Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 113

Click on the video above to watch Episode 113 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: Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts, this is episode 113, the episode where my mic goes crazy, so I’m going to pass things off real quick to Bradley, everybody can go down and say hi. Bradley, if you don’t [inaudible 00:00:13]

Bradley: Yeah, I will takeover, because Adam’s mic is not cooperating today.

Hey everybody, this is Bradley Benner with Semantic Mastery, this is the Hump Day Hangouts episode 113, It’s January 4, 2017, we’ve got a full house on. Adam who can’t speak, we’ve got Chris. Hey Chris, how are you?

Chris: Doing good, happy to be here in the new year. We’re going to have a strong year.

Bradley: That’s right.

Chris: Good to have everybody on board.

Bradley: Hernan how are you?

Hernan: Hey guys, hey everyone. It’s really, really good to be here. Again, super excited for 2017, we have a lot of stuff going on in January, February, it’s going to be a hell of a year man, so I’m excited.

Bradley: And last but not least, our mad scientists Marco. What’s up Marco?

Marco: Hey man, what’s going on? Trying to deal with this stinking volcano.

Bradley: Oh yeah, it’s acting up?

Marco: It’s been acting since I got here, but the wind is blowing this way, so I have ash all over.

Bradley: Nice. Volcanic ash, people pay money to like take baths in that shit, you know that?

Marco: Yeah I’m going to start packaging it man. If anybody wants some volcanic ash let me know. I’ll mail it to you.

Bradley: You sell it by the kilo.

Marco: Yeah right, Kilos! Doing Kilos ma.

Bradley: Bricks of volcanic ash.

All right guys, the only announcement we have today is at least because Adam can’t speak and he usually does all our announcements, is we got a webinar next Monday for a really cool video marketing suite, or software, it’s an online application. It’s kind of like Syndwire, but on steroids. It’s like an enterprise level version of Syndwire. The developers have been working on it for months and asked for feedback and stuff like that from us. We’re going to have a webinar next Monday. We’re going to send out the registration e-mail probably tomorrow. I think Adam said we’re going to do that tomorrow. I just want to give everybody a heads up. If you don’t have a powerful video marketing suite yet, or software, or tool, it might be something you want to check out.

If you’ve already purchased Video Marketing Blitz, which is Abs product. We did a promotion with that a few months ago, then you probably don’t need to attend this upcoming webinar, because you’ve got pretty much everything already. For those of you who that maybe missed out on that, this is a comparable solution, and it’s quite powerful.

In fact, I think this application that we’re going to be hosting the webinar about on Monday has less of a learning curve then Video Marketing Blitz. It doesn’t have all the features that that did, but it has less of a learning curve, and it’s really, really powerful. Anyways, just wanted to give everyone a heads up on that.

Is there anything else we need to announce guys before we get moving?

Hernan: I think we’re good.

Bradley: Okay, cool.

All right, let me grab the screen and we’ll get into it.

Okay cool. We got a lot of questions on the page already so let’s try to roll through these. Also, just a quick update guys, anybody that’s in IFTTT SEO academy, the update webinar number 8 is immediately following Hump Day Hangout, so be there or be square. If you don’t know how to get to it, go to the facebook group and click on the events tab and there will be a link that will take you over to the Google event page for the update webinar.

Random Search & CrowdSearch Campaigns

So Michael’s up first, he says, “Happy news years guys. I have started using crowd search and wanted your opinion on a few ways I am using it. Number one, I like random browsing on some of the searches, but with random browsing on I get a lot of instances of 15-30 seconds of time on any one page. Example, seven eight page views in four minutes. Do you use it?”

Yeah, sometimes just to switch up, Michael. The search activity, or the browsing activity of the bot, or whatever it is. I switch it up just so there’s some randomization there. Okay. I wouldn’t worry so much about that. Just turn it on sometimes, and sometimes don’t. That’s all.

“Number two, I have a couple campaigns that start at WP or Tumblr that go to the Google+ post page and then click on a post going to my website. I vary what post is clicked. Good idea?”

Yes, absolutely Michael, that’s social referral traffic. That’s a great idea. That’s one of the more powerful ways of using CrowdSearch in my opinion. All right?

“Number three is when I see a link show up in Google search console, I add that to CrowdSearch. Example last month I had 5 visits from an unknown Pinterest board show in analytics. I checked it and is a good board themed for my industry, so I added a campaign for a few searches a month coming from that Pinterest board. Is this a good type of things to do?”

Again, yes Michael. That’s a great idea, and that’s actually a really great idea, is to go into search console guys, and take a look at … If any of you that are using CrowdSearch, if you’re not you probably should be, but go into the search console and take a look at your search queries report, and take a look at some of the keywords, the search phrases that have given your site impressions for that maybe you didn’t get many clicks for. If you highlight in search console, the click through rate it will show impressions, click through rate, clicks and position, search position. Highlight all of those, or check all of those boxes, and then you can go through and take a look at search queries that are giving your site impressions but maybe your rank position is such that you’re not getting any clicks. In other words, maybe you’re position like say 14 for example, and so you’re not getting any clicks right? Because whoever goes to page two of Google. It’s rare right?

Those would be good terms to actually set up some CrowdSearch campaigns. Be very, very conservative on that stuff though guys. Because if your site’s been given impressions for a certain keyword search phrase, and it doesn’t have any clicks, and there’s a history of no clicks, and then all of a sudden you have it doing click throughs, exact match keyword plus click through, and you have a significant number of that, that’s going to look unnatural. I would do it really, really conservatively, and then you can kind of ramp it up. But you should see a little bit of movement from that if you set it up correctly.

