Wave Issue 90

First...

It seems like Google had another mini-update a couple days ago because the two sites that were hit have started to recover their previous rankings.

The main "fixes" I made after the update was announced to be over were:

Cleaned up interlinking, so that anchor text was diversified.
Tightened up silos with interlinking. Links needed to be more relevant.
Added or replaced photos to be more 'original'.
Adjusted and optimized content where needed.
I added author boxes to all the posts.

I haven't had the time to do this to every article either. I first focused on the ones that were previously ranking.

I don't know exactly what helped or didn't help, but it seemed enough to start getting rankings back.

Niche Creators

Niche Creators - Q&A Interviews - niche surfer

This week's two Niche Creators - Jason Mills and BowTiedWookie - are very active in sharing their knowledge on Twitter. Both share great tips and positive messages.

Check out their interviews:

Income Reports

June 2022 Income Reports

These are the June 2022 income reports that I've found. Many interesting reports here because some of them have had sites get hit from the Google May Core Update.

Passive Income Unlocked - $50,750
Ron Stefanski, One Hour Professor - $33,703
Mike Donovan, Niche Twins - $23,093
Carl Broadbent - $12,803
Tortoise Cash Flow - $5,346
Below Average Blogger - $5,266
Keith Mint, Minted Empire - $1,912
Jasper Pieterse - $1,887
WP Eagle - Had 3 of 4 public sites hit
Shaun Marrs - Month 6 update for his $1M case study

SEO

Google’s May 2022 Core Update - Analysis & Lessons

A good look from Mordy Oberstein on the Google Core Update in May. He focuses on financial and health sites here.

A little context goes a long way
Content accuracy is key
Go beyond the surface of search intent
Include relevant topics

It Is Safe To Delete Your Disavow Link File If No Manual Actions Or History Of Link Schemes, Google Said

In the recent SEO Office Hours, Google's John Mueller said it is probably safe to completely delete your link disavow file if you have not had manual actions for links before and/or you don't have a history of link schemes on the site.

He said, he would remove the disavow file because Google is good at ignoring typical spammy looking links that you do not build yourself.

Google Search Ranking Updates

This Google page details the latest ranking updates made to Google Search that are relevant to website owners. it links out to the different updates too.

It's a nice, central page to have for the major updates, but it doesn't list the smaller updates.

Pros & cons and other SERP annotations give us clues to creating great content!

In this blog post, Marie Haynes discusses her thoughts on how the pros & cons and other SERP annotations can give users clues on creating great content!

It's very interesting to see that the Pros and Cons that Google may list in the SERPs may not come from a Pros and Cons section in your content. Google is actually extracting their own pros and cons from paragraphs.

Freshness & SEO: An Underrated Concept

Chris Long talks about Content Freshness in Moz's blog. He explains why the entire SEO community has underrated the concept of “freshness”.

After working with a news organization and testing the learnings from that work on other sites, Chris and his team started to see the immense power that freshness updates could produce in SEO and on evergreen content.

Wondering if this means we'll start seeing more sites that show dates?

SEO Office Hours, June 3rd, 2022

This is a Onely summary of the most interesting questions and answers from the Google SEO Office Hours with John Mueller on June 3rd, 2022.

Can I use two HTTP result codes on a page?
Does using a CDN improve rankings if my site is already fast in my main country?
Should I disallow API requests to reduce crawling?
Should I use rel=”nofollow” on internal links?
Is there a way to force sitelinks to show up?
Our site embeds PDFs with iframes, should we OCR the text?
Does Google crawl URLs in structured data markup?

Tools and Resources

Great Deals Out There for Niche Site and Content Creators

AppSumo's Sumo Day 2022 starts on July 11th and lasts for only 96 hours. They're currently accepting giveaway entries.

There will also be some discounts during Sumo Day, so be sure to check in to see anything you're interested in might be on a discount.

Luminar - Edit photos like a pro in half the time using the power of AI. Definitely a very cool tool, even if you're not into photography. Can make those stock photos more unique. Check out a demo video.

The 13 best free keyword research tools for SEO

List of 13 Free keyword research tools to try out. Some are free trials, while others are completely free:

Google Search Console
Google Ads Keyword Planner
Google Trends
Google
Keywords Everywhere
Answer the Public
QuestionDB
Keyword Surfer
Keyword Sheeter
Ahrefs keyword generator
Moz
Keyworddit
Alsoasked

Content

8 Pillar Page Examples to Get Inspired By

Si Quan Ong from Ahrefs puts together 8 examples of pillar pages to get your creative juices flowing.

If you're not sure of how to create a pillar page / content hub, these are good examples for inspiration.

Education

Faster WordPress rendering with 3 lines of configuration

For the more technically-minded out there, this tip uses HTTP2 and .htaccess to load CSS as early as possible to solve the blocked rendering CSS.

Stoyan describes how to add code in Apache and NGINX with 2-3 lines of codes.

11 Google Sheets formulas SEOs should know

Some very useful Google Sheets formulas here from Jackie Chu.

Formula for Keyword Management - VLOOKUP, CONCATENATE, FLATTEN, LOWER, COUNTIF, SUMIF
Formulas for Internationalization - GOOGLETRANSLATE
Formulas for Content/URL Management - SPLIT, LEN, REGEXREPLACE
Formulas for Dashboards - SPAKRLINE

How We Used a Video Course to Promote Ahrefs (And Got 500K+ Views)

This is a good look from Tim Soulo, CMO at Ahrefs, on creating and promoting a video course. If you're thinking about a course, this is a good overview.

Reason number 5445131 why some SEOs destroy the reputation of SEO

A very interesting look at a site that used a counterfeited press release to generate about a thousand high authority links from Italian government websites.

I'm not endorsing this at all, but it is interesting to see the lengths that people will go to for backlinks.

Case Study

Just Another WordPress Programmatic SEO Build

Sam Partland shares his 1,000+ page programmatic SEO build using a combination of WordPress and Google Sheets (with plenty of formulas!).

It's very interesting look at programmatic SEO by using just Google Sheets, exporting a CSV, and importing the CSV into WordPress.

VPNs: The ULTIMATE Million Dollar Affiliate Niche?

Gael and Mark from Authority Hackers dive deep into a single niche, the VPN niche. They analyze the top players, looking at what they do, how they do link building, and so on. They draw lessons and conclusions from what these sites are doing in this fairly competitive niche.

Even if you are not in the VPN niche, you can expect to gain a lot of value from this episode.

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Have questions? 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 taking your niche sites to another level!