Click on the video above to watch Episode 109 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 Hump Day Hangouts, Episode 109. We got everybody here, so we’re going to go down real quick like we do and say hello to everybody. Chris, how’s it going?
Chris: Good. Looking for “stuff near me” here.
Adam: Yeah, no kidding. Oh, man. Hernan, how’s it going?
Hernan: Hey, guys. Hey, everyone. It’s really, really good to be here. I’m getting ready for Christmas already. 7th of December, I can’t believe it. It’s going to be good.
Adam: Awesome. Marco, how’s the weather treating you?
Marco: Hey, what’s up? We’re getting ready for Christmas, man. I was just listening to Cheech & Chong, “Santa and His Old Lady.” That’s funny stuff, man.
Adam: Awesome.
Marco: Weather’s great. Dry season’s coming in. Won’t rain for five months. Sorry, guys. While you guys are in the US dealing with tons of snow-
Chris: Yeah, [inaudible 00:00:54].
Marco: I’ll try to send some sun your way.
Adam: Thank you. I could use it. I woke up to about an inch of snow on the ground this morning.
Marco: Yeah, there you go.
Adam: That’s pretty tame compared to later also. Oh, man. Bradley, how’s it going?
Bradley: I’m good. Just happy to be here.
Adam: Good deal. Well, yeah. Right before we started … Bradley’s going to talk about this in a minute, but it’s kind of funny, because you guys heard saying “near me” … It’s funny. Marco was saying he spent two hours on Power Suggest Pro doing keyword research last night, and then Bradley was talking about some of the stuff he’s found, so I’m going to let them talk about that, but what I wanted to remind everybody about was there’s a webinar tonight with Damon Nelson. If you guys are interested in this, I’m just going to paste a link. Go check it out. You’re free to attend, free to not, but I think it’s really cool stuff. If you’re at all interested in IFTTT, which hopefully most of you are, I think this is going to be something that you’re going to want to check out. I’m going to drop the link in. Hop over. Check it out. It’s going to be in a couple of hours. While I’m doing that, Bradley, if you and Marco, you guys want to talk about what happened last night?
Bradley: Yeah. We had Angel Cruz and Mike Pearse on for the … Near Me Domination course is what he called it. It’s only going to be open for another six days. It was really powerful. It’s a strategy for targeting keywords with the “near me” modifier. In other words, it’s mostly driven by mobile-search queries. It’s when somebody searches and they say, “something near me.”
In fact, what was really interesting … I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this because you guys can watch the webinar replay, but it’s even starting to show up on desktop from Google auto-suggest. If you just go to Google, even from your desktop, and start searching for various types of keywords, keywords with local intent specifically, as soon as you put your keyword in and press the space bar, you’ll notice that a lot of them, not all of them, but a lot of keywords even on desktop are showing the “near me” as the auto-complete, or the suggested auto-complete is what I should say. If you do it from a mobile device, it’s almost always going to be an auto-suggest, but from a desktop, it’s starting to show too, and so the trends are going through the roof. If you go to Google Trends and start searching “stuff near me,” you’ll see the trend going straight up. It’s something that we should be optimizing for.
I had been turned onto that concept several months ago, but never really took the time to dig into it. Fortunately, we had Angel on last night. He had a little presentation. He really opened my eyes to the potential that’s there. I was really freaking excited. In fact, Marco and I both got so damn excited after watching the webinar … I gave up my R&R time last night just focused specifically on keyword research. I spent my whole evening just drilling down into keywords, and apparently, Marco did the same. You want to comment on that?
Marco: Yeah, it’s amazing. It’s amazing because … What I did was I took … Remember, the example was for “medicinal marijuana doctor near me,” was a joke, but then I said, “Well, what about … “, just something off the top of my head, “a bakery near me,” because if you go to the doctor for some medicinal marijuana, you’re going to want to know where the bakery is afterwards, the nearest bakery. A ton of keywords came back. Then I drilled … You know how we do the wild card in Power Suggest Pro, right? I drilled into “bakery near me,” and the amount of keywords that came back, the amount of stuff that people are actually looking for under “bakery near me” is incredible. I mean, cookies, cakes, you name it. You name the pastry and they’re looking for it. You name the item, the article, “bakery goods near me.” So much money. These are keywords that you can monetize very easily if you find the right offers or if you find the right person that has the hardware to sell.
There’s a thousand ways that you can do this. It’s not just a sales webinar. He did give away a gold nugget. I mean, it’s pure gold, pure value. Go in there. If you guys that are in RYS Academy and our Semantic Mastery Mastermind, or you guys that follow us, when you see this, you’ll know what to do with it. It’s actionable. You can use it right now in your IFTTT, with your RYS stats, with anything and everything that you’re doing, because it’s another link from Google. I’ll just leave it at that. Go watch the webinar. It’s awesome.
