Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 114

Click on the video above to watch Episode 114 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: All right. We are live. I’m slightly confused by the new layout. I feel like I’m on the Brady Bunch or something, I don’t know if everyone is seeing this. Anyways welcome to Hump Day Hangouts episode 114, we got everybody here, and we’re happy to see everybody, so man, I just pick at random, I guess, I’ll go backwards. Hernan, how’s it going?

Hernan: Hey, guys. Hey, everyone. It’s really good to be here. I have no idea how to turn on the mic, off the mic, so I apologize if I’m a bit loud, we’ll get use to it.

Adam: all right. Bradley, how’s it going?

Bradley: Marsha, Marsha, Marsha. You said Brady Bunch, I had to do it.

Adam: Awesome.

Bradley: I’m good, man. I’m excited about using the new Webinar Jam platform I hope it works well for us guys, to prevent some of the issues we’ve had with just flat out Hangouts before, so we’re going to test it out and see what I guess after one or two Hump Day Hangout sessions, you guys will be the judge and let us know what you prefer.

Adam: Yeah. Definitely. Helpful feedback is appreciated.

Bradley: Yeah.

Adam: All right. Chris, how’s it going?

Chris: Doing good. Finally snowy in Austria, enough to go snowboarding, so-

Adam: Nice.

Chris: We’ll be off next week a couple days.

Adam: Awesome. That sounds like a good time. Speaking of not snow, Marco how are you doing?

Marco: Hey, man. What’s up?

Adam: How’s the weather?

Marco: I cannot complain, man. It’s about 85 today. Dip in the pool before Hump Day Hangouts it’s always good.

Adam: Not bad.

Bradley: I’m going swimming before Hump Day Hangouts, that’s-

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:01:38].

Adam: Somebody’s got an open mic, if you guys can check real quick, while I’m doing the announcements, and see if that goes away. Anyways.

Bradley: What’s an open mic mean?

Adam: I can hear an echo. Might just be me, but since we’re using a new setup. Anyways, real quick, wanted to let everybody know we’ve had some updates, we’ve had some other things going on with Outsource Kingpin, and Content Kingpin which is obviously the Mastery PR products, via kind of Semantic Mastery. On Monday, there’s going to be some price increases associated with that, so we wanted to let everybody know today that you’ve got the opportunity if you aren’t in either of those products now’s a great time to go check them out. All right. There’s some awesome training.

The Outsource Kingpin, if you’re not using VA’s you should be, I mean, I’ll let everyone else expand on that, but that’s the bottom line. Then, Content Kingpin is awesome. Great ways for creating really high quality content, but for a really low price. I’m going to put the links up there, if you guys want to say something more about those, I mean, that’s obviously not the sales page in Word, but if you want to go in depth real quick, I’m just going to pop the links up, so people can check them out.

Marco: Yeah, man, you mentioned products, I’m surprised you didn’t mention that I’m going back into the lab.

Bradley: Yeah.

Adam: Good one. I got to watch it, right? I’m not sure, so I’ll let you guys do some talking about that.

Marco: No. We just decided that it was time to shove more, put the children away, shove more shit down Googles throat, and we’ve been kind of going back and forth, of course, co-creator of RYS Academy, Doctor Gary Kirwan, and then another master spammer that we got hold of, and we’re getting together for the next six to seven months, or however long it takes. Just figuring out how to shove more shit down Googles throat, and making them like it. That’s what we’re into, that’s what we’re going for, and I think we’re going to put RYS Academy on steroids, if not on steroids already. It’s going to be, so I’m looking forward to what comes out after we’re done.

Bradley: Yeah. That ones going to be a big one, because the first version is so freaking powerful still, and they’re going in and adding a bunch of new shit to it already, so it’s going to be incredibly powerful, I’m excited to see it. I just want to reinforce what Adam said about Outsource Kingpin, and Content Kingpin, guys, we’re tripling the price on Monday, tripling it, so just so you know, there will be not be any whining, or support tickets that come in that get special privileges, unless you’re a Mastermind member, but other than that it’s going to be triple the price, so if you haven’t got them, pick them up now, because we are not going to be selling any cheap products anymore, inexpensive products anymore. They’re too damn good. It is what it is.

With that said, I saw somebody, Jay you asked where do you submit questions ahead of time? On the thank you page, after you register there is a, and I even have a video that I recorded specifically pointing down and saying submit your question, here. You can submit a question there. I’m assuming if you have pre-questions before the next webinar, now that you’re registered, you just have to register again, I don’t know. We haven’t tested that. I don’t know if it will give you an error code if you try to preregister.

Also, on the thank you page, guys, there will be a link I point to it in the thank you page video that says that you can auto subscribe to the rest of this Hump Day Hangouts series, so that the notifications will come to you every week without you having to register every week, unless you want to submit a pre-webinar question. In which case just go through the registration process one more time, it’s very simple. Okay?

