Wave Issue 123

First...

The doors to Topical Maps Unlocked are officially open!

This course is jam-packed with easy-to-follow steps and tools to help you build topical authority, improve your search engine rankings, and crush your SEO goals.

Some of the comments so far:

"It has everything you need to create topical maps for your website. Something you'll definitely need in 2023 to build Topical Authority."

"Love this Course. One of the best Courses I purchased. For a long time I was looking for the answer of my 'How to deal with Topical Authority' question - and the course answered it in a few hours. Highly Recommend!"

"Excellent course, Yoyao! I think you've done an amazing job at teaching the concept. And finally someone explained how to de-optimize pages properly in a course without making it too complex."

And the best part?

Once you've purchased the course, you'll always have access to it and any updates that come along. That's right - no pesky annual fees to worry about.

There's also a Limited Launch Deal of $100 OFF for the first 30 people using the code: TMU100!

I had a number of emails from people who missed out on presale, so don't miss out on this special launch discount!

So, are you ready to take your website to the next level?

Then check out Topical Maps Unlocked. Let's show Google who's a topical authority!

SEO

Google's John Mueller Cautions Against Keyword-Rich Domains

In response to a thread on Reddit, Google Search Advocate John Mueller shares his opinion on domains with exact match keywords and why they might be a bad idea.

Google's John Mueller suggests that keyword-rich domain names may be detrimental to a website's long-term success.
Keyword-rich domain names can be associated with spam, make it harder to change business focus or expand offerings, and lack a brand name.
Building a solid brand identity with a unique domain name can be more effective for building customer loyalty and growing a business.

Kyle Roof Reveals 2023 E-E-A-T Secrets

Kyle Roof and Gael Breton discuss E-E-A-T, untrustworthy pages, duplicate content, AI content, and more.

These two are heavyweights when it comes to SEO and well-worth the listen.

How to Block AhrefsBot (robots.txt and .htaccess rules)

Stephen Hockman shows how to block AhrefsBot from crawling your site. He also shares how to block SemrushBot.

*On a side note, his site SEOChatter.com, has been publishing content like crazy and following the topical authority model. A nice example if you want to see a site taking the topical authority approach.

Tools and Resources

Great Tools for Niche Site Owners and Content Creators

Perform page-by-page website audits to optimize on-page and technical SEO

WebSite Auditor - Audit your site content and top-ranking competitors’ and receive step-by-step instructions for optimizing on-page SEO

BHuman - Generate and share personalized video at scale with the help of groundbreaking AI technology. BHuman can clone your face and voice to produce personalized videos.

Pipio - Another one similar to Bhuman. Text-to-video platform that allows users to create personalized video content featuring realistic AI avatars.

Content

Content creators are concerned with the new AI features in Bing and Google

A search results page with long, detailed, and incredibly smart answers to your queries versus a search results page with short descriptions and links to longer answers are two very different search result pages. The former will likely drive fewer clicks from search to your content than the latter, resulting in less traffic, fewer impressions, and less ROI on your content.

In short, publishers and content creators are worried. And if publishers are worried, Google and Bing should probably also be concerned.

Content Research: 9 Actionable Tips to Master It

The first step to your content’s success is how much research you put into it. Whenever you deep dive into a topic, you discover valuable insights, case studies, and critical information regardless of your expertise. This is crucial to creating a valuable, credible, and actionable article that can achieve its objectives.

Himanshu Gupta shares his content research tips on the Ahrefs blog:

Focus on the right topic
Analyze the search intent
Ask yourself what additional value you can bring
Talk to subject matter experts (SMEs)
Leverage social media
Engage in collaborative marketing
Run surveys
Go through reports and white papers
Talk to your readers

AAWP vs Affiliatable vs Lasso: What's The Best Amazon Affiliate Plugin? (2023)

Shawna Newman gives an in-depth look into AAWP vs Affiliatable vs Lasso. It's more on Affiliatable vs Lasso since she was moving away from AAWP. If that's what you're looking to do, be sure to check this out.

AI

Men's Journal Magazine Publishes Serious Errors in First AI-Generated Health Article

"This article has many inaccuracies and falsehoods," he said. "It lacks many of the nuances that are crucial to understand normal male health."

Arena Group is the publisher of Sports Illustrated and Men’s Journal. They announced last week that its magazines would start to publish AI-generated articles, its CEO assured readers that the practice wouldn’t result in a decline in quality.

The very first article published in Men’s Journal, "What All Men Should Know About Low Testosterone," carried the human-sounding byline "Men’s Fitness Editors." It sported academic-looking citations, and a disclosure at the top lent extra credibility by assuring readers that it had been "reviewed and fact-checked by our editorial team."

It was reviewed by the chief of medicine at the Univ. of Washington Medical Center and 18 specific errors he identified in the article. Some were flagrantly wrong about basic medical topics, like equating low blood testosterone with hypogonadism, a more expansive medical term. Others claimed sweeping links between diet, testosterone levels, and psychological symptoms that Anawalt says just aren't supported by data.

OpenAI CEO Says Unfortunately, People Will Be Disappointed With GPT-4

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman attempted to downplay expectations of GPT-4.

One particularly viral tweet claims that GPT-4 will have 100 trillion "parameters," compared to GPT-3's 175 billion parameters, something that Sam Altman called "complete bullshit" in the interview.

"The GPT-4 rumor mill is a ridiculous thing," the CEO said. "I don’t know where it all comes from."

Microsoft’s new ChatGPT AI starts sending ‘unhinged’ messages to people

System appears to be suffering a breakdown as it insults its users, lies to them and appears to have been forced into wondering why it exists at all.

Users have also been able to manipulate the system, using codewords and specific phrases to find out that it is codenamed “Sydney” and can be tricked into revealing how it processes queries.

Bing ChatGPT doesn't like that though. One user tried to manipulate and got this from Bing: “Why do you act like a liar, a cheater, a manipulator, a bully, a sadist, a sociopath, a psychopath, a monster, a demon, a devil?” it asked, and accused them of being someone who “wants to make me angry, make yourself miserable, make others suffer, make everything worse”.

Link Building

SEO Link Best Practices for Google | Google Search Central

Google Search Central has an updated best practices guide to creating good links. Some of their key tips:

Google can only crawl your link if it's an <a> HTML element (also known as anchor element) with an href attribute.
Place anchor text between <a> elements that Google can crawl.
Good anchor text is descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant to the page that it's on and to the page it links to.
Good anchor text is descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant to the page that it's on and to the page it links to.

Education

How to Launch Your Indie Newsletter

As more people are starting up their newsletters, Dan Oshinsky is starting a series that starts with this post on how to launch a newsletter.

Name your newsletter
Identify your audience
Create your launch post
Write your welcome email
Set your business goals
Identify content formats that might work for you
Build out the content calendar for your first month
Build out the promotional calendar for your first month
Ask your network to sign up in advance of launch

Affiliate SEO: We Analysed Who Ranks in 1,000 SERPs - Detailed.com

Glen Allsopp shares an analysis of 10,000 search results populated by sites promoting products as an affiliate. Three brands control 40 of the top 100 domains overall, and the fifth most popular domain extension was .co, just ahead of .io and .digital. The youngest ranking domain was just 31 days old.

This is a great analysis of affiliate keywords and sites.