Bradley: Yeah. I’m looking at it. Angel talks in his webinar about, I guess, using his method with SEO. In other words, he ranks sites targeting the “near me” keywords using SEO. Well, I instantly thought about it from the AdWords aspect, and so that’s what I started focusing on, was starting to drill down and do some keyword research and start setting up some campaigns that I want to test using PPC, both local but plus for affiliate stuff, which I thought was really interesting, because you can find a lot of “near me” keywords that you could actually promote affiliate offers with me. That’s what I’m going to be doing, both a little bit of local stuff but a lot of affiliate stuff with that. That’s what I want to be testing.
Anyways, guys, go check it out. Do yourself a favor. It’s only an hour long. Go check out the webinar. If nothing else, at least get the concept down so that you can go run with it on your own. I would suggest that if you were going to end up wanting to purchase the training, you should do it, because he said he’s going to shut it down in six days and he won’t open it again ever. I would take a gander, though.
Adam: Yeah. As I understood it too, this wasn’t, “Oh, it’s open for Semantic Mastery people.” They’ve obviously done a few webinars. They’ve talked to other people, but as far as we know, this is it. They’re stopping after this.
Bradley: Yeah. They don’t want to be saturated, and I don’t blame them. It’s a big market. It’s wide-open right now, but I don’t blame them.
Adam: Yeah.
Bradley: Okay, cool.
Adam: Also, real quick, quick shout out: Jay Allred, looking good in your Semantic Mastery hat. Glad to see somebody out there. We’ve shipped out a few of them. Jay, he entered into the Black Friday contest, and was a winner, and got it, and so I appreciate him sporting that. Hopefully … We’ve got a couple other people out there with T-shirts now too.
Bradley: Yeah, and sharing the photo. That’s awesome.
Adam: Yeah, definitely.
Bradley: Thanks. All right. I’m going to grab the screen and we’re going to get into it. We got some questions available already. You guys let me know if everything looks okay.
Adam: Good to go. Got your full screen.
Directory Creator Plugins In WordPress
Bradley: Cheech & Chong. Thanks, Greg! We definitely needed that, especially after Marco’s montage. All right. Let’s go with Charlottesville Homes’s Toby. That’s right. He says, “What plugin do you think is the best directory-creator plugin to build unique, rankable pages in,” by that, I’m assuming he means every city, “in Virginia. I am looking at Directory Creator.”
I’ve not used a directory plugin before. I’ve used directory-style WordPress themes but never just a plugin. I’m curious what that … Yeah, I’m not sure what that … I’d have to probably dig through here to find the correct one. Anyways, again, I’ve used themes for that, but never an actual plugin, so I can’t really comment on a plugin or suggest one for that.
I never really had any success with doing directory-style sites. I mean, I did somewhat, but they weren’t as successful as I had hoped that they would be, so I kind of abandoned that project. That was several years ago. In fact, that Virginia Hangouts network that I had set up for the IFTTT training, or you guys got to see some of it in the IFTTT training, the original one, was originally a video business directory or, yeah, a business video directory. I guess I should say that. It worked well but it didn’t work as well as I had hoped. Again, that’s why I’d stopped. There were several type of directory-style themes that I looked into at the time, but this was, shit, three or four years ago, so I’m assuming there’s probably a lot of other, better stuff out there now.
The only thing I would suggest is if you’re going to be creating a full state-wide directory, that you’re going to probably want to use a complex silo structure for that. That can get a bit tricky. Depending on whatever your SEO level is, setting up a complex silo structure to cover an entire state, like I said, can be tricky, but that is the way that I would do it, because eventually it could end up being a massive site, and so you’d want to take the steps up front to plan it out ahead of time, at least.
You’ll never be able to plan it all the way out, but at least you can try to look down the road several months or even a couple years to try to determine what the site would look like, and then try to structure it in such a way that it will accommodate that size at that point. If you start with something like a simple silo structure and the site continues to grow, if you get some traction and you start signing people up to be directory listings and all that, then it would be more difficult to change the structure later, is what I’m saying.
For that reason, I would just suggest that you use a good silo-creator plugin. Network Empire has one that’s free that you can use. Ultimate SEO, they have themes that you could use with complex silo structures. What’s the name of the company that makes those, the SEO theme and the Ultimate SEO plugin? You guys know what I’m talking about? Somebody? I’m drawing a blank here.
Adam: Yeah, but I don’t remember. That’s such a …
Bradley: SEO Design Solutions, or something like that, is the name of the company that does it. Anyways, you can search for stuff like that, but I would be looking for … I don’t know about a directory-creator plugin. I would probably use a directory theme, but I would use a silo-builder plugin, if that makes sense. Does anybody else want to comment on that?
Hernan: Yeah. I follow what you’ve said, Bradley, because I’ve always set up themes for the directories. You have those themes that … In fact, if you go to ThemeForest.com, you will have a ton of directory themes that are based and optimized for that, with a map on the homepage where you can pick the area that you’re trying to find, etc. That’s that. Then on the other hand, I remember that we have put together some projects together, Bradley, where we used Network Empire’s “How to Build a plugin.” Then video [set up 00:11:39]. Even if we didn’t use the videos at the end of the day, it would be a huge help for building out the entire structure, because you will be using complex silo structures, as you were saying.
