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LivingOffCloud SEO & Affiliate Marketing News Roundup📰: June 2020 Edition

For this news roundup, I tried hard to avoid mentioning anything about Google updates 😅 

Frankly speaking, I am a bit sick of closely watching what Google has done and how our traffic has gone up or down by a couple of positions 🙄

May was full of this kind of news and for June release, I decided to put my attention somewhere else (but Google did roll out some kind of update if you really need to know).

So in this post, we will talk about ads and affiliate marketing:

  • News about display ads 📰
  • An Amazon Affiliate rival getting stronger 💪
  • How resilient affiliate marketing in fact is 🏄‍♀️

And then, we will switch to SEO:

  • A new Google ranking factor 😉
  • Bulging links from the same sites 🔗
  • My shameless plug about disavow 😜

Let’s dive in!

We will start with a bomb 💥 that one of the popular ad platforms prepared for us.

New Mediavine requirements

👉👉👉 mediavine.com/new-mediavine-requirements/

On June 15, Mediavine, a very popular ad platform, increased its entry barrier and traffic requirements from 25,000 sessions per month to 50,000 😱

I guess that they got a huge influx of applicants after the Amazon slashed their affiliate fees for the US program.

If you hoped to get accepted and sent your application before June 15, they will review it based on the old traffic requirements 🎉

Apart from new traffic numbers, Mediavine also introduced other changes. It affects such cases when a site changes the owner and when you already have a site or sites with Mediavine and want to add another one

Go to the article to read about it in detail.

I guess Ezoic, the closest rival of Mediavine, now will be even more popular than before! If you are thinking of joining it, do it now before they changed their requirements! 😅

Troubleshoot a drop in earnings

👉👉👉 support.google.com/adsense/checklist/9822920?hl=en&ref_topic=1190787 

If you are still with Adsense, this article can be useful for you.

Adsense is not a bad ad platform and is still very valuable if you cannot join other ad platforms for various reasons. For example, your traffic is low or you are just… being afraid! Like me! (my new 🦄 Website still uses Adsense 🙈😂).

So here’s a helpful article by Adsense about how to troubleshoot a drop in Adsense earnings

I found it helpful to understand how display ads work on a website even if you do not use Adsense. 

Reports for each platform
Image credit: support.google.com

Now, let’s switch to affiliate marketing.

Walmart partners with Shopify to expand its online marketplace

👉👉👉 techcrunch.com/2020/06/15/walmart-partners-with-shopify-to-expand-its-online-marketplace/  

Walmart, one of the Amazon rivals is determined to grow online even more! They intend to bring “1,200 Shopify  sellers to the marketplace this year.” This is good news for online small businesses and for us affiliate marketers.

Walmart has an affiliate program that might be a partial replacement of the Amazon Affiliate program or just an extra one to increase your earnings. 

What they offer is $10.00 or 1%-4% depending on the category. It makes it comparable with the Amazon affiliate rates ⚖

To learn more about the plans Walmart has for Shopify, read the article above.

Affiliate marketing resilient as ad spend drops, study finds

👉👉👉 performancein.com/news/2020/06/11/affiliate-marketing-resilient-as-ad-spend-drops-study-finds/ 

If I need to summarize the article above, I would say: “It’s good to be in the affiliate marketing business!” 👍

The post talks about how the pandemic boosted online sales and we affiliate marketers were not left out of it. In general, retailers have kept their affiliate programs intact compared to ad spending, which saw a decrease.

I am glad to see this business model has proved itself of being resilient in the direst of times!

On this positive note, let’s switch to the beloved SEO that helps us prosper and thrive 😁

Page experience: a new Google ranking factor

👉👉👉 yoast.com/page-experience-google-ranking-factor/ 

Did you know Google has got a new ranking factor? It’s called Web Vitals, “a new set of metrics to measure the speed and user experience of websites.”

This month, Google announced that Web Vitals will be added to the core algorithm as one of the ways to rank websites.

The change will happen somewhere in 2021 but we should start preparing for it now

In their article, Yoast explains in-depth what the new metric is about and how to measure and improve it. A highly recommended read!

Yoast new metric
Image credit: support.google.com

Switching from something Google plans to measure to something it does not…

Google: We Don’t Explicitly Measure EAT In Search

👉👉👉 seroundtable.com/google-explicitly-measure-eat-29653.html

While Google has been telling us how EAT,expertise, authoritativeness, and so on are important, in fact, it… does not measure it 🙀

According to John Mueller, EAT is “not something we’d explicitly measure for Search — it’s a concept we wrote about in our Quality Rater’s guidelines.” 😮

Why is it like this? 

Well, with the current level of the technology, it’s very hard for Google to quantify and verify it. But it does not mean that in the future, Google won’t suddenly become able to check it.

So while now, EAT is not that important, you should still do a minimal set of EAT as perps for the SEO of tomorrow 😅 (that may arrive in.. 2-3 years? 🤔 🔮😜)

Twitter discussion on if Google does not measure EAT

Now, to the link building!

4 reasons to build more links from the same website

👉👉👉 ahrefs.com/blog/links-from-same-domain/

Do you build more than one backlink from the same site? 

I usually don’t. I have considered it a waste of time since I thought that only the number of unique referring domains matter.

Well, this post from Ahrefs shows us why this thinking is wrong!

They talk about four reasons to build more links from the same site:

  1. Increase the ‘authority’ of your pages
  2. Get links to more pages
  3. Get more referral traffic
  4. Build links more easily

To read about it in detail, head over to the article👆

A chart showing organic search topic
Image credit: ahrefs.com

And now… here’s my shameless plug! 🙈

20+ tips and tricks about how to manually disavow backlinks fast using automation based on my experience

👉👉👉 livingoffcloud.com/manually-disavow-backlinks-tips/ 

I usually do not mention my own posts in a news roundup. After all, it’s a place to present nuggets I found on the other sites!

But for this post about tips and tricks for manual disavow, I couldn’t help but break my rule 🙈

I am quite proud of the results I achieved and want to share it again and again! 🤣 

If you need to do some disavowing and you do not plan to buy any tools to do it, my post might be very helpful for you. Check it out!

A graph showing when the new disavow file was uploaded

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