ISSUE 30

Affiliate Site Breakdowns, Google I/O Updates, MUM vs Bert, Blogger Burnout, How Many H1s To Use, 4 Kinds of Keyword Research, and more!

Author

Yoyao
May 22, 2021 • Est. Learning Time: 10 minutes

Issue 2

FIRST…

The nice thing about affiliate websites is they continue to work while you're on vacation or even while you're laid up in bed.

It's been a tough week for me being under the weather. I haven't had the energy to publish new content on my sites, but the writers have still been writing. Their articles are there waiting for me to go through and publish.

I'll keep this short. Here are some highlights of what's out there.

SEO

ISSUE 30

Here's what Brian Dean and Backlinko learned after analyzing 208,085 webpages.

Large-scale analysis of Core Web Vitals scores, along with their relationship with UX.

ISSUE 30

Rand Fishkin covers 4 types of keyword research:

  1. Keyword research for SEO/PPC

  2. Keyword research for social media marketing

  3. Keyword research for content creation

  4. Keyword research for market/audience research

Google’s search ranking system relies on signals like engagement, links, traffic, brand, referrals, and the digital equivalents of word-of-mouth. Earn those signals from all those other places, and Google will reward you with greater visibility and traffic.

There seems to be more and more people talk about indexing/deindexing issues, especially on newer sites. I've been seeing it myself on a 4-month old site.

John Mueller offered advice to someone during an office hours. First thing is to check for any technical issues, like ensuring your site is crawlable.

The second is to promote the site to encourage users to go to the page and site. It helps tell Google that the site is legitimate.

CONTENT

6 SEO Strategies from billion-dollar companies that generated over 500+ million monthly visits in traffic. Think about if any strategies can be translated over to your site.

  1. RapGenius - user-generated content

  2. Pinterest - topic/clusters

  3. Canva - extending your product via templates

  4. PandaDoc - creating side doors for search

  5. Wise - building new products for SEO

  6. HubSpot - search-first content approach

EDUCATION

Poll of nearly 2,000 SEOs shows more than 50% don't know what Google recommends for H1 headings. Does Google recommend only using one H1 heading? No.

Google’s John Mueller said in an office hours hangout that publishers are free to use as many H1 headings as they want.

ISSUE 30

Buying a website rather than building one can allow you earn decent income but you need to know how to weed out the bad sites from the good. Flippa gives their top 7 tips:

  1. A Declining Website

  2. No Comprehensive Traffic Analytics

  3. The Site Generates Traffic from a Handful of Keywords

  4. Buying a Site outside of Your Expertise

  5. Buying a Site That Has Been Badly Hit by the Latest Google Update

  6. Buying a Site With 'Direct Traffic' Only

  7. No Definite Site Transition Plan

ISSUE 30

Burnout is something we'll all experience at one point or another. It's something that not many of us talk about, so it's good that Carl Broadbent talks about it here.

Blogging is a marathon and not seeing the quick returns can easily affect us negatively. Carl gives some of his top tips to control the burnout.

CASE STUDY

ISSUE 30

Authority Hackers looks at another 5 affiliate sites and picks them apart to give us the good and bad. They look at low DR sites to see what can be learned from them.

Gael and Mark always do a good job of reviewing sites.

For another site review, Julie Adams reviews a boating and water sport site on Matt Diggity's YouTube channel.

NEWS

ISSUE 30

John Mueller talks about Search during his Google I/O Session. He does a broad overview of what's various topics like HTTP/2, Crawl Budget, Structured Data, Video Clip and Seek markups, and Google Search Console updates.

Each of the sections has URLs to specific resources you'll want to check out to understand more.

There are many more Google I/O Sessions to watch from Google Search Central too. See their whole playlist, which includes a few other good ones to watch like Preparing for page experience ranking.

Google's John Mueller said that recognizing PBNs (public blog networks) is easy and "pretty obvious to the appropriate tools and basic scripts."

John adds that PBNs are just link schemes, and they'll respond in automated and manual ways.

ISSUE 30

Google introduced their latest AI milestone, Multitask Unified Model (MUM), that's 1,000 times more powerful than BERT.

It's not just about understanding languages, but also generating it - in 75 languages. MUM is multimodal, so it also understands information in images and in the future, video and audio too.

Read all about it in their blog post.

ISSUE 30

WordPress released an update to patch an Object Injection Vulnerability rated by the National Vulnerability Database as Critical.

Be sure to update your WordPress to 5.7.2 to patch the vulnerability.

LIKE NICHE SURFER?

Let me know! Reply or email me at [email protected]. I’d love to know what you think and if you have any ideas.

I’d also appreciate it if you shared it with fellow niche surfers.

Have a great week with taking your niche sites to another level!

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