Forums Now Dominate 19% of Affiliate Keywords — Here’s What It Means for You

Summary

It’s no secret that Google has been “punishing” small content sites that don’t have much going on for them outside of content meant to bring in revenue – with no business, store, tool, software, or community behind the website.

At the same time, they seem to be rewarding big publishers and what they consider “real businesses” – or websites that aren’t solely affiliate websites and have more going for them.

What We Did

We gathered a list of 1921 mid-range affiliate keywords.

The selected keywords are random “best” keywords, and cover various topics.

We tried to clean up unrelated keywords that can’t be used for affiliate marketing purposes and remove them from the dataset.

Mid-range, as in, US Volume 1000 to 3000, and Ahrefs Keyword Difficulty under 40.

Our two-step method consisted of:

1. Pulling SERP data for the 1921 affiliate keywords we found
2. Identifying the forum links in the top 10 and top 20 results by looking for common forum URL footprints

This was, of course, mostly done programmatically with a script.

This method is not foolproof, and we likely missed a forum or two, but as far as automated data processing goes, this should do the job.

If you want to look at our full dataset, which contains the keywords, forums we could find, including what they’re ranking for and at which position, and the final math, you can do so here.

The Results

The results were clear and, I must say, expected.

From a total of 1921 scraped keywords, here’s what we found:

Analyzing the Top 10 SERP Results

A total of 361 keywords, or 18.79%, had forums ranking within the top 10 search results, with 89 of these showing more than one forum.

Out of the 361 keywords, only 150 of those were repeating, and 211 were unique domains (filtered by root domain).

So, we have 211 different forums ranking in top 10 for the 361 keywords that have forums ranking in top 10.

Given the variety of the niches and keywords, this isn’t surprising. The logical conclusion here is that Google prefers to rank niche-relevant forums as opposed to broader niche or general forums.

That is, of course, aside from Reddit, which apparently deserves to rank for everything.

Analyzing the Top 20 SERP Results

Extending the filter to the top 20 search results, forums were ranked in the top 20 in 784 out of the 1921 total keywords.

This represents a remarkable 40.81% presence, with 315 of these keywords featuring more than one forum in the top 20.

490 out of the 784 forums in the top 20 results were unique domains (filtered by root domain).

So, there’s a 40% chance of seeing a forum on page 1 or page 2 of the search results for mid-range affiliate keywords, and this number will likely only go up.

Conclusion

The implications here are quite straightforward.

First, forums secure a significant share in the search results for mid-range affiliate keywords.

Second, it’s not uncommon for multiple forums to appear for the same keyword, further solidifying their importance.

And third, Google seems to prefer niche-relevant forums. Again, along with Reddit.

In conclusion, overlooking forums could mean ignoring a substantial portion of potential affiliate marketing and revenue opportunities.

Launching a forum and growing it could lead to substantial growth in both the user base and revenue.

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