Actually, the death of thin affiliates has been declared multiple times, and perhaps there’s something to it, but like the “corpse” in Monty Python’s “Bring Out Your Dead” sketch, thin affiliates say they’re doing fine, thanks.

However, in early January 2010 Google slashed the number of advertisers in some categories by 90%, clearing the way for those who create original products and original content. And that’s what it eventually comes down to, even for thin affiliates that make quick fortunes slinging affiliate sites all over the place: if you don’t have unique content, you’ll be roadkill on the information superhighway eventually.

The way to long term marketing success with Google has always theoretically been high quality original content, it’s just that now they’re backing up their words with some slash and burn tactics that make thin affiliates a shorter term proposition for most.

The first screenshot, from the Google Webmaster Central Blog, shows load time on the y-axis and time on the x-axis. The dotted line shows the 20th percentile value across all sites. It is what Google uses to separate the fast from the slow sites. The second screen shot, from the same blog, shows example pages and load times. The third screen shot shows helpful suggestions for getting your page to load faster.

It is important for you to know that at the time of this writing, Google site performance (speed) data does not affect your search engine ranking in any way. That could, of course, change eventually, but right now page load speed does not affect search engine ranking.

Should you have keywords in your URL structure? Yes. It won’t hurt and can only help. Consider your URL structure as an important part of a user-oriented design. Your URL structure is a key part of the usability of your site. Your site’s information architecture is how the information is grouped and categorized on a site. If you start out with a logical architecture covering your home page and all the pages within, your site will be easier to navigate for human readers and for search engine crawlers.

It’s common sense. If your page on, say, the Louis Vuitton Keepall 55 carry-on luggage has a URL structure like “http://www.yoursitename.com/designer goods/luggage/carry-on-luggage/Louis-Vuitton-Keepall-55″ it is easy for users and search bots to figure out what that page is all about because you’ve described it in ever-increasing detail as you progress from the home page to the specific page.

However, keep in mind that search engines are limited in the number of characters in a URL that they’ll crawl. Shorter URLs that don’t look like dynamic URLS (which are full of special characters and hard to remember) and that are shorter and to the point are a great investment in the future of your site’s search engine ranking.