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

[Hanuman]

Maybe a good time to lean into the storm while others are retrenching or hunkered down...

Good point. I guess it's the opportunity cost. I am spending most of my content budget on other topics which I think are broader and have a better chance of bringing more traffic.

Although I am primarily focusing on publishing content on one broad niche (3.5 month old site right now), I have since started around 3-4 other websites. I do not want to have to face sandboxing issues later on. So, I have like a 1:5 post frequency on these sites against my main website. The idea is to front-load content on my main site and then go full-throttle on the other sites in 6-7 months time when all sites are out of the sandbox.

 

[Joseph George]

I bought an old domain. I was thinking of redirecting each page with backlinks to something i have or crreate a new page.
Considering Cloudflare's limited rules. Can i do the above using html redirects on S3?

 

[DanielS]

Not Acceptable!​

An appropriate representation of the requested resource could not be found on this server. This error was generated by Mod_Security.

Have any of you ever gotten this error when visiting a page on your website? Just got it today for one of my blog posts and don't know what it means. All I've done recently to my site is integrate it with Ezoic. I searched around and people are talking about editing the .htcaccess file for my website but I'm a little hesitant to start messing around with the backend of my website because I have no clue what these things mean and what goes where.

 

[DanielS]

Not Acceptable!​

An appropriate representation of the requested resource could not be found on this server. This error was generated by Mod_Security.

Have any of you ever gotten this error when visiting a page on your website? Just got it today for one of my blog posts and don't know what it means. All I've done recently to my site is integrate it with Ezoic. I searched around and people are talking about editing the .htcaccess file for my website but I'm a little hesitant to start messing around with the backend of my website because I have no clue what these things mean and what goes where.

Ended up fixing this issue. All I had to do was contact my hosting provider and get them to change some settings on their end to stop flagging my IP address as a security issue.

 

[NSG]

One of my goals is to sign up for Mediavine when I hit 50,000 sessions. I've noticed there seems to be a lot of bot traffic in google analytics. I've tried using filters (not sure how effective it's been) and I'm wondering if I should really be shooting for something much higher than 50,000 sessions to account for the bots before applying?

 

[DunderMannen]

One of my goals is to sign up for Mediavine when I hit 50,000 sessions. I've noticed there seems to be a lot of bot traffic in google analytics. I've tried using filters (not sure how effective it's been) and I'm wondering if I should really be shooting for something much higher than 50,000 sessions to account for the bots before applying?

Just stop caring about the total numbers and focus on hitting that 50k with Organic Sessions only. The excess traffic over that is just a bonus.

 

[NSG]

Just stop caring about the total numbers and focus on hitting that 50k with Organic Sessions only. The excess traffic over that is just a bonus.

How do you deal with the bots in the organic sessions then?

 

[Ryuzaki]

How do you deal with the bots in the organic sessions then?

Sadly, this isn't a problem you're going to solve. You can filter out ghost hosts (hits on your analytics that never came through your site), you can filter out known spam domains, known spam keywords, etc. But what you can't do is perfectly filter out organic bot traffic and worst of all, you can't fix historical data. This is for Google Analytics, I mean.

The fortunate part is the more traffic you get, the less meaningful the bot and spam noise is, until eventually it's a fraction of a percent and doesn't really affect your data.

Unless you're running huge database sites (these are particularly vulnerable in my experience, especially with tons of addresses listed), it's not something to worry about.

Mediavine's ad exchange partners are well aware of bots. As vague and frustrating as it is, @DunderMannen has the right idea. Just exceed their threshold some. You can apply at the moment you pass the threshold and it might turn out just fine. There's no rule that says you can't apply more than once, and it's not discouraged.

What you're really looking to do is get accepted by enough ad exchanges that you'll have a respectable RPM. Mediavine doesn't do any accepting or rejecting. The exchanges do. But where Mediavine does play a role is if you only get accepted by (and I'm making these numbers up) 4 out of 12 exchanges, they'll reject you because they can't guarantee you their great PRMs, which would hurt their reputation.

