Google’s blogging platform, Blogger, has announced today on a new ad product that can help bloggers make some money through their blog- Affiliate Ads for Blogger. The problem is that it will probably make Google’s search engine keep a close eye on your blog…

But first, what is it exactly “Affiliate Ads for Blogger”? This is basically an addition to the Post Editor, which enables bloggers to add fast and simple advertising products from Google Affiliate Network INSIDE of the blog post. Here’s how it works:

1. First you need to sign up for the service. You can do it in two ways- Directly from your blog dashboard under the “Earnings” tab or through this page.
2. Enter your Post Editor and click on “Advertise Products” from the right sidebar.
3. Type the keyword of the product you wish to advertise on the search box.
4. Choose how do you want it to appear (link, image, full ad) and click “Done”.
5. The ad has been added to your post and it will be published with the post.

For all you bloggers who do wish to use this ad product, I have to warn you that it might affect your Google’s search engine rankings. Google always had tensed relationship with affiliates and even on its Webmaster Guidelines it is discussing about its approach towards affiliate sites:

Thin affiliate sites: These sites collect pay-per-click (PPC) revenue by sending visitors to the sites of affiliate programs, while providing little or no value-added content or service to the user. These sites usually have no original content and may be cookie-cutter sites or templates with no unique content.

Although Google is referring on this section to thin affiliate sites and warns only them, websites with affiliate links tends to be under Google’s radar and sometimes have to prove themselves more than other websites for better rankings.

Not only that, but it also appears that websites with affiliate links were negatively impacted from the Panda algorithm tremendously. On a poll from last year, affiliate websites were ranked as the sites which got hit from the Panda algorithm the most.

It isn’t the first conflict between two products of Google. On November 2011, Matt Cutts from the search team has stated that too many ads can get sites penalized, while at the same time (and always actually) Google AdSense was urging webmasters to add as much ads as possible on their websites.

On a personal note I just want to add that I really hate advertisements INSIDE the actual site’s content (which is the post). Whenever I see this kind of advertising it makes me think that the post is probably bias and rounds only around the ad.

But yet again, this is just my humble opinion (well, and many others as well)….