Bradley: Yep. I still use that plugin. I use the free version, the free version of the Network Empire silo plugin, because that’s all you need, because I build out the silos manually anyways. It’s just a matter of it helps to set up the category structure and everything else. It helps to manage all of that. That’s all. I still set them up manually. There are some automated versions, though, that will build out a site all in one fell swoop with some auto-generated content, but probably you end up having to go back and swap out the content anyway, so I typically just don’t use the auto-builders. I just end up doing it manually with a simple silo-builder plugin.
Here. I just did “business directory WordPress themes” search in Google. I mean, there’s bunches of them, guys. It’s been several years since I’ve even looked through any of them, but there you go.
Creating A Blog From A Different Domain Even Though It Is Separate From The Domain In GMB
Well, if you’re restricted, Ryan, you got to work with what you can. It sounds like that’s a reasonable strategy considering your hands are already tied behind your back, so to speak. Yes, it will help. It’s a matter of if you’re link-building from a blog.subdomain, that you just want to make sure that your contextual links within the body of the post are pointing up to the site that you’re trying to rank or the domain that you’re trying to rank. It can go through a redirect, that’s fine, but you just want to make sure that you’re content-marketing and link-building to whatever site it is that you’re trying to rank from within the content. Okay? Comments anyone?
Hernan: I agree.
Bradley: Okay. Good enough. Yeah. Just so you know, yeah, you can absolutely do that. It’s the same thing as if we put a blog on a subdomain of a money site. Even though I know this is a secondary domain altogether, it’s still the same principle, because remember, Google considers a subdomain as an independent domain altogether. Even though we will typically put a blog on a subdomain of the money site itself, we still end up having to link back up to the money site if we’re trying to rank the money site, because Google’s going to consider the blog a separate entity, kind of, and so you want to do the exact same thing. Even if it’s a secondary domain, it doesn’t matter. It’s the same principle. Nothing changes.
That kind of stinks when you … I know I’ve dealt with some franchises before that have had issues or restrictions like that, as far as the marketing. It kind of stinks because they’re limited in what they can do for their own business, because they’re stuck with whatever the marketing strategy is from the overall parent company. That kind of sucks.
Setup An RSS Feed Pulling From One Of Yoast’s Custom Title/Descriptions
I am not aware of that being possible, Toren, but I’m not a programmer so I have no idea. I’ll ask Chris and/or Marco about that. Hello?
Hernan: No. I was trying to think on a way of doing that, actually, because I know that there’s … Well, with Backlink Commando, which unfortunately is being discontinued or has been discontinued, you could set up different variations of the feed … I think it was the feed description, the titles, etc, and it will create a separate feed for that only, that feed that will be re-boosted every 30, 60 days, whatever.
Toren, if you are using Yoast and the regular RSS feed, I think the RSS feed will only pull the title and the snippet, because Yoast custom title descriptions, that will be more like within the code. Yoast will add that to the code of the page, but not to the RSS feed. The RSS feed is managed within WordPress, not within Yoast, so those are different … They end up being different titles and descriptions, because Yoast is actually … How do I put it? It’s not like Yoast is editing the title or the description of the post, but rather adding those tags so that Google can take them from the page. At the end of the day, the post description and the title is still whatever you input on WordPress. Does that make sense? Did I make sense at all?
Marco: Yeah, it made tons of sense. My suggestion is you’re going to have to code your own plugin that does this. That’s the only way I see it. I don’t see Chris going into our RSS plugin and doing this for one person that needs it. If there were a community need for this particular thing to be added to our plugin, it could be done. You could do a program or pull from Yoast custom instead of the page title and description. You could possibly do that. I don’t know how much tweaking you would have to do to our own RSS plugin, but my suggestion is code your own. If you need something that’s this specific, code your own, because I know Toren likes to code.
Bradley: I know one of our Mastermind members was [Aniki 00:18:34]. I don’t know if I’m ever pronouncing his name properly. I know he was talking about potentially developing a plugin that will pull [Web 2.0 post 00:18:42] URLs, like what Backlink Commando used to do. That’s something that could be actually probably coded into that. Now, I’m not sure that that project’s ever going to proceed, but if it does, that might be something that we could consider as a feature, possibly. Again, I’m not a coder, so this is all foreign to me. I just defer to Marco and Chris and to them, but it’s something that could certainly be looked into. I agree, if it’s something that you need … It sounds like it would be pretty beneficial for others as well, but I don’t know of a way to do that at the current time.
How To Backlink The IFTTT Network The Safe Way?
Okay. Asi’s up. He says, “Hi Chris, Bradley, Marco. Can I ask a favor? Until the IFTTT network shows in Ahrefs, it takes ages. Can you send a diagram how to backlink the network the safe way? Thanks.”
