Click on the video above to watch Episode 110 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. We are live, and welcome to episode 110 of Hump Day Hangouts. We got part of the group here, so we’ll do quick hello, and then we’ll get started. Marco, what’s going on man?
Marco: Quick hello.
Adam: Well played. How’s the weather?
Marco: It’s great, man. It’s fabulous. Rain is leaving us, so now we won’t have rain for about four or five months, and it’ll still be warm.
Bradley: That’s because all your rain is going to where Adam lives as snow.
Marco: Yeah.
Adam: That’s why I got my beanie on in case we get an avalanche in here.
Marco: Oh crap.
Adam: How about yourself, Bradley? How you doing?
Bradley: I’m good. Happy to be here. I’ve got a lot of questions already.
Adam: All right. We’ll keep going then. I wanted to let everybody know, next week, if you’re subscribers, you’re going to be getting an email with some special offers. We’ve got a couple offers next week that we’ve never had before. Going to leave it at that. We got some cool stuff coming up, and we’re also going to be tying that in with some charity work that we’re doing. We’re going to be donating some money from each of the sales to two foundations I guess you call them. Toys for Tots at the USMC Foundation, and then the other one I believe, Bradley correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s the Shriners Children Hospital.
Bradley: Yeah, Shriners Hospital for Children. Correct.
Adam: That’s it. Got you, so we’re going to be donating 10% of every sale to both of those, or dividing up between those two. Not to get that wrong. Hopefully, and also if you’re interested in just donating, we may put a link definitely up to that. If the products aren’t for you but you feel like donating and you’re in the spirit, then by all means help out some kids over the holidays.
Then Marco and Bradley, you had something about Near Me, right? We had the webinar last week. I think some people were still asking us about the Near Me webinar we did with Mike Pierce, so if you just want to fill people in on what was going on there.
Marco: Sure.
Bradley: Before we do that though, got to say hi to Chris and Hernan who both show up fashionably late. Hey guys.
Hernan: Hey guys. Sorry about that, but for some reason Hangout wasn’t liking it.
Bradley: Blame Google.
Chris: Same here.
Hernan: Yeah, always.
Near Me Domination
Bradley: As far as the Near Me stuff guys, since the webinar that we did with Mike Pierce and Angel Cruz about the Near Me Domination is what it was called, and looking at the Near Me key words there’s a shit ton of traffic there. It’s kind of tricky as how to I guess monetize that traffic properly. If you’re going with local there’s I think some restrictions or some road blocks, because people that are searching with the Near Me key word are typically – I mean, that’s like a national search. In other words, it doesn’t matter where they are in the country, they’ll search for that. Optimizing for SEO purposes, there’s a ton of traffic. I haven’t been through the course 100%. I’ve scanned through it, but I think that for local stuff there are some challenges that again, are probably resolved within the content itself, but I haven’t been through it like all the way through. However, that said, I’ve been playing with it ever since last week, because when I saw how much traffic there was on those key words it really got me excited.
You guys know I’ve been doing a ton of pay per click click stuff, Adwords stuff, so I set up several different campaigns now for Near Me key words, and I’m testing affiliate offers. What I’m finding is there is a ton of traffic in those Near Me keywords. For affiliate offers the challenge is people typically that are searching for something Near Me are typically looking for a service or a class or whatever that’s near them, so trying to monetize that traffic with affiliate offers is been a bit challenging for me. I’m getting a ton of clicks through to my landing page, but I’m not sure that the offer is jiving correctly with that type of traffic. I’m going to keep testing with various offers to see if I can capitalize on the traffic that’s there. It’s pretty exciting, and I think I’m going to continue testing with it. I’ve thrown a couple hundred dollars in the traffic in the last week at it already, and I plan on continuing to test until I find a few methods that work really well. I highly recommend that you guys check it out. I don’t know if that offers going to be open for anymore than probably about another 24 hours or so. Adam do you know when it closes?
Adam: Yeah, we’d have to look. I put on there – I’m not sure. Sadly, it might already have ended, but I think – They said a week, and I thought it was last Wednesday, but if not, like I said, check out the webinar. There’s some killer information in there.
Bradley: The last thing i want to say about it is just that I think that there is a ton of traffic there. There’s no doubt. I’ve proven that through my own data, which by the way, we’re going to have master class after Hump Day Hangouts today. I’m going to be going through some of the Near Me campaigns that I’ve set up and ad words with the master class guys, so those of you that are in master class, you’ll be able to see some of my data from the last few days, so I’ll share that with you. But what I’m saying is there’s a ton of traffic there, and why not take advantage of it while it’s there. What I mean is, every time we find something guys in marketing, especially when you talk about SEO, but I’m doing strictly the PPC stuff on this case study, is we typically want to look for stuff that has longevity. I don’t know how long this will last, except that Google is promoting the Near Me searches. They are, and in the webinar Angel pointed that out through what they call micro-moments and all that, so they’re actually pushing that.
