Notification of Froogle Delisting

From an email which went out to Froogle store owners yesterday:

In an effort to provide the best possible shopping experience for our users, we’ve modified our Froogle program policies. After careful consideration, we’ve decided that all online pharmacies displaying products on Froogle must be members of the SquareTrade Licensed Pharmacy program. Our policy change will help ensure that our merchants and users have a relevant and trusted marketplace for online pharmaceuticals.

At first glance, it looks like this change will actually make it impossible for any pharmacy outside the US or Canada to provide listings for anyone anywhere. Since this would amount to some fairly prejudicial overkill, we were glad to read in the actual policy overview that:

As of 10/10/05, Google will require a SquareTrade ID for all online pharmacies and online pharmacy affiliates advertising on Froogle and targeting the United States or Canada. The SquareTrade program is only open to pharmacies based in the United States or Canada.

In other words, this change apparently applies specifically to listings which are targeting the US or Canadian online pharmacy markets. We’ve asked Google for confirmation that they do not intend to eliminate all non-US, non-Canadian online pharmacies across the board, but we’ve yet to receive that confirmation.

Impact of the Policy Change on Affiliates

As Froogle-watchers will know, Google seems to have been playing whack-a-mole for months in their battle to maintain high quality listings in Froogle. They perpetually wound up authorizing spammy pharmacy affiliate sites, only to yank them again a few weeks or months later. In recent weeks, the problem seems to have escalated, with new spammy sites appearing more rapidly than old ones were being eliminated. No doubt quite a few affiliates who were willing to scam the system and get their sites listed in Froogle made a real killing while the company was trying to catch up. If you’re one of those affiliates who made a killing, this new policy change won’t be very good news.

But if you’re directly running an online pharmacy with a SquareTrade seal, this change is of course stupendous: you’ll now be alone with very few competitors in Froogle searches.

And what about for everyone else, including the legions of online pharmacy affiliates? Well, we’re inclined to think that for everyone else, it is also great news!

Why? Because with one fell swoop, Froogle has eliminated a huge swath of the competition for eyeballs in the relevant niches of the online pharmacy space. Affiliates will now be able to compete with other affiliates on a level playing field, without having to contend directly with the scammers who finagled their way into Froogle, and without having to see other affiliates among the Froogle selections which appear at the top of some SERPs. Web users who visit Froogle will see only the SquareTrade online pharmacies, and no affiliate sites. But since few online pharmacy affiliates target the same niches as those which are served by SquareTrade pharmacies anyway, this concentration of SquareTrade sites in Froogle presents little threat. Rather, it is an opportunity for those competing outside Froogle. Back in the main Google playing field, competition between non-SquareTrade sites, including affiliate sites, will be back to the way it used to be.

In other words, cleansing Froogle of affiliate spam allows the SquareTrade pharmacies to battle the SquareTrade pharmacies on their own turf, and everyone else to battle everyone else on their own turf.

And for affiliates who concentrate on offering quality and value to their visitors/customers, rather than relying on scamming their way into Froogle, this is great news!