Click on the video above to watch Episode 96 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.
Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.
The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.
Announcement
Adam: Hey everybody, welcome to … Hey, Hernan, how’s it going? Welcome everybody to Hump Day Hangouts. This is number 96. Hernan is here, so Hernan, take it away. No, I’m just kidding.
First of all, I think we wanted to get the important stuff out of the way. Today is National Beer Lovers’ Day so I thought I’d start things off here [crosstalk 00:00:23]. Cheers. Not bad. Got a Session IPA out of upstate New York. It’s good stuff.
Bradley: I’m refraining. I didn’t even know it was National Beer Day until about an hour ago and I was like, “Woohoo! I’m gonna start drinking early,” but the two-and-a-half hours of webinars coming up, I decided I better not until afterwards. I assure you, though, as soon as this webinar is over I’m going straight … We got a local brewery. I’m going down to the brewery and sitting my ass at the bar and not leaving for several hours.
Adam: Gotcha. I played it safe. I got a Session so this is like 4 1/2%, so basically not much. Anyways, moving right along. We got a few announcements today. After we say hello to everybody, we’ll get into that, but Hernan, how is it going, Hernan?
Hernan: Hey, guys. Hey, everyone. It’s really, really good to be here. That’s what I get to jump really, really late on the call. I wanted to say, “Hi,” but anyways, it’s really good to be here.
Adam: Awesome. Marco, what’s up, man?
Marco: Man, it’s warm, it’s sunny, it’s Beer Day, and I can’t drink.
Adam: Aw, man.
Marco: I might, though.
Bradley: Sure you can.
Adam: Well, you know me and Bradley will pick up the slack.
Bradley: You need that can-do attitude, Marco.
Marco: Pick up my funeral bills, right?
Adam: Bradley, how’s it going?
Bradley: Good, man. I’m just looking forward to having my beer.
Adam: Fair enough. You can live vicariously through me for a couple hours.
Let’s see. First up, we’ve got some… Oh, that’s right. Serp Space, man. Cool one. I’m gonna be posting some stuff here once I stop talking, but we’ve got a special discount from Serp Space. This includes, not just IFTTT networks, but also link building if you ordered them together. That’s kind of an important thing. If you want to do some link building on a network, now would be a good time. I’m going to post that in there with the information. It’s just a forty-eight hour coupon, if you can go over to Serp Space. I’ll give you the links and you can get your IFTTT network. This applies to all single-tiers, full two-tier networks, and then link building on top of that. Pretty sweet discount.
Right after this webinar, we’re going to be going to the MasterCLASS like usual, but in this case we’ve opened up and you all are invited to join the MasterCLASS. I’ll also post the link to that in case you haven’t seen it. You’re going to want to be there. It’s Simon … I’m going to let, actually, Bradley or Hernan talk real quick about this.
Bradley: Yeah, it’s Simon Dadia, the creator of BrowSEO. I use about five or ten percent of what BrowSEO is capable of, but that five or ten percent that I use is incredibly important to me and to my business. I don’t even know most of the things that it does. We’re lucky enough, fortunate enough to have Simon on today from 4:30 until 6:00pm for the MasterCLASS webinar which we’re opening up to the public. He’s going to come give a demonstration of BrowSEO 3.0, which was just released this week, and go through all the functionalities and all the stuff that I don’t even know that it does that I know is incredibly powerful. I’m actually looking forward to this myself. I’ve been using BrowSEO for close to a year now. Some of our virtual assistants use it as well so it’s really, really important. I would like to get to know the software better, and who better to learn it from than the developer himself.
Everybody is welcome to attend that today. I highly encourage that you stop by and take a look at it. Even if it’s something that you’re not ready for at the moment, I would encourage you to check it out so that you understand what the tool is and maybe when, later down on the road when you are ready for it, you’ll understand why it’s so important and critical to have in your business.
Adam: Awesome. We wanted to mention… We had a couple who have been asking about our RYS Dumfries services. We’re going to put the link in there, obviously, you can find out some more about it. If you’re a subscriber of ours, we’re going to send out a special discount. That’s not something we’re going to post publicly, but if you’re interested in that, you’ll get it in the e-mail. If you’re not sure if you’re on the e-mail list just say something here, and we’ll point you in the right direction.
Marco: Cool.
Bradley: All right. Anything else?
Marco: Yeah, I just want to add… Guys, video powerhouse. I know that you’re hearing that there’s this embed network, that embed network. We’re putting a lot of time and effort and just sweat into making this the most powerful embed network, bar none. I won’t even share in the mastermind the type of stuff that we’re going to inject into our networks to just get everything juiced up and going. If you’re not in there right now, I will suggest that you get in there at the lower price, because once this is all scaled out, the price will be going up because of all the time, effort, and money that is going into development and into scaling the networks. I hope that everyone else here knows that when I get into something, and once Semantic Mastery puts their name on something, you can bank on it that it’s going to work the way that it’s supposed to.
I just wanted to add that. If you’re not in it, fine. Don’t. But for those of you, especially video people… By the way, we’re going to be doing map embeds, also, but video, you know how powerful embeds are. Just imagine what Semantic Mastery can do for your videos.
