Newbie Question(s) so dumb, you're afraid to even ask!

Elon Tusk said:
Can anyone tell me, is it possible to transfer the ownership of a specific Amazon tracking ID to another person?

Or delete a tracking ID from my account, so a buyer of a given site can simply create the same tracking ID on their account? Without the need to change tracking IDs on the site?

I ask because I'm in the process of selling a site and the buyer seems to expect me to hand over my amazon account, but this isn't an option because I have other sites using amazon etc, also it's tied to my personal info (tax, bank, etc).

Just to check, it is the norm for the buyer to have the responsibility of changing the tracking IDs to their own account eh? Trying to make the transaction go smoothly so I've offered to change the tracking IDs myself (unfortunately I used amzn short links for some posts) would appreciate any advice
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Not possible to transfer tag to another account. Never hand over your Amazon account. They need to create their own account and tracking IDs. Usually it's the buyer's responsibility to change the tracking IDs. However, I've always done it for the buyers of my websites since it's a simple database search and replace when you don't use short urls.
 
Does Ezoic, Mediavine etc, mess up the design of a site as much as Adsense?

I might have asked this before, but I added Adsense to some pages and it's very aggressive. Definitely not what I would ever have done, even in 2011.
 
Anyone seen (or read a good case study highlighting) a clear correlation between a big YouTube push and rankings growth? My thinking is thousands more nofollows from a trusted platform, many of which are clicked on by actual users, surely must be decently strong authority and relevancy signals?

Trying to convince my Neolithic corporate overlords to double down on video development but despite the brand being in clear decline (a'la Trends data) branding alone is not enough of a justification apparently, nor are conversions because they see rates next to organic search/paid search and scoff..
 
bernard said:
Does Ezoic, Mediavine etc, mess up the design of a site as much as Adsense?
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Stuff like Adsense Auto Ads and Ezoic try to split test positions on pages. It can be random and crazy, like even in footers and headers. Adsense is even removing padding or margins so they can place larger ads.

Mediavine and the like also auto load ads but they do it in the main content at regular intervals that you can decide. I would say that these do not affect your design, where as the ones above do.

harrytwatter said:
My thinking is thousands more nofollows from a trusted platform, many of which are clicked on by actual users, surely must be decently strong authority and relevancy signals?
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I would tend to agree, especially after Google launched the newer a rel="" options like sponsored, ug, and whatever the other one is. They obviously want to take nofollow into account in some fashion and need us to train their algorithms about which they should count or not.

The Income School guys always go hard on Youtube for their sites. Whether or not it works out well for them organically, I don't know, but they manage to push respectable traffic through. You might dig around their posts and see what you can find.
 
When did Adsense become so strict?

I built a nice little directory site with content I scraped from Google Maps and a couple of hours of manual data entry, plus added some guides and a nice design, but it keeps getting rejected for thin content.

So Adsense basically won't allow Adsense on a site if it has "auto generated" template posts, regardless if it has a bunch of other content?
 
miketpowell said:
Pick boring/large niches so that your success is not limited by some tiny niche. Don't do the stuff everyone else is chasing, find the super boring stuff. There are so many billion-dollar niches that are incredibly unsaturated
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Cool! Any good examples what you mean by large and boring niche?
 
algospider said:
Cool! Any good examples what you mean by large and boring niche?
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Data type stuff - finding badly formated data that people search for with long-tail keywords.

For example, I've looked at finance-type data stuff. There is so much data generated each day from the markets there are many businesses that specialized in just saving and storing it and offering it for resell. Well, that might have used to be the only viable model. But with how cheap server space is much of that data you can probably build sites around having it and ranking for people looking for it and just giving it away for free mostly with display ads.

Also, it will help with main higher volume keywords. If you make a site that specializes in having option history data for S&P 500 stocks (such as what did an Amazon 7/16 call option for $3000 sell for throughout the day over the last 6 months or something) you can probably also rank easier for "how to trade options" or something.
 
What's the best way to go about deleting posts marked as "Discovered Not Indexed" in GSC that won't index even after force-indexing them multiple times? Should they just be deleted or is there something that needs to be done in GSC to signal to Google that the posts have been deleted? I'm not talking about 404-ing or anything like that- these posts have 0 links and haven't gotten a single visitor in the past 6+ months.
 
DanielS said:
What's the best way to go about deleting posts marked as "Discovered Not Indexed" in GSC that won't index even after force-indexing them multiple times? Should they just be deleted or is there something that needs to be done in GSC to signal to Google that the posts have been deleted? I'm not talking about 404-ing or anything like that- these posts have 0 links and haven't gotten a single visitor in the past 6+ months.
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I wouldn't do this. If you wrote them to your standards, they're good posts and you just need page rank to them to justify them indexing. They're likely optimized for keywords that are worth going after since you already wrote them too. If they suck I'd just improve them a bit.

