In episode 124 of Semantic Mastery’s weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one viewer asked about how switchbox SEO works, particularly with regard to redirected content.
The exact question was:
I am considering the seo switchbox strategy – not sure how to word this but the question is with the rss syndication strategy how can posts be made on the cloned site if the site redirects to the clients site when visited – also if a post is made, that same post wont be on the clients site it will be on the clone site so is that just left normal ie part of the cloned site and not redirected to the client site? But of course the internal links in it will redirect to the clients site? sorry if that sounds confusing just confused about that aspect and basically want to know if i can built the ring and the rys around the cloned site ultimately keeping all the power with the cloned site should i disconnect the main pages and home page
Even if you know — deep down in your heart of hearts — how important SEO is, it's hard to prioritize when you have less than 3 hours a month to devote to it. But there's still a way to include the bare minimum, even if you run on a tight schedule. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand covers a minimum viable SEO strategy to give those with limited time a plan going forward.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week, Minimum Viable SEO. So if you only have a few minutes in a month, in a week to do some SEO, and I know many of you are professional SEOs, but you work with lots of folks, like content creators, clients, web developers, who have very, very limited time, what I want to try and do is provide a path for you of "do this if you have no other time in the week to do your SEO."
So let's say here's my calendar. It's February, so 28 days. Start of the month, you have an hour to give me, sometime in the first week of the month. It doesn't have to be, but that's a great way to go. At the start of each week, I'm going to ask for 10 minutes just to do a little bit of planning, and then each time you publish content, a very, very small amount of time, just 3 minutes.
I know it sounds hard to believe, but you can get a fair amount of solid SEO work. Especially if you're in an industry that is not hyper-competitive or if you're going after the right kinds of keywords, that aren't super competitive, you can really make a difference. If you're building up a lot of content over months and years, just following this simple protocol can really take your SEO to the next level.
Start of the month: 1 hour
So, all right, let's say we're at the start of our month. We have our hour. I want you to do one of two things, and this is going to be based on if you're technical SEO, meaning if your website is using WordPress and it's pretty much nicely crawlable, maybe you've signed up for Google Search Console, you don't see a lot of errors, there's not a lot of issues, you haven't created a bunch of technical data on your website in the past, great, fine, then you're going to be focused on keywords and content. A keyword to content map, which is something we've discussed here on Whiteboard Friday — I'd urge you to check that video out if you haven't yet — but I'm going to make an MVP version, a very, very small version that can help a little bit.
Keyword → content map MVP
Create a spreadsheet with valuable keywords...
That spreadsheet, I just want a spreadsheet with a few things in it, three things really. The most valuable keywords, so just the most valuable keywords that you know you're targeting or that you care about right now for your business. You think that people are searching for these keywords. Maybe you've done a little bit of keyword research. It could be for free, through Google's AdWords tool, or you could pay for something like Keyword Explorer for Moz, but, really, just 50 to 100 keywords in there.
...current rank and SERP features...
I want the current rank and whatever SERP features appear. You could even trim this down to just your current ranking and the top search SERP feature, so if it has a featured snippet, or if it has videos, or if it shows maps or news, whatever that is, tweets.
...and the URL targeting it (or a note to create content).
Then I want the URL that's targeting it. Or if you have no URL targeting it yet, you haven't yet created a piece of content that targets this keyword, put a little, "Okay, that's a 'needs to be created.' I need this before I can start targeting this keyword and trying to rank for it."
You're going to update this weekly. You can do that totally manually. Fifty keywords, you can look them up in an hour. You can check the rankings. You can see where you're going. That's fine. It's a little bit of a pain in the butt, but it can totally be done. Or you could use a tool, Moz Pro, Ahrefs, SEMRush, Searchmetrics. There are all sorts of tools out there that'll track rankings and show you which features appear and whether your URLs are in there or not.
