One SEO professional asked John Mueller in a hangout about content ratios.
Their question was: does the portion of content that is created by a publisher matter?
They mean – in the sense of affiliate or even sponsored content.
They were curious whether – if 40 percent of your content was affiliate content, will Google consider your site a deals website? And if so, would your authority be dinged a little bit?
John explained that he doesn’t believe they have any threshold like that.
Partly, because it’s very difficult to determine such a threshold. You can’t just take the number of pages and say “this is a type of website because it has 50 percent of their pages like that.”
Because the pages can all be visible in very different ways. Sometimes you have a lot of pages that nobody sees.
It wouldn’t make sense to judge a website based on something that essentially doesn’t get shown to users.
This happens at approximately the 53:27 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
SEO Professional 9 53:24
Is that better? Yes. Perfect. Sorry about that, I have two questions that I hope won’t take too much time. So does the portion of content created by a publisher matter? And I mean that in the sense of affiliate, or maybe even sponsored content. Um the context is: there’s a Digi day newsletter that went out today that mentioned that publishers were concerned that if you have, let’s say, 40% of your traffic or content, as commerce or affiliate, your website will become or considered by Google a deals website, and then your authority may be dinged a little bit. Is there such a thing that’s happening in the ranking systems algorithmically?
John 54:05
I don’t think we would have any threshold like that. Partially, because it’s really hard to determine a threshold like that. You can’t, for example, just take the number of pages and say, this is this type of website because it has 50 percent of its pages like that. Because the pages can be visible in very different ways. So sometimes you have a lot of pages that nobody sees. And it wouldn’t make sense to judge a website based on something that essentially doesn’t get shown to users.
