Live SEO Audit: Gear Hungry
Video Lesson
Overview
Gear Hungry was once making 6 figures per month and bringing in nearly 2 million visitors per month. After the December 2020 update, it got decimated. This audit breaks down what went wrong.
Key Stats
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Peak Traffic | ~2M visitors/month |
| Peak Revenue | 6 figures/month |
| Sale Price | Low 8 figures |
| Domain Rating | 70 |
| Indexed Pages | 5,260 |
Main Issues Identified
1. Over-Monetization
75%+ of pages were affiliate/monetized content
• Review pages with "best" or "review" in title
• Pages with outbound affiliate links
• Too few informational articles2. Too Broad / No Topical Focus
- Categories: Gear, Grooming, Health, Home, Outdoors
- Competing against Forbes-level authority sites
- No clear topical authority in any single niche
3. Technical SEO Problems
- Missing meta descriptions on category pages
- Lots of orphaned pages (no internal links)
- Pages linking to broken 404 pages
- Slow load times
4. Content Issues
- Introduction paragraphs too fluffy
- Over-optimized keyword density
- Template-based content across all articles
- Content length not matching SERP expectations
What Matt Recommends
Recovery Strategy
- Stop building affiliate content - Focus on informational content only
- Clean up technical issues - Fix orphaned pages, broken links, meta descriptions
- Improve interlinking - Link relevant pages together, not random connections
- Audit with Surfer - Fix over-optimization on key pages
Internal Linking Issues
The audit revealed problematic interlinking patterns:
| Source Page | Target Page | Problem |
|---|---|---|
| Best Alarm Clocks | Coffee Makers | Not relevant |
| Best Straight Razors | Coffee Makers | Stretch relevance |
| Best Coffee Beans | Coffee Makers | Correct |
Key Learning
Only interlink pages that share topical relevance. A coffee page shouldn't link to a razor page just because both mention "mornings."
Tools Used in This Audit
- Ahrefs Site Audit - Technical SEO issues
- Ahrefs Site Explorer - Backlink analysis
- Surfer SEO - On-page optimization
- InLinks - Entity/topic analysis
- Archive.org - Historical page analysis
View Full Transcript
In this video, I'm gonna be giving a very thorough review of the very popular affiliate SEO content website, Gear Hungry.
This site was once run by some acquaintances in the affiliate SEO community and in its heyday was making six figures per month, primarily focused on Amazon affiliate. Eventually it was flipped for low eight figures, which was a huge payout for the seller.
And during this time, according to Ahrefs, it was bringing in nearly 2 million visitors per month. But that didn't last long as it started losing traffic. Then in the December 2020 update got nearly decimated.
So I'm gonna take a look and try to figure out what went wrong...
The biggest culprits that I've seen are the amount of monetized affiliate content on the site in proportion to the rest of the site. Single page, on-site SEO, just taking a look using a tool like Surfer to just look at things on a page by page basis and see if they're optimized properly. And then the wild interlinking issue.
I think out of all three of these things, it's probably the first one that's the main issue here.
Related Content
- 009 - Technical SEO - Technical audit checklist
- 010 - Internal Linking - Proper interlinking strategy
- Algorithm Recovery - Recovery workflow