Hey Yusuf,
Great article and I have added some claps 😀 👍
I have a question too, how did you create the CTA button to "Sign up to WA Free" on your Medium post. I was trying to do that on some of my product reviews to really highlight a CTA but haven't figured out how to do it yet.
Pete
@petedr93 Thanks a lot Pete.
Actually, it's just a small image that I made on Canva. As far as I know, it's the only way to make a button on Medium.
@yusuf I did wonder if it was just an image but how did you get the URL embedded in the image. Any time i have tried this I can't find an option to do this. I asked Diane about this too and i am sure she didn't think it could be done either
@yusuf thanks for that, every day really is a school day 😀
As Diane said it is a great tip, i might have to go back and add that into some of my earlier posts
given enough time and social signals, my review will find its way to page one, but in your experience, how long does this typically take?
I was seeing my Medium reviews hitting page one within 24 hours quite often. Then they tend to slip back down the SERP again often with newer Medium posts taking their place. Then sometimes there was a little dance between my review and another Medium review ... one day I am on P1 then the next day, someone else!
@rohanm Well, then that's bad news for me, because my review is nowhere to be seen in the SERPs after 3 days of publishing it.
Not sure if social signals will have their say with time, but it doesn't look good so far.
@yusuf I have seen that my Medium posts seem to change quite dramatically, I had one post ranking at position 5 after 5 days then it disappeared completely. Another post hit position 60 after 7 days and stayed there, another suddenly appeared in position 4 after 7 days after being nowhere. Every day there are different websites moving up and down and sometimes quite big movements, really interested to see what happens when i start aiming some backlinks at a post with Partha
@yusuf it's definitely not a given you'll rank. It's a bit of a numbers game I think. Get lots of articles online and you may get 50% ranking. I'm seeing LinkedIn and Reddit ranking well for the target phrase and then a Medium review at #11 published May 25th which hasn't been banned yet 🤫
Hi Yusuf,
I just gave you 50 claps
What most people fail to understand, though, is that people who write negative reviews usually recommend alternatives, and that would be the ulterior motive in this case.
I know you've never promoted WA before, ND potentially you've never gone through the Bootcamp training, but the above sentence ALWAYS makes me laugh when a Wealthy Affiliate member writes/says it.
In fact, there is a prominent member (also a member here) who I have seen say something like the above time-and-time again, something along the lines of:
"Have you noticed that negative WA reviews always offer an alternative product, so realistically they're just trying to earn affiliate commissions from another product without really knowing anything about WA"
Do you want to know why I laugh at that?
This is EXACTLY what the Bootcamp training taught WA members to do until the WA training had an overhaul LAST YEAR (in other words, for OVER A DECADE this is what WA was teaching, the ENTIRE Bootcamp process was "bait and switch", i.e. write 500 product reviews, slag off every product, and then offer WA as an alternative at the end"
IT'S TRUE!!! (and I don't even know what is said on Bootcamp anymore, but I'm guessing EVERY SINGLE REVIEW on a Bootcamp wesbite STILL OFFERS WA as a "better option")
It amazes me that so many WA members over the years have slagged off this tactic when people are wrting negative WA reviews, but it's perfectly acceptable for them to do for about 100-500 other products that are not WA.
I don't get it!!!!
(again, I know you haven't done the Bootcamp, so this isn't against YOU)
Anyway, I just wanted to get that across, but I'm sure there will be people within WA who will defend this tactic to the hilt, i.e. "No other people can't slag off WA and then offer an alternative, that's terrible and dishonest marketing BUT WE AT WA CAN DO IT IF WE WANT" (Honestly, I have seen the above "argument" over 1000 times over the years... again I don't get it, it's almost like saying, "if you murder someone you should go to jail, but if I murder someone it's fine, because I'm a member of WA"
What's good for the goose is NOT good for the gander... apparently!
ANYONE who is deeply offended by the above, PROVE ME WRONG!!!
Okay, as for "searcher intent", this is actually what GOOGLE THINKS people are searching for (user intent is actually what people are REALLY searching for, more often than not, the two will align, but if ever you see a complete change in the SERPs, this is because Google feels they got "searcher intent" wrong, usually because people AREN'T interacting with the content that is currently ranking).
Anyway, the point is that Nyall and Craig's reviews (Nyall has two, one on Reddit and the other on his site) have been the logest ranking reviews for the keyword "Wealthy Affiliate Reviews".
Pretty much every other result has changed during that time, except for those two (three) results.
Going back to what I've said above, and if a WA member can't see this they are too far gone for me to ever help.
