SEO Tactics That Could Be Hurting Your Google Traffic
A surprising new case study has shown that four popular SEO tactics you’re probably using could be killing your Google traffic. These are the strategies that top SEOs swear by, but recent updates show they actually lead to significant traffic drops. In this post, we’ll expose these SEO pitfalls and show you exactly how to fix them.
Plus, stick around because we’re unveiling a sneaky Google loophole that savvy affiliate marketers are exploiting to rank for competitive affiliate keywords with ease. Welcome to another edition of our marketing news roundup. I’m Mark Webster, co-founder of Authority Hacker and strategic adviser and marketing pro. Today’s post is brought to you by Search Intelligence. More on them a little later. For now, let’s dive into the four SEO practices that could be sabotaging your traffic.
Case Study by Cyrus Shepard
A case study by Cyrus Shepard from ZI SEO, and previous guest on our podcast (go check that one out here), explored the impact of recent Google updates on 50 international sites relying on ads and affiliate links. This wasn’t just some superficial analysis; the sites were carefully selected for similarities in traffic, content, monetization methods, and whether or not they gained or lost traffic after major Google updates in 2023. Shepard stresses that the sample size is small and correlation doesn’t equal causation, but the findings are significant.
Key Findings from the Study
Anchor Text Variations
First, losing sites had a higher variety of anchor tags for both internal and external links. For example, using “contact,” “reach out,” and “get in touch” as anchor texts for the same URL counts as three variations. Varying your anchor text has been considered SEO best practice since the Penguin update that went after heavy link optimization, so this is pretty surprising.
Frequent Updates
Shepard also found that websites with more frequent updates performed worse. The average published or updated age of URLs on winning sites was 774 days. Losing sites, on the other hand, had an average age of only 273 days. Shepard’s thought is that making minor text updates is now worse than making no updates at all, as Google might interpret them as you trying to game their algorithm by getting a freshly updated post. Google’s documentation even hints at this by asking, “Are you changing the date of pages to make them seem fresh when the content has not substantially changed?”
Title Tags
Another interesting finding was about title tags. Sites with fewer adjectives and numbers in their titles performed better. In other words, clickbait titles were more common among losing sites. Google seems to prefer more straightforward titles, so an exaggerated title like “10 Breathtaking Beautiful Spanish Destinations to Visit in 2024” might boost your click-through rate, but it could also trigger an algorithm penalty.
Structured Data
Shepard’s analysis also touched on the use of structured data, or schema for us nerds. Losing sites on average used more structured data than winning sites. While structured data can improve search appearance, it appears that overdoing it might not be beneficial. Winning sites often had barely any structured data, whereas losing sites included extensive markup.
SEO Features Without Significant Correlation
Shepard’s study also highlighted several SEO features without significant correlation to traffic changes:
Google Traffic Reliance
The first is that overreliance on Google traffic didn’t seem to matter either way. Winning sites had 61% of their traffic come from Google compared to 67% for losing sites. This is interesting because it challenges the theory that Google’s helpful content update targeted sites that don’t have a variety of traffic sources.
Author Information
Author information also didn’t show a significant impact. Despite Google’s emphasis on experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trust (or E-A-T for short), having detailed author info didn’t correlate with better rankings. This finding implies that just adding author bios isn’t a guaranteed way to demonstrate expertise and trust.
Table of Contents
Using a table of contents was another non-factor. While some impacted sites did have them, so did many of the winning sites, showing no significant correlation.
Article Length
Rumors that Google is punishing longer articles were also debunked. Winning sites had shorter articles on average, but many still published long-form content. There’s no significant correlation between article length and traffic changes.
Google Business Profile
Lastly, having a Google Business Profile didn’t offer protection from updates. Losing sites were twice as likely to have one, but Shepard says this wasn’t statistically significant. This finding is surprising because many believe that having a Google Business Profile signals legitimacy to Google.
Main Takeaway
Here’s the main takeaway: over-optimization in certain areas like anchor text variation, frequent updates, catchy titles, and excessive structured data might be hurting more than helping. Google’s sensitive to SEOs trying to game the algorithm with these factors, and it’s better to make sure they don’t think you’re trying to pull the wool over them. This could significantly alter the way you approach SEO.
While these findings are anecdotal, they still reinforce the idea that you should worry less about the technicalities of SEO. Overdoing them could potentially hurt you. Instead, focus more on driving real engagement and foot traffic to your site, as it’s becoming more and more obvious that Google is heavily using these signals nowadays.
Google Loophole for Affiliate Marketers
While Shepard’s warning site owners against over-optimization, affiliates are cashing in on a Google loophole to easily rank for ultra-competitive keywords without worrying about their own website. When you hear “parasite SEO,” you might think of shelling out big bucks to get your affiliate content on high-authority news sites. It was effective but pretty expensive and hard to get into, and the most popular sites that used to offer placements like Outlook India got smashed in the March and May updates.
But the landscape has drastically changed. Google’s recent preference for user-generated content platforms like Reddit, Quora, Medium, and even LinkedIn has opened up a treasure trove of inexpensive and highly scalable affiliate opportunities. These platforms are topping search results for countless queries, and Reddit and Quora are shining even brighter with Google’s predominantly displayed forums and discussion features. Savvy affiliates are cashing in on this golden window of opportunity. But how exactly are they doing it?
Quora
Let’s start with Quora, which is hosting some particularly harmful black hat SEO techniques. An investigation by Orie Zilberstein has uncovered an AI spam network that’s flooding Quora with dubious health affiliate content. Here’s how it works: Affiliates create bogus profiles specializing in health topics like back pain, using realistic headshots generated by thispersondoesnotexist.com. They use keyword tools to find Quora threads ranking on Google for relevant keywords. For each thread, they generate a short-form article with ChatGPT that includes a generic answer and an affiliate link to a health product.
