Wave Issue 30

First...

The nice thing about affiliate websites is they continue to work while you're on vacation or even while you're laid up in bed.

It's been a tough week for me being under the weather. I haven't had the energy to publish new content on my sites, but the writers have still been writing. Their articles are there waiting for me to go through and publish.

I'll keep this short. Here are some highlights of what's out there.

SEO

We Analyzed 208K Webpages. Here's What We Learned About Core Web Vitals and UX

Here's what Brian Dean and Backlinko learned after analyzing 208,085 webpages.

Large-scale analysis of Core Web Vitals scores, along with their relationship with UX.

There Are Four Kinds of Keyword Research; Make Sure You're Doing the Right One(s)

Rand Fishkin covers 4 types of keyword research:

Keyword research for SEO/PPC
Keyword research for social media marketing
Keyword research for content creation
Keyword research for market/audience research

Google’s search ranking system relies on signals like engagement, links, traffic, brand, referrals, and the digital equivalents of word-of-mouth. Earn those signals from all those other places, and Google will reward you with greater visibility and traffic.

Google's Mueller Offers Two Tips for Getting Indexed

There seems to be more and more people talk about indexing/deindexing issues, especially on newer sites. I've been seeing it myself on a 4-month old site.

John Mueller offered advice to someone during an office hours. First thing is to check for any technical issues, like ensuring your site is crawlable.

The second is to promote the site to encourage users to go to the page and site. It helps tell Google that the site is legitimate.

Content

Kieran Flanagan Twitter - 6 SEO strategies worth 500+ million monthly visits

6 SEO Strategies from billion-dollar companies that generated over 500+ million monthly visits in traffic. Think about if any strategies can be translated over to your site.

RapGenius - user-generated content
Pinterest - topic/clusters
Canva - extending your product via templates
PandaDoc - creating side doors for search
Wise - building new products for SEO
HubSpot - search-first content approach

Education

H1 Headings: Over 50% of SEOs Doing it Wrong?

Poll of nearly 2,000 SEOs shows more than 50% don't know what Google recommends for H1 headings. Does Google recommend only using one H1 heading? No.

Google’s John Mueller said in an office hours hangout that publishers are free to use as many H1 headings as they want.

7 (Proven) Ways To Quickly Weed Out Bad Sites - Flippa

Buying a website rather than building one can allow you earn decent income but you need to know how to weed out the bad sites from the good. Flippa gives their top 7 tips:

A Declining Website
No Comprehensive Traffic Analytics
The Site Generates Traffic from a Handful of Keywords
Buying a Site outside of Your Expertise
Buying a Site That Has Been Badly Hit by the Latest Google Update
Buying a Site With 'Direct Traffic' Only
No Definite Site Transition Plan

Blogging Burnout - How I overcome it

Burnout is something we'll all experience at one point or another. It's something that not many of us talk about, so it's good that Carl Broadbent talks about it here.

Blogging is a marathon and not seeing the quick returns can easily affect us negatively. Carl gives some of his top tips to control the burnout.

Case Study

5 Real Life Affiliate Site Examples (And What You Can Learn From Them)

Authority Hackers looks at another 5 affiliate sites and picks them apart to give us the good and bad. They look at low DR sites to see what can be learned from them.

Gael and Mark always do a good job of reviewing sites.

For another site review, Julie Adams reviews a boating and water sport site on Matt Diggity's YouTube channel.

News

What's new in Search | Google I/O Session

John Mueller talks about Search during his Google I/O Session. He does a broad overview of what's various topics like HTTP/2, Crawl Budget, Structured Data, Video Clip and Seek markups, and Google Search Console updates.

Each of the sections has URLs to specific resources you'll want to check out to understand more.

There are many more Google I/O Sessions to watch from Google Search Central too. See their whole playlist, which includes a few other good ones to watch like Preparing for page experience ranking.

Google Says PBNs Are Pretty Obvious

Google's John Mueller said that recognizing PBNs (public blog networks) is easy and "pretty obvious to the appropriate tools and basic scripts."

John adds that PBNs are just link schemes, and they'll respond in automated and manual ways.

MUM: A new AI milestone for understanding information

Google introduced their latest AI milestone, Multitask Unified Model (MUM), that's 1,000 times more powerful than BERT.

It's not just about understanding languages, but also generating it - in 75 languages. MUM is multimodal, so it also understands information in images and in the future, video and audio too.

Read all about it in their blog post.

WordPress 5.7.2 Patches a Critical Vulnerability

WordPress released an update to patch an Object Injection Vulnerability rated by the National Vulnerability Database as Critical.

Be sure to update your WordPress to 5.7.2 to patch the vulnerability.

Like Niche Surfer?

Let me know! Reply or email me at [email protected] I’d love to know what you think and if you have any ideas.

I’d also appreciate it if you shared it with fellow niche surfers.

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