Jonny Scott

Respect to the German language affiliate website ranking first for many big 'casino' queries in Australia with an 8k word article on a website that has only been live for a couple of months. Somewhat supported by a little help from journalists who are happy to publish any survey data with zero fact-checking.

Site abuse: Google has confirmed it has taken manual actions. I took 2,500 of the most popular search queries for discount and voucher codes from the UK and Australian markets. The data was sourced from @semrush. Using these queries, I created a ‘Share of Search’ report for each market. From the data, I reviewed each website to determine which company was supplying the 'codes' to obtain an overall market view of publishers and their visibility within Google. Below are the top 10 overall publishers of 'codes' for the UK and Australia. Given the small sample size of queries, it suggests that two publishers nearly dominate 50% of the market. I removed a couple of brands that were sensibly driving traffic to dedicated landing pages on their sites, such as The Iconic. This data could change significantly over the next week, given how search query positions have been changing in the last few hours as Google rolls out the 'site reputation abuse.' Early indications suggest that Google is not messing about.