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

Well, hello everyone!

So I've been hanging around on subreddits like r/juststart and r/blogging for a while (this forum seems far superior btw), and a lot of people seem to be talking about how important topical authority is to rank.

Instead of going with the vertical strategy that is used in the crash course, many bloggers seem to go for micro niches in order to have any possibility to rank since the competition is lower.

Here are my questions that might be dumb:

How do Google and ad networks determine your niche to give you a fitting rpm and estimate how authoritarian you are? Can rpm be different per blog post depending on the topic (ex: food (higher rpm) or culture (lower rpm)) or is it the same for the whole domain?

How are you supposed to be sure when you can start moving into additional niches within your vertical without Google misunderstanding it in a way that lowers your topical authority in your already established niche?
 
Magoo said:
Instead of going with the vertical strategy that is used in the crash course, many bloggers seem to go for micro niches in order to have any possibility to rank since the competition is lower.
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We suggest this in the crash course as well. We suggest having a broad brand and domain that can encompass more topics, but start at the micro level and work your way horizontally through a vertical as you cover more and more topics.

The reason for this relates to your next questions, largely because if you're monetizing through display ads you need a lot of volume of traffic, which you can't get in a single micro-niche.

Magoo said:
How do Google and ad networks determine your niche to give you a fitting rpm and estimate how authoritarian you are? Can rpm be different per blog post depending on the topic (ex: food (higher rpm) or culture (lower rpm)) or is it the same for the whole domain?
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The way RPMs are determined is by dividing your traffic for the day (week or month even) by 1,000 and then dividing your earnings for the day (week or month) by that number. So Earnings / Traffic / 1000.

Google and ad networks don't assign you an RPM. They let advertisers bid on every single ad that loads on your site. The winning bid gets to place the ad (and this goes for CPC too, which is cost per click). So it's based on what the advertisers are willing to bid at that point in time and how many ads get shown. It's not just how much traffic you got that affects how many ads get shown, but how engaged the traffic is, how long they stay on the page (as ad blocks refresh and show new ads) or how far they scroll (and load more ads), etc.

RPMs will change constantly. One post on your site about Food might get a $25 RPM on day and a $22 the next. At the end of Q4 (financial quarter 4) it might get a $40 RPM and and at the start of Q1 it might get a $10 RPM. Advertising budgets are higher at the end of each quarter and higher for every later quarter in the year.

Advertising interest (and thus bids and thus RPMs) is not determined by the domain. It's determined by the content on the page that the ads load on. A lot of time you'll get very related RPMs and a lot of times they'll get beat out by general all-purpose campaigns like Ford trucks or Walmart or Home Depot, etc.

Not only is there "based on the content" ads but there's "interest-based ads" where people get cookied and tracked. So someone who's really into camera equipment might end up on a pet site and still see camera ads because the bids are higher and they know the user is interested in cameras.

Magoo said:
How are you supposed to be sure when you can start moving into additional niches within your vertical without Google misunderstanding it in a way that lowers your topical authority in your already established niche?
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You're pointing out the reality of all of this. It's voodoo and theoretical. We're very certain topical authority exists but we can't measure it. You get a sense that you've achieved it because you articles start ranking like gangbusters. The way to achieve it is to cover more and more (and more) of the same topics in the same niches, and interlink them. Place them in categories that associate them together, too, and use breadcrumbs to reinforce this categorization. That's how you reinforce it and also seek to not confuse Google.

If your site is about "Boats" you might get topical authority on fishing boats before you start posting on speed boats and then pontoon boats. But what you won't do is start talking about motorcycles. You have to stick to your lane. Google prefers sites that stick to one topic. So a vertical that is "all vehicles" including cars, trucks, vans, motorcycles, boats, airplanes, 4-wheelers.... that's way too broad. Choose one and stick to it, and if you run out of topics, you need to dig deeper instead of broader.
 