Bradley: We got a full team now working on building that out and really further development. We’ve got a coder on it, we’ve got several builders on it, we’ve got Marco involved. We’ve got a full-on team, six or seven people working on this now, guys. We’re really trying to scale over the next couple of months, and make it incredibly powerful, because it’s something that really got put on the back-burner for a while but now we’ve ramped it back up. We certainly encourage you to get in now while you can.
Other than that, I guess we can get right into questions. Am I right?
Adam: Yeah, let’s do it.
Bradley: All right. Let’s do it. I’m going to grab the screen, and I’ll zoom in, guys, because I know that makes it easier for you all to see. Give me one second. Cool. Is that good enough? Can you guys see that fairly well? Besides Adam’s smiling face? Okay, cool.
Redirect Expired Domains To A Tier-1 IFTTT Network
Here we go. Let’s start at the bottom with Ryan. Ryan says, “Hey, Bradley. I’ve found a lot of inspired domains that have great relevant back-links, no spam, but the archive shows they were used as a PBN at some point or had Chinese content. Since the back-link history is clean, would there be any risk to redirecting those domains to a tier-one IFTTT property, or would it be best to avoid them completely?”
I usually avoid those, Ryan. They may still have some juice. If the back-link profile is clean, they may still be valuable domains. The problem is, typically, if you see that they had been built as a PBN and then they were dropped, or likewise, if they had Chinese content on them and then they were dropped, which, you know, that’s how you picked it up again… A lot of the times it’s because it had been de-indexed. That’s the only reason why it was dropped, because if it had a clean back-link profile and it was not de-indexed, then why would the PBN, whoever owned it as a PBN, why would they drop it or why would the Chinese company. That’s not always the case, but more often than not, it is. You won’t really be able to tell that without purchasing a domain, and in submitting it to a search console, and then looking for the manual spam action notification or message within search console. That’s really the only way to tell. If it was a recently dropped domain, or one that was in auction, for example, or one that had just recently been dropped, if you do a site colon operator search on it in Google, you can sometimes still sometimes see indexed links or indexed pages or posts. If that’s the case, then it hasn’t been de-indexed.
Most of the time, when you’re buying stuff like domains that you found, or scraped with Blue Chip Backlinks, they’ve been dropped for some time, and so there won’t be any indexed pages anyways. You can’t tell whether it’s de-indexed or not that way, by checking for indexed pages, because it’s been dropped for so long that it’s fallen out of the index. There’s no way to really tell without purchasing a domain and then actually submitting to search console and then looking to see if there’s a manual spam action notification.
Typically, I just avoid those altogether, but if you have some of them, then I would certainly not point those directly to a money site. I would point them to a buffer site, but I would still probably go ahead and submit those rebuilt sites, if you’re rebuilding them, whether you’re rebuilding the old content or building a PBN – putting a blog on it – if you’re just doing a redirect, you don’t have to worry about all that. What I would suggest at least doing, is taking a domain like that, and putting at least the homepage content on it. You could just do the archive.org from way, way back. What I mean by that is go back before it was a PBN or before there was Chinese content, just download the archive file, upload the index.html file that you pulled, and then submit it to Search Console through a persona account anyways, to check to see if there’s any spam actions, manual actions taken against the domain.
That’s what I would do first. It’ll only take you a few minutes to do that. Sometimes you’ve got to wait twenty-four hours or whatever in Search Console for you to see a notification, but if it comes back clean, then try to force the index, which is what I’ll do. When you submit to Search Console, it’ll usually index anyways, but if it’s indexed, if there’s no manual spam action, and it indexes, then you know it’s a clean domain, at least clean enough to be used to point to a buffer. You could just do a redirect at that point, or since you already have the index.html page uploaded, you could just go in and hack a link into that page itself. That’s entirely up to you how you want to do it, but that’s how I would do it because I personally don’t like to use any kind of manual spam action domains in my link stream, anyways. Even if it’s two hops from my money site, I still don’t want to inject something that dirty into my link stream, if that makes sense.
Hernan, what’s your take on that? Is Hernan here?
Adam: Yeah, but he’s having some browser issues, I think.
Bradley: Okay. How about you, Marco?
Hernan: I’m trying to roll back the Chrome because the latest version is hammering on my end and it’s pretty bad.
Bradley: What about Marco? Is he still here?
Marco: Yeah, I’m still here. I agree totally. You just have to be really careful. That’s it, just due diligence. They could still be used, just we always taught, launder the juice. Google is going out further and further, that’s why you have to see if there’s a manual action. Eventually, it might catch up, it might hit your … Although it could stem it. Your tier-one could stem that …
Bradley: Yeah, tier one.
Marco: [crosstalk 00:11:30] could be directed to it, sure. It won’t really hurt it. It won’t push it through unless it’s due follow. Then you might get into some problems.
Hernan: Hello?
Bradley: That’s why I was saying, Ryan, I typically just avoid those domains because you really just don’t know until you’ve purchased it and done the various steps that I just mentioned. For that, that’s just a lot of additional work just to test to see if the domain is worth anything.
Importance of Title Tags For Maps Ranking
Okay, Mark says, “Hi guys, hope you’re well. Got a title tag question for you. Let’s say I have a lead gen property called Roofer Pro Dallas, and a keyword I want to rank in Maps for is “roofers Dallas,” if my title tag was “roofers in Dallas,” “Roofer Pro Dallas,” is this over-optimized?”
I would say yes, Mark.
“I know that would be competitive but I have one like this but in a small-ish town that is not too competitive. What advice would you give for my title tag? Does it play an important role in ranking the maps? Thanks.”
