NSP 4 Update for January 2019: The Good, the Bad, and the Spammy Links
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When I started Niche Site Project 4, I knew that there would be both good and bad moments to share along the way. As much as it pains me a little share some of the things that don't go as planned, I also know that is why people find some value in these projects.
I'll simply report what happens and try not to hold anything back.
Overall, there are definitely some positive things happening with my site. However, there are also some things that are concerning (but in the end should be fixable). And as the title suggests, I appear to be attracting a ton of spammy links. More on that in a minute.
Finally, I'll share the updates from several other participants in the niche site project below as well.
Contents
The Good
The good news is that the site continues to grow in terms of traffic. The site has increased in traffic by quite a bit in both social media traffic and organic traffic.
Traffic
As you can see, January is by far the highest traffic month! More people are coming to my site each month and that's great.
The above screenshot is organic traffic only. The trend is moving in the right direction; more than doubled the organic traffic from Dec to Jan! However, I feel like this traffic source should be much higher and will discuss my plans below to improve this.
The above screenshot is from social traffic. And most of this is from Pinterest. The traffic from Pinterest more than doubled and there is no slow down.
My Pinterest account is also starting to get more followers; which leads to more repins and traffic.
(Pinterest screenshot showing monthly viewers for my account).
(Pinterest screenshot showing how many followers my account has…not bad!).
I don't have a magic bullet for Pinterest, but here's what I do. For each post written, I create 2 pins (1 short and 1 long) and upload them to Pinterest using keyword related hashtags and descriptions (get our full guide to Pinterest hashtags here).
The pins are scheduled and rotated using Tailwind and I'm a part of a few Tailwind tribes as well. That's about it.
Overall, the good news is that the traffic is trending in the right direction.
Content
During January, I was able to pick up the pace in publishing new content on the site. In fact, I was able to publish a total of 32 articles!
That brings the total published articles on the site to 82. Part of that was just me publishing about 12 or so articles that were sitting in draft since mid-December. But my biggest focus in January was also just ramping up the content.
I utilized Content Pit for some of the content published in January, and I've been very happy with their service. The writers are trained specifically in writing for affiliate sites and do a great job. They will even find images and format and add your article in WordPress for you if you want.
Niche Pursuits readers can get 20% extra content from Content Pit for free by using this affiliate link.
As the traffic and content indicate, many things are moving in the right direction.
However, not everything has gone as planned.
The Bad
With the increased traffic from both organic and social sources, my earnings must have really ramped up as well, right? Well, unfortunately, that didn't happen.
Earnings
I only earned $6 from the site in January. And to rub salt in the wounds, one of the products from December was returned and so I had to give $0.40 back in commissions. I mean we are not talking a lot of money, but it still hurts.
The overall conversion rate was WAY down from December. So, I attribute much of the decrease in earnings to the holiday season just being really good. As much as I would like the earnings to increase each month on the site, apparently that was not meant to be going from December to January.
Site Speed and Indexing Issues
We all know that site speed is important for both users and Google. However, despite doing my best using Shortpixel to optimize images and using a CDN, I was still not satisfied with the speed of my site.
Here's a screenshot from Google PageSpeed Insights, before any improvements were made.
Mobile Speed
Desktop Speed
55 on mobile is not good. 88 on desktop is decent, but has room for improvement.
After doing what I knew how to personally do, I hired someone on upwork to go through the site and improve a few other things. Here's the site speed now, definitely an improvement.
Mobile
The site went from a 50 to 76, a nice improvement on mobile.
Desktop
The desktop speed went from an 88 to a 94, in the fast zone!
I'm going to continue tweaking things, especially for mobile, to try and improve the overall speed and optimization of the site. Hopefully, this will lead to good things in terms of ranking in Google.
Indexing Issues
I've been watching Google Search Console for a while and have noticed that several of my pages are taking way longer than normal to get indexed. At this point, I still don't know why. However, with as much content as I've published on my site, I would expect more traffic from Google.
Here's what I'm seeing that is concerning. First, AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)
Notice that my site has 72 valid pages in Google Search Console, but only 19 Valid AMP pages. That's not good. In other words, Google is not indexing the AMP version of my site very well.
