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.
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.
In all, we analyzed the rankings of 6,179 keywords that had either declined or been completely lost between November 18th and November 25th.
For those same keywords, we ran a traffic analysis in Ahrefs Traffic Share By Domain report within Keywords Explorer.
There’s a real mixed bag of sites winning across different industries; from UGC, to personal finance, ecommerce, and news media.
But Reddit is the one cleaning up, earning 6% of that lost traffic share, followed closely by Bankrate and Amazon.
While the publisher drops may seem like a win for independent affiliates, niche sites, and small businesses, it remains to be seen whether it will actually benefit them.
The top 20 sites reaping the biggest rewards right now are still the “big names”, boasting an average Domain Rating of 92.