You can also do some of the social stuff like what you’re talking about, Michael, here. Some social referral traffic to that page. To the page in the example that I’m talking about because that will help too, and that will be a little bit safer than doing direct click throughs from search, if that makes sense. I’d mix it up and kind of add some diversification to that.

Good questions though Micheal.

Getting Off Twitter SandBox With Twitter SEO Academy

Greg’s up. I read this one earlier. I’m going to actually let Marco handle this. Guys, I can’t give anybody any advice on Twitter for anything. I just don’t use it very often at all. I can’t give you any advice on Twitter, Greg, but Marco can probably answer this. The only thing I know is that the few times that I’ve … Not the few times, actually every time I create a new Twitter account for an IFTTT ring or something, or I get one back from our builders, it’s a branded ring, then I will go in and manually tweet and re-tweet a few times and do some direct messaging and stuff like that on the account to get it out of the sandbox. I’ve never had any issues with Greg, but I know that other people have, so Marco, can you comment on this question please?

Marco: Yeah, I was just taking a look at it. I’m just wondering if he went into the update section and if he tried the 10 tweet out of the sandbox method that Dr. Gary updated in there. Because it works, I haven’t had any problems. You can get sandboxed again if there isn’t enough activity, if you don’t do anything with the trader profile and it’s just sitting there, you can get sandboxed again, and every time that I’ve gone in and done the 10 tweet, some people do three or four and their out of the sandbox. Sometimes it takes 10, but I haven’t had to take any more than that.

So Greg, go into the advance section, and take a look at the 10 tweets out of the sandbox method.

Bradley: Very good, thank you.

Like you said Marco, generally probably 9 out of 10 of the twitter accounts that I’ll get back from our builders for branded networks, I’ll go in and I’ll spend 15 or 20 minutes tops on just interacting on engaging with other tweeters or Twitter members, or whatever you call them, and it gets me out of the sandbox. I’ve never had it take more than 15 or 20 minutes, and that’s it.

Building Stronger SEO With IFTTT

Okay, Asi’s up. Asi says, “I was just wondering if there is a way to make stronger SEO with IFTTT besides the tier one ring for a website, I am looking for something stronger. I was doing RSS feed, mixing it to three tiers. Is that okay?”

Sure that’s fine Asi, as long as you’re minimizing your footprint on tier two and three. You certainly can do that, that’s not a problem, it’s just a matter of making sure that you’re hiding your footprint I believe you’re in a foreign market, so you can probably get away with a hell of a lot more than we can here in the US. As far as spammyness, but I would still try to minimize your footprint in tier two and tier three as much as possible. If you follow the training we talk about how to do that.

Besides that, we also did a webinar with Damon Nelson, and he has that new application called RSS Masher, and I’ve got the link to that here. I’m actually going to drop this on the top of the page. This is the webinar that I did Damon about, I don’t know, two weeks ago or something like that where we go through how to use RSS Masher. Why I advocate or encourage the use of it now for tier two log syndication networks, or second tier blog syndication networks, which before, for the last year and a half, close to two years I’ve been preaching against doing that, but with RSS Masher, it’s something that can be done in my opinion now, safely, and it’s manageable using this application. Whereas before, you could still do it using related content feeds at tier two, but it was pain in the ass.

It was a lot of additional work to set up and it was hard to maintain. Difficult to maintain so it just was too cumbersome and so that’s why I had recommended against doing it for so long. But this makes it a hell of a lot more manageable. There’s still more work involved. You still have to be careful with what you’re doing, but this makes it a lot more manageable. If you’re using this, then you can certainly go out to tier two or tier three and reduce or minimize footprint issues. You should be able to get quite a bit of traction using that.

The other thing that you can do is make sure … Let me just put this real quick on the page webinar. Even if you guys aren’t interested in picking up RSS Masher, I’d still go watch that because it’s pretty powerful what you can do with some of the feeds and stuff.

By the way, obviously there’s a button that will pop up when you start watching that webinar with the option to go purchase RSS Masher. Damon’s left the R backdoor special offer pre-launch offer open for us only, or as far as I know. He’s leaving it open for us, let’s put it that way, until the end of this month. The end of January, so I would recommend if you’re even considering you should do it sometime soon before that offer closes.

The other thing that you can do is power up your tier one ring. You can boost that, build links to it. That’s something that we recommend at all times, is to always to power up that tier one ring, and continually publish content, because that’s what’s going to help to theme that network and make it stronger and build more authority.

The last line of his comment is pretty cool. It’s says, “By the way, the website I did it with him got to the first and second spot in a very high competition keyword and stuck there like glue.” That’s awesome, from an IFTTT ring. That’s great.

Hernan: Just to add to what you were saying Bradley, if you’re looking for something stronger you can always try vodka. I’m just kidding. The realities is that IFTTT … Any project that we’re starting right now has an IFTTT attached to it, no matter what, because it will equalize your link profile and make it so much natural. You can actually start building some other kind of links. I like to go with links that will actually bring you traffic. That’s why we’re doing IFTTT, but you can with PDF links, Web 2.0s, PBNs if that’s something you want to do. Those will actually bring you results and you will be more protected, and you will also have several link targets to point to, because you’re using IFTTTT.