In part, when you do a search on a mobile device in Google, you’ll see for almost every keyword the auto suggest will suggest whatever your keyword is plus near me, and that’s even starting to show up on desktop searches. While there are some challenges there, there’s a ton of traffic to be had, and I think that we should be exploiting that to the best of our abilities, which is why I’m testing so heavily on it right now. We’ll have more data as some more test results come in. Marco, did you want to comment on that?
Marco: Yeah, and it’s really simple. I mean Google is behind this, and so they can end it at any moment they want. I mean they could end search at any moment. It’s Google’s company, guys. They can do whatever they want. They’re going to piss off a whole lot of advertisers if they do that, because there’s people that are actually paying, like you, for ads for Near Me. If they stop, how many people are investing money in Near Me searches, and ad words, and YouTube ad, and whatever else people are buying ads for. Think of it that way. Personally, I don’t think it’s short term. Neither is it long term. They’re pushing people some kind of way. I don’t know what they’re trying to teach [inaudible 00:06:42]. I don’t know what it is they want the AI to learn. I don’t know what they want from this, other than just tons of data, these micro-moments, because [inaudible 00:06:53] just Near Me searches, right? Go ahead Chris.
Chris: Well, the thing is they will replace [inaudible 00:06:58] GPS data, or like data they get from the mobile phones, location based. They get all the data right now and collect on that, and we can literally bank quite nicely on that when they are collecting data. [inaudible 00:07:11] just replace it on any kind of mobile phone and get the data from that phone and it’s just replaced.
Chris: Exactly.
Marco: When we came out with [inaudible 00:07:26] academy people kept asking, “Well, wouldn’t they just close the loophole?” Well, yeah, of course. They just could.
Bradley: It’s been two years though.
Marco: They haven’t, so why not just keep taking advantage of it? This is the way we do it. We always tell you, “Never experiment on a client site.” So go get your own stuff, do it as an addition to whatever it is that you’re doing for your clients. Add a page. If anything happens take it away. Go into a sub-domain. Protect your client at all times, but by all means take advantage of this right now.
Bradley: I agree with that 100%, so anyways. Anything else we got guys, before we move on?
Adam: I think that’s it.
Manually Linking To The Blog Posts In The YT Google Video Profile That Ranks Higher Than The Brand Page
Bradley: Okay, cool. Well, let’s get into some questions. We’ll start with Jordan. He says there’s a diagram on the IFTTT Facebook page that makes this a much simpler question, ha. Okay, Jordan. I’m not going to go pull that up right now. Somebody else wants to pull that up for me, and maybe drop the link.
Adam: [crosstalk 00:08:34] actually. Must have clicked on it [inaudible 00:08:36] down earlier.
Bradley: Yeah, okay. Had done for you network built for YouTube for a church. Thus, I have a Google branded page for non-profit client Milestone Church that syndicates their YouTube along with a corresponding profile [inaudible 00:08:52] as pastor little Jeff, or Jeff Little, excuse me. There is also a separate RSS blog fed Google page for the pastor – Okay, blog fed Google page for the pastor that syndicates the blog and corresponding profile for the pastor that receives a blog RSS fee that is built around the leader’s name. We are naming this term to search well. Okay. Currently the YouTube fed video Google profile – YouTube fed video Google profile. Number one profile is searching better for pastor Jeff Little than either of the blog RSS branded page or profile number two from the term – Yeah, this is freaking confusing. Do we have a link somewhere for that guys, for the diagram? It would help if I had a diagram.
Adam: No, I’m looking right now. [crosstalk 00:09:43] if you’ve got it, [inaudible 00:09:44] later on Facebook or something.
Bradley: We might have to come back to this one Jordan. Question, would it hurt to manually link to the blog post in the YouTube Google video profile number one above? Link to the blog post since it ranks higher, or would Google see having a branded page around the person featuring all the posts plus a different profile sharing all the blog posts as gaming the system? Recommendations. Again, without looking at a diagram to where I have a better understanding of this, this is a little bit abstract for me to visualize in my mind.
Bradley: You did?
Adam: Yeah, what do you want me to –
Bradley: Drop it in slack. [crosstalk 00:10:24].
Adam: As soon as Facebook plays ball here. There we go, all right.
Bradley: Let’s go check it out. YouTube feed, persona – Oh, I know you guys probably can’t see this. Let me click on it. Maybe I can zoom in. Corresponding profile persona of pastor little Jeff. Okay. Best ranking for pastor Jeff – Now why do I keep saying little Jeff? Dyslexia kicking in for some reason. It’s selective dyslexia. Will it hurt to manually share the blog post to YouTube profile? No, it shouldn’t, and the only reason I say that guys is because it’s okay to share to both a Google plus page as well as to a profile. It makes sense to do so. I mean, think about it guys. We set everything up in the IFTTT training using pages. The reason we do that is because you haven’t been able to post by any automated fashion to a profile until recently, which I think was pointed out to us last week on Hump Day Hangouts. That buffer now allows you to connect to profile, which I confirmed that today actually, and so that’s pretty cool. Google had never allowed anybody to automate posts to a profile. It was only automated to Google plus pages, and so that’s why we always used pages, number one.
