On Sunday, May 5th, Google fully rolled out the new feature. spam updatealso known as the “Site Reputation Abuse Policy.”
Since its announcement in March, its eerie presence has been looming over affiliate marketing.
In its initial press release, Google added news sites that “host coupons provided by third parties” to its list of what is considered spam. This set off alarm bells across the voucher code space. However, the same press release assures us that “if a publication is actively involved in the production of a coupon area, there is no need to block this content from Google Search.”
We spoke to Global Savings Group and Savings United As of this release. Both companies remain confident in the face of this new policy and maintain the legitimacy of their businesses and close partnerships or active engagement with brands and publications, so they should pass through unscathed. He claimed that.
Generally, this was the expectation for May 5th. Publications with lazy and unmanaged coupon directories will be indexed, but legitimate players will continue as usual.
That didn't happen.
Instead, news sites' coupon directories have been almost completely wiped from Google SERPs. SEO consultant carl hendy shared his stuff the study to X and outline the impact on our affiliates in the UK, Ireland, Australia and the US. A number of coupon pages from major publications such as the Daily Mail, Metro and The Mirror, which dominated coupon-related search terms last week, have now disappeared from Google Search.
Some players were still standing. In particular, The Sun showed up in many searches.Hendy reports that The Sun has blocked its 'voucher code' subdomain via robottext This way, we avoided Google's crawlers. But he believes they too will soon disappear.
Glenn Alsopalso shared by the founder of Detailed.com Screenshot of his findingsdisplays publications that were hit or deleted by updates.
This is a bold and disruptive move from Google. It doesn't seem to differentiate much between sites that actively engage with sites that don't, and instead targets the entire industry of news sites that host coupon codes.
First-party issuers of coupon codes, on the other hand, have survived the shakeout and are performing well in the SERPs as a result.
Some commentators have already indicated that this could be considered “anti-competitive”. Google has been in trouble before..If there is a legitimate case here, Google further litigation Submitted by affiliated companies by the end of the year.
The drop in SEO is not limited to this update. Lily Ray, vice president of SEO strategy and research at Amsive, recently revealed that between September 4, 2023 and April 22, 2024, she was the site that experienced the greatest decline in Google SEO visibility. I shared the data with my girlfriend X that shows. Almost all sites are affiliate publishers.
We are in contact with a number of publishers affected by this and hope to hear their views on this situation soon.
