In episode 98 of our weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked about the link velocity and link types when using Google Drive Doc and About.Me pages when building links in an IFTTT network.
The exact question was:
With comments like ‘You can spam the hell out of iftt properties”” being used in this community, how careful do we have to be with link velocity and link types when spamming things like a Google drive doc with our properties in our about.me pages? Also, which out of the main list contain do-follow links
If you've been stressing over how to optimize your SEO for RankBrain, there's good news: you can't. Not in the traditional sense of the word, at least. Unlike the classic algorithms we're used to, RankBrain is a query interpretation model. It's a horse of a different color, and as such, it requires a different way of thinking than we've had to use in the past. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand tackles the question of what RankBrain actually is and whether SEOs should (or can) optimize for it.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about RankBrain SEO and RankBrain in general. So Google released this algorithm or component of their algorithm a while ago, but there have been questions for a long time about: Can people actually do RankBrain SEO? Is that even a thing? Is it possible to optimize specifically for this RankBrain algorithm?
I'll talk today a little bit about how RankBrain works just so we have a broad overview and we're all on the same page about it. Google has continued to release more and more information through interviews and comments about what the system does. There are some things that potentially shift in our SEO strategies and tactics around it, but I'll show why optimizing for RankBrain is probably the wrong way to frame it.
What does RankBrain actually do?
So what is it that RankBrain actually does? A query comes in to Google. Historically, classically Google would use an algorithm, probably the same algorithm, at least they've said sort of the same algorithm across the board historically to figure out which pages and sites to show. There are a bunch of different ranking inputs, which we've talked about many times here on Whiteboard Friday.
But if you search for this query today, what Google is saying is with RankBrain, they're going to take any query that comes in and RankBrain is essentially going to be a query interpretation model. It's going to look at the words in that query. It's potentially going to look at things possibly like location or personalization or other things. We're not entirely sure whether RankBrain uses those, but it certainly could. It interprets these queries, and then it's going to try and determine the intent behind the query and make the ranking signals that are applied to the results appropriate to that actual query.
So here's what that means. If you search today — I did this search on my mobile device, I did it on my desktop device — for "best Netflix shows" or "best shows on Netflix" or "What are good Netflix shows," "good Netflix shows," "what to watch on Netflix," notice a pattern here? All five of these searches are essentially asking for the very same thing. We might quibble and say "what to watch on Netflix" could be more movie-centric than shows, which could be more TV or episodic series-centric. That's okay. But these five are essentially, " What should I watch on Netflix?"
Now, RankBrain is going to help Google understand that each of these queries, despite the fact that they use slightly different words and phrasing or completely different words, with the exception of Netflix, that they should all be answered by the same content or same kinds of content. That's the part where Google, where RankBrain is determining the searcher intent. Then, Google is going to use RankBrain to basically say, "Now, what signals are right for me, Google, to enhance or to push down for these particular queries?"
Signals
So we're going to be super simplistic, hyper-simplistic and imagine that Google has this realm of just a few signals, and for this particular query or set of queries, any of these, that...
Keyword matchingisnot that important. So minus that, not super important here.
Link diversity, neither here nor there.
Anchor text, it doesn't matter too much, neither here nor there.
Freshness, very, very important.
Why is freshness so important? Well, because Google has seen patterns before, and if you show shows from Netflix that were on the service a year ago, two years ago, three years ago, you are no longer relevant. It doesn't matter if you have lots of good links, lots of diversity, lots of anchor text, lots of great keyword matching. If you are not fresh, you are not showing searchers what they want, and therefore Google doesn't want to display you. In fact, the number one result for all of these was published, I think, six or seven days ago, as of the filming of this Whiteboard Friday. Not particularly surprising, right? Freshness is super important for this query.
Domain authority, that is somewhat important. Google doesn't want to get too spammed by low-quality domains even if they are publishing fresh content.
Engagement, very, very important signal here. That indicates to Google whether searchers are being satisfied by these particular results.
This is a high-engagement query too. So on low-engagement queries, where people are looking for a very simple, quick answer, you expect engagement not to be that big. But for something in-depth, like "What should I watch on Netflix," you expect people are going to go, they're going to engage with that content significantly. Maybe they're going to watch a trailer or some videos. Maybe they're going to browse through a list of 50 things. High engagement, hopefully.
Related topics, Google is definitely looking for the right words and phrases.
If you, for example, are talking about the best shows on Netflix and everyone is talking about how hot — I haven't actually seen it — "Stranger Things" is, which is a TV program on Netflix that is very much in the public eye right now, well, if you don't have that on your best show list, Google probably does not want to display you. So that's an important related topic or a concept or a word vector, whatever it is.
Content depth, that's also important here. Google expects a long list, a fairly substantive page of content, not just a short, "Here are 10 items," and no details about them.
As a result of interpreting the query, using these signals in these proportions, these five were basically the top five or six for every single one of those queries. So Google is essentially saying, "Hey, it doesn't matter if you have perfect keyword targeting and tons of link diversity and anchor text. The signals that are more important here are these ones, and we can interpret that all of these queries essentially have the same intent behind them. Therefore, this is who we're going to rank."
So, in essence, RankBrain is helping Google determine what signals to use in the algorithm or how to weight those signals, because there's a ton of signals that they can choose from. RankBrain is helping them weight them, and they're helping them interpret the query and the searcher intent.
How should SEOs respond?
Does that actually change how we do SEO? A little bit. A little bit. What it doesn't do, though, is it does not say there is a specific way to do SEO for RankBrain itself. Because RankBrain is, yes, helping Google select signals and prioritize them, you can't actually optimize for RankBrain itself. You can optimize for these signals, and you might say, "Hey, I know that, in my world, these signals are much more important than these signals," or the reverse. For a lot of commercial, old-school queries, keyword matching and link diversity and anchor text are still very, very important. I'm not discounting those. What I'm saying is you can't do SEO for RankBrain specifically or not in the classic way that we've been trained to do SEO for a particular algorithm. This is kind of different.
That said, there are some ways SEOs should respond.
If you have not already killed the concept, the idea of one keyword, one page, you should kill it now. In fact, you should have killed it a long time ago, because Hummingbird really put this to bed way back in the day. But if you're still doing that, RankBrain does that even more. It's even more saying, "Hey, you know what? Condense all of these. For all of these queries you should not have one URL and another URL and another URL and another URL. You should have one page targeting all of them, targeting all the intents that are like this." When you do your keyword research and your big matrix of keyword-to-content mapping, that's how you should be optimizing there.
It's no longer the case, as it was probably five, six years ago, that one set of fixed inputs no longer governs every single query. Because of this weighting system, some queries are going to demand signals in different proportion to other ones. Sometimes you're going to need fresh content. Sometimes you need very in-depth content. Sometimes you need high engagement. Sometimes you don't. Sometimes you will need tons of links with anchor text. Sometimes you will not. Sometimes you need high authority to rank for something. Sometimes you don't. So that's a different model.
The reputation that you get as a website, a domain earns a reputation around particular types of signals. That could be because you're publishing lots of fresh content or because you get lots of diverse links or because you have very high engagement or you have very low engagement in terms of you answer things very quickly, but you have a lot of diverse information and topics on that, like a Dictionary.com or an Answers.com, somebody like that where it's quick, drive-by visits, you answer the searcher's query and then they're gone. That's a fine model. But you need to match your SEO focus, your brand of the type of SEO and the type of signals that you hit to the queries that you care about most. You should be establishing that over time and building that out.
So RankBrain, yes, it might shift a little bit of our strategic focus, but no, it's not a classic algorithm that we do SEO against, like a Panda or a Penguin. How do I optimize to avoid Panda hitting me? How do I optimize to avoid Penguin hitting me? How do I optimize for Hummingbird so that my keywords match the query intent? Those are very different from RankBrain, which has this interpretation model.
So, with that, I look forward to hearing about your experiences with RankBrain. I look forward to hearing about what you might be changing since RankBrain came out a couple of years ago, and we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
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In the 98th episode of Semantic Mastery’s weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked how to stack multiple Tier-1 networks on a YouTube channel.
