I was having lunch with one of our PPC affiliates this week and the topic of privacy policy came up. Specifically, the affiliate said that even if he’s running traffic through AdWords to a thin site “one page site”, the site will still have more than one page – and one of the main reasons is because the site will have a privacy policy page.

Coincidentally, Search Engine Land’s Bill Slawski posted an article that talks about the importance of a privacy policy when you are doing search engine marketing. Like any of Bill’s articles, this one is well thought out and researched and points to three reasons you’d want to make sure you include a privacy policy on your site (so make sure you read the full article here). They are:

1. Privacy policies give your site credibility and reassures your users
2. Whether your site has a privacy policy or not has an influence on your PPC Quality Score with Google
3. Some people think that having a machine readable privacy policy will affect everything for search rankings to the filtration of sites by toolbars and other tools

All this privacy policy talk made me realize that a lot of new affiliate marketers probably don’t even think to add a privacy policy to their affiliate site – which could be hurting their chances of success. If you fall into that boat, you should make it a goal to get a privacy policy added to your site(s) by the beginning of next week.

Oh yeah, one other thing, don’t just go and steal someone’s privacy policy off their site…that’s bad form. Instead use one of the helpful online tools out there like this privacy policy generator.