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

Ryuzaki - Thank you very much

I have another one, when I first build the site I build around 50-60 knowem style profiles to secure my brand. Run them through some indexation services and get plenty of them indexed. I found today that most of them are still working fine but they are not longer indexed. (after a half year or so)

Will you bother with log in into each one, do some activity or refresh it to some level and try to index them again? Or I should let them by? I personally dont know what to do...
 
@micho24, That was something else John Mueller mentioned. He's saying that Google pretty much ignores all user-generated content now. Not all, but most. He really emphasized "profiles" as something Google ignores now. So if you believe what he's saying, then I'd may not bother. If there's any action on those social sites and you can promote to fans, it might be worth the time though.

Something else to think about is whether or not Google needs to have something indexed for it to be a part of the link graph or not. Do they need to index it or only crawl it? There's no definitive answer here, just something to consider.
 
Any recommendations in Wordpress for a service provider directory with user generated profiles? It will only have a small number, maybe 10 to 20 in the first year, so something which looks nice and has options. Something which has good support for pics, video, social media. I forgot, maybe I asked this question before.
 
@bernard, I think this was the thread we had before on the topic that you started. Looks like UsersWP.io and GeoCraft V2 were the ultimate offered solutions.
 
Hello, another question. Banner on all posts pointing to one money post on the same domain. Do you see any problem with that or it is fine? Want to drive traffic from other posts to that specific one post.
Thank you very much for answer :smile:
 
Perfect answer, thanks @CCarter.

Follow up question, I originally registered my .com with a hyphen. It was the best opportunity I thought I had at the time. The opportunity to buy the .com without hyphen has come up - $700. Worth it?

I think I've already decided the answer is yes, as I want to turn this into a brand, not just some sketchy aff website. But I appreciate feedback.

$700 - better spent on a domain (no existing links) or new content+links to my current domain?
 
jjj_ said:
I think I've already decided the answer is yes, as I want to turn this into a brand, not just some sketchy aff website. But I appreciate feedback.
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If it's long term you know what needs to be done. $700 is pretty cheap, we've bought domains for a lot more for projects we haven't started yet. But it helps with the position in the future for us.

However if you ONLY have $700 and this current project is not making money right now - it might make more sense to worry about generating revenue today and create "content + promotion" (not links - change the mentality to go further) versus going -$700 in a project not generating revenue.

if you are making $700+ a month in revenue, then it's just a business expense where you have to take a hit this month to secure and protect your brand. If you are making $0 - then it's just a deeper hole that mentally some people might not be able to dig themselves out of.
 
Anyone know of a batch image processor that will auto-crop images and ideally remove white backgrounds (replacing with transparent)?
 
jjj_ said:
Anyone know of a batch image processor that will auto-crop images and ideally remove white backgrounds (replacing with transparent)?
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Imagemagick may be able to do that. It's fairly powerful.
 
Alright this is a good one.

Google Search Console is warning that I have problems with a bunch of schema, back from when one of my sites ran WooCommerce. It hasn't been on WooCommerce for 6 months now, and some of these pages haven't been on the site for over 18 months.

So why are they only "detecting" these warnings today? I assume the page is cached on their end and rather than evaluate the live site/pages, they use their cache instead.

All of the pages on the live site have since been updated, 404'd or 301'd to new pages. So what's the best course of action here?
 
@jjj_, is this on the new Search Console or the old? The new one should give you the ability to request "Validate Fix," which takes weeks but they crawl "most" of the URLs and recheck them all.

They definitely can take more than 6 months to recrawl everything, accept the 301's and 404's as reality, etc. I've been forcing their hands with ~700 URLs using new temporary sitemaps and other tricks and I still have a good 40-50 to go, and we're getting really close to the 6 month mark. If you do nothing, lots of URLs will still be around at the 6 month mark.

Google also just said recently that they're now able to process a lot more errors for users beyond the ones they were sending out. It could be related to that somehow.

If they're fixed or the pages don't exist, you could choose to do nothing or just "Validate Fix" if that's an option. Otherwise it's going to take some intervention to get them to hurry up and recrawl all those URLs. And that's not fast either.
 
I'm noticing a strange thing regarding my Amazon Associate sales recently. The prices that I see in my orders report do not match up with the prices on Amazon.

For example, I sold a product that had a price of £315.83 in my orders, but when I click the link to go to the product on Amazon it is listed as £379. There are no other sellers selling it cheaper and there are no used or refurbished items.

I know that Amazon changes their prices regularly, but I track this product and I know for a fact it has never been sold at such a low price. I have also checked this on items that have just come through, on today's orders. An item that is listed on Amazon for £99.99 is in my reports as £82.50.

Anyone else noticed this? Is Amazon skimming off some of the sale before it even reaches my account, or have I missed a hidden fee?

Edit: I just checked my last 5 orders and the prices are all roughly 18% lower in my orders than they are on Amazon.
 
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Ryuzaki said:
@jjj_, is this on the new Search Console or the old? The new one should give you the ability to request "Validate Fix," which takes weeks but they crawl "most" of the URLs and recheck them all.
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On the new one. I must have been tired yesterday not wanting to just validate fix on all of them

Cash Builder said:
Anyone else noticed this? Is Amazon skimming off some of the sale before it even reaches my account, or have I missed a hidden fee?
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Could this be a tax situation @Cash Builder ? My guess is you're living or selling in a region where a large sales tax is applied but they are only paying out a commission on the ex-tax amount.
 