But 404-ing is the correct way to do this. The "urgent" way is to make them show a 410 error, where 404 is "missing but might come back" and 410 is "gone on purpose".

Back to my original point, nearly everyone with indexing problems don't have indexing problems. They have page rank problems. The solution is to get more of it.
 
Let's say I'm trying to rank for:
  • "dark chocolate gummy bears" (search volume 10-100) vs
  • "dark chocolate covered gummy bears" (search volume 100-1K).
What is the impact (from Google's perspective) of writing a title like "Best mouth watering dark chocolate gummy bears"? Are they going to ignore the supporting words and rank for the direct phase? Or are you better off targeting just the phrase directly in your title?

Is it possible if you used the higher search volume key phrase in your title, and included the lower volume key phrase in a subheading within the article to get ranked for the smaller volume phrase?

Later I decide I wanted to rank for more terms in the gummy bear family:
"dark chocolate gummy bears"
"milk chocolate gummy bears"
"white chocolate gummy bears"

Would it be better to write 3 separate articles targeting those or just add on to the original article? And if it is better to just make one larger article, is the sandbox going to start over because I updated the page?
 
NSG said:
Let's say I'm trying to rank for:
  • "dark chocolate gummy bears" (search volume 10-100) vs
  • "dark chocolate covered gummy bears" (search volume 100-1K).
What is the impact (from Google's perspective) of writing a title like "Best mouth watering dark chocolate gummy bears"? Are they going to ignore the supporting words and rank for the direct phase? Or are you better off targeting just the phrase directly in your title?
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The word "covered" changes the intent of the search by narrowing down the product specifications, so I'd consider these different things (assuming chocolate flavored gummy bears exist as opposed to normal ones coated in chocolate).

Google won't ignore the supporting words but it won't hurt your ability to rank for the main phrase, considering you'll be doing a lot more on-page SEO that tells them what you intend to rank for. I'd rephrase that title for the users and for Google though, like "The Best Dark Chocolate Gummy Bears Your Mouth is Already Begging For" or whatever. It pushes the main keyword closer to the front (will probably improve your click through rating for users and signifies importance for Google). Users need to see the main key phrase ASAP or you risk losing them.

NSG said:
Is it possible if you used the higher search volume key phrase in your title, and included the lower volume key phrase in a subheading within the article to get ranked for the smaller volume phrase?
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Absolutely, but they need to be tightly related keywords, with one acting as the parent and the other acting as a related child. It doesn't have to be this way but you'll find a much greater success rate if you do it this way.

NSG said:
Would it be better to write 3 separate articles targeting those or just add on to the original article? And if it is better to just make one larger article, is the sandbox going to start over because I updated the page?
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Separate articles based on the intent. Dark is not Milk is not White. The sandbox doesn't start over by updating the page. You tend to see a boost because you restart your freshness score to 100% and then it slowly decays again.
 
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Say I wanted to generate a site using data - like government data or very reliable data - with the intention of turning that into pages with unique insights, ranking those pages, earning traffic and then monetizing it somehow..... where would I find said data?

Are there some obvious search strings to find these types of things?

...I'm so green to this stuff I don't even know how to ask the damn question!
 
illmasterj said:
Say I wanted to generate a site using data - like government data or very reliable data - with the intention of turning that into pages with unique insights, ranking those pages, earning traffic and then monetizing it somehow..... where would I find said data?

Are there some obvious search strings to find these types of things?

...I'm so green to this stuff I don't even know how to ask the damn question!
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Here is something:

https://www.programmableweb.com/apis

It's a list of free, open APIs from all kinds of sources.

Depending on where you live, you should try calling the local Departments of your government and ask them if they have some sort of data sharing, open knowledge, initiative. They usually have. If you're lucky, then they have common standards and publish data already.
 
Hi all, I've discovered this site a couple of days ago and have done a LOT of reading here already! I'm not from a Digital Marketing background so a lot of the content and concepts are completely new to me and weirdly I'm enjoying the feeling of being a complete newbie at something and knowing I have a lot to learn.

One of my early ideas is to start an informational website and build its traffic with the plan of eventually introducing ads and also funnelling the traffic towards an additional brokerage service I will offer down the line. I've got a free trial of SEMRUSH and the obvious keywords for the "niche" only have a monthly search volume of around 4,000.

