2024.04.26|Julia Logan | ZANGOOSE.DIGITAL
BrightonSEO talk by Julia Logan:
Sponsored posts, parasite SEO, helpful content and what to make out of it all
If you have heard my BrightonSEO talk, you will know that it was only 20 mins long so there was little chance to squeeze in all the information about the topic into it, given how long I have been interested in this phenomenon and all the content I have produced about it so far, hence I'd like to give you a bit more context here.
The slide deck itself can be viewed at https://speakerdeck.com/zangoosed/sponsored-parasite-helpful-brightonseo/.
Some interesting points to keep in mind to grasp the entirety of the picture:
When the influx of non-gambling media sites to the gambling SERPs has initially started, apart from the mainstream media sites / large newspaper sites I have spoken about in my talk, there was a different kind of sites present as well. Two very curious representatives of this second kind would be NewsDirect and Business2Community.
I have written an entire article examining the case of NewsDirect, you can read it here:
As of now, this is the current status of NewsDirect in Google SERPs:
I have also provided some commentary for an article about Business2Community:
Here is what's going on with Business2Community now:
Furthermore, last year I have written an article covering the entire phenomenon of mainstream media sites in the gambling SERPs:
After August 2023 Core update we have produced a detailed report about its impact on different kinds of non-gambling sites publishing sponsored content - the report can be accessed here: https://zangoose.digital/docs/August-Core-Update-Zangoose-Digital.pdf
One other interesting player that was featured prominently is Outlook India - here is what's happening to it now:
As of the time of this writing the Google Core update which started on March 5, 2024 is not yet complete - if things change drastically after its completion in this space I will update this post to reflect that.
UPDATE: As Google announced on the night after my talk, the Core update has actually been completed on April 19, so what we have seen above already reflects the post-Core update status quo.
Google's changes to their spam policies concerning the site reputation abuse were supposed to come into force on May 5. Nothing happened on May 5, whereas on May 6 some manual penalties have been handed out.
In this Twitter thread, I discuss the pre-penalty state of things on May 5 vs changes that can be seen on May 7.