Yes, it does, but what I would do … That’s the brand name, Roofer Pro Dallas, so that’s a lot of the times why … You might be able to get away with that one because this is the brand name, and there’s slightly different terms. I would still kind of shy away from that, if possible. What I would probably do in this situation is just do – if the keyword is “roofers in Dallas,” I would go, “roofers in Dallas” and then put the phone number, then that would be it. I would just omit the brand name from the title tag. That’s what I would do. Again, that’s only because those are two very closely related terms, like “roofer” and “roofers,” I would think that would be over-optimizing.
It’s interesting because I found with YouTube videos recently, with adding a second keyword into the title tag, it actually gives it a little bit more of a boost, but with websites I don’t typically like to do that. Usually, the format that I use for all title tags is, I do the keyword, which is primary keyword plus city, if it’s a local term, then I’ll do a separator. I don’t use the pipe symbol anymore, though, guys. I think it’s kind of a spam signal. I don’t have any data to back that up, I just don’t use it anymore. I just use hyphens now, but let’s just go through this real quick. Then I’ll do the phone number. Then I do the brand name. But again, in a case like where the brand has the keyword in it, which happens a lot, especially with contractors, then what I’ll do is I’ll just omit this last part of it, and just do the keyword plus the phone.
You could test that if you have more than one property that you could test something like that on, or a couple different key words, a couple different landing pages. You could do one landing page the way that I just mentioned, like this, and then another landing page like the way you have here with the brand new appended at the end, and see if you get better results with one over the other. That’s what I would do is test against – on the same site. If you’ve got two different landing pages, that’s what I would do is test against it. Personally, I would say that looks a little bit over-optimized there. It’s almost like stuffing the title tag, if that makes sense.
Marco: Hey, Bradley, I just posted something in the chat, the way that I would break that up just to include everything.
Bradley: Okay, I got it. “Roofer Pro-Dallas roofers.” Yeah, you could do that too. “Roofer Pro-Dallas roofers.” Again, you might still be a little over-optimized. I’m just real cautious about that, guys. I would test it, and see. Remember, if you’re going to make a change, Mark, you can change the title tag. Just once you change the title tag, leave it alone for about three weeks. Then assess what movement has occurred after about three weeks has passed, and see. If you’ve improved, great. If you didn’t move at all, then it didn’t do any harm, but it didn’t do any good. If you dropped a spot or two, or whatever, then you know to go back and change it again. All right? You don’t want to do too many changes too quickly. Title tag is pretty damn important, because that’s the first thing that Google sees when it hits your page. That’s the first thing the bots see, is your SEO title. When you make a change like that, you don’t really want to do anything else on that page until it’s had time to settle in. Which is about a three week period.
Getting Traffic For Curated Content
Henry says, “Hey guys, just bought Content Kingpin, checked it out already. I must say it is really another great product you guys produced, and I’m sure it can help me a lot with my business. Thank you for that.”
Let’s plus one that.
That’s a great question, Henry. Obviously if you’ve been following us for any length of time, you know that IFTTT SEO is the really the foundation that we build upon for all SEO activity. Essentially, Content Kingpin is a content production method that we use to produce content to feed the blog, which feeds our syndication networks, which produces our SEO: the off-page, the authority building, the social signals, all of that. Content Kingpin is a way to help us produce that content efficiently and for a much better price than just hiring out content writers. Curating is more efficient and it’s cheaper. It’s more cost-effective.
What I do is I blog from the site using curation methods that are taught in Content Kingpin, and they get syndicated out via IFTTT. That’s pretty much the foundation now. Obviously, if you’re in a competitive industry, you may need some additional off-page SEO work to actually accomplish what you’re trying to accomplish. That’s where press releases come in. If it’s local sites, you’ve got citations, RYS Academy stuff that you can do, you’ve got external link building, private link networks, private blog networks. There’s so many different other things that you can do, but it all starts with content blogging regularly, using your blog as your link building method with an IFTTT network. That’s pretty much the core strategy that we teach, guys.
If you’re blogging with curated content from your main money site, then you’re already, without any additional work – you’ve got to set the network up, or have somebody set it up for you. You can hire us to do it, or hire a virtual assistant, which I certainly recommend you do one of those, instead of doing it yourself. Then you start blogging consistently from your money site and that’s going to really help to boost your SEO.
No-Follow For Outbound Links of Curated Content
Next is, “For all the outbound links on curated content, do we have to use nofollow attribute on all of them? Is it okay to do this for all the outbound links? Thanks, guys.”
Henry, inside the training, I go over that very, very, very thoroughly because it’s really important to know when you’re curating content from your money site, I recommend that you nofollow all external links. I just do that for all of my money sites, guys. Unless I’m linking intentionally to something I want to pass equity to, in which case, I leave it as dofollow. Because I always nofollow all my outbound links on money sites, I just put a plugin on the site. There’s many plugins that will do this. One of them is called Nofollow External Links, another one is just called External Links. All you got to do is, go inside your WordPress dashboard, go to ‘Plugins’, ‘Add New’, and then go to the search box and type in, “Nofollow external links.” You’ll see a bunch of different plugins come up. Just pick one, install it, and what those plugins do is automatically add the nofollow attribute to any outbound link. Any link that links to something off-page or offsite. It’s brain dead simple.