The exact question was:
I have heard you talk about stacking multiple Tier-1 networks on a YouTube channel. How do you do that? Once you have the ring of properties around the YT channel (the Tier-1 network), isn’t adding more persona networks and powering them up with links all you can do to make the network more powerful?
This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.
We all know building backlinks is one of the most important aspects of any successful SEO and digital marketing campaign. However, I believe there is an untapped resource out there for link building: finding your competitors' broken pages that have been linked to by external sources.
Allow me to elaborate.
Finding the perfect backlink often takes hours, and it can can take days, weeks, or even longer to acquire. That’s where the link building method I've outlined below comes in. I use it on a regular basis to build relevant backlinks from competitors' 404 pages.
Please note: In this post, I will be using Search Engine Land as an example to make my points.
Ready to dive in? Great, because I'm going to walk you through the entire link building process now.
First, you need to find your competitor(s). This is as easy as searching for the keyword you’re targeting on Google and selecting websites that are above you in the SERPs. Once you have a list of competitors, create a spreadsheet to put all of your competitors on, including their position in the rankings and the date you listed them.
Next, download Screaming Frog SEO Spider [a freemium tool]. This software will allow you to crawl all of your competitors website, revealing all their 404 pages. To do this, simply enter your competitors' URLs in the search bar one at a time, like this:
Once the crawl is complete, click "Response Codes."
Then, click on the dropdown arrow next to "filter" and select "Client Error 4xx."
Now you'll be able to see the brand's 404 pages.
Once you've completed the step above, simply press the "Export" button to export all of their 404 pages into a file. Next, import this file into to a spreadsheet in Excel or Google Docs. On this part of the spreadsheet, create tabs called "Trust Flow," "Citation Flow," "Referring Domains," and "External Backlinks."
Now that you’ve imported all of their 404 pages, you need to dissect the images and external links if there are any. A quick way to do this is to highlight the cell block by pressing on the specific cell at the top, then press "Filter" under the "Data" tab.Look for the drop-down arrow on the first cell of that block. Click the drop-down arrow, and underneath "Filter by values," you will see two links: "Select all" and "Clear."
Press "Clear," like this:
This will clear all preset options. Now, type in the URL of the competitor's website in the search box and click "Select all."
This will filter out all external links and just leave you with their 404 pages. Go through the whole list, highlighting the pages you think you can rewrite.
Now that you have all of your relevant 404 pages in place, run them through Majestic [a paid tool] or Moz’s Open Site Explorer (OSE) [a freemium tool] to see if their 404 pages actually have any external links (which is what we're ultimately looking for). Add the details from Majestic or Moz to the spreadsheet. No matter which tool you use (I use OSE), hit "Request a CSV" for the backlink data. (Import the data into a new tab on your spreadsheet, or create a new spreadsheet altogether if you wish.)
Find relevant backlinks linking to (X’s) website. Once you've found all of the relevant websites, you can either highlight them or remove the ones that aren’t from your spreadsheet.
Please note: It's worth running each of the websites you're potentially going to be reaching out to through Majestic and Moz to find out their citation flow, trust flow, and domain authority (DA). You may only want to go for the highest DA; however, in my opinion, if it's relevant to your niche and will provide useful information, it's worth targeting.
With the 404s and link opportunities in hand, focus on creating content that’s relevant for the brands you hope to earn a link from. Find the contact information for someone at the brand you want the link from. This will usually be clear on their website; but if not, you can use tools such as VoilaNorbert and Email Hunter to get the information you need. Once you have this information, you need to send them an email similar to this one:
Hi [THEIR NAME],
My name is [YOUR NAME], and I carry out the [INSERT JOB ROLE – i.e., MARKETING] at [YOUR COMPANY'S NAME or WEBSITE].
I have just come across your blog post regarding [INSERT THEIR POST TITLE] and when I clicked on one of the links on that post, it happened to go to a 404 page. As you’re probably aware, this is bad for user experience, which is the reason I’m emailing you today.
We recently published an in-depth article regarding the same subject of the broken link you have on your website: [INSERT YOUR POST TITLE].
Here's the link to our article: [URL].
I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind linking to our article instead of the 404 page you’re currently linking to, as our article will provide your readers with a better user experience.
We will be updating this article so we can keep people provided with the very latest information as the industry evolves.
Thank you for reading this email and I look forward to hearing from you.
[YOUR NAME]
Disclaimer: The email example above is just an example and should be tailored to your own style of writing.
In closing, remember to keep detailed notes of the conversations you have with people during outreach, and always follow up with people you connect with.
I hope this tactic helps your SEO efforts in the future. It's certainly helped me find new places to earn links. Not only that, but it gives me new content ideas on a regular basis.
Do you use a similar process to build links? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
In episode 98 of Semantic Mastery’s weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one viewer asked about the best place to learn about structured data and how to mark up a website.
The exact question was:
Hi guys!
Have just finished creating my first Tier-2 network. (Phew!) I have a couple of questions.
Where is the best place to learn about structured data and how to mark up a website?
Content marketing has been discussed and researched more in the last 5 years than ever before.
Source: Google Trends
There are various kinds of content marketing strategies out there. Blog promotion, infographics, video strategies, and creative content are some. Depending on your goals, some are more effective than others.
At Distilled, we’ve been fortunate enough to work on many creative content pieces with some incredible clients. This article is going to focus on a piece of content that my team and I created for a client. We’ll take a look at both the creation process and the tangible results of the piece we made.
Note: In general, you don’t want to rely on one piece of content for link acquisition. It’s recommended to focus on multiple pieces throughout the year to add link diversity and give your content pieces a good chance to succeed. The following is simply a case study of one piece of content that worked well for my client.
Client backstory: We need links!
Our client is Ginny’s (shoutout to Matt and Cailey). Ginny's is an ecommerce business based in the beautiful state of Wisconsin.
We knew that regardless of how much optimization was done on the site, their lack of incoming links would be a huge barrier to success. This quickly became a topic of discussion for us.
The general rule of thumb: the more linking root domains (LRDs) your site has, the stronger the domain authority should be. And the stronger the linking root domains are, the better it is for your DA. In other words, it’s better to get 1 strong link (DA 80+) than 10 weak links (DA 20-). Kudos if the links are topically relevant to your website/brand.
So, my team and I sat down and started thinking of different ways we could accomplish the task of increasing LRDs and (hopefully) DA for my client.
The process of creating a link-worthy story
Here are the steps my team and I went through for this particular client.
Note: For an extensive look at creating creative content, please see the following articles:
The first step in the creative process is ideation, because without great ideas you can’t a have a great piece of content. It’s important to give yourself enough time for ideation. Don’t rush it, and be sure to include various team members with different backgrounds to get as many ideas as possible. Note: stock up on coffee/Red Bull and snacks for this.
Validation
Typically after an ideation session you'll have many potential ideas. It’s important to go through and validate them. When I say "validate," I mean making sure others haven’t already done something similar, or that creating the piece is actually possible (you have access to the right data, etc.)
At this point you'll have a handful of ideas that are not only on-brand and interesting, but have great potential in being picked up by various sources. Put together a nice deck and pitch your ideas to the client. The goal is to get your client to pick one (or a few, depending on the budget).
Once your client signs off on a piece, it’s time to dive into the data! Depending on the piece you're creating, this might look like scraping websites and doing a ton of research to get the right data you need. Take your time on this, as you want to make sure your data is accurate and relevant.
Design
During this part of the process, it’s a great idea to start mocking up some potential designs. If your piece is smaller, this might be a quick and simple task. If you have a data visualization, this will be longer. Typically, it’s a good idea to create 2–3 mockups and give your client some options.
Development
Once your client signs off on a particular design, it’s time to dive into development.
Copy
The actual copy for the piece doesn’t have to happen after the development, but it’s usually a good idea to allow the copywriter to see how much space they have to work with. What you don’t want is for your copywriter to write 500 words when the designer has made space for 100. Communication is key in this process.
