4 ms·
Loooong-time digital & affiliate marketer here. Interestingly, I'd say the #1 culprit here is time...and the second is probably content thinness. Each page is
by kposehn 8y ago
Loooong-time digital & affiliate marketer here. Interestingly, I'd say the #1 culprit here is time...and the second is probably content thinness.
Each page is certainly useful, but doesn't really show much information that google _believes_ is useful to a user.
Example: https://www.goodcheapandfast.com/articles/best-cordless-vacuums https://www.goodcheapandfast.com/articles/best-cordless-vacu...
The page itself is quite useful to someone searching for the right cordless vacuum, but google's algorithm is looking for signs of quality that would assist it in better understanding the potential value.
Examples here include:
1. Structured data in the page such as a standard price / discount price / features / avg rating table
2. A longer description of the product with more information, such as features
3. Shorter backlink anchor text to Amazon that have less data crammed in them (try and separate out the features from the actual product name here)
4. Crosslinking: you have reams of content that is related, so cross link it! You're making it hard for google to discover relevant content paths. Cordless Vacuums -> Robot Vacuums -> Dyson Vacuums -> Dyson Vacuum Accessories, is one example. The content journey one can take is pretty much Home -> Search -> Article -> Amazon, much too short.
5. Everything is stacked under tld/articles/article-name and you have very little variation, making it harder for users to easily see this sort of indexing. Interestingly, category pages, landers with aggregation of multiple areas of content, etc. can help because you assist in discoverability for the user. Keep your canonical tags sorted, no-index variants of category pages so you don't end up with reams of pages indexed, and you should see better potential user journeys.
This is just off the cuff and YMMV, but is my first take. Hit me on LinkedIn if you want to chat.
- seanwilson 8y agoDon't spammy affiliate sites do all these relatively easy to automate things already? Presumably they don't have decent backlinks though.
- kposehn 8y agoSort of - spammy sites can create a lot of formulaic structured content. It is fairly easy to see that though as they tend to have lots of auto generated content, duplicate content, thin pages with lots of links, etc.
- seanwilson 8y agoI'm not seeing how Google is going to tell the difference based on that. It's not hard to auto generate content that has fewer links, doesn't have duplicate content etc. The website the OP is about looks formulaic as well. Not trying to knock the effort put in to it but my immediate reaction to the site was it looks like a spam affiliate website.
- midef 8y agoThanks for the encouragement and double thanks for emphasizing the word "believes." I work hard to make the content as short as possible while still being useful, but it's true that Google may not be able to see the value in that (at least, without a lot of user feedback signals).