ashley said:
Fiverr "increase dr" type services ok?
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I hope you'll forgive me for not answering all of your questions. One could write an actual textbook length book on the topic and I don't have the time at the moment. But I can say that these "increase DR" Fiverr services aren't even links. They're redirects from Google domains and from sites that contain ad scripts where you can trick Ahrefs (and not Google) into thinking they're real links. They don't help you in Google, and they make your Ahrefs data worthless. Don't use those.

ashley said:
if the tier 2 links are slapped at an update, will the tier 1 links (those pointing to money site) lose power?
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Yes, if you lose the juice from Tier 2, that juice no longer passes through Tier 1. The entire point of doing tiered links is to not point that crap at your own site, so in this case it would be working as designed. But if you're tiering through good sites, you should respect them and not spray mass spam at them either. That should help you understand the type of links you should be looking for.
 
a bit of a "how long is a piece of string" question: when selecting kw's to write up, how low will you accept for search volume?

so I'm trying to get an authority site up, it's all product reviews but apparantly I need info content to be a topical authority - eg a book review site where it really should be only book reviews but instead I'm having to write articles about "how to read a book" "why read books" etc.
Many of these kw's are useful (ie make sense from a topical authority perspective) but incredibly low search volume.
How low would you accept to write an article on? (initially)
I've read about people writing on 0 volume kw's and getting traffic from them but that seems very "hopeful" thinking to me.
 
ashley said:
a bit of a "how long is a piece of string" question: when selecting kw's to write up, how low will you accept for search volume?

so I'm trying to get an authority site up, it's all product reviews but apparantly I need info content to be a topical authority - eg a book review site where it really should be only book reviews but instead I'm having to write articles about "how to read a book" "why read books" etc.
Many of these kw's are useful (ie make sense from a topical authority perspective) but incredibly low search volume.
How low would you accept to write an article on? (initially)
I've read about people writing on 0 volume kw's and getting traffic from them but that seems very "hopeful" thinking to me.
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Have a read of the avalanche technique thread. Should help you. Really sparked my though process. I tend to start with <100.

https://www.buildersociety.com/threads/seo-avalanche-technique-ranking-with-no-resources.5114/
 
ashley said:
I've read about people writing on 0 volume kw's and getting traffic from them but that seems very "hopeful" thinking to me.
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It is hopeful. The question is do you want to achieve topical authority or not. An article doesn't have to attract traffic to be worth your time.

Some are there for topical authority. Some are there because your users expect to see them even though you'll never rank for these difficult keywords. Some exist simply to be link bait and link out to other parts of your site to push juice around.
 
Ryuzaki said:
It is hopeful. The question is do you want to achieve topical authority or not. An article doesn't have to attract traffic to be worth your time.

Some are there for topical authority. Some are there because your users expect to see them even though you'll never rank for these difficult keywords. Some exist simply to be link bait and link out to other parts of your site to push juice around.
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thanks for this

What creates topical authority?

I thought it was covering the topics related to the niche - like you said, even if it doesn't attract traffic

But I read elsewhere that you get topical authority by *ranking* for kw's related to the niche, not just by having the articles on your site.

By this definition, writing articles that you don't rank for takes away from the overall authority of the site (Eg "how to read a book" kd90) despite being relevant to the niche (because it's not ranking), whereas having long tail kw that you rank for ("how to read a book while cooking dinner for 5 kids" kd0) helps :confused:

I know there are people like Koray who go into things like this in detail but I haven't done their courses (and don't intend to) - seems like everyone has a different opinion.

Ugh :confused:
 
Don't overthink it.

See what others are covering, then try to do one better in how many topics you cover, how well researched, with unique images, with video, with new data in the form of tables, with being more precise, with being more in depth.

There's an old SEO mantra: Match and Exceed, meaning, first match their content in scope and then make it just a bit better.

And I would add: Create content for people, not robots.

If you keep both those two in mind, then you should know how to get started.
 
bernard said:
And I would add: Create content for people, not robots.
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I don’t think these are mutually exclusive.

It’s one of the problems I have with Koray’s work is that it is too focused on google so the end result on some of his sites actually sound like spun content to a human.
 