Also, you can separate the page from the persona that way, and that way the persona could actually have multiple pages if needed, and you can syndicate different content to the different pages, so that’s in part why we didn’t do it. It makes perfect sense that if you have a legit profile that is associated with the page or the business or the brand, that you would also share your stuff on that profile. Particularly because most of the time, the Google plus profiles are going to have more followers and more engagement interaction than pages do, right? That’s just the nature of Google plus. If you go through Google plus posts, like just in your Google plus feed, you’ll notice that almost everything is done via profile. Like all engagement and most all posts and everything else. Typically the brand posts have very very little engagement, right? Anything that’s posted to a brand page has very little engagement. Usually there’s not as much interaction, that kind of stuff. You’ll see that most profiles are associated with some sort of brand, but the activity is produced from the profile itself instead of through a page.
Again, if you have a specific situation like what you’re talking about here Jordan, then yeah it makes absolute perfect sense to be able to also post to the Google plus profile, and you can automate that now apparently, according to Buffer. You might just want to – So that you don’t have to do it manually. Unless there’s a reason why you’re doing it manually, you know so you can add additional stuff into the post and all that, that’s fine if you want to do that. If you want to automate that you could always set up a second IFTTT account and a second Buffer account, and therefore you could automate those posting over to the profile page as well. Does that make sense? Guys, was I clear on that?
Hernan: Yeah, I think it was clear enough really.
Website Version To Choose When Evaluating Metrics Of Expired Domain In Majestic SEO
Bradley: Okay, well then we’re going to move on. Okay, Dean says, when evaluating the metrics of an expired domain in majestic SEO, would you use the values given by – Oh, this is a good question Dean. You have to look at all of it, Dean. In fact, Terry Kyle – Let’s see if we can look this up real quick. Terry Kyle … Let’s just go look at his blog really quick. He has a great post about this very specifically if we can find it, and I’m not going to search for it guys. You can search for it yourself, but – Let’s see. He might have it here. Just a second. Right here. Well, no, that’s not it. This is a different one. This is a different post. Anyways, go search on Terry Kyle’s blog. It’s blog.terrykyle.com guys. Go search on the blog. Go look through his blog posts. It’s somewhat of a recent post within the last two or three months, but he talks very specifically about that. About how whenever you’re looking at a domain, especially a domain that you’re going to purchase that has expired or whatever, and you’re looking at a majestic, you got to look at all versions of the domain, which sucks.
It’s really stupid. I wish there was some sort of mean or average that majestic could come up with for all the different variations. It’s going to be different if you’re looking at sub-domain or the root domain, and that includes dub dub dub dot, or any other sub-domain. Whether you’re looking at the full URL including HTTP. All of those are all going to give you different values, and on top of that, you multiply all those different variations by two because there’s a historic and a fresh index, and everything is going to give you different results, every single one of those. It ends up that you end up with like ten or twelve different metric values from majestic for every single domain that you look at. It’s incredibly irritating, but you have to look at all of them and then make the determination.
Hernan: I would suggest that you also subscribe to his blog. [crosstalk 00:16:39] yeah, it’s a great blog. Terry’s always got [inaudible 00:16:44]. We take a really similar approach with the no bullshit approach. We were saying we were testing it, etc cetera. It’s kind of our own [inaudible 00:16:59] if you would. I would suggest you go ahead and subscribe to his blog. We learn a ton of things from Terry Kyle, and not only that we kind of test stuff and then we give it our own tweak. He is also grabbing stuff form our site. I talk from time to time with Terry Kyle via Skype, and he would tell me that he saw one post or whatever from [inaudible 00:17:25] and I could tell he was really interesting. It’s a two way interaction, so you guys can get a ton of value from his blog as well.
Bradley: He’s one of the people that I truly respect in SEO guys for sure. Definitely go check out his blog, and look that one up specifically Dean. You’ll find a great post about that. Chris has got a good point. He says choose the most advantageous and use that as your canonical. In other words, point all of the other versions to that as the canonical, but you know again, just go though that blog post. It’ll give you a better idea.
Semantic RSS Plugin
Chris W says, “Does your RSS plug in cause any sort of duplicate content issues if you also have [inaudible 00:18:08] installed?” No, Chris. No. There’s no duplicate content issues because of an RSS feed. All an RSS feed does is display content from your blog. A standard RSS feed is not indexable. Google won’t index an RSS feed. Now, some of the third party RSS apps that you can use, like FeedBlitz for example. FeedBlitz will index your RSS feed, because it’s formatted like an html page anyways. But even so, that’s not duplicate content, because it’s typically going to be just snippets, and there’s going to be multiple snippets on the feed, which will change dynamically every time a new post is added to the blog. It will never be considered as duplicate content.
