The SERP visibility of affiliate publications has dropped dramatically over the past few days.
Previously, Glenn Gabe shared a “Stop the Media” post, revealing that Google had penalized various affiliate directories through a series of manual actions.
Parasite SEO This usually happens when users post self-referential links on other sites to leverage their authority. Google’s Site Reputation Abuse Guidelines initially focused on this type of third-party spam.
but Google recently updated its policy Clear site reputation abuse is still possible Even if there are first-party players involved. This was the first sign that things were about to get tricky for affiliate publications.
As Angela Petulla points out, this hit coincides with Black Friday, the day when these publishers are expected to make most of their revenue for the entire year.
If you haven’t caught up yet, here’s the story.
Publications began to monetize their historical authority by creating affiliate directories and in the process began to rank for many commercially competitive keywords.
SEOs and affiliates have criticized these publications for producing inauthentic affiliate content that prioritizes profit over providing value to the end user. Around the same time, hundreds of independents suffered SERP “shadow bans” following Google’s Useful Content Update (September ’23), and they’ve been struggling to regain visibility ever since.
Aside from the odd dip, it’s business as usual for many well-known affiliate publications.
But that all changed last week.
Over the past few days, many well-known publications have seen significant drops in traffic to their affiliate directories.
This is the same view minus Forbes Advisor, so you can see the traffic declines for other publications more clearly.
But not all affiliates have been hit. Some still have stable visibility, while others — like The New York Times — have actually benefited.
SEO has been doing Google site: Searched, looked everywhere for evidence of affiliates of big brands, but they didn’t find much.
In fact, Chris Long (VP of Marketing at GoFish Digital) found that some weren’t even ranking for themselves brand name. latitude.
When publications leave the stage, they leave behind a lot of traffic and revenue.
Despina It’s a good idea to dig into the data and find out which websites claim to have it. So, that’s exactly what we did.
For each affiliate directory below, we examined the 1,000 keywords with the largest drops in organic traffic.
- https://www.wsj.com/buyside/
- https://reviewed.usatoday.com/
- www.independent.co.uk/advisor
- www.thesun.co.uk/shopping/
- www.forbes.com/advisor/
- www.newsweek.com/vault/
- www.cnn.com/cnn-underscored/
In total, we analyzed rankings for 6,179 keywords that dropped or were missing entirely between November 18 and November 25.
For these same keywords, we performed traffic analysis in the Ahrefs Traffic Share By Domain report in Keyword Explorer.
Winning websites in different industries are a mixed bag. From UGC to personal finance, e-commerce and news media.
But Reddit was the leader, earning a 6% share of lost traffic, followed by Bankrate and Amazon.
While publisher abandonment seems like a win for independent affiliates, niche sites, and small businesses, it remains to be seen whether it will become a reality. actually benefit them.
The current top 20 sites with the biggest returns are still the “big name” sites, with an average domain rating of 92.
So, we’ve seen who might profit from Google’s manual efforts, but what do affiliate publications actually lose? How much is their lost visibility worth? Also, is there any opportunity for others to step in? Here’s what we know so far…
Organic traffic value dropped by an average of $4 million
On average, all seven publishers saw a decrease in monthly organic traffic value of -$4,111,485.
According to our Site Explorer data, in the best-case scenario, a publication loses $89,000 per month, and in the worst-case scenario, a publication loses $26 million per month.
Most of the affected keywords are financial in nature
Looking at Ahrefs’ parent topic report, it’s clear that most of the missing keywords are financial keywords.
I also asked ChatGPT to categorize the affected keywords by industry. Details are as follows:
Among the categories successfully classified by ChatGPT, the largest category is again Finance, followed by Legal and Insurance, and Transportation.
Here are some examples of missing financial terms:
- Business credit card
- Small Business Online Accounting
- Business bank accounts have no minimum balance
- renovation home loan
E-commerce queries saw the biggest decline in organic traffic
Using Ahrefs Keyword Presets in Keyword Explorer, I was able to better understand the types of keywords affected by affiliate publisher placement…
I looked at the organic traffic drop for each publication, and for each keyword in our analysis (i.e. 6K+ keywords).