Yeah, sure. We can talk about that briefly. The fact that the IFTTT network links don’t show up in Ahrefs doesn’t mean they’re not there. They’re there, and it doesn’t mean they’re not being counted. It just means they’re not being indexed by Ahrefs. Chances are, Google is indexing them, or Google is aware of them.
We’ve talked about this many times before, but, for example, if you were to look at your backlink profile from in Ahrefs and in Majestic and in any other backlink analysis tool like Moz … Moz is probably the worst as far as showing links. They’re usually really poor about showing links, but Majestic is pretty bad about showing Web 2.0 links unless they’re particularly powerful. Ahrefs shows probably the most amount of links, through my experience, but even they don’t show a lot of the Web 2.0 links, unless, again, they’re particularly powerful, which you can boost by building links to your Web 2.0 URLs.
I can understand the second part of your question, saying, “Would you send me a diagram on how to backlink the network?” Yeah, we can talk about that in just a moment, because it’s fairly simple, but as far as just the links not showing up in the backlink analysis tools, who cares? Honestly, who cares? It’s just for your vanity. I’m not trying to sound like I’m condescending you specifically, but I’m saying it’s a vanity metric, to want to see the links. My point is I’ve always liked the fact that my IFTTT links don’t typically show up in backlink analysis tools, because it prevents prying eyes from … It doesn’t prevent them, but it makes it more difficult for them to figure out exactly what the hell I’m doing. Remember, if you can see those links in Ahrefs or Majestic, then so can anyone else that’s looking at your domain. I prefer having my links not being shown to the general public.
If you go to Search Console, if you have your website connected to Google Search Console … Although this has changed recently, and Terry Kyle did a blog post on this about two or three weeks ago, maybe a month ago, about even Google is starting to show less and less links, but if you go to Search Console and you look at “Links to your site” … It’s in the sidebar. I can’t remember what the main heading is, but it’s in one of the drop-downs. Then you click on links to your site, and then you expand to show all links, you can download a report and it will show you all of the links. At least it used to. Like I said, recently, within the last few weeks, Google has even started to restrict that. Not entirely, but they’re not showing the entirety of the backlink profile as they know exists, if that makes sense.
It’s becoming more limited in the amount of data that they’re going to show you about your backlink profile, but if you go check it, chances are you’re going to see Digo links, Delicious links, WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, the whole IFTTT network. You’ll see domains linking to your money site and Search Console. That said, you guys want to comment on that while I pull up a diagram real fast? Anybody?
Hernan: Yeah. What we usually do is [to send 00:22:51] just a handful of links … That’s what has been working for us, just a handful of contextual links backed up with spam. Even so, even when … If you are into metrics at all, if you are seeing the metrics going up, and when you are seeing rankings going up, which is the main point here, and visitors going up from the feed, for example, from the RSS feed, even at that point, Ahrefs, Majestic, even Google will not show you those links. You know there is something going on, but you cannot actually tell that from whatever tool you’re using because Ahrefs or whatever, they do not index your stuff. It’s not that they will not index; they will not show you, which are two completely different things.
Bradley: Right. It’s just a matter of them not showing them to you. I mean, they’re there. That’s my point. Google sees your link, and so will Majestic and Ahrefs, but you got to imagine the amount of computing power it takes, guys, to constantly re-index links like that. That’s why in Majestic, there’s a fresh index and a historic index, because they only keep stuff in their fresh index for about 90 days, and then they let that stuff start to drop out because of the amount of computing power it takes to carry that or to keep it up. Google has almost unlimited resources when it comes to that, so that’s why they’re able to index and keep so much stuff the way that they do, but you got to figure Ahrefs and Majestic, they try to limit extra data usage when possible. That’s in part why it is, and that’s why typically, unless it’s a particularly powerful Web 2.0 link, you won’t see them.
Right. Anyways, I couldn’t find the graphic I was looking for right off the bat, so we’re just going to use this graphic here. Guys, all you got to do for backlinking IFTTT networks is … I’m going to let Hernan talk about it a little bit more, because he’s the one that typically will run spam campaigns and stuff like that, but the way that I know that our link-building service works is that we build to the Tier 1 ring. Let’s consider this your money site or Youtube. It doesn’t matter, but this is your Tier 1 ring, your branded ring. We will typically build anywhere between 50 to 125 links to each individual property that are contextual links typically on higher metric properties that we’ve scraped. We’ve scraped custom, what do they call it, target sites or whatever, custom lists for our link-building campaigns, and we build links, contextual links, higher metric properties, to there, anywhere between 50 to 125 per network property. Then we throw spam behind those.
It ends up being Tier 2 links to your network properties, which end up being … Your Tier 2 links to your network properties are ultimately your Tier 3 links to your money site. You don’t want to point just kitchen-sink spam at your network properties. Well, at least not to a branded network. Persona network’s a bit different, but for branded networks, guys, you don’t want to throw kitchen-sink spam directly at them, because they’re extensions of your brand. You want to try to treat them … You can be a bit more abusive with them than you can with your own money site, there’s no doubt, but you don’t want to completely abuse them. You want to try to keep the link profile somewhat clean to your Tier 1 network, and then behind that, you can throw kitchen-sink spam, at least as it stands today. At some point, that may change.
