Forbes, CNN & WSJ Affiliate Pages Collapse As Google Rolls Out Site Reputation Abuse Update

You might have thought the reckoning for affiliate sites in search results was easing as the year winds down. That it would all settle in time for Black Friday, in time for the holidays. Well, Google had other plans.

The past few days have been some of the most dramatic this year, which says a lot after the past 12 chaotic months.

Affiliate territory in Google results has been in a state of upheaval since the search engine launched its site reputation abuse policy back in May. The fallout, aptly named ‘vouchergeddon’, brought mass disruption to the coupon space – as several former SEO titans saw their traffic completely crash.

Some of these pages have disappeared from the web entirely. The URLs for the coupon pages on the Daily Express, The Mirror, Reuters, USA Today, Washington Post, Forbes, and others now lead to either 404 errors or redirects to the sites’ homepages. 

Others have kept their coupon pages up, but they are not materialising in search results, or at least nowhere near the first page. These include: The Telegraph, Wired, Daily Mail, and GQ. 

The decision sparked mixed reactions. Some critics agreed with Google, saying that these sites were perpetrating ‘parasite-SEO’ tactics to promote poor-quality content and defective codes at the top of search results.