The table below shows the average drop in organic traffic, sorted from highest to lowest based on the category presets we were able to apply in Ahrefs Keyword Browser.
| Number of keywords | Percentage of data set | Average organic traffic change👇 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| e-commerce | 1026 | 17.0% | -236 |
| Seasonal | 228 | 4.0% | -154 |
| message | Chapter 498 | 8.0% | -141 |
| Compare | 2555 | 41.0% | -103 |
| Comment | 140 | 2.0% | -84 |
| forum | 2396 | 39.0% | -69 |
| local | 83 | 1.0% | -64 |
| benefit | 39 | 0.6% | -56 |
| feature | 133 | 2.0% | -49 |
| price | 528 | 9.0% | -47 |
| trend | 19 | 0.3% | -twenty three |
Compare keywords such as “best savings rate” or “ipad and “macbook” appears the most in the data set, but e-commerce keywords have the largest decline, followed by seasonal keywords and news-based queries.
We define e-commerce keywords through the emergence of shopping-based SERP features.
Here are some of the e-commerce queries that saw the biggest declines:
- Advent Calendar 2024
- AirPods Max
- Apple earphones largest
- Apple AirPods Max
- hexagonal cladding
- Julie shower head
- chat phone
- Best Refrigerators of 2024
- canada goose black friday
- Not brushing teeth
Affected keywords receive nearly 2K searches per month
Affiliate directories for keywords that have lost visibility are very popular. Average search volume equates to 1,985 searches per month.
At age 25, the average difficulty for each keyword is medium-low, including keywords like “best simple printers.”
This provides an opportunity for independent websites and other less authoritative websites to gain a foothold.
The average cost-per-click for the affected keywords was $2.21
The average CPC for the affected keywords was $2.21, with most keywords having much lower average CPCs, so the drop in traffic amounts to a considerable loss of value.
One-third of the missing keywords are brand keywords
Data shows that 35.1% of lost keywords are brand keywords. This does not mean that they feature the name of the publication, but rather that they feature a specific brand.
Here are some examples of affected brand keywords:
- Ovara water bottle
- Home Depot Credit Card
- AirPods Max
- kindle paperwhite
- chat phone
Most traffic losses were informational, but more than a third were commercial
Traffic dropped at both ends of the funnel.
Most of the 91.2% traffic drop or loss was for informational purposes, but a large portion (39.7%) was also for commercial purposes.
Side note.
Keep in mind that these numbers don’t add up to 100% because many keywords display multiple intents.
The highest value business keywords lost include:
| Business keywords are missing | CPC |
|---|---|
| Truck Accident Lawyer | $129.15 |
| Best Car Accident Lawyers in Houston | $81.54 |
| Austin Car Accident Lawyers | $68.25 |
| Mesothelioma Lawyer Directory | $67.88 |
| car accident lawyer | $60 |
Affiliated publications used to rank some of the most competitive legal queries, but now that they are no longer there, these terms are back on the table.
Affiliated publications lose trending stories feature
From the outset, these publications struggled to rank on most SERP features, with 89.4% of keywords failing to generate any rankings. In the few cases that did, the most common feature was headlines, accounting for 7.4% of all missing positions.
A quick look at the keywords generated by the top stories shows that they are primarily focused on mortgage rates and similar, finance-related queries.
Summarize
Here’s the TL;DR:
- Google imposes manual penalties on affiliate directories, reducing their visibility.
- Top publishers such as The Wall Street Journal and CNN lose an average of $4 million in traffic value each month.
- Big players like Reddit, Bankrate, and Amazon seized on the loss of traffic.
- The most affected keywords are financial and e-commerce terms, with medium to low difficulty.
- High-risk keywords such as “truck accident lawyer” are now up for grabs.
- Hundreds of news and business inquiries posted.
- Small players see hope, but giants still dominate the traffic game.
Let me know your thoughts and findings LinkedIn!
