Google’s SERPs seem hellbent on making life difficult for authentic affiliate publishers.What were once fields ripe and bountiful with conversions to harvest, have now become miles and miles of impenetrable walled gardens. And the worst part is, if you look a little closer, the walled gardens are filled with nothing but rotten fruit.Rotten fruit, in this metaphor, means affiliate spam, which appears to be dominating product review searches right now, at the expense of genuine, curated content commerce sites.This is the revelation from an insightful new piece of analysis put together by Detailed’s Glen Allsopp.Google’s ‘Discussions and forums’ featureThe story starts back in November 2023, when Google began a wider rollout of its ‘Discussion and forums’ feature in the SERPs.Google’s aim was to enhance search results with a more personal touch, listing helpful content from forums and online discussions at the top of some SERPs, alongside traditional web results. You can see an example of how it works below.Source: Google’s blogWhat seemed like a good idea rapidly descended into an infestation.As Allsopp finds, there were a couple of triggers for this. A heavy presence of the ‘Discussions and forums’ feature in product review search terms.The dominance of Reddit and Quora pages in this feature.These two factors created predictability for the valuable SERPs of product review searches – predictability that was quickly exploited.Reddit’s SEO problemFor the investigation, Allsopp deployed 10,000 hand-picked product review terms.Across the 10k search results, he found that the ‘Discussions and forums’ feature was present in 7,702 (77%) of them and Reddit.com was present in 7,509 results, featuring 14,263 times. This gave Reddit a 97.5% chance of showing up when product review search terms were put into Google.Quora also ranked high, appearing in 3,513 searches. However, after these two titans, the prominence of other sites drops significantly. The unnamed site in third place, for example, featured in just 235 searches. The majority of the top 20 sites to show up in this feature were seen in less than 100 searches.With such high odds to rank at the top of a Google search, Reddit pages for product reviews soon became overwhelmed with spammy comments using affiliate links. These comments were then pumped up to the top of Reddit pages using bots and fake upvotes. The illegitimacy of these posts is often evident by the lack of history from the accounts that post them.Why do we care?This reflects badly on affiliate marketing and gets in the way of the genuine affiliate publishers doing golden work in the SERPs.Editorial, authoritative, and authentic content commerce articles are a tried-and-true method for driving value for both consumers and brands.Affiliate links can be combined with well-thought-out and informed content, directed to a particular audience, that highlights the best products in a particular field.What’s being prioritised in the SERPs, however, is anything but.Instead, we’re seeing quick cash grabs – inflated spam comments with affiliate links that are merely trying to capitalise on the SEO advantage that Reddit currently holds.Not only does it reflect poorly on affiliate marketing, but it’s a bad look for Google and Reddit. Thankfully, this means that we will likely see changes soon.Just last week, Google representatives shared two posts on X suggesting that something needed to be done. Source: DetailedReddit, on the other hand, seems to be in denial that there are any issues to be dealt with. A spokesperson for Reddit reached out to Search Engine Land after the publication of Allsopp’s report, stating that it is ‘flawed and misleading’.Whether there are discrepancies in exact numbers or not, this report certainly highlights why trustworthy content commerce ought to be championed in the SERPs over product reviews in forums.
https://hellopartner.com/2024/02/15/affiliate-spam-is-clogging-product-review-searches/
