Affiliate SERP Analysis from Glen Allsopp
https://detailed.comGlen Allsopp has put together a nice little analysis of Affiliate SERP landscape to answer your questions like Are ‘general’ sites like Business Insider taking over, or do single-niche affiliate sites still rank well? They looked at the search results for 1,000 affiliate-populated keyphrases to see if general sites have truly taken over, or whether hyperniche sites still perform well.
Here are a few snapshots of what he shared, I suggest going through the entire post when you get some time:
How many times each type of site was present in the first 10 results of an affiliate-populated SERP.
Based on the numbers, it’s clear that:
- A niche site-type was present in almost every single search result we looked at
- Hyperniche sites were present in almost the exact same number of SERPs as general review sites
- A news site was present in the first page of search results for almost half of our 1,000 keyphrases
What type of site was present in the first organic result of an affiliate-populated SERP.
Compared to general review sites, hyperniche sites secured 33% more first place rankings, despite being present in six fewer search results.
How often were Amazon affiliate content on these sites?
How old were these sites?
Out of the 2,197 individual websites, at least 309 of them were less than three years old.
What was their backlink profile like?
How many were .COM site?
Miscellaneous URL Elements: Underscores, Subdomains and More
Other Interesting bits:
They were surprised to see how many of the top ranking pages in their study no longer exist.
175 of the URLs from now redirect to another page. In most cases, a change was simply made to the year in the URL. So sitename.com/best-leather-wallet-2019 became sitename.com/best-leather-wallet-2020.
tl;dr (with caveats):
news and general review sites, they are performing very well across the board, but having some kind of niche element to your website certainly seems like a smart approach that’s being rewarded.
