It’s been in the works for a long while, but the news is now out – Google is taking moves to restrict how affiliates use AdWords. SEW has commentary here.
With the change, Google will allow only one ad to lead to a particular web page per query, whether that ad be from an affiliate of the web site or the web site owner.
“We’ve seen and heard from users that there are many cases where we are showing the same creative with the same visible URL linking to the same page,” said Salar Kamangar, director of product management at Google, explaining users don’t like this. “Just like with search where we have duplicate removal, we want to make sure we aren’t showing duplicated ads.”
ClickZ coverage here.