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- ISSUE 39
ISSUE 39
Analyzing Traffic Drops; Topical Relevance Hack; Redirect Mistakes; To Share Host or Not?; Cornerstone Content; Aged Domain Spam Checks and More!
Yoyao
July 24, 2021 • Est. Learning Time: 15 minutes
FIRST…
The Tokyo Olympics 2020 are underway!
Yes, it's "2020" - not a typo. I paused when I first saw "Tokyo 2020" myself. That's how crazy things have been and are still going around the world.
That got me thinking about all the work that must be getting put into putting together the Olympics. None of the organizers, coaches, athletes, and anyone else gave up. Everyone kept working at it to put the Olympics on.
They never gave up.
Giving up is easy to do, especially with niche sites. You write an article and expect Google to bring you hundreds of people a day. Not likely.
This journey is a marathon and you need to keep working at it. Keep doing the keyword research, pushing out articles, and learning.
You can see some big $$$ income reports out there. You can get there too. Look at how many articles they wrote - hundreds. Don't think that 10-20 articles on your new niche site will make you thousands in a few months.
Everything takes time and work. This year may not be the year for you, but if you keep working and learning, next year could be it.
Go get it!
SEO
Gary Illyes from Google has given a concrete answer for how long a redirect should be live for now - "at least 1 year."
If you have a redirect live for a year, you can then remove the redirect and Google will continue to pass the signals from the origin URL to the destination URL.
But that also doesn't mean you should remove them. He goes on to say that you should try to keep them indefinitely for your users.
Daniel Waisberg, a Google Search Advocate, draws examples of traffic drop patterns, what they could mean, and the five main causes for drops.
Look at your Google Analytics and/or Google Search Console. If you see one of these patterns, look to see if the drop is due to one of these causes:
Technical Issues
Security Issues
Manual Actions
Algorithmic Changes
Search Interest Disruption
Sitebulb article on XML Sitemaps, why they are important, how and why you need to structure them correctly, and how to test and audit them to identify any issues.
Most people don't think too much about sitemaps because they use something like RankMath or Yoast. I use Rank Math and pay for the Pro version as it has some useful features in there.
Some people will think to put everything on their sitemaps, but there are a number of things you probably don't want search engines to index like site search pages. There's a list of them in the article that you should avoid in the sitemap, since you don't want to use up your crawl budget on unimportant pages.
TOOLS AND RESOURCES
Great Tools for Niche Site and Content Creators
Frase - Their AI tools, Content Analytics and the good ole content optimizer are great. They also have AI Writing that should be coming up next week that looks like it may replace other GPT-3 based writers. Frase NLP looks better than GPT-3 and the beta feedback I've been seeing is great. There's a Loom video of an intro for their beta testers to see what they're releasing soon. Try their Free Trial.
AMZ Image - Makes it easy to add Amazon product images with your affiliate links, so you can earn revenue from the sales. It's a one-trick pony, but does it well. AAWP does the same thing with images with the addition of product boxes. I use AAWP myself.
Spayee - Create courses and a mobile app to go along with it. This deal ends in 3 days.
The Power of Storytelling - Free - Bozoma “Boz” Saint John's free ebook on marketing and influencer strategies. She's currently the Glocal Chief Marketing Officer at Netflix. The ebook is Free for a limited time and then it'll become paid.
Google Analytics 4 Bootcamp - Free - Free 5-lesson online course on Google Analytics. Might be worth it to learn about GA4, because GA3 (Universal Analytics) will eventually go bye-bye.
CONTENT
Moz shows you how to create, optimize, and promote cornerstone content that drives traffic to your website.
Cornerstone content can also be called Pillar Pages or Evergreeen Content. They're the core pages of your site that you build around.
Nice tip from Steve Toth on how to find the supporting content that are helping a specific page that shows up for keywords.
He uses the highly competitive "car insurance" search query to find how the top SERP results are ranking up there.
LINK BUILDING
Redirects are often part of a site’s evolution, but mistakes can impact traffic and rankings. If you purchase smaller sites and/or expired domains, then use a 301 redirect strategy, you'll also want to keep these 6 common redirect issues in mind:
Redirecting Everything to Your Homepage
Redirect Loops That Never End
Sending Crawlers Through Redirect Chain Nightmares
Forgetting That Case Sensitivity Matters
Using a 302 Redirect Instead of a 301 Redirect
Not Keeping Track of Your Redirects
Nice tips on doing your due diligence on backlinks of sites from Sumit Bansal at SerpNames.com.
I've purchased an aged domain from them and 301 redirected to Site 1 as well. Good experience overall with them.
Itamar Blauer discusses his white hat SEO technique that has helped increase his site’s referring domains by 553% within one year. He calls it the "The Teammate Technique":
Create content that confirms your expertise
Find websites with content/knowledge gaps
Reach out like a teammate
EDUCATION
John Mueller answers the question whether Shared Hosting is good or not in Google's eyes.
The answer is that it's totally fine for Google, but there are a couple of things to be careful of - Server Overload and Bad Neighbors.
Since the servers are shared with other sites that you don't own, if those sites get large amounts of traffic or start using significant server resources, it will affect your site. Your site's load time could be negatively affected or it could even render your site unloadable. That means Google will not be able to crawl your site.
John also says that if the content of the other sites will not influence how Google views your site. This is a bit of a hot topic as there are some who see that it does affect their sites.
For me, I'd rather steer clear of any potential issues and get my own VPS server for $6 a month. I have a blog post on how to migrate to VPS hosting that you can check out.
Jon Dykstra gives 19 techniques that he uses on his content publishing journey that helps makes life easier and more efficient for him.
I don't do everything he does, but he does give a number of good tips. Some are interesting too, but they do make sense for him.
Do you use tabs or accordion panels on your sites to have a cleaner design?
This is a more technical article that takes a look at whether Google will read and index the hidden content. This study was first done in 2018 and is now updated to see if there are changes to Google in 2021.
The summary of the article:
We were somewhat surprised to learn that Google does not consider JavaScript dictionary strings to be content. That said, if content needs to be hidden, use dictionary strings or the onClick event handler to call an API.
For businesses that need to have their content discovered in tabs, use static HTML on the page load or call an external API, but ensure to avoid using onClick events for loading content.
CASE STUDY
Matt Diggity goes into a client project and how they grew website traffic from near 0 to 20,000+. It's a good watch to get an overview of how to build and grow sites.
Content Strategy - Establish Topical Authority
Technical SEO Must-Do's
Link Building Techniques
Read the companion article that goes into more detail.
NEWS
WordPress 5.8 “Tatum” was released this week and named in honor of the legendary jazz pianist Art Tatum. The biggest things that they added were:
Manage Widgets with Blocks
Display Posts with New Blocks and Patterns
Template Editing Mode
Kinsta has a nice 5.8 rundown with the details and screenshots of all the new features.
As I normally do (or don't do), I'm not updating to 5.8 immediately. I usually like to wait for another update to fix any bugs that might show up with major updates. So it'd be 5.8.1 before I'll update.
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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