How Someone Bought a Politician’s Website to Build an Affiliate Website – Over 114.6K Organic Search Traffic / Month

Domain reselling is a widely used technique by the SEO community to benefit from the historical results of a domain and rank faster than starting from scratch, there are various services that offer a list of these domains. This case study involves a politician’s website and how an affiliate site was built on top of it and made a killing in organic traffic and thus probably also make a killing in affiliate commissions.

One of the candidates in 2017 French Election was Marine Le Pen, her campaign team used the website https://marine2017.fr/ as expected it got a bunch of backlinks. After the election, these websites are usually abandoned because they don’t have a purpose anymore. In this situation, it is especially the case since the year is included in the domain, making it useless for any use after the 2017 election has taken place. Fast fwd a bit someone gets the domain throws in a product comparison website with affiliate links in them with a lot of review content, that was actually good and matched with the user intent.

The new website managed to rank on keywords like “meat grinder” in a matter of weeks. The targeted keywords all have the same characteristics: huge search volume, clear purchase intent and related products with medium to high purchase value. They maintained strong growth in 2018.

Then in 2019, the website almost disappeared during several weeks from Google. The owner tried to move the content from the current domain marine2017 to a new Consolab branded one. The results were not as good as expected, hence the decision was taken to reverse the change, even if the brand is still “Consolab” as you can see on the website right now.

But why were the results were so bad assuming the migration was implemented correctly? (Pro Tip: Canonical can be your friend ?)  Probably Google didn’t like the fact that so many backlinks were linked to the word “Marine”, something that didn’t appear neither in the content nor the domain name. It’s only a guess, but the fact is that the migration was reversed quickly because the new domain didn’t work, and almost immediately marine2017.fr retrieved its previous position.

This is only a quick tl;dr of the original post, go check that out for everything in its full glory with screenshots.