Then what I’ll do from there is – any outbound links on the money sites get nofollowed. If I’m doing curated content for link building, in other words, if I’m curating content on private blog networks, or webTOS, or something like that, then I always keep all links to dofollow because otherwise you’re leaving a footprint. Here’s the thing, if you’ve got a private blog network site, or your own network of sites, and you’re using them for link building, I still recommend using curated content. It’s a much better content method, it’s higher quality content, you’re going to be giving a lot of the signals Google is looking for by linking to relevant, high-authority type content, it’s reinforcing the topical theme of the post itself.
The thing is, you want to leave all link building type of articles with dofollow links. I know traditional SEO will tell you no, you want to nofollow eveyrthing except for the one dofollow link back to your money site, but that would clearly leave a footprint. If you’re posting multiple posts on that same blog, and all the links are nofollowed on the blog except for a select few that are left dofollow, and they’re all pointing to your own money sites, that’s a footprint. I recommend it for any off-page link building using curated content, you leave all links to dofollow. For any on-page, or any money site, curated content, you leave all external links to nofollow. Hopefully that was helpful.
That’s all inside the training, guys. I’ve covered that really, really thoroughly in multiple parts inside of Content Kingpin. By the way, drop a link for that if you hadn’t yet, Adam. I’m pretty sure you did, but…
Adam: I did not, let me look that up.
Bradley: Content Kingpin, yeah. We got a lot of really good feedback from that course.
Adam: Yeah, I just got to make sure because we did it ourselves where we put “.com” instead [crosstalk 00:21:32]
Bradley: It’s contentkingpin.co.
KML Map/File In The Schema
Tim says, “I’ve generated a KML map for a client, where do I add that onsite, and add to the schema?”
You mean a KML file, Tim? If it’s just a KML file, you just upload it to the root of the server, to the root of the domain. Just upload it to your server, so it would be domain.com\KML. That’s typically how a KML file is, I don’t know about a KML map. I’m not familiar with that term, but a KML file, you just upload it to your server. That’s really an old school tactic, I don’t know how effective that is anymore. That’s something I did four or five years ago, where we would generate a geo sitemap and a KML file, and upload it to the server. Let’s see if we can find some of this stuff real quick. This is something we used to do years ago. I don’t know how effective it is anymore, now that we have schema, I don’t think it’s nearly as important.
This was pre-structured data days, guys. Pre schema.org, this is what we used to do for local, and it was very, very effective. Now that we have structured data available to us, I don’t think this is necessary. I stopped doing this several years ago. If anybody has any data to say that this is still valuable, please let me know. I just stopped doing it ever since we started using structured data.
Anyways, you should just do geo sitemap generator, same thing. Geo sitemap and KML generator, here’s another one. They’ll give you instructions, but basically you just upload it to your server. You upload the KML file to your web server, do you see that? And the geo sitemap, all a geo sitemap does, is it’s a sitemap that points to the KML file. That’s all it does. It just gives Google a way to locate your KML file.
Marco: Not necessarily going into the server, but Google Earth KML into RYS Academy, and I’m not going to say how, and then from that, use it. That creates kind of a slipstream where Google is seeing that you’re using their properties to do stuff. You know how Google loves itself, right? It’s just one of the additional things that we played with in RYS Academy. I’m really reluctant to share all my stuff because, you know, we have a bug inside our groups that likes to share our shit, and so I’m very reluctant. I would tell Tim, if he’s in RYS Academy, reach out to me privately because I know he’s not the one sharing our shit. Reach out to me, and I can tell him what he can do, if he wants that extra KML push for relevancy. That’s how I use it, relevancy.
Bradley: Okay. That’s a great question, Tim. Again, I haven’t used a KML file in at least three years, ever since we started using structured data on a regular basis. JSON-LD seems to really give it the push that it needs, anyway.
Using Google Adwords Keyword Planner Without Paying
Broglio says, “Recently my key word planner started showing ranges for search volume.”
Yeah, Broglio, that’s because unless you’re an advertiser with Google now, they just give you limited data for keyword search volume. That’s trying to force more people into the [inaudible 00:24:57] platform, I totally understand. Fortunately, I’m doing a lot of AdWords stuff now.
I don’t know, Broglio. Honestly, I haven’t tried to hack my way around that yet because I’m a paying advertiser now for multiple campaigns and clients and AdWords accounts, so honestly, I have all the data I need. It’s not something I’ve spent the time to do. Does anyone else have a workaround for that yet?
Bradley: Pause the campaign.
Marco: Yeah, pause the campaign, and see if it works around into giving you the information that you’re looking for.
Bradley: That’s a good idea. Set up a YouTube ads campaign or something, and then just pause it. I don’t know if that will free it up for you, or not, but that’s probably one thing that I would try, Broglio. I’m assuming you’ve already tried that, but if you haven’t, I would attempt that first.
Other than that, I really don’t know what to tell you. I’m using AdWords so much now, personally, I wouldn’t know where else to look. I don’t really care about search volume for SEO terms, for the most part, and I haven’t for a year and a half, two years now. What I like to do for SEO terms – the key word planner is an AdWords tool, it’s not an SEO tool – so, the search volume, things like that, it’s different. It’s not the same as looking at organic search volume.