Testing
Once the piece is built, it’s important to test it out on various browsers and devices. Ask people to give it a run and try to fix as many errors/bugs as possible.
Promotion
Depending on your timeline, you might want to start promotion sooner than this. The important thing to note is to consider pre-pitching and reaching out to contacts to gauge their interest in the piece as soon as possible. Keep your contacts updated and be sure to give them everything they need for their stories.
On the day the piece launches, be sure that you are reminding journalists, reaching out to contacts, sharing the piece on social media, and making your social campaigns live.
Celebrate
There are a lot of steps to building a creative piece, so don’t underestimate the work that goes into it! After you launch the piece be sure to have a beer, give yourself a pat on the back, or do whatever it is you need to do to celebrate.
Post-ideation: What we came up with
After the process outlined above, our team came up with 50 States of Bacon.
The idea was simple: Everyone likes bacon, but who likes it the most? Ginny’s caters to a lot of people who love deep frying, so this was on-brand. We decided to use Instagram’s (now difficult to access) API to extract 33,742 photos that were tagged with #bacon and located within the USA. To normalize for population distribution and Instagram usage, we also collected 64,640 photos with the tags #food, #breakfast, #lunch, and #dinner.
To make this data more visual, we made it interactive and included some fun facts for each state.
What happened after we launched the piece?
So, what happened after we launched the piece? Let’s dive in.
Here are some of the larger websites 50 States of Bacon got picked up on.
Website
Domain Authority
Other
US News
94
Tweeted from account (115K+)
Mashable
96
Tweeted from account (6.95M+)
AOL Lifestyle
98
Referred 1,200+ visitors
Eater
85
N/A
Daily Dot
85
Tweeted from account (274K+)
Here is what the LRDs and DA looked like before we launched the piece, and then after 4 months of it being live:
Before Launch
4 Months Later
Linking Root Domains
450
600
Domain Authority
29
36
Let’s break this down by metric. Here's a graph of the LRDs over time (we launched the piece at about the start of the uplift).
The domain authority didn’t budge until about 4 months after we launched the piece. We weren’t actively pursuing any other link-based campaigns during this time, so it’s safe to say the creative piece had a lot to do with this boost in DA.
Note: Since DA is refreshed with new pools of data, this observation wouldn’t have been as valid if the DA only moved one or two positions. But, since it moved 7 positions so close to the launch of this piece, I feel like it’s safe to assume the piece contributed greatly.
Does this mean if you do a similar piece that your DA will also increase? No. Does it give us a good example on what can happen? Absolutely.
A note on LRDs, DA, and setting expectations
Setting expectations with clients is hard. That's even more true when you both know that links may be even more important than user engagement with your campaign. To make sure expectations are reasonable, you may want to encourage them to see this campaign as one of many over a long period of time. Then there's less pressure on any individual piece.
So, it’s important to set expectations upfront. I would never tell a client that we can guarantee a certain number of links, or that we guarantee an increase in domain authority.
Instead, we can guarantee a piece of content that is well-built, well-researched, and interesting to their target audience. You can go one step further and guarantee reaching out to X amount of contacts, and you can estimate how many of those contacts will respond with a "yes" or "no."
In fact, you should set goals. How much traffic would you like the piece to bring? What about social shares? What seems like a reasonable amount of LRD’s you could gain from a piece like this? Benchmark where you currently are, and make some reasonable goals.
The point I’m trying to make is that you shouldn’t promise your client a certain amount of links because, frankly, you'd be lying to them. Be upfront about what this looks like and show examples of work you’ve done before, but make sure to set their expectations correctly up front to avoid any conflicts down the road.
Conclusion
There's a lot to be learned from the results of creative campaigns. The goal of this article is to share one piece that I’ve worked on with a client while highlighting some things that I learned/observed along the way. If you'd like to see more campaigns we’ve worked on at Distilled, take a look at our creative roundup for last year.
To wrap things up, here are the key takeaways:
Creative pieces take a lot of thought, work, and time. Don’t underestimate the task at hand.
Don’t frame the project as only focused on gaining links. Instead, aim for creating a compelling piece of content that is on-brand and has the potential to gain traction.
Oftentimes it’s best not to put all your eggs in one basket. Plan multiple pieces throughout the year.
If your research is right and you pitch the piece to the correct people, this is a strategy that can gain your domain some very strong LRDs. In this particular case, 110 linking root domains (and counting).
…But those links won’t come easy. You need to pre-pitch, remind, and re-pitch your contacts. There are many great pieces of content being published daily; you need to be proactive about ensuring your spots online.
There are other benefits to doing pieces like this aside from links. Social shares, brand awareness, and referral traffic are some other metrics to look at.
It is possible to increase your DA by doing a piece like this, but it takes time. Be patient, and continue doing great work in the meantime.
Other thoughts
There are some arguments to be made that a piece of content like this only has spikes and doesn’t do any good for a brand. I don’t believe this to be true. The way I see it, if a piece is too evergreen, it might not gain as many strong links. At the same time, if a piece is completely left-field and doesn’t fit with the brand, the links might not be as impactful. I think there's a fine line here; it should be up to your best judgment on the pieces you should create.
This piece could potentially be updated every year to gain more links or traction (although it would be a lot more difficult with Instagram drastically limiting their API).
It’s possible that this piece didn’t have a direct impact on DA, but because there were no other link acquisition strategies during the 4 months, we can safely assume the two are correlated.
There's an argument to be made that jumping from the 20s to the 30s is much easier than from 40s to 50s when you’re speaking of DA. We know that it gets more difficult to increase DA as it gets higher, so do keep that in mind.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
In episode 98 of our weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked about using area-specific citation sites and adding 2 location-specific citations to a SameAs attribute in the header of a website.
The exact question was:
Hi guys hope you’re all doing great. First of all, I would like to say thank you for all the hard work you guys put in. It’s of extreme high quality and I have learnt a ton of very useful information from the SM crew. With your information, Humpdays and IFTTT courses I’ve got my first Lead Gen site to number 17 in 6 or 7 weeks – brand new domain for a roofing term, which is very exciting, so thanks for that!
My question is about the value of less powerful but highly relevant links. I’ve watched every Humpday Hangout and I have heard you talk a lot about relevance.
I have found 2 citation sites that are specific to the area I am trying to rank in but these are not powerful sites like Yelp or Yell for example, are these 2 sites worth it and if so would you advise adding these 2 location-specific citations to my schema same as attribute in my header? Thanks.
On this episode we talk about how you can become your own traffic broker and stop depending on Google! Here are the books Adam mentions: http://ift.tt/2dcDscf
Join the IFTTT SEO ACADEMY V2.0 Which is Rocking Socks!: iftttseo.com/
The Fractl team has worked on hundreds of content marketing projects. Along the way, we’ve kept track of a lot of data, including everywhere our client campaigns have been featured, what types of links each campaign attracted, and how many times each placement was shared.
While we regularly look back on our data to evaluate performance per campaign and client, until now we’d never analyzed all of these data in aggregate. After combing through 31,000 media mentions and 26,000 links, here’s what we found.
Most high-authority links don’t receive a lot of social shares.
Most marketers assume that if they build links on high-authority sites, the shares will come. In a Whiteboard Friday from last year, Rand talks about this trend. BuzzSumo and Moz analyzed 1 million articles and found that over 75 percent received no social shares at all. When they looked at all links – not just articles – this number rose to around 90 percent.
We (wrongfully) assumed this wouldn’t be the case with high-quality links we’ve earned. It turns out, even the majority of our links on sites with a high Domain Authority (DA) didn’t get any social shares:
52 percent of links with a DA over 89 received zero shares.
50 percent of links with a DA over 79 received zero shares.
54 percent of links with a DA over 59 received zero shares.
On average, our campaigns get 110 placements and 11,000 social shares, yet a single link accounts for about 63 percent of total shares. This means that if you exclude the top-performing link from every campaign, our average project would only get 4,100 social shares.
Since most links don’t yield social shares, marketers with goals of both link building and social engagement should consider a strategy for gaining social traction in addition to a strategy for building a diverse link portfolio.
