Ahrefs’ Digest #207: Affiliate marketing statistics, parasite SEO, and more

Welcome to a new edition of the Ahrefs’ Digest.

Here’s our meme of the week:

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Quick search marketing news

• ​Google is removing the sitelinks search box from November 21, 2024.

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Best of the week

The Billion-Dollar World of Parasite SEO: How to Cash In: Follow this playbook to make quick, good money off parasite SEO. I’m joking—this post is satirical.

58 Affiliate Marketing Statistics for 2024: Here are the best affiliate marketing statistics you need to know.

Hi Google, Please Stop Sh*tting The Bed: A Desperate Plea From The Independent Web: Another website has come forward to show how Google has destroyed the web and its search results. (I actually really like this site.)

I Attended Google's Creator Conversation Event, And It Turned Into A Funeral: Google invited some of the most vocal independent site owners who’ve been hit by the Helpful Content update to an event to learn more about how they could improve. Tl;dr: It didn’t go so well (at least for the creators.)

How Ahrefs’ Best Bootstrapped Backlink Builders Got Their Links [Analysis]: Vince Nero of Buzzstream built on Ryan’s work on the best bootstrapped link builders and did a deep dive into their strategies. Tl;dr: Promotion (this includes link exchange, purchased links, and organic mentions.) was the most common way sites gained links over the past year. Ironically, promotion also stands out as the most penalized strategy, with 12 sites. 

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Latest from our podcast

This week’s podcast guest is Zac Harris, former Head of Demand Gen and SEO at Copy.ai and founder of Rankd.

• How Copy.ai grew search traffic to 1M clicks/month

• Does "mass content pruning" work?

• How Zac handles marketing attribution (especially for re-activations and expansions)

• The impact of influencer marketing on brand visibility

• How sales calls can be a gold mine for AI content

Listen to the full episode on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.

See you next week,
Si Quan

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