For example, one profile provided 159 answers on back pain in just 17 days. They got over 26,000 views to their profile thanks to Google ranking these answers for back pain queries. Adding to the problem, the increased views on spam answers create a false sense of trustworthiness. On each answer, Quora displays the profile’s total number of answers and the answer views to help users gauge how active the account is. With Google feeding views to these answers, users are more likely to trust their advice.
Reddit is arguably an even more lucrative opportunity for parasite SEO, with Google exploding Reddit’s traffic to over 600 million page views per month and it’s still climbing. For instance, a Reddit thread is currently ranking second for the highly lucrative “best VPN” keyword, and the post includes an affiliate link. The issue extends to many other valuable product review keywords such as “best Bluetooth speaker” and “best gaming mouse.” If you search for other products with high-paying affiliate programs such as “register agents for business,” the top results include a variety of Reddit threads containing affiliate links.
So how are people manipulating Reddit? According to 44 Media, one method involves finding already ranking pages and adding comments with affiliate links using aged Reddit accounts. These accounts are really easy to buy on forums like Black Hat World, where many sellers sell high karma accounts for pennies on the dollar. To push the comments to the top, they manipulate the upvotes with either a small army of bot accounts or by purchasing upvotes from a service.
We’ve also noticed a second method that’s a bit more sophisticated. This is present in the “best VPN” result. It involves making a post on a separate subreddit that contains your affiliate link and includes keywords like “Reddit” and “2024” in your title and content. Then you cross-post that post on a more popular subreddit where it gets more engagement and ranks on Google. Internal linking helps the thread rank, and moderators are probably less suspicious of Reddit internal links. There are even bots now that will market your products for you. 44 Media highlighted a service named Reply Guy, an AI that comments on Reddit to promote your product. Just give it the product name and URL, and the bot will find and reply to relevant Reddit posts on its own.
Just to be clear, we’re not advocating these tactics, merely reporting on them. We think they’re short-sighted and just a little bit spammy. It’s not something we endorse, but it is something that’s working for now on Google. For sure they will change this, but as marketers, it’s important to know what other people are doing.
LinkedIn and Medium
While Reddit and Quora dominate the parasite SEO landscape, they’re not the only players. LinkedIn and Medium are also being exploited for substantial affiliate profits. We conducted an experiment to test the power of parasite SEO on LinkedIn. We removed a ThriveCart software review post from our blog, reposted it on our co-founder Gail Breton’s LinkedIn profile, and redirected the URL to the LinkedIn post. This post quickly ranked and has been fluctuating between ranks 1 to 5 for the “ThriveCart review” keyword for several months now, making several hundred a month on autopilot.
The same type of thing is happening on Medium. For example, if you type in “T-Mobile home internet,” a query with over 370,000 monthly searches, the number two rank is a Medium post with an affiliate link for another mobile service. Medium and LinkedIn aren’t as spammy, but they still represent an opportunity for affiliates to break into keywords that otherwise need a high-authority website to rank for.
Future of Parasite SEO
Is this going to last forever? Certainly not. With how easy it is to generate spam content and make parasite posts, the problem will likely escalate to a point where Google has no choice but to act. This almost feels like a throwback to the pre-Panda update days when platforms like Blogspot and Squidoo could easily rank. Google patched the loophole, and they’ll likely do the same here too. John Mueller has hinted at a high-quality content update in the next core update, so these parasite SEO results might be replaced by more conventional websites. Maybe they’ll finally allow small websites to rank again.
But here’s the kicker: Google said that they’ll address this parasite SEO issue over six weeks ago. What’s the hold-up? Our next story will dive deeper into Google’s delays on dealing with parasite SEO, but first, a quick word from today’s sponsor, Search Intelligence. They recently ran a digital PR campaign that earned their client links in top news sites like The Mirror, Express, and Yahoo News. By analyzing Google search data for terms like “fraud number” and “fraud helpline,” they identified the top five UK banks where customers are suffering from fraud. They crafted a compelling press release, and within days, their story was featured in many major publications, landing 16 high-quality links. So if you’re looking to boost your link building with a creative digital PR campaign, head on over to search-intelligence.co.uk.
Google’s Site Reputation Abuse Update
On May 5th of this year, Google launched a site reputation abuse update aimed at combating parasite SEO. It started off with a bang. As we mentioned in a previous video, manual penalties struck major news sites with third-party coupon directories, causing giants like USA Today, Business Insider, and even CNN to lose millions of page views overnight. But it’s been over six weeks since these manual actions, and we’ve heard nothing but crickets, despite large sites still very much using their domain reputation to rank for almost everything.
On May 23rd, Google search liaison Danny Sullivan said a broader algorithmic approach was on the way and would likely be very clear when that goes live. Well, we’re still waiting, and Google search results are getting spammy by the day. In fact, parasite SEO continues to thrive on some sites that received manual penalties for their coupon directories. USA Today features a significant amount of finance content from a third-party company called Blueprint. The content attracts nearly a million monthly page views, and USA Today makes it clear that this is parasite SEO. They explicitly state that Blueprint is the one earning the affiliate commissions. With such high traffic to their finance content, losing their coupon directory was only a drop in the ocean for USA Today. And while there’s been a slight dip in traffic, Sullivan clarified that any decreases in traffic up to now were not due to a site reputation abuse update.
For this week’s debate, we want to know what you think. Do you think Google’s currently penalizing sites that are following previous SEO best practices, or are Cyrus Shepard’s findings just anecdotal to you? Let us know in the comments below. And if you liked this post, you’ll also like our other post on Instagram SEO: A Comprehensive Guide to Boost Your Visibility.
