In August, every link in Google’s search results changed address. The links now pass through a redirect on google.com before they reach the website. A normal visitor notices nothing.
The tools affiliates use to track rankings noticed everything. Reading five pages of results now takes between 500 and 1,000 requests, where one used to be enough. Several big SEO tools went down or ran days behind, and some of the ranking jumps people worried about in August came from the measuring tools, with no real movement behind them. 👻
It’s the classic haunted house moment. You come downstairs in the morning, and somebody has moved the furniture.
Every rented house does this
Search, social feeds, ad platforms, and app stores are great places to find an audience. They also belong to someone else, and the owner can rearrange the rooms whenever they like.
Media buyers know their own version: a policy update, a new review step, an account paused while someone takes a look. Nobody needs to take it personally. It comes with the rent.
Build one room you own
The fix is small and old-fashioned: keep part of your audience somewhere you control. A newsletter, a Telegram channel or a small community stays where you put it when a platform moves the furniture.
It also helps at deal time. Plenty of affiliate deals still lean on ranking screenshots. When rankings get more expensive to check, they get harder for the partner across the table to trust as well. Your own subscribers and your own first-time conversions are numbers that stay put.
Two things to try this week
- Put a date on every number you report. Six-day-old rankings and yesterday’s clicks tell very different stories, and a dashboard that mixes them is full of ghosts. One large affiliate group now shows the age of every block in its dashboards for exactly this reason.
- Give your best page or channel a front door. Take the one that brings you the most first-time conversions and add a single clear way to follow you, such as a newsletter signup or a channel link. Start there and let it grow.
Happy Halloween from Strong Affiliates. And if you’re counting first-time conversions this month, every 100 of them earns you a ticket in our monthly draw. Consider it the treat. 🎃