DR90+ Sites Deleting Product Reviews

Barry

Barry

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I just read that britannica.com - DR91 - deleted all of their product review pages.

I then checked merriam-webster.com - DR91 - and noticed that they have also deleted all of their product reviews.

Both of their subfolders - britannica.com/reviews/ and merriam-webster.com/reviews/ have been completely removed.

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They had lots of "best" affiliate pages ranking #1.

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Why would both of these sites simultaneously remove all of their top ranking affiliate pages, killing a lucrative revenue stream?
 
It wasn’t performing well?

i had a DA 60 travel domain and we tested writing travel review articles. So we wrote 40 or 80 review articles at 2,000 words. They didn’t do well since only that article was about the product. You need a whole silo filled with many pages about the topic to rank. Not just one.

no idea what the teams at those two companies decided however. I also wouldn’t panic if I were you. They don’t know anything more about Google than you. Just stick to your investment thesis.
 
Barry said:
Why would both of these sites simultaneously remove all of their top ranking affiliate pages, killing a lucrative revenue stream?
Click to expand...
It's hard to definitively call it spam, but it was spam. It was off-topic, bottom-of-the-funnel, zero-value-added content designed specifically to rank on Google and not for the customer. It had nothing to do with the topic of their domain, which they used only to parasite off of the very nice backlink profiles.

There was a point after WireCutter popped off that every newspaper and magazine did this. Some are still doing variations of it. I saw BusinessInsider publish some article about something as dumb as "How to progress further on random mobile game" the other day (yes, I looked it up, it's a good game!)

I think they see the window of opportunity not only closing but slamming shut so hard it breaks the glass and damages not only that wall but causes structural damage to the foundation of the house. Meaning if they kept it up, the Product Reviews system could tag them and hurt even the main portion of their site.

They probably already saw some indication of that happening. But what's certain is they can't spruce up all of those pages to make them match what the Product Reviews system is demanding of them. I don't see Merriam Webster going out and buying Sea Monkeys, Fidget Spinners, and Dyson vacuums for pet hair and doing actual original content with it all.

I'd say, to sum it up, the ship sailed and the harbor was likely to spread disease to the rest of the town, so they sank the entire thing into the ocean.
 
Barry said:
Why would both of these sites simultaneously remove all of their top ranking affiliate pages, killing a lucrative revenue stream?
Click to expand...
They're not two separate companies, so the simultaneous action is easy to explain.
Britannica owns Merriam-Webster.
This was really just one parent company pivoting across multiple domains.
 
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