Wave Issue 60

First...

I shared last week that I started to dive down the rabbit hole of buying aged domains and ended up purchasing more domains than I had time. I like all the domains and see potential with them, whether as a 301 Redirect or building a niche site on them.

I received a few emails from people who were interested in looking at the domains and potentially purchasing a domain. So what I did was set up a basic site to list the domains, their metrics, and my thoughts when I was bidding on them on the auction sites like GoDaddy.

I've already started to use three other domains I purchased. Two domains were 301 redirected to two of my current sites in the same niches.

On the third domain, I recovered the content from Wayback Machine to give Google some content to crawl. This site had content as late as March 2021. What's interesting is the site is already geting search impressions again. It's a good sign, and I'll start on keyword research and articles for this site soon.

On the 5 domains I've listed, I recovered Wayback content too, so that Google has some content to crawl. The recovery process isn't perfect due to it depending on what Wayback has available, but it's better than nothing. This will help get the domain some crawl budget and for when new content is uploaded.

The domains and the content are indexing already, so that's a great sign. Some are showing more pages in the index than others, because that depends on when I received the domain and put the content up. A couple of the domains I only received in the last two days and put up recovered content.

I'll be putting up more domains in the coming days. I don't have possession of the domains right after winning the auctions. I usually have to wait several days. For example, GoDaddy doesn't transfer you the domains for around 10 days.

All the available domains are listed at https://domains.yoyao.com, so check them out and buy them if you're interested.

Feel free to reply to this email if you have any questions about the domains.

Income Reports

November 2021 Monthly Income Reports

Here are the income reports from other niche site owners out there:

SEO

Keyword Cannibalization: What It (Really) Is & How to Fix It

Joshua Hardwick at Ahrefs covers keyword cannibalization and how to fix it. You can sign up for Ahrefs' free website tools account and use their platform to find which keywords have multiple pages ranking.

What keyword cannibalization is
Why keyword cannibalization is bad
How to find keyword cannibalization issues
How to fix keyword cannibalization issues
Bad keyword cannibalization solutions

How To Create an SEO-Friendly URL?

Onely offers up an in-depth article on URLs and how it can affect your site's SEO. There are lots of great info in here to browse through. I wish I had read something like this when I was just starting out, instead of making a bunch of mistakes along the way and learning from them. I'd much rather have just skipped all that.

Even these 3 nuggets would've saved me a bunch of time. I do all this now, but in the first niche site I ever created, I sure didn't:

"In a 2020 study, Backlinko found a correlation between the length of an URL and position in Google SERPs. Though the correlation was not major, they did discover that shorter URLs were more likely to rank higher."
"It’s best to omit stop words in URLs, such as “the,” “and,” “or,” “of,” “an,” “to,” etc. They don’t add meaning, and by avoiding them, you can keep the URLs shorter."
"You should also remove any redundant words – focus on only including words that describe the core of the page’s content."

Google Product Reviews Update 2.0 Analysis (December 2021)

Are you freaked out by the new Google Product Review Update and want to know how it will affect your websites?

Matt Diggity covers this thoughts on the update and what to do. He covers:

Update 1.0 Review Points
Using Product Images
Buying & Reviewing Products
Including Multiple Links

For another look at the Product Reviews Update, Income School made a video as well.

Tools and Resources

What are the Best Article Generator Software Tools In The Marketplace?

There are so many AI content generators out there now and still more to come. Amy Derungs at Niche Pursuits reviews 12 article generators - half of which I haven't even heard of.

I've tried a bunch before and some are decent for short copy, good for ads, lists, and generic paragraphs. Some tools are getting better though.

The best of the bunch for me in the article is Jarvis AI. Writesonic and Rytr are okay (Rytr still has a lifetime deal). Copysmith content just hasn't been usable for me. I have a lifetime deal with them and try to use it once in a while, but just don't get anything usable.

For me, I still use Closers Copy and Frase with Frase being the one I use the most because their own AI engine is the best I've used yet. Nothing is ever click and done, but they offer the most relevant content to edit from.

Closers Copy still has a lifetime deal going on and the price will increase in 2 days on Dec. 13th. Frase is monthly, but it is also a content optimizer at the same time.

Education

What Is Latent Semantic Indexing?

Loganix, a SEO agency, has been doing many "What is *" blog posts in the past weeks. This is a good one for many people who are trying to understand Google and how the algorithm reads content.

Latent Semantic Indexing is why tools like SurferSEO and Frase have become so useful in ranking content. As more and more people build niche sites, these tools help give you an edge because they help Google see your site as an authority in topics your site covers.

Related Entities vs Related Queries in Semantic SEO

RankRanger continues breaking down Semantic SEO in their blog and this one discusses the difference between Related Entities and Related Queries. This will help you understand how Google might rank your content for certain searches, but not rank you for other searches.