Not only that, but our RSS plug in gives you a custom RSS feed URL, and then the [inaudible 00:19:03] just uses your standard word press feed, so domain.com/feed, right? Those are not going to be duplicate content. They’re just two different feeds, that’s all. So no, it will not cause any duplicate content issues, okay?
Duplicate Content Issue That Should Be Avoided With Adwords
Skye says, “What are the duplicate content issues that should be avoided with ad words, and what happens if an exact match phrase was deleted at some point?” I’m not sure what that means, Skye. That you should be avoiding ad words? I’ve never had any content issues with ad words period, duplicate content issues. I don’t know that there is, and I’m not sure what you mean by an exact match phrase was deleted. I’m not sure what that means. If something was deleted just add it back. Maybe you can clarify, Skye. Until then, I’m going to move on.
Indexing A PDF In Google
RYS Academy‘s been updated, guys. Sorry, that was a bad link. How do you get a PDF index to buy Google? Well, the same way you get anything else indexed, Dr. Brian. You can submit it directly to Google. Make sure, first of all, it’s like a public PDF. The thing is, is if you’ve uploaded a PDF let’s say to Google Drive for example, or to Amazon or Dropbox, or something like that, unless it’s a public link, which you set that as the share URL to make it public for anybody to view, and make it indexable that kind of stuff. You need to make sure that that setting is set correctly, number one. Then all you need to do is go submit the URL directly to Google.
The same thing. You can do that. You can index it by submitting directly to Google, or you could do something like Tweet it out, or just build some links to it, and that will eventually get it indexed provided that it’s set to public.
Hernan: To add to what you were saying Bradley, you can even upload it to your own Word Press. You can host it somewhere that is public. Again, in the route for example, of your server, and as long as it’s accessible by Google, it will crawl the entire doc, because the PDF can have live links that Google can actually follow. It can crawl the text within the PDF, so that’s that. Another option I’ve had great success with was uploading to PDF websites, like PDF hosting websites. Like script, slide share. If you have a slide deck you can turn that into a PDF. Doc stock is another one, but if you upload to script, a PDF, you will get a ton of views and a ton of hits from script, and you have a high chance of ranking it as well, which is the main point.
Bradley: Document sharing sites. That’s a good point. Also, Dr. Brian, just so you know, when I said submit directly to Google. Just go to Google and search for submit URL. Submit URL or submit URL to Google, and it’s going to be the first link that shows up. Guys, when in doubt go to Google. You can literally submit the single URL directly through Google search console and you’re telling Google to directly come crawl this URL please and index it, okay? Problem solved.
Hernan: Just to add on to that, if you spam that URL submitter, you get your IP sandbox.
Sharing RSS Feed URL For Multiple Clients
Bradley: Yeah, that’s true. Don’t spam it. All right Chick’s up. He says, “Cheers. Since several RSS feeds are utilized to power up a tier two network, do you think having three to four customers in either the same or similar niche can share that network from their branded tier one branded networks?” Yes Chick, absolutely you can. As long as it’s – Remember guys, tier two networks, which I haven’t been recommending for damn near two years now, at least a year and a half. I recommend that you stick with a single tier branded network only for blog syndication. For YouTube syndication there is no limit to how tiers you can go out, because there is no footprint issues, but for blogs there always has been. We try to reduce that by injecting relevant content triggers, or content sources into the tier two networks so that the tier one branded networks continue to only post content form the blog itself. Not other people’s content. Unless it’s a curated piece of content, in which case it’s still being posted from the money site blog, they’re just referencing other people’s content within the post.
I am going to be coming on as a guest to talk about specifically how to use RSS masher for tier two triggers, which now I’m okay with using that for blog syndication. Full tier two networks for blog syndication. I’m going to cover that next week Chick for his webinar. Maybe after that webinar, and maybe after the first of the year or something I’ll share that strategy with the rest of everybody else. To answer your question, yes if you have a full tier two network – Let’s say you have three two tier rings, and you have three or four or five clients that are in a very similar or related industries, each with their own branded networks, yeah there’s absolutely no reason that you can’t share that two tier network across all of them. Remember, they’re just supporting networks. That’s actually a good way to do it in my opinion, because now you’re going to be syndicating content from multiple money sites out to tier two instead of from just one, which is where the footprint issue comes in.
The whole reason why we use relevant content feeds from other sources at tier two is to reduce footprint so that the tier two networks don’t always just have content being republished from one blog. That’s clearly a footprint. You’re doing that clearly to gain search results. If you’re using four or five money sites to feed out to the second tier blogs, you end up with the tier two networks being fed with multiple content sources so that it’s not always just pointing back to one location. In fact, that would reduce or eliminate your footprint issues on its own. You wouldn’t even really need related content feeds at that point if you had enough other tier one blogs actually feeding out to tier two if that makes sense. Was that clear as mud?
Marco: Hopefully I didn’t confuse you guys with that. We’re going to be talking about –
Hernan: I think that’s pretty clear.
