LivingOffCloud SEO & Affiliate Marketing News Roundup📰: November, 2019
Here in Montreal, Canada, it’s pretty much winter with snow ❄ and temperatures below freezing ⛄. For me, it’s the best time to snuggle at home and to double down on working on my sites… After all, Black Friday coming very soon! 🏪💰
I know that many of you are spending days and nights in front of your computers preparing for the biggest sales season of the year. I also know the time is always precious in our world so I hope I will make it a bit easier for you to keep up to date with the latest news in SEO and affiliate marketing world that happened in the last 30 days.
It was the time when several significant changes happened that has shaken the world of SEO to its core.
First, I will talk about Google (thanks to Google, it’s so easy to have something to write about every month! 😂):
- BERT Update
- The November 8 update (I know many have been affected by it 😢)
Then, we will briefly talk about Quora and then we’ll switch to an unusual source of entertainment news: mainstream media! This is media that is not related to SEO and affiliate marketing. We will take a look at 3 pieces including the one that was published at WSJ (oh yes 🤨)
Google BERT Update
At the end of October, Google announced yet a new search algorithm update that was named BERT. Citing Google, it’s the “biggest change of the last five years” and “one that will impact one in ten searches.”
BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers and aims to improve understanding of content and search queries, especially the long tail ones.
If you want to understand better how BERT works, check out this awesome slide deck “Google BERT and Family and the Natural Language Understanding Leaderboard Race.”
It was prepared by Dawn Anderson whos is one of the most interesting SEOs to follow in this area according to Yoast.
In her slides, she explains the science behind BERT and why it is such a big deal in the search engine world.
You can take a look at it from right here 👇👇👇
Google BERT and Family and the Natural Language Understanding Leaderboard Race from Dawn Anderson MSc DigM
The November 8, 2019 Google Update may have been a link related update
👉👉👉 mariehaynes.com/november-8-2019-google-update/
And of course, Google never stops updating its search algorithm 😆
After BERT, they released another kind of update on November 7-8. While Google claims this update was no different than any other regular updates they do monthly (not like BERT), it was very widely noticed by the community 💥
It seems that the update affected a huge number of webmasters and the ones who were affected negatively were also affected badly.
But what did Google change? 🤔
Marie Haynes and her team analyzed many websites that were negatively affected by the update and concluded that it could be an update related to backlinks.
Head over to the post above to read more about their investigation!
Quora Marketing: ~1 Million Views Generated. Here’s How to Replicate Our Success
👉👉👉 ahrefs.com/blog/quora-marketing/
Google keeps making our lives and business unpredictable “thanks” to their constant black-box updates. One of the ways to deal with it is to diversify your website traffic.
Recently, Ahref published an extensive guide about how to get traffic from Quora. So far, it’s the best guide on the subject I have seen. Check it out if you think you can utilize Quora for your advantage.
Misquoted and misunderstood: Why many in the search community don’t believe the WSJ about Google search
This is not the original article by WSJ (it’s behind a paywall) but it’s an interesting analysis of it by one of the SEO experts WSJ actually interviewed for the article.
Read it to learn what the, I would say, sensational WSJ article is about and what the SearchEngineaAnd writer who has been writing about SEO topics for over 16 years.
One thing that comes to my mind when I think about the WSJ article… Have they been negatively impacted by the latest Google updates? 🤔😆
The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising
👉👉👉 thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-here-its-called-online-advertising/
What monetization method brings you the most money? For me, since I switched from Adsense to Ezoic, display ads became one of the main sources of income 🤷♀️
That’s why when I saw this article, I jumped on to read it.
It’s a bit controversial article… but it raises some good points. Read it and decide for yourself!
Walmart appears to be gaining ground against Amazon
👉👉👉 cnbc.com/2019/11/04/walmart-appears-to-be-gaining-ground-against-amazon.html
Now, here’s an article about another biggest source of our income: Amazon. The Amazon Affiliate program is an easy and lucrative way to monetize a niche website so many are using it.
However, do we know if it is there to last? 🤔
The article looks at one of the main competitors of Amazon in e-commerce and it seems Walmart is closing the gap fast.
Still, it seems that Walmart has not understood the power of the affiliate network. Their regular online sales commission is only meager 1-4%. And for some categories, it’s 0% 😟
However, //Commerce (former VigLink) now offers automatic access to a 24% commission rate with Walmart 😲
Cookie length is 3 days and affiliate traffic’s accepted from Canada and USA.
If you are an existing //Commerce publisher, you can get affiliate links from the Merchant Explorer page. If you are not their publisher, you can register via my affiliate link.
What do you think guys? Would you like to try out Walmart? 🤔 I think it may convert as well as Amazon since it’s a well-known brand. I plan to take advantage of the holiday commission rate.
I hope you enjoyed my news roundup for November! Oh and while you are here, I just wanted to let you know that…
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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! 🤗