Okay, this is our keyword to content map. If you have that hour, but you know you have technical issues on the site, I'm going to urge you, before you focus on keywords and content, to make sure your technical SEO, your crawl is set. That means, step one, just a basic, simple crawl analysis. So for free, you can use Google Search Console. It will show you, most of the time with relative accuracy, big important errors like 404s and 500s and things that Google thought we're duplicate content and that kind of stuff.
If you want to pay, you can get a little bit more advanced features and some better filters and sorting and more frequency and those kinds of things. Moz Pro is fine for that. Screaming Frog is good, OnPage.org. All of these are popular in the SEO field.
Crawl/technical SEO review
Step two, you don't need to worry about every single crawl issue. I just want you to worry about the most severe, most important ones with your one hour. Those are things like 404s and 500s, which can really cause a lot of problems, duplicate content, where you potentially need to use a rel=canonical or a 301 redirect, broken links, where you just go in and fix the broken link to something that's not broken, missing or bad titles, title elements that are particularly long or include misspellings or that just don't exist, bad, very bad to have a page on the web with no title, and thin content or no crawlable content. Those are really the worst of the bunch. There's a number more that you could take care of. But if you only have that limited time, take care of this. If you've already done this, then we can move on here.
Every time you publish a piece of content: 3 minutes
Finally, last thing, but not the least, every time you publish a piece of content, I'm going to ask for just three minutes of your time, and that is going to be around this minimum viable pre-publish checklist.
The minimum viable pre-publish checklist
So does the content have a keyword target? Yes, no, maybe? If it doesn't, you're going to need to go and refer over to your keyword content list and make sure that it does. So if you're publishing something, I'm assuming you're not publishing a tremendous amount of content, but a little bit. Make sure everyone has a keyword target. Make sure, if you can, that it's targeting two to three additional keywords, related keywords. So let's say I'm going after something like Faberge eggs. I probably also want to target Carl Faberge, or I want to target Faberge eggs museums, or I want to target Faberge eggs replicas, so these other terms and phrases that people are likely searching for that could have the same or similar keyword intent, that could live on the same page, that kind of thing.
Is that keyword in the title, the main one you're targeting? Do you have a compelling meta description? Is your content doing a good job of truly answering the searchers' queries? So if they've searched for this thing, are you serving up the content they need?
Then, have you used related topics? You can get those from places like the MozBar or MarketMuse or SEO Zone or Moz Pro. Related topics are essentially the words and phrases that you should also be using in addition to your keyword to indicate to the search engines, "Hey, this is really about this topic." We've seen some nice bumps from that.
You're doing this every time you publish content. It only takes three minutes.
Start of the week: 10 minutes
And the last thing, at the start of the week, I'm also asking you for these 10 minutes to do one or two actions. I just want you to plan one or two actions at the start of the week to bump your SEO. It could include some publication stuff. But let's assume you're just doing these three minutes every time you do that.
Take a few actions to boost your SEO
Link outreach and targeting keywords with content
At the start of the week, the last thing you're doing is just choosing one of these, maybe two. I don't need more. I want you to do something like link outreach. Reach out to a couple of high-potential targets. Maybe you use like a LinkedIn or SecTool to figure out people who are linking to two of your competitors. Or reach out to partners, to friends, do some content contributions, just a little thing to get one or two links. Or maybe create some content that's targeting a missed keyword. When you do that, of course, you go through your pre-publish checklist.
Upgrade ranking content
Maybe you are upgrading some content that's already ranking, like number 5 through 20. That's where there's a lot of opportunity for a high-value keyword to get bumped up. You could just do little things, like make sure that it's serving all of these items, try and get it a featured snippet, identify content that might be old, that needs a refresh, that's not serving the searcher intent as well because the information in there is old.
Contribute off-site content
Or you could try contributing some offsite content. That could be to places like YouTube, maybe you've seen videos show up for something, guest posts, a forum where you contribute, answers some questions on Quora, contribute something to LinkedIn or Medium, just something to get your brand, your content, and hopefully a link out there to a different audience than what's already coming to your site.