A better tool which doesn’t give volume metrics would be Google Trends. Google Trends is better for actually finding terms for SEO than the keyword planner is, in my opinion. I think Trends is a better tool for that. Then once I have developed my seed set of keywords, then I drill down on that seed set using Power Suggest Pro, or some other type of keyword suggest scraper. I just happen to think Power Suggest is the best. They don’t give search volume either. All they do is just return a bunch of long-tails for my seed terms, but those are keywords that generate traffic because they’re suggested phrases.
I know I’ve talked about this before, but the thing is, especially with mobile – more than, what? 60% of all search traffic now comes from mobile. That’s why suggest phrases are so good because when somebody starts to do a search on mobile, first of all, they’re either speaking their search in, or if they’re starting to type a search in, then half of the mobile screen is taken up by the keyboard, and the other half becomes the Google suggested phrases. Mobile search traffic, unless it’s been spoken into the search, most mobile traffic comes from suggested phrases. That’s why I like to use suggest terms because even though you can’t, a lot of the times, get any volume data on those terms, it still ends up being traffic producing keywords because people are searching through mobile and they just tap to complete the search string, instead of actually typing it all out. Suggested phrases are a huge traffic source.
How Many Networks To Use When Rank Videos Of A Production Company?
Clark, that’s a great question. Typically, what I did was create several different types of networks, like one was a contractors network so that I could cover any time of businesses in the home services and contracting industries. Then I had another one that was a Virginia business specific network, so that was the bit broader. The common denominator there is the fact that everything was Virginia businesses, but it was broad enough that it could cover any industry as long as the business was a Virginia-based business. That’s how I did it. I also had a health and wellness network. Then I had a technology type network that covered things like mobile devices, and electronics, and things like that. I’ve had multiple networks. It’s just over the years I’ve developed so many damn networks and so I had all of those available.
How many networks do I use? It depends. For the Virginia network, I think I had a total of four two-tier networks, maybe five two-tier networks attached to the primary channel I was using for that. Essentially, a full two-tier network is four rings, it’s roughly 80 properties, so if you’ve got five of those, you’re looking at 400 properties that your videos get syndicated to with just an upload or a livestream, which is beautiful. It’s why I love those IFTTT networks, guys, it’s hands-free. Once it’s built, it’s hands-free.
It depends, Clark. Theme your networks. If you’re starting on a budget, then I would recommend you go with something broad. If you’re going to stick within a particular city, you could theme a network just around that one city. If you plan on expanding outside of that city, then I would recommend theming a network around your state. Then you could cover any businesses in your entire state. That’s where I would probably start, although – if you’re working with video production companies, that’s what you’re going to have to do because you’re going to have to be a bit more broad to begin with because like you said, you don’t know which clients you’re going to get from the production company. It’s going to be all over the map. All over the industry map is what I mean. You can’t really niche down in that case. If you want to niche down, which is how I recommend – if you’re going to go directly to business owners instead of through a production company, then I recommend sticking with a particular niche because then you can get really hyper-focused on your network as to what the niche is about.
Start off with just a broad network based around your city or state and just continue building that one out. Then you can always kind of silo through playlists. Which, again, always use playlists, guys. If you’re doing a location-based network, whether it’s city or state, it’s okay, doesn’t matter, you can start siloing by niche within that channel.
How do you brand your networks? Just come up with something. You have to be creative in that regard and just come up with a brand. I’ll always use the Hangouts brand, like Virginia Hangouts, or North Carolina Hangouts, or Carolina Hangouts which would cover both North Carolina and South Carolina. That’s what I always did because when I first started doing this, I would actually interview business owners on a Google Hangout, on air. That’s how I started that whole business. Eventually, I moved away from doing interviews and just targeting video production companies that had the higher quality videos that they already produced. I didn’t really want to deal with trying to get the business owners on Google Hangouts and stuff, it was kind of a pain in the ass. It worked well, but it was kind of a pain in the ass, so that’s why I moved over to doing the production company work instead.
IFTTT Networks For ECommerce Sites
Jay, that’s exactly what I would’ve suggested.
“But, I want the Shopify page to rank and not the posts, how can this be achieved? Thanks in advance.”
What you do is within the posts – so you build a subdomain, you put a blog on a subdomain, which I totally would have recommended that anyways – and use the WordPress blog as your content distribution engine. You’re publishing posts within the blog, but you link to the pages on the Shopify site that you’re trying to rank. Category pages are always good pages because it will distribute – what I mean is if you’re going to link from the blog to the Shopify category pages, that’s always a good one because it will distribute the link juice across all the items in that category as opposed to the one product page. That’s one way that you could do it. Just use the blog, but build links from the blog posts to the pages or the items on the Shopify store that you’re trying to rank.
Here’s a good one. Wong, I saw this one earlier. He says, “Bradley, I’ve been joining IFTTT V2 for a month now. Last eight days, I syndicated my first dating product reviewed to a full two-tier network, and two days ago it ranked. It ranked, everyone!”
That’s awesome.
“My first ranking, first page, position two, product name plus review with the IFTTT syndication network. Unfortunately, I still haven’t had income to report, but I get to fired up. My shiny object syndrome just upgraded from ne product to new keyword ranking. New keyword is the shiny object I go after. Thank you, Semantic Mastery for being so generous with such powerful information.”
Let’s go to question, I think I already plus one’d that.
Adam: I like that ranking keywords is his new shiny object. That’s awesome.