With that said, the questions can be posted here in chat once they’re live, and if for whatever reason that doesn’t work, posting your questions through the thank you page, like for example if, and again we haven’t tested it, but if Webinar Jams says no you’re already registered or whatever, then we’ll have to set up a Google Forum where you guys can submit questions a head of time, and we might do HD questions, or semanticmastery.com/hdquestions, or something like that, so that you guys can always go to a Google forum, and submit your questions. We’ll test it out, again, just bare with us, we’re on episode 114 now, and we’ve done it all 113 episodes on just Hangout platform, so I’m sure they’ll be a little bit of kinks and bugs, but we’ll work through it. Okay? With that said, can we get into what we got?

Adam: Yeah. Let’s do this.

Bradley: Okay. I’m going to grab the screen, and we’re going to look at the pre-posted questions that we did receive, and then from there we’ll just jump into questions that come through chat, so let me figure out how to share a screen again. Here we go. Are you seeing it?

Hernan: Yeah.

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: Okay.

Chris: Yeah.

Should You Set Category Pages of An Affiliate Blog To NoIndex To Avoid Duplicate Content Issues?

Bradley: All right, so here’s the questions that were submitted the first one was Mark O’Connell, he’s a regular, he’s the winner of today for the first question. He says, “Semantic Mastery crew, I hope all is well. I have a followup question, I asked this a while back, and what I asked was should I now index my blog category page as it has a summary of the blog posts, and I didn’t want any duplicate content issues on my site, and you advised to no index it, so I did and that works well for my lead gen sites, because I don’t care about ranking the blog, but I’m about to setup a affiliate site and would like the blog to rank. Should I no index it and forget about ranking my blog, or is there something that can be done? Cheers.”

What I was saying category pages don’t have to be no indexed. Unless, you only have one post in that category. Okay? Because, here’s the thing. It depends on your theme, too, because a lot of the times the themes, and I think you said that it shows a summary of the blog post is what you said. Typically a category page, if your theme only shows a summary and the read more link or button, or whatever. To go expand to go to the full post, then that’s not going to be duplicate content anyways, unless, again you only have one post in that category, in which case there could be a slight issue with that, but typically with a summary showing instead of the full text of the post, it’s not going to create an issue. Okay?

I think, what you’re mixing up, Mark, with what I was talking about was tag pages. Not necessarily category pages. Now, category pages, if you’re going to be siloing out a site a lot of the times the category pages are going to be the category page URL will be redirected to the actual page URL that you setup, because remember you match slugs, when you’re siloing out a site you create a page, and then you go create a category with the same slug. Then, what you can do is redirect the category page URL to the page URL, because remember even though they share the same slug, a category page is going to have domain.com/category/slug, so it’s going to insert category in the middle of that link. If that makes sense?

Typically with a silo site, there’s really no reason, unless it’s a blog style site, there’s really no reason for you to leave the category pages for visitors to visit, because a lot of the times that’s not, you want the top of the silo to be an actual page, and not just an index page, which is what a category page is, is an index page. Does that make sense? What I would suggest is you don’t have to no index them, I think you’re confusing what I was talking about for tag pages, but for category pages you’re usually going to have more than one post in the category, anyway, so you shouldn’t have to worry about it. It only becomes and issue if the category page shows the full text post, in which case I would no index it. Does that make sense? Anybody want to add to that?

Hernan: No. I think that was perfect.

Bradley: Okay. All right. We’re going to move on. Guys, the reason why I tag pages, I recommend no indexing tag pages, unless you know what you’re doing, because a lot of times people when they create a tag, for a post, they use unique keywords, or unique tags for that post. For every single post, for every single tag that you add to a post, WordPress automatically creates a tag page from that tag itself. If you have a unique tag that’s only been added to one post, then that tag page that’s created automatically by WordPress will be an exact duplicate of your post. Right?

The only difference is in the URL, because just like I mentioned before domain.com/category/slug, a tag page is domain.com/tag/slug. Right? Which would be their post slug, in this case. What happens is you end up with a duplicate page, if you only have one post with that tag, if that makes sense? If you have two posts, with the same tag then that’s going to be a tag index page just like a blog, or a category index page, so it’s going to list both posts on that tag page for that tag.

Both posts that share that tag will be shown on that tag index page, so that prevents it from being duplicate content, but you can also use canonicals, which you go into your advanced settings, go to tags and in advanced, or click on the tab, and go to advanced, especially if you’re using something like Yoast, plug in WordPress SEO, by Yoast, then you can go in and actually set canonicals from unique tags back over to the post, which is something pretty ninja, because then you can build links to the tag page itself. It will be harder for competitors to trace back what it is you’re doing. Okay?

It just gives you another, basically another link building point, too. All right. That’s probably what you were confusing, but category pages are usually left to index. I mean, there’s no reason to not index them unless you’re only going to have one post in a category page, but usually your going to end up having them 301’ed to a actual page that’s going to be the top of your silo, anyways. Great question, though.

Would You NoFollow Authority Sites To Keep Its Link Juice?

Next one. This one’s from Chris, he says, “An on page SEO question, I’m building out an authority site, and I want to sculpt PR authority on my site, via the internal linking instructions and keep as much link use as possible. However, I also want to link out to authority sites, too. Would it be wise to now follow those links, or not? What are your thoughts?”