The social strategy can be as simple as targeting a few key websites that routinely yield high social shares. It’s also helpful to look at target sites’ social media accounts. When they post their own articles, what kind of engagement do they get?
Of all the sites that covered our campaigns, the following five sites had the highest average social shares for our content. We know we could depend on these sites in the future for high social engagement.
Exceptions to the rule
Some content can definitely accomplish both high engagement and social shares. The BuzzSumo and Moz study found that the best types of content for attracting links and social shares are research-backed content or opinion pieces. Long-form content (more than 1,000 words) also tends to attract more links and shares than shorter content. At Fractl, we’ve found the same factors – an emotional hook, a ranking or comparison, and a pop culture reference – tend to encourage both social sharing and linking.
Few sites will always link to you the same way.
To ensure you’re building a natural link portfolio, it’s important to keep track of how sites link to your content. You’ll learn if you’re earning a mix of dofollow links, nofollow links, cocitation links, and brand mentions for each campaign. We pay close attention to which types of links our campaigns earn. Looking back at these data, we noticed that publishers don’t consistently link the same way.
The chart below shows a sample of how 15 high-authority news sites have linked to our campaigns. As you can see, few sites have given dofollow links 100 percent of the time. Based on this, we can assume that a lot of top sites don’t have a set editorial standard for link types (although plenty of sites will only give nofollow links).
While getting a site to cover your content is something to be celebrated, not every placement will result in a dofollow link. And just because you get a dofollow link from a site once doesn’t mean you should always expect that type of link from that publisher.
Creating a lot of visual assets is a waste of time in certain verticals.
There’s an ongoing debate within Fractl’s walls over whether or not creating a lot of visual assets positively impacts a campaign’s reach enough to justify the additional production time. To settle this debate, we looked at our 1,300 top placements to better understand how publishers covered our campaigns’ visual assets (including both static image and video). This sample was limited to articles on websites with a DA of 70 or higher that covered our work at least four times.
We found that publishers in different verticals had divergent tendencies regarding visual asset coverage. The most image-heavy vertical was entertainment, and the least was education.
Some of the variation in asset counts is based on how many assets were included in the campaign. Although this does skew our data, we do receive useful information from this analysis. The fact that top entertainment publishers used an average of nine assets when they cover our campaigns indicates a high tolerance for visual content from outside sources. Verticals with lower asset averages may be wary of external content or simply prefer to use a few key visuals to flesh out an article.
Keeping these publisher vertical preferences in mind when developing content can help your team better allocate resources. Rather than spending a lot of effort designing a large set of visual assets for a campaign you want to be placed on a finance site, your time may be better spent creating one or two awesome visualizations. Similarly, it’s worthwhile to invest in creating a variety of visual assets if you’re pitching entertainment and health sites.
Analyzing our entire link portfolio taught us a few new things that challenged our previous assumptions:
High DA sites don’t necessarily attract a lot of social engagement. Just because a site that linked to you has a huge audience doesn’t mean that audience will share your content.
Most sites don’t consistently use the same types of links. Got a dofollow link from a site one time? Don’t expect it to be the norm.
Certain publisher verticals are more likely to feature a lot of visual assets. Depending on which verticals you’re targeting, you might be wasting time on designing lots of visuals.
While I hope you’ve learned something from Fractl’s internal study, I want you to see the broader lesson: the value of measuring and analyzing your own content campaign data as a means to improve your process. If you’ve done a similar analysis of links earned from content marketing, I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
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Announcement
Adam: Hey everybody, welcome to Hump Day Hangouts. This is episode number 98, and today is the 21st of September. We’ve got almost a full crew here. Going to go down real quick like we do. I see we’ve got Hernan on video, so everyone’s getting a special treat today.
What’s up man?
Hernan: I’m good. I’m good. You guys should be paying less for actually watching my face right now.
Bradley: Ah, turn it off.
Hernan: It’s really good to be here. What’s up.
Adam: Good deal. Hey Marco, the volcano hasn’t blown you away yet, right?
Marco: No, not yet, but 6 times in the last 2 days. Lots of ash.
Adam: Yeah, I think that’s worse actually. I was, I’m dating myself here, but I was born right around the time of Saint Helen’s explosion and I just remember hearing the stories about ash just ruining cars and stuff like that. Once it gets in anything.
Marco: Yeah. It’ll peel the paint off the car, rust the motor. It’ll corrode the motor. You just have to pour water on the car. You don’t scrub it with anything, because it’s an abrasive. You don’t want to rub the paint off the car. You just pour water on everything. It comes off.
Adam: Cool. Bradley, how’s it going?
Bradley: Good, happy to be here.
Adam: All right. Well I will get to my quick announcements everybody. Wanted to say real quick, hopefully everybody here’s signed up as a user over on SERP Space. If you’re not, I’m going to drop the link. You can head over there, sign up for free and check out the services. Been really busy pushing out a lot of updates. Some really cool stuff with Video Powerhouse for Map and video embedding, as well as a secondary network now, and we’re going to talk some more about this later. What else we got? Press releases coming out on the 30th this month. We’ve updated the link building packages themselves, so there’s now even more options for you. You can do…
Bradley: Citations.
Adam: Yeah, citations are coming. That one doesn’t have a date, but it’s soon. It should be actually within probably 30 to 45 days. There’s just a whole lot going on, so I’m going to be writing some emails and getting people notified about that. If you’re already a user, by all means, check it out. The PBN domain is live too. You can buy PBN domains.
Bradley: What about, do you want to mention credits and recurring credits now?
Adam: Yeah, thank you. Credits, so like Video Powerhouse, you can save money, because it runs on a credit system. Basically you use a credit when you have a video posted. It used to be for various reasons, if you get a subscription you need to use those in 30 days. We changed up the system, and now when you get a subscription, 1, you save money. Then 2, your credits roll over. Let’s say you only use half of your credits, well those will still be there that next month, and then you can use them on other stuff. Pretty awesome.
Bradley: Have we started moving all the other products over to the credit based system yet?
Adam: We’re working on it. Eventually we’re going to do that, but yeah, it’s kind of a, we’ve got to figure things out and get it tested.
Bradley: Okay. It’s coming too though, so that’s kind of exciting too, which means you guys can use your credits to purchase. It’s coming, but you’ll be able to use your credits to purchase not just Video Powerhouse and map embeds, but also like IFTTT networks or link building packages and all that kind of stuff.
Marco: Don’t forget prices will be going up. This isn’t a scarcity tactic. We spent a lot of time, a lot of money. We had the developers in there. I’ve been cracking the whip on this gang to get this done. All of that takes time and money, and so prices are going up. Get in now so that you can get grandfathered in, or if you don’t mind paying higher prices, then don’t and wait.
Adam: Yeah, I’ll back Marco up on this too and say that we are going to do a public launch, so if you are interested in that, now here in the next couple months is a real good time to see if that works into your SEO toolkit, which by now I would say it definitely should, based on what we’re offering. Yeah, go check it out. Especially go check out Video Powerhouse and some of the map embedding options. It’s pretty awesome.
Bradley: Cool. What else?
Adam: I think that is all I have for right now, so if you guys are good I guess we’ll get started.
Bradley: Yeah. We’ve got a ton of questions already, so let’s go ahead and jump into them. Grab the screen. Make sure I did cameraman first, just to double check. Yeah I’m good. All right, and I’ll zoom in on this guys, because I know it’s easier for you to see that way. Bear with me. That should be good.
Adding 2 Location Specific Citations To A SameAs Attribute In The Header
All right. Let’s see, Mark O’Connell’s up first. He says, “Hi guys. Hope you’re doing great. First of all I would like to say thank you for all your hard work you guys put in, it’s of extreme high quality and I have learned a ton of very useful information from the SM crew.” Oh plus one that. “With your information Hump Days and IFTTT courses, I got my first lead gen site to number 17 in 6 or 7 weeks. Brand new domain for a roofing term, which is very exciting, so thanks for that.” Well congratulations Mark. That’s awesome. 17’s not where you want to be yet, but it’s definitely a jump in the right, a step in the right direction.