Have I gone too narrow with this? My initial thought is potential for ad revenue is probably very limited with this level of search volume, but I still think the future brokerage can bring in decent income.

Does anyone have experience of ranking a site with low search volumes? And what kind of search volumes should I be targetting generally in any industry/niche to be profitable?
 
Gospel said:
I've got a free trial of SEMRUSH and the obvious keywords for the "niche" only have a monthly search volume of around 4,000.

Have I gone too narrow with this? My initial thought is potential for ad revenue is probably very limited with this level of search volume, but I still think the future brokerage can bring in decent income.
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Depends on how many of these keywords there are, how hot the traffic is from the intent of the keywords, and the value of the brokerage service. 4,000 isn't bad, when you consider you'll pick up a lot of long-tail keywords for each article, too (if you can rank them).

As far as ads go, if you want to offer a service, you'll probably not want to get as aggressive with the ads as you need to be to make it worth your while. I'd decide if the brokerage service is worth pursuing, and then making that the primary goal and forget about the ads, unless you also create some informational part of the site away from the main "funnel pages" that you can slam with ads. But even those should serve to lead people in need to your funnel pages.

The best advice I was ever given was to start at the point of conversion and work backwards. That sounds like your service, and nowhere in expanding outwards up your sales funnel do I see a point is sending your visitors to some other brokerage for pennies while they make thousands per conversion or whatever.

But yes, I make a lot of money on keywords with a lot less volume across a lot of posts. It's viable with ads.
 
Hello All,

Great to have found this site and already spent a good amount of time browsing some of the helpful posts!

I am interested in learning how to rank and rent websites. Can anybody suggest any viable course(s)/training to get me on the right path?

Many thanks and excited to be here!
 
What would be the reason for a post to be ranking on the first page for months, take the snippet, then a few days later lose all of it's keywords and it hasn't recovered any since then (4 months ago)?
 
jd90 said:
What would be the reason for a post to be ranking on the first page for months, take the snippet, then a few days later lose all of it's keywords and it hasn't recovered any since then (4 months ago)?
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A core update is often the cause of such a thing, where data is crunched and calculated offline and rolled back into the live algorithm. This can include "per page" calculations (usually with Penguin) and "whole site" quality calculations (Panda), among other things. The newer a site is or a page is, the more likely this is to occur. There's a window of time between the launch of a site and a page where you can "outperform yourself", which is why they've also added in time delays and sandboxes and all that, to combat this issue until they can roll out the accurately crunched data.
 
Ryuzaki said:
A core update is often the cause of such a thing, where data is crunched and calculated offline and rolled back into the live algorithm. This can include "per page" calculations (usually with Penguin) and "whole site" quality calculations (Panda), among other things. The newer a site is or a page is, the more likely this is to occur. There's a window of time between the launch of a site and a page where you can "outperform yourself", which is why they've also added in time delays and sandboxes and all that, to combat this issue until they can roll out the accurately crunched data.
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That makes a lot of sense. It's just a waiting game then as I improve my authority and trust?
 
jd90 said:
That makes a lot of sense. It's just a waiting game then as I improve my authority and trust?
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Sadly, yes. Time is one of the most important factors in SEO. That means you can lose a lot of time doing the wrong things because you don't get feedback soon enough. Takes a lot of experience before you can really understand what to do and how much to do it, etc. Make sure you learn from others mistakes and from what they do right!
 
So here's a question...

Starting a new site in a new niche. I have an old site from 2003-2011 or so that was once pretty prominent in its niche in the blogosphere, but I haven't put up new posts in years. Maybe I should revive it.

There's a lot of content on the old site that would be related to the new niche, though I wasn't specifically targeting the new niche at the time.

I'm about to begin uploading lots of content to the new site... some of it will be updated/reworked/souped-up and optimized content from the old site, with image improvements, tables, skyscraper technique, etc.

Would it be worthwhile to go into the old one while I'm at it, and "seed" links to the new content on the new site?? Or will the Powers that Be at Google regard that as private blog network douchebaggery?

Or should I be nuking the old blog posts and salting the Earth as I go?
 
@Bucksfu, if it's all relevant content linking to relevant content that's not duplicated, then sure, I'd link over, but I'd only do it one way. Not because I'm worried about Google, but that I'm trying to power up the new site and not leech it back to the old one that's powering up the new one.

Google doesn't care if you have real sites interlinking, if you aren't manipulating. Big companies interlink all of their sites and do it often with sitewide links. They're still kicking and making money.
 
Does anyone have any negatives to having more than one website on an email platform (e.g. Getresponse)? I would assume it's potentially cheaper to have one account than multiple for each website?
 
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