I always, no follow outbound links unless I’m specifically trying to push link equity somewhere. For all money sites, I usually just install a no follow external links plugin, that will automatically add the no follow and target equals blank, which means open a new tab for any external links. I usually do that, because if somebody lands on my site, if they click an external link, I don’t want that to load in that same tab, because then they go off site. I’d rather open in another tab, so that even if they click over into the other tab, my site is still showing in their browser window, it’s a better engagement signal for analytics, for example.

Unless you have some advanced tracking scripts through analytics that show when a cursor, or somebody is off the actual browser tab, but the universal analytics tag, the generic universal analytics tag isn’t that sophisticated, you have to go in and actually add scripts and stuff to analytics in order for it to recognize that your mouse is not within the browser, or that somebodies not actually viewing that tab.

When somebody clicks on an external link, and it opens in another tab, then you’re still getting under most normal analytics conditions, you’re still being shown as time on site, that visitor is still being shown as time on site. Does that make sense? I just learned that in the last week, guys, because I’m brushing up, I’m actually learning a lot about analytics stuff right now, so I didn’t know that before, but I still didn’t want people to be taken off my site, if they clicked an external link, because they may never come back.

At least when you click a external link it opens in a new tab, and your site is still available for them in another tab, so they can always come back to the site without having to click a back button or whatever. But, to get back to your original question, should you now follow them? I do. There might be some conflicting opinions out there, I’d like to hear Marco, and Hernan’s opinion as well, but I usually always no follow out bound links on money sites, unless I’m specifically trying to push equity somewhere.

Hernan: Yeah. I wanted to say real quick, I’m sorry, again about mic volume I tried to lower it, but I cannot. Sorry. Now, yeah, I don’t do follow, I leave them as they are. That’s just the way it is. That’s just the way I do it, so I think at the end of the day, I think you’ll need to test which ones give you more equity, because I understand Bradley’s position of no following them to keep the links use, but I also try to keep the [inaudible 00:14:26] flowing, or keep the do not try to stop [inaudible 00:14:29], you know? That has given me good results.

At the end of the day, again, when you for example when you are embedding that tweed, when you’re embedding Google Plus post, et cetera, those are usually do follow links. You know? I just want to keep that exact same logic when doing outbound links. In any case, use them, because we have proven time and time again that do follow, no follow it doesn’t really matter, because we were getting good [inaudible 00:14:57] from no follow properties, social properties, so at the end of the day it’s just a matter of testing, I think.

Bradley: Yeah. Before we get Marco’s opinion on that, I want to explain that I totally agree with Hernan, in that don’t sweat so much, like for example, when you’re trying to get links, inbound links to your site, don’t worry so much about them being do follow, no follow. I think there’s way too much emphasis put on that now, it used to be a couple of years ago it was so much more important, but now link profiles are so heavily weighted with no follow links, because that’s pretty much how most sites are going for external links.

They are doing very similar to what I’m mentioning, which is just no following all external links. It’s just an automatic thing. So, because of that it’s not necessarily that trying to push link juice, or link equity as it is about pushing relevancy, guys. You don’t need to push PR to validate relevancy. Does that make sense? That’s why I typically, and again, it’s like what Hernan said, I totally agree you should test, you should test for your own specific situation. My logic behind always no following is a lot of the biggest sites do that, most sites do that, now. Where there are no follow links for any external links, number one.

Number two, I don’t care about losing link juice, but I no follow them because I don’t want to lose the link juice, but it’s not necessarily, to me, I don’t care whether I’m losing link juice or not, I just want to make sure that the link, no follow or not is linking to something that reinforces the content on the page that I’m linking from. If that makes sense? The bots are still going to crawl that link, there’s just not going to pass juice through that link, but if they crawl that link, and they land on the destination page, and it reinforces the content that they just came from, that’s a positive signal, regardless. Anyways, Marco, your turn, please.

Marco: Yeah. Link juice will still bleed. No matter, even if it’s no follow. They tell you that it’s not passing any link equity, but it will, and it will flow back, but what we do on a money site is exactly what you said, no follow everything, and then we go outside to other properties that we own to push do follow back to the money site, I mean we select places like Twitter, YouTube, and Google, of course, because it’s Google to get the do follow links, that we want to power up whatever it is that we’re doing, that’s why we went into RYS Academy. We’re going to show people how to get do follow links from Twitter. I different way than what we showed in the original Twitter SEO Academy, which it turned into Twitter SEO Academy, we can actually get a really good do follow thing out of Twitter.

Those are really powerful, because you have to remember your link profile is going to be mostly no follow. Then, you go into these powerful sites and you get a do follow, Google pays special attention. It becomes really powerful and it’s within whatever it is that you’re doing, that relevant, niche relevant of course, and [inaudible 00:18:14] I mean, it hits and it’ll push everything up, it’s unbelievable what happens when everything is sculpted right.

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: When you do everything right onsite, offsite, and you get hit with a do follow. It just pushes everything up. That’s how we’re doing it.

What Are Some Best Practices In Keeping The Backlinks And Link Juice From An Old Site To The New One?

