Growth
SEO for forex affiliates in a YMYL world
Search engines treat pages about money differently from pages about anything else. That is a barrier if you are anonymous and an opportunity if the rest of your industry is.
What YMYL actually changes
Your Money or Your Life is the category search engines apply to content that could affect someone's finances, health, safety or legal position. Trading content is squarely inside it. The practical effect is not a different algorithm, it is a much lower tolerance for content that cannot demonstrate where its claims come from or who is making them.
That is why an anonymous affiliate site with a hundred thin comparison pages struggles in this niche while a site with twenty pages and a named team does not. The rest of this industry buys traffic instead of earning it, which leaves the earned side unusually open.
Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust, concretely
The framing is vague on purpose. The implementation does not have to be.
Visible company details
Registered entity, registration number, address, and an honest statement of regulatory status. For an introducing broker that statement includes what you are not: not a brokerage, not the holder of client funds, not the regulated party on the account.
Primary sources, cited
Link the regulator, the standards body, the platform vendor or the legislation. Not another affiliate's summary of it. A page that cites primary sources is the page other people cite, which is where the links come from.
Real data, shown rather than claimed
Your own figures, with the method stated. And if you do not have figures you can stand behind, say so and say why. A visible gap reads as honesty. An invented range reads as fine until somebody checks it.
Cluster structure, and why it beats a pile of posts
A cluster is one pillar page covering a commercial topic in full, plus a handful of supporting articles that each go deep on one part of it and link back up. The pillar targets the term with the money behind it. The supporting articles target the long tail and pass their authority upward.
The alternative, a blog with a hundred loosely related posts, spreads the same effort across a hundred pages that each compete with each other and none of which rank. Structure is the difference between an archive and an asset.
Step 1 of 4. Write the pillar as a real page, not an anchor
A pillar has to be a URL a search engine can rank and a person can link to. A section on the homepage with an anchor link is neither, however good the copy is.
Step 2 of 4. Build the comparison cluster early
A versus b searches carry the highest purchase intent of anything in this niche, by a wide margin. They also demand the most honesty, because a comparison written to produce a predetermined answer is obvious to the reader who is actually comparing.
Step 3 of 4. Publish the technical content that earns links
Nobody links to a landing page. People link to the article that explained how the attribution works. That article is the reason the commercial pages rank.
Step 4 of 4. Take the languages nobody has bothered with
The Nordic and other smaller-language markets in this industry are close to unoccupied compared to English. The competition is a machine translation of an English page, which is not competition.
The technical floor
None of this wins on its own. All of it loses if it is missing.
- All content in server-rendered HTML. A crawler should not have to run your JavaScript to read your copy.
- One h1 per page and a heading outline that does not skip levels.
- Structured data that matches what the page actually shows. An FAQ in the markup that differs from the FAQ on the page is a mismatch a search engine checks for.
- A canonical URL on every page, and language annotations that point both ways.
- A sitemap that contains every indexable route and nothing that is not.
- Accessibility, which overlaps with this list far more than people expect: heading structure, link text, contrast and keyboard order are read by the same parsers.
The language annotation, both directions
<!-- on the English page -->
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://example.com/revenue-share" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="nb-NO" href="https://example.com/no/revenue-share" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://example.com/revenue-share" />
<!-- and the same set on the Norwegian page, pointing back -->
A one-sided annotation is discarded rather than half honoured, so
shipping the pairing before the second page exists removes the signal
from the page that does exist.What not to do
- Publishing a comparison you would not show to the competitor you are comparing against.
- Quoting a rival's commercial terms from memory. Terms change, and a wrong quotation on a page about money is the kind of error that gets a page removed rather than corrected.
- Inventing benchmark figures because the page format expects a table. An empty table with a stated reason is a better page than a full one you made up.
- Spinning one article into fifteen near-identical location pages. That is the pattern the helpful content guidance describes explicitly.
- Hiding the risk warning. In this category it is required, and burying it is a trust signal in the wrong direction.
Questions
How many articles does a cluster need?
One pillar and roughly four to eight supporting articles, each covering one part of the pillar in depth and linking back to it. Beyond that you are usually better served by making the existing pages better than by adding more of them.
Can I translate my English pages rather than rewrite them?
Translate rather than transliterate, and keep the commercial figures resolved from one source so a rate change cannot land in one language only. A page that reads as machine output ranks like machine output, and in a small language market it is competing with other machine output, which is exactly the opportunity you would be giving up.
Where this comes from
Sources
Primary sources only: the regulator, the standards body, the platform vendor, the legislation, or our own agreements. Not another affiliate's summary of one.
- Search engine documentationGoogle Search Central
Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content
What Google says it looks for on a page about money, and where the experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust framing comes from.
- Search engine documentationGoogle Search Central
Introduction to structured data markup in Google Search
The rule that structured data has to match what the page shows a reader, which is why the FAQ schema on this site is built from the same array the page renders.
- Search engine documentationGoogle Search Central
Localized versions of your pages
The return-link requirement that makes an hreflang cluster work, and why a one-sided annotation is dropped rather than half honoured.
- StandardW3C Schema.org Community Group
The definitions behind the Article, HowTo, FAQPage, Service and AggregateOffer types this site emits.
- StandardWorld Wide Web Consortium
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1
The AA contrast and keyboard requirements every page on this site is tested against before it ships.