Wave Issue 107

First...

Have you started to see Q4 increases in earnings?

If this is your first Q4, you're going to continue to be giddy throughout Q4.

If you were hit by any of the Google Updates, the Q4 earning increases should help to lessen the sting of a decrease in traffic.

But that doesn't mean you should give up on it!

Now's a good time to perform a good audit of your site and see what you can improve over the next month.

Make the changes and get your traffic back by the time Q1 and lower earnings come around. Your increased traffic can then help to lessen the sting of a decrease in RPMs.

When revenues increase due to seasonality, it's common for people to take their foot off the gas pedal and not do much work over Q4 (that was me too).

Do take time off for holiday festivities and spending time with family and friends, but that doesn't mean you should take off for 2-3 months.

Remember, SEO takes time and any new content and changes you make will take time for you to see the improvements and traffic increases.

Depending on your current site's authority, niche, and competition - What you do in Q4 will most likely help you in Q1 and Q2.

Now's a great time to continue working on your site, so the Q1 Dip doesn't have as big of an impact on your site.

Always be publishing!

And for Black Friday / Cyber Monday, I'll be sending out a special mid-week BFCM issue. If you have a course, product, service, or anything else that will be on sale, feel free to send it my way for inclusion!

I've also set up a Black Friday Sale Page that I'll be adding to regularly to help you plan out your buys!

Niche Creators

Niche SaaS Creators - Q&A Interviews

This week's Niche Creator is Guillaume Souillard!

Guillaume is a Niche SaaS Creator from France. He contacted me last week to check out his SaaS - Affilisting.

Affilisting is a large database of over 11,000 affiliate programs and where to join them. It can save you so many hours of research. Even if you have a content-only site, adding affiliate links will only have upside to your earnings.

Check out his Q&A:

Guillaume Souillard

Income Reports

Income Reports for October 2022

These are the income reports that I've found so far:

Mike Donovan, Niche Twins - $39,807
Passive Income Unlocked - $36,822
Ron Stefanski, One Hour Professor - $24,271
Jasper Pieterse - $4,265
Keith Donovan, Niche Twins - $1,989

SEO

How Google Knows if a Document is Fresh? (Determining Document Freshness)

JC Chouinard takes a look at a Google patent that determines how it recognizes how fresh a document is. The 3 core freshness attributes used are:

HTTP last-modified-since
Proportion of “fresh” documents linking to the document
Creation and removal time of links pointing to the document

Search Off the Record: LIVE Q&A from brightonSEO

Join John, Lizzi, and guest, Myriam Jessier, SEO Trainer, for a live recording of SOTR from brightonSEO: a conference where SEOs gather to chat, network, and learn about search marketing.

In this episode, they answer a bunch of questions hand-picked before the event. They cover topics like which is better: subdomain or subdirectory, to criteria for penalizing backlinks, and the pros and cons to templated content outlines. Learn about adding schema types, image alt, and more!

If you prefer, there's also a transcript for this episode. I like skimming the transcripts like an article to find the good things. These look like edited transcripts, so it's better than others that are only auto-generated and shared.

Google October 2022 Spam Update : (at least) 7 types of websites shot down by Google

Alexis Rylko shared examples of sites hit by the Spam Update. Based on his examples, it's clear that Google is going after the PAA-only content sites.

I obviously don't know what the algorithm includes, but it seems Google focused on these site criteria:

New sites with quick growth and lots of content
Majority PAA content
Badly translated sites (those auto-generated ones)

He has a blog article on this, but it's in French. If you know how to read French or want to translate it, take a look at the full article

Canonical URLs: A Beginner‘s Guide to Canonical Tags

James Brockbacnk discusses canonical URLs and tags in the SEmrush blog. Understanding canonical URLs is essential knowledge for SEO. Implementing them correctly can help your site's performance on Google and other search engines.

The canonical URL is the URL for the master copy of a page when you have duplicate versions of that page. You set the canonical URL using a canonical tag in your HTML. Then, when Google crawls the page, it can distinguish this page from the duplicate pages.

You can already read James' Niche Creator interview that he previously did.

How To Fix “Alternate page with proper canonical tag” in Google Search Console

An "alternate page with proper canonical tag" error message in your GSC Index Coverage report indicates that a page is marked with the canonical tag pointing to another URL. The most likely culprits:

You have duplicate or thin content that you want to optimize,
You chose the best version of your content that you wanted to be displayed in search results, so
You marked your duplicate with the canonical tag that points to the primary URL.

