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.
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.
For each affiliate directory below, we examined 1,000 keywords with the largest declines 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 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.
So, we’ve seen who may be profiting off the back of Google’s manual actions, but what do affiliate publications actually stand to lose? How much is their lost visibility worth? And, is there opportunity for others to muscle in? Here’s what we know so far…
Organic traffic value has dropped by $4M on average
On average, the monthly organic traffic value of all seven publishers has declined by -$4,111,485.
In the best case scenario, one publication lost $89,000 per month, and in the worst, one hemorrhaged $26 million, according to our Site Explorer data.
Most keywords impacted were financial in nature
Looking at Ahrefs’ Parent Topics report, it’s clear to see that the majority of lost keywords were financial.
I also asked ChatGPT to categorize the impacted keywords by industry. Here’s the breakdown:
Of those ChatGPT successfully classified, the biggest category was—once again—finance, followed by legal and insurance, and transportation.
Here are some examples of those lost finance terms:
- corporate credit card
- online accounting for small business
- business bank account with no minimum balance
- home loan for renovation
Organic traffic dipped most for ecommerce queries
I was able to find out a bit more about the kinds of keywords impacted by the affiliate publisher drops, using Ahrefs’ keyword presets in Keywords Explorer…
I looked at the organic traffic drops of each publication, for every single keyword in our analysis (i.e. 6K+ keywords).
The table below shows average dips in organic traffic, sorted from highest to lowest, based on the category presets we are able to apply in Ahrefs Keywords Explorer.
| # of keywords | % of dataset | Avg organic traffic change 👇 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ecommerce | 1026 | 17.0% | -236 |
| Seasonal | 228 | 4.0% | -154 |
| News | 498 | 8.0% | -141 |
| Comparisons | 2555 | 41.0% | -103 |
| Reviews | 140 | 2.0% | -84 |
| Forums | 2396 | 39.0% | -69 |
| Local | 83 | 1.0% | -64 |
| Benefits | 39 | 0.6% | -56 |
| Features | 133 | 2.0% | -49 |
| Price | 528 | 9.0% | -47 |
| Trends | 19 | 0.3% | -23 |
Comparison keywords such as “best savings rate” or “ipad vs macbook” appeared most in the dataset, but ecommerce keywords were the ones that saw the most significant drops—followed by seasonal keywords, and news based queries.
We define ecommerce keywords by the appearance of shopping based SERP Features.
Here are some ecommerce queries that dipped the most:
- advent calendar 2024
- airpod max
- apple headphones max
- apple airpod max
- hexclad
- jolie shower head
- gabb phone
- best refrigerator 2024
- canada goose black friday
- unbrush
Affected keywords received nearly 2K searches per month
The keywords affiliate directories have lost visibility for are pretty popular. Average search volumes equated to 1,985 searches per month.
At 25, the average difficulty for each keyword was medium-low, including keywords like “best simple printer”.
This presents an opportunity for independents and other less authoritative sites to gain a foothold.
Affected keywords had an average CPC of $2.21
The average CPC of keywords impacted stood at $2.21—most keywords average far lower, so the traffic dips equate to a fair amount of lost value.
A third of the keywords lost were branded
The data showed that 35.1% of the keywords lost were branded. This doesn’t mean that they featured the name of the publication—rather that they featured specific brands.
Here are some examples of the branded keywords impacted:
- owala water bottle
- home depot credit card
- airpod max
- kindle paperwhite
- gabb phone
Most lost traffic was informational—but over a third was commercial
Traffic dips occurred at both ends of the funnel.
At 91.2%, the majority of declining or lost traffic was informational in intent, but a significant amount (39.7%) was also commercial.
Sidenote.
Bear in mind that the numbers don’t add up to 100% because many keywords display multiple intents.
The highest value commercial keywords lost included:
| Commercial keywords lost | CPCs |
|---|---|
| truck crash attorney | $129.15 |
| best car accident lawyer in houston | $81.54 |
| austin auto accident lawyer | $68.25 |
| mesothelioma lawyer directory | $67.88 |
| car crash attorneys | $60 |
Affiliate publications were ranking for some of the most competitive law queries out there, but now that they’re out of the picture, these terms are back on the table.
Affiliate publications lost out on Top Stories features
From the outset, the publications struggled to rank for most SERP features, with 89.4% of their keywords failing to generate any. Among the few that did, the most common feature was Top Stories, representing 7.4% of all lost positions.
A quick look at Top Stories generating keywords suggests they centered mostly around mortgage rates and similar, financially-geared queries.
Wrapping up
Here’s the TL;DR:
- Google slammed affiliate directories with manual penalties, tanking their visibility.
- $4M/month in traffic value was lost on average by top publishers like WSJ and CNN.
- The big players snagged that lost traffic: Reddit, Bankrate, and Amazon.
- The most affected keywords were financial and e-commerce terms, with medium-low difficulty.
- High-stakes keywords (e.g. “truck crash attorney”) are now up for grabs.
- Hundreds of informational and commercial queries have been released.
- Small players see hope, but giants still dominate the traffic game.
Let me know your thoughts and findings on LinkedIn!