Who’s Winning Off The Back Of The Affiliate Publication Drops?

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.

For each affiliate directory below, we examined 1,000 keywords with the largest declines in organic traffic.

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…

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

The highest value commercial keywords lost included:

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.

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.

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.