I don't know all the reasons. I've been using the official AMP plugin from WordPress in partnership with Google (and others). However, since things clearly aren't going that well with AMP, I found a higher rated AMP plugin called, AMP for WordPress here.
I don't know if this will improve things or not, I'll let you know next month (or if I see significant improvement before then).
In addition to AMP indexing issues, I have a bunch of articles that are “Crawled, but not indexed”. This is also quite concerning as some of them are a few months old.
Now, as I look at the affected pages, many of them are AMP pages, but many of them are just regular pages that should have been indexed months ago (in some cases). Initially, I was patient because my site was so new; however, it's now been a few months. My new content gets indexed in a couple of days, so I'm not sure what's going on.
However, this week I plan to tackle this issue with the following 2 prong strategy:
- I'm going to go through each of these URLs one by one and use the Fetch as Google tool to request indexing.
- I'm going to re-publish these articles so they show up on my homepage as fresh content with a new date. I figure Google is clearly crawling and indexing my new content, maybe it was just having a hard time when my site was new finding some of the articles.
Overall, I'm hopeful that Google will get all of this content indexed so that I can start ranking for all these keywords I'm targeting!
Update: About 30 minutes after I wrote this, I went ahead and “fetched as Google” on one of my un-indexed URLs. I also updated the date on 3 of my articles (so they were on the homepage). The one I fetched as Google is now indexed (after less than 24 hours)! The other 2 that I updated the dates on are still not indexed. Looks like the solution is to fetch as Google. I'll be doing the other URLs today.
The Spammy Links
I've shared the good and the bad, now it's time to check out my ugly spammy links!
This one baffles me. I have not done any link building other than a few blog comments (on very real blogs) and some outreach I tried last month that didn't work out.
However, as I've been checking the links on Ahrefs, I started to notice lots of foreign language links coming to my site. But none of the links are pointing directly to my homepage or any particular articles, they are all pointing to random search results pages that don't exist.
For example, they point to something like: mynichesite.com/search?q=안동출장미인아가씨
Above is just a small sample of the spammy links I'm seeing to my site. There has to be at least 100 different domains all linking to my site using these foreign characters, that are clearly spammy. In addition, the far right column in this screenshot shows how many links that domain has to my site. The top one shows that it is linking 360 times to my site…ouch!
So in aggregate, I now have thousands of spammy links and I have no idea where they came from.
At this point, it's difficult to tell if they are having any impact on my site. The number of impressions my site is receiving has leveled off in the second half of January, so that does have me concerned.
The silver lining is that I can see that lots of these links are marked as “lost: link removed”. So, part of me wonders if all of these links will just disappear on their own, since they clearly appear to be some automated spam.
The other part of me wonders if I should take aggressive action and start submitting a disavow file through Google search console for these links. I am strongly leaning towards submitting a disavow file, because I hate seeing these new spammy links pop up each day. (Yes, more are being added everyday).
Is my site getting some sort of negative SEO attack? I don't know. This is what happened to me last time I did a public project. And none of my sites that I've built in private have ever had a negative SEO attack.
So, is it possible that someone discovered my site and wanted to have “some fun” by sending tons of spammy links? I have no idea.
However, I'm hopeful that Google is smart enough to know that I have nothing to do with these links and to just ignore them. However, I may go ahead and take the more drastic step of disavowing all of these links as I see them come in.
Phew, what a journey this has been! And we are only getting started…
Report from Other Niche Site Project 4 Participants
As usual, I requested an update from all the participants in the project and I was not disappointed. Please read the reports and see the progress being made by all the Niche Site Project 4 participants.
It's great to see more and more people starting to earn money!
