For a long time, affiliates dominated search results and could grab a good share of everyone’s margins, but now that’s coming to an end. Right now, it’s e-commerce businesses that own the positions, and affiliates are taking a backseat.
The affiliate industry had a knowledge advantage over e-commerce businesses for a long time, often making it easier to create space for solid SEO on their sites. A comparison of stores or service providers is excellent content that fits perfectly on an affiliate site, but in e-commerce, it’s not as natural. This applies to many types of content, and combined with a low barrier to entry, middlemen could become dominant in Google’s results.
Recently, however, Google has been very hard on affiliate sites, and much of what they used to do is now grounds for filtering. “Thin affiliate pages” are specifically mentioned in Google’s guidelines for the quality raters – Google considers them to be that bad.
Lately, I’ve noticed that it’s going much better for e-commerce businesses, even though they might feel that it’s hard. The industry itself is tough, but e-commerce businesses are being rewarded over affiliates in search results. We’ve even chosen to dive into the industry ourselves – as you may have read before, we are making a significant investment in an online store. The reason is that I strongly believe in e-commerce in the coming years, even though Google has issued a storm warning.
As mentioned, Google has gone out and warned that they will target “thin e-commerce sites” in the same way they previously targeted “thin affiliate sites.” What this might mean is something we can only speculate about, but I choose to interpret it as Google now feeling that e-commerce sites have it too easy in search results. This is an opportunity window if there ever was one. 😉
Aaron Axelsson
Head of SEO / Vice President
Aaron works as Head of SEO at our headquarters in Örnsköldsvik since 2015 and oversees all things SEO at Brath