You do these things, right, you start the month with an hour. Every time you publish content, you put in 3 minutes, and at the start of the week, you put in 10 minutes to do a couple pieces of planning, this will take you a long way. Look, SEO professionals are going to do a lot more than this, for sure. But this can be a great start, a great way to get that SEO kicked off, to have a minimum viable SEO plan.
I look forward to your thoughts. And we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
In episode 124 of our weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked whether copying the product description and canonical URL tag of original product page to a Woocommerce site could cause issues.
The exact question was:
I have a woocommerce affiliate site . Is it okay to copy the product description and add a canonical url tag of original product page. Does it create any bad impact or issue?
According to our calculations, MozCon 2017 is a mere 158,000 minutes away. (But who’s counting, right?) As you might have guessed, we’re quite excited about our latest event, in large part because we have some new tricks up our sleeves. (More on that at a later date. We promise.)
Aside from a few tweaks here and there, though, the next MozCon won’t be much different from those in years past.
That is, it'll be unique and awesome in equal amounts.
MozCon 2017: July 17–19 in Seattle
You can still expect world-class speakers sharing original information in a one-of-a-kind, charged atmosphere. Plus great food, plenty of snacks, and conversations that’ll have your mind humming for days.
And for you last-minuters who haven’t grabbed your ticket yet, now’s the time to... um... grab that ticket you’ll be crying over if you wait too long:
We've kept you waiting long enough, so take a look at some of what's in store for you at MozCon 2017.
Emcee
Last year, we tried a format that included three emcees — Rob Ousbey, Zeph Snapp, and Ronell Smith.
The test was a success, with each doing an amazing job.
However, this year we’re returning to a single-emcee format, with Ronell Smith, a Moz Associate, taking the reins.
Ronell Smith is a content nerd who loves nothing more than seeing brands help themselves by recognizing content as more than mere words on a page.
The MozCon 2017 Agenda (Sneak Peek Edition)
With more than three months to go until the event, many of the details are still being finalized. Therefore, you should see this agenda as an appetizer for, say, a five-course meal. There’s plenty more where this came from.
For example, several speaking spots are yet to be finalized, and we’ve yet to send out the call for community speakers.
We’ll share those details in later posts.
However, we'd like to showcase our awesome lineup of speakers, many of whom will be familiar to you for the great work they do and share with the Moz community.
Dawn Anderson is an International and Technical SEO Consultant, Director of Move It Marketing, and a lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Up and to the Right: Growing Traffic, Conversions, & Revenue Matthew Barby HubSpot
So many of the case studies that document how a company has grown from 0 to X forget to mention that solutions that they found are applicable to their specific scenario and won't work for everyone. This falls into the dangerous category of bad advice for generic problems. Instead of building up a list of other companies' tactics, marketers need to understand how to diagnose and solve problems across their entire funnel. Illustrated with real-world examples, I'll be talking you through the process that I take to come up with ideas that none of my competitors are thinking of. Matt, who heads up user acquisition at HubSpot, is an award-winning blogger, startup advisor, and a lecturer.
Reverse-Engineering Google's Research Into What People Want Rob Bucci STAT Search Analytics
The SERP is the front-end to Google's multi-billion dollar consumer research machine. They know what searchers want. In this data-heavy talk, Rob will teach you how to uncover what Google already knows about what searchers are looking for. Using this knowledge, you can deliver the right content to the right searchers at the right time, every time.
Rob loves the challenge of staying ahead of the changes Google makes to their SERPs. When not working, you can usually find him hiking up a mountain, falling down a ski slope, or splashing around in the ocean.
Stephanie currently leads the Global Acquisition & Retention Marketing teams at Etsy. Previously, she was a Senior Consultant at Distilled.
Inside the Googling Mind: An SEO's Guide to Winning Clicks, Hearts, & Rankings in the Years Ahead Rand Fishkin
Founder of Moz, doer of SEO, feminist.