Bradley: Thanks, guys. Next one. Let’s see. Andy, says, “Hi, all. One of my clients has a website ranking well, however we are building another new site for them, and copying their old site content and articles over. We plan to give the old articles a face lift, making sure it’s optimized well, and updated with new images that are more relevant for the market today. Those sites are now live, but the old site will soon be closed. We currently link from the old site to the new one, and eventually will 301 to the old site to the new. Can you give us any tips on this kind of processing work? What’s the best way to do this, and make sure that all the back links copy over, and we maximize link juice, et cetera?

I think while the old site is up, if you have both pages live on the web, like the old page, and the new page, linking from the old page to the new page really isn’t the best way to do it, in my opinion. You’re better of pointing a canonical to the new page, because it’s the same content, it’s called a cross domain canonical, and again you can do that with pretty much all of the SEO plugins, now. You just go down to the advanced section within the page editor, itself, go down to the widget area, where your SEO plugin is underneath the WYSIWYG Editor, and click on the advanced settings for whichever SEO plugin you’re using, and there’s typically a canonical field there, that you can paste the link to the new post. Right? The new page with the content on it on the new website. All right? Because it’s the same content, and across domain canonical is how Google actually tells us how we’re supposed to handle that.

Once you are done building out the new site, and you’re ready to make the permanent switch, then you make the 301. Okay? What I would also do is take an inventory of inbound links to the pages and posts on the old site, take a closer look, this is what I’ve always done, but take a closer look at the individual pages and posts, unless it’s a massive site, but I don’t know whether it is or not, but most of the sites that I’ve dealt with aren’t that big, so I’m able to go through and take a look at all the various pages of posts that have inbound links. You’ll be surprised a lot of pages and posts won’t have any links at all, or they might have a couple spammy links, and stuff like that, in which case I wouldn’t 301.

All I’m saying is take a survey of the inbound link profile to individual pages and posts, if it’s not a massive, massive site. Find, if you can identify pages, or posts that didn’t, that have kind of a poorer link profile built to them or some spammy links, some links from bad neighborhoods, that kind of stuff, then I would not 301 those, I would just take the whole page down, if that makes sense? You’re going to copy the content over to the new site, and you’re going to have a new page URL, anyway, but then you’re not pushing, the way I look at it is if you’re going through this process it’s a good time to try to clean up some questionable links within you inbound link profile.

Now, if you notice, here’s the thing, if you notice a significant drop, you’re going to see a lot of dancing anyways, because you’re changing domains, it’s just the way it is, but if you after some time has passed, and it should start to settle in, if you’re noticing that some of the pages and posts aren’t ranking as well as they used to, or whatever, and they happen to be the ones that you did not redirect, because what you deemed were spammy links, then you might want to go back and selectively start re-enabling those 301’s, if that makes sense?

Again, I like to try to, if I have to go through that process, anyway, I like to take the time to try to clean up the link profile, and you might not even have that issue, but if it’s an older site chances are you probably have some spammy links in that profile, that could be cleaned up. You guys want to comment on that, as well?

Hernan: I agree with you Bradley. Whatever you can do to clean that up and then wait. Give it 15 to 20 days maybe to get that going, but I think that should help.

Bradley: Very good. Jeff’s up, “New member of 2.0,” so he’s talking about IFTTT, and moving along, “Loving your training and taking action.” Awesome, Jeff, I would plus one you, but I cannot, which by the way, guys do you think, I just was thinking about this while I was listening to Hernan or Marco, but because this chat box is awfully small, maybe what we should do is still set up an event page, and at the start of every webinar, I’ll just post the event page link, the Google event page link at the top here, as a sticky comment. Then, that way I can just pull open the browser with that window, and we can see everybody’s questions, and that way Wayne can still submit memes, because I’m really going to miss those.

I don’t know maybe we’ll do that, like I said, this is a work in progress, guys, we’re going to work out a system that works well, but what do you guys think about that, comment in the box, let me know if you think having a Google event page available for each one of the Hump Day Hangouts, so that we can see each others questions better? That might be a better way to go. Let me know what you think. We’re going to keep moving.

What Are Your Insights On YEXT?

All right. Jeff says, “Any insight on Yext, good, bad or indifferent?” Okay. Yext is okay, it’s expensive. It works fairly well, I’m not going to lie, I’ve used it. The thing that sucks about Yext is when you decide to stop paying them, they go in and basically remove all the listings that they were managing before. It’s an absolute nightmare, it’s like once you get on the hook with them, you’re stuck. You’re stuck on the hook, because if you get results, if part of the reason you rank in the maps section is because of the Yext citations that they’re managing, which they manage a lot, then you go and you remove that eventually because you decide you don’t want to pay them $500.00 a year, or whatever it is $350.00 a year per listing, or whatever it is.

Then, they’re going to go in and basically pull all those down, it’s a real pain in the ass, and it can end up really tanking your rankings, because they manage a lot of the higher end citation links. I’ve made that mistake, I avoided Yext for several years, and I let a salesperson from Yext talk me into testing them, so I’ve got a few clients in there, and a couple lead gen sites in there that I’m now stuck every single year, I got to pay that bill to Yext for each one of those sites that they manage, because otherwise my rankings can tank. It just sucks because now I’m stuck, my hands are tied. You know what I mean?