Bradley: That’s right. Good for you, Wong, congratulations, man. Way to hustle. That’s how you do it, buddy.
“My competitor has a YouTube video ranking for the keyword “sexual decoder system review,” here is his YouTube video URL. I found that he has 1,000 plus spam backlinks to his video, and his video which has 1,000 backlinks with keyword “anchor.” Is this video very, very tough to outrank?”
It may be. Let’s go analyze it for a minute because of that good review that he just left. Let’s see. 20,000 views, that’s quite a bit. Let’s go see the [inaudible 00:34:48] I do. Well majestic isn’t showing shit. That’s not –
Adam: Yeah, but like he said it’s a bunch of spam backlinks.
Bradley: Majestic’s probably not picking up most of those.
Adam: How could he rank a video?
Bradley: Yeah, it’s interesting. “[inaudible 00:35:16] very, very tough to outrank?” I don’t know because I don’t know what the rest of the competition’s like because I know nothing about that particular industry. Is it going to be tough to outrank? Possibly. Can it be done? Of course it can. I don’t know how much you’d have to throw at it. You just got started with IFTTT networks. I believe in the IFTTT SEO training, Wong. In V2 even, we had the advanced video ranking, in the advanced module section. I believe there’s two webinars in there where I go through a lot of advanced backlinking stuff to rank videos, when IFTTT networks aren’t enough. I would go back and review those. They were both full on webinars like hour and a half long each, but it’s in the advanced module and there’s some real ninja stuff that we do for the videos that – when IFTTT networks aren’t enough. You can pretty much rank video for just about anything when you apply those methods that are in the advanced section. I would recommend that.
Also, guys, we kind of talked about this briefly earlier when Broglio was asking about the Google Keyword Planner. Remember, guys, set up an AdWords campaign for that video that you’re trying to rank. Set up an AdWords campaign, and you can drive traffic to your video through AdWords, through two different means. Either in-display ads, which are the ads that show up in YouTube search results. You can also drive traffic using the Google Display network and have a banner ad that shows up on the right-hand side of a video watch page. It’s a little bit more advanced because you’ve got to get into the display network, but if you want to just stick with YouTube stuff, like specifically videos, I would set up an in-display ad, which would be when they click the ad, it would actually play the video that you’re trying to rank. There’s also in-stream videos which are the pre-roll ads, the ones that play before other people’s videos. You could have a call to action that when somebody clicks on that, it takes them to the watch page on your video.
What happens is by setting up the AdWords campaign for those, guys, that’s kind of a secret weapon I use for ranking videos, is AdWords. Because Google tells you they don’t give any preferential search treatment to advertisers, but that’s bullshit because I’ve proven it many, many times where I’ve had videos that were difficult to rank on page one. Then I’ve set up ad campaigns and – now, what causes it to rank? Is it that you start paying Google, and they give you preferential treatment, which they deny? Or is it that when you set up the ad campaign, you’re video naturally starts getting more engagement, because people are naturally clicking the ads, you’re driving more traffic to the video, more people are watching it, which is engagement signals. Maybe it’s a little bit of both. Either way, it works, that’s what I’m saying. I would suggest that you set up an AdWords campaign for that video that you’re trying to rank and that should give you a nice push too. Go back through the advanced section in the IFTTT SEO Academy and watch those and that should give you some pretty good ideas.
“I would like to submit an endorsement to you guys, but since I can’t join the IFTTT SEO Academy Facebook group – “
Yeah, we still haven’t figured that out? What we’re going to do with that yet?
Adam: Yeah, it’s a work in progress. This week we’re actually working on it, we started setting things up. Just so people know, we’re going to be creating and migrating the Facebook groups, so you’ll see some information really soon, like literally tomorrow.
Bradley: Okay, great.
– is there a way for me to submit to you guys, or do you have too much and you don’t need anymore?”
Yeah, we’ll certainly take it, Wong. If you don’t mind, send us a support ticket. Support@semanticmastery.com, again support@semanticmastery.com with a review, or a testimonial, whatever you feel like sharing, we’d be happy to take it. Absolutely, we love hearing that kind of stuff.
Last one.
“Last word for the public who are watching this: IFTTT SEO do work. In fact, it is much better than PBN. I’ve always struggled to rank a YouTube video and website. Today, seeing that I got my first ranking, my confidence is in SEO really boosted. Thanks again, guys.”
I’d plus one it again if I could, Wong, so thank you.
Adam: Awesome.
Marco: Can’t plus one it anymore.
Adam: I can, there’s three.
Content Kingpin & Tube Kingpin
Here we go, another one. Guys, let’s plus one that.
“And I already have my first client that wants me to supply content with video and blog content. Here’s the video, everyone can view, like, and share it.”
Cool. We got two testimonials back to back about Content Kingpin. Oh man, if I have to watch lying ass Hillary, I’m going to throw up. Let’s not bring politics into this discussion. The name of the video I curate is “Lie Detecting [inaudible 00:40:03]” That’s great, Paul. I’ll plus one that.
Is There A Danger When Linking To News Coverage Articles?