Hernan: Yeah. I agree. We have been using this technique for quite a while now, sending, yeah, anywhere between 50 to 100, 150 links, contextual links, of course. This also applies, guys, for PBNs. If you’re doing PBNs, and if you’re not sure to link to your money sites, just link to Twitter, link to a WordPress blog that you’re syndicating your content to, link to your Facebook page, link to your Google+. As long as … You need to be a little bit more careful with Google properties, but you know what I’m talking about. If you’re doing SAPE, I know that most of my members are doing SAPE, you can use this firewall to send those links to them.
What’s really good about this is you can start using detachable link juice. This is a concept by Terry Kyle as well, 301 or Switchbox SEO. That means that if you’re not entirely sure about the quality or the precedence of those links, what you can do is to link to a 301 and then see what happens. Point that 301 to your website and wait for 15, 20 days. Detach that link juice and point it to an internal page and see what happens. Detach that and link it to a WordPress blog, to the homepage. Then you can link it back or 301 it to, I don’t know, an internal page and see where the link juice does most of the damage. I think that we should be starting to think about that.
Again, as Bradley was saying, we really think that your Facebook profile, YouTube, LinkedIn, About.me, or all of the other properties that we update on the V2 IFTTT SEO Version 2.0 webinars, that we add a ton of new properties every month, all of those are an extension of your brand, so you need to be careful, but as long as you keep it low, and you can spam on the Tier 3, Tier 4 and onwards.
Do You Still Use Or Build Serp Shaker Sites?
Bradley: Yep. Okay. Thank you, Hernan. Joel’s up. He says, “Hey Bradley and team. Do you still use or build SERP Shaker sites? And do these seed sites as you refer them stick?”
Okay. First thing: I don’t use SERP Shaker. Nothing against it; I just use Lead Gadget, and have been for, well, two years now, actually, the ATM, and that’s because I have access to it, so why would I use anything else, right? “Do these seeds sites as you refer to them stick?” I don’t know of ever calling them seed sites. I think you may have that confused with what Marco talks about with seed sites and seed sets.
Marco: Yeah. I think he’s misapplying the nomenclature.
Bradley: Yep. They’re not actually seed sites, as far as the way that we talk about them, if that makes sense. Let’s just carry on with the question. “I have been hearing that SERP Shaker sites are getting de-indexed.” Yeah, that’s very true or very possible. I don’t know specifically about SERP Shaker sites because I’m not using that plugin, but those types of sites, these mass page generator sites often get de-indexed, guys. It’s a spam strategy. It’s a pure spam strategy.
I know some people that have sites up that have been up for years and are still generating traffic, or are still indexed anyways … Whether they’re generating traffic or not, I don’t know, but my experience with them is that they are somewhat short-lived sites. Not always the case. I have some that have been up for many, many months that are still generating traffic, but the majority of them, I expect them to be short-lived. I’d slap up a site. It takes a while for them to begin to index now, anyways. It used to be that we could get a site indexed within … I mean, tens of thousands and sometimes hundreds of thousands of posts and pages could be indexed within a matter of weeks, but now it doesn’t seem to be that way, at least not with the sites that I’m still building. It can take anywhere … It usually takes four weeks before the sites really start to index well, and then it takes another anywhere between two to four weeks before they fully index. It varies as to what fully indexed means.
What I’m saying is if I build a 30,000 post site, which covers just about every city in America, and then, let’s say, I have twelve tags per post, that’s 360,000 tag pages too, I end up with 390,000 pages on my site. Out of that, I might be lucky to get 80 to 100,000 of them indexed, but that’s significant. You can still generate a lot of traffic from those. My point is, though, a lot of my sites just flat-out won’t index, or if they do, they never index more than a couple hundred pages, and then they end up tanking at some point and becoming de-indexed. That happens often with these sites. That’s why the strategy is such that you just continually build sites all the time.
I know that some people ask questions many times about, “Well, I was thinking about backlinking my SERP Shaker site or my Lead Gadget site so that I could get it to perform better,” and I always say the same thing: “Don’t waste your time.”Because if at any time that site could be de-indexed or slapped or demoted, then all the off-page work that you do will be completely moot, will be useless. You will have wasted your time, energy, money, effort, all of that. A better strategy, in my opinion, is to build the sites and just continually build more and more sites. Keep going after the same keywords.
The way that I like to do it is I like to throw … If I go after a particular vertical or a set of keywords, build 10, 15, 20 sites targeting variations of that keyword. Each site is basically built upon or around one keyword or one focus keyword, and so I just build multiple sites. If I find that I start getting good traction or good results from any one of those sites, then I can hone in or zero in on the keywords that I’m getting the traction, and then duplicate and scale using that keyword so that I can get more and more traffic coming in. That’s typically the way that I do it. I don’t spend any time on off-page stuff. I build the sites, try to get indexed. As soon as I see that it’s starting to index, I use a overlayer plugin to overlay a landing page on top of the entire site so that no matter what post page, tag page, whatever somebody lands on, they’re going to see my landing page that I want them to see.