I would recommend avoiding them. There’s some benefits to them, but I think overall you can still accomplish the same thing without using them, and then you’re not, they’re not going to pull the rug out from underneath you if you decide, if you build it up on your own, then you don’t have to worry about that is what I’m saying. Hopefully, that makes sense.

“How negative is the outcome when cancelling a contract in regards to citations in any paid damage?” I just explained that. “Also it seems like some of their sites have do follow links except, especially to Facebook and Twitter, is it just worth it for a company to keep their monthly subscription or dump it? Any recommendations? Happy new year.” Yeah. Again, you know I think once your on it, you’re stuck. Honestly, I’ve never, I tried to, attempted to pull one down, it was ranking well before, and cancelled it, and I ended up losing my rankings and there was like, I just remember it being a freaking, it’s about a year and a half ago, but I just remember it being a nightmare trying to recover those citations that Yext pulled down, because it was like a lot of the directories were saying that I couldn’t register that site, the business because of Yext. It was just a pain in the ass, so the way I look at it is if you’re already using it, keep using it. If you’re not using it, don’t use it. You guys have an experience with Yext?

Hernan: No. Unfortunately I haven’t Bradley, you’re the citation expert, here. With that said, there’s a [inaudible 00:26:21] that we start offering that service as well, so-

Bradley: Yeah.

Hernan: I will just tease it, but I won’t say anything else, but there’s a big probability that we come to an agreement with one big company, so we can start offering that to you guys as well with the quality that comes with Semantic Mastery products. You know?

Is It Safe To Blast The Site.Google.com With SAPE Backlink?

Bradley: Yeah. Okay. The next one, I’m not even going to attempt to pronounce that, let’s see, “Is it safe to blast the site Google.com with safe back links?” I’m going to give you my answer, and then I’m anxious to hear the answers to the other guys, too, but I blast the shit out of any Google property with any type of link. I don’t care about spamming Google links, usually I try, the first tier links to the Google property, I try to make them somewhat higher quality, but didn’t throw kitchen sink spam behind that, but for sites.google.com, yeah, site back links my suggestion is to try to get somewhat topically, well at least categorically relevant links from [inaudible 00:27:25]. I know if you’re buying links yourself from the site network, but if you’re buying them from, like a black-hat forum provider, you can usually request. If you are buying them from a reseller that doesn’t bulk a lot of the times you’re not going to be able to specify which type of category it’s coming from, but it’s an effective strategy, there’s no doubt. What do you guys have to say?

Marco: He’s talking RYS Academy, here, and you’re talking to the unrepentant spammer. I’ve tried [inaudible 00:27:54]. I’ve tried to break it, literally. Throwing anything, and everything at it, at not only the sites, but at the folders, files everything that’s involved with creating that sites.google.com, and it’s still holding. I mean, most of the stuff that we did ranks like crazy still. Anything new that we throw up, now ranks even without back linking.

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: I mean, it’s crazy. It’s crazy what’s going on. The more that they try to shut things down, the more that they open up for some backdoor goodies, so that’s what we’re after. Every time they close door, another one opens, so we go in there, and see how much trouble we can get into. Yeah. Totally. Throw a [inaudible 00:28:38] throw the kitchen sink, if a dog gets in the way kick him in there, too.

Bradley: Yeah.

Hernan: Yeah. I wanted to say real quick that it’s like those commercials where you see the guys, the stuntmen, and say, do not try this at home. Marco, knows his stuff, and he knows what he’s doing, and we’re having great results. My point is that whatever you deem worthy, I guess, the keyword here is that the same way we treat our IFTTT properties, like Google Plus, or whatever you’re doing for a client, or whatever site you deem worthy, you may want to go with [inaudible 00:29:18], a tier two, maybe a tier one, and then blast them with spam whatever, but keep it safe, but then again, if you want to test with sites.google.com for your own projects, or whatever you do not have, we always say this, do not test on your clients website, by any means, do not test on whatever you deem worthy. Okay? That’s really important. I think that’s a big caveat, but yeah go to town. I mean, go to town, if you have your own projects that you want to test, or you want to just go totally full black-hat and rank, turn and burn, whatever you are trying to do, go ahead and go nuts.

Bradley: Very good.

Marco: Yeah.

Bradley: Sorry. Go ahead, Marco.

Marco: I’m going to agree, and disagree with Hernan, and that you totally protect the client. You totally protect your money, but if we’re doing RYS methods, it all depends on how he’s building his G-site, because if he’s doing a traditional site then you don’t want to spam that site. You do want the next layer of protection, which he should then be building an IFTTT network around it, and spam the crap out of that, going into the Google site. The way that we do it, as you know is we stack Iframes–

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: The power goes through the Iframe to the source, which is inside Google for extra protection and from there it goes out to wherever it is that we want to direct it. That’s why it works so well. It’s just extra layers of protection.

Bradley: That’s a great point, Marco.

Marco: It’s Google doing it.

Bradley: Yeah. That’s a great point.

Marco: It all depends.