I tend to agree about it sounding like spun content - it's only going to get worse with 1 click ai writing! The whole topical authority thing is another subject all the main Gurus are pushing like it is a new thing.

In the past, it maybe wasn't as well publicized but good advice was to cover your niche thoroughly.
A problem I see with it - it is being touted as a game changer, but is it really? Lack of topical authority doesn't seem to stop news sites, Forbes and the likes from ranking for specific niche topics.

That leads me to another point that bugs me. SEO onpage optimization. Seems like the gurus are together again - the need to use tools - Surfer and the rest. Again looking at the serps in a semi competitive niche you'll see the same high DR or whatever sites cleaning up with thin unoptimized content.

I'm not saying Topical authority or onpage doesn't matter - just that the gurus should be more honest and point out to newbies (and more) that they are still just small parts of the puzzle. Backlinks and domain strength still seem to trump everything else. At least that is the case in my experience.
 
link indexing: how to?

I've remembered an active forum profile I had on a competitor's forum and can add links to old forum posts I made. How best to get those indexed? These are years' old posts but the DR is high and it's one of my main competitors.

I guess the same goes with if you do manual blog commenting on old blog posts, what to do next once comments are approved?
 
Kninemark2 said:
Have a read of the avalanche technique thread. Should help you. Really sparked my though process. I tend to start with <100.

https://www.buildersociety.com/threads/seo-avalanche-technique-ranking-with-no-resources.5114/
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In the soon future, what stops a bot from just crawling these low-search keywords and writing articles about them? I mean, they might not provide enough traffic for a major publisher to spend their human writer's time and resources on them, but if they automate it - why wouldn't they do it?

As long as they cover enough long tail keywords, it might just be worth it and if their site has enough authority, Google maybe won't mind that it's written by AI?
 
Magoo said:
In the soon future, what stops a bot from just crawling these low-search keywords and writing articles about them? I mean, they might not provide enough traffic for a major publisher to spend their human writer's time and resources on them, but if they automate it - why wouldn't they do it?

As long as they cover enough long tail keywords, it might just be worth it and if their site has enough authority, Google maybe won't mind that it's written by AI?
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Most of these low volume search terms don't even have relevant pages ranking in the SERPs. Robots (A.I.) scrape existing results to gather data. Meaning, they'll also produce irrelevant content. So, you come in and produce relevant content that addresses the topic in detail, making your content better than the rest.
 
Magoo said:
As long as they cover enough long tail keywords, it might just be worth it and if their site has enough authority, Google maybe won't mind that it's written by AI?
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It will just lift the bar for what is considered good content.
 
Magoo said:
In the soon future, what stops a bot from just crawling these low-search keywords and writing articles about them? I mean, they might not provide enough traffic for a major publisher to spend their human writer's time and resources on them, but if they automate it - why wouldn't they do it?

As long as they cover enough long tail keywords, it might just be worth it and if their site has enough authority, Google maybe won't mind that it's written by AI?
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This really sent shivers down my spine, because it might just happen. I guess in just a few years, there will be robots that will auto detect very low competition long tail keywords like "soft toothbrush for Pablo Escobar's berzerk hippos in Colombia" and will create micro-niche websites with 10 articles.

Pretty scary...
 
tziahs said:
This really sent shivers down my spine, because it might just happen. I guess in just a few years, there will be robots that will auto detect very low competition long tail keywords like "soft toothbrush for Pablo Escobar's berzerk hippos in Colombia" and will create micro-niche websites with 10 articles.

Pretty scary...
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You can do that already, just get the GPT4 API and hook it up to an Ahref Enterprise account to get the API, then off you go.
 
Magoo said:
In the soon future, what stops a bot from just crawling these low-search keywords and writing articles about them? I mean, they might not provide enough traffic for a major publisher to spend their human writer's time and resources on them, but if they automate it - why wouldn't they do it?

As long as they cover enough long tail keywords, it might just be worth it and if their site has enough authority, Google maybe won't mind that it's written by AI?
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You can still be ahead of the curve by posting about questions that haven’t been asked. I think it’s something like 15% of searches have never been searched before.