That’s how I do it. I’m actually doing that for the master class right now. It’s not a local case study. We’re doing an affiliate case study, a diet-supplement niche, and I’m freaking crushing it right now with building an e-mail list using these type of sites. Hopefully, that answers your question as far as are they being indexed. Yes. That’s the nature of the game. As far as other tools, I don’t use any other tools other than [BATM 00:33:32] for that. I know there are a bunch of them out there. Hernan can probably talk about a couple of them, but the only one that I use is Lead Gadget, so I can’t really talk about any of the others.
Hernan: Yeah. I’ve built SERP Shaker sites and also MPC, mass page creators, which would be 100% HTML websites with upsides and downsides, the upside being that you do not need to handle databases and those kind of things, and scripts and plugins. The downside is that whatever you need to do, you need to unpublish and republish the website, which is a pain in the ass.
With that said, I have always experienced the same thing, de-indexations like lack of quick-indexing. Not only that, maybe the website is fine, but your Amazon account gets shut down, or AdSense or whatever, because you’re spamming. At the end of the day, that’s what you’re doing. You need to be super conscious that you are spending your time doing that. Even if it works, it’s not sustainable. That’s why I stopped doing it completely, because it was a lot of work. I made good money but it wasn’t sustainable, so we always need to be on top of things, thinking of new ways of stop the de-indexations, purchasing domains, etc. I decided to quit doing that and started investing the same amount of effort, the same amount of time in things that will last on time, for example, building the Semantic Mastery brand, bringing in more content. Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter, but it will be a much more sustainable approach at the end of the day.
Don’t get me wrong. There’s a ton of people doing Churn & Burn, there’s a ton of people still doing SERP Shaker websites with their own flavor, which still works, but at the end of the day, I wanted to invest my time in something more on the long term, like Semantic Mastery, for example.
Bradley: Yeah. Same thing. I’m not a big Churn & Burn fan. I still use them. Like I said, right now, I’ve got some of those sites that are performing really, really well with helping me build my e-mail list for that affiliate project, but a lot of the sites just don’t perform, or a small fraction of them, in my experience. Again, it could just be because … If I had enough time to test a whole bunch of different configurations and content types and that kind of thing, then I’m sure I could get my success rate of sites that index higher, but I don’t have the time to devote into testing a whole bunch of different configuration types for those mass page builds, so I try to slap them together as quickly as I can or I have my VAs do it. Some of them will stick, but it’s a small percentage of them. Okay? Play with it. If that’s a strategy you want to use, I know there’s a lot of people crushing it.
Marco: What I always tell people is you need to know what you’re getting into. Even though most of our stuff, what we teach, IFTTT master class, even though it now, I don’t know, straddles the terms-of-service line where we’re okay sometimes … Google comes in and says, “We no longer allow this to happen,” and so you have to be aware how close you are to straddling the line and when you’re just totally against Google’s terms of service.
For example, even though RYS Academy and everything that we do in there is supposedly within the terms of service, Google says that it doesn’t allow spam; there’s no spamming. It’s all about spamming. That’s what RYS Academy is. It’s a whole course on how to spam Google with Google, which is okay for now, and it’s been okay for well over a year now. How much longer will it remain? We don’t know, but it’s working right now, and so use it as a tool to draw traffic, to make money, but don’t consider it something that’s going to be around for 10, 15 years. It might, but we don’t know what the Internet’s going to be like in 10, 15 years.
Go there. Use it. Make money. See if it works for you. If it doesn’t, move onto something else, but always have that one strategy that’s going to keep making money for you regardless of the changes. Right now, that’s IFTTT. It’s been working for, what, three, four years? It continues to work. It continues to get stronger and better. It has survived every update so far.
Bradley: Four years, it’s been a mainstay.
Marco: Everything that Google has thrown at it, we’ve been good, simply because we do what Google says within IFTTT. Yeah, we sometimes go a little bit beyond, but we always have that shield that allows us to pull back into that comfort zone. Always remember that. Like Hernan said, you need that long-term strategy. You need to have that secure place from which you can do everything else that you need to do to make more money, to look into different income streams.
Look at this. I just saw Dr. Gary posted something on “near me” where he ranked overnight first page just by doing something “near me”. These are the things that you need to go and take advantage of right now. Go. Do it, because it’s working. Will it work tomorrow? I don’t know. Nobody can tell you what’s going to happen tomorrow.
What Is a Feeder Site?
Bradley: Ivan’s up. He says, “Hey guys! Following up on my question last week about WordPress and Google sites. Bradley talked about a ‘feeder site’. This is a new concept for me. Can you explain a little bit or lead me to some resources explaining this?”
