Episode 40 – Be Thankful for the Traffic

Theory of Content

What’s happening in SEO this week?

Google’s update to the no-follow attribute! OMGERD!

Google introduced no-follow in 2005. It’s 2019, and they’ve just updated it!

We now have rel=sponsored and rel=ugc. You can even use them together! But how does this all work?

Do I have to go back and update my old content? *sob*

What are we talking about this week?

• Content Development: Should I niche down? How do I decide what to write about? Anatomy of a good post.
• Things that matter in analytics, and things that don’t – bounce rate, traffic sources, etc

Mailbag

Campbell Kerr – Highlands2hammocks.co.uk

My name is Campbell and I run the travel website highlands2hammocks,
along with my partner Gemma.

First of all, I would like to thank you for all of the help and inspiration that this podcast has provided Gemma and myself for our online business. We are not currently with Mediavine but that is our target for 2019. We are currently binge listening to you for 8 hours a day as we prune olives trees in Australia, as part of our visa.

We have a couple of questions with regards to both issues on our website and some points that you have made elsewhere in your podcast.

Firstly, I know how much you hate the topic of deleting old content, so I will try to keep this short and painless. I have heard a rumour that low ranking content on your website can have an effect on your sites overall ability to rank high for other content. Is this true?

We have a load of old content from when we didn’t take the website too seriously and before we really switched on to the idea of running it as a business. None of this content is optimizable and we are not emotionally connected to it so would have no problem archiving it. Would removing our old, low ranking content make ranking new content easier to rank for? Or is this gibberish?

Next, we have a YouTube channel with loads of content and are producing more regularly. This content relates to a lot of our posts and we like to include the videos in our articles to show a more visual display of the locations we are writing about. We currently embed the videos using the YouTube coding given in the website but we are curious if uploading the videos directly to our media library would be better?

Thanks again and keep rockin!

Alina Zavatsky | Vegan Runner Eats

Hi Josh and Amber,

Glad to have Theory of Content back! I usually listen to your episodes straight on your theoryofcontent.com website, and I have a suggestion: can you please list all of the tools/websites/useful links/products you mention on the podcast (like Josh mentions Xenu link checking tool in episode 38) in the show notes for each episode?

Also, a topic suggestion for future episodes: Domain Authority. How it’s calculated, how much influence it has on rankings, how to improve it, etc.
Thank you for the podcast, and keep up the good work!

Best,
Alina

Alina also asked:

Hi Amber and Josh,

I’m resending you a question that I’ve asked you on Facebook:

Can you please talk in one of your future episodes about dofollow vs nofollow links (as in from my site to other sites): which one should be used when, etc.

Case in point: in the Mediavine Social Share Group on FB, we often ask for links from other bloggers to include in various roundups (e.g. kid-friendly recipes, Mother’s Day recipes, etc.). Should we use dofollow or nofollow links in those roundup posts?

Angela Devaney | mowgli-adventures.com

My husband Graham and I have finally got round to listening to your podcast and wishing we’d done so months ago! Better late than never so onwards and upwards from here.

Our ability to run our blog is challenged by our inconsistent access to wifi. We travel permanently in our camper van and we’re currently in Uruguay. Wifi is pretty crap and we often spend hours in fuel stations for the best wifi signals! That’s where we’re writing this from!

Anyway, our question: I’m trying to sort out our site speed. I’m using Lighthouse as an indication of problems, intending to work through each in turn. The scores look awful but also fluctuate wildly. I’ve run the audit on the same post over and over and rarely get a consistent score. Sometimes I’ve had 36 (I told you it’s crap) and other times get 12(!!) within moments of the first test. I feel this makes “fixing” things somewhat difficult as I’m not sure what’s accurate or not. Can you tell me what I’m supposed to be looking at or if I’m making a schoolboy error when I run or read the audit report? Any guidance you can provide us will help with our sanity at the very least!

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