The truth of the matter is that depending on your niche sometimes IFTTTT is always enough, sometime it isn’t. To be completely honest, on super competitive niches, they do not exclude themselves. It’s not like we are saying you do IFTTT and don’t do anything else. No by any means whatsoever, this is an addition to whatever any other thing that you are doing. It’s a smart addition it will actually leverage whatever other thing any other link building you’re doing. PBNs, Web 2.0s whatever. It will actually help you with that to run better and faster. You know?

Bradley: Yeah, IFTTT SEO is the foundation. It’s the starting point. It’s rarely the be all end all. I wish it would be, I wish it was that easy. But if it were that easy, we’d all be out of work, because everybody would be doing it. But it is definitely the foundation. I always build upon an IFTTT network. I start with that and just blogging, content marketing and see what kind of results I can get from that and I assess it and determine what else has to be done from there and then add to it going forward.

Double 301 Redirect / Link Laundering

Mark’s up next, he says, “Hey guys, happy New Year, hope you had a wonderful Christmas period! Got a 301 question for you and would love some advice. I don’t know if you have heard or used SERP drive but it basically does an expired domain crawl for you, like a blue chip back links style crawl, and one search is just 12 bucks so I’m considering doing one maybe two 301 redirects to a lead gen site, or any advice or best practices would be awesome. I know this may be more mastermind stuff but even a sly hint would be great, ya don’t have to give the farm away although I suppose we would let you give it away just this once if you must.”

I’m assuming what you’re trying to do is like a double 301 redirect or what we used to call “link laundering”. You know, I don’t do nearly as much of that as I used to because it’s become less effective, which is normally what happens in SEO. Right? You find something that works and you exploit the shit out of it and everybody else does it too and then it becomes less and less effective over time. That’s generally what happens. About a year and a half ago, about probably between two years ago and a year ago, all of last year basically, not 2016 but 2015, we were doing a lot of that, the double 301 redirect stuff and it was working really, really well. I noticed it started to not work as well.

You can still do it, but what I would recommend doing is if you’re going to be doing like redirects to boost properties, I would still boost a buffer site prior to … Instead of doing a double redirect direct to the money site, I would do maybe a double redirect to a buffer page with a DoFollow Link with a keyword anchor back to your site. That’s typically how I found to get better results because, again, it became less effective over time and one of the ways I was able to increase its effectiveness again was to instead of going direct to the money site, I would go through a buffer property. I don’t know if that makes sense, Mark, because I’m not 100% sure that that’s what you’re asking about, but does anybody else read this a different way than I do?

Marco: Yeah, no I just want to tell them that the reason why it lost effectiveness is because of the distance graph. Right? Most of the sites that we were buying were garbage domains that weren’t linking to any authority or weren’t receiving any links from any authority. They boosted subdomains with garbage. Right?

Bradley: And they were not relevant most of the time.

Marco: Correct. That’s why they stopped working, but if you can find a really good domain with a good link, now you don’t have to 301 that because it’s clean. It would still work, but you don’t have to 301 a good website. You’re buying spammy Chinese domains that with high trust flow, high domain authority. We don’t even look at those metrics anymore, and we would just double 301 n launder them and they were working really well until Google came up with the distance graph. Once that started being applied, then it lost effectiveness of course because of the link quality that was coming into those websites and out. It wasn’t related to anything that was trusted or authoritative or that was in any way related to the niche that we were working in, which is what we’re looking for now. If you can do those three things, if you can find something that has good quality links from at least one trusted source, then it’s a really good domain to apply, but you don’t have to double 301 that, again, because it’s clean.

Bradley: Yeah, and the other thing is, and that’s in part why I started going to a buffer site instead, because you can inject relevancy into that stream, into that link stream through the buffer site. In other words, you could still use, I haven’t done this in probably eight months at least, since the last time I set one of these up, but you could still use some of those Chinese spammy domains that just had a shit ton of juice coming into them, a bunch of link juice coming in because they had thousands or hundreds of thousands of backlinks built to them, but totally spammy, you could still use those in a link laundering stream.

But instead of going direct to the money site, which we used to do, or to a subdomain, now I go to a buffer site because a buffer site I could out a relevant article, so content is relevant, and then use an anchor text link so that can inject relevancy at that point into that link stream. But again, I would shy away from doing that now, because really all we’re looking for now is relevancy more so than metrics or anything else. It’s more about relevancy. I would rather buy a domain, an expired domain that has relevancy but only a couple links and maybe not even the greatest metrics, but the relevant backlinks to that domain relevant to the topic in which I’m going to be using to link to, if that makes sense. I’d rather buy those domains than go out and buy a domain that’s got incredibly good metrics or high metrics but is non-relevant, unless they’re incredibly good metrics. If that makes sense. Even so, I would still push that to a buffer site where I can inject relevancy.

That’s kind of more like MasterMind stuff, Mark. We can get into it a hell of a lot deeper if you want to join us there.

Google Doc Description Function

Virginia says, “I saw in RYS Speed that you were adding a description to each Google Doc. But G has changed the look of that site again. I searched online for an hour to find out how. It looks like G removed this feature. Am I wrong again? Thanks Toby.”

As far as I know Toby, you can still add information to G Docs. He’s talking about metadata, Marco.

Marco: Yeah, and I just checked, I dropped a whole Wikipedia page in the description. It’s still spammylicious.

