Reddit dominates affiliate search results, appearing in 67% of first-page rankings, but traditional media like Forbes and Wirecutter secure the top spots. Forbes publishes thousands of affiliate pieces monthly and updates 90+ per month, a strategy that works better for rankings than Reddit's forum format.
All right, so we're going to talk about the websites that dominate when it comes to affiliate ranking. So this is an interesting post by ViperChill, who has some good SEO stuff that he shares on his Twitter. So you can follow him @ViperChill. So here's what he said. Those of you that can't see the screen, I'll read it to you. So last week, for the 4th time this year, I analyzed 10,000 search results where product review affiliates dominate rankings. So Neil, do you first want to explain what product review affiliates are?
So product review affiliates are like those sites that have articles like the 10 best toaster ovens, and then they end up just breaking down every little thing. They'll end up analyzing it, giving star ratings, reviews, and they go super in-depth to the toaster ovens and they have affiliate link to each one and they make some money.
Yeah, so one would be like Wirecutter, for example. They sold to the New York Times. So Wirecutter does like, hey, here's the best blanket you can buy. And then here's the second best blanket and they'll collect an affiliate commission off of it. And these do pretty well. And so Reddit is actually the most popular product review domain on the English-speaking internet and it's not even close. So he says they rank in the first 10 results for, let's just call it 6,700 search terms or 67% of them. To put in that perspective, that's almost double the number of rankings as second place, which is New York Times. ranking in 3,700 search results and the most dominant we've seen by far. So that's interesting to me because I would have never expected Reddit. You would expect something else like Forbes maybe to do better than that. So that's interesting. This is like after maybe a recent update.
Yep. I didn't know that Reddit was that big when it came to affiliate reviews. I don't even know how—
Dude, check this out, check this out. Look, Quora also saw a massive jump and went from 682nd most popular domain In July to 10th most popular in October. But go ahead.
I didn't know that Reddit even has affiliate links.
I didn't know that either. I'm kind of— I'm like, do they really have affiliate links? I'm not sure about that. That's worth checking.
Or it could just be that they're ranking and they're not really monetizing.
I don't— so, okay. We should read this point over here. So out of the 6,700 search results, they were on the first page of Reddit, only picked up 17 number 1 rankings. So they're not ranking number 1. For context, New York Times picked up 955, Forbes 355, Good Housekeeping 361. So these sites are more optimized for affiliate.
Yeah. I can see New York Times and Forbes, especially Forbes and Good Housekeeping as well. Yep.
So Forbes appeared in more search results than we've ever recorded and picked up 29% more first-place rankings. So Amazon more than doubled, blah, blah, blah. I'm not going to read everything here, but one thing that's worth calling out is that Forbes is basically an affiliate site. They drive a good amount of revenue. I think they do a couple hundred million a year, maybe $200 or $300 million a year. And most people don't know this, but the— I wouldn't say the majority, but a huge chunk of the new content that they produce each month, and they produce, I believe, thousands of pieces a month, maybe a third to 50% are content updates. And what they're focusing on is updating their pages that drive revenue. So it's very affiliate-focused. I remember listening to Authority Hacker. They did a good interview with one of the SEOs that worked at Forbes, and he basically unveiled the inner workings and the behind the scenes. Really recommend listening to that if you really want to learn how this affiliate stuff works. And if you're in the affiliate world, that's worth looking at.
Yeah, no. And if you go pull up Forbes on Ahrefs, it'll show you how much content they're producing that's new on a monthly basis. And you can even see how many updates they're doing. They're spending the majority of their time updating content versus creating new content. That's where the money is. Like once you have a blog and it's established, you know, whether you're affiliate or you're just having a blog so that way you can build up your personal brand or generate more sales for your business, what you'll find is once you have enough pieces of content, there's a higher ROI updating your content versus writing new pieces of content. Eric and I did a podcast about this a little bit ago. I was writing at one point, my team and I, 10 blog posts a day, and now we only write 1 blog post a week. So to give you an idea, we went from 70 a week to 1 new blog post a week, but we spend way more time updating our old articles, which helps us generate way more traffic.
So is it now 70 updates a week from your side?
I don't know the exact number of updates that we did in the last month, but I do know that we try to do roughly 90+ updates a month. Now, sometimes we get to 200 updates or 250 or 300, But I know our minimum number of updates that the team has hit no matter what is at least 90 updates a month.
Yeah, so that's a lot. And all of you, if you have Ahrefs, you can just go to Content Explorer and it'll show you the volume each site's producing and also the number of net new versus republished, which is basically an update. So that's that. I do think it's worth looking at Conde Nast as well, which is they do like travel affiliate. And then again, take a look at Forbes, take a look at what New York Times is doing, take a look at Wirecutter as well, which is now owned by New York Times. And then you can also take a look at Reddit to figure out, okay, why is it that they're ranking so well? But they're not capturing number 1 and number 1 positions. And my thesis, my hypothesis here would actually be, not thesis, would be that Reddit is constantly getting updated. Those pages, right? Because it's like a forum, people are constantly adding more comments, there's more UGC, so they're getting updated. But they're not exactly formatted the best to capture a top 3 ranking. And so, If I were working in SEO at Reddit, that's something I would think about emulating.
And if you— and if they haven't, I would add in affiliate links and make some extra income.
Yep, exactly. So that is it for today. Hope you enjoyed this one and don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow.
