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Google and affiliate sites are not good friends.
Hey guys,
Google continues to release new updates regarding review sites.
I would like to hear what you do to survive the updates on your affiliate sites. Considering that you do not own the products or use the products.
How do you build authority even though you are not really an expert in the niche?
How do you show that you use the products without having the products?
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1 Reply
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I think the ones that will rank the best will be written by someone who has at least some familiarity with the product, or at least the ability to effectively research and write about the product.
I’ve written articles like ’50 time-saving tricks for iOS’ despite not ever owning an Apple device. Someone else already did the research, all you’ve gotta do is present it in a more SEO-friendly way than they did.
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I have worked on a number of big reviews sites that heavily use affiliate links. Certainly it helps if you have been in the space building your authority for decades but even sites like that want to expand into new areas for which they are not recognized category experts. A model I have seen used in these cases is: 1) create a directory where you put all content on the topic … so if you are a tech site and you want to get into personal finance, serve your personal finance content from, say, /finance/ and your personal finance articles from /finance/article-slug 2) publish a lot of non-affiliated articles to build up Google’s authority score for this folder (if you believe such a thing exists)… explainers, how to, news etc. 3) after you can reliably rank for those, add affiliated best lists, single-product reviews, deals articles etc. Or to put it more succinctly, build up your authority in the new space by producing a lot of non-affiliated content first.
Another thing I have seen is having clear “trust signals” on the page: elements which assure the reader of your objectivity, prominent links to your ethics policies and pages that outline your testing methodology, on-page author bios that emphasize the author’s expertise with links to view the author’s full bio and all stories they’ve written on the site, and bylines (and bios) for editors and fact-checkers in addition to the author’s. From an SEO perspective, these really only matter if your page goes to human review at Google which I believe used to be common for all YMYL terms but has been scaled back to ones that may cause “harm”. Still the idea is you want a human reading your site to feel like they can trust the information on the site … even if you aren’t going to human review at Google, your readers are human so pursuing this goal can only help you. These tactics are most common on health and personal finance sites so look at those for inspiration.
Good luck!
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While there are bad Review sites, there are really important ones. I work in B2B tech and they rank and do very well. A lot of money gets poured into industry research.
There are multiple ways the Google System deals with these. If people don’t like the affiliate sites, then they will avoid clicking on them. Falling CTR is really hard to fix without a pivot.
You’re conflating Google Authority with general authority – and thats super broad. Journalists aren’t experts in any field except maybe writing. But News sites sit atop the best trafficked (esp from Google) sites in the world.
Authority isn’t just about being an expert (yes, I know, I’ve ignored the Google sound bites on these too) – its about being an authority on making it relevent and understanding what the user needs too.
Some examples – there are a lot of SEO sites – mine included – that outrank Google’s Web Dev site (ostensibly an SEO dev site) for technical SEO terms – because they’re not trying to focus on ranking for those.
Google’s search is now “re-branded” as Google Systems (from GSC to the SEO/Webmaster forums) – you need to stop thinking in binary (yes/no, a/b, true/false) and start thinking like an engineer in a “systems” mode.
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Being an affiliate site doesn’t mean you can’t be an authority. On the contrary, if you are perceived as objective, it can give you a lot of authority.
If you aren’t an authority on the subject you write about, then that’s a whole different problem. I only hire writers who know their shit.
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Someone who reviews a product they don’t own and haven’t used shouldn’t expect to get good, long-term search performance.
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The affiliate marketing concept is to remove the middlemen in the marketing sector. Removing them is a big-cost saving for both the buyers and manufacturers. In past, people used to work as distributors under an MLM concept. As technology grows, the same business concept takes a digital evolution called Affiliate Marketing. Through this method, the manufacturing company can directly sell their products to the customers. And a major portion of the product price is shared with those affiliates.
Now, let us discuss about Google and Affiliate Business.
The best way of doing Affiliate Business is by running a blog. And blogging becomes highly competitive nowadays. To generate a sustainable income from affiliate marketing is to grow your blog as an authoritative source of income.
Despite Google algorithm updates, if you make people believe and trust your content, you can definitely win. Spend more time to create valuable and helpful content consistently.
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