Bradley: Yep. Still spammylicious. In fact, I can probably find … It’s just the info button on the file itself, correct? I don’t have it here so I’d have to actually look at a doc.

Marco: That’s all it is.

Bradley: Yep.

Marco: It’s a nice big icon on the top right.

Bradley: It’s just an “I” icon for info. You click on that you’ll open … It pops out from the right side, like the sidebar area and then you can paste in metadata.

Marco: You have two options. You have details and activity. You want to click on details instead of activity.

Bradley: And spam the ever living hell out of it.

Marco: Yeah, do some lovely stuff to that.

Bradley: It’s like a spam bucket, it’s awesome.

Using RYS To Rank Sites Without Google Verified Business Pages

Paul says, “Hi guys. I’m back from my trip to the Philippines and have a lot to catch up on.”

Glad to have you back, Paul.

He says, “First I want to comment on the RSS Masher. I got the program, put it into action and its working great on all of my tier two networks. I like it, and time will tell how it performs producing traffic and ranking.”

That’s great Paul, that’s awesome. I’m glad it’s working for you.

“My question is on RYS again, I have had the best success with the service with my clients, and now I want to use it on my own sites. I am building out “near to me” sites. I have one site that will pay $141 per click when I get it ranked without the Google verified business pages for each one, without NAP, et cetera. How can I use and incorporate RYS to help get these sites ranked? And a follow up question; after I get the stacks back, what can I do with the stacks to increase the rankings and visibility? Happy New Year to everyone.”

Paul, yeah, well first of all, obviously I’ve been using RYS or drive stacks for local mainly, but we’ve got … We actually did another test recently, within the last couple of weeks Marco and I, that yesterday in ranking on page one for a “near me” term that gets like 8,800 searches per month. Guys, this is a drive file with zero backlinks and it’s ranked on page one, I think position six for 8,800 search term, it’s a “near me” term, a “near me” search phrase. It gets 8,800 searches per month on average and we’re number six with zero backlinks for a drive file, it’s freaking awesome.

Marco: With zero nothing because we did-

Bradley: Didn’t do anything, yeah. That’s what I’m saying, it’s just a drive file that was created to the same specifications that we teach in RYS Academy. Anyways, yeah, you can use it for local, that’s typically how I’ve been using it because a majority of the work that I do is local, but you can boost anything with drive stacks, guys. Anything, a video, a press release, a website, organic or local, national or local, it doesn’t matter what you’re trying to rank in the maps pack organically. You build links back to your website, inner pages, silo pages, using the drive stack and then obviously the sites, sites.google.com site as well.

How do you boost the power of those or you can build links to them. Remember, those are all drive, they’re Google domains essentially. Everything’s on the Google domain so you can use that to your advantage and build links to the drive stacks. Because you’re letting Google’s domain actually filter all that spam out, you’re basically just boosting it and it doesn’t take much really, to get some pretty good results with the drive files just by throwing some links at them. Marco, what else would you suggest?

Marco: I think that from what we’ve seen for “near me” it’s so simple that you just throw it up and it’s going to pretty much rank and then just by adding our own link building service. Go through us and order when you order the stack, order the link building. It’s get dripped out anyway right? It doesn’t get hammered all at once and that should be enough. But I mean, there’s other things that he could do with it.

Bradley: He could crowdsearch.

Marco: Yeah, crowdsearch, PBNs, there’s a bunch of things that you could do if it doesn’t wok. You could buy a couple of domains with Bluechip Backlinks maybe push them into the stack and out to wherever you want it to go. But the stuff inside the stack rank anyway.

Bradley: That’s right. That’s the thing, think about this Paul, you can take a GOO.GL short URL and a link from inside a drive file to your money site and then set up, like crowdsearch for example, some search CT spam, click through spam campaigns to search for the drive files. Put a hashtag or something in the file and use that as part of the search phrase so that crowdsearch will quickly identify the file and click on it and then click your GOO.GL short URL that goes back to your landing page or your website, if that makes sense, because what you’re doing is you’re … With the GOO.GL short URL, you’re injecting Google analytics into the link, like right into the link stream so you’re allowing Google to see where traffic is coming from and activity.

You can do that with the drive files so that you’re basically telling Google, “Hey, I found this drive file in search results and clicked on it through to the money site or to this website over here,” and those are strong ranking signals. That’s something that you can do as well, very powerful, and that will help your drive files to rank too by the way.

Giving Opinion On Non-English Site In Local Language And English Attribution

All right, this person’s next. “Hi guys. I have a question about content curation: is it okay to give opinion on non-English site in local language and English attribution?”

I imagine so. I’ll let Marco and Hernan comment on that, but I can’t imagine why that would be a problem.

Marco: I defer to Hernan on this one because I don’t know.

Hernan: That’s actually a good question. Let me check it out because I-

Bradley: Wow, this guy’s the winner, we got to give him a prize for stumping us.

Hernan: Yeah, right. It hasn’t happened before. A non-English siting local language and English attribution … I’m not fully understanding the question. Hold on.

Marco: He wants to give his opinion but it’s a non-English site in whatever his local language it. He wants to add English attribution, is that okay?

Hernan: Oh, yeah. Okay, yeah. I get it now. Okay, so what you would doing would be to grab English news and put your opinion and then back to the English site. Is that what he’s saying? Back to the English-

Marco: I think so.

Hernan: Well, to be honest I haven’t done it, like I haven’t done it before because I think that you should have plenty of information in news on your native language, you know? That’s my opinion anyways.

