Wave Issue 14

First...

Looks like this Wave issue turned out to be one of the longer newsletters, if not the longest, with 11 links. There was just some good information out there. I still had more in my list, but narrowed it down to these links.

The first month of 2021 is almost over. Did you get done what you wanted?

I came up short in a couple goals, but that's because new goals popped up. It's an interesting start to the new year. I might talk about it in my January 2021 income report next week.

And...that's it. Super short intro this week as the good stuff is down below!

SEO

Drop In Search Traffic?

Matthew Woodward has been putting out lots of content recently on his YouTube channel.

Majority of the videos are less than 5 minutes with brief overviews of topics. This is one of the more detailed ones that covers what to do if you see a drop in search traffic.

Search traffic killing popups
Easy structured data optimization
How to increase website speed in 5 minutes
How to find & remove bad backlinks
How to create a simple link building strategy

See that first one on popups? I mentioned those interstitials in the past and how they hurt user experience.

Watching this video hurt, but also made me feel for him as he was the one who was browsing the site.

Google Search News (Jan ‘21)

John Mueller, the News Anchor, gives the latest updates on Google Search.

Crawling Updates - Updated crawl stats report. Definitely take a look at these reports to see how Google is crawling your sites.

For large site owners (1 million+ unique pages), they have a guide to managing crawl budget that's interesting. Even if your site is less than 1 million pages, you should still check this out. The Best Practices section is one that you should be following anyways in general to ensure Googlebot will have less problems crawling your site.

Indexing Updates - He breaks the news that the Request Indexing feature is back! Yea, I think everyone's been following that.

Link Building - He shares an article by Gisele Navarro list 28 Best Link-Building Campaigns that she saw last year. He does say that these are "Great examples of what sites can do."

Structured Data Testing Tool - It's not going away! It's just moving to schema.org.

That's all folks!

How to Avoid Layout Shifts Caused by Web Fonts

Core Web Vitals + Cumulative Layout Shifts (CLS) + Fonts

I'll admit, I never thought about fonts leading to potential layout shifts. Then again, I always use system fonts and not the web font.

I could see that Google/web fonts were slightly affecting site speed due to the additional requests made to load those web fonts. That's one of the main reasons I switched to using system fonts. Plus, I prefer the system fonts as they're simpler and not fancy, so easier for visitors to read.

This article gets into the weeds of fonts, but it's a good read. It's one of the "long-tail" topics of site speed and one I didn't think about previously.

It becomes a pretty technical article when he gets into how to change things, but the generalized information is great to read still.

Tools and Resources

How to Interlink Between 2 Sites That You Own Using Link Whisper - Link Whisper

Oooooh, very interesting. Interlinking between external sites that you own.

I'll call it "exterlinking" here to make it easier to refer to.

At first, I was thinking "Yes! Just what I needed for my network of sites!"

But as I thought more about it, I'm not sure if I'd get any use out of it. It'll be rare that I'm going to link between my sites.

If I did exterlink, I'd only do it once or twice. I don't want Google to think that I'm running a PBN (Private Blog Network) and exterlinking between all the sites.

There are large sites that do exterlink between themselves, so it does happen. But they're also large sites with massive authority. They'll also usually say that there's a relationship between them and/or they're part of the same media company.

I don't really know here. What do you think?

Would you exterlink between your sites? Do you already?

Check out Link Whisper if you want to more easily find interlinking opportunities.

Content

9 Best Blog Post Title Strategies - Niche Safari

Chris at Niche Safari gives 9 tips in creating your blog titles. There're some that I'm always using. I won't list all of them here, because it is his video, and he generates income off of views:

Start with Odd Numbers
Out 'List' Your Competitors
Keyword: Numbers (Brackets)

Interesting thing is there's no number 4 in the list of tips. So it's technically 8 tips?

Education

Niche Website Builders Podcast episode with Tyler Bishop, Ezoic CMO

Have Ezoic ads? Mark April 15th down on your calendars.

Tyler Bishop made a pre-announcement announcement that that's the target date for a product they're cooking up to crush Core Web Vitals. They said it's going to be the fastest way to serve ads.

Excited to see what they have up their sleeves.

