Google cracks down on affiliate marketing and voucher code pages
Google’s recent core algorithmic changes have had a jaw-dropping impact on the rankings of some famous sites that use affiliate marketing – and now they’re manually going after news publishers’ voucher code pages too.
Google’s algorithm changes on site’s affiliate marketing pages
This list, compiled by SEO guru Lily Ray, is shocking. Some of the names at the top you may not recognise in the UK, but there are familiar names: Hello magazine has lost 79% of its search traffic, NME.com is down 73%, GQ is 70%.
Lily does point out this data from Sistrix only includes the top organic links – not Top Stories, News or Discover.
But search referral traffic could be soon further impacted by SGE – Search Generative Experience – which is generative AI-driven search results displayed on the page. But the results so far have been hit and miss – and even dangerous.
Why is Google targeting the search ranking of affiliate marketing and voucher code pages?
Affiliate marketing is where there are links, often in product reviews, where the publisher gets a fee if you go on to purchase it. Some sites may highly rate a product because they are incentivised to do so.
And Google did warn that it was cracking down on ‘site reputation abuse’ or ‘spam’, such as where news publishers host low-quality, unchecked content from third parties to benefit from their ranking power – like voucher codes and affiliate reviews. This is not the same as syndicated news content, forums or native advertising with close involvement with host sites.
Google has indicated this downranking is being done manually at the moment – more sites will be impacted by the algorithmic changes.
Is this a bad thing? Well, Google see it as improving the experience for users – which is much needed. And I’m sure like me, you hate being tricked into trying to use an old voucher code or buying a product that appears to have a good review, only for it to be useless.
It’s a sign of how hard things are now for publishers, with sharp declines in social traffic and display ad revenue. It seems diversification of income streams and focusing on high quality, relevant content continues to be the best advice.
Read: How news publishers can compete with the threat of AI