Maybe you get to 7 out of 12 and they accept you and you have average RPMs. Then you double your traffic and suddenly qualify for 10 out of 12 exchanges and your RPMs go up. The game never changes. You need more and more traffic to make more and more money at exponential rates due to higher RPMs due to higher acceptance by exchanges and their own advertisers.

So more traffic is always the thing to focus on and it won't change even when you get accepted.

 

[getRichOrBT]

Following the low comp low volume method, what do you generally expect for page views per month per article?

Would a low end estimate of around 200 be suitable to avoid inflating expectations?

 

[Reapzy]

Hey guys,

I am curious to note when it comes to building silos - is it best practice to find supporting articles with keywords that are within your Avalanche Search Volume?

Or would a supporting article purely be for topical relevance so it can boost the main article?

Or is it good to mix the two?

I ask this because there are some money keywords I am targeting, but I am struggling to find some supporting articles that are within my Avalanche SV and low competition.

There are some KW opportunities but the competition is fierce (KD 30-40/100 according to KW Finder, SERPs dominated by DR 40 - 90s).

Any input is much appreciated!

 

[willyboy85]

Is it always best to hire via Upwork and effectively train/sculpt writers into the beasts you want them to be or sometimes are content farm/textbrokers simply the fastest/best way to get content clusters nailed?

 

[PulseOften]

About aging posts and editing.

I ordered a bunch of articles that are ready to edit. A lot of them aren't optimized yet (not formatted properly for the snippet, possibly low CTR because of the intro, no images, OBL, etc.)

But, the articles are 85% there in terms of content scope, so I won't be changing them drastically or anything.

My question is, do I publish them immediately, and then play the editor? So that Google sees them and the post ages, etc.

Or do the usual, which is to edit each article with formatting, images, links, etc. All before publishing.

I really don't want my posts to sit around, not aging, but at the same time, I don't want Google to recalculate the post's rankings because of editing further down the line. Thank you.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Following the low comp low volume method, what do you generally expect for page views per month per article?

Would a low end estimate of around 200 be suitable to avoid inflating expectations?

Sure. A keyword with 100 search volume might get 40 clicks per month at the #1 spot, but you'll also rank for a lot of keyword variations, synonyms, and long tails. At the same time, many you won't rank for and some you'll rank for that get way more traffic than you ever expected.

Any low comp / low volume method needs to be compensated for by publishing at higher volume by casting way more fishing rods, in which case worrying about the average estimated monthly traffic to each doesn't really matter. What you end up feeding off of is the whales you find, not all the tiny little fish. Those might end up making up 20% of your total traffic. The whales will make up 80%.

You're not looking for whales. You're just casting tons of rods. The success isn't in what gets caught on the fishing line. It's in the act of casting the rods correctly (keyword research, on-page, and so forth). What comes after shouldn't be the focus, because if you're doing it right enough times, it will come regardless.

Hey guys,

I am curious to note when it comes to building silos - is it best practice to find supporting articles with keywords that are within your Avalanche Search Volume?

Or would a supporting article purely be for topical relevance so it can boost the main article?

Or is it good to mix the two?

I ask this because there are some money keywords I am targeting, but I am struggling to find some supporting articles that are within my Avalanche SV and low competition.

There are some KW opportunities but the competition is fierce (KD 30-40/100 according to KW Finder, SERPs dominated by DR 40 - 90s).

Any input is much appreciated!

It's not a black or white issue. If you can find keywords to use for topical relevance that you can rank for now, then by all means go for it. If you can't find ones you can rank for now, but they still support the money keyword, they're still worth publishing. You may be able to rank for them later if you don't ignore link building. If you never rank for them, they're still worth having, and will still eventually earn their keep.

Is it always best to hire via Upwork and effectively train/sculpt writers into the beasts you want them to be or sometimes are content farm/textbrokers simply the fastest/best way to get content clusters nailed?