Searcher behavior, intent, and satisfaction are on the verge of overtaking classic SEO inputs (keywords, links, on-page, etc). In this presentation, Rand will examine the shift that behavioral signals have caused, and list the step-by-step process to build a strategy that can thrive long-term in Google's new reality.
Rand Fishkin is the founder and former CEO of Moz, co-author of a pair of books on SEO, and co-founder of Inbound.org. Rand's an un-save-able addict of all things content, search, and social on the web.
Data-Driven Design (3D) is an actionable, evidence-based framework for creating websites & landing pages that will increase your leads, sales, and customers. In this session you’ll learn how to use the latest industry conversion data to inform copywriting and design decisions that impact conversions. Additionally, I’ll share a new methodology for prioritizing your marketing optimization that will show you which pages are awesome (leave them alone), which pages aren’t (massive ROI potential here), and help you develop a common language that your teams of marketers, designers, and copywriters can use to work better together to collectively increase your conversion rates.
Unbounce co-founder Oli Gardner is on a mission to rid the world of marketing mediocrity by using data-informed copywriting, design, interaction, and psychology to create a more delightful experience for marketers and customers alike
The Tie That Binds: Why Email is Key to Maximizing Marketing ROI
Justine Jordan Litmus
If nailing the "omnichannel" experience (whatever that means!) is key to getting more traffic and converting more leads, what happens if we have our channel priorities out of order? Justine will show you how email — far from being an old-school afterthought — is core to hitting marketing goals, building lifetime value, and making customers happy.
Justine is obsessed with helping marketers create, test, and send better email. Named 2015 Email Marketer Thought Leader of the Year, she is strangely passionate about email marketing, hates being called a spammer, and still gets nervous when pressing send.
The Truth About Mobile-First Indexing
Cindy Krum
CEO and Founder at MobileMoxie, LLC
Mobile-first design has been a best practice for a while, and Google is finally about to support it with mobile-first indexing. But mobile-first design and mobile-first indexing are not the same thing. Mobile-first indexing is about cross-device accessibility of information, to help integrate digital assistants and web-enabled devices that don’t even have browsers, to achieve Google’s larger goals. Learn how mobile-first indexing will give digital marketers their first real swing at influencing Google’s new AI (Artificial Intelligence) landscape! Marketers who embrace an accurate understanding of mobile-first indexing could see a huge first-mover advantage, similar to the early days of the web, and we all need to be prepared.
Cindy Krum, the CEO and Founder of MobileMoxie, LLC, is the author of Mobile Marketing: Finding Your Customers No Matter Where They Are. She brings fresh and creative ideas to her clients, and regularly speaks at US and international digital marketing events.
Joanna Lord is the CMO of ClassPass, the world's leading fitness membership. Prior to that she was VP of Marketing at Porch and CMO of BigDoor. She is a global keynote and digital evangelist. Joanna is a recognized thought leader in digital marketing and a startup mentor.
Ian Lurie is founder, CEO, and nerdiest marketing nerd at Portent, a digital marketing agency he started in the Cretaceous era, aka 1995. Ian's meandering career includes marketing copywriting, expert dungeon master, bike messenger-ing, and office temp worker.
Facing the Future: 5 Simple Tactics for 5 Scary Changes Dr. Pete Meyers Moz
We've seen big changes to SEO recently, from an explosion in SERP features to RankBrain to voice search. These fundamental changes to organic search marketing can be daunting, and it's hard to know where to get started. Dr. Pete will walk you through five big changes and five tactics for coping with those changes today.
Dr. Peter J. Meyers (aka "Dr. Pete") is Marketing Scientist for Seattle-based Moz, where he works with the marketing and data science teams on product research and data-driven content.
Britney is a MN native who moved to Colorado to fulfill a dream of being a snowboard bum! After 50+ days on the mountain her first season, she got stir-crazy and taught herself how to program, then found her way into SEO while writing for a local realtor.