Bradley: If it’s the same topic though, I can’t imagine … I don’t know, maybe, I’ve never tested it either so this is purely based on assumption, or this is purely speculation, as long as it’s the same topic, I imagine Google understands that it’s topically relevant, even if it’s different languages. Right?

Hernan: Well, yes and no because what I found out is that even if you are … The reality is that that’s why doing a CO in other languages is so easy, because the grammar and the syntax and everything that has to do with language recognition in English is so advanced that when you are a company, like Google for example, and you need to invest your resources and your people, of course you will invest it in English. You will need like grammar people and language whatever … That’s why I do in Spanish or French or German, whatever is so much easier because Google hasn’t catch up to that point of what he can easily recognize those kind of patterns. But again, I wouldn’t know why would you want to put some …

The reality with curation is like copy and pasting some sort of the article, some part of the article like a paragraph. If you’re doing that, that would have to be in English for example. Let’s say that you where building a website in Spanish, you will have pieces of English content. It’s kind of weird for the tier one or it’s even kind of weird for the visitor. You know what I mean? If I land you into a Spanish website and it has like little snippets of English, I’m just thinking, “This guy is translating poorly,” or whatever. It’s kind of weird from the visitor point of view so if you cannot find any kind of news, maybe you’re in a really specific niche, I don’t know, I haven’t done it so I cannot advise. I can only advise on the perspective of somebody that lands on a website and happens to find content in various languages. That would be my only advise.

Bradley: I would just assume he’s having trouble finding whatever particular topic he’s curating about, finding content in his native language and that’s why he’s asking about that. From a strictly SEO standpoint, again this is based purely on speculation, but I would imagine that it would still work, but from what Hernan’s saying, I would totally agree, it would look weird for any visitor. You know what I mean? I was talking on a purely technical basis, it may still work. You’d have to test it to be honest with you. But from a user, a visitor standpoint it just really wouldn’t make sense. I agree with you. I would just test it. I mean guys, we don’t have all the answers all the time unfortunately. Generally if we don’t have an answer, what we do is go set up a test, which is something that you can do as well. If we have the answer, we’ll share it but if we don’t then we generally will set up a test and that’s something that you guys can do as well and we encourage that.

Marco: That advice that I would give him is that if you’re not doing English, it’s not really that complicated because as Hernan said, Google will invest resources in where most of the money is, which is English language, and then where it’s really highly spam. I don’t know what language he’s working in or what niche or whatever, but I would say, “Man, don’t even sweat it.”

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: IFTTT, oh crap. I don’t know if I should give this away. I’m getting 40 to 50,000 visitors a month on a website where all I do is copy/paste a Wikipedia page but I push it through Google translate because if Google says that this is the proper translation, then it should work regardless whether it’s legible to a human being. I’ll take the page and I’ll translate it to the foreign language that I’m targeting and I’ll just use the Wikipedia translation and it works like gangbusters. I’m at about 40,000 visitors a month just from that, literally copy/paste into Google translate. That’s how easy it is in foreign language.

Bradley: I see an application in the works, a software app. Google translate plugin or something that just automatically copies in foreign languages, niches. That would work well.

Video Spinner

Brian’s up next, he says,“Do you do any video spinning? Any recommendations on a good spinner. Saw a webinar where someone had 30 new videos on one channel and it helped ranked videos in Google.”

I’m not sure what that last part means Brian, but video spinning is typically something that is included if you have a video marketing suite of tools. Like for example, we just mentioned Video Marketing Blitz at the beginning of this webinar, which is Abs product, there’s a spinner in there. You can buy standalone spinners. Basically video spinning, the way that I understand it, is just taking a single video file and making multiple variations of that file. It doesn’t really change the actual content of the video much. It just changes the file type or maybe it will swap still frames at the beginning and at the end out and change the duration and change the file type and that kind of stuff so that it gives to YouTube unique versions of the video.

It’s a way to where you can take the same video and create dozens of copies of that video and upload them to the same channel without YouTube algorithmically detecting that they’re duplicates. However, any type of spam tactic like that or spam strategy, which is what that is, if a manual reviewer were to come look at it, they’re going to terminate the channel for spam, there’s just no question. That’s why I’ll do that kind of stuff, spin videos and spam and stuff like that, but only with specific channels that are designated for that. I don’t ever do any kind of spun videos crap on money channels anymore because I’ve had channels terminated for that stuff. It’s crazy because it’s hit or miss. I mean I’ve got channels out there that … I’ve got a channel that’s got like 968 videos on it that are all basically spun video. They’re all shitty videos, all complete spam and that channel is still up and still generating leads now, which is unbelievable because it’s been up for like three years. I don’t know why it hasn’t been terminated yet.

Anyways, most video marketing suites are going to have a spinner in them. You can buy standalone spinners, I don’t recommend any of them because … The only ones that I would recommend are the ones that come with another suite of tools already. For example, Video Marketing Blitz, Mega-Ray, the product that we’re going to be doing a webinar on on Monday, I believe it has a spinner in there as well. Most of the more advanced tools will have that included already. I’ve tested some of the standalone video spinners in the past, like years ago, and I wasn’t real happy with any of them. The quality of the videos usually came out pretty poor. They’re probably better now, I’m sure they are, but again, I don’t really do a whole lot of spam stuff in YouTube anymore because it’s just less and less effective.

