Domain Magnate Update
This is our 4th weekly newsletter and we’d like to get your feedback! Just reply here to let me know if you like the new format with industry news and consistent weekly emails, what you’d like to see more here, and any feedback or suggestions are welcome!
New content this week is a deep dive into all things buying, building and selling online businesses in my interview with Jonathan Jay for The Business Buying Strategies Podcast. If you’re interested in acquiring or selling an online business, but don’t know where to start, reply here directly.
On the industry side we are seeing growing multiples for all online businesses, especially SaaS and more financing options available. The trend is expected to continue, however, current high evaluations drive experienced buyers to look for private deals, and be even more selective.
How Healthy is Your Content Site Portfolio?
It’s important to regularly check the health of content sites within your portfolio. We often think that as long as organic traffic, revenue and domain authority are growing over time everything is ok. However, we need to dig deeper to really assess the underlying condition.
First, we never want to be reliant on any one page in google for bringing in the majority of revenue. We need to ensure that the top page accounts for less than 20% of search traffic and ideally less than 10%.
Second, you need to track your keyword position distribution. In Ahrefs you can track your ranking positions segmented via groups – Positions #1–3, Positions #4–10, Positions #11–50 and Positions #51–100.
An increase in new keywords in positions #11–50 is only good as long as your positions #1–3, and positions #4–10 remain stable.
Third, to ensure our sites survive the next Google update, we need to ensure that we have a diversified backlink profile in terms of the domain rating of sites linking to us, and also diversified anchor text pointing to our sites. Matt Diggity has a great free post on Anchor Text Optimization for 2021.
P&L Financial Due Diligence
Our friends at HoriZen Capital, led by Ex-PwC Pierre, have put together a new course on P&L Financial Due Diligence. From the course you will:
1 – Understand how the Big 4 approach and structure Due Diligence
2 – Get a wide set of P&L Financial Analyses tools and methodologies
3 – Learn how to do a proper Quality of Earnings when assessing a company
4 – Understand how to review budget and tie your findings to forecast review
Check out the full course and get a $100 discount we negotiated for you right here.
Want to Recover from the latest Google Update? Fix Your Content
In the wake of Google’s broad core algorithm update, many sites have seen major drops in search rankings. Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst, John Mueller of Google advises not to rush into technical fixes but alternatively suggests to focus on improving your website’s on-page content instead.
He explains that if you really want Google to see your site, you should look at areas where there might be low quality content or where users could be confused as they navigate a website. Mueller concludes that when a site loses ranking because of an algorithm update, it will likely take longer to get back to where it was before, as the previous version of your website is now considered by Google to be a different website than your previous version.
Does Google consider the number of indexed pages when calculating quality?
One common question is whether a website with thousands of indexed pages influences Google’s perception of site quality. The short answer is no, it’s not a sign of quality. Here’s the relevant portion of the answer from Google employee John Mueller:
“So it’s definitely not the case that if you have more pages indexed that we think your website is better. Sometimes it makes sense to have a lot of pages indexed. Sometimes they’re kind of useful pages to have indexed like that. But it’s not a sign of quality with regards to how many pages that are indexed.”
Google’s John Mueller has also clarified how Google deals with site moves and shared some tips for minimizing the chances of triggering a so-called ‘Sandbox Effect’.