That’s a good question, Sky. Here’s the thing, because it’s a widespread tactic, that’s why I don’t think it’s going to be an issue. It kind of makes sense in my opinion to do that because if somebody’s got a news article, or whatever posted on a news type of site, then that’s kind of a high-authority thing, and you would want to reference that. It’s like you’re borrowing authority from those sources because they mentioned you on a high-authority source. It’s kind of like press release stuff. Linking over to a press release publication – a press cable linking over to that when a new press release has been – and a link back to your site. I haven’t experienced any issues with that. I understand it’s very much like a reciprocal link, but I haven’t had any issues with that. Like you said, it’s a widespread tactic, and I think that may be the case why. Essentially, you’re linking over to the authority source that is also citing you, that is citing your site. I don’t think it’s an issue. I haven’t seen any negative effect from doing so, is my point. Doesn’t mean it won’t change down the road. I’m just saying, as it stands right now, I haven’t seen – How about you guys, you got any input on that one?
Apparently not.
Hernan: No, no, I’m thinking. Can you guys hear me, by the way?
Bradley: Yes.
Hernan: Okay. Here’s why I think there shouldn’t be any issues whatsoever when curating content, or linking to news coverage articles on their own websites, etc., that’s exactly what Wikipedia does. They will have hundreds upon hundreds of internal links whenever it makes sense because they are not stopping the bot. The less you stop the bot from crawling the rest of the internet, the more you’re helping Google, and the more Google rewards you. That’s why we insist on curation, and we insist on outbound authority links and those kind of things. Curated content has been around forever because even big media outlets need to churn out content like crazy, and they have a staff of full-time journalists, and they still recur to curation. I don’t think there could be any danger here, Sky, not in the short-term. Basically at that point, you’re using links, not to pass link juice, but to point to other resources. You know what I mean? My advice, whenever it makes sense, just do it. There are huge networks of websites. I know there are a bunch in English and there’s a bunch in Spanish, that they will have 20 or 30 authority websites. Take [inaudible 00:43:39] for example. They have like seven authority websites and they are completely interlinking each other, and I think that they are on the same IP.
Bradley: They’re not even trying to hide it, yeah.
Hernan: They’re not even trying to hide it. That’s my point. We have a big network in Spanish that they have, maybe 30 authority blogs, like real authority blogs, real assets. And they’re all under the same IP. They are hosted on the same IP and they are linking each other like crazy, but they are not hiding it. Whenever it makes sense, just go with it. That would be my take on it.
Bradley: Good answer. We’ve got about ten minutes left, guys. We’re going to spend about five minutes getting ready for the Simon Dadia webinar. Again, you guys are all welcome to attend if you’d like. That’s coming up in about 15 minutes. I’m going to try to roll through the next few because I know we didn’t get to very many questions today.
Creating A Subdomain On A Website That Is Already Ranking Or Creating Another Website
This looks like another testimonial. Ivan Letz says, “I have a site for my business, computer repair, and I built a tier one IFTTT. It ranked one keyword on the first spot in YouTube results, and I’m not on the second page in web results for another general term. Thanks for the tip, guys.” Another plus one there, guys.
It’s up to you, Ivan. If you’re going to create an SEO services site, you might want to have it be a separate brand all together. It’s up to you, you just need to decide how you want to brand it. If you’re going to start providing SEO services to other businesses – which is great, if you’re learning to do it for yourself, why not? It’s another stream of revenue. You need to determine how you want to brand it. Do you want to brand it as a division of your existing company, computer repair? There’s kind of a relationship there, right? Somewhat, between computer repair business and online marketing. There’s somewhat a relationship. You need a computer to do it. You could do it that way, as just another division. Or you could create a separate brand all together, it’s entirely up to you. I would personally, probably, set up a separate brand for that, but, again, it’s up to you. Congratulations by the way.
Brian says, “I have a client with an over-optimized website with a fair amount of content, not ranking very well. Very old style site, high bounce rate, but it’s still generating some sales, about $800 a month for a weight loss test. Bodytype.com. Recently, bought an exact match domain with good search volume, bodytypediet.com, and are building a new site for her. We have to keep the test on the old domain and we don’t want to lose that traffic revenue going to it either, but the content that we need on the new site is the same as the old site. What should we do with the content on the original and/or new site? Should we keep both sites going? If not, how do we phase out the old site, and how do we prevent duplicate contact penalty on the new site? Thanks.”
Brian, what I would do is, once you built the new site… I don’t understand why you need the same content on both if it’s over-optimized. Again, is it the content that’s over-optimized, or just in general the site’s over-optimized? Meaning the title tags are over-optimized, the content itself is over-optimized, all that kind of stuff. There’s some variables there that I’m not real clear on. If you were using the same content on both domains, then what I would do is, once you made the new domain public, is I would do 301 redirects from the old to the new. That’s what I would do because then you’d end up pushing all of the juice from the old site to the new site, which you said is not ranking very well. You could do that.
The other thing you could do, which I don’t know how effective this would be, would be to leave the old site up, and not do a 301 redirect, but do a page by page canonical to the new site. I don’t know how well that would work though, you’d have to test that. In fact, what I would probably do is, I would probably just select a couple pages that are ranking fairly well on the old site, and then do a cross-domain canonical over to the corresponding page on the new site and watch it and see what happens. That way you’re not doing it all on one fell swoop, you’re just selecting a couple pages and testing to see what kind of effect it would have.
