LivingOffCloud SEO & Affiliate Marketing News Roundup๐ฐ: June, 2019
Summer is time for taking vacations โฑ ๐โฑ but it seems that the affiliate marketing and SEO workaholics are never at rest!
This month, I was able to find so many interesting bits of news that I had to make hard choices in order to see what I want to include in this round-up. Otherwise, I would have never finished it!ย
So, in this news round-up, we will talk about:
๐๐ป the latest changes in Upwork, a freelance hiring platform
๐๐ป a new way of building links
๐๐ป SEO trends in 2019
๐๐ป and a mini SEO case study performed in tweets.
Then, we will switch to the topics about content:
๐๐ป whether itโs better to buy a website to merge it with yours
๐๐ป discuss the possibility of diluting the keyword density
๐๐ป and how to design content better.
Finally, we will touch a bit of the news coming from Bing.
Letโs dive in! ๐ณ
New Upwork plansย
๐๐ป๐๐ป๐๐ป www.upwork.com/i/pricing/
Ah, Upwork, a place of pain and sorrow! It seems like more and more of us are starting loving to hate you.
The Upwork changes I mentioned in my previous News report are happening now. In April, there were rumors that Upwork is changing the way they work with us, clients.ย
And indeed, on June 17th, I received an email notifying me precisely about that. They have introduced new plans as well as an increase in the fee ๐
Now the fee is 3% ๐ฑ instead of 2.75% and the hiring process will be even harder than before.
If you are like me and chose the Basic plan, well, we are screwed.
I won’t be able to invite more than 3 freelancers to my position and the invitations were the only way I was able to attract candidates to my positions ๐จ
Upwork is definitely losing me as a customer.
How about you, are you staying with them or going away as well?
Oh well.
Now, let’s talk about something more positive and exciting. For example, about a new way of building links ๐
How to Leverage Offline Events for Link Building
๐๐ป๐๐ป๐๐ป moz.com/blog/leverage-offline-events-for-link-building
In this post, MOZ talks about how to build backlinks by creating events. Itโs pretty straightforward: You create an event on an event site and provide a link to your website there.ย
However, the members of the AuthorityHacker FB group saw a better opportunity in this approach.ย
You can just join or sponsor an already existing meetup or event that is relevant to your niche and ask them to provide a link to your website.ย
On meetup.com that has DR of 92, it will be even a dofollow link ๐ for example, check out this event:
www.meetup.com/West-Island-Leadership-Public-Speaking/events/rnlfxnyzjbhc/
And while we are on the SEO topic, letโs talk about SEO trends in 2019.
2019 SEO Trends: You Really Should Be Following These 5 Things
๐๐ป๐๐ป๐๐ป raventools.com/blog/seo-trends/
The article is a quick recap of 10 SEO trends that you should remember about these days. It mentions featured snippets, structured data, on-page optimization among other points.ย
You can turn it into a checklist โ โ โ and use it to verify if your website is up to date in terms of the latest SEO developments.
And speaking of the latest SEO tendencies… I found a nice short but interesting Twitter tread by Dan Shure, an SEO expert who analyzes a traffic drop happened to some particular high traffic URL.
An SEO analysis from an SEO expert
๐๐ป๐๐ป๐๐ป twitter.com/dan_shure/status/1138233558718394370
Dan took a look at the recent traffic drop happened with www.ccn.com/bitcoine-price.ย
ccn.com is a cryptocurrency news website.ย
Unfortunately, the website has taken the page discussed in the tweets down so we cannot take a look at it ๐๐
Still, it’s interesting to see a train of thought when an SEO expert analyses how one of the latest Google core updates affected a high traffic page. He used AhRef and took a look at the anchor text distribution and other factors that apparently were quite over-optimized by the webmasters.
Now, SEO is all about getting top ranking spots. But what about getting not one spot per keyword but two? Is it possible? Yes – if you own more than one website in the same niche. How can you achieve that?