Can You Upload And Publish Tier 1 Videos Directly To The 2nd IFTTT Ring Or Use The YT Like Recipes?
Bradley: We’re going to be talking about this, like I said, next week. Anybody that picked up RSS masher, whether it’s from our link or direct from Damon, it doesn’t matter. I’m going to be on the webinar with him next week, and we’re going to go over this strategy specifically. Ivan’s up. “Hey guys. I finished creating a second IFTTT branded network.” Beautiful. Plus one. “Around a new service for video promotion. No website yet. How should I use the videos of my first network? Can I upload and publish them directly to the new ring, or use the YouTube like recipes?” Like recipes, Ivan. That’s the best way to do it buddy. Just go ahead and set up the like recipes. They’re in the account workbook template. Make sure that you’re logged in to that channel, for that second network I mean, logged in to that channel, that YouTube channel, and then go like the videos from the first channel. They should syndicate out to your second network, and that’s the best way to do it.
Are Google Sites No Longer Free?
Craig’s up again. He says, “Tried to map a domain to G site recently, but wasn’t allowed to. Are Google sites no longer free? When I looked they were coming up as part of the G suite, which is a minimum of five dollars per month. Will this affect stack or am I being paranoid?” That’s a good question. Marco, I’m going to have to have you comment on that, because it’s been a few months since I’ve built a G site.
Marco: No, I just built one yesterday.
Bradley: Okay.
Marco: I haven’t mapped any, so that might be the only way you can map now is by paying Google. I’ll have to check it out, but Justin would have told me we now have to pay for G sites if the problem were that they can’t be created free. As far as I know, and I just checked yesterday because I was testing, they can still be created – As a matter of fact, I was testing both old and new just to see how much trouble I can get into. You can’t do anything with the new ones, but they look really good, so no. I don’t see any problems. They’re still free. Now, if you want to map – He might be trying to map to the new G sites, and that might be a problem. Now, I don’t see any problem with paying Google five bucks a month, because then you become a customer rather than just a mooch. It offers some protection. I’m not saying that you’re totally protected, but you do get some protection, so five bucks a month for the G suite go for it.
Bradley: What did you mean by the new sites you can’t do anything with them? I’m curious.
Bradley: Yeah, probably because it’s responsive right?
Marco: Yeah, that would be one of the reasons, because you can’t manipulate, like you can’t play with the CSS since they control it. It may be part of a future update where they go as far as WordPress has gone, and give us all that flexibility. I don’t see it though. That’s what I meant. That I can’t do anything with it other than create a site that looks really good on both mobile and desktop by the way, or any type of device. It looks fabulous, and Justin – I forgot to mention that, right? Justin did a whole tutorial on how to create a new G site, and I might be giving that maybe during a webinar. A special webinar, whatever. We’ll give that training away if you guys feel up to it. We can discuss it. Anyway, that’s what I meant.
Bradley: Stop giving away the farm, dick.
Marco: Yeah, right.
What Permalink Structure To Use On A Mail URL?
Bradley: Oh, how the tables have turned. Next, Emmanuel. He says, “Hey guys. For some weird reason I seem to be having a hard time understanding how to silo out a WordPress site. In the permalinks I have a custom structure of category [inaudible 00:32:33]. When I create a new post the permalink looks like, but when I go to view the category the URL is.”
Yes, Emmanuel, that is correct. Now what you have to do Emmanuel, is you have to 301 redirect the category URL to the actual page that you set up. In other words, in WordPress if you want to set up silo structure and use pages and categories both – Remember, category structure deals with posts, not with pages. If you set a category you put blog posts in the category. It doesn’t do anything with the pages. Pages are separate. If you want a silo structure with pages you create a page, which is known as a parent page, and then a child page. That will give you the same structure. The physical silo structure which you see in the URL. In other words, if you had root domain and then you had a top level page, which would be a parent page, and then you want to have a child page, then it would be root.com/parentpage/childpage, so that’s the physical silo structure. You see it in the URL. You can literally see it visually in your address bar.
However, if you want to use a combination so you can go to a third level deep via posts, stay with me here guys, then you would still use categories for your silo structure using posts, but what you do is you end up – Remember, with categories you can also create parent categories and sub categories. Top level categories and sub categories, which again, will give you that same structure. Root.com/category/categoryname/subcategoryname, but then you can go even one level deeper, and that’s with posts. The way that you work that out or reconcile that inside of WordPress so that you can use a combination of pages, categories, and posts all in the same silo structure, is with the categories you go create the category, then you go create the page. If you are using sub categories as well, which would be known as a complex silo structure, then you would also create corresponding child pages. For every category you create, you create a page with the same slug. You guys get that?