<td data-sheets-value=”{“1″:2,”2”:”I've launched the site on 7th of January with a 250+ pages eBook. I've written a total of 8 blog posts so far. The aim of the site is to help people build not just niche sites but mainly how to start making money online with blogging and creating authority sites. The site also has an amazon affiliate case study itself which is documented every month. “}”>
<td data-sheets-value=”{“1″:2,”2”:”I finished keyword research, I started the site properly, I wrote several articles and I published some of the the written articles. “}”>
| Real Name or Nickname | Number of articles TOTAL published on your site since inception? | Number of Total “Sessions” your site received in January 2019? | Earnings for January 2019? |
What was accomplished in January 2019 for your site?
|
| Simon | 30 | 2000 | 65 |
Found some great writers, hit 5k insta following, got about 6 good links (total 15 now) hit first page for a couple good “best keyword” terms.
|
| Kevin | 17 | 46 | 0 |
5 Articles and few backlinks.
|
| Manuel | 8 | 941 | 115 | |
| slipperx | 11 | 25 | 0 |
I spent the entire month dealing with phishing hackers increasingly saving malicious files in the filesystem at siteground and disabling all my sites. I upgraded to Wordfence and had a hard time getting security to the full because of technical issues. So content creation is suspended whilst that scenario continues to play out.
|
| bill | 50 | 167 | 0 | internal link , I've spent my time watching incomeschool,doug cunnington, neil patel on YouTube to find idea to optimize my website.”}”>
Adding some content. Re-edit old content by adding internal link , I've spent my time watching incomeschool,doug cunnington, neil patel on YouTube to find idea to optimize my website.
|
| Lucio | 7 | 36 | 0 | One article. |
| Owais | 6 | 0 | 0 |
I started my site in January. i know i am 3 months behind 😛 I did extensive keyword research and hired 2 writers to work part time for me. I'll be editing and publishing the article myself. In jan i posted 6 articles. In feb, i plan to post 20 more articles.
|
| Chelle | 14 | 540 | 3.2 |
Absolutely nothing. Site is where it should be. Traffic doubled. Made $3.20.
|
| Arun | 4 | 66 | 0 |
Scrapped the old website since I was unable to target “best x” keywords since the niche was competitive. Started a new website and targeted less competitive keywords.
|
| Rohan | 60 | 50 | 0 |
Nothing much…I combined the similar articles into 1 so that the SEO would increase. It didn't impact much.
|
| Mouad Real | 30 | 510 | 18 |
i dont do a lot of work this month , i post 1 post that all i do
|
| endre | 0.5 | 0 | 0 |
I get distracted all the time. Have 3 different, the 3 first, articles in draft. The website looks good, but miss content. Hope to get a writing wibe soon….
|
| Nen | 4 | 0 | 0 |
I wrote 1 long article and 3 short ones. I had website there with Divi Theme but when I updated to the latest version of WordPress, it became unworkable, it took me some time to figure out what to do next. I removed Divi with the intention to change it to another theme, but it's taking a lot of time for me to learn another theme. Maybe I'll go back to Divi; I don't know what to do. I'm still thinking about it. I'm stuck.
|
| Moris | 0 | 7 | 0 |
Stopped working on it. The site I’m working on was registered before NSP4, and that wouldn’t be with the rules expected 🙂
|
| Ben Doyle | 48 | 121 | 23.53 |
– Hired ContentPit to write 2 articles but I really wasn't impressed so I had to re-write them myself.
– I found a branded expired domain (completely by accident) with 490 referring domains in exactly the same niche as my site. Looked into the history of te domain and it was someone's personal blog but he died. So I won the domain on backorder and transferred all of the content from my old domain to the new one and 301 re-directed my old site. Hopefully that'll give me a massive boost in the serps! – Worked on the new site structure and internal linking campaign. – Redirect some of the new sites backlinks to my articles. |
| Towfiquir Rahman | 29 | 388 | 39.68 |
The first month of 2019 was a total productive month for the site. Published total 8 article in this month. Total Session and earning both increased this month.
|
| Violeta | 3 | 13 | 0 |
It started to rank in top 100 for a bunch of keywords.
|
| smshs | 27 | 153 | 0 | na |
| Kutluay | 5 | 2531 | 56.62 |
Please check my site http://PinterestMakesRich.com/ for the details of my public experiment site
|
| Andrew Courtney | 75 | 11484 | 7.07 |
Wrote 15 articles and kept up Pinterest strategy. Only starting to monetize site now, so hope earning will improve next month.
