Comment by jacurtis
9 months ago
The reply post to that one [1] is a perfect example of what I see everyday on Google. You search for "Best Men's Wallet" and the top examples are from 1) Forbes, 2) BusinessInsider, 3) New York Times.
These sites are huge content sites, getting lots of backlinks. Therefore, as mentioned in the tweet, they can basically create any content they want and Google will reward them. In this case, they are just grabbing affiliate links from wallet companies and ranking them based on top affiliate conversion/payout rates. Which is why you see all the sites have the same recommendations but you buy it and realize they are garbage. They are just cashing in some free internet coins by leveraging their SEO trust status. As a result, the rest of us looking for useful content in this search category can't find anything because of low-quality affiliate content by sites that honestly have no business writing about this stuff.
[1] - https://twitter.com/SeanDoesLife/status/1716988691556798629
Just for funsies I'd like to see what would happen if google downranked sites with affiliate links.
I know many small honest sites (and some big ones) do depend on affiliate links for their actual quality reviews, so probably would be unfair to implement it permanently, but man I would like to see what the results looked like without money involved.
I'm more interested in them downranking sites obviously written to game SEO. Like when an article takes 5 paragraphs to answer the one line asked in the H1, or regurgitates the same content as written in 10 other SEO spam articles, just reworded.
I kind of wish the internet was just a lot more terse.