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LivingOffCloud SEO & Affiliate Marketing News Roundup📰: September, 2019

It’s now officially fall 🍂 and the back to school season is almost over. Everybody is already in the school 😁 Meanwhile, we, niche website masters, affiliate marketers, and SEO professionals, we never stop learning! Indeed, how can you stop if new changes are coming on almost a daily basis?

So let’s dig into the SEO & affiliate marketing news the internet brought us in September. September was the time when many significant changes happened that has shaken the world of SEO to its core.

First, I will talk about how Google makes our lives harder… or easier? 🤔 See for yourself:

👉 a huge change for nofollow links💥
👉 a new feature in the Search Console
👉 a crack-down on review rich snippets 🌟☠
👉 a new plugin for the native lazy loading of images

Then, we will get off Google’s back and will switch to:

👉 a case study about how to make your titles perfect 👌
👉 Pinterest SEO 😍
👉 a simple (but very technical) way to implement A/B page tests 🤹‍♀️

Let’s go! 🤪

Google Nofollow Links Ranking Change – How it Affects SEO

👉👉👉 searchenginejournal.com/google-nofollow-hints-seo/

Unless you are living under a proverbial rock of SEO, you must have heard of a huge change Google introduced in the SEO world. Now, no-follow links are being taken into account when calculating websites’ rankings 💥

This changes the whole field of SEO. 

There are many posts out there that discuss this change. However, I found that this particular one explains well the worries and hopes of the SEO world. It discusses what’s in it for publishers, how Google responded to criticism over the change, what the SEO community thinks, and more. It also mentions the other changes from Google, which are two new link types, namely user-generated content and sponsored.

A must-to-read if you want to understand the full impact of these novations.

google-nofollow-links-760x400[1]

On this note, let’s check another new thing Google has just introduced: Fresh data in the Search Console 😍

Performance on Search Results now with fresh data

👉👉👉 support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7576553#preliminary

On the first day of fall, Google introduced a new feature in the Search Console. Now, you can see the search data that is fresher than 3 days old 🎉

It is called Preliminary Data and it shows only in the Date Range and did not affect the Compare section.

search_console_preliminary_data

The changes are still being rolled out and some of you may not see it yet. 

I guess it’s a good feature but I am not sure it will be helpful for me to manage my SERP anxiety 😬 Now I have an incentive to check the changes in my rankings even more often… 😩😆

The next item on our list is yet another big change done by Google that has shaken the sphere of the rich snippet SEO. 

Google cracks down on some review rich results

👉👉👉 searchengineland.com/google-cracks-down-on-some-review-rich-results-322143

This is another big update (not that 💥-y though like the previous one) Google rolled out. This change affected review rich results and many websites stopped showing it in SERPs.

It was dubbed as Stargeddon since it killed so many star reviews in SERPs  ✨💀 It looks like that even The Wirecutter website, one of the best and well-known product review sites, lost their star reviews.

The post above discusses possible reasons for the rich results to disappear and what Google now expects to see in the schemas that are responsible for these rich snippets. It’s an especially useful reading if you own a website that got affected or plan to implement these schemas.

But not always Google makes us suffer. Sometimes, they want to help us, for example, by developing new free tools 😮

Google Launches a Native Lazy-loading Plugin for WordPress

👉👉👉 wordpress.org/plugins/native-lazyload

This is a new lazy-loading plugin developed by Google. To each image on the website where it is installed, the plugin adds a  “loading” attribute with a value of “lazy.” No setup required, you just install the plugin and you’re good to go.

Apart from that, if the new native lazy-loading attribute is not supported in a browser, you can rely on the fallback mechanism that the plugin provides. It includes custom JavaScript that is optimized for page load speed and does lazy loading.

The plugin seems like a great idea but its ratings and reviews are not so good 😒 It seems that indeed, not all browsers support the HTML image attribute loading= “lazy”. When it happens, the fallback Javascript code should take care of it. Unfortunately, it seems to not work so well since the reviewers reported multiple problems across various setups and browsers.

Also, it seems to not support featured images from what I see? 🤔

I tried out the plugin and did not see any issues. It did not make drastic changes in the website speed compared to the Lazy Loader plugin I use. I think I will stick to Lazy Loader, I really like how it shows a spinner while loading visual resources.

On this note, let’s switch from the news coming from Google and talk about other SEO things, for example, about article titles.

We Analyzed 1.5 Million Title Tags To Find Out What The Ideal Length Is For SEO In 2019 (Hint: It’s Not 80 Characters Anymore)

👉👉👉 authorityhacker.com/seo-title-tags

Now, that’s a massive article with a great data-driven case study about how to optimize article titles for SEO. Titles are “one of the most important factors when it comes to making your content relevant for your chosen keywords.”

From the article, you will learn about what the title is and what it is not, how Google rewrites titles, why it is bad, how to prevent it from doing it, and more and more useful info and stats. 

average-headline-length-1024x628[1]

The post also includes an example of how to write a perfect title 🤗

It made me look at the titles of the articles on my websites and oh my, do they need optimization! 😱 I used Screaming Frog Spider 🐸🕷 to do the analysis. The app gives excellent stats that show exactly how much you are in trouble.

Here are my results for one of my niche websites:

titles_for_one_of_my_websites

I guess I should start working on improving my titles ASAP🏃‍♀️💨

 

Now, let’s move onto a different type of SEO, which is much less covered out there. That is, the Pinterest SEO! 🤩📌📌📌

Pinterest SEO Simplified

👉👉👉 blog.tailwindapp.com/pinterest-seo-simplified

Tailwind, a Pinterest & Instagram managing app, has published another great post.

This time, they wrote t in depth about Pinterest SEO and how to make sure your pins do not get lost among other millions of pins.

I use almost all the tricks they talked about and my Pinterest accounts are booming, actually, 😉 So I can confirm it works!!!

If you are wondering whether Tailwind is a good app and is suitable for you, check my post about whether Tailwind’s worth it. In that post, I also talk about what works for me in Pinterest and what does not and some of it reflects the things the article talks about.

Now, let’s go into even more technical debris! 

A/B page tests: A simple way to split the traffic between your original + variation pages

I found it in the closed FaceBook group by AuthorityHackers, which I got access to after buying their course.

If you need to do split tests but don’t want to bother with all those fancy pants software out there aaaaaand you like to code aaaaaaand you are not afraid to make your hands dirty in .htaccess coding, here’s a simple way to do it 😉

This script will split the traffic between your original and variation pages. Also, you need to add a canonical link to the original page in your variation page.

According to the author, Paul Fournier:

That code redirects each listed page to its variation on uneven seconds. On even seconds it does nothing, just loading the original page. It’s a 302 temp redirect. Couple that with a canonical link and you’re set.

Just add it to your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
# Redirect the below URLs if the current second is an uneven number
RewriteCond %{TIME_SEC} [13579]$
RewriteRule ^best-viagra-pills/$ /best-viagra-pills-b/ [R=302,L]
RewriteRule ^best-poker-bot/$ /best-poker-bot-b/ [R=302,L]
RewriteRule ^best-cat-with-boots/$ /best-cat-with-boots-b/ [R=302,L]

The code, obviously, does not do any tracking of the final results (winner/loser) and you would need to implement it separately.

 

Hope you enjoyed my roundup for September!

Let me know what you think in the comments below. Or, even better, subscribe to my newsletter 😉

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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! 🤗

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