|
| Chris | 8 | 10 | 0 |
8 articles posts, 1 article scheduled, 4 Youtube videos published, 1 scheduled, no outreach or link building yet. No earnings but only a month old.
|
| Jesse | 50 | 400 | 7.9 |
Started guest posting outreach, traffic is starting to pick up
|
| Ryan Faucher | 86 | 1551 | 26.52 |
Added a new product comparison page. A couple of Pinterest pins really took off. Read the details including the discovery of a celebrity's amazon affiliate site!: https://bit.ly/2WArzSZ
|
| Justin | 4 | 0 | 0 |
Completed another article
|
| Steve Allen | 13 | 68 | 0 |
Not a lot of progress for January and being completely honest, my attension was elsewhere, albeit a good elsewhere. Only three articles published, but I have two in draft and five others currently being written for me.
I have a big project I'm working on right now so I'm setting the bar low for the niche site throughout Feb but once I have this project done I'll be able to invest more time with the niche site. You can check out my updates on my blog coffeeshopblogger.com. Cheers! |
| Shane | 16 | 188 | 0 |
Cleaned up site for Google. No index peripheral pages and improved pagespeed index. Published 4 articles.
|
| Jobe | 28 | 258 | 0.54 |
My first sales (2 items shipped)!!. This happened after 3 months and 3 weeks after publishing my first article so the 3-4 months timeline to get the first sale is a good indicator to see if you are doing things well. Other than that I only published a few articles.
|
| Y77DJS | 20 | 220 | 21.98 |
Slow month, gradual growth. I've been busy with other projects and so this has taken a bit of a back burner this month.
|
| Hassane | 10 | 13 | 0 |
I didn't write any new articles
|
| JA | 28 | 207 | 3 |
eBook launched and Facebook ad campaign's running. Over 80 sales, ROI increasing up to 25% from last 7 days.
|
| Jules | 15 | 5557 | 23.25 |
I created an email opt-in and my subscriber conversions quadrupled, so that was exciting! At this point I know I need more content, it's just finding the time and/or a writer I really like. I tested one out and it wasn't a great fit, so I'm going to try again in February. I joined a new affiliate program with a company I feel like is a perfect fit and I can write a ton of content around. My niche site is www.JoyfulArtJournaling.com
|
| Seb van Dort | 3 | 7 | 0 | |
| Rachel | 15 | 705 | 6 |
No progress in January. Focus for upcoming month on creating content. Organic traffic increasing despite lack of new content on the site during January.
|
| Mike | 11 | 454 | 0.78 |
Polished up the Homepage, Contact, About, and other relevant pages. Published 2 articles. Built 5 links. Did more keyword research. found 20 keywords to target in February.
|
| Ismail blogger | 58 | 1320 | 67.27 |
This is the second month of my Niche Blog. My main focus is on adding new KGR (Keyword with 4-6 words Low searches) content with 4 experienced team members. I shifted my blog from A2hosting to Wpxhosting (Highly recommended) for better speed & also got few authority links via outreaching. for Detailed casestudy you can check ismailblogger.com
|
| Hasan | 40 | 200 | 3 |
I was not able to do any work for this week
|
| azonwiki | 20 | 581 | 8.08 |
I haven't done much in January as I'm lacking motivation. I'll do more keyword research in Feb to come up with more posts in the next few months. My goal is to have 30+ posts ready before this May.
|
| Katha | 36 | 321 | 2.8 |
This is my first update since October. I haven't added content to the original site since then, but Google traffic has picked up in January nevertheless. I would like to add an affiliate storefront to the site in the upcoming months. I decided to start another site in November. Ramp up has been much faster. I have 53 articles published on the site as of now. My goal is to get to 100 articles by the end of February.