I'm about to snapback a really strong domain. The plan is to 301 it to one of my money sites.

At first I was planning on simply doing the redirect from my registrar.

My mate then told me that a lot of people seem to get better results when doing it on server level and then adding it to your Google webmaster account and redirect it from there as well.

What do you guys think? Is the second alternative much better than the first one?

Thanks in advance.
 
jjj_ said:
Could this be a tax situation @Cash Builder ? My guess is you're living or selling in a region where a large sales tax is applied but they are only paying out a commission on the ex-tax amount.
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Yeah, I’m in the UK so it looks like they take VAT off before they pay commissions. Bit of a bummer, but at least I know now.
 
@Olov this has been discussed several times a quick Google of "site:buildersociety.com 301", will give you several threads indicating that best results come from page level 301s including boilerplate pages like about and contact.

I've just been reading them. :wink:
 
Not really business related question, is it possible to sort the posts by likes? It would really help me find which posts in 10+ pages long thread are the best one to read. This way I can really save a lot of my time.

Thank you!
 
Going all in on Sendy. Paid someone on Fiverr to screw me around. Now planning to do it the right way.

2 options:
  1. Setup Sendy on AWS (obviously SES, but CentOS or something on EC2)
  2. Setup on my NAS at home (fiber connection)
Is there an obvious reason why 1 or 2 is better? I'm very green to email marketing. Don't plan any enormous lists any time soon. Both would be sub-10,000 subscribers.
 
TheWeeb said:
Not really business related question, is it possible to sort the posts by likes? It would really help me find which posts in 10+ pages long thread are the best one to read. This way I can really save a lot of my time.
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I don't believe that's possible. The consolation is we only have one or two threads with 10+ pages.

jjj_ said:
  1. Setup Sendy on AWS (obviously SES, but CentOS or something on EC2)
  2. Setup on my NAS at home (fiber connection)
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Ben, the creator, said he uses an Amazon EC2 "small instance" with 1.7GB of RAM and hit 10k emails in ~9 minutes. Sendy is multi-threaded now and can reach some pretty high mails/minute, but whether or not that's even necessary depends on how often you're going to mail your ~10k lists. At just once or twice a day, I wouldn't care to let Sendy batch the work and let it run in the background of my main server (which is what I do) since SES is doing all the heavy lifting.
 
Ryuzaki said:
Ben, the creator, said he uses an Amazon EC2 "small instance" with 1.7GB of RAM and hit 10k emails in ~9 minutes. Sendy is multi-threaded now and can reach some pretty high mails/minute, but whether or not that's even necessary depends on how often you're going to mail your ~10k lists. At just once or twice a day, I wouldn't care to let Sendy batch the work and let it run in the background of my main server (which is what I do) since SES is doing all the heavy lifting.
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Thanks, just spent the day sorting it out. I'm not confident my setup is perfect but the test send worked. SES limits lifted, tomorrow the real test begins.
 
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Beginner question: How effective are Amazon affiliate banner ads? I found one that's very relevant to my website, but I was wondering if there's any downsides to using them (bad for SEO ranking or just plain ineffective). They're more intrusive than simple affiliate links in text, so I was wondering if using them was a good idea. I'll test it out anyway (no real downside risk), but interested if anyone has any experience with them.
 
My newbie question is about doing local SEO for a service industry... Is using a page generator to create location specific pages with spinned content the best place to start or...?
 
city17 said:
Beginner question: How effective are Amazon affiliate banner ads?
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Nowhere near as good as text links and image links in your posts. It'll probably shake out about the same as Adsense would depending on where you place them, except you won't get paid on the click. You're far better off doing pre-sale work and sending the user to specific products than just shooting them to Amazon for a general category and hoping for the best.

Jeff181 said:
My newbie question is about doing local SEO for a service industry... Is using a page generator to create location specific pages with spinned content the best place to start or...?
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If you're trying to roll out so much content that you're having to spin content, then you're probably making doorway pages, which is something Google took care of a long time ago and continues to watch with Panda.

If you feel you must, you're better off doing ad-lib content than spun content. This sounds like churn and burn work though, which I never really recommend when you can spend a bit more time, energy, and money and end up with real assets that you can keep around forever.

We've had a lot of conversations about spun content and local lead generation. If you do a search you'll find them. Here's one that's active now: [GOAL] Local Lead Gen - 50k per month

Here's a few more from a quick search:
 
Ryuzaki said:
Nowhere near as good as text links and image links in your posts. It'll probably shake out about the same as Adsense would depending on where you place them, except you won't get paid on the click. You're far better off doing pre-sale work and sending the user to specific products than just shooting them to Amazon for a general category and hoping for the best.
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Ah, I see, I was worried that would be the case. I'll try it anyway because I can put the banner in a prominent place above the fold, while my product links are less visible. So I'm hoping the increased visibility will outweigh the reduced conversion rate. I actually got two sales since adding the banner yesterday, but that's random luck lol.
 
I have 2 email lists:

2000 people who opted in after changing GDPR settings. They are now subscribed to a newsletter.
11000 people who opted in before GDPR, which was also mixed with the 2000 GDPR approved users.

Does anyone know of a simple (Google Sheets?) way to "subtract" the 2000 GDPR approved users from the 11000 person list?

I want to email the 9000 remaining people saying "if you want to opt back in, do x y and z", but don't want to fk up and confuse my 2000 good subscribers.
 
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