Two years ago, you could get aways with a bunch, even a year ago, you could still create a business basically out of spamming YouTube all the time. What I found now is that people are becoming more used to ignoring spam videos and just skipping over them and so they don’t convert. If you’re doing spam stuff in YouTube specifically for SEO purposes, then fine, spam away. Spam until your heart’s content, but I wouldn’t recommend doing spam stuff in YouTube anymore for like traffic generation or for actual conversions. To me, it’s just based on my own campaigns, it really has plummeted the effectiveness. Conversions just suck whenever you do spam stuff. For SEO purposes, it works fine.

Usually spun videos guys, like for example, if you have a nice quality video and you want to target 20 different keywords with the same video, you would use a spinner for something like that, but I wouldn’t put all those spun videos so that you target 20 different keywords on the same channel or if you are going to put them on the same channel, don’t ever do that on your money channel. Do it on a separate channel that specifically used for spam purposes only so that you protect your money channel.

Adding Websites With Embedded IFrame In Google Search Console For Faster Crawl Rate

All right, Ivan’s up. He says, “Happy New Year guys, last week I created and published a one page Google site with the new interface with a Google map, Google presentation, Youtube, okay.” He says, “Now I want to create another Google site with the old Google site but the same content but using IFrames. I watched the videos from RYS Academy. These two sites are companion sites for my main site. Two questions: Is it a good idea to add these two sites in my search console for them to be crawled faster? What about duplicate content?

Okay, first of all, I wouldn’t add both of them in the search console and not in the same account. I would add them into two different accounts, so like create a persona account, which you probably already have anyways and put one in one search console account, one in the other that way they’re both not the same site, sitting in the same search console account. If that makes sense. That’s what I would do. You can probably get away with it, it probably wouldn’t cause you any problems, but I would still separate them.

About duplicate content, duplicate content only exists on the same domain. If you have two pages on the same domain on a site, on your site that have the exact same content, that’s duplicate content. Two pages with the same content on different domains is not duplicate content. Okay? That’s a myth that has gone through our industry for years now guys, and if that were the case, press releases would tank everybody’s site every time someone used a press release. Social media posts would tank people’s sites, so don’t worry about the duplicate content issue unless it’s on the same domain.

Increasing Site Authority By Using RSS Feeds From Authoritative Sites

Ethan, “Hey guys, is utilizing RSS feeds from high authority sites, aka industry leaders, to populate your money sites with syndicated content on a regular basis an effective way to raise the authority of it?”

I wouldn’t do that Ethan, not automatically. I don’t like publishing other people’s content on a money site period, unless it’s been in a curated post because then we’re siting other people’s content but the post still originates from our blog, if that makes sense, from the money site blog. I wouldn’t automatically post content to a money site from RSS feeds, from even authority feeds. I would do it because … Unless you’re monitoring it on a daily basis, there could be some stuff that comes through that you don’t want on your site number one, also … I just wouldn’t do it. I’ve never done that. We use other people’s content all the time on money sites but we do it based upon curation, the strategies that we teach in Content Kingpin and that’s the proper way to do it so that we’re following the DMCA, Digital Millennium Copyright Act guidelines as far as when we’re referencing or siting other people’s content. We follow all those rules so that the content comes out the way that Google likes it. Would you guys have any comment on that? Hernan, you do a lot of that stuff for PBNs, but what about money sites?

Hernan: No, money sites hardly ever to be completely honest. Anything and everything that I do for money sites is completely manual. You know? I try not to risk it. For PBNs, you can if you do it on a, how would you call it, on a sidebar for example. You can even have these feeds that update themselves, not RSS feeds but for example, Twitter feeds based on a hashtag or Pinterest boards based on whatever category, if you want to put those on your money site that’s probably better because those are, I would say, officially released by, for example, Google or Twitter. If you have a finance website you want to, I don’t know, show all the tweets from finance blogs, whatever, that could work. But in terms of [inaudible 00:40:30] et cetera, I only do it for PBNs but not for money sites.

Bradley: Yeah, and there’s plugins that you can use Ethan, that will, like so example you can add RSS feeds and it will give like a little news widget that you can add to the sidebar or footer of your site that will update with the headlines of that RSS feed but it won’t be actually populating your blog with content. In other words, you can set it up so that it’s dynamically updated and you can set it up with filters and things like that or go hand-select the feeds so that it’s related content, but the only thing that shows is the headline and it’s a clickable link that will go off site over to the content source. But that’s what I would do and I’ve done that. I’ve done that on money sites.

Typically, that’s stuff that I would do for PBNs and not so much for money sites, but you can still do that for money sites. That’s something that I would say is okay because then you’re not actually publishing content to your blog that’s from other sources. You’re just showing headlines in a widget, like a sidebar or a footer widget. Which again, that activity is dynamically updated. It will still keep the bots crawl in your site, but it won’t be republished content that’s just straight copied content from somebody else’s site, if that makes sense. With curation, you want to add commentary because then …

Guys, remember with a curated piece of content, it becomes an original piece of content because you’re curating multiple sources of content into one piece of content and you’re adding commentary, you’re injecting opinion. That in itself makes a unique piece of content, does that make sense? But when you’re just taking a straight 100% republished post from somebody else’s site and pasting it on your money site, then it’s zero original content. It’s copied content that you’re just republishing and so I just wouldn’t do it, not for money sites. Okay?