Everyone wants links and coverage from sites such as New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the BBC, but very few achieve it. This is how we cracked it. Over and over.
Lisa is the founder and CEO of award-winning SEO agency Verve Search and founder of Womeninsearch.net. Feminist, mother of two, and modern-day shield maiden.
How to Be a Happy Marketer: Survive the Content Crisis and Drive Results by Mastering Your Customer’s Transformational Journey Tara-Nicholle Nelson Transformational Consumer Insights
Branded content is way up, but customer engagement with that content is plummeting. This whole scene makes it hard to get up in the morning, as a marketer. But there's a new path beyond the epidemic of disengagement and, at the end of it, your brand and your content become regular stops along your customer's everyday journey.
Tara-Nicholle Nelson is the CEO of Transformational Consumer Insights, the former VP of Marketing for MyFitnessPal, and author of the Transformational Consumer.
Thinking Smaller: Optimizing for the New Wave of Social Video Platforms Phil Nottingham Wistia
SnapChat, Facebook, Twitter, Instragram, Periscope... the list goes on. All social networks are now video platforms, but it's hard to know where to invest. In this session, Phil will be giving you all the tips and tricks for what to make, how to get your content in front of the right audiences, and how get the most value from the investment you're making in social video.
Phil Nottingham is a strategist who believes in the power of creative video content to improve the way companies speak to their customers, and regularly speaks around the world about video strategy, SEO, and technical marketing.
You are laser focused on user growth. Meanwhile, you're neglecting a gold mine of existing customers who desperately want to be part of your brand's community. Tara Reed shares how to use communities, gamification, and membership content to grow your revenue.
Tara Reed is a tech entrepreneur & marketer. After running marketing initiatives at Google, Foursquare, & Microsoft, Tara branched out to launch her own apps & startups. Today, Tara helps businesses implement cutting-edge marketing into their businesses.
Ego and assumptions led me to chose the wrong keywords for my own site — yeah, me, Wil Reynolds, Mr. RCS. How did I spend three years optimizing my site and building links to finally crack the top three for six critical keywords, only to find out that I wasted all that time? However, in spite of targeting the wrong words, Seer grew the business. In this presentation, I'll show you the mistakes I made and share with you to approaches that can help you to build content that gets you thanked.
A former teacher with a knack for advising, he’s been helping Fortune 500 companies develop SEO strategies since 1999. Today, Seer is home to over 100 employees across Philadelphia and San Diego.
Marketing in a Conversational World: How to Get Discovered, Delight Your Customers, and Earn the Conversion Purna Virji Microsoft
Capturing and keeping attention is one of the hardest parts of our job today. Fact: It's just going to get harder with the advent of new technology and conversational interfaces. In the brave new world we're stepping into, the key questions are: How do we get discovered? How can we delight our audiences? And how can we grow revenue for our clients? Come to this session to learn how to make your marketing and advertising efforts something people are going to want to consume.
Named by PPC Hero as the #1 most influential PPC expert in the world, Purna specializes in SEM, SEO, and future search trends. She is a popular global keynote speaker and columnist, an avid traveler, aspiring top chef, and amateur knitter.
Stay tuned
Again, consider this morsel of information as simply the first of many courses to follow. In upcoming posts we'll share details regarding after-hours activities, including MozCrawl.
Also, you didn't hear this from us, but there may even be a few exciting, totally new changes for 2017. Mum's the word.
We'll be back soon.
Tell us — who are you most excited to see and hear speak this year?
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
In episode 123 of Semantic Mastery’s weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked whether RSS Masher is ok for merging feeds as an alternative to Backlink Commando.
The exact question was:
Since Backlink Commando is no longer working, can we use RSS Masher to merge all the feeds? And then how would we be able to scrape all the urls like we could with Backlink commando?
For years, I've been saying that if you have a problem with spammers in local results, you can just wait it out. I mean, if Google cared about removing spam and punishing those who are regular spammers we'd see them removed fast and often, right?