Let’s say that your slug is top level silo one. I know that’s an incredibly long slug. You would never use that. Let’s say it’s top level category one, or top level silo page, you would create that as a category. Then you would go and create a page and use the exact same slug. No typos, no changes, nothing. Make sure it’s the exact same slug, so top level silo page. Then you go in with a 301 redirect plug, and you can use simple 301 redirects, and you take the category URL. Anything past the .com here in this case, you would the slug part of it, you know what I’m saying, for the category, and then you would point that over to the page URL. The matching or corresponding page URL, so that, if anybody ever clicks on a category it redirects them automatically, and they’ll never see it. It’s done automatically, but it’ll redirect them to the page, which is what you want.
On top of that, whenever you start building out your silo with supporting posts you should always link within the post a contextual link back up to the category. By doing so, you’re always going to be feeding relevancy back up to that top level page. You don’t want to rank a category page, you want to rank a page, so you want to make sure your category URL is redirected to your page. That’s something that we cover extensively in stuff like master class and mastermind. I don’t have time to draw out a diagram to show you guys that here on Hump Day Hangouts, nor is this the place for that.
Marco: Hey Bradley, I posted links to our video. We have a video series where we go into silo architecture. Simple. Complex. I posted it further up if anyone wants to click on it and go take a look you’re more than welcome.
Bradley: That’s a great question Emmanuel, for real. That’s a really good question. I understand that trips a lot of people up. Marco, thank you for posting those. I did two videos for simple silo structure and complex silo structure, and there’s diagrams in there. If you need additional help beyond that Emmanuel, come join us in the MasterClass, and we’d be happy to diagram that out for you and help you with it.
Does Linkedin Work Well With IFTTT?
Emmanuel is back up. He says, “Also I notice LinkedIn isn’t in the IFTTT 2.0 training. Does that platform not work well with IFTTT?” No it doesn’t Emmanuel, or else it would have been in there. A couple reasons why it doesn’t work very well. Number one, creating fake LinkedIn profiles, they don’t stick. They get terminated very easily, so it’s a waste of time if you’re trying to create persona profiles.
Second, I have tested – It used to be a few years ago where you could post to a company page inside of LinkedIn from IFTTT, but I think that option has been removed, so I just don’t mess with it. It’s just not worth it. There are ways if you have your own profile for LinkedIn, because I don’t recommend creating fake profiles guys for LinkedIn unless you’re using Browseo. If you’re using Browseo that’s a different case all together, because then you’re going to have a specific IP associated with that account, and you are going to leave your cookies in that browser specific to that profile anyways, so that you create a digital footprint, which is what you want. Then you can actually build out some great LinkedIn profiles and get a lot of traction and stuff with those, and not have to worry about them being terminated. Unless you’re using BrowSEO, then no. I don’t recommend creating fake LinkedIn profiles. They won’t work. They won’t last. Not only that, but it’s a pain in the ass to get them to post correctly. There are ways that if you have a real profile, or if you’re using BrowSEO, that you can post directly to LinkedIn from other sources instead of through IFTTT.
That’s why it’s not in there guys, because it’s just a pain in the ass. If the company page’s posting applet or recipe worked, then I would have added a section in the training for that, but since it doesn’t work – I tested that somewhat recently as well, within the last few months, and it still doesn’t work, so we just avoided that all together.
Any Advice On How To Get A Video Rank Back To The First Page?
My question Brian, would be have you used silos playlists? Essentially siloing out. If you’ve been through our YouTube silo academy, which you should have been by now, there’s a couple different ways. One of the ways I call a mono-silo within that training. It really helps with videos that won’t budge, but you’re going to need to create a bunch of supporting videos. They can be spam videos. It doesn’t matter, but you need to put them in a playlist. Make sure everything is interlinked correctly within the playlist, within the silo essentially. Then you have all of those additional supporting videos that you can use to build links to, which will force link juice back up to the top of the silo. In this case, the video that you want to rank. It’s a great strategy. It works really, really well. It should still work. It’s been a couple months since I’ve done that, but it should still work, because then you’re piggy-backing off the internal linking structure of YouTube.
Bradley: Could be.
Marco: I mean, how soon after the video tanked did he start hitting it with everything that he could think of, which is what it looks like he did. Then, after he did all that, he waited. That’s what I get from the post. I need to know basically how long did you wait Brian before you started hitting it with embeds, links, Adwords, and everything else?
Bradley: The one thing I would say about YouTube though is that I’ve taken videos that I have had sandboxed or demoted because of being too aggressive with links and stuff and been able to recover them by engagement signals alone, which doesn’t mean buying social signals. It doesn’t mean building more links or more embeds. What it means is getting viewers to your video and not spam viewers. Unless you’re using something like a CT spam tool. What do I mean by CT spam? Click through spam tools such as crowd search. That’s something that will work. It does help especially if you set up referral traffic. We’ve talked about that before. I’m sure you can find a video on our YouTube channel where we talk about sending referral traffic to YouTube videos. That helps, but also if you buy – I know you said you did ad words for videos, but it depends on what you were doing. If you do ad words for video, and you do, for example, a video discovery ad for your key words and you can get some traffic to your video, it’s the engagement signals of people clicking on your video and watching. When you use ad words for video you’re paying Google for views. You guys get that? You’re paying Google for views.