Bradley: Because within the sites.google.com site it’s with the way we set them up in stacks, you’re right. We don’t link usually direct from the sites.google.com site to the money site, it’s all the links to the money site are within the Iframes. That’s a good point. That separates what I was saying earlier, and what Hernan was saying, is if you were building this site, the Google sites, specifically to link over to your money site, then I would still put that first tier layer of links that were higher quality and then through spam behind that.

As Marco was just saying he’s a 100% correct, if you’re using the drive stacking method that we do inside of the RYS training, and the RYS stacks that you can purchase, then yeah you can spam directly to the Google site because there’s not a direct link to the money site, it’s all going through Iframes, and that’s a great point. Thanks, Marco. I forgot about that.

How Does The Video Syndication Using PBNs Work?

Okay. Next one is Justin, he says, “Hey, please go in depth on video syndication PBN’s,” I thought we did this a few weeks ago, but we can do it again. Themes, domain name choices, hosting options. Domain name choices, I typically don’t give a shit what the name is, because if I’m looking at domains that are themed for particular topics, that’s all I care about, I don’t care what the name is. Hosting opts, again, usually for, and for video syndication posts, I’m going to let Marco talk a little bit more about this, because he’s heading up the Video Powerhouse builds right now, it’s something that he took over, but when I was building on a lot of the video syndication sites for my own networks and stuff, I would just get domains based upon metrics. Relevancy wasn’t as important a year ago for video syndication sites. I don’t know what the impact is now, but I know before it was more about metrics, just like it was for buying domains for SEO. Right? Now, I believe it’s going more about topical relevancy. What do you say Marco?

Marco: Yeah. We’re theming everything. We want that topical relevancy. If we have a health category, we want it to be in some way related to health we don’t want to add something that was carpentry in a health category. We’re not even looking at metrics. We don’t care of it’s zero, whatever because it’s third party and they have their own algorithm and they’re only guessing at what Goo.gl is doing. From our testing we know that Google wants relevant. Right? Unique relevant content that’s updated on a regular basis that’s what they want. They tell us exactly what they want, so we’re after that. Metrics, if we can get an [inaudible 00:33:35] domain which you cannot. Right? It’s clean and it’s pristine, yeah, it can be about anything, and you can change it because of the power that it has, other than that then just forget the metrics, look for it to be relevant, look for it to be on point, in your niche, and that’s how we’re building out Video Powerhouse, and that’s how we’re building out the secondary embed networks.

We have the primary embeds with roots and we’re going to have IFTTT around it, and then from that we’re going into the secondary, which is also going to be themed web 2.0’s, so we’re getting double power. We’re getting everything niched, so it’s just going to carry, it’s going to be the best embed network out there. Period. I don’t know how much more I can say, and getting back to his question, that’s what you should be doing. Domain names don’t matter. Hosting options, hide the footprint as much as you can.

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Maintenance involved, there’s tons of maintenance, because you have to keep track, they go down all the time, and you have to go in, and you have to fix it, you have to update, I mean, we have a couple of programmers that look over everything, each and every day. Right? That’s how much maintenance is involved.

Bradley: For smaller networks you can, syndication networks, you can use Main WP to help you manage all that, and Main WP has extensions such as uptime monitors, and stuff like that, which can notify you when your sites go down. That is a ranking factor, so it does actually matter, to make sure you got a somewhat decent host that your sites aren’t going down all the time, I know that, that can kind of suck if you’re doing video syndication sites, because you don’t want to spend a lot of money on hosting those, because they are just syndication sites, I get that.

You might want to think about maybe getting a better shared hosting account from somewhere like WPX hosting, which is Terry Kyle’s hosting, I’m actually testing that right now, one of my newest sites I just bought a hosting package from him. Something like that, that has good managed services, and using various DNS services, third party DNS services, like CloudFlare, Amazon Root S3, and there’s other ones as well. That way even if you only have one IP, with video syndication networks, I found that it’s not as important to hide the footprint as it is for PBN’s.

At some point that may change, though, it’s likely to change. You’re better off masking, or hiding as much footprint as possible, up front, so that you don’t have to do it later. What I’m saying is, for smaller networks you can get away with using one hosting account, one IP. Make sure it’s a decent host, though. Then, try to basically split up your sites using different DNS services. Okay? That’s another way to kind of minimize your hosting cost, because on of the things that’s shitty about using PBN hosts, and stuff, a lot of times those host accounts are so overrun with just shitty sites, and they slam way too many sites on those IP’s that the uptime is terrible.

The pages load slow, because of the bandwidth is being hogged by the hundreds of sites on those single IP’s. It’s ridiculous, so a lot of the times the SEO hosting isn’t good. I’d rather spend more money for a better host than try to diversify my IP’s, change your SOA records, and things like that to be able to hide the footprint, if that makes sense. Okay? Again, with video stuff it’s a little bit more forgiving, guys, certainly than it is for blog networks for websites. All right.

Marco: Yeah.

Bradley: Sorry. Go ahead.

Marco: The way we went after building Video Powerhouse is just set it up from the get go to hide anything and everything we could, so that we wouldn’t have to do it later on.

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: It’s just better. It’s preparation. Right?

