August 2020 News Roundup๐Ÿ“ฐ: Whatโ€™s New In SEO & Affiliate Marketing

What happened on August 10 with Google search? ๐Ÿ˜ฒ How to make the switch away from Amazon Affiliate successful? How to disable a particular non-disableable feature in WP 5.5? ๐Ÿค” 

You can learn answers to all these questions and more from my August news roundup!

Ok, in this news roundup, I could not help but mention a Google update ๐Ÿ™ˆ Itโ€™s just this update was hard not to notice ๐Ÿ™ƒ

So, in this news issue, we will talk about:

  • A bug in one of the latest Google updates ๐Ÿ›
  • Switching from Amazon Affiliate (yep again! ๐Ÿ˜‚)
  • Two case studies ๐Ÿ˜ป
  • How to disable lazy loading in WordPress 5.5 ๐Ÿ†•
  • How knowing how the image search works in theory benefits you ๐Ÿ–ผ
  • An upcoming change in Google Chrome ๐Ÿ”œ

Letโ€™s dive in ๐Ÿ‹

Google: An Indexing System Failure Caused The Search Results Glitch

๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰ www.seroundtable.com/google-indexing-system-failure-29934.html 

On August 10, something went very wrong during a regular Google updateโ€ฆ ๐Ÿ˜ฌ SEO masters across the entire globe ๐ŸŒ saw wild changes in the rankings of their websites โ†–โ†˜โ†•โ†™โ†— ๐Ÿ˜ต

It turned out that a failure in the Google indexing system got a bug or a glitch ๐Ÿ˜ฑ

Code meme
Image credit: reddit.com

I bet quite a few SEO masters got some gray hair from it ๐Ÿ˜ฌ but also, quite a few were pretty happy ๐Ÿ˜‚

I am mentioning it because itโ€™s most likely that you guys did see the effect of the glitch in your Search consoles. On my side, only the ๐Ÿฆ„ Website (the one I bought in April) was affected by 6 websites. And in a very nice way ๐Ÿค—๐Ÿ˜†

Graph of my websites

So if in your Google Search Console, you see an abnormal jump or dip in your clicks/impressions on August 10, it means you got affected by The Glitch โšก

Ok, enough about Google updates! Letโ€™s switch to our other โ€œfavoriteโ€ topic: Amazon Affiliate ๐Ÿ˜ˆ๐Ÿ˜…

Switch From Amazon to High Paying Affiliate Programs [Step by Step Plan]

๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰ watch the video below

Sooo howโ€™s your switching away from Amazon Affiliate going on? ๐Ÿ˜‰

As Gael Breton from Authority Hacker puts it: 

[โ€ฆ] many affiliate marketers started the year with โ€œF*ck Amazon โ€“ weโ€™re gone!โ€ after their recent drop in commission rates.

And how few of them actually went through with thatโ€ฆ4 months later.

…myself included ๐Ÿ™ˆ 

But in my defense, I did try to add other affiliate linksโ€ฆ but they just donโ€™t convert ๐Ÿ˜ฌ๐Ÿ˜ซ๐Ÿ˜ซ๐Ÿ˜ซ

And itโ€™s a real problem ๐Ÿ™

But the AuthorityHacker guys found a seemingly excellent way to solve this problem ๐Ÿคฉ I have not tried it myself but I am sooo putting it in my high priority task queue! ๐Ÿƒโ€โ™€๏ธ

Apart from that, the video show the whole process of finding and testing affiliate programs ๐Ÿ‘

Watch it now:

Another plus on non-Amazon affiliate programs is that they allow you (most likely) to use the affiliate links directly in emails. It means that you can run promos directly in your newsletters without bringing your subscribers first to a landing page.

But it only works if you do have email subscribers. So our next topic is about a case study showing how to grow an email list ๐Ÿ“ง

Case Study: How We Built A Funnel And Achieved 54.3% List Growth In 3 months

๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰ onfolio.co/case-study-email-funnel

From this case study, you will learn the exact steps about how to grow an email fast. What was the exact setup, the failure happened along the way, what was done to fix that failure – all that makes a good, interesting, and useful story is there. Dive in!

