Comments:
> Clearly, Hitwise’s report puts to bed the notion that one can rely on their affiliates to effectively squelch adversaries.
Not really - did you ever hear of affiliates that bid on trademark keywords in PPCs to drive activity to datafeed sites?
I have heard of them, yes. I don’t know how they relate to the point I made though. My point is that one cannot rely on affiliates to “push out” competitors in search engines using paid search.
The relate directly, as affiliates that create a datafeed site around a given merchant are taking the traffic they purchase and delivering it to the merchant.
So this is effectively more representation for the merchant to effectively minimize the exposure of competitors.
Understood and I’m not questioning that. I’m simply suggesting that Hitwise’s study/data demonstrates that no matter what you do you can’t prevent users from landing on competitors’ sites. Affiliates don’t provide complete “blockage.” Someone like me looks at how some brands police their marks (prohibiting affiliates, affiliates of competitors and competitors themselves) and finds it to be a better solution to dominate brand term search/PPC ad results. The results are more complete.
Agreed - affiliates cannot block competitors entirely, but I think they certainly aid the efforts of a merchant.
There is no perfect solution while Google insists on allowing competitors to big on one’s brand.
Agreed that there’s no perfect solution. I’m simply suggesting that there is a better one and that invovles policing it yourself. Just my opinion that is based on what’s more effective in achieving the goal—without regard to costs involved.