Bradley: Yeah. I agree with that, because again, even if you can get away with it now, let’s say a year from now all of a sudden IP’s and footprints effect even video syndication. Video ranking, as it does, and it can become a negative factor like it would for a website. Using blog networks for websites. If that’s the case, then you’d have to go back through and rework all of your networks, and that’s a real pain in the ass. You’re better off setting it up now, the correct way.

Would The Same Image With Different File Names Result To Low Quality Signal Or Not?

All right. The next one is, “If you use a copy of the exact same image on multiple pages and use different file names, is this a low quality signal, or is this a good way to improve relevance?” No. It’s a low quality signal Sky, because Google knows, Google can read that image, they’re image recognition, algorithm is hell of a lot better than it used to be. Even changing the file names and stuff isn’t going to be good enough, I guess if you skew the images and that kind of stuff enough, you could probably get away with it, but it’s better to use unique images on every page. Just so you guys know, there’s been a lot of testing done. Eric Lancheres, he does a lot of testing on stuff like this. He’s done some tests, and case studies where he’s proven that using original images over stock images is a ranking factor.

Even if you have a stock image with the licensing and all that kind of stuff, it’s the fact that it’s not unique, Google knows that image is a stock image, because it’s used on other websites. Don’t get me wrong, I still use stock images, today, I’m not going to always have unique images for sites, but if you have, if there’s anyway you can get unique original images, that’s actually a ranking factor. Using the same image on multiple pages that’s kind of a negative factor, because Google can recognize that image, unless you’re doing something to skew the image to make it unrecognizable. You can do something like go to TinEye and drop the file in there, and see where else it is on the web.

You guys familiar with TinEye? If not, go check it out. You can drop images in there, and it will tell you where else that image is on the web. All right. Let’s go take a look at that real quick. Reverse image search, there you go, tineye.com. You can drag and drop an image in here, you can paste URL in here, you can do whatever you want, and it will go out and show you where that image is on the web. Where TinEye has it indexed, anyways. Okay? I recommend-

Marco: Yeah. Can you guys see me right now?

How Does RankBrain Impact The Indexing And Ranking Of Website Assets Like Articles?

Bradley: Trying to stay unique if possible. All right. Last one on this sheet, then we’re going to get into what’s in here, which I know we didn’t get very far. It is what it is. David’s up, he says, “What impact do you guys think that RankBrain is having on the indexing and ranking of website assets, such as articles, et cetera?” All right. My understanding is that RankBrain is an algorithm layer that was added. That brings Google search more further into the semantic web, because it understands more what the semantic relationships are between words and entities. More about entities than anything.

I’m going to let Marco talk about this, because I know he’s the patent geek out of all of us. As far as indexing and ranking of website assets and articles, again, I don’t think it’s so much about indexing and ranking. It does have an effect on indexing and ranking, because RankBrain is looking to validate the entity, the publishing entity. Right? The publisher of the content, it’s looking at its other relationships to other entities on the web. Who is this entity, and how does it relate, and how does it fit into this topic, this category? Is it an authority site, or is it an orphaned site? Does it have semantic relationships, or does it not? That’s going to effect indexing and ranking. Marco, can you share your expertise with this?

Marco: You hit the nail on the head. Entity validation. I mean, as we go deeper and deeper into the semantic web, and we’re already pretty deep in the shit, it is what it is all about. You are either a validated entity that’s trusted, and authoritative, or you’re somewhere in the middle, or your out there at nowhere, and nobody is paying attention to whatever it is that you’re doing. You either have to become a seed site, or part of a seed set, or get as close to a seed site, or seed set as possible, so that you feed RankBrain. Right? You feed that artificial intelligence, and get the bot to see you as that validated, trusted entity that’s authoritative in it’s niche. I hope that makes sense.

Bradley: There you go.

Marco: That’s how it works.

Bradley: This graphic, right here.

Marco: That one. Exactly.

Bradley: Circle of trust. You. If you’re not in the circle of trust, and that’s what RankBrain does. RankBrain determines whether you are here, or here. That’s a funny movie. I haven’t seen that in a while, The Fockers.

Marco: I’m going to tease a little bit more in that we’re actually after the three pack, and the knowledge graph with RYS Academy revisited. I still don’t know what we’re calling it. We’re still going to call it Rank Your Shit, whatever, because you can rank your shit with it. What we’re after is exactly what you’re showing. It’s showing you how to get into that circle of trust by using Google.

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: I’m hoping it turns out the way that I see it turning out.

Bradley: All right. We got a few minutes to … let’s see, and guys I’ll go through the questions later on, and see. I heard you Marco, I don’t know who wasn’t hearing you, but anyways I’ll go through later and see what your responses was to my question about setting up an event page for these. We’ll see how that works. Adam, has anybody been paying attention to questions? Nevermind I see-

Adam: Yeah. We’ve been interacting a little bit.

Bradley: Yeah.

Adam: I just start at the bottom and work my way up.

Bradley: Okay.

Adam: [crosstalk 00:43:35] five minutes.

Marco: Greg has the first question.

Bradley: Okay. “I want to make my page,” is that the one?

Marco: Yeah, or the one below that, Wayne, I think we answered that.

Adam: Yeah. Let’s do Greg’s question.