While there are instances where spam has been removed, it seems these are not fast fixes, permanent fixes, or even very common. In fact, they seem few and far between. So today I’m changing my tune a bit to call more attention to the spam issues people employ that violate Google My Business terms and yet continue to win in the SERPs.
The problems are rampant and blatant. I've heard and seen many instances of legitimate businesses changing their names just to rank better and faster for their keywords.
Another problem is that Google is shutting down MapMaker at the end of March. Edits will still be allowed, but they'll need to be made through Google Maps.
If Google is serious about rewarding brands in local search, they need to encourage it through their local search algorithms.
While some changes — like the Possum update — seemed to have a positive impact overall, root problems (such as multiple business listings) and many other issues still exist in the local search ecosystem.
And there are other technically non-spammy ways that users are also manipulating Google results. Let's look at a couple of these examples.
It's not all spam. Businesses are going to great lengths to stay within the GMB guidelines & manipulate results.
Let’s look at an example of a personal injury attorney in the Denver market. Recently, I came across these results when doing a search for trial attorneys:
Look at the #2 result listing, entitled "Denver Trial Lawyers." I originally thought this was spam and wanted to report it, but I had to do my due diligence first.
To start, I needed to verify that the listing was actually spam by looking at the official business name. I pulled up their website and, to my surprise, the business name in the logo is actually "Denver Trial Lawyers."
This intrigued me, so I decided to see if they were using a deceptive logo to advertise the business name or if this was the actual business name.
I checked out the Colorado Secretary of State’s website and did a little digging around. After a few minutes I found the legally registered trade name through their online search portal. The formation date of this entity was 7/31/2008, so they appear to have been planning on using the name for some time.
I also reviewed their MapMaker listing history to see when this change was made and whether it reflected the trade name registration. I saw that on October 10, 2016 the business updated their MapMaker listing to reflect the new business name.
After all of this, I decided to take this one step further and called the business. When I did, the auto-attendant answered with "Thank you for calling Denver Trial Lawyers," indicating that this is their legitimate business name.
"Your name should reflect your business’ real-world name, as used consistently on your storefront, website, stationery, and as known to customers. Accurately representing your business name helps customers find your business online."
But what does that mean for everyone else?
Recently, Gyi Tsakalakis also shared this beautiful screenshot on Twitter of a SERP with three businesses using their keywords in the business name:
It seems they're becoming more and more prominent because people see they're working.
To play devil's advocate, there are also businesses that legitimately sport less-than-creative names, so where do you draw the line? (Note: I've been following some of above businesses for years; I can confirm they've changed their business names to include keywords).
Here's another example
If you look closely, you'll find more keyword- and location-stuffed business names popping up every day.
Here's an interesting case of a business (also located in Denver) that might have been trying to take advantage of Near Me searches, as pointed out by Matt Lacuesta:
Do you think this business wanted to rank for Near Me searches in Denver? Maybe it's just a coincidence. It's funny, nonetheless.
How are people actively manipulating local results?
While there are many ways to manipulate a Google My Business result, today we’re going to focus on several tactics and identify the steps you can take to help fight back.
Tactic #1: Spammy business names
Probably the biggest problem in Google’s algorithm is the amount of weight they put into a business name. At a high level, it makes sense that they would treat this with a lot of authority. After all, if I’m looking for a brand name, I want to find that specific brand when I'm doing a search.
The problem is that people quickly figured out that Google gives a massive priority to businesses with keywords or locations in their business names.
In the example below, I did a search for "Fresno Personal Injury Lawyers" and was given an exact match result, as you can see in the #2 position:
However, when I clicked through to the website, I found it was for a firm with a different name. In this case, they blatantly spammed their listing and have been floating by with nice rankings for quite some time.
I reported their listing a couple of times and nothing was done until I was able to escalate this. It’s important to note that the account I used to edit this listing didn't have a lot of authority. Once an authoritative account approved my edit, it went live.