Tools and Resources

Topical Map Delivery Example - Spiral Stairs

If you've been wondering what a Topical Map looks like, I shared my version of it recently. I share the spreadsheet and mind map deliverables that I give to clients, so they can start building topical authority.

Since I've shared this, I've seen another service copy my format. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery - right?

What do you do in your keyword and topic research to ensure you're covering everything you need to?

Affilisting - 11000+ affiliate programs list across 550+ niches

Affilisting.com is a really easy way to find the affiliate programs that match your niches through a list of 11111 programs and 556 niches.

Will help you save time when researching your next niche for a new affiliate site:

Use Affilisting to see if there are good affiliate programs.
Find current competitors to assess difficulty with Niche Site Metrics
Use LowFruits to extract the low-competition keywords from those competitors that you can target.

Grow Flow | Surfer’s AI Growth Management Platform

SurferSEO has now expanded their free plan to have no limitations in order to use the Grow Flow feature. The previous limit was having less than 100 daily impressions in order to use it for free, but now there's no limit.

Grow Flow gives you bite-sized tasks to increase organic traffic on your site. That includes keywords, links, and new article suggestions.

Check out all that GF gives you.

Content

How to Maximize Your Content — Whiteboard Friday

Content marketing expert Ross Simmonds walks you through the content life cycle, and how you can use it to ensure that the content that you're developing quarter after quarter, month after month, year after year, is actually maximized for ROI, results, and impact.

This is a good overview of repurposing content. As you look to build brands for your site, it's important to repurpose content or you'll be wasting time and effort creating new content for every platform and channel.

Link Building

Google Says Links Will Be Less Of A Ranking Factor In The Future

In the Search Off The Record podcast (also shared in this issue), John Mueller of Google said that he believes that over time, links as a ranking factor will be not as important and not as big as a ranking factor as it is today. In short, links won't be weighted as much as it is today in the future in Google's ranking algorithm.

Before you go screaming "link building is dead," John says later that links are still important because that's how Google discovers content.

Education

Why SEO localization is more effective than SEO website translations

Adriana Stein at Wix covers best practices when it comes to ranking foreign language websites.

If you're building foreign language sites, especially ones based on existing sites in your main language, this is a good read. It'll cover things like the differences between translation and SEO localization, and why simply translating a site won't drive organic traffic.

Using Google Search Operators In SEO and Beyond

FATJOE covers the majority of search operators to use in Google to help you fine-tune your keyword and competitor research.

Search operators are simple commands you type into the search bar when you’re on Google (or other top search engines, like Yahoo! and Bing). They refine results, showing you what you want to see immediately without trawling through dozens of pages first.

Case Study

How KK Ezekiel Earns $18k Per Month From A Troubleshooting-Tech Blog

KK Ezekiel is the latest guest on the Niche Pursuits podcast. He talks about how he built a $18k per month blog using smart keyword research and more.

If you liked his Niche Creator interview, be sure to check out the Niche Pursuits interview too.

SEO Split Test Result: Adding Month and Year to Page Title

SplitSignal tested adding the month and year to the page title for a travel site. When they put a Twitter poll up asking for guesses on organic clicks, 70% of voters said that clicks would increase.

Makes sense, right? For a travel site, if you're able to show updated results, searchers would want the latest information - wouldn't they?

Apparently not! There was a negative impact.

Can Placing FAQ Content Within a Collapsible Section Harm SEO?

SearchPilot tests putting FAQ content inside a collapsible section that requires JavaScript to render and if organic traffic will be affected. The reason most people do this is for a better user experience.

The result is that there is an impact, but not what most people would think.

51% in their Twitter poll said there'd be a negative impact on organic traffic, but in reality, it was the opposite!

News

Performance improvements in WordPress 6.1

Nice recap from Edwin Toonen on the Yoast blog on WordPress 6.1 and its many performance improvements. This release is a step in the right direction for full-site editing, bringing various customization options and improvements to the content creation and site creation experience. A big part of the update is the performance enhancement for speed to help with SEO.

They have another post on the editing side of the 6.1 update. They've added more design customization features that are making page builders less needed.

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Have a great week taking your niche sites to another level!