Merging two websites in one or keeping separate?
This question appeared in a closed FB group by AuthorityHacker. Hence, no link, sorry.
Some of you might have done this trick already: Buying a smaller website relevant to the one you have, dumping its content into your website, and using 301 redirects to drive the juice from the website you bought to the one you already have.
However, is it the best approach? ๐ค
If you have an authority website A and you find another competitor B in the same niche, if you acquire them and properly integrate and 301 redirect, is CombinedValue(A + B) > IndividualValue(A) + IndividualValue(B)?
Based on the answers in the group, it seems like it all really depends on your competition.ย
If you are not in an extremely competitive niche (like food, recipes, fashion, etc), it’s better to keep the websites separate. First of all, 301 redirects can be hard to predict (they may not transfer the linking juice well). Second of all, having two websites will help you better dominate the SERP and take more space in the search real estate ๐ก๐
I am doing this with my ๐ websites. Both of the sites rank for the same group of keywords and it allows me to steal more than one SERP. and my niche is not very competitive.
However, if your niche is highly competitive, it seems to better double down on one website to make sure it can compete with the rest of the crowd. In this case, merging new content into the existing site may make more sense.
If, in the end, you did decide to merge the content of the new website into the old one, here’s the question you might end up asking yourself.ย
Does non-relevant content dilute overall site keywords density?
๐๐ป๐๐ป๐๐ป www.webmasterworld.com/google/4949196.htm
The question was asked on the Webmaster forum:
Does non-relevant content dilute a website overall relevancy โscoreโ for a given keyword? Example โ If a website selling apples has lots of content on apples and also other types of fruit, will its relevancy for apples and ranking for apple keywords be negatively affected if the site has lots of information on fruit in general.
This situation can happen if you merge some content into your website or if your niche is fairly narrow and you have run out of truly relevant topic ideas. The latter was my case with some of my websites.
The thread has some interesting thoughts about how to overcome the problem. It discusses keyword overoptimization, website user intent, types of new content, and more.
In my case, I ended up writing a small paragraph or two that are highly relevant to the core niche of the website and tied them back to the topic of the overall not-that-niche-relevant article. And speaking of the website user intentโฆ do you correctly design your content?
Content design: A great way to make user-centered content
๐๐ป๐๐ป๐๐ป yoast.com/content-design/
This is a post by Yoast, a maker of a well-known SEO plugin.
According to the article, content design…
…is answering a user need in the best possible way for the user to consume it.
Given that Google now pays attention to user intent, it becomes more important than ever to recognize the needs your users have ๐ง๐ป๐ถ๐ป๐ต๐ป๐ธ๐ป๐ฑ๐ปโโ๏ธ๐ฉ๐ปโ๐ฆณ
The article gives step-by-step instructions from doing audience research to choosing the language to getting feedback on your piece.ย
If you want to know how to write better content through content design, go read that post.
BTW, do you try to rank in Bing? I don’t but it comes to my mind more and more often. I see that my websites have visitors coming from Bing and I wonder if I should take a closer look at it…
In any case, if you have the same thoughts, now submitting posts to Bing has become easier for some of us.
Bing Adds Batch URL Submissions To Webmaster Tools API
๐๐ป๐๐ป๐๐ป blogs.bing.com/webmaster/june-2019/bingbot-Series-Introducing-Batch-mode-for-Adaptive-URL-submission-API/
If you have a lot of URLs to submit to Bing, good news to you! ๐
In June, Bing announced that you can now submit up to 500 URLs per API request. It means you don’t need to submit one by one URL anymore; instead, you do it in batches, which is more time efficient. The 10,000 URL limit per day still applies, though.
It’s nice to see that Bing is not dying and on the opposite, they listen to their users and implement features requested by them.
Don’t miss a post – subscribe to my newsletters!
Disclaimer:ย 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!ย ๐ค