After Google algorithm update: Implement commerce content offers Guideline-compliant

Gerhard Trautmann, Managing Director Global Savings Group.

Commerce-content partnerships help to continue financing high-quality journalistic offerings in the digital age. At the end of August, numerous commerce content offers from media companies worldwide, such as coupon and product comparison offers, recorded a decline in visibility in Google's search results, in some cases significantly.

The Google algorithm update, whose roll-out was observed from 22.8.- 6.9.2019, correlated in time with a message of the search engine company distributed via Twitter. In it, Google clarified that content collaborations are basically covered by their guidelines and thus allowed. "That includes commerce content offers," says Gerhard Trautmann, managing director of the Global Savings Group. "But it's important to Google that when implementing these collaborations, the partners work closely together and the media companies monitor the published content."

Google does not punish commerce-content partnership model

After the update that has now been rolled out and the changes that can be observed, it is clear that Google is not punishing the commerce-content partnership model as such. Rather, the search engine giant specified its guidelines in this area and has adjusted the algorithm to better recognize their implementation. This creates a plus in clarity. Market participants who rely on a partnership model now understand better where they stand: Google expects media houses and commerce experts - even more than before - to enter into genuine collaborations that are coherent in terms of content and committed to creating independent, high-quality content.

Partnerships that implement these specifications very well have in part gained visibility in the August update, while others have lost it, sometimes significantly. This is true at least for the established partnerships that have been around for a while. "However, we also noticed during the analysis that some very young partnerships have lost visibility, even though they work according to the described quality approach. We assume that these will develop positively again over time," explains Trautmann.

Five learnings from the update

What does this mean in concrete terms for commerce content models? And what lessons can be learned from the analysis of traffic changes in recent weeks?

• Cooperation is what counts: Commerce content offerings located on subdomains or subfolders of media partners should not operate outside the control of the news portals. The editorial teams or commerce content teams should be involved in the commerce content offerings at all times and have final responsibility for their publication.
• It is advantageous if the media partners are directly involved in the creation of the content. In fact, Google is now taking pains to determine whether content has been created completely independently of the actual domain host, i.e. the media house. The search giant wants to be able to recognize at any time that the content of a commerce content offer was created in close cooperation between all parties involved. Close collaboration, interlocking, and an exchange of activities and content created within partnerships and the shopping-relevant content published elsewhere by a media house will become increasingly important. 
• The decision of a media company to cooperate with a commerce content partner should always be of a strategic nature, and all decision-makers should be behind it. All parties involved must clearly commit to producing high-quality and shopping-relevant content and distributing it transparently via their own portals. The content should represent added value for the media brand's readership and should therefore also be appropriately linked and linkable to other content.
• For each partnership, there should be a recognizable connection between the purpose of the commerce content offering, its content, the target audience, and the content of the main page.
• An absolute no-go is and remains domain leasing. In contrast to real commerce-content partnerships, some domain owners also pursue the strategy of leasing their well-ranking subpages. In this case, the tenant populates the pages with content that has nothing in common with the domain owner or his other offerings. The domain owner himself does not actively participate in the creation of the commerce content offer. The point of this variant is not to expand an offer with complementary content, but merely to benefit from the good search engine ranking of the main domain.

"Our experience shows us that the points are best implemented with mixed or closely meshed teams of both partners working together on content production and distribution," says Gerhard Trautmann. "Basically, the better the commerce content offers are adapted to the target group of the main site and their needs, the more successful they will be."