Mark, yes absolutely. Hyper local citations are incredibly powerful, regardless of what the domain metrics are. Don’t worry about that. This is kind of what we’ve been kind of preaching, especially in the last few months. Marco is really adamant about this, don’t worry so much about metrics, it’s more about relevancy guys. Hyper local citation sources are oftentimes have more of an effect on your local rankings than the big sites do, like Yelp for example. It’s because they’re hyper local, and Google knows that.
Getting listed in hyper local business directories, like maybe municipal type, what do they call them? The newspapers that are for local cities, they’re usually really small types of cities. There’s what do they call like coffee news, those kind of rags that you can pick up free that are usually print publications, but they have an online aspect as well. Those are very, very powerful type of citations. Again, the metrics don’t say so, but as far as the effect that they have on ranking locally, they are.
There’s a few others ones, or even like national type sites. For example, Topix is a site that’s kind of like a national, it’s a forum type site, but it’s hyper local. Another one is Pulse. I think it’s Pulse, I can’t remember off the top of my head, but there’s several of those types of sites out there that actually starting a thread in your local area, which sometimes it’s on a sub domain with like a city sub domain and that kind of stuff. Starting a thread in one of those forums and dropping a link or a citation, name, address and phone number, is very powerful. Absolutely.
I would say Mark, it’s definitely worth your time. In fact, we mentioned this Marketer Center, which is a reseller, kind of a white label service that you can purchase citations from. Andrew Scherer, he’s the guy that runs that. It’s a great service. I use it quite a bit. They have a package specifically for hyper local citations. Now, they’ve scraped their own list and they’ll do a little bit of research up front for when you, like put in your name, address, phone number and details when you’re ordering the citations, they’ll do a little bit of research and try to find some local directories that they can list to.
They’ve already compiled a big list of local directory type stuff, instead of just the big national directories. They have the big brands, the big citations they call it, but they also have the hyper local citations. That’s kind of a 1-2 punch. I always order the big citations and hyper local citations right off the bat. Then, like I said, if you have somebody on your own team, or even if you do it yourself, to actually go out and try to hunt down business directories that are specific to your area only.
The 2 most powerful types of citations, I mean the big citations are important guys. That’s kind of like standard operating procedure. Trying to find city specific, or like I said, hyper local business directories to list on, as well as niche specific directories. For example, like a plumber only directory. A landscaping only directory. Those are also very powerful. Again, it doesn’t matter what the metrics say. I can tell you from experience that just using those types of directories, that are so targeted, very specific, are going to have a huge impact on your ranking.
Marco: Before we move on from this hyper local, just so you guys know, we’re doing an RYS update webinar on Friday for members only. It’s in the Facebook group, so make sure you get in there and let me know you want to attend. It’s not going to be recorded, absolutely not, because the stuff that I’m sharing is stuff that I’ve been working on, that I’ve been looking through, and this is just for the RYS group. It’s regarding this, it’s just how to give more local relevancy to a map. That’s what we’ll be getting into Friday.
Bradley: Wait till we get to Paul’s comment up here. We’ll get to that in a few minutes, because that’s pretty exciting.
Hernan: Sorry Bradley, but on the same topic, from local, or finding really good local backlinks. I’ve had good results with using Bluechip Backlinks for this, like scraping a local directory for example, or some sort of local website or newspaper, as you were saying. Sometimes they would be really open to it, to get you featured on it if you’re a local company, but sometimes you can get domains with 0 metrics, but they have a couple of backlinks from these local directories or local newspapers. Just 301 of that, you will notice a nice boost. You can combine that with the hyper local citations, and finding and scraping, you know with Bluechip Backlinks or something similar, and getting some domains to 301. Do not go crazy with this, but it’s really powerful.
Bradley: Yeah, and that’s why I just pulled this up while you started mentioning that, Hernan, because that’s a great point. That’s one way that we do it as well, is just go search for, I’m just using Atlanta as an example here guys. Put your city name in, or municipality, even if it’s a smaller area. Put your city name in and then business directory. Then just grab the URLs from the first 2. In fact you can do this in Bluechip Backlinks, what’s called the SERP Sweeper. Just grab all the business directory URLs and drop them into your domain crawler. Preferably you’re using Bluechip Backlinks, but whatever domain crawler you use. Drop all these business directory URLs in there and let it crawl, because that’s true.
First you want to go ahead and try to get a citation on those local directories anyways, like an actual citation that you get your business listed. A lot of those, it’s not something I recommend that you do yourself. You can outsource that kind of stuff, and I recommend that that’s what you do because it’s tedious work. It’s just data entry. It’s pretty dumb. It’s not fun, let’s put it that way, but it’s very powerful. At the same time you can also, like Hernan just said, find broken backlinks on these directory sites and just pick them up for dirt cheap and use them. Even if they’re not like industry specific, which most likely they’re not going to be, you can still use them for like deep links, or links to inner pages, or blog posts and that kind of stuff. It’s going to help boost because of the local relevancy.
It doesn’t have to be, even if it was a link from a business that went out of business, and it’s still listed on the directory. You would say, “Well I don’t want to screw up my NAP by buying the expired domain and then having it point over to mine and confusing Google.” Because it’s the link at the bottom of an NAP from a different business, but it’s redirecting to my site. Well that’s why you could use a buffer site, or you could run it to an IFTTT property or something like that, or just link it to like a blog post from your money site. Because you’re still pushing local relevancy into your domain at that point, and that’s really, really effective.
That’s a great question, Mark. As far as the same as attribute, yeah you can. Again, I would only use the same as attribute for those listings if you have your own NAP listed on there, not like a scraped domain, or a purchased expired domain. I wouldn’t do that. I would absolutely use the same as if you have your own listing URL. Like if you get your own page URL on that directory, then yes, you can list that as a same attribute. Great question. Love Paul’s “Me mira Bubba Gump.” Forest Gump. That’s pretty funny.
Learning Structured Data & Site Markup
Ben says, “Hi guys. I’ve just finished creating my first tier 2 network, phew.” Plus one that. That’s a lot. “I have a couple of questions. Where is the best place to learn about structured data and how to mark up a website?” Oh, I’ve got the perfect one for you. Just give me one second. This are some of the best, that’s the schema generator. I’ll drop all these links guys. Just let me pull these up real quick. I’m trying to find the list. Here’s one of them right here, and then I’ve got another one.
There’s 2 really good articles that I always refer to whenever I’ve got something new to do, because I don’t know this shit off the top of my head guys. I always have to refer to one of these guides to kind of guide me whenever I’m adding markup. I am not a coder. I don’t even pretend to be one on TV. These are both really good. Is that the same article? Dammit, let me find the other one. Just a minute. It’s Built Visible, this is it. These are probably the 2 best guides that I know of for this. The Built Visible blog is fabulous. This is one of them.
There’s another one too. There’s another one by Built Visible if I can find it. Let me try that real quick. Just give me one second. I’ll have to find it guys. It’s in here somewhere, but I’ve got so many damn articles in here. I’ll drop these 2 links in when we’re done. Adam, if you can remind me. I’ll come back and add the other ones. These are some of the best resources for schema and structured data. Both JSON-LD and micro data, depending on how you need to implement. Then there’s the micro data creator. Just go through some of these guides, is all you need to do really. Here’s another one.
Then here’s a JSON-LD creator. This is pretty cool. Marco pointed this one out to me and I use that now sometimes. There’s one other article. I’ll find it and it’s really good. It’s the best one of them, and for whatever reason I’m not finding it right off the bat, but I’ll get to it later.
Hernan: There’s also just tons of, but it’s really geeky, the information in schema.org.
Bradley: Yeah it is. If you know how to … Is this it? No. I’m sorry guys. I really want to find this for you and I’m just having trouble finding it right now. I’ll find it and I’ll post it on the page later. Anyway. If you go onto schema.org, if you understand micro data and the markup and what the tags are, what do they call them? The item types and that kind of stuff, then you can get everything you need right from schema.org, but you have to know how to put them into the proper DIV tags and all that kind of stuff. That’s what I always have to refer to resources for, because I don’t know, I’m not a coder.