Very simple concept, Ivan. A feeder site is nothing other than a third-party site or web property, period, that you use to feed traffic into your main money site or your main offer or whatever it is that you’re trying to drive traffic to. That’s it. It’s just a … What do you call it? You can call it barnacle SEO. There are so many different terms for it, but essentially all it is is just creating entities, properties on other websites, social-media sites, platforms, whatever you want to call them, and then ranking those and using those to drive traffic to your money site or your video or whatever your office is, your landing page is, whatever. That’s all a feeder site is.
WordPress.com sites rank well for local stuff. They are at least right now. They have been for a few months now. Google sites still rank well, especially if you use the RYS Academy methods, drive stacks and all the stuff that we do inside of there. Those are very, very powerful, and that’s what I was talking about, was using those to drive traffic. Not only to drive traffic, but you can use those for backlinking opportunities to your money sites, and you can also use them just to crowd out competitors on the homepage for your keywords, or, excuse me, on the SERPs for your keywords, because if you rank a Google site and a WordPress.com site on page one for your keyword, you’ve just taken up two spaces. Hopefully, your main money site would be ranked, or your video, or whatever the hell else it is that you want. That’s all a feeder site is. Very simple. Good question, though.
Issues With Syndicating OneNote In IFTTT
No, Michael. That would destroy the automation. In other words, that would completely eliminate … You wouldn’t be automating anything at that point then, if you have to go back and manually add links to every post. As far as that, it should just be giving you …
Let me log into that real fast, guys, because I want to check this out. Unless something changed with that. I can’t imagine it would have. Come on, IFTTT. We’re going to grab this RSS to OneNote, page from link. Let’s see if I have that in my account, because I don’t know if I have it in my personal account. Let’s see. Is it going to actually ask me to go through all that shit? I wanted to see the actual recipe, but it’s probably not going to … Yeah. I’d have to sign in and all that.
All right. Well, I’m not going to go through that. We don’t have time, but what I wanted to say was with the RSS to OneNote page from link, it should just be a screenshot. There should be a brief snippet of text, which is part of the ingredients of the recipe, or which we call an applet now. If you take a look at the details of that applet and the body part of it, it should pull in some text but not the whole post, because it’s supposed to be taking a screenshot. All you’re looking for there really is the attribution link back to the original post source, which would be your money site or your YouTube channel. That’s all that you really need.
I’ll make a note of it. In fact, I’ll put it on my whiteboard right now to double-check … Just a second. I’m writing it down. Double-check the OneNote recipe, or OneNote applet, I should say. I’ll make sure that if it needs to be edited, I’ll update it on the spreadsheet, but it should be really just a small little bit of text with an attribution link pointing back to the source of the post, and then the rest of it should just be a screenshot. As far as the internal links and any of the text that’s there, don’t worry about it, because what you’re looking for is the attribution link back to the post source. That’s all that really matters there. If you can get links in …
You can play around, by the way, Michael, with other publishing types. We used to have the RSS to OneNote where it would create a doc, like a text doc, inside of OneNote, but there was no hyperlinks or anything. Because of that, I eliminated that recipe or applet and created the one that is the page from link, because again, we’re just looking for the attribution back to the post source, but I’ll double-check it, Michael, and if it needs to be edited, I will. I’ll just post back and plus-mention you here on this event page so that you know if I change it or update it, okay?
Exact Match Slug For An Internal Page As Was Suggested In The Near Me Webinar
All right. We’re going to keep moving. Look at Gary. Crushing it. That’s awesome. That was an awesome webinar, guys, last night. I highly encourage you to go watch that. Greg says, “In regarding the ‘near me’ webinar you mentioned, Bradley, how do you feel about the ‘exact match’ slug for an internal page as was suggested? That would seem to be duplicate with the page SEO title.”
Yeah, maybe, but without testing it, I don’t know. I don’t know if that would be a problem or not. I haven’t tested that. Like I said, I’m looking at the “near me” opportunity, because I think there’s a lot of potential there right now. I’m looking at that from a pay-per-click standpoint, not an SEO standpoint. The SEO standpoint or angle has been covered in that course, but I’m neck deep in PPC stuff right now. I’m not doing a whole lot of SEO stuff other than maintaining properties, so I probably won’t … I haven’t had a chance to test that yet, Greg, but if Angel says it’s working, and I didn’t pay attention to that particular part about the internal page and how he’s optimizing that … That’s all covered in the training. I would just go through the training and follow his training, or test it on your own. One or the other.
Anybody else want to comment on that? What I think he’s mentioning is having “near me” as … keyword plus “near me,” and creating a page on the money site that’s optimized for that, and then using the “near me” in the slug. Greg, I would probably keep the keyword out of the actual page URL and put “near me” maybe in the page URL, because remember, I think he said it works best with a branded domain anyways. I do remember that part, Greg. He mentioned that creating an internal page on an existing money site, that a branded domain is better. Why is that? So that it’s not an EMD.
