Website Investing Weekly - Check Your Vitals š
Happy MondayĀ and welcome toĀ Website Investing Weekly, bringing you up-to-date with whatās been going on in the world of website investing. You can leave comments on the web version of this post.
š„ Vitally Important
Google made an announcement of a future algorithm update happening at some point next year, giving site owners advanced notice for when that judgment day comes. They are calling it Core Web Vitals and itās about improving page experience:
Core Web VitalsĀ are a set of real-world, user-centered metrics that quantify key aspects of the user experience. They measure dimensions of web usability such as load time, interactivity, and the stability of content as it loads (so you donāt accidentally tap that button when it shifts under your finger - how annoying!).
Both Neil Patel and Ezoic wrote articles on how to prepare and improve your Largest Contentful Paint šØ- a new metric for me that is now showing in Google Search Console if you have pages taking longer then 2.5s to load.
Ezoic states that going forward:
The biggest thing is to focus onĀ building a better website and delivering a better experience to the user.Ā Ā That will trump everything else youāre working on to improve these metrics.
š¤Æ Software With A Service?
In a surprising move by a software company that had a $40MM investment round, Semrush continued to build out its new Marketplace by offering guest posts for sale.
The page has since been taken down (you can see it in Wayback Machine) but I caught it indexed in Google last week:
In-content white hat links normally can't be bought, just earned. Our team research, select and outreach the best niche resources suited to your business's specifics. A great outcome requires a lot of complicated and time-consuming work, so here we are to free you from it.
SEO John Locke was one of the first to pick this up:
To which Semrush replied:
To which John Mueller, Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google replied saying this would be an unnatural link (which Search Engine Journal covered):
Indeed, their guest post page gave two examples on this site and this site, and Yashar Ghaffaarloo responded by saying those sites actually sell links:
SEMRush claimed that it does not buy links from the publishers, that they are simply asking sites if they want to publish the articles. But wouldnāt it be ironic if their software tool were to flag them:
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š New Flippa Integration
Flippa launched a new integration with SEMrush where every listing page now shows a sitesā authority score, along with the number of domains / keywords. Users have the ability to buy the full report for $10.
š„ Investors Club 2.0
Investors Club launched their 2.0 which now comes with in-app messaging & offer system, plus a Q&A section below each listing where approved users can ask questions and sellers can respond. They are now doing everything that was previously included in the Assisted Purchase option by default, and negotiating is now done by buyers and sellers in the offer system. Plus, you can now buy and sell a site from the same account, where sellers have the ability to accept, decline or generate a counter-offer. As Andrej, the CEO states:
This is a giant step towards our main goal - creating the best possible marketplace for online businesses that don't suck and are presented in an objective way with no hype.
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EzoicĀ is an AI driven platform built for publishers to optimize ad revenue, maximise site speed and access big data analytics. I have a software review site which runs on their nameservers and integrates with cloudflare to achieve a 99/100 Google Pagespeed Insights score on desktop.
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