|
| Jae Jun | 0 | 911 | 1789.38 | Amazon FBA business, check it out. Free to use for any 3 sku's and you'll be able to get the data and pulse of your fingertips straight to a spreadsheet. Templates included for free for you to get started :)”}”>
Financially, Jan was a drop in net revenue. Could be due to Jan effect where people signed up in Dec for business expense reasons. Could also be due to the increase in price where we eliminated the cheapest tier to get more qualified and targeted customers. Wasn't able to work on the site due to other business projects and business trip with higher priority. Did make inroads in getting the blog theme updated so that emails can be reused. Dev team is close to finishing up our advanced feature as we aim to move up market for our software. Also trying to get more users to use the Gorilla ROI addon for free. So if you are reading this and run an Amazon FBA business, check it out. Free to use for any 3 sku's and you'll be able to get the data and pulse of your fingertips straight to a spreadsheet. Templates included for free for you to get started 🙂
|
| Angela Lewis | 16 | 115 | 36.38 |
I am focusing on keywords that will rank in my niche.
|
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52 Comments
Conversation
Great update, Spencer!
Google is a lot better now at knowing to ignore links like that rather than punish them like in the past.
For an existing site with lots of good links already, it’s usually fine to just leave it alone.
For a brand new site with a bare link profile, the best way to combat spammy links like that is to build quality links. Perhaps it’s time to start link building sooner than you started.
Yep, I agree that it’s time to start building some more links. I should have added that to the update…my plan is to take a proactive approach this month to building new links.
Hi Spencer! I’m glad that you are making progress. I’m a little new to nichepursuits so i wonder
How much budget do we need for content creation in the beginning?
That all depends on if you want to write all the articles yourself or outsource it.
Hey Spencer, I’ve seen the “bad link” issue on my site and believe it may be attributed to having the RSS feed enabled. Not sure if that’s the case here but could be. Also, I’ve never disavowed any “Bad” looking spammy links and never received a penalty. I believe Google just ignores links like this now.
I’ll have to look into the RSS feed potential issue. I do think that Google will most likely just ignore these types of links, but I’m keeping a close eye on it.
Thanks for the update Spencer, I have been seeing similar issues with page indexing on my site also, so you are not alone. I was also running AMP when i first stared, but found it very difficult to 1. get conversion friendly page layouts happening 2. like you, google didn’t like them and chose not to index half of them 3. i got so many AMP errors. So decided to do away with it for now. I was using the second plugin you mentioned, AMP for WP. Just FYI.
Interesting, thanks for the heads up.
With the spammy links – Google is smart nowadays to ignore many of them. These are probably just scrappers. There are plenty around. Many times their link is nofollow anyway.
Indexation issue – look at the reason in Google console. It will tell you the reason. Also sometimes the page is actually indexed and shown in search results – inspect the URL in the console to see what’s happening with it. You are submitting a sitemap? Check indexed pages vs. submitted pages.
Page speed – I can’t see it as a ranking factor unless your site take ages to load.
Conversion – Pinterest / social traffic is hardly converting. A better choice is to get them into a mailing list or put ad units as well. They are not in a buying mode. Getting people into a list and selling them indirectly will probably make you money long term considering the amount of traffic you get, But you really need to WOW them. People are fed up with sales pitches so you’ll need to connect with them and provide great value – this takes time and effort.
Also – see the origin country of the site visitors. Possibly they don’t have much to spend.
December is usually a strong month (people are in a buying mode). But a huge drop in January and advertising budgets reflect it.
Thanks for the input, Jack!
What did you do for site speeds? Please share some tips to gain green signal.
As mentioned, I hired someone on upwork to do this, but this is what they did:
Defer offscreen images: Implementing Lazy Loading for images.
Serve images in next-gen formats: Serving images in the next-generation formate like compressed jpg, WebP, SVG as per the theme compatibility.
Eliminate render-blocking resources: Defer and Async asset like JS and CSS files loading to avoid render blocking and improve above the fold loading time.
Defer Unused CSS: Moved all Unused CSS code from header to footer to reduce network bytes consumption on initial page load time.
Properly size images: Setting up “setsrc” property for images to get served in the appropriate dimension according to device resolution.
Caching Setup: Important! For caching mechanism, we have used WP-Rocket plugin keep it in an activated mode along with Gonzales plugin for assets management and we will get optimized results.
