1

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

What surprise has Amazon prepared for their affiliates for Prime Day? Why should you take the accessibility of your websites seriously? How to revive and monetize your stale email list

You can learn answers to all these questions and more from my September news roundup! In this news issue, we will talk about:

  • Tiered Amazon affiliate rates for October ♒
  • Why your website accessibility may be really important 🚨
  • News about the Wayback Machine and why it matters for you 🔙
  • Button click tracking with Google Tag Manager 🧈
  • Crawl budget optimization 🦀
  • Reviving a stale email list case study 📧
  • How Google adjusts its search to prepare for the U.S. vote ❎

Let’s dive in 🐋

Amazon Announces Tiered Affiliate Rates for October

👉👉👉 🤷‍♀️

Amazon has privately announced that they will introduce tiered affiliate rates for the month of October when their Prime Day will be held.

Amazon announcement

If you are an Amazon affiliate, you may have already received the email with the update. If not, you may receive it soon… or may not receive it at all 🤷‍♀️ It’s not clear yet if this will be applicable for every affiliate or only for the top earners 🤷‍♀️ 

I have not got it yet but I saw at least two affiliates reporting it on the forums 🔊

Amazon obviously wants to make their Prime Day be a success and that’s why they re-mobilize their army of affiliates 😏 So, now you need us ugh? 🙄

Ok, now – can you be sued for having a website with bad UI? It turns out you can!

How & Why Accessibility Matters for SEO

👉👉👉 searchenginejournal.com/seo-accessibility/379582

What is web accessibility? 🤔 According to Search Engine Journal:

In short, website accessibility is the act of making sure websites are accessible and usable for everyone.

In the post above, you can learn more about web accessibility is and how it’s applicable for SEO. Here, I just wanted to highlight legal implications if your website is not compliant with the web accessibility requirements ⚖

I stumbled upon this topic in one of the niche website forums. Someone asked if an email they received about the subject was legit. The email was saying something that the site owner “may be fined $75K-$150K for not complying and in addition get privately sued.” 😱🤔😐😑

It looked like a typical spam… and the person who got it thought so 🙄

However, after reading about the experience of the others who commented on the post, the topic-starter and all of us realized that this is a real deal 😬😱

Comments section
more comments

Apparently, it can cause you a lot of problems if someone decides to go against you with it, especially during these hard times. 

Why? Because, as Search Engine Journal mentions in their post:

A report […] found that 62% of accessibility practitioners surveyed in March and April 2020 reported that “COVID-19 has raised the awareness and impact of accessibility on the digital channel.”

So it does not look like a joke at all 😟

Head to the post ☝ to learn about how you can make your website complied with the accessibility requirements to avoid being fined 😬

Now let’s look at the news about one of the powerful free tools every SEO should know about and use: Wayback Machine.

Cloudflare And The Wayback Machine, Joining Forces For A More Reliable Web

👉👉👉 blog.archive.org/2020/09/17/internet-archive-partners-with-cloudflare-to-help-make-the-web-more-useful-and-reliable

I am sure you have heard of the Wayback Machine. It is the biggest digital archive of the internet 📚 Now, thanks to this deal, it will become even bigger and more reliable 🤩

But… Why should you care? 🤔

Well, Wayback Machine can be very helpful for you when you are vetting websites that you plan to acquire backlinks from 😏 

In my previous News Roundup, I mentioned a webinar with Matt Diggity where he said that it is important to check if the website in question was a PBN in the past. 

How you can do it? 🤔😉 By taking a look at it in Wayback Machine 😉

This allows you to avoid the sites with a potentially toxic backlink profile that can be useless or even harmful to your site (and, of course, to prevent you from wasting money if you are about to buy a backlink).

So this deal is good for us, SEO masters, since it makes Wayback Machine much stronger! 💪

If you want to know more about what the community thinks about the deal, read a discussion on Hacker News.

Moving on.. To tracking and optimizing!

How To Track Buttons With Google Tag Manager

👉👉👉 serpstat.com/blog/how-to-track-buttons-with-google-tag-manager

Optimizing your website for revenue is a low-hanging fruit of increasing income that is pretty much entirely in your control.

But what is not measured cannot be improved, right? 😉

That’s why you need to track important parameters of your site.

One of the best free tools to do that (or maybe the only one? 🤔) is Google Tag Manager.

The tutorial above teaches you how to track button clicks, which may be very useful if you have buttons with non-Amazon affiliate links (for Amazon links, you have AAWP 😉)

I use Google Tag Manager on regular basis to run Optimize experiments. I usually have 1-5 experiments at once running on some of my sites.

From my experience, I can say that Google Tag Manager can be a bit unintuitive to deal with (let’s put it that way 😅).

So you struggle with it, too, or just never tried it before, go and read the post.

Aaand the next item on our list is a kinda unusual way to improve your site. I am talking about optimizing the crawl budget.

All About Crawl Budget Optimization (& How One Site Used It to Double Organic Traffic in Under 3 Months)

👉👉👉 botify.com/blog/crawl-budget-optimization

I’ve heard many things about crawl budget including an unorthodox opinion that crawl budget is a myth 🤯

If you do not know what crawl budget is or how it works or want to learn more, this article is for you!

crawl budget is a myth
Image credit: botify.com

You will learn how to analyze crawl budget, how to optimize it, about potential problems, and more including a case study (you know how much I love them 😉).

It’s a truly comprehensive guide 👍 Loved it! 🤩

Meanwhile, I am sure you know that you can make a lot of money from email subscribers. Right? But is it easy to do? 🤔😬

How To Make $11.15 From 1,900 Email Subscribers!! 🤦 Reviving An Email List Case Study Update

👉👉👉 nichepursuits.com/how-to-make-11-15-from-1900-email-subscribers-%f0%9f%a4%a6-reviving-an-email-list-case-study-update

In August, Spenser from NichePursuits started a case study about reviving and monetizing a stale email list. I missed the first part but I did stumble upon the second part.

It seems like a very interesting case study since email marketing is something that is not very well covered (trust me 😅). I’ve also seen very few (pretty much 0️⃣) articles covering how to revive an old email list.

I personally have 2 email lists I would love to revive! 😂

In this update, Spenser shares the difficulties he’s facing along the road. Watch the update here:

And now, last but not least! Why it’s important that big companies (well I mostly mean FANG) are socially responsible and apolitical! 👍

Google Says It’s Eliminating Autocomplete Suggestions That Target Candidates Or Voting

👉👉👉 techcrunch.com/2020/09/10/google-autocomplete-election

It turns out that Google has political power 😒 and they recognize it very well:

The company says that it will now remove any Autocomplete predictions that seem to endorse or oppose a candidate or a political party, or that make a claim about voting or the electoral process. That would mean eliminating predictions like “you can vote by phone,” “you can’t vote by phone” or anything suggesting that you donate to a party or candidate.

It does not look like a big change… 😐 but at least, they are doing it!

Google also made some other changes to prepare for the upcoming U.S. presidential elections; you can read about them in the post above.

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


Don’t miss a post – subscribe to my newsletters!
I love my subscribers and often send them exclusive content that nobody else sees 🤗





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! 🤗

Click Here to Leave a Comment Below 1 comments