Who’s Winning off the Back of the Affiliate Publication Drops? - https://lnkd.in/dW3_kj_S #cryptocurrency #bitcoin #news #affiliateprogram #remotework #work
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Affiliate publications have seen a sharp drop in SERP visibility over the last few days.The news came after Glenn Gabe shared a “stop-the-presses” post, revealing that Google had penalized various affiliate directories through a spate of manual actions.Parasite SEO usually occurs when users post self-referential links on someone else’s site, to take advantage of its authority. Google’s site reputation abuse guidelines originally focused on this kind of third-party spam.But Google recently updated its policy to make it clear that site reputation abuse is still possible even when first-party players are involved. This was the first sign that things were about to get tricky for affiliate publications.As Angela Petulla points out, this blow comes just in time for Black Friday, when these publishers would expect to make the majority of the year’s revenue.Here’s the story if you’re not yet up to speed.Publications began monetizing their historic authority by creating affiliate directories, and in doing so, started to rank for many commercially competitive keywords.SEOs and affiliates criticized these publications for producing inauthentic affiliate content that prioritized profit over providing value to the end user. Around the same time, hundreds of independents incurred SERP “shadowbans” in the wake of Google’s Helpful Content Update (September of ‘23), and have been struggling to regain visibility ever since.Aside from the odd drop, it’s been business as usual for many big name affiliate publications.But that all changed last week.So what’s happening now?In the last few days, the affiliate directories of many well known publications have seen significant drops in traffic.Here’s that same view minus Forbes Advisor, so you can see the traffic dips of other publications more clearly.But not every affiliate authority has been hit. Some still have steady visibility, and others—like New York Times, have actually benefitted.SEOs have been doing Google site: searches, looking high and low for evidence of big brand affiliates—but they’re not finding a lot.In fact, Chris Long (VP of Marketing at GoFish Digital) discovered that some aren’t even ranking for their own brand names. Woof.As publications exit stage left, they leave huge amounts of traffic and revenue on the table.Despina had the great idea of digging into the data, to find out which sites had claimed it. So, that’s exactly what we did.Reddit cleans up off the back affiliate publication dropsFor each affiliate directory below, we examined 1,000 keywords with the largest declines in organic traffic.https://https://lnkd.in/d2CahHnP