No, it's not always best. It depends on your goals, your demands, your needs, and who can meet those needs. Volume is one particular issue that determines which is best. If you want to reach volume with your own team, you'll spend all the time and opportunity cost training, evaluating, firing, hiring, training, hiring someone to do all that and training them, dealing with editors and all that. Or you can pay an agency to take care of that for you.

Crap like TextBrokers doesn't bring the same benefits as an agency, though it'll come at the same costs most of the time. If I'm paying a premium, I want the benefits, which mainly include all the hiring and training and firing and editing and mainly accountability.

About aging posts and editing.

I ordered a bunch of articles that are ready to edit. A lot of them aren't optimized yet (not formatted properly for the snippet, possibly low CTR because of the intro, no images, OBL, etc.)

But, the articles are 85% there in terms of content scope, so I won't be changing them drastically or anything.

My question is, do I publish them immediately, and then play the editor? So that Google sees them and the post ages, etc.

Or do the usual, which is to edit each article with formatting, images, links, etc. All before publishing.

I really don't want my posts to sit around, not aging, but at the same time, I don't want Google to recalculate the post's rankings because of editing further down the line. Thank you.

My opinion is to get them up to snuff then publish. Then you can move on with your life. Otherwise you're feeding Google sub-par crap and you'll tank your sitewide quality score for a long time. Even if you come back around and fix them rather quickly, you can wait for 6 months for your quality score to recover (we're talking Panda here).

Plus, you're just leaving open loops in your mind and your work flow. The next question becomes "do I go ahead and publish 100 more unfinished articles or do I finish the ones I already published and 'slow down' my progress". Just do it right the first time so life can move on.

 

[Reapzy]

Sure. A keyword with 100 search volume might get 40 clicks per month at the #1 spot, but you'll also rank for a lot of keyword variations, synonyms, and long tails. At the same time, many you won't rank for and some you'll rank for that get way more traffic than you ever expected.

Any low comp / low volume method needs to be compensated for by publishing at higher volume by casting way more fishing rods, in which case worrying about the average estimated monthly traffic to each doesn't really matter. What you end up feeding off of is the whales you find, not all the tiny little fish. Those might end up making up 20% of your total traffic. The whales will make up 80%.

You're not looking for whales. You're just casting tons of rods. The success isn't in what gets caught on the fishing line. It's in the act of casting the rods correctly (keyword research, on-page, and so forth). What comes after shouldn't be the focus, because if you're doing it right enough times, it will come regardless.


It's not a black or white issue. If you can find keywords to use for topical relevance that you can rank for now, then by all means go for it. If you can't find ones you can rank for now, but they still support the money keyword, they're still worth publishing. You may be able to rank for them later if you don't ignore link building. If you never rank for them, they're still worth having, and will still eventually earn their keep.


No, it's not always best. It depends on your goals, your demands, your needs, and who can meet those needs. Volume is one particular issue that determines which is best. If you want to reach volume with your own team, you'll spend all the time and opportunity cost training, evaluating, firing, hiring, training, hiring someone to do all that and training them, dealing with editors and all that. Or you can pay an agency to take care of that for you.

Crap like TextBrokers doesn't bring the same benefits as an agency, though it'll come at the same costs most of the time. If I'm paying a premium, I want the benefits, which mainly include all the hiring and training and firing and editing and mainly accountability.


My opinion is to get them up to snuff then publish. Then you can move on with your life. Otherwise you're feeding Google sub-par crap and you'll tank your sitewide quality score for a long time. Even if you come back around and fix them rather quickly, you can wait for 6 months for your quality score to recover (we're talking Panda here).

Plus, you're just leaving open loops in your mind and your work flow. The next question becomes "do I go ahead and publish 100 more unfinished articles or do I finish the ones I already published and 'slow down' my progress". Just do it right the first time so life can move on.

Appreciate the reply, thank you.

Also, have another question; I've gotten to the point where my website is getting a decent amount of traffic and I am starting to get outreached for guest posts.

My initial thoughts are to stay away as I value the quality of my content too much, but at the same time if I set strict guidelines, would it not be beneficial to get someone to write for me in exchange for a backlink and some cash?

