ISSUE 90

June Income Reports; Pillar Page Examples; Content Freshness; Google Sheets Formulas; Core Update Analysis; and Much More!

Author

Yoyao
July 09, 2022 • Est. Learning Time: 14 minutes

Issue 2

FIRST…

It seems like Google had another mini-update a couple days ago because the two sites that were hit have started to recover their previous rankings.

The main "fixes" I made after the update was announced to be over were:

  1. Cleaned up interlinking, so that anchor text was diversified.

  2. Tightened up silos with interlinking. Links needed to be more relevant.

  3. Added or replaced photos to be more 'original'.

  4. Adjusted and optimized content where needed.

  5. I added author boxes to all the posts.

I haven't had the time to do this to every article either. I first focused on the ones that were previously ranking.

I don't know exactly what helped or didn't help, but it seemed enough to start getting rankings back.

NICHE CREATORS

ISSUE 90

This week's two Niche Creators - Jason Mills and BowTiedWookie - are very active in sharing their knowledge on Twitter. Both share great tips and positive messages.

Check out their interviews:

INCOME REPORTS

ISSUE 90

These are the June 2022 income reports that I've found. Many interesting reports here because some of them have had sites get hit from the Google May Core Update.

SEO

A good look from Mordy Oberstein on the Google Core Update in May. He focuses on financial and health sites here.

  1. A little context goes a long way

  2. Content accuracy is key

  3. Go beyond the surface of search intent

  4. Include relevant topics

ISSUE 90

In the recent SEO Office Hours, Google's John Mueller said it is probably safe to completely delete your link disavow file if you have not had manual actions for links before and/or you don't have a history of link schemes on the site.

He said, he would remove the disavow file because Google is good at ignoring typical spammy looking links that you do not build yourself.

This Google page details the latest ranking updates made to Google Search that are relevant to website owners. it links out to the different updates too.

It's a nice, central page to have for the major updates, but it doesn't list the smaller updates.

In this blog post, Marie Haynes discusses her thoughts on how the pros & cons and other SERP annotations can give users clues on creating great content!

It's very interesting to see that the Pros and Cons that Google may list in the SERPs may not come from a Pros and Cons section in your content. Google is actually extracting their own pros and cons from paragraphs.

ISSUE 90

Chris Long talks about Content Freshness in Moz's blog. He explains why the entire SEO community has underrated the concept of “freshness”.

After working with a news organization and testing the learnings from that work on other sites, Chris and his team started to see the immense power that freshness updates could produce in SEO and on evergreen content.

Wondering if this means we'll start seeing more sites that show dates?

ISSUE 90

This is a Onely summary of the most interesting questions and answers from the Google SEO Office Hours with John Mueller on June 3rd, 2022.

  1. Can I use two HTTP result codes on a page?

  2. Does using a CDN improve rankings if my site is already fast in my main country?

  3. Should I disallow API requests to reduce crawling?

  4. Should I use rel=”nofollow” on internal links?

  5. Is there a way to force sitelinks to show up?

  6. Our site embeds PDFs with iframes, should we OCR the text?

  7. Does Google crawl URLs in structured data markup?

TOOLS AND RESOURCES

ISSUE 90

AppSumo's Sumo Day 2022 starts on July 11th and lasts for only 96 hours. They're currently accepting giveaway entries.

There will also be some discounts during Sumo Day, so be sure to check in to see anything you're interested in might be on a discount.

Luminar - Edit photos like a pro in half the time using the power of AI. Definitely a very cool tool, even if you're not into photography. Can make those stock photos more unique. Check out a demo video.

List of 13 Free keyword research tools to try out. Some are free trials, while others are completely free:

  1. Google Search Console

  2. Google Ads Keyword Planner

  3. Google Trends

  4. Google

  5. Keywords Everywhere

  6. Answer the Public

  7. QuestionDB

  8. Keyword Surfer

  9. Keyword Sheeter

  10. Ahrefs keyword generator

  11. Moz

  12. Keyworddit

  13. Alsoasked

CONTENT

ISSUE 90

Si Quan Ong from Ahrefs puts together 8 examples of pillar pages to get your creative juices flowing.

If you're not sure of how to create a pillar page / content hub, these are good examples for inspiration.

EDUCATION

For the more technically-minded out there, this tip uses HTTP2 and .htaccess to load CSS as early as possible to solve the blocked rendering CSS.

Stoyan describes how to add code in Apache and NGINX with 2-3 lines of codes.

ISSUE 90

Some very useful Google Sheets formulas here from Jackie Chu.

  • Formula for Keyword Management - VLOOKUP, CONCATENATE, FLATTEN, LOWER, COUNTIF, SUMIF

  • Formulas for Internationalization - GOOGLETRANSLATE

  • Formulas for Content/URL Management - SPLIT, LEN, REGEXREPLACE

  • Formulas for Dashboards - SPAKRLINE

ISSUE 90

This is a good look from Tim Soulo, CMO at Ahrefs, on creating and promoting a video course. If you're thinking about a course, this is a good overview.

A very interesting look at a site that used a counterfeited press release to generate about a thousand high authority links from Italian government websites.

I'm not endorsing this at all, but it is interesting to see the lengths that people will go to for backlinks.

CASE STUDY

ISSUE 90

Sam Partland shares his 1,000+ page programmatic SEO build using a combination of WordPress and Google Sheets (with plenty of formulas!).

It's very interesting look at programmatic SEO by using just Google Sheets, exporting a CSV, and importing the CSV into WordPress.

ISSUE 90

Gael and Mark from Authority Hackers dive deep into a single niche, the VPN niche. They analyze the top players, looking at what they do, how they do link building, and so on. They draw lessons and conclusions from what these sites are doing in this fairly competitive niche.

Even if you are not in the VPN niche, you can expect to gain a lot of value from this episode.

LIKE NICHE SURFER?

ISSUE 90

Be sure to also join others riding the passive income wave in the Niche Surfer Discord group.

Have questions? 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 taking your niche sites to another level!

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