How Google's December 2020 Core Update Affected Affiliate Sites [Data Analysis]

Always like your videos. You are really really awesome.

Thanks (i meant it)

hardly found anyone can teach things so fast and in a short time.

always wait for your great videos.

good job

Thanks Matt, Good analysis, and I am in agreement with you considering how my sites performed. I had one site with 90% affiliate content, got hammered, but another site with less affiliate content sustained even with no backlinks. Also, I just launched 2 sites a few weeks back, 1 content-focused and 2nd affiliate articles. Within weeks, I saw the content site getting rankings, but the affiliate site doesn't even appear. So, it more or less in line with your analysis. But, your second observation - "Authority Being King" is still a question mark, probably there are few more variables attached to it. One question I have is, did you analyze the data based on the ratio of the content on site with respect to Informational vs Affiliate? Is there a safe zone with a certain minimum % of informational content?

Interesting 🤨 thx

Thanks for this analysis Matt. I saw your diggitymarketing .com website get a massive boost in this dec. core update :)

Most important skill for an entrepreneur: Never give up!
If you are reading this: Please never give up and keep working on your dream! :)

Ah interesting. I always build sites with keywords like "golf course" and Not "best golf course" because they have more search Volume. So y think it dosent make sense for a affiliate site? I am Ranking on page 20

It is a great analysis Matt. I heard the same discussion on your FB group. Jason Dolman pointed out the same.

My site got hit too. But recovered after after the disavowing some low quality links with added more quest post and niche edit links and currently ranking no 1 (was on 2 page after the update).
P.S. my site earnings did not affect at all as my buyer intent keyword is of different niche. This is because even after the update and being on 2 page, it was still no 1 in other engine such as bing, yahoo, duckduckgo etc.

Google wants each and every penny through google ads . And the method to get these pennies is called a google update. Both Amazon and google hate affiliate marketers and its about time online affiliate marketers are part of history. Writing is on the wall unless one deny it!

Really great info Matt, I love nerding out on this data. Thanks for sharing, I'll be mentioning this data in my video this week.

reason number 1 to sell your affiliate when its near peak, not think of it as a long term business

This is quite insightful. Matt's findings and recommendations are perfectly in line with what I noticed on my sites during the December update. Seems Google now wants affiliate marketing to be made a remotely secondary monetization option -- if it would be used at all.

you are the only guy who has mentioned that they see new sites get away with murder. I've had folks fight me on that point.

I wonder if google is trying to restrict Amazon from making tons of money on via affiliates on the google platform since they have been pushing their own shopping app so hard lately.

Great analysis Matt. It would also be interesting to see a grouping of those 600 websites to their niches and then analyse which niche is affected the most. It could again be all over the place or not. But thanks for sharing the video with broader community.

Good one Matt

I'm tired of your ads man

When panda was released in the late 2000s, the affiliate job industry was hit hard. Google said at the time you most provide additional benefit that the destination site didn’t offer.

I would say this is a key element for affiliate today. If you don’t offer more than the destination, you’re just an additional link in the way.

And if you want to offer a “best” post, I’d say that doubles.

Too many affiliates just read Amazon reviews, take a few key points and summarise. That’s not offering more and the NLP stuff is starting to be able to evaluate this.

Not saying at all this is the only reason, but I think it’ll be harder as time goes on to provide basic info and expecting traffic.

Finally. Seen so many people saying 'it's not just affiliate sites that got hit (*cough* Authority Hackers ) - but you didn't see thousands of Ad based/pure info sites being hit with 80-90% drops.

So Google hates Affiliate sites to the core

Worth 25 minutes of time.

was one of the best updates for our sites, hitting 50k a day consistently now

Happy to contribute! Solid piece of information.

Hi, Matt,

You said that you will write informational content as short as possible. How many words per article on average?
And is there a danger that Google will consider these pages thin?

Thanks

Any authenticated source for checking Google update?

My guess is Google wants to get rid of many Amazon Affiliate sites to erase competition for its own new shopping site.

Great tips. Thank you.

Google is bipolar

Hey Matt, what about just focusing on content and categories and blocking product pages from being crawled?

Nice to see you man.

You're obviously super smart. If you deal with data and talk about data, maybe pronounce "data" like "dayta" as most statisticians do. I'm sure people will quibble with this suggestion.

Is there any update for this with more data/sites analysed?

Hi Matt, it has been more than 7-8 months now since this update. My website traffic has still not increased. I lost almost 70% of traffic after this update. I did all the things you suggested when you published this video. Now, what to do? Please guide!

Every affiliate site has to have a affiliate disclosure. Easy pickens for Google.
Years ago Google sent people to washington to help Obama with heathcare website. Many laws got changed and added that helped Google. Now FTC requires a affiliate disclosure, but not tv or radio adds.