I would do my due diligence and vet the website properly to ensure that they are relevant to my niche, and if they provide good content that my audience would enjoy.

But is there a downside to accepting guest posts for $$? Is there anything else I should be suspicious about?

 

[JamaicanMoose]

Appreciate the reply, thank you.

Also, have another question; I've gotten to the point where my website is getting a decent amount of traffic and I am starting to get outreached for guest posts.

My initial thoughts are to stay away as I value the quality of my content too much, but at the same time if I set strict guidelines, would it not be beneficial to get someone to write for me in exchange for a backlink and some cash?

I would do my due diligence and vet the website properly to ensure that they are relevant to my niche, and if they provide good content that my audience would enjoy.

But is there a downside to accepting guest posts for $$? Is there anything else I should be suspicious about?

Tell them you want $250+ per sponsored post and you'll filter out the spammy requests from the legit brands real quick. I haven't had an issue doing that.

 

[Hanuman]

Appreciate the reply, thank you.

Also, have another question; I've gotten to the point where my website is getting a decent amount of traffic and I am starting to get outreached for guest posts.

My initial thoughts are to stay away as I value the quality of my content too much, but at the same time if I set strict guidelines, would it not be beneficial to get someone to write for me in exchange for a backlink and some cash?

I would do my due diligence and vet the website properly to ensure that they are relevant to my niche, and if they provide good content that my audience would enjoy.

But is there a downside to accepting guest posts for $$? Is there anything else I should be suspicious about?

What do you value more - the content, or the cash?

If you are enjoying good traffic, and getting paid for guest posts is an incremental addition to your revenue, I would stay away as the risks to accepting cash for a dofollow link outweighs the benefits.

If money is not the motivator here, and the destination link is good, what I would suggest is that you do keyword research of your own and suggest them a topic to write on, along with detailed outline of the headers you want to include in the article.

This way, you are basically outsourcing content production to a company and paying them with a backlink.

 

[Assblaster]

Should I be concerned that my new 3-month-old website (on a new domain) is doing very poorly or is it still too early to tell?

By poorly, I mean half of my keywords aren’t found by Serprobot, while the others are on page 3-6 in the SERPs. The thing is, all of the keywords are low volume (10-70), KGR, and have zero competition (no relevant sites, only a few forums in the top 5 at best). All of them are indexed on Google if I search for site:mysite.com, though. Most of them have been aging for at least 2 months already.

My previous and relatively successful website was already ranking in the top 10 for a bunch of its keywords in the same timeframe and with the same number of articles. I also think that my On-Page and KW research is decent at least since I got my previous website to ~30k visitors a month in under a year without any backlinks at all and with less than 50 articles.

I can’t tell if I’m impatient and overthinking it or if it’s an actual problem and requires a separate thread.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Should I be concerned that my new 3-month-old website (on a new domain) is doing very poorly or is it still too early to tell?

By poorly, I mean half of my keywords aren’t found by Serprobot, while the others are on page 3-6 in the SERPs. The thing is, all of the keywords are low volume (10-70), KGR, and have zero competition (no relevant sites, only a few forums in the top 5 at best). All of them are indexed on Google if I search for site:mysite.com, though. Most of them have been aging for at least 2 months already.

My previous and relatively successful website was already ranking in the top 10 for a bunch of its keywords in the same timeframe and with the same number of articles. I also think that my On-Page and KW research is decent at least since I got my previous website to ~30k visitors a month in under a year without any backlinks at all and with less than 50 articles.

I can’t tell if I’m impatient and overthinking it or if it’s an actual problem and requires a separate thread.

It's waaay too soon. And you're going to need some backlinks. It doesn't matter how low competition the keywords are. The pages that are ranking may not have any backlinks and page rank, but the domains those pages are on most certainly do.

 

[DanielS]

How much plagiarism is too much in your opinion? Just put a few articles of mine through some checkers and Quetext in particular seemed to believe that some of my articles were 5% to 10% plagiarised (they're all unique and I don't even use references for these articles BTW). Was just curious!

