Stock Photos Will Be The Death Of Your Affiliate Site

A common theme that I see creators do when building their new content websites is use stock photos that they do not own, to explain topics that they are producing content on and apparently have an authority on.

This is an easy mistake to make, and one the industry doesn't deem as a "mistake" at times, especially if its an informational post of some kind, but I believe that it's becoming a very important indicator for Google and other search engines that your content is not "helpful".

Google has continuously said to its publishers that you should be making "helpful content" and that's a big indicator to help with your search rankings, even if Google typically go against their own guidelines when it comes to the results shown... especially this year.

However, I do believe they will get better at this, and I believe that it's in publishing creators best interest to stop using stock photos.

I had a conversation with Google's Search Liason, Danny Sullivan when I was invited into their London Headquarters to discuss why we had been affected and what areas of their search engine needs working on from a creators perspective.

He asked how I think they could solve the issue of websites ranking for product reviews and best lists where they do not actually test the products, a long seen issue that their search engine is facing.

You can still see it to this day. Big brands and media goliaths are using their domain authority to write about products and reccomend products that they have never tested. We still get outranked by this and these large websites simply use stock photos and gibberish text to outrank real creators who are testing real products.

I mentioned to Danny that I believe an easy to detect this is to see if they are using 100% unique images that they have taken themselves. It's an easy thing to detect and integrate into their algorithms.

This would immediately show which brands are using never seen before images that they have taken themselves, compared to publishers using stock images or straight up stealing images from other publishers.

If these websites use stock images, see that as "unhelpful". If you see publishing creators using their own images, with proof that the products have been tested, see that as "helpful".

It's a simple metric, and I can't believe they aren't really doing this in 2024. They maybe doing it to a certain extent, but the negative ranking signal needs to be much stronger to remove this rubbish from the search results.

And this is why I believe stock photos will be a thing of the past in future updates and to keep your content ranking as well as you can I recommend never using stock photos for reviews, best lists and as much content as you can.

It's going to become a simple indicator to show the difference between being a real authority who has the products in-house or a fake authority who simply writes about the topic.

News is a little different and I believe stock photos are still fine here, as long as your content is marked up as "news".