Now, Google tells you not to buy spam views, or to try to – YouTube will terminate your account if they think you’ve done that. That’s why those viewing services don’t work anymore that use to, but if you buy views from YouTube or from ad words for video, then all bets are off. That’s not against terms of service. My point is is that you can, especially if it’s for a local term, and Brian I don’t know whether it’s for a local term or not, but you can set up your video discovery ads for example, to that video and have your geo targeting, but go with a broad, like affinity targeting or even topic targeting. Don’t go with such key word targeting, because a lot of times if you have a narrow geographic targeting area you won’t get much traction with just key word targeting or even placements for that matter.
Placements wouldn’t be for video discoveries anyways. That would be for in stream ads, but for video discovery adds you could do something like top targeting or affinity targeting, which is very broad or very general, and you’ll get a flood of traffic to your video. That, a lot of the times especially – Again, keep in mind I mentioned the geo-targeting if it’s a local keyword that you’re trying to rank it for, because if you set up your geo-targeting correctly, all the views that you’re paying for from your ad words for videos will be form local IP’s. It gives huge engagement signals, the right engagement signals to Google to help promote that video back to page one of the search results, because it’s getting local IP click throughs. Does that make sense? If it’s not a local video then you can still, it’s going to require more views, but you can set up the video discovery ads. Target it that way to where you get clicks through to the video.
Also you can set up an in stream ad. When somebody clicks the link in the in stream ad that takes them to your YouTube watch page for that video. Most people think of in stream ads as driving traffic to landing pages, but you can use a YouTube URL on an in stream ad, in other words you can have people click through from the in stream ad over to a YouTube watch page. That works really well because then you can set up in stream ads with specific placement targeting for other videos that are completely relevant to what it is that you’re trying to rank, so now you’re getting relevant traffic to that video as well.
For ranking videos I don’t encourage just doing strictly SEO stuff. Engagement is one of the biggest factors for ranking videos now, so if you can buy engagement signals directly from Google do it.
How Do You Know When Your Site Has Been Sandboxed?
Okay, Virginia [inaudible 00:46:20] is up. “Greetings. How do you really know when your site has been sandboxed? Thanks, Toby.” One good way is to search for the brand name. Do a Google search for the brand name and see. Your site should rank number one for your brand name search. If it doesn’t, if there’s third party pages and stuff like that that rank above your site, chances are it’s sandboxed. Another thing you can do is search for the domain name. In other words, go to google. Search mydomain.com and see. See if it comes up on top. It should. I like to do both. I like to look at the brand search first and then also look at the domain search, and it should be number one both of those. If it’s not there’s typically an issue, but Marco and Hernan I’d like to hear your thoughts on that as well.
Marco: That’s actually a good question. I’m trying to think what have been my experience in the past with this.
Bradley: Okay, so while you’re thinking [crosstalk 00:47:29] hold on Marco real quick. Since I searched semantic mastery, you see how this comes up number one? You can do the same thing guys. It’s search Google for semanticmastery.com and in both instances you should come up number one. Well, in that case I need to go to google.com to do it, but in either case you should come up number one, and if you don’t then there’s typically an issue. That’s a pretty good indication. Go ahead Marco. I’m sorry.
Marco: I have a really simple way that I test, but I don’t know if we should give it away for free. That’s my concern. You’re going to tell me I’m giving away too much, but there’s a really simple method that’s like 100% sure for you to know whether your site is sandboxed.
Bradley: Are you going to share it or just tease us?
Marco: I’m asking, should I give it away?
Bradley: Yes, give it away man.
Marco: Okay. You set up a Google doc with a [gobbledy 00:48:27] gook title. Meaningless. Really long tail, and you set up a page on your site with a really long tail with the same page. Long tail page. Then you get them both to index. If you don’t rank, the website for that gobbledy gook keyword, but your Google doc does, and it will, then you have a problem. You’ll know if you’re sandboxed immediately, because you won’t rank.
Hernan: I like you saying on this case, because I was looking for a panel on SEM rush. On this case I’d like to use SEM rush, because you can actually see – I think that SEM rush in terms of exposure or keywords that you are ranking for, it’s one of the fastest ones. Not in terms of links, but in terms of how many key words you have actually ranking within the top 100. Besides that, if you can make a quick search on SEM rush and see how many keywords you have ranking, if you have zero or very little like a couple, there’s a high chance that you are being sandboxed besides the other two techniques that Bradley and Marco have shared. That would give you quite a good panorama of what’s going on.
How Do You Diversify The On Page SEO Between Branded Domain Vs EMD Domain??
Bradley: Tony’s up. He says, “What is the main thing to think of when diversifying the on page SEO between branded domain versus EMD domain?” Okay, first of all, I don’t recommend EMD domains guys, unless you’re doing turn and burn stuff. I stopped using EMD domains probably close to two years ago now. You can still use EMD domains. There’s no doubt you can. The problem with EMD domains is that you’re at a disadvantage in that you’re so much closer to tripping or triggering an over-optimization penalty right off the bat. You’re coming out of the gate already toeing the over-optimization line. Does that make sense?
