If you’re subscribed to an Internet marketer’s mailing list, you’re probably getting told today about a new product coming on Tuesday called Google Shadow. Google Shadow is from the same guy who brought us Affiliate Project X and other products, all of which focus on making money with affiliate marketing and Google AdWords. Those products like to show you images like this one:

Looks impressive. Does Google Shadow actually work? Who knows? I don’t have any special insight into it. (If you want, I can send you the same promotional emails everyone else is sending…)

However, there’s one thing I can talk about which is at the heart of Google Shadow and that’s something called direct linking.

Direct Linking Explained

Direct linking is a funny term, because in this context it’s an oxymoron. Direct linking is an AdWords technique where you send traffic directly to a merchant’s website via your affiliate linking. You’re not actually “directly linking” to the merchant’s website, but anyone who clicks the ad eventually does get there. This is as opposed to “indirect linking” where anyone clicking the ad ends up on a landing page you control, such as a review page or a squeeze page.

Some examples here might help. Here’s an example of indirect linking:

                Google Shadow Review
                Don't Buy Google Shadow
                Until You Read This
                GoogShadow.com

It’s indirect because the destination URL — the URL the user sees in his or her browser’s address bar — is not the official Google Shadow website.

And here’s an example of direct linking:

                Buy Google Shadow
                Learn Direct Linking Secrets
                Google Doesn't Want You To Know
                DJKShadow.com

This is direct linking because the destination URL is the merchant’s site. If you click my affiliate link, http://egiguere.djkshadow.hop.clickbank.net, you’ll see that’s where you eventually end up. (And if you buy the product from there, I get a commission, so thanks in advance!)

Problems With Direct Linking

Direct linking was a quick way to make a few bucks in the early days of Google. In fact, the “original” AdWords infoproduct called Google Cash is all about making money with direct linking.

Google’s quality control folks didn’t like all these affiliate ads showing up, though, and so eventually they instituted a rule that made affiliates work harder to get their ads to show on Google. The rule is quite simple: only ONE ad for any given domain gets shown at a time for a given keyword.

Say there are 10 affiliates all using direct linking to promote a product. Only one affiliate’s ad is going to be shown. Which one? Either the one that has the highest bid or the highest clickthrough ratio — probably a combination of both. In other words, Google forces all the affiliates who are trying to make money with direct linking to compete directly with each other. Only the strongest survive this virtual bidding war.

The result was that most advertisers abandoned direct linking and switched to using landing pages on their own sites.

Direct Linking Today

Note that Google didn’t ban direct linking. They just made it harder to do. In some ways, it’s too bad, because direct linking was an easy way to get an AdWords campaign going… you just concentrated on getting the ad clicks and let the merchant worry about converting the traffic into sales. You can setup direct linking campaigns very quickly. (That said, if the merchant’s landing pages sucked then you wouldn’t want to necessarily use direct linking.)

What have the Google Shadow people figured out? I don’t know, to be honest. Probably a way to find keywords with traffic but little or no direct linking competition, which would let you use direct linking without getting into an expensive bidding war with other affiliates.

I guess we’ll see what’s what on Tuesday.

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