Hey Spencer,
Thanks (again!) for sharing all of this with us — the good and the bad! (Sorry about the bad stuff, though!)
I was wondering, where did you find that info, “Crawled, but not indexed”? Is that in Google Analytics? Or the plugin you were talking about? I’d love to know!
Thanks again!
With gratitude,
Jules
Google search console: https://search.google.com/search-console/about
Greeting spencer
First of all thank you for adding my casestudy to your list. sad to hear about the bad and spammy links to your website but thats normal. and as chriss suggest, now its time to start working on outreaching.
i started outreaching from the 1st month that is giving me results right now, people response is a bit slow but possitive.
Such post help me to more focus on my website,build quality content and links.
my only question is, do you have any pinterest guide so that i can read that?
thank you
regards
I don’t have a full pinterest guide. Thanks!
Hi Spencer,
I am sure you know this and you may have even mentioned it in your article ( skimmed the part about the links). The “links” you are getting is most likely due to people trying to maliciously inject your search function with their cod (the code/ scripts that are injected are shown after the query variable or “q=”), to either do negative SEO or “plant” some of their own keywords / pages, or even worse…
I should have mentioned in the post but didn’t. I just disabled the search function on my site, in an effort to avoid this going forward.
Good job, earnings will come.
Some of my new articles also tend to take ages to index, which did not happen before.
I think Google’s changed something. Several small algorithm updates lately.
by the way, are writers from contentpit native English speakers?
No, they are not. But I have not been able to tell the difference at this point.
thanks for another update, and the transparency
I’m getting 94 on mobile and 97 on desktop according to Google’s page speed insights. However on pages where I use Amazon SiteStripe generated links, I get down to 70 / 87. It sucks.
re: spammy links.
Those links are in Korean. It’s related to adult keywords. Don’t know whether somebody found out or anything, but definitely not natural and not good links even if it’s getting removed.
Interesting, thanks for the additional insight. Its just odd that something like has never happened to any of my sites except the 2 that I’ve blogged about here.
Really like these updates. Too bad Jan was not a good month for you. Keep it up though, it never goes in 1 straight line up !
Hey Spencer, it’s fun to read the update. Thank you for doing this.
Something even more funny would be to copy paste the anchors of those spammy backlinks to Google translate to see what they mean. Haha!
By the way, Jae Jun is making almost $1800 without any content. How’s that possible?
Software product, email marketing. Here’s the podcast he did: https://www.nichepursuits.com/podcast-140-jae-jun-launched-google-sheets-business-part-niche-site-project-4/
Wow, what a timing I chose to read this article because that’s the exact same issue I’m having with those spammy Korean gambling and adult links for one of my affiliate sites! And just like in your case, Spencer, it has never happened to me before so I guess it’s a quite recent spam technique. Fingers crossed that it won’t harm the rankings. The old version of Google Search Console notified me about more than 4000 404 errors on my site (generated by those spammy searches) which is definitely something to worry about. On the other hand the new GSC seems to completely ignore those links (and pages) so perhaps Google is smart enough nowadays to identify it as a pure spam or negative SEO attempt not relevant in any way to the site… or maybe that’s just my wishful thinking. Anyway my anchor text report in Ahrefs is completely messed up and I hate it!
Did you disable the search function on your site by putting some code in functions.php or used an external plugin such as “Disable Search”?
Wish all the best to you and your sites!
I used the external plugin, disable search. Good luck!
Great progress, how many links I should build every month for a new niche site and is there anything like sandbox?
Hi Spencer,
It is good to see your traffic increasing steadily over the months.
As for the spam links, do you think they really affect your rankings or site in any way?
Thanks
Gareth
Its hard to say. Google says it shouldn’t, but I’ve decided to disavow anyway just to be safe.
Spammy link – Google knows that, so you don’t do anything. They don’t affect you.
AMP there are many cons of having AMP (one is backlinks that are not on your site due to amp) I would recommend it to turn off. AMP is more for big news sites.
