Google has confirmed it has taken manual actions, says Carl Hendy.
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.
In the screenshot 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.
Early indications suggest that Google is not messing about.
Gone:
🇬🇧 DailyMail (Global Savings Group) subdomain
🇬🇧 Metro (Global Savings Group) subdomain.
🇬🇧 Mirror (Reach PLC & Widilo) subdomain.
🇬🇧 The Express (Reach PLC & Widilo) subdomain.
🇦🇺 Nine Coupon Codes (Global Savings Group) subdomain
🇦🇺 7 News Coupon Codes (The Savings Group Limited) subdomain
🇺🇸 USA Today Coupon Codes (TSG Commerce) subdomain
🇮🇪 Irish Times Discount Codes (The Savings Group Limited) subdomain
🏴 The Scotsman Discount Codes (The Savings Group Limited)
🇺🇸 The Business Insider Coupon Codes (Global Savings Group Limited) subdomain.
🇺🇸 CNN Coupon Codes (Global Savings Group) subdomain.
🇬🇧 Telegraph Betting (Betting Expert aka Better Collective) subfolder.
🇺🇸 Reuters (Upfeat) subfolder.
🇬🇧 NME discount code folder removed within the last week.
Going:
🇬🇧 The Sun discount code (Webgears Group) subdomain.
🇦🇺 News AU coupon codes (The Savings Group Limited) subfolder. A little slower than others, possibly algorithmic.
🇬🇧 Independant Betting (Gambling.com) subfolder.
Since March I’ve been monitoring 2,500 coupon-focused terms to see what Google changes with their Site Reputation Abuse update, says Glen Allsopp.
The manual actions started, and here are some early insights.
I’ve been tracking a lot of non-coupon third-party content that I was going to display that hasn’t been “hit” but that feels like outing them e.g. APNews with their third-party content from Taboola.
There’s still a lot of examples out there that don’t appear to have been impacted yet, if they will be at all.
It’s not an exhaustive list.
P.S. Pretty funny to see on WIRED.com/coupons they have text referring to themselves as The Washington Post (they both have the same coupons provider).