I agree with you on some of this stuff, but that’s why, Ethan, my suggestion is to hire a virtual assistant. If you haven’t gone through Content Kingpin, our course, it’s specifically set up for how to train a virtual assistant to do curating for you. A curator can curate posts on a money site. I’ll pay curators, a good curator for money sites, it just depends, anywhere between 5 to $15 per post, it really just depends on what it is that they’re doing and what the money site’s about. But $5 to $15 per post for money site curating, they’re top quality posts guys, top quality posts. Okay? By the way, if you hire somebody and pay them on an hourly basis, I like to pay on a per post basis, but like an hourly basis, you can hire a good curator from the Philippines and pay him $5 an hour and you can get three good curated posts out of about an hour and 20 minutes, a hour and a half, let’s say an hour and a half. For $7.50 you can get three really good curated post. If that makes sense.

For PBN curated posts, you can get posts done three per hour and you can pay 4 to $5 an hour for VAs to do that. That ends up being like $2 per post, $1.50-$2 per post and that content’s a hell of a lot better than buying that shit content from content farms that’s just spun garbage. Okay?

URL Structure For Faster Ranking

All right, Ethan’s up next, “Hey again, I have another question, this time about on-page optimization. For years, I was told that the best strategy is to try to rank for a topic rather than just a few keywords. However, I am frequently seeing high ranking pages in the SERPs that are VERY targeted for just a few keywords, especially in the URL structure. More specifically, I am noticing sites with the exact match of the main keyword in the URL structure ranking very well. For example, when searching the keyword “small business loans” sites with the URL structure, example.com/small-business-loans. How do you guys structure URLs? Do you only put the main keyword you’re targeting in there, or do you add in additional relevant keywords?”

We’ve talked about this a lot on Hump Day Hangouts and all the other webinars that we do but the way that it has been for the last few years has been the four main things that the bots look at when they come to crawl the page, Google bot especially is the SEO title, the URL, the page title, which is the H1 tag, and then the meta description. Those are the first four things, they’re in the header guys. Google looks at those first and so typically I will only put the exact match keyword in the SEO title. That’s the meta title that shows in the search results, that’s where I put it. That is the most effective place to put an exact match keyword.

One of our members, Dr. Gary, one of the co-founders of RYS Academy, he recently did some tests on that to prove that as well, that the SEO title was still the most important place to have the exact match keyword. I don’t typically put the exact match keyword in any more than one location out of those four. Right? I will use variations for the URL, the H1, and the meta description. I’ll use, you know, related keyword phases, co-occurring keyword phrases, but I typically will only put the exact match keyword in the SEO title. The URL will usually be a truncated or succinct version of it unless it’s an exact match domain in which case it would already be in the URL, but I typically don’t use exact match domains anymore either. Okay?

Again, I think it’s better … Guys, you don’t have to hit Google over the head with keywords anymore because of RankBrain. It understands, and Hummingbird, it understands semantic relationships between words a hell of a lot better. If you add the SEO title, the exact match keyword and the SEO title, you’re telling Google, “Hey, that’s what this page is about.” Then you can basically sprinkle throughout the rest of the content or in those other three locations, the URL, page title or H1 title, and in the meta description, variations of that keyword to kind of reinforce it. That’s how I do it Ethan, and the reason I say that is because it’s been working for me for about the last two and a half years really well and I don’t see how any … If you’re only putting the exact match keyword in one of those four locations, how could you ever get penalized for on page SEO, for over optimization, if that makes sense. You can still get penalized for off page shit, no doubt. But how could your page ever be penalized with a [Panda 00:46:52] penalty if you only put the exact match keyword in one location, out of those four I mean. You’d still have it in the content, but you don’t need to hit Google over the head with … Keyword doesn’t need to be near as high as it used to be either. Right?

Wow, we’ve had a ton of questions and we still have a lot to go through so we’re going to keep rolling. You guys, anybody want to comment on that? Or was that good enough?

Hernan: I think you nailed it, Bradley. Whatever I would say is just repeating what you were saying.

Ranking A Video In First Page For A Fairly Competitive Niche

Bradley: Jamie’s up, hey Jamie. She says, “Hi, I have a video in a fairly competitive niche that I can’t seem to push onto page one. It bounces between 11 and 14 and seems like the last push is the toughest. I have my link wheel, I’ve ordered embeds and links on SerpSpace, I’ve created some YouTube link wheels with about 300 YouTube links to the video. I’ve run some PBNs and web twos to the video. By the way I have keyword optimized both the video and the channel. I have crowdsearch running seven views per month to it. Any thoughts on what else I can do to push it over the top? Thanks.”

Okay, number one for videos, you can go a lot more aggressive with views if you’re using CrowdSearch. Second of all, I would set up some referral traffic campaigns using crowdsearch to the video, particularly through a GOO.GL short link so that you can inject analytics into that link stream, which is what I talked about earlier in this Hump Day Hangout. Okay, the other thing is remember Jamie, there are just some keyword phrases that Google will damn near refuse to rank a video for on page one. That is the case guys, it didn’t used to be but it is the case now. There are categories of searches now and there are certain search phrases that are just not friendly to videos because it doesn’t make sense. Now, I don’t know that that’s the case with you, Jamie, but it sounds like it because … Usually when you have a video that you can get, that bounces between like 11 and 14, and I’ve seen that happen myself many, many times, it’s because it’s one of those keyword phrases that Google just doesn’t want to put a video on page one.