 

[SunnySkies]

I have a question about duplicate content and I’m not sure if google will light me up for it.

say I’m writing a post “how to clean red carpet” and another “how to clean green carpet” and the content is exactly the same but maybe a paragraph of variation.

mis it duplicate content? Even if I wrote the keywords for two different people searching something for THEIR carpet color and how to clean it

 

[Ndegs21]

I'm running a 2-month-old blog with about 35 articles published. I don't have much traffic yet but majority of my current traffic is from tier 1 countries. I've recently signed up for Amazon affiliate program and I'd like some advice on the best way to add affiliate links on the already indexed posts.

 

[Ryuzaki]

I have a question about duplicate content and I’m not sure if google will light me up for it.

say I’m writing a post “how to clean red carpet” and another “how to clean green carpet” and the content is exactly the same but maybe a paragraph of variation.

mis it duplicate content? Even if I wrote the keywords for two different people searching something for THEIR carpet color and how to clean it

Unless you rewrite it and make it unique to robots (even if humans realize it's similar), you're going to fall into the Farmer Update trap. These are called "doorway pages" and exist simply to eat up SERP real estate for random longer-tail keyword variations.

Google dealt with this around a decade ago when Demand Media was publishing insane amounts of content for tiny volume keyword variations like this. Demand was on top of the world, and they got crushed so bad and annoyed enough people that they even changed their name.

You can write both of those articles if you make them unique. Doing even a dozen of them isn't going to hurt you. Doing tens of thousands will.

Just pay someone to rewrite them and remix them so they're unique and not ad-libbed or copy and paste.

I'm running a 2-month-old blog with about 35 articles published. I don't have much traffic yet but majority of my current traffic is from tier 1 countries. I've recently signed up for Amazon affiliate program and I'd like some advice on the best way to add affiliate links on the already indexed posts.

Skim your articles, and if you mention some type of product you can suggest one with text links. If you have images of products, link them, or use a caption beneath the image to link to them. If the post is the type where you suggest a lot of products, you can even create a list near the top like "Products Suggested in This Article" and link to them all.

There's no rules here, just put them in there. You can do comparison tables and all that, whatever you find works. If the post is about a product, you can use buttons and calls to action and all that to really entice a click.

The best way to understand how to get it done is to search keywords you know are full of affiliates and browse around, observing how lots of sites are doing it. That'll help you feel comfortable in feeling that you understand what to do, then just do it!

 

[fatalityhawk]

Guys, is it just me or the search console has stopped updating after 17th Sep? This is happening across all my verified sites and clients.

 

[Upsilon]

How much plagiarism is too much in your opinion? Just put a few articles of mine through some checkers and Quetext in particular seemed to believe that some of my articles were 5% to 10% plagiarised (they're all unique and I don't even use references for these articles BTW). Was just curious!

Not sure what exact number to reply but I can tell you this:

In my niche there are two websites which are certainly owned by the same individual. They have the same custom theme which I have never seen anywhere.

Well, for a particular best x for y keyword, they are both on page 1. The "value" part of their articles is literally copy-pasted; we're talking about 50% of the article. The reviews are different because they are reviewing different products, except for 1 which is common. That is copy-pasted as well.

Kinda made me mad, ngl.

 

[DanielS]

Not sure what exact number to reply but I can tell you this:

In my niche there are two websites which are certainly owned by the same individual. They have the same custom theme which I have never seen anywhere.

Well, for a particular best x for y keyword, they are both on page 1. The "value" part of their articles is literally copy-pasted; we're talking about 50% of the article. The reviews are different because they are reviewing different products, except for 1 which is common. That is copy-pasted as well.

Kinda made me mad, ngl.

I've done some research about this and it seems that Google doesn't technically care- they'll rank content from websites they trust, regardless of whether the content is copied/similar. It makes sense- how else would writers be able to paraphrase and piece together articles if having 5-10% of an article plagiarized resulted in penalties.

The thing that was mainly confusing me was that I was getting general sentences such as "at the end of the day, you must" marked as plagiarized- clearly this isn't something to worry about.