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LivingOffCloud SEO & Affiliate Marketing News Roundup📰: August, 2019

Back to school season has started but, frankly speaking, in the world of online marketing, learning never ends, right? 👩‍🎓👨‍🎓😉

So let’s dig into the goodies the internet brought us in August. It just happened that this roundup post is primarily about Google!

First, I will talk about:

👉 an official post from Google
👉 Google search issues with Instagram photos
👉 a peculiar manual penalty from Google
👉 and an article about clicks that should but don’t come from.. guess where? Google search! 😜

Then, we will get off Google’s back and will switch to:

👉 an SEO case study that made me scratch my head
👉 a YouTube interview with a successful online entrepreneur 📺

Let’s go! 🤪

Webmaster Central Blog: What webmasters should know about Google’s core updates

👉👉👉webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/08/core-updates.html

This is an article from the official Google blog 😱😄 It contains an explanation of what core updates are as well as practical steps about how to assess the quality of your content.

All coming directly from its Majesty Google!

It should be on your August reading list.

Google Warns: Embedding Instagram Images Can Cause SEO Issues

👉👉👉 seroundtable.com/google-warns-about-instagram-embeds-indexing-28036.html

If you rely on the image search traffic and you use embedded Instagram photos, you should know that it can screw up your appearing in SERPs 🖼☠

The article explains how exactly the Instagram code causes that. 

Also, in the comments, somebody provided a nice solution to the problem for WordPress websites: a plugin Instagram Feed Pro by Smashballoon. It fixes the root cause as it generates HTML while replicating the images and comments on your site. It is made by SmashBalloon and you can find it here.

Less than Half of Google Searches Now Result in a Click

👉👉👉 sparktoro.com/blog/less-than-half-of-google-searches-now-result-in-a-click/

I found this in the private FB group by AuthorityHacker.

Is Google turning from search engine to walled-garden? The article by SparkToro (written by Rand Fishkin) explores this thought by backing it up with some reliable data.

The data comes from the clickstream data company JumpShot (the data arm of Avast,) that analyzes Google searches data:

As you can see above, it shows that:

Google was sending a huge portion of search clicks to their properties (~6% of queries and ~12% of clicks)

According to the article, Google is becoming a search monopoly (not really news) and shows how the said monopoly grows over time. It talks about so-called “zero-click searches”, what it is, and how to get a value from it.

Keep in mind that the data gathered may not represent the whole internet since it comes only from browsers with the Avast security installed.

It’s a thought-provoking post and it may well be our future. Check it out and don’t forget to read the comments that have some good discussions.

Google Still Penalizing Sites For Unnatural Links & It Can Hurt Bad

👉👉👉 seroundtable.com/google-unnatural-links-manual-actions-penalty-28106.html

Search Engine Roundtable found an interesting Twitter post. One of the well-known SEOs, Dan Petrovich from Dejan SEO, reveals that his website got a manual action and is no longer ranking for its brand name 😱

The interesting thing is that they did not build any links for about the last 5 years and the penalty may have come from the actions he did in the past. Dan admits that:

Possibly there could be something old biting me in the back that I failed to disavow. We did experiment a lot in the past.

Dan goes full-transparent about it and even provides the link disavow file of his website 👍

Go to the article to read more about this interesting (and I would even say intriguing) case.

SEO Case Study: How I Increased SEO Traffic by 600% in 24 Months

👉👉👉 wordstream.com/blog/ws/2019/08/01/seo-case-study

A good case study that highlights the main points of SEO from content optimization to internal links to external links.

One of the interesting parts is that 90% of the content was unpublished.

Another interesting part is about a method on how to do internal linking quickly. However, I think this approach works well for small websites only.

For me, the case study looks a bit controversial. Removing 90% of the content usually does not come with increased ranking because with removing content, you remove keywords the content may have been ranking for.

So, I am including it here to give a different perspective on the process of revamping a website.

$1,472 to $192k per Year Ron Stefanski Interview

👉👉👉 youtube.com/watch?v=7SUTtuhuElA

I found this in the private FB group by AuthorityHacker.

This is a video interview by Don Cunnington, which has tons of great tips about growing niche websites.

Don interviews his friend Ron Stephanski, a successful online entrepreneur, about how Ron grew his websites from -$1,472 to $192k per year 🤯 He has come a long way to achieve that!

Ron talks about one of his website, an informational website that brings him  $16,000+ per month so far in 2019. Here are my main highlights of the interview:

• Ron talks about the article length (23:53)
• How he organizes his team of writers and how they are paid (27:53)
• His history about how he quit his 6-figure job (1:14:25)
• How he grew this particular website that brings him a lot of money (44:29)
  First, his website went viral on FB but soon, the traffic died off as it happens with social media. This forced Ron to start doing link building.
  He says it’s a must at the beginning and later when the website becomes an authority.
• How Ron does link building (48:29)
  He tests different types of link building since each niche is very different from each other.
  However, if some tactics work well, it can be dangerous! Ron explains what happened with one of his websites in this regard.
• How to stay motivated while working full time and doing niche website business on the side (1:00:15)
  His secret is simple: He loves what he’s doing and that his websites are genuinely helping people
• How many articles he publishes each month across all his websites (1:03:22)
• Keyword research (1:05:02)
• What’s the #1 reason for his income to increase so fast? (1:07:30)

 

Hope you enjoyed my roundup for August!

Let me know what you think in the comments below. Or, even better, subscribe to my newsletter 😉

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Disclaimer: Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. I will receive a small fee if you choose to buy after clicking on any of these links. Thank you if you do! 🤗