This is Adam scaring me with the Joker image. Five more minutes. Okay, yeah, but my point is, you’re toeing that line right out of the gate, and so that’s why I don’t like to use EMD domains. You can still do it, but you have to be a hell of a lot more careful, and means all of your other on page optimization stuff that you do has to be diluted or watered down, okay? What I do is I recommend always going with a branded name, or at least maybe a partial match domain instead of an exact match domain. That’s better, in my opinion, but if you can go with something branded you’re much better off, because then you can optimize as usual. With EDM domains you have to be a lot more careful, because remember, the keyword is in the domain at that point.
You’re already sending a signal to Google that you’re in SEO, and if you have an exact match keyword in the SEO title, and then you have an exact match keyword in one of the H tags, particularly the H1 tag which is the page title, then that’s Google – The first things that Google looks at when the bots come and crawl your page is it looks at your SEO title number one, your URL, your H tag or page title, your H1 tag which is your page title, and then your meta-description believe it or not. Those are the first four things that it looks at.
Why do you think it’s in the top of the head section of the site? When you look at view page source all that info’s right at the top. The meta-data’s right at the top, because Google looks at that first. If it sees an exact match keyword in more than one of those four locations, it’s already going to give your page a lower quality score right off the bat. It’s tainted. It’s now looking at it through an over-optimization lens. You’re sending a signal, before the bots even crawl the content on the page, you’re sending a signal that yes this page is most likely over-optimized.
Everything else you’d have to try to de-optimize or optimize less the rest of the page of the post if that makes sense. By the way guys, keep in mind that when Google crawls your site, not just the content of the page or the post. That’s why a lot of the SEO plug ins are junk in my opinion because all they do is, as far as analyzing content and telling you when it’s optimized well or not. Like if you are using the Yoast plugin for SEO and you try to get that little indicator green, chances are you’re way over-optimized for that page. Remember, when Google crawls the page, they’re looking at your header, your sidebar, and your footer as well. Not just the content of that article body. You want to make sure you don’t have the keyword stuffed in your navigation bar. You don’t want to have to many occurrences of the keyword in your sidebar or your footer, because all of that is taken into play.
There’s a great tool, and I know we got to go, there’s a great tool that you can use. It’s free. It’s called SEO centro, seocentro.com, and if you go there there’s a tool. It’s called keyword density. Right here on the left sidebar. Click on that. You can paste your URL in here of the page or the post once it’s been published on your site. Fill out the caption, click submit, and you’ll see what Google is looking at. The page in it’s entirety, including the header, sidebar, and footer. You’ll see the keyword density there.
I’ve been using … It’s funny we also talked about this in the mastermind this week too, but I’ve been using very specific thresholds. 2% for single word keywords, you want to stay under 2%. You’ll know what I’m talking about if you use this tool. It’ll show you one word keywords, two word keywords, and three word keywords that it’s analyzing. For one word keywords you want to stay 2% or under. Two word keywords you want to stay at 1% or under, and for three word keywords you want to stay at .2% and under. That’s just a rule of thumb I’ve been using since about [inaudible 00:55:43] around April or May of 2014, and it’s held true up until now.
Hernan: Before you move on Bradley, I’d just like to mention because you mentioned one of the best things about our MasterMind, and that’s how we get all of this input and sharing from the members in the MasterMind. Dr. Gary is one who happens to be – He helped me with RYS Academy. Clint Butler is another one who’s constantly in there just killing it, and sharing all of the stuff he’s doing. Now that you pulled up Wayne, he’s another one that’s constantly in there. Greg. It’s not just us in there answering questions like we do on Hump Day Hangouts, or giving webinars or whatever. There’s a whole bunch of give and take and people just sharing all sorts of different strategies, so guys our mastermind is just about the best mastermind that you can imagine. Of course I’m biased. I will admit that. I want to be totally transparent, of course, it’s ours, but there’s nothing like it anywhere. I can guarantee it.
Bradley: Clint, and I know we got to go before I get yelled at, Clint says, “I gave MasterMind members a bunch of the document sharing sites that have tons of link value to help boost the IFTTT stacks, RYS stacks, and money sites. I did the same with audio sites for those who leverage content in multiple formats. Join and get them.” Clint is absolutely correct. I sent Clint also a big list of sites, webtubes and stuff, and he went through every single one of them and confirmed or verified whether they were valid or not, and whether they should be used, and that was incredibly helpful, and we have a big ass list inside mastermind for that as well. Like Marco just said, our mastermind does rock guys, but enough of that. MasterClass starts in about three minutes, unless I’m late because I stayed too long for this. Thanks everybody for being here. We’ll see you guys next week right before Christmas, and if we don’t see you next week merry Christmas. Thanks everyone.
Marco: Bye bye everybody.
Bradley: See you guys.