, I was being a bit of an ass posting that link yesterday. Doing a search for “day job killer” I made a guess that probably a lot of the results, organic and paid, were from Day Job Killer affiliates. That guess proved to be correct. With one exception (which was two results, and had affiliate links for other products plastered everywhere) every PPC and organic link had a Day Job Killer affiliate link. Some went straight to the Day Job Killer landing page, some had an e-mail autoresponder squeeze page.
In terms of Google delivering objective results, this is an example of complete and total failure. For affiliate advertisers, this is precisely what you want.
In fairness to Google, there is going to be a significant bias when a critical piece of the product is plastering the web with affiliate links for it. Unlike a Bowflex or some diet system infomercial, “making money on the internet” ebooks nearly always involve turning consumers into an army of salespeople.
Outside of this digital cult, there is not very much mindshare. By creating his own brand the author was able provide his affiliates with a specific set of terms to dominate the search engines with. It provides a near-perfect defense against negative feedback.
So what should Matt Cutts and the Google team do to solve this little problem? Not much, in my opinion. With a few exceptions this cult stuff tends to stay out of the mainstream. No mainstream coverage from other sites with real Google weight mean there is no content to rank.
In the meantime, if you want to defend your brand, starting an affiliate program is a very good start. Just make sure you can pay out.