He also gets into a whole lot more on display ad revenues and site speed, so be sure to listen!

It's funny, I was a guest on a podcast and I mentioned how I wasn't thinking about optimizing site speed too much at the moment. Ads will just slow sites down.

As long as the speed isn't egregious, it'll be fine for now. That's because there're are smarter people than me working on it right now. I didn't know who, but someone would come up with a better solution than what's out there now for sites with ads.

Turns out Ezoic is on it and will come out with something soon!

How to Start a Weight Loss or Tech Blog in 2020 (and Make Money)

Ron Stefanski has been creating niche sites since 2014. He blogs at onehourprofessor.com and he also has a YouTube channel.

He has this series of epic "How to Start a (name your niche) Blog" posts in various niches. What's great about them are the general overviews of the niches and looking at areas of focus within the niche.

He does everything from start to finish, so if you've built a site before, you'll be jumping around.

The meat and potatoes of these articles are in the beginning when he covers the niche overviews and then in the Begin Blogging sections with the type of posts you could write.

The rest is pretty stock info that's almost copy/paste across similar "how to" posts, but that's also what I'd do. When you get a visitor from the SERPs, that's probably the first time they've seen your site.

That first impression of "oh wow, this is everything I need" is what you want. They're not going to know the same information is in other how-to posts for other niches.

Two popular niche examples are Weight Loss and Technology.

But those are highly competitive niches and unless you found a great micro-niche under the general niche, it's going to be a loooong time before you see results. And that's assuming the content is top-notch.

11 Ways for Bloggers to Make Money

Spencer Haws goes through 11 different ways that bloggers (you and me) can make money. He also shows examples of sites that're utilizing the different monetization methods.

These are just 6 of the ways:

Display ads
Affiliate marketing
Sponsored Posts
Create an Online Course
Create a software product
Services the blogger offers

I think we all know #'s 1 and 2 as that's what we mostly focus on when it comes to monetizing what we're doing.

Think about your sites. Are there monetization opportunities that you're missing?

SERP Pursuit SEO Quiz (Holiday Ed.) w/ Brodie Clark & Izzi Smith

So this was a post during the holidays, but it's still a fun little quiz to test your knowledge on Google SERP features...

"Take the SERP Pursuit SEO Quiz by Brodie Clark and Izzi Smith of Ryte below to test your knowledge on the latest changes and updates to Google SERP features. You could be surprised about how much has changed in recent years!"

"Questions focus on SERP features such as Featured Snippets, rich results generated by Structured Data, Web Stories, the latest updates to the Surfaces Across Google program (soon renamed to “free product listings”), and much more."

Case Study

7 Incremental SEO Changes For Massive Results [Case Study]

Month 2 of Matt Diggity's Project Cashflow case study is here. It's actually his 3rd post, since his first post started the month count on Month 0.

"Project Cashflow Month Two is more about the incremental steps our team is taking to reach page one."

He goes through optimizing content, creating new content and building links. But what caught my eye was the 301 Redirects section when combining two sites together.

He talks about publishing a dedicated "Acquisition Page" on Project Cashflow for all the 301 Redirects of old pages.

The Acquisition Page described the merger of the two "companies" (sites). That helps to make it more natural for users and Google to understand why the other site was being merged into the new site. The page then links to the site's top 3 money pages.

Interesting strategy, you'd usually redirect individual pages to specific, related pages on your own site. Or create new pages with similar content to the old site's pages, and redirect the old pages to the new pages.

And as I kept reading...that's what he explains a bit later.

The reason he did it that way was because the majority of links went to the old site's homepage and not to individual pages. That does make more sense and makes for a cleaner transition. It'll also make it easier to link to target pages, because I'd venture to guess that his homepage links to multiple pages. The outgoing links on the Acquisition Page will be easier to control.

News

Lots of Google Updates

Barry Schwartz of SE Roundtable listed off a bunch of Google-related updates, including a possible smaller Search Ranking Algorithm Update on Jan. 27th. Did you get affected?

There were also small design updates in search results. Nothing huge.

If you like to know all things Google, do follow his YouTube channel. He's got his ears to the ground.