Competition is enormous in 2019 compared to 2016. In 2016 you could get results in months. Now you need 6 months to even a year and more. I believe that in upcoming years it will be even more from 1 to 2 years to rank. There are so many better ways to earn money that amazon affiliate with 24h cookie time and low %. But I understand why it’s so popular especially among 3rd world like India where everyone can start website with few bucks.
Hi Spencer,
Another great update, thanks for that.
You mentioned you hired a freelancer from upwork.
Regarding the speed issue, did you advertise for a designer or something more specific and how much did it cost?
Thanks
I just put a job specifically what I was looking for. Speed up my wordpress site as judged by Google page insights.
Thanks for that Spencer, I’ll try that myself.
Hey Spencer,
Thanks for sharing. This is amazing how our websites are facing absolutely same issues. Basically, I have been attacked with the same spammy links too. Also, my impressions dropped quite a lot in the second half of January and I thought this might have been Google algorithm update.
After reading this article I have also checked mine articles and most of the non-indexed pages are images however I have 4 articles that have been published around summer time last year when the website was very new and those are not indexed despite the fact that I have been told that this is an amazing piece of content. Will try to fetch with updated date and see how it goes.
What great content these project posts have, I love that. In fact, hope you don’t mind if I publish case studies similar to yours that I have done with my websites I am building now on my future web about the online world.
Cheers, Eugen
PS: Let me know how do you managing these links as I have decided to ignore them for now, however, I feel like they might have impacted my site, thus the drop since mid-Jan.
Glad you are enjoying the updates! I went ahead and disavowed the links. I’m not convinced that I needed to, but better safe than sorry is what I came down to.
Fair enough, to be fair I have done the same the day after I have commented here. The question is, did you disavow domains or just links? I have opted for domains with most of the spammy links.
Eugen
I just did the links, not domains.
Very informative post. I was able to increase the speed of one of my websites to 97 (on PC) by moving it to Siteground. Siteground is faster than most of the hosting companies IMO.
Hi Spencer.
Great update. As for the Chinese links that point to search results, I’ve seen those in several of my websites as well but never had a problem due to the SPAM.
As you said, those automatic links also get erased or deindexed after a while, so I wouldn’t worry about them. Once you start building a link profile it probably won’t matter.
What’s strange though is Google not not indexing your posts after months. It seems like something between the AMP plugin is confusing the crawlers.
Looking forward to your next update.
Thanks Servando. I went ahead and removed my AMP plugin. And then after asking Google to crawl and index each individual URL, they are now all indexed. I don’t think I’m having any indexing issues now as all new posts are fine.
Hi Spencer
Are you able to resolve the issue with the new AMP plugin. Please share
I removed AMP completely. Now my website seems to actually be doing better in the serps.
Hi Spencer,
Fantastic blog post. Had one question for you:
In what way(s) does having social media positively impact your website if your website is focused on getting people to Amazon to make a purchase?
In other words–I can understand if you wanted to gain a large following on Twitter or Instagram in order to gain trust from your visitors and, in turn, they would read and share the written content on your blog.
But, let’s say your site is aimed at getting people to purchase kitchen appliances on Amazon. If you have a large Twitter or Instagram following, and you tweet out or post a link on Instagram to your brand new blog review of a toaster…isn’t it more likely than not that the people who are following you on social media already own a toaster and are happy with it, and therefore would be less likely to click the link, let alone make a purchase through Amazon?
Just curious–thanks!
Sure, it can send some traffic. But if your site is so narrow that you are only covering toasters or blenders, then you aren’t likely to gain much of a following. Post how-to guides, recipes, and more surrounding those items. Finally it also helps because it can lead to links. Someone might see your social media post and then end up linking to your site. Traffic and links.
Hey Spencer,
Thanks for the update.
Is it possible I join this project as I want to start my own affiliate site by tomorrow (1st of April)?
Thanks.
Yes
Hi Spencer, I need to fix my site speed and services I looked at charged $500-800 for optimizing site speed. Would you happen to recall the vendor/name of the provider on Upwork you used.
Also WpRocket and other site optimization sites said to use https://tools.pingdom.com/ for the most accurate load testing.
I could look up the name on Upwork. However, just post a job on Upwork, you will get tons of responses and then just the pick one.