This is a good article to pair with the Latent Semantic Indexing article from Loganix in this week's digest.

ADTHRIVE vs MEDIAVINE - Which Is BETTER? (...And Why I Use Both!) - YouTube

Nice comparison from Morten Storgaard on the similarities and difference between Mediavine and Adthrive.

If you have 50,000 or 100,000 sessions on your site, you can apply to them. If you don't have that much traffic from English-speaking countries, do take a look at Ezoic. Ezoic doesn't have a minimum amount of traffic anymore after they've automated many things for users now.

Check out Ezoic.

Case Study

76 Sold Sites from Business Blueprint Emails: How Are They Performing Today?

Mushfiq goes through all 76 sites he had previously done due diligence on in the past year and shared them as potentially good niche sites to purchase. He shares what he found with how the sites ended up. His due diligence process ended up with good results:

73% of Sites Increased in Traffic
49% of Sites Doubled in Traffic
52 websites had an increase in AHREFs organic traffic,
10 websites had a decrease in AHREFs organic traffic,
9 websites were flat (less than 10% change), and
5 sites were 301 redirected

He also provides great case study summaries of some of 3 aged domains, 4 niche sites, and 3 interesting niches.

Mushfiq is one of the top website flippers in the game now and a great person to learn from. Check out his great course on website flipping and his due diligence process.

The “No Stone Unturned” Case Study: Update #1

The guys at Passive Income Unlocked have released their first update to their "No Stone Unturned" case study. I'm glad their doing this because I had plans to do this as well with one of my newest sites, but then life took over and I haven't created a blog post in quite some time. I've been building my site, but just not writing any monthly updates for it.

Their approach to building the new site is to cover one topic at a time, regardless of keyword competition. For their previous sites, they would write articles for low-competition keywords on many different topics.

My approach changed early last year to cover topics as fully as I could because I saw topic clusters / silos becoming a more important part of SEO. For me, I also like to think about the user experience on my sites. I want to provide all the information for users, so they don't need to go elsewhere.

So I like that these guys are talking about this strategy on their new site, but one thing I do disagree with is how they're combining some keywords into subheadings in a longer article. But of course, it depends on what Google's SERPs are giving you. It seems like they're combining keywords into one article without looking at the SERPs.

I get more into this in my how to do keyword research article where I use the dog food example with the below keywords as examples. I also covered why I like to organize and write using topic clusters, instead of low-competition keywords across multiple topics.

Question: Would you write 1 article, 4 separate articles or another combination?

Best dog food for puppies
Best dog food for puppies with sensitive stomachs
Best dog food for puppies with allergies
Best dog food for puppies with diarrhea

(My approach at the very end of the newsletter)

Note: If you do read my keyword research article, you can ignore the KGR stuff. It's gone from "very loose" to zero-use.

Niche Website Builders Review: 22 Backlinks Case Study

Mushfiq gives his review of his Shotgun Skyscraper Link Building campaign from Niche Website Builders. He built backlinks for his health niche site case study and got some pretty good results.

He was happy with NWB in the end and I was too in my skyscraper campaign from NWB. Read my skyscraper case study here. NWB also recently completed 100k word content order for me and I was pleased with the articles too.

If you're looking for content for link building services, NWB does a great job. Their Black Friday sale is over now, but you can still get 10% more content on content orders or 10% discount on link building services.

News

The 85 Best Small Business Ideas for 2022

Being able to obtain a full-time income from affiliate websites can be tough, so you may need to supplement your sites with some side income. Or maybe these ideas can get you a full-time income by itself. Here are some of the top ideas that Wordstream gives:

Best small business to start from home: web developer
Best stable small business: childcare owner
Best profitable small business: event planner
Easiest small business: notary
Most creative small business: travel planner

SEOs & Devs: Harmony in Tech - Official Trailer - YouTube

Google Search Central is coming out with a new series that aims to bridge the disconnect between SEO and Web Developers by highlighting the intersection of the two professions. Join host and SEO Martin Splitt and his guests for an in-depth conversation about their jobs and questions for each other.

Should be another good series of videos to help you understand Google's algorithm and SEO.

WordPress Security Plugin Exposes +1 Million Websites

The WPS Hide Login WordPress plugin had a security vulnerability that exposed the secret login page. Be sure to update your WPS Hide Login plugin if you haven't updated it yet.

I use the plugin myself for security. I combine it with Wordfence. On Wordfence, I immediately lockout any login attempts of usernames that don't exist.

For extra security, I also use a unique username for an administrator login. I don't use "admin" or 'website name' as a username as they're too easy to guess.

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.

Also, be sure to Whitelist [email protected] and/or drag the email to the Primary Inbox to make sure you don't miss the emails!

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

Puppy Food Approach: I'd write 4 separate articles because the SERPs show that it would support 4 articles. With the higher level article, I'd link to the longer-tail keyword articles and link back up.