Who wins from affiliate publishing?

Over the past few days, affiliated publications have seen a acute decline in SERP visibility.

The news came after Glenn Gabe shared a “stop the press” post in which he revealed that Google had penalized various affiliate directories following a series of manual actions.

Parasite SEO typically occurs when users post links referring to themselves on another person’s site to take advantage of that site’s authority. Google’s Site Reputation Abuse Guidelines originally focused on this type of third-party spam.

But Google recently updated its policies to make it clear that it is still possible to abuse the site’s reputation even if first team players are involved. This was the first sign that things were about to get complicated for affiliate publishing.

As Angela Petulla points out, this blow comes just in time for Black Friday, when these publishers expect to make the bulk of their annual revenue.

Here’s the story if you’re not up to date yet.

Publications began to monetize their historical authority by creating affiliate directories, and in doing so, they began 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 independent users received “shadow blocks” on the SERPs following Google’s Helpful Content update (September 2023) and have been struggling to regain visibility ever since.

Apart from the odd decline, it’s business as usual for many high-profile affiliate publications.

But everything changed last week.

Over the past few days, affiliate directories for many well-known publications have seen a significant drop in traffic.

Here’s the same view without Forbes Advisor, so you can more clearly see traffic declines for other publications.

But not every affiliate body was hit. Some of them still enjoy constant visibility, and others – like the Up-to-date York Times – have actually benefited from it.

SEO is done by Google site: he searches everywhere for evidence of massive brand partners, but doesn’t find much.

In fact, Chris Long (VP of Marketing at GoFish Digital) discovered that some of them don’t even rank on their own brand names. Thread.

When publications leave the final stage, they leave a huge amount of traffic and revenue on the table.

Despina he had the great idea to dig through the data and find out which sites reported it. So that’s exactly what we did.

For each partner directory below, we checked the 1,000 keywords with the highest declines in organic traffic.

1. https://www.wsj.com/buyside/
2. https://reviewed.usatoday.com/
3. www.independent.co.uk/advisor
4. www.thesun.co.uk/shopping/
5. www.forbes.com/advisor/
6. www.newsweek.com/vault/
7. www.cnn.com/cnn-underscored/

In total, we analyzed the rankings of 6,179 keywords that dropped or were completely lost between November 18 and November 25.

For the same keywords, we ran a traffic analysis in the Ahrefs Traffic Share By Domain report in the Keyword Explorer.

There are actually a lot of sites that are successful in different industries; from UGC to personal finance, e-commerce and news media.

But Reddit is the one that cleans up, earning 6% of the lost traffic share, closely followed by Bankrate and Amazon.

While the publisher decline may seem like a victory for independent affiliates, niche sites, and diminutive businesses, it remains to be seen whether this will actually happen. Actually benefit them.

The top 20 sites that are currently benefiting the most are still the massive names, boasting an average domain score of 92.

So we’ve seen who stands to profit from Google’s manual efforts, but what do affiliated publications actually stand to lose? How much is their loss of visibility worth? Do others have a chance to prove themselves? Here’s what we know so far…

The value of organic traffic dropped by an average of $4 million

On average, the monthly organic traffic value of all seven publishers decreased by -$4,111,485.

According to Site Explorer data, at best one publication was losing $89,000 a month and at worst it was losing $26 million.

Most of the keywords involved were financial in nature

Looking at the Ahrefs Parent Topics report, it is clear that most of the lost keywords were financial in nature.

I also asked ChatGPT to classify the affected keywords by industry. Here’s the breakdown:

Of ChatGPT’s successfully classified categories, the largest category was – once again – finance, followed by law & insurance and transport.

Here are some examples of lost financial conditions:

• corporate credit card
• online accounting for diminutive businesses
• business bank account with no minimum balance
• home renovation loan

The largest drop in organic traffic concerned e-commerce inquiries

I was able to learn a little more about the types of keywords that are affected by affiliate publisher drops by using Ahrefs keyword presets in the Keyword Explorer…

I looked at organic traffic declines for each publication, for each keyword included in our analysis (i.e. over 6,000 keywords).

The table below shows the average drops in organic traffic, sorted from highest to lowest, based on the category settings we can apply in Ahrefs Keyword Explorer.

	Number of keywords	% of the dataset	Average change in organic traffic 👇
E-commerce	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
Characteristics	133	2.0%	-49
Price	528	9.0%	-47
Trends	19	0.3%	-23

Compare keywords like “the best savings rate” or “ipad vs macbook” appeared most frequently in the dataset, but e-commerce keywords saw the biggest declines – followed by seasonal keywords and news-based queries.

We define e-commerce keywords based on the appearance of shopping-based SERP features.

Here are some of the e-commerce queries that dropped the most:

• advent calendar 2024
• airpod max
• Apple headphones max
• Apple AirPod Max
• hexclad
• Jolie shower head
• Gabba phone
• best refrigerator 2024
• Canada Goose Black Friday
• comb out

The affected keywords received almost 2,000 hits. searches per month

Keywords for which partner catalogs have lost visibility are quite popular. The average search volume equates to 1,985 searches per month.

At level 25, the average difficulty level of each keyword was medium-low, including keywords such as “best elementary printer”.

This gives independent and other less authoritative parties a chance to gain a foothold.

Affected keywords had an average CPC of $2.21

The average CPC for the affected keywords was $2.21 – most keywords have an average much lower than that, so traffic declines represent a significant loss of value.

One third of the lost keywords were brand related

The data showed that 35.1% of lost keywords were brand related. This does not mean that they included the name of the publication – rather, that they featured specific brands.

Here are some examples of branded keywords affected:

• oval water bottle
• credit card from home depot
• airpod max
• Kindle Paperwhite
• Gabba phone

Most of the lost traffic was informational, but more than a third was commercial

There were traffic drops at both ends of the funnel.

At 91.2%, the majority of withering or lost traffic was informational, but a significant portion (39.7%) was also commercial.

The most frequently lost, highest value commercial keywords included:

Commercial keywords lost	CPC
truck accident lawyer	$129.15
best car accident lawyer in houston	$81.54
Austin car accident lawyer	$68.25
Mesothelioma Lawyers Directory	$67.88
car accident lawyers	$60

Affiliate publications used to rank among the most competitive legal queries, but now that they are out of the picture, these terms are back on the table.

Affiliated publications have lost Top Stories features

From the beginning, publications struggled to rank for most SERP features, with 89.4% of their keywords generating none. Among the few that did, Top Stories was the most common feature, accounting for 7.4% of all lost items.

A quick look at the keywords generating Top Stories suggests that they were mainly focused on mortgage rates and similar financial queries.

Summary

Here’s the TL;DR:

• Google attacked partner directories by imposing manual penalties, worsening their visibility.
• Top publishers like WSJ and CNN lost an average of $4 million in traffic per month.
• The massive players took over the lost traffic: Reddit, Bankrate and Amazon.
• The most affected keywords were finance and e-commerce terms with medium to low difficulty.
• High-stakes keywords (e.g. “truck accident lawyer”) are now available to employ.
• Hundreds of information and commercial inquiries were published.
• The diminutive players see hope, but the giants still dominate the road game.

Share your thoughts and findings on the topic with me LinkedIn!