I would just probably leave the key word out of it and just have a “near me,” or some variation of the key word, so that the title is slightly different than the URL, but again, I haven’t been through the course and I also haven’t tested it, so I can’t really answer that. Marco, what do you think?
Marco: Yeah. I’m trying to think. It’s working right now. It’s what Google wants. Right now, just give Google what it wants. If at some point it changes, you can just change the slug. You can just 301 it. Let’s ask Dr. Gary [Karlin 00:46:42] how he went about it. Did he do the exact match? Is it branded? How did he get away with ranking #1 overnight for three “near me” terms?
Bradley: Yeah. It’s crazy. It’s funny, because like I said, I spent two hours last night on keyword research and a little bit of time today, because I’ve got a whole bunch of campaign ideas that I want to test that I’m really excited about it, guys. It’s pretty cool.
Marco: The great thing too, if you happen to get in, Greg, is there’s a Facebook group. I’m in there. I’m probably going to ask this question anyway, because I’d be interested to know what Angel and Mike’s take on this are. Then I could probably get you a response, but get into the course, man, or go and hit the Facebook group, and just start ranking for everything near you.
Bradley: Yeah, and I’m going to be sharing my PPC campaign data with those guys. There’s potentially a collaboration in the works, because I think that’s something that could be covered entirely as a whole other add-on module or something like that, but I’ve got a lot of campaigns that I’ve started planning out already, so I’m really anxious to test that and see what I can do with it. All right. Greg, thank you for that!
That was it: SEO Design Solutions, those guys. They’re the creators of the Ultimate SEO plugin. I actually know the developer somewhat, a little bit. We’ve communicated several times, but yeah, it’s good stuff. I know one of our Mastermind members was having some issues with one of the SEO Design Solution themes, but from my limited experience with them, it’s very solid because they know silos well. The developer of this, the guy that owns this company, he knows silos well, and silo architecture and all that, and that’s what they designed this theme for. It’s a good theme.
Turning A G-site Into A Link Juice Switch
Okay. BeyondMeasure says, “Is there a way to turn a g-site into a link juice switch? For example, I have a g-site that is built up and very strong for a particular niche. If I get a client, can I just 301 all power from the g-site to their site?”
No. Unfortunately, you can’t. I know we can do some meta-refresh stuff with Blogger and Tumblr and things like that, or Weebly. I’m not sure if we can still do it with Tumblr, but I don’t think … Marco, you know, because you’ve dug around on g-sites deeper than I have. We can’t get them out of refresh into the header, right? I don’t think we can edit the header at all.
Marco: No, no, no.
Bradley: Yeah.
Marco: They won’t let you get that intricate. Even when you do your own domain, when you map your own domain, you still have to use the g-site as your CMS, and you’re very limited in what you can do with that. There used to be some kind of widget that would let you, but that was done away with. I don’t know. Maybe there’s something that can be done in developers. There’s just so much that I have to look into, that I would [inaudible 00:50:02] to anything, but yeah, go in there and play.
Bradley: Yep. What I would suggest is make the homepage of the site and embed a g-doc or something like that that has a link clicking over to your money site, and that’s it. Nothing else. No other links on the page, nothing. You have content. Then embed a drive file of some sort and just backlink the ever-living shit out of that g-site, because if you put a contextual link on a g-site, anything external is going to nofollow automatically. That’s just the way that g-sites does it, but if you embed something, there’s a workaround there. It’s a bit of a backdoor. That’s something that you can do, is an embed on it.
Guys, you can embed tweets. You can embed Tumblr posts. You can embed all kinds of stuff. You can embed G+ posts. Play around. Figure out which type of properties you can iFrame or embed into the g-site that provides the type of link that you want: dofollow, JavaScript link, whatever. That’s all more advanced stuff that we talk about in RYS Academy. Again, you can play around with it, and if you need step by step instructions, come join us in RYS.
Greg says, “You can also attach yourname.me domains to WordPress and they rank crazy for EMD.” That’s awesome, Greg. I bought bunches of domains last night. I did. I ended up buying a whole bunch of domains last night that are “near me” stuff, and I got some really good ones. I’m not going to share them with you guys, but I got some really, really good ones, that I’ve got enough domains now to cover several big projects that I’d like to set up and test.
Go play with it, guys. Go get on that webinar and check it out. We got another one with Damon coming up tonight, but the “near me” thing, like I said, limited time on that, so I’d jump on it, learn what you can, and try to join if you can. Looks like we’re done. We finished up just in time. Sweet.
Adam: Awesome. Quick reminder, everybody. We got the webinar coming up here in a couple hours. I’m going to re-paste that link, in case you weren’t here when we started. We’ve got the link too for the Near Me webinar replay we posted earlier, and we’ll be sending that out probably here on Friday with our e-mails.
Bradley: Very cool. Thanks everybody.
Adam: See you, guys!
Marco: Bye, everyone.
Bradley: See you, guys.
Hernan: Bye bye.
Bradley: I’ll see all the rest of you guys at 7, or some of you, anyways. All right.