Search Engine Lounge

29/09/2022

Seems like Google's algorithm has started working properly.

Another affiliate site recovered and traffic increased from 200 to 1K users per day, 6K to 30K per month.

Tips shared in the last SEL post. I applied the same fixes on all of the hit sites.

This one got hit in June Product Review Update and recovered 2 days ago when the September update rolled out.

1. What you can do is simply to fix on page and technical issues. If you don’t know how to fix, simply hire someone on Fiverr.

2. After fixes, some sites may recover, but if you do not find any success, wait for the next update. It took me 3 months.

3. Content on your site should be unique, high quality, and well researched. No compromise on content.

Let me know if you have any question.

05/09/2022

Amazon Affiliate Website Recovered (Complete CaseStudy)
I recently recovered an Amazon affiliate website from the June Review update. Here's how I did it.

This post is a must-read.

To give you an idea, 3 of our sites have been hit by the previous 2 Google updates. I applied various techniques to all of the 3 sites, out of which, 1 is recovered and 2 are still down. This shows that google treated every site differently.

I'm still struggling with the rest of the two sites so let's see how they goes.

Let's jump to the recovery stages.

Stage 1: First, I completely analyzed the website speed, structure, internal links, external links, plugins, backlink profile, no-index content, and many more small SEO factors.

Stage 2: I removed all the useless plugins that had nothing to do with the website and were activated.

Stage 3: I installed the EWWW optimizer plugin and smushed all the images to reduce their sizes and activated the .webp format. Now the images are loading fast and the page speed is reduced to 1.5 seconds.

Stage 4: I checked the history and deleted all the articles that didn't generate traffic so far.

Stage 5: Fixed some front-end issues like:
- Related posts were shown 2 times
- A plugin was used to structure the article and look it fancy. But the code of that plugin kept those parts of the page as no-index content. I removed the code and pasted the text as normal.
- I removed the search bar as well.
- I added a custom text of "Affiliate disclosure" to the sidebar to show it on every page.
- Increased the text size.
- Changed the font family.

Stage 6: Some pages were orphans while others were dead-end. I fixed the internal links issue.

Stage 7: Checked the backlinks profile and disavowed the bad links or links that were made auto.

Stage 8: In this stage, I collected all the URLs on the websites in an excel sheet. (To do this, Open the XML file (site.com/sitemap.xml) and collect all the URLs.)

Stage 9: I checked all the URLs one by one to separate the indexed and no-indexed pages. You might be asking how they got de-indexed, but this is normal with google. They sometimes remove your pages from SERPs during the updates. Therefore, you must cross-check whether all of your posts have been indexed.

Stage 10: I made the following changes to each of the no-indexed pages:
- Added new content (optimized with new related keywords) to the deindexed pages
- Removed mistakes from articles
- Shuffled 2-3 products
- Added new products
- Added 2-3 faqs
- Updated the article.

Stage 11: I indexed the article by fetching manually in the search console (10 per day) and thus they started indexing one by one. Most of them are indexed at the same positions from where they got disappeared.

Stage 12: I followed stage 10 (which is very effective) for all of the other articles on the website.

P.S: Was it helpful?

20/08/2022

I'll share with you 5 tips to help you reduce the risk of upcoming Google update called "Helpful Content Update".

What I did and what you can do?

Let me share mine first.

I've deleted many articles that don't follow the guidelines of the recent update.

Those contents include:

Release dates:
Recently, I wrote a couple of articles on products' release dates but now Google announce that content promises to answer a question that actually has no answer, such as suggesting there’s a release date for a product, movie, or TV show when one isn’t confirmed. So I had to delete them.

Irrelevant articles:
Some of the articles on one of my sites were irrelevant that doesn't match the exact niche. I removed them as well. Google this time focused on relevancy.

Just to give you an overview of the "Helpful Content Update", it will target sites:

1. Who follows search volume alone, and doesn't provide top-notch, high-quality content that can really help users.

2. Those who use automation to pump out a lot of lower-quality content just to target queries with search volume. Talking about the AI content based sites with thousands of articles.

3. Who just summarize what others are saying and don't provide unique insights into what you know about the product or a topic. Once again, talking about AI content based sites.

4. Those who artificially increase word count believe that Google will reward them for it. Adding fluff content (any general information or details that fail to add value to your content) to your content won't work any more according to the Helpful Content Update.

5. Those who overpromise and underdeliver. As I discussed above, don’t promise an answer to a question that has no answer. Simple is that.

Remember this is a site-level quality algorithm that can impact an entire site if most of the articles on your sites do not follow the guidelines shared by Google.

20/08/2022

Hello Peeps!

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05/07/2022