Stacking Multiple Tier 1 Networks On A YouTube Channel
Let’s say you have 2 tier 1 networks. You have the 1 tier 1 network that you’ve already got connected to your YouTube channel. Now you’ve got another tier 1 network that you built, it’s just another IFTTT network. You haven’t assigned it as a tier 1 or a tier 2 yet. You just have a whole other network just sitting there waiting to be assigned to something. Well all you need to do is log in to that IFTTT account for the second network, and then just activate you YouTube channel, the same YouTube channel in the second IFTTT account. Then whenever you upload a video to that channel, it’s going to syndicate to both the first network and the second network. You can do that with as many networks as you want. There is no limit.
It’s not like IFTTT, YouTube will only connect to 1 IFTTT account, you can connect YouTube to unlimited IFTTT accounts. You can only have 1 YouTube channel activated in each IFTTT account, so that just means you need multiple IFTTT accounts. Each persona ring, or each syndication ring that you create, is going to have its own IFTTT account anyways. You can literally stack, it’s unlimited. As far as I know it’s unlimited. I’ve never hit the limit. You can just put as many tier 1 rings on that 1 YouTube channel as you want.
Now I’ve found it’s more effective to have 2 tier rings, full 2 tier rings, or structured setups. If you have more tier 1 rings, you oftentimes rank faster than the 2 tier rings, but the 2 tier rings tend to make the videos stick longer. Now that’s not always the case, but that’s just kind of the trend I’ve seen over the years. Is that the 2 tier rings, they don’t rank the video normally as quickly as having multiple tier 1 rings, but it does help the video to stick longer once it ranks. That’s why I prefer using the 2 tier rings over the single tiers alone. Don’t get me wrong, you can stack as many full tier 2 rings on a channel as you want too. We’ve got some out there with 5 or 6 full 2 tier rings on it, that’s considerable. That’s 400 to 500 properties that that video gets syndicated to, with nothing other than an upload or a live stream. Very powerful.
“What theme are you using for your SEO business site, Big Bamboo Marketing?” Honestly, I have no idea. I haven’t updated that site since I built it in 2012. I don’t plan on it, because I don’t ever get any work from my actual website, very rarely, I don’t want to say ever. I’m not looking to take on any more client work, that’s why I don’t even update it. To be honest with you guys, my SEO business site, it didn’t really every generate me any work anyways, I always got work from networking or cold contacting using video email, which was my preferred method. Then also from referrals. Occasionally I do get leads now because of the SEO Virginia case study that I did for RYS Academy, and so I do still get leads from that, but I usually quote them so high they turn around and run away, because I don’t want to do any more client work right now. Honestly I can’t remember. I’ll have to look it up, Ben, but it’s an old theme. It’s probably now 4 years old. I really never updated that site.
Link Velocity And Link Types When Using Google Drive Doc & About.Me Pages
However, it is beneficial to know which ones are due follows, and typically I have the go to ones like Blogger and WordPress and that kind of stuff, that are due follow links. I’ll use strategically with spam or with PBN type links and that kind of stuff. We probably should make a list of that, or make a note of it in the IFTTT account workbook template, so that you guys know which ones they are. If we can make a note of that, guys. We can get somebody to do that for us, one of our VA’s or something.
Adam: Yeah, we’ll discuss on the back end. I just have concerns since some of that stuff changes. I guess it would be kind of a at your own risk, this is what it is at the time of publish. Be sure to check.
Bradley: Yeah, we might do that, just add like another column to the network workbook, guys, and put follow, no follow, something like that in there, just so you guys know. We can get a VA to do that. Maybe we’ll have that done by this time next week, Dean. As far as spamming the properties, okay, just keep in mind, I look at any type of link building as spam, pretty much, except for like desk posting, where you’re creating real content. Pretty much any type of link building tool is a spam link, in my opinion. That’s just the terminology that I use for any type of link building that isn’t 100% manual.
Manual content, putting links into content manually, that kind of stuff. Any kind of tools or whatever, I just call that spam. Don’t let that confuse you, but with the drive stacks you can pretty much spam them with anything and it’s not going to hurt it. Because we’ve gotten pretty crazy with those and had some really good results with it. With your network properties, your tier 1 branded network properties, I always like to follow Hernan’s guidelines on that. Hernan, you want to mention how you do it?
Hernan: Yeah. Basically we just send a handful of links, and this is like the, I would say the process or the framework that we give our VA’s or daily hour, whoever is building links at that point. Is that they should only send a handful of contextual links usually, to the properties, to the IFTTT properties, so as not to spam them as well. As we keep mentioning, you can spam the hell out of them, but the reality is that they are branded properties so you need to take care of them and you want them to be, they can generate a sale as well, so you need to be careful. We just send a handful of links, maybe from 50 to 150, something like that, contextual links, and then we spam the hell out of those contextual links. We are putting some kind of buffer in between the property, whatever it is, and the spam.
Also we have found best results with doing that, instead of just spamming, you know, a Twitter profile. If you put, let’s say 100 contextual backlinks between your spam and the Twitter profile, the Twitter profile will be much more powerful. The metrics will say so. It will get indexed more easily. For example, from spam itself, only from spam itself, maybe you can get it to, I don’t know I don’t want to get into metrics, but you can get it to a trust flow of 5. If you go to this recipe of a handful of contextuals backed with spam, you can get it to 10, 15, 20 trust flows. You need to have that in mind. Metrics are higher, the property becomes more powerful following these kind of guidelines. OF course you can experiment yourself with velocities and those kind of things, but just be careful, and just send a handful of links.
Bradley: Yeah. When you guys, If you order a link building service from us, inside of SERP Space, it’s the same thing. That’s what we do, is we will build a handful of the targeted links, contextuals like what Hernan’s mentioning, to your tier 1 properties or your citations, whatever it is, your target URLs. Then we throw the kitchen sink spam behind those. That’s really why we do it that way, because it’s much more effective and safer as well.
By the way, I found that article. I just needed to not be talking to find it. This is it, guys. Built Visible, this one, micro data, JSON-LD and schema.org, rich snippets. This is the best guide I’ve ever seen on this. It is so comprehensive. This is my go to guide for any time I have to add any sort of micro data to stuff, this is what I go to. This is hands down the best guide I’ve ever seen for that, and it’s free. Enjoy it.
It’s been so long since I’ve logged in here. I have 0 credits remaining. If you paste your URL in there. For best results enter a webpage or whole article. Right here, I know it’s hard for you guys to see. It’s very small, but check your entire site with batch search. Copyscape, you’ll have to buy some credits, but they’re cheap. I think just like 5 cents per search. Then you can drop with batch search in there, and basically drop your URL in there and it will crawl the entire site and then compare all the pages on the site and tell you which pages have duplicate content and that kind of stuff.
It will show you what the percentage of duplicate content is on each occurrence, or each instance where duplicate content was detected. It will show you what the percentage of duplicate is and all that kind of stuff. It’s just all done right within CopyScape. You can actually just like I said, it’ll batch the entire site. It’ll crawl the whole site and then categorize everything for you and give you a report. That’s just within CopyScape. That’s how I’ve done it in the past. It’s very, very simple.
“All that is true, do you recommend a comprehensive …” Yeah, I mean that’s the only thing I’d do. Jay, I just run it through CopySCape and just check it and see. Also something else that you can do is, if you use Screaming Frog, SEO Spider. That’s a great tool to be able to map a site very quickly and give you a high level overview of all the title tags and H1’s and H2’s and meta descriptions and that kind of stuff. It will also find broken links and things like that. Screaming Frog, SEO Spider. It’s a really good tool. It’s a little bit expensive, but it’s a good tool if you’re doing a lot of client work and stuff.
