After five years, the informative content hub at The Times (co.uk , com) website has shut down. It was free and open so one can assume it was an informational content acquisition channel – an SEO project. A new project starts in Autumn and a proportion of the content will now be behind a paywall.
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At its peak it reached a VI of over 8 in the UK. The keyword rankings for Money Mentor at that point attracted an estimated 148 thousand organic clicks from UK search every month.
Paid clicks in this sector are worth a lot of money and although The Times couldn’t own the buyers’ journey, that was passed along to others through affiliate links. The image below shows some rankings and estimated CPC values from March 2024
Just a few months ago the website appeared as the #13 most visibile in our SectorWatch report on Money Management.
Today, as The Times announces the closure, the VI stands at just 0.286.
Many existing URLs, the affiliate links and the current rankings, appear to be stable but the Money Mentor landing page is no longer there. These remaining URLs are at risk of losing their breadcrumbs and internal links. All the previously ranking links from the co.uk version of the website, pre-2024, are now missing.
What can we learn from this? An informational content strategy from 2019-2024 appears to have worked well but, since mid 2024, the organic visibility has dropped and AIO numbers have risen.
The existing URLs still rank for 87178 keywords (live data, SISTRIX) but of those, 41079, that’s nearly half, have an AIO box in the SERP.
The Times has announced that a new money section will be launched in the autumn and that some content will be behind the paywall.
Track the money management sector
Our current weekly tracker for the money management sector shows the following websites leading in the informational space:
- moneysavingexpert.com
- moneyhelper.org.uk
- barclays.co.uk
- natwest.com
- lloydsbank.com
- reddit.com
- hsbc.co.uk
- raisin.co.uk
- ybs.co.uk
- citizensadvice.org.uk
SISTRIX data and features used in this report:
- Visibility Index overlays (multiple historical directories across two domains.)
- Live and historical keyword rankings database.
- AIO and position filters.
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