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LivingOffCloud SEO & Affiliate Marketing News Roundup📰: February 2020

Can you believe it’s already the second month of 2020 that comes to the end? I certainly can’t! I still make mistakes once in a while by writing 2019 instead of 2020 😅

In February, there were a lot of new articles about the updates Google did in January. 

In today’s news release we will talk about the analysis of these updates including what they could have targeted and how to recover if you got affected.

Then, we will switch to predictions and trends for 2020!🔮

So, in this post, you will find:

• Analysis of January 2020 Core update and how it may have affected affiliate marketers
• What kind of January changes Google is reverting
• A case study about Featured Snippet deduplication
• February 2020 update by Google
• A massive content marketing guide for this year
• Upcoming SEO trends and how to address them
• How to measure search for one of the biggest upcoming SEO trends 😉

January 2020 Core Update

👉👉👉 mariehaynes.com/january-2020-core-update/

I wrote about this update that was rolled out in the middle of January in my previous news release. It seems it was a big one with many websites being affected.

In the post above, Marie and her team take a deep dive into data about who lost ranking and who gained it in order to understand what exactly the update addressed and affected.

What I found particularly interesting was the conclusion that the update might have corrected some of the consequences of the infamous November 2019 update when many website owners who suffered felt it was very unfair.

Here’s an example of a website regaining traffic after January 2020 Core update:

Another interesting bit of the article is for affiliate marketers. If you are one of them, you should know that Google might be taking a crackdown on affiliate marketing websites that do not do a proper disclosure for affiliate links. 

Marie talks about how to do it quite unobtrusively for readers using Amazon affiliate links as an example – and I have already started incorporating her advice into my new content!

Google May Revert Favicons & Black Ad Label On The Desktop Search Results

👉👉👉 seroundtable.com/google-revert-favicons-black-ad-label-28899.html

One of the changes Google did in January was to show website favicons and black ad labels the way they are doing it on mobile:

Google launched the mobile search interface design it had since May 2019 on desktop. It brought the favicons to the snippets and the black ad label for the desktop search ads.

In my previous news report, I was joking that we are now doing image SEO 🤣

Well, we do not need to do that anymore – the change did not survive for long. 

Apparently, Google decided to listen to the community and do extra testing before making the change permanent – or was it just a covert way to say that they are killing it? 🤔

A Case Study Of 2,000 Featured Snippets About Deduplicating

👉👉👉 kevin-indig.com/a-case-study-of-2000-featured-snippets-about-deduplicating/

A big community-stirring change Google did in January 202 was featured snippet deduplication:

If a web page listing is elevated into the featured snippet position, we no longer repeat the listing in the search results.

💥💥💥

Many webmasters immediately got upset and thought the change negatively affects the traffic  😭😭😭 Kevin from kevin-indig.com was one of them.

In order to understand if it’s the case, he conducted a case study to investigate whether the deduplication really negatively affected one of his websites.

TLDR: He found “a net positive impact on traffic. Not a substantial one by any means, but noticeable.”👍😅

If you want to read about the details of his study or maybe to replicate it yourself, go ahead and read the post☝

Google Update February 2020: Background and Analysis

👉👉👉 blog.searchmetrics.com/us/google-update-february-2020/

February did not go without updates either. Many websites reported spikes and drops in their organic traffic. 

Google did not pre-announce this update. When asked about it, they said they do updates all the time 🤷‍♀️

Backlinko’s Guide to Content Marketing in 2020

👉👉👉 backlinko.com/content-marketing-this-year

This is a massive, beautifully-designed guide with tons of useful info about content marketing. I wanted to count how many exactly sections it has and couldn’t 🙈

I can only say it has 7 chapters plus a bonus one and each chapter is several page-down scrolls 🤯 It covers video content, topics to write about, email marketing, and more, and more 😅 

Here’s a list of the chapters (with my comments🔊):

1. Double Down on Video Content (YoutTube is #2 popular website after google.com! 🤯)
2. Promote With Email (neat tricks 👍)
3. Publish “Be The Source” Posts (ride on new topics🏄‍♀️)
4. Get Engagement (and Reach) on LinkedIn (LinkedIn, really? 🤔)
5. Create More Epic Content (duh! 🙄)
6. Jump On Emerging Topics (stay ahead of the curve 🔮)
7. Content Repurposing 2.0 (it’s just a must ♻)
8. Content Marketing Tactics for 2020 (a bonus!🎉)

Pocket, an app I use to read web articles offline, estimates the reading time is about 17 min 🕰 I am definitely going to allocate at least an hour in my calendar in order to go through it carefully.

Pay Attention to These SEO Trends in 2020 and Beyond

👉👉👉 moz.com/blog/seo-trends-2020-and-beyond

Curious to know what SEO trends might be in the new year? I bet you do! 

In this post, Suganthan from Moz talks about 9 trends they spotted based on the Google activity during the last 12 months.

In addition to diving into the trends, Suganthan also writes about “But what does this mean for SEOs?”. It helps us to understand what could be the specific steps we webmasters need to take in order to stay on top of our game and how we may need to change our approach to SEO strategies.

And, based on the search trends in 2020, there is a particular question you may want to ask Google…

How Can I Measure The Voice Searches?

👉👉👉 twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1225102859009695745

TLDR: Buy a smart speaker and test your queries by running them yourself 🤣

As Jon Mu, who’s a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, answered it on Twitter, you cannot currently measure this kind of searches 🤷‍♀️

Hopefully, Google will catch up with it soon!🏃‍♂️💨