I like to use it for analyzing client sites whenever I’m prospecting especially. That way I can run reports on somebody’s site before even taking them on as a client, and I can show them, “Here’s where a lot of issues are occurring on your site because of duplicate titles and that kind of stuff.” A lot of people just, it’s hard to do that when you’re just manually looking at page by page. When you look at the site as a whole, in 1 interface or 1 dashboard, then it makes it much easier to recognize patterns. Kind of like footprints, even within the own site, is what I’m saying. You can find repeated titles and that kind of stuff, which actually will affect the overall site score. Screaming Frog is a good tool for that. If you’re doing a lot of client work that should be one of those tools in your toolbox, if you do client work, or if you have a large portfolio of your own sites.
Next question from Jay says, “IFTTT content kingpin customer.” Sweet. “Built first IFTTT network on branded property last week. Pushing content, looking good so far. Also video marketing blitz user. You mentioned in a previous video a webinar where you discussed paper call exchange networks and using Video Marketing Blitz. Very interested in seeing that info. Help a fellow receding hairline SEO brother out.”
Oh man, why’d you have to point that out, man? “Don’t get me wrong. You guys have already helped me out greatly. Grateful for these hangouts. They are can’t miss. Thanks guys.” All right Jay. Adam, you want to, we did the Video Marketing Blitz bonus webinar for purchasers. I don’t know if Jay didn’t get that or not, but if you make a note of it, I can PM Jay with the link to it later on.
Adam: Yeah, well I was going to say. Jay, just send an email in to support@SemanticMastery.com and mention what we’re talking about and we’ll get you sorted out.
Bradley: There you go. Yeah, because we did the first of 2 bonus webinars. The second one’s coming. I don’t know when. We’ve got a VA that’s learning Video Marketing Blitz right now, he’s in training, and he’s a full time VA. That’s going to be his job, is to just run that software. As soon as he gets done training we’re going to pick back up on the case study that I started. We’re actually going to do several case studies, because he’s working on multiple projects right now for me, using that tool. Actually in master class today we’re going to start, I’m going to reveal a new case study today. Part of it’s going to be Video Marketing Blitz is going to be part of that case study as well.
If you’re not in MasterClass, Jay, I recommend you get over there, but we’ll still, just send in a support ticket and we’ll get you the replay of the first VMB bonus webinar. Then when the second one gets scheduled we’ll just make sure that you let us know and we’ll make sure that you’re on the notification list. That’ll be coming guys, I don’t know when, but it’ll be coming. It’s going to be several more weeks, but once he’s trained well enough and I have the procedures in place, that’s when I’m going to schedule the second webinar. That way you guys will see how the process works with an outsourcer. Because again, it’s something that should be outsourced in my opinion.
I’m not sure what you’re asking here. If you already have the subdomain, you’re not going to be able to change that, unless you set up a new site. You’re not going to do that because you’ve already got metrics on this site. What you could do, is you could buy a non-EMD type domain and just do a 301 redirect to that webs.com site, and use your purchased domain in all of your link building. That’s what you could do. It would just be a 301 redirect to the .webs.com site. That way, when you’re building the links, the EMD, it wouldn’t be an EMD, it would be your purchased domain that you have 301’d to that site so that it wouldn’t count as a exact match anchor text. Does that make sense?
Hernan: Yeah I like that.
Bradley: What were you going to say, Hernan?
Hernan: I was about to say that since it’s a PBN site, he’s going to treat is as a PBN site. He could also do persona based network. Let’s say that the owner of the webs.com is John Doe. Instead of going for, letsgorunning.wordpress.com, he could go for johndoe.wordpress.com or something like that.
Bradley: Yeah okay. I see what he’s saying there. Yes. Guys that’s what I always recommend doing. Other than a branded network. For example, for PBN type sites, when we build networks, they’re typically persona based networks, for PBN’s. Sometimes, if the PBN has a pretty strong brand of its own, then we will create a branded ring. For a lot of the ones that look like blogs, instead of looking like business sites, we end up just basing them, creating a persona based ring around it and making it like a person’s blog. That works well too.
As far as what Hernan said, that’s a good way to do it, is use a persona name as the subdomain instead. That’s perfectly find, but also, like I said, if you wanted to build links directly to the webs.com site but you don’t want to use the exact match domain. The problem guys, just so you’re aware, the problem is when you have an exact match domain and you build links with naked URLs, which everybody says that’s what you should be doing so that you don’t tip the scales and over optimize the anchor text, that kind of stuff. The problem is, with EMD’s, is those naked URLs count as exact match keywords. It didn’t used to be that way, but it has been for like the last 2 years at least, maybe even 3 now. You’ve got to be really careful with EMD’s, and that’s in part why I just don’t use them anymore.
What you could do, like I said, is just use like another domain that’s more of a branding type domain, that you just 301 redirect to that, and then build all your other links referencing the purchase domain. Because then the anchor text would be the name of the domain, even with naked URLs, it wouldn’t be an exact match keyword. Both of those routes would work.
Marco: All right, so correct me if I’m wrong, but he’s going to build the IFTTT network around the webs.com subdomain.
Bradley: Correct.
Marco: Okay, but for something ridiculous, like $5 a month, webs will let you get a custom, they’ll add a custom domain name and then they’ll 301 the subdomain to the actual. It’s like what Google does with sites.google.com. If it’s worth it, for $5 a month you can actually have the domain name that you want. You can change it. It gets 301’d up by BioWebs.com itself. Then you still have the subdomain that you can link build to.
Bradley: That’s a good point.
Marco: That might be another way to approach it. Then when I post out to the IFTTT network, you’ll have the new domain name that you’ll be using. It won’t be as much of an EMD, and you can stay away from anchor text problems.
Hernan: Right, and that will inherit the metrics that they currently have, like from the subdomain. That would be a good idea too.
Video Powerhouse And Map Powerhouse Serp Space Credits
All right, well if the content is different, I don’t know. I have mixed feelings about this, because if the content was the same, then you could either 301 redirect the old to the new, or you could do canonicals, cross domain canonicals. You point the old page to the new page with, not a 301 redirect, but with a canonical. That way you’re telling Google, “Hey there’s this page here, but I want to give all the credit to over here. Push all the credit to this other page.” You assign the canonical URL for that. That’s typically how I would do it.
Now Google says that cross domain canonicals should only be used if the content is the same. It says that, that’s what Google says within their cross domain canonical, when they first, I guess, created that, which I think was back in like 2012 or something like that. It was awhile ago. I could find the blog post from the Google blog itself. Anyways, I know that I have tested this, where the pages don’t have the same content, and I still canonicalize it to the new page, and gotten a boost out of that.
I know some of our mastermind members do the same thing. They’ve tested canonicals, or done testing with canonicals, and been able to accomplish some pretty nice ranking boosts using other pages in canonicals. That’s just typically how I would do it, I would experiment MJ, seriously I would experiment and maybe take a handful of pages and canonicalize them to the new site, from the old site to the new site, and then maybe take a couple other pages and just do a 301 redirect and see, monitor your target URLs and see what kind of movement occurs after doing that. I want to hear from the other guys. Hernan, Marco, what do you all think?
Hernan: I was actually thinking about it.
Bradley: While you’re thinking about it, let me find that article.
Hernan: I mean, usually if, I would go, when a client is already ranked, they have gained good rankings. They rank well on the 3 Pack, or they have gained like page 1. What else can you do? That would be my question. What would be the next step? The next step would be to run a couple of feeder sites in that case. It can be IFTTT Properties, but usually what you would do is to do that, spread and try to rank a feeder site. That’s the only way that I see viable, having 2 websites trying to rank. At the end of the day you will be competing with yourself, which is a great thing.
With that being said, I don’t know how many resources you currently have to try to rank the 2 of them, or offer the client some sort of deal where you can rank the 2 of them or you can work on the 2 of them. In my experience, that’s not ideal, because usually, maybe it was me making a bad deal, but back in the day I had that kind of a deal when a client’s just throws websites at me, and he would expect to rank. The reality is that there’s some randomness in it, so some websites will outrank the others, just because of the way Google works. I would definitely 301 it. The 10 year old site will definitely boost the new website, but I wouldn’t work with the 2 of them unless you have gotten them good results with at least 1 of them. Probably the 10 year old one. That’s what I would do.