A lot of times, for example real estate terms, a lot of real estate lead gen terms, not for house listings but for like realtors in cities and stuff like that, or real estate agent plus city name and stuff like that, those are really tough terms to rank videos for and I’ve fought tooth and nail to get them to rank on page one before and typically once I get them to page one, they don’t stick anyways. They’ll bounce right back after just a few days to page two, no matter what. I’ve learned to just not target those types of keywords when I have that much of a difficulty ranking it, then I look for other variations of the keyword that I can rank. Okay?

Marco: I would also ask her, has she ever just left it alone? Has she ever just let it sit, because it seems like she’s been doing a whole bunch of stuff to it. Has she ever just let it sit for, I don’t know, six, eight weeks and see what happens?

Bradley: [inaudible 00:49:45] search views and the other thing, Jamie, you can do is set up some YouTube ads. Set up an AdWords campaign, give it a dollar a day budget, that’s 30 bucks a month. Or $2 a day, 60 bucks a month, right? Set up a video ad campaign because that oftentimes will give that last push that it needs to get to page one. I’ve experience that many, many times over the last two years. That’s kind of like one of the tricks I keep up my sleeve for whenever SEO just isn’t working for a particular video, is you set up, and I talked about this I think last Hump Day Hangout, because Brian Lichtig, I remember he had the question specifically about that.

If it’s local, I don’t know that it’s local, but if it is local, you can set up targeting with the geographic location targeting to where you don’t even have to get keyword specific on it because all you’re looking to do is get clicks to the video from local IPs. You can set up a very broad targeting campaign that’s just mainly targeted by geographic location. For example, you can use affinity audience targeting or topic targeting, you don’t even need to use keyword targeting. Just use topic or affinity audience targeting and set up a local campaign, set the geographic location, if it’s a local video, which I’m assuming it is but maybe it’s not. If it’s a national thing, well then I would still set by country. Target US but then I would go a little bit more narrow in my other targeting options. But for local, go broad in your audience targeting, but specific in your geographic targeting and just start getting local IP clicks to that video. It’s going to make a huge difference.

That’s something that you can’t really do with CrowdSearch. You can to a point, but not like you can when you’re paying Google. Remember, when you’re paying AdWords, when you’re using YouTube ads, you’re paying Google for engagement. Right? You’re paying Google for engagement signals and they’ll provide them to you. We got one more and then we’ll have to wrap it up.

Hernan: [inaudible 00:51:44] real quick, I don’t know if you have even tested Video Powerhouse, Jamie, for your video? If you haven’t and you’re interested in testing it, just write us a support ticket because maybe we can make a case study of sorts and we can get you sorted out with Video Powerhouse. This would actually be a good case study so just write us to support.[inaudible 00:52:11].com. Just hit us up and maybe we can help you with Video Powerhouse and turning this into a potential case study if that’s something that you wanted to do.

Issues Connecting Google Plus Pages In Buffer

Bradley: Yeah. Okay, Lori’s up and then we got to wrap it up guys. The IFTTT SEO update webinar starts in about eight minutes so this will be the last one. Lori says, “Happy New Year to everyone! I’m creating a tier one branded ring for a new client. When I set up the YouTube Channel, it let me choose ‘Use Business or Other Name’ to create a G+ Page. However, when I set up a Buffer account and tried to connect that page, it said there wasn’t one, but ‘Click Here to Create One’. I did that but now when I click ‘My Accounts’, it shows that I have two branded pages. Any thoughts? Is it bad to have two branded pages? If so, which one should I link other accounts to? I’m using a persona name behind the accounts, but using the business brand for logo, cover pics, et cetera.”

Well Lori, what I would do, I’m not sure why Buffer gave you an issue. Sometimes when that kind of stuff happens it can be like a cache issue with your browser. I know that sounds weird but oftentimes some weird shit can happen with that. In that case, maybe I would have tried to close that browser down, run CCleaner, clear cache and cookies, all of that and then open the browser, log back in to Buffer and that Google account and try a second time. I know that’s past where you’re at now anyways, but what I’m saying is that’s what I would have done initially instead of creating and new page when you had already created a page. Right? Because now you’ve got two pages.

Yeah, I would delete one of those pages, which you can do as the page owner. You can go into the settings and if you scroll all the way down to the bottom it’ll say, “Delete page,” and I would delete the duplicate page. Keep the one that is connected to Buffer already, unless you’ve already got your IFTTT network built in and the other page has already been connected throughout a lot of those properties, in which case I would delete the one that Buffer created and then I would try again because I just connected a Google+ page to a Buffer account today in fact, because I was preparing for the IFTTT SEO update webinar.

I don’t know why, it was probably just some weird browser cache issue. I would have closed out, cleared cache and cookies, and tried again and then like I said, I would delete the page that was created through that process and keep the one that you had already created that should probably already be interlinked to all the other properties. Otherwise, you’re going to have to go back and edit all those other properties. But again, just go through, find which one is the duplicate and then go to the settings as the page owner, go to the settings, scroll all the way down to the bottom and there’ll be a “Delete page” button. Okay?

Okay guys, sorry we didn’t get to all the questions. Look at that, awesome. Sorry guys, apparently we had a lot of questions today. Everybody’s looking to get busy in 2017 apparently. I’m glad everybody’s here. IFTTT SEO update webinar starts in about five minutes. We will see you guys then, otherwise we’ll see you next week. Thanks everyone.

Hernan: Bye bye guys.

Marco: Bye everybody.