I have pages that no one has searched for (yet).
They all help the overall site though and I know some of them will get searched in the future.

When they do I should be well positioned to rank for the query.
 
Domain succeeding with spammy links: do the same?

One of my competitors is ranking really well on the basis of obviously cheap links, I'm talking the type you know it when you see it - one site even has a "post your article on our site" page that has a button leading to a "buy high dr links" service. These are showing up on ahrefs so I'm assuming they're not disavowed.

He's got zero good quality links

I'm already planning on haro outreach and high quality manual guest posting outreach, but those links likely won't be pointing to money pages

This guy has about 400 cheap links (combined) pointing to his money pages - seeking some feedback on what you'd do in my case, would you throw in some cheap links to your money pages or stay away from them or... ?
 
ashley said:
These are showing up on ahrefs so I'm assuming they're not disavowed.
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Google's disavow tool and Ahref's crawling and cataloging backlinks have zero relation to each other. They're not the same company and don't share data with each other.

No, don't spam your site if it's a site you care about. And honestly (and I'm not trying to be a smart aleck here) if you knew how to affectively utilize these types of links you wouldn't be asking the question in the "newbie" thread, you know. It's akin to playing with fire. Those without experience are likely to be burnt.

High powered contextual links are the real needle movers. Obviously you can get some low quality links and get some traction. These are also more likely to be ignored by Google over time as they do their number crunching. You'll naturally obtain enough low powered links as time progresses without putting in effort.

If you want to understand the world of spamming, watch the CBD results for a while. You'll see people dominate with 1,000's of exact match anchor text links pointing in. And then Google updates and all the guys on top doing that are now completely wiped out and replaced with the next set of guys doing that. So yes, this kind of stuff works, but temporarily. And you're probably not in a niche where "temporary" is built into the game, where "temporary" can make you a million dollars and walk you off into the sunset. If you want longevity, do it right, despite what you see others doing. They don't tend to stick around.
 
Ryuzaki said:
If you want longevity, do it right, despite what you see others doing. They don't tend to stick around.
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thanks really appreciate your reply! And it's great to get this reminder, this guy's site is relatively new.

For all I know this guy's game might be temporary, in that he'll just replicate this site elsewhere if he gets hit or he'll move onto another niche, or maybe he even hired an agency who went and got these links without him understanding
 
I have my eyes on an aged domain through a marketplace. The backlinks are good, high quality but the links are at least a decade old. Do links lose power as they age?

The site is indexed but has no traffic. The domain was redirecting (301) to a betting site for several years after the original site changed ownership. Is this a risk?

Domain costs several thousand dollars.
 
DarkCarnage said:
I have my eyes on an aged domain through a marketplace. The backlinks are good, high quality but the links are at least a decade old. Do links lose power as they age?

The site is indexed but has no traffic. The domain was redirecting (301) to a betting site for several years after the original site changed ownership. Is this a risk?

Domain costs several thousand dollars.
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Logic tells me that the strength of the backlink will depend on the authority of the site that issues the link and how it ranks over time.

In my case, I have had websites with power that after leaving them abandoned generating traffic, were losing traction and over time authority, with which, I would like to think that the links I added to third parties will also have lost strength, right?
 
jpaask said:
Logic tells me that the strength of the backlink will depend on the authority of the site that issues the link and how it ranks over time.

In my case, I have had websites with power that after leaving them abandoned generating traffic, were losing traction and over time authority, with which, I would like to think that the links I added to third parties will also have lost strength, right?
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Thanks for the reply. I ended up skipping this domain. I got a better domain through godaddy auctions at a much lower price. Would recommend auctions to anyone looking to get an aged domain.
 
Do you put a long-tail keyword /search query in your title exactly "as is"?

If a Google dropdown suggestion is displaying something, is it bad to make an article with that exact title (plus anything else after a colon if it fits)?

Wondering how good google is at deciphering different titles that are designed to answer that searches intent, or if I should lean on it being 1:1 more.

Thank you.
 
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