Can We Add A Static Page Linking To An Authority Site To Multiple RSS Feeds In Lisa’s RankFeeder?

Bradley: Okay. “I want to make a page on my site a static or sticky page,” let me see guys, I’ll grab this screen. No, because it will look like that mirror, mirror thing, so nevermind. Okay. “I want to make a page on my site a static or sticky page and co-citation with one particular outside authority site in Lisa’s Rank Feeder. Can we add that same page to multiple RSS feeds and have a different page from the outside authority site, to each of the different creative feeds?” Have a different page from the outside authority site to each of the different creative feeds. Yeah. Greg, of course you can. That’s actually really powerful.

With Rank Feeder, okay, you guys know those of you that purchased it, if not, it’s a very powerful SEO tool for creating co-citation. Yeah. Greg, you can absolutely take one post or page and make it sticky across multiple Rank Feeder feeds, and use different content sources for each feed. That if they’re topically relevant, each time they, the third party content sources post new content, or publish new content the feed up dates, the bots come crawling and associates that type of content with your sticky post, your sticky page. Whatever. Yes.

That’s a very, very powerful strategy, Greg, and as far as I know, I haven’t tested it, but as far as I know, you could probably stack just about unlimited feeds on that, create unlimited feeds with that posted sticky and all it would do is help the relevancy. Again, I haven’t tested it, I recommend that you do that, prior to implementing it to a money site, or if it’s lead gen site or something that you’re willing to test on, that’s fine.

What Will You Expect From In-Stream Video Ads?

I wouldn’t do it for a client site until you’ve tested it. That’s a very powerful strategy, indeed. Okay. Next, Ethan, “Hey, guys. What are the expectations with In-Stream video ads? I ran a test campaign with placements that were topically relevant, although many of these placement videos didn’t have intent, unfortunately the results were disappointing. I’ve received about 350 views, and only one phone call. My ads are,” is that what happens it just cuts it off?

Adam: I guess we’re going to have to figure that out. I don’t see a way to expand it, or anything.

Bradley: Yeah. I think we’re going to have to set up an event page for the next one, guys. That’s cool, then I can lock the screen on the event page, and you guys can all see what I’m looking at as well. That’s probably the way to go, guys. For next week, we’ll do that, just so you know. I’ll create a Google event page, and I’ll post the link as a sticky link at the top of the chat box, here, so once you join the webinar you can just click on that and take us over. By the way, what I might do is create the event page like we have been, and then send an email out notifying you guys that the new event page is up prior to the webinar, so that you can post your questions early. How about that? Let’s do that, because that way you guys can still post all your questions on the event page prior to the webinar. I think that’s the best way to go. We’ll test that for next week, guys, sorry.

Ethan, as far as In-Stream, I have really, really good results with In-Stream ads. It’s not all campaigns, there’s no doubt. For list building purposes, when I’m driving people from an In-Stream ad to an opt in page, I’m having incredible results with In-Stream ads. In fact, some of my In-Stream ads are actually producing cheaper cost per acquisition, or cost per conversions then a lot of the other types of ads that I’m using, which is incredible.

We have Master class starting in about 10 minutes, so we got to wrap this up in about five. We got Master class starting in 10 minutes, and we’re going through a case study there where I’m doing an affiliate case study with nothing but paid traffic, and I’m getting really good results with In-Stream ads, as well. Let me go into that in granular detail on a biweekly basis. If your not in the Master class you should probably join, Ethan, for real, because if you’re doing any sort of paid traffic, like I am literally net deep in that right now in the case study, and it’s getting more and more advanced, and it’s awesome. I’m seeing killer, killer results. Okay? Yeah.

If you structure your campaign properly guys, you should be able to get really good results, it’s all about targeting though. You have to make sure, like you said that the videos may not have intent, they may be topically relevant, but you got to try to put yourself in the viewers position and what their intent is at that time. If they’re just trying to gain some general knowledge about a particular topic, then they might not be in the position to take action. You know what I mean? They’re unlikely to convert, because they’re not at that part of the sales cycle, where they want to make a purchase decision, or a take action. Whatever your conversion goal is, you know what I mean? It’s a matter of trying to figure out and target specifically the types of videos that they may be watching when their further along in that process, closer to that conversion goal, if that makes sense? You’ve just got to spend some more time refining your targeting, building your placement list, and maybe test some other targeting types. Okay? [crosstalk 00:48:37].

Adam: All right. I think we got to wrap it up and get ready for Master class.

Bradley: Yeah. Okay. We’ll do that, and I got about five minutes, right, or no? Do I have to do it, now? Yeah. Actually because we’re starting with-

Adam: Yeah. We should cut it off.

Bradley: Webinar Jam, I probably do need to cut it off. All right, guys. This was our first attempt. We appreciate everybody being patient with this. Next week, like I said, I’ll set up an event page, and then I’ll email it out to everybody on the list, so you can post your questions early. When we get into the webinar next week I’ll post the link to the top of the chat, and everybody can go chat on that event page and hopefully that will work. Thanks everybody for being here. We’ll see you guys in Master class in a few minutes.

Hernan: Bye-bye.

Bradley: Bye.

Marco: Bye, everyone.