By the way if you’re using WordPress Yoast SEO plugin, that’s really simple to do. On a page, or a post, scroll down underneath the Wysiwyg editor to where the Yoast widget is, and click on the gear icon, which is the advanced settings for the Yoast plugin for that post or that page, and you’ll see the canonical URL field. You just copy the URL that you want to pass – essentially what you would do is, on the old site, you would click on the post, or the page, scroll down, click on the advanced Yoast SEO settings, and then you would grab the URL from the corresponding page on the new site, and paste that as the canonical URL inside the old site. It’s very simple to do when you’re using Yoast. That’s what I would do.
Basically, either do a redirect, or set up canonicals, and see if you can achieve the same results with the canonicals which would be pushing authority from the old site to the new site. I would totally try to not use the exact same content, especially if it was over-optimized. I would take a lot more care on the new site to make sure that it was optimized properly.
Just a few more minutes guys.
What Kind Of Backlinks Should I Build To My Tier 1 IFTTT Site?
Robert Noon says, “Hey there guys, what kind of backlinks should I build to my IFTTT first tier money site?”
You mean you’re first tier network?
“I was going to use relevant web 2.0 site networks to buffer the links, then send quality links to web 2s with GSA, will this work best, or not?”
Yes, that’s basically what we do, Robert. We build links to our IFTTT first tier network properties, but the first tier links to the first tier network, so they’re essentially second tier links. We build links to the IFTTT network, so imagine that your IFTTT networks, that your properties within the networks are your target URLs. Your first tier links to those are going to be – what we do, we do with GSA, and also with Turbo Web 2.0 and some other tools like that, and we just build a handful of higher quality links to the IFTTT networks, and then we throw kitchen sink spam behind those. That’s what I would recommend that you do. Just make sure that that first layer of links to your IFTTT networks are fairly clean and fairly decent links, then you can throw kitchen sink spam behind that.
If you’ve got access to all those tools, by all means, do it yourself. If you don’t, you can hire us for it because we have the link building service that’s specifically set up for those networks in citations and press releases, and PBNs too, so it’s good for all of those. You can always buy a link building service from us and then compare it to what your own plan was, and kind of model that if you want it. It’d be a good way to do it.
Kevin says, “Hey guys, what press release service would you suggest for premium traffic driving press release distribution, not junky SEO, only tight press releases, but solid traffic driving PR services. I see Newswire has $9.99 press releases that also include print ads and magazines, billboards, etc., would that be worth it?”
I don’t know. Newswire, I was using it for a very, very long time, but it started to become less effective. I’m not saying anything bad about them, I don’t subscribe to them anymore. We are going to be releasing press releases within certain space. I know we’ve been talking about it for damn near a year now.
Adam: Yeah, and the end is in sight. I’m putting my neck out a little bit, but word on the street is end of the month.
Bradley: End of the month. I’m not going to hold my breath [crosstalk 00:51:11].
Adam: I feel confident. I’ve told people it’s coming before, but end of the month is the timeline. I realize that things can happen, at least on the software side, but that’s been the date promised.
Bradley: However, that said, let me see if I can find…
Adam: Also, I think this is going to have to be the last one, we got to get going pretty quick.
Bradley: This is the one. This is rather expensive, but this is Prreach.com. It’s $297 for one press release. It’s been about two years since I used this service. The last time I used this service it was $97 for a single press release, so it’s gone way, way up, but it was a really, really good service. This might be something that you can test. Again, it’s rather expensive, but it was really good a couple years ago, I can’t imagine it’s gotten any worse. With the price goin up, it’s probably just gotten better, so check that out.
All right, I think that was it. Just one more. I’m going to answer this one from Ethan, and then we’ll wrap it up, guys. Just one, Ethan, sorry, but we got to run.
“Few questions about Content Kingpin, I’m curious if the course is significantly different than your content curation course. I purchased that about a year ago.”
No, it’s not. There is some differences, but if you purchased Curation Mastery then you can get Content Kingpin for free. Just submit a support ticket. We’ll confirm that you were in Curation Mastery just to verify it. We can make sure that’s correct and if that’s the case, we’ll add you to Content Kingpin, and you will get, in your email, login details.
“Also, I tried to purchase Content Kingpin yesterday, but I was redirected to a John Goodman F U video.”
That’s awesome.
Bradley: How was he redirected to that, though?
Adam: I have no idea.
Marco: We’ll need to check.
Bradley: Yeah, I don’t understand how that happened.
“Anyway, to purchase this deal I’d really like to get started using this strategy soon because my PBNs are itching for new high-quality content.”
Yeah, Ethan, like I said, just contact us at support@semanticmastery.com, and just tell us what you just told us here. We’ll go confirm that you’ve had Curation Mastery, and once we’ve done that we’ll just send you login details for Content Kingpin, and you’ll be good to go.
Marco: Also, send the URL where you were trying to purchase, Ethan, so that we make sure, what’s going on.
Bradley: Please do that, but in the meantime –
Adam: Well, John Goodman is an affiliate of ours.
Bradley: I’m going to go ahead and drop this link on the page and we’re going to wrap it up, guys. Anybody’s curious about the John Goodman F U video, which – this is a motto that we live by, so I’m just going to post this on here for your viewing pleasure. John Goodman POFU video, which is the position of FU. Go watch that when you get a chance. This is the position that you guys should all be striving for in your business, so go watch that and make it a motto. Live by it.
All right, guys, we’ll see everyone in a few minutes on the Simon Dadia Browseo webinar. We’re looking forward to it, see you guys then. Otherwise, we’ll see you next week. Thanks everyone.