Source record
Valentine's Day is a major example of huge news publishers using their SEO authority for affiliate products...
Valentine's Day is a major example of huge news publishers using their SEO authority for affiliate products. CNN, The New York Times, USA Today, even Business Insider all have pages targeting Valentine's Day gifts. Here's the CNN page.
These are all affiliate links. People don't realize this, but these publishers depend a ton on affiliate revenue like this. This study shows how news publishers have had SEO traffic cut in half over the last two years.
More people are going to social media for their news. The smart way to go after unrelated keywords is to break off a part of your brand. The New York Times has NY Times Cooking.
BBC has BBC Food. Now they can show up on Google for romantic dinner ideas. The nuance is this can't be managed by a third party.
Google has this policy called site reputation abuse, specifically calling out publishing third party pages on a site in an attempt to abuse search rankings by taking advantage of the host site's ranking signals. Orb's famously got hit by this, losing a ton of traffic from Google. These news publishers can rank for anything.
It's likely that very soon many of them will offer subscription sass tools. BBC Food, for example, could dominate the cooking app space through SEO alone. But for now, don't forget to get your Valentine's Day presents.
Happy Valentine's Day, everyone.
Publishers can use authority for adjacent affiliate topics, but third-party managed pages can create Google site reputation abuse risk.
Do not host third-party affiliate pages just to exploit site authority; keep owned editorial control and check site reputation abuse policy.
This source is connected to Site reputation abuse / affiliate SEO.
Valentine's Day is a major example of huge news publishers using their SEO authority for affiliate products. CNN, The New York Times, USA Today, even Business Insider all have pages targeting Valentine's Day gifts. Here's the CNN page. These are all affiliate links...