The spam listing below has the keyword and location in the business name.
We reported this listing using the process outlined below, but sadly the business owner noticed and changed it back within hours.
How can you fight back against spammy business names?
Figuring out how to fight back against people manipulating results is now your job as an SEO. In the past, some in the industry have given the acronym "SEO" a bad name due to the manipulative practices they performed. Now it’s our job to give us a better name by helping to police these issues.
Since Google MapMaker is now disappearing, you'll need to make edits in Google Maps directly. This is also a bit of a problem, as there's no room to leave comments for evidence.
Here are the steps you should take to report a listing with incorrect information:
Make sure you’re signed into Google
Locate the business on maps.google.com
Once the business is located, open it up and look for the “Suggest an edit” option:
Once you select it, you'll be able to choose the field you want to change:
Make the necessary change and then hit submit! (Don't worry — I didn't make the change above.)
Now, don’t expect anything to happen right away. It can take time for changes to take place. Also, the trust level of your profile seems to play a big role in how Google evaluates these changes. Getting the approval by someone with a high level of trust can make your edits go live quickly.
Another issue that we see commonly with maps spam is fake business listings. These listings are completely false businesses that black-hat SEOs build just to rank and get more leads.
Typically we see a lot of these in the locksmith niche — it’s full of people creating fake listings. This is one of the reasons Google started doing advanced verification for locksmiths and plumbers. You can read more about that on Mike Blumenthal's blog.
Joy Hawkins pointed out a handy tip for identifying these listings on her blog, saying:
"Many spammers who create tons of fake listings answer their phone with something generic like 'Hello, locksmith' or 'Hello, service.'"
I did a quick search in Denver for a plumber and it wasn’t long before I found a listing with an exact match name. Using Joy’s tips, I called the number and it was disconnected. This seemed like an illegitimate listing to me.
Thankfully, in this case, the business wasn't ranking highly in the search results:
When you run into these types of listings, you'll want to take a similar approach as we did above and report the issue.
Tactic #3: Review spam
Review spam can come in many different forms. It’s clear that Google's putting a lot of attention into reviews by adding sorting features and making stars more prominent. I think Google knows they can do a better job with their reviews overall, and I hope we see them take it a little bit more seriously.
Let’s look at a few different ways that review spam appears in search results.
Self-reviews & competitor shaming
Pretty much every business knows they need reviews, but they have trouble getting them. One way people get them is to leave them on their own business.
Recently, we saw a pretty blatant example where someone left a positive five-star review for a law firm and then five other one-star reviews for all of their competitors. You can see this below:
Although it’s very unethical for these types of reviews to show up, it happens everyday. According to Google’s review and photo policies, they want to:
“Make sure that the reviews and photos on your business listing, or those that you leave at a business you’ve visited, are honest representations of the customer experience. Those that aren’t may be removed.”
While I'd say that this does violate the policies, figuring out which rule applies best is a little tricky. It appears to be a conflict of interest, as defined by Google’s review guidelines below:
In this particular case, a member of our staff, Dillon Brickhouse, reached out to Google to see what they would say.
Unfortunately, Google told Dillon that since there was no text in the review, nothing could be done. They refused to edit the review.
Although there will still be cases where spammy reviews are ignored until Google steps up their game, there is something you can try to remove bad reviews. In fact, Google published the exact steps on their review guidelines page here.
You can view the steps and flag a review for removal using the method below:
What can you do if the basics don't work?
There are a ton of different ways to spam local listings. What can you do if you've reported the issue and nothing changes?
While edits may take up to six weeks to go live, the next step involves you getting more public about the issue. The key to the success of this approach is documentation. Take screenshots, record dates, and keep a file for each issue you're fighting. That way you can address it head-on when you finally get the appropriate exposure.