The TrustPilot reviews are ALL because people have been told to go and make WA sound great, there is NOT a single TrustPilot review that says "I earned XXX dollars", they are all, well pretty much what we're used to, "it's the greatest trainig in the world, better than anything I've ever seen before, and I've been scammed a million times, the training works!!!!"
(I won;t talk about the recent "the training works" posts, yeah I'm aware, lol a 6-year member celebrating getting ONE visit from Google (it was probably a bot 🤣), other members of 2-3 years celebraiting being on page 5, etc.)
So, the TrustPilot reviews are "manipulated".
The same can be said for the Quora results, in fact, I even remember a highly successful WA member starting one of the threads, and then going to the comments section of WA to ask for loads of comments, and this was actively encouraged, and it's still ranking.
So, the main "positive" reviews have manipulated UGC platforms to rank.
Therefore, putting that content on Medium (Linkedin, Reddit, Quora, etc.) has a great chance of ranking.
However, I have a feeling that the NEGATIVE reviews will always rank at the top of the page (Google believes searcher intent is "I do not recommend WA")
I could be wrong, of course.
The other thing I've noted, sonce the spam update of a couple of weeks ago a lot of the "parasite"/UGC articles have changed.
I can't find Don on page two any more, but there are two new Medium articles.
Something to note is that both Medium articles are about ONE MONTH OLD (and one of them has absolutely NO social signals, i.e. no claps or comments).
Based on that, I would say to wait up to one month to see where you are.
That being said, I can't obviously say this for every niche (this is something that most people don't get taught, we tend to generalize, "how long does it take to rank?", but forget keyword competitiveness, it's often also the case that you can see differences niche-to-niche, so, and these are just examples, NOT EXACTS, a MMO article may take 2 weeks to index and rank, whereas a weight loss articles may index and rank on the same day as publication, whereas an article about relationships takes 6 weeks to index and another 3 weeks to rank, there are NO EXACTS. this is why it's so difficult to answer the questions "how long")
What I've personally noticed in VARIOUS niches but BEFORE the recent SPAM update (20th June - 27th June) is that articles either ranked in the top 20 results in the first week after publication or NOT AT ALL.
Obviously, I have also seen articles NOT follow this "rule", but in the main, I've noted that the Medium articles that do well are usually ranking within that first week.
Looking at your final comment about "authorattive domains", you'd like to think this is the case, and while I HAVE SEEN THIS many, many, many times with articles I have written on Medium, I have also seen the opposite, i.e the article isn't even indexed after a month.
Let's see what happens, I'll keep an eye out as well, but check out page two and you'll see two fairly new Medium articles there now.
@partha hahahaha laughed so hard at this, WA is like a cult:follow the training and you'll be rich! It amazes me too.
( I got an invite as well to write a review on Trustpilot in my mailbox, some time ago. Decided to wait with the review. Because at the start, I was honestly positive about WA, as I knew nothing about building a website, affiliate marketing, ads, socials, nothing nada. So for beginners, WA is great and I would have given it at least 4 stars on Trustpilot. Cheeky and clever though, the owners lol. But when I got hit a second time by google, and got mad over their hosting and such, decided to finally give a review on trustpilot. I'm hard to get mad, but at that point : djees, their support sucks, and they leave EVERYTHING TO THE COMMUNITY TO FIX THINGS. And getting ridiculous 'advice' from that same community. You and Diane and Andy were a few exceptions.
So, I gave a 3 star review. Got a message that Kyle didn't believe that I was a member, so I needed to prove it to Trustpilot. While my review was filled with details that a non member wouldn't know about. I talked about you and Diane and if you 2 weren't there, I wouldn't see much reasons to stay. So I proved that I was a member, wtf, and my review remained. For sure: most positive reviews are from beginners,not making any money, but who are impressed with their training and AI writer, thinking that this is the way they'll be rich. Gosh, have my eyes opened.)
@ohnoo_not_her Yeah, I agree with you. Trustpilot reviews are practically useless, that's why I explicitly said I won't go over them in my WA review.
@partha Alright, I'll give it a month and see how things are. Thank you Partha.
Totally with you on what you said about WA. Not sure if you saw it, but in my review, I did mention the downside of the ☀️🌈 sunshine-and-rainbows ☀️🌈 world many members tend to live in. I said that experienced members find it irritating. I was thinking of you when I wrote that. 😂
When I was talking about the bait-and-switch tactic, I wasn't necessarily criticising it or saying it was dishonest, I was just countering the idea that a negative review is seen as inherently more genuine since there's nothing to be promoted.
I was basically telling myself that both types of reviews (positive and negative) are trying to make money, so negative reviews shouldn't have this "genuine" edge.
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