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October 2020 News Roundup📰: What’s New In SEO & Affiliate Marketing

Somehow, it has happened that this News release is almost 75% about Google 🙈😂 it seems like the month of October 2020 was not the best month for both Google and Google users 😫

So in my October news roundup, we will talk about:

  • Indexing problems of Google 🎛
  • Consequences of indexing problems of Google 🦑
  • consequences of consequences of indexing problems of Google 🤣
  • The U.S. government’s stopped liking Google – what’s in it for us 🤔
  • interesting results of Amazon Prime Day 😮
  • some Bing news 🙄
  • And news in the world of education 😉

Let’s dive in 🐋

The “Request Indexing” feature of the URL Inspection Tool has been disabled

👉👉👉 https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6211453#url_inspection

If you used to submit new URLs of your site manually, you cannot do it anymore starting from October 14 🙁

Apparently, Google has disabled this feature until further notice 😮

URL inspection tool disabled

This is how it looks in the Search Console:

Page actions are temporarily disabled

Will this feature come back?

While Google claims it will, many are skeptical. Tom Rayner, a well-known SEO master, published a pol and this is what the poll showed:

Manual indexing disabled

I guess only time will tell…

If you really need to notify Google about new pages on your site, there might be a workaround. You can try to directly ping Google with the location of your sitemap

I have not tested if the workaround works it… all my new pages used to get indexed pretty quickly 🤷‍♀️ If I notice that it’s no longer the case, I will try this method.

But why did Google disable manual indexing? 🤔

Apparently, it is one of the consequences of indexing issues that Google’s been experiencing since the end of September.

Google indexing problem – confirmed on October 1, 2020

👉👉👉 https://cognitiveseo.com/blog/24578/google-indexing-problem/ 

It looks like Google has had a major bug in the indexing system 🐛🐜🕷

In order to get a good understanding of what has been happening, head over to the post. 

The article talks about when the problems started, how they started, who was affected (their own blog was, actually 😬), and what Google has been saying 🙄

If you are experiencing a search traffic drop in the last few weeks, there is a chance that it’s happening because of the indexing issues.

Google now hides full addresses on the Chrome browser (version 86)

👉👉👉 https://www.chromestatus.com/features/6256768407568384 

As I mentioned in my August News release, Google’s decided to hide full URLs in the URL bar keeping only the domain name.

The Chrome browser version that contains this change was released on October 6.

I bet you have noticed that already 🤣 I definitely have and the change has been annoying me a lot 😤

it took me a while to disable it. However, the fix is very simple: You need to right click on the URL bar and check Always show full URLs on 👇😀

Choose
Image credit: androidpolice.com

The US government sues Google for alleged anticompetitive abuses in search

👉👉👉 https://edition.cnn.com/2020/10/20/tech/doj-google-antitrust-case/index.html 

Surprise-surprise! The government is bringing its iron fist over the head of one of the biggest tech companies 😱

The Trump administration on Tuesday sued Google in what is the largest antitrust case against a tech company in more than two decades.

This is the biggest lawsuit since the United States v. Microsoft Corp. case 😮

How can it affect us affiliate marketers who live off SEO? 🤔

First of all, such lawsuits may take years in order to have any significant impact on the status quo. It means that there’s nothing to worry about right now.

In the long term, it may mean that we’d have to do search optimization not only for Google but for a bunch of other search engines as well, such as Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc 🙄 Even if they’ll use the search index from Google, I bet they’ll add their own twist to it 😒

However, I feel that we should already pay attention to other SE. For example, Bing.

🦄 Website that I bought in April has 7.4% of search traffic coming from Bing. It may seem like a small number… however, when something happened in the Bing Land and my site temporarily lost ranking, I did notice it 😬 The traffic dropped, and more importantly, the revenue went down noticeably 😧

Because for the Bing traffic, the Earnings Per Thousand Visitors value (an Ezoic metric) is almost twice as high as for the Google traffic! These visitors bring in 14% of the ad revenue.

Yep, the Bing traffic seems to be very lucrative 🤑 I am seriously considering learning how to do search optimization for Bing.

So from my point of view, this lawsuit is a part of the normal course of action. Maybe, we will even gain from it more than we think!

Speaking of Bing…

Bing site explorer: old but new

👉👉👉 https://www.seroundtable.com/bing-site-explorer-relaunches-30277.html 

Bing has recently relaunched its Site Explorer, a tool that shows how Bing sees and understands your website.

Not sure how it looked before but this is how it looks now:

Bing's Site Explorer
Image credit: seroundtable.com

I took a look at Site Explorer in my Bing Search Console… 

…and I think it looks exactly like Windows File Explorer 🤦‍♀️ 

No! Not exactly – worse than File Explorer 🤦‍♀️ The sections that the main area is divided into are not resizable and they have horizontal scroll bars 🙀😖

A UI with the horizontal scroll is the worst UI ever 😫 They are sooo inconvenient to use!

Come on, Microsoft! If you want us to use Bing for real, you can do better 😂

My only hope that Site Explore still seems to be in its Beta (given the tag “Beta” showing next to its name in the side panel) so I hope they will fix it 🙏

Now, let’s move to the news of our other favorite tech giant… Amazon! 😆

Winners on Prime Day 2020? Non-Amazon sites

👉👉👉 https://www.practicalecommerce.com/winners-on-prime-day-2020-non-amazon-sites

As you know, Amazon decided to hold Prime Day in October and they again ran it for two days, Oct 13-14.

While they claimed that:

Third-party sellers—most of which are small and medium-sized businesses—surpassed $3.5 billion in sales on Prime Day—a nearly 60% year-over-year increase, growing even more than Amazon’s retail business

… many third-party sellers were not pleased with it. The advertising fees on Amazon were higher compared to the last year and the sales were not that great, still.

Here are some stats about Amazon sales:

[…] the average Amazon customer order size on Prime Day was $44.21, and 56 percent of consumers who shopped Amazon placed more than two orders. However, 45 percent of orders were under $20. The average order was $59.02 in 2019

And here are the numbers about e-commerce that are not on Amazon:

[…] on October 13 non-Amazon sites in the U.S. saw a 51 percent increase in online traffic compared with the first day of the 2019 event. Additionally, conversion rates on non-Amazon sites were up 16 percent compared with Prime Day 2019. Ecommerce sales for non-Amazon sites grew by 69 percent globally and 76 percent in the U.S. on October 13 compared with the first day of Prime Day 2019.

It gives some food for thought, right? 😮 Head over to the article above to read the rest.

On my sites, I did see an increase in the number of purchases during this period. However, given that I did not get the affiliate fee increase that I talked about in my previous report, I did not make a very significant amount 😒

And last but not least… there are some good but not-long-lasting news in the area of self-education 😊👨‍🎓👩‍🎓

Authority Hacker Pro course is open for enrollment

👉👉👉 https://livingoffcloud.com/recommends/authority-hacker-pro/ 

Authority Hacker Pro, one of the most comprehensive and complete courses about how to build and grow your niche website is currently open 🎉 

It does not happen very often. In fact, the course gets open only once a year. 

If you are looking for ways how to invest in yourself, this can be a perfect opportunity 😃

But you should hurry up since it will close at the midnight on Monday, October 26.

Want to know more? Check my review here 😀

Did you enjoy my News Roundup? Let me know what you think in the comments!


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