Bradley: I was looking at one of the next questions. By the way, I posted that article. It was from 2009. This is Google webmaster central blog, it was 2009 that they posted this. This is the cross domain canonical post. I posted on the event page. Test with that, MJ, and see, that’s what I would do. Whenever you guys come across something like this, it’s best to run a few tests, like compare one method against another, or against 2 others, whatever. Then track results and see which one gives you the best results.
Possible Google Penalty For Duplicating The Content In 3 Branded Google Drives
Marco: I have never seen any penalties with duplicate content inside drive.
Bradley: I haven’t seen any penalties with drive period.
Marco: That’s not to say it won’t happen in the future. As I’ve mentioned before, the only thing I’ve ever gotten banned by Google and slapped down for, I uploaded a .TXT file with a 301 redirect, and they said, “No, you can’t do that.” I couldn’t use the TXT file anymore. Other than that, I’ve just never seen anything happen. In fact, we recommend it, we recommend sharing in between the different drive files. We recommend 1 main drive file, and then you can share folders among all of the other files. You can share each other’s files. It would stand to reason that 3 people in the same company would be working on the same file and adding comments and adding links and adding edits, just whatever, which is what we teach people to do inside ROIS Academy. I mention that again.
Bradley: I guess if you share content, if you share a drive file with another account, then it’s basically stored in both accounts. I think he’s talking about like copying the content and creating, instead of it being a shared file, it would be a duplicate file in another account. Again, I’ve never seen any issues with drive stuff yet.
Marco: No, but just to be on the safe side, share them.
Bradley: Yeah, you can, but that doesn’t give you different target URLs. Does that make sense? Same file URL, is what I’m saying. Yeah, you could do that, but if you wanted separate target URLs for different spam points, spam targets, then you could just copy the content and upload it to those other drive files.
Adam: I was going to say, if you really put on your tin foil hat, you could just make a literal tiny edit to it and rename it V1, V2, V3. That’s real. People do that. They make copies of documents and stuff.
Good question Earl. Again, canonicals. I was pulling up one of my demo blogs that I do a lot of testing with, and all you do is go to post, go to tags, locate the tag that only has 1 post. It’ll tell you, in the count column over here, how many posts are using that tag. Any 1 single tag, any type of singular tag, should be canonicalized, or you should leave your tags set to no index. That’s the thing, guys. We’ve covered this many times, Earl, but for the benefit of everybody I’ll try to cover it very quickly.
If you use a tag, WordPress by default is going to create a tag page, which is an exact duplicate of the post itself. Tags are supposed to be, a tag is a more general type of descriptive keyword, or term, or phrase, that can be used across multiple posts. Then the tag page that’s created will be like a blog index page. It’s a tag index page. It would be like a category page. In other words, all the posts that share that tag will show up on the tag page. That becomes a unique page, compared to a solo tag that becomes an exact duplicate of the 1 post that the tag was added to.
If you’re going to use tags and leave them set to index, which is by default, then you just have to be aware of that. If you’re going to use tags, use a tag across multiple posts. If you’re going to use a singular tag, on only 1 post, so a unique tag, then you want to canonicalize that tag page to the actual post URL. If you’re using the WordPress SEO plugin from Yost it’s very simple. You just go to post, go to tags, then you select the tag. For example, this one says [D-GO 00:47:45], and I would click on edit. Then from the edit screen you’ll scroll down and in the Yost section, let’s see where is it? It’s in the advanced settings right here. Right here, you click the advanced settings of the Yost plugin, and right here is the canonical URL, that’s where you paste the URL of the blog post in, and then click update.
Now that tag page, even though you’re right, it’s a duplicate, it’s 100% duplicate and it will cause issues guys, will cause duplicate content issues on your own site. It’s a panda issue. If you’re using singular tags, either turn them to no index, set them to no index, which you can also do in Yost. You go to the taxonomy section and check the box to no index tag pages. If you want to leave them to index, which is fine, just want to make sure that you set the canonical for singular tags to point to the original post. That’s all. Hopefully that was helpful.
Seriously I don’t like, if it’s a channel that you plan on making money from that’s not a turn and burn where you know it’s going to get burned at some point. If you’re in it for the long haul, then I don’t recommend doing that. I recommend that you switch up the videos, you change them enough to where, if there was a manual review, your account wouldn’t be terminated for spam. I know that’s difficult, but that’s why it’s sometimes good to have tools like Video Marketing Blitz, or something like that where you can have literally 30, 50, 100 YouTube accounts that you can spread the same video across multiple accounts instead of putting the same video in 1 account 100 times. Does that make sense? It’s just safer that way, guys. Remember, we’re using YouTube, it’s YouTube’s rules. Look, we spam with the best of them, but we try to do it in a way that keeps our properties alive as long as possible.
When Is It Good To Use And Not To Use Goo.Gl Links?
All right, there’s probably going to be some differences of opinions between my partners and I, although I know we’re on the same page on some things. Look, Google links are fine to use when you’re not spamming. Actually Google short URLs are good to use if you know what you’re doing with them and there’s a reason for it. Sometimes there are reasons to do it, you can even spam with them, but I recommend that, essentially when you use a goo.gl short link, you’re injecting analytics into that link path.
You don’t want to do any sort of spammy shit with Google links, because you’re giving them a window, a view right into what it is that you’re doing. You’re injecting Google code into your link stream. You just got to be careful. I don’t do any real spammy, well sometimes I do some real spammy stuff with Google links, but it’s very specific reasons when I do it. For the most part I don’t like to use goo.gl short links for any sort of spam stuff. However, we use the hell out of them in drive stacks. They’re great because you’re injecting Google into the stream. What are your take Marco and Hernan?
Marco: When I use them inside a drive stack, I don’t care. When I use them outside a drive stack, I try to stay as clean as possible, unless it’s just something I don’t care about and I’m just looking for the metrics. Absolutely, and I saw this, he’s using it in Facebook. If you use it in a private group that Google couldn’t access otherwise, and you’re expecting action, you’re expecting people to interact with that shortened link, Google will love you for it, and it does pay off every time that you’re sending signals to the bot from a place that it would otherwise not have access to. Yes, by all means, don’t spam it unless you know what you’re doing.
Hernan: Right. Just to add to what Marco was saying, which I agree 100%. The other way around is that you spam it and all of those links end up showing on Google Webmaster tool, because there’s no secrets anymore. We have some cases of students that 301’d the spam domain, or a Chinese domain, directly into a goo.gl, and that was pointing at the website. All of those spammed links end up showing on Google Webmaster tools. You need to be really, really careful because it will show up like that. You don’t want to do that. You need to have several hoops, or you need to be using it, as Marco was saying, to actually inject analytics when you know what you’re doing, so be careful.
Bradley: All right, we’ve got to wrap it up here. Tell us Cambridge electronics … I love it when there’s not a name. We posted, Adam beat me to it, BrowSEO 3.0, that’s what this was. Outstanding tool guys. I think it’s an absolute necessary tool for SEO going forward. It’s like the Swiss Army knife of SEO tools. That’s what I call it. It’s fabulous. We did a full webinar with the developer, Simon Dadia, and you can see it right here on this link. I’d check it out. It’s a great tool. I recommend anybody that’s doing a lot of SEO work, or personas, content marketing, IFTTT stuff, it’s almost a must have now. All right guys, let’s see, last one.
Adam: We can come back and we’ll answer. Some of these we can definitely answer afterwards. Hernan will pick up some on the podcast.
Bradley: Yeah, I was going to tell him. If you’re having an issue with the network, just send it to SERP Space support, we’ll get it taken care of for you.
Adam: Yeah. Support@SERPSpace.com
Bradley: Sorry about not getting to all the questions guys. It pays to get your question on the event page early. Whatever I didn’t get answered here, post them in the appropriate groups, or save them for next week. We’ll see you then. Thanks everybody. We’ll see you. Masterclass starts in 5 minutes. We’ll see you guys there.
