Is Google at war with affiliate marketers?

Head of SEO Branding at Wix and SEO Consultant for Semrush, Mordy Oberstein, joins the podcast today to share his high-level perspective and valuable insights to help you mitigate risk and save your rankings.

In the last 12 months, there have been core updates, review updates, and spam updates. And he believes it's important to look to data for patterns to better understand the SEO ecosystem.

In his roles, he has access to huge swathes of data, and to help site owners succeed, he has a vested interest in unpacking what Google seems to value in the content it rewards.

Here are just a few examples of important recommendations he shares in the interview:

Read the content of competitors who outrank you after an update to understand what replaced you.
Use the brand sniff test to determine if your content is of high quality.
Use internal linking and semantic understanding to build topical authority.
Hire a content marketing agency if needed to help translate your expertise into digestible content because readability is important for user experience.

He also discusses the continuing rise of AI-written content that is largely generic using similar language structures. And how adding real human experiences is key to providing unique insights and quality content.

He even offers a great example people can use in product reviews to accomplish this.

But Mordy says quality is a domain-level analysis, not just at the page level. And so, to improve domain-level quality scores, it is important to focus on technical health, content, and user experience.

Predicting and understanding user needs is crucial.

He believes quality content means targeting the audience and offering the right amount of nuance to predict their needs.

And while links are a secondary signal, they may become less important as Google gets better at understanding content, with relevance and domain quality playing a more significant role in ranking in a scenario where content is generic across the web.

He does believe that leveraging AI can help automate tasks that were not possible before though.

AI can be used for research, understanding topics, organizing information, rewriting content, and automating tasks like writing headers and product descriptions. However, users have become more skeptical of web content due to issues such as data privacy and fake reviews. As a result, the bar for acceptable content has risen, and web content creators need to up their game.

So if you're a site owner or online content creator, you'll definitely want to check out the full interview and take lots of notes!

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"Google is at War with Affiliate Marketers": Mordy Oberstein's Key Insights to Win at SEO