The Impact of Google’s Helpful Content Update on Affiliate WebsitesWant to take control of your prompts and get more out of AI tools? Take the online course on December 19
“Where do you get your product advice?” I asked one of the most famous and successful affiliate marketers in the world. He chuckled and said, “Um, I don’t know. I’ll ask a friend or something.”
I think this answer is the crux of the problem in the affiliate industry. And it also explains Google’s desperate attempts to wipe out affiliate websites and niche sites in general.
Google has proven surprisingly effective at this since their Helpful Content Update (HCU).
image rest in peace google affiliate websites
Image source: Start24 research
The impact of HCU on Dutch affiliate websites
This research shows what the effects of the HCU (and subsequent Google updates) were on the Dutch affiliate industry. These effects were not mild. To quote a few findings from the article:
Dutch websites that rely primarily on an affiliate marketing model are estimated to have lost 37.65% of their monthly traffic.
In contrast, the impact was much greater on expert review websites, which lost 53.59% of their traffic.
38% of these expert review websites saw a traffic drop of more than 70%.
The turnover losses of these websites are between thousands and tens of thousands of euros per month.
Established affiliate websites within niches such malta email list 149912 contact leads as telecom & internet, energy and insurance have seen virtually no traffic decline.
These findings apply specifically to ‘expert review’ websites:
The 102 expert review websites studied lost a total of 53.59% of their traffic
39 of these websites saw a traffic drop of more than 75%.
20 websites saw a traffic drop of more than 90%.
Consumer products websites were hit the hardest analyze your data quickly & easily with chatgpt’s ‘data analysis’ with a 69.42% drop in traffic.
The software (-13.2%), money (-3.24%) and travel (-5.08%) niches saw a significantly smaller decline.
28 out of 102 expert review websites actually test agb directory products (27.45%).
Within the consumer products niche, products were tested by only 12 of the 71 websites (16.9%).
overview of findings research affiliate websites
I know quite a few online entrepreneurs who want to completely step away from the affiliate marketing business model. Including a few who can be labeled as very successful.
I myself have been active in the affiliate marketing industry for