Now, letโ€™s switch to yet another case study; this time itโ€™s about link building! ๐Ÿ”—๐Ÿ”—๐Ÿ”—

Link Building Case Study: How We Built Backlinks With a โ€˜Statsโ€™ Page (And Ranked #1)

๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰ ahrefs.com/blog/link-building-case-study/

AhRefs posts often appear in my news roundups (for example, the previous news post talked about how to increase DR). And itโ€™s no wonder since they are very informative and actionable.

This one about link building with a Statistics page is no exception. 

But you might be wondering: there are tons of posts out there that are about building links with โ€œskyscraperโ€ content… Why am I talking about yet another one? ๐Ÿค”

Well the thing is that each domain is different and depending on the domain, different skyscraper posts perform well. The Statistics content may go well in your domain – or may not. But itโ€™s worth trying anyway. So check it out!

Now, letโ€™s talk about the latest WordPress 5.5 update and a particular feature thatโ€™s now included  by default ๐Ÿ˜’

How to Disable Lazy Loading in WordPress (And Why You Should Do This)

๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰ blogpioneer.com/disable-lazy-loading-wordpress

WordPress 5.5 was released on August 11, 2020.

It got many features and one of them is lazy loading. Lazy loading is a technical term for โ€œimages wait to load until theyโ€™re just about to scroll into view.โ€

Unfortunately, the feature is included by default and cannot be disabled.

While I do think it should be optional and disableable, I am kinda happy itโ€™s now a part of the standard WordPress ๐Ÿ™ˆ ๐Ÿ˜

This forces plugin creators to make their code compatible with lazy loading by default. I have had quite a few cases when lazy loading broke some of plugins and I had to either disable plugin features or to find a workaround ๐Ÿ˜’

But still, if you need to disable it or if you are just curious why you may need to do it, head over to AJ’s post. The method is a bit for nerds ๐Ÿค“ since it requires knowledge of coding.

Aaaand the next topic is yet another post for nerds ๐Ÿค“ ๐Ÿ™ˆ

Textual Image Queries and Classification of Images at Google

๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰ gofishdigital.com/textual-image-queries/

If you are into knowing details about how image processing and categorization is implemented (in theory ๐Ÿ˜ฌ๐Ÿ˜†), this lengthy article is for you.

If you just want to know the takeaways, scroll to the very bottom of it ๐Ÿ“œ๐Ÿ˜‰

Here is my main takeaway: Google can recognize and understand the text on the images very well. It seems to be very beneficial for ranking if your posts include images with text that contain the post keywords. 

For example,  If you want to rank for Toyota cars, you may want to add to your post images of cars with Toyota written on them or next to them (and, of course, images with the Toyota logo.) ๐Ÿš—โ„ข

The last section is about a new change that’s coming to Google Chrome in the future.

Google Resumes Its Attack On The Url Bar, Hides Full Addresses On Chrome 86

๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰๐Ÿ‘‰ androidpolice.com/2020/08/13/google-resumes-its-senseless-attack-on-the-url-bar-hides-full-addresses-on-chrome-canary

Pretty soon, Google Chrome will be hiding the full URL in the address bar ๐Ÿคฏ Instead, it will show the root domain of the URL ๐Ÿคฏ

The feature is currently available only in the Canary or Dev releases and is planned to be released in October.

Hereโ€™s how it will look like:

As mentioned in the comments to the post, one of the reasons for the change might be:

this is probably to prevent fake URLs. when “normal” people glance at the address bar to check if a site is fake or not.

So how may it affect you

First of all, it affects you as a user of the desktop Chrome browser. Itโ€™s a pretty big change in the UI and I personally plan to disable it right away ๐Ÿ™ˆ I work in the browser, like, 99% of the time and I just need to see the full URLs for my work ๐Ÿคทโ€โ™€๏ธ

As a website owner, I think the change may scare the site visitors at the beginning so the bounce rate may increase for a while. And at the same time, I do think itโ€™s a good feature to have because it may reduce successful phishing attacks and should help with fighting copycats who mimic your website in terms of the UI.

Hereโ€™s a good discussion on HackerNews if you want to read more about the change.


Don’t miss a post – subscribe to my newsletters!
I love my subscribers and often send them exclusive content that nobody else sees ๐Ÿค—





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! ๐Ÿค—

Click Here to Leave a Comment Below 0 comments