Depending on whether or not the listing is verified, you'll want to try posting in different forums:
Verified listings
If the listing you're having trouble with is a verified listing, you'll want to make a public post about it in the Google My Business Community forum. When posting, make sure to provide all corresponding evidence, screenshots, etc. to make the case very clear to the moderators. There's a Spam and Policy section on the forum where you can do this.
Unverified listings
However, some spam listings are not verified listings. In these cases ,Joy Hawkins recommends that you engage with the Local Guides Connect Forum here.
Key takeaways
Sadly, there's not a lot we can do outside of the basics of reporting results, but hopefully being more proactive about it and making some noise will encourage Google to take steps in the right direction.
Start being more proactive about reporting listings and reviews that are ignoring the guidelines. Be sure to record the screenshots and take evidence.
Don’t spam local results. Seriously. It’s annoying. Continually follow and stay up-to-date on the Google My Business guidelines.
Lastly, don’t think the edit you made is the final say or that it'll stay around forever. The reality is that they could come back. During testing for this post, the listing for "Doug Allen Personal Injury Attorney Colorado Springs" came back within hours based on an owner edit.
In the future, I’m personally looking forward to seeing some major changes from Google with regards to how they rank local results and how they monitor reviews. I would love to see local penalties become as serious as manual penalties.
How do you think Google can fight this better? What are your suggestions? Let me know in the comments below.
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In episode 123 of our weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one viewer asked whether a website will rank better if there is no meta description on it.
The exact question was:
Does not adding a meta description to a web page better rank a page? The reason I am asking, I see a plethora of sites on the first page of google with no meta description and it appears google displays the appropriate information from the page that relates to the query. I have tested this a few times and I have seen the meta description data change.
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://ift.tt/1NZu6N2.
Announcement
Bradley: I’m sure we’re live, already.
Adam: Well, we are now. Hey, everybody. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts. This episode 124, on the 22nd of March 2017. We got almost everybody here, I think Hernan is out doing something amazing or I don’t know. Actually, he’s just not here. Anyways, let’s go around and see what’s up with everybody. Sorry about my non video, I know everybody is just looking forward to seeing me, but apparently my bandwidth isn’t so great, here, while I’m on the road. Let’s see picking the top right.
Bradley: The problem-
Adam: Is it?
Bradley: The problem is, Adam, my beard isn’t as majestic as yours.
Adam: I know. I’m getting tied down. Now, that I’m getting it trimmed regularly and I don’t look like a hobo, I’m being cut off on the camera. We’ll start in the top right, Marco, how’s it going, man?
Marco: Hey, what’s up man? Doing good. Just lots and lots of spam, I mean testing.
Adam: Good recovery. Chris, what’s up, man?
Chris: Doing good. Good to be here on another Hump Day.
Adam: I second that. Bradley, how are you doing, today?
Bradley: Happy to be here. I got lots of questions, already, so I’m ready to go.
Adam: All right. I think, this morning everyone probably heard, I’m going to let Bradley talk about this a little bit, because Bradley is going to be working, or sharing some information about the case study. Actually, I’ll just kind of hand it over to you, Bradley, if you want to tell people about the [inaudible 00:01:30] case study stuff.
Bradley: [crosstalk 00:01:32].
Adam: Tell them about that, and we can pop some links in there for people, if they’re interested.
Live Rank Sniper Webinar
Bradley: All right. Yeah. Sorry, guys, I’m looking at a text file to grab some links that I can drop on the page. All right. Peter Drew, a great developer, a friend of Semantic Mastery, the link is on the page, now, guys. He launched Live Rank Sniper, it’s been in beta for like a year. No shit. I’ve been part of the beta testing group. I like to jump in on every one of Peter Drew’s products, because they’re always really good. Anyways, I’ve been using it on and off again for about a year, but I haven’t used it much, but the launch is obviously happening today. I’m sure you guys have gotten a million emails about it, from us as well as many others. It’s a great product, and in fact, we’re having a webinar, so I dropped the links on the page, guys. By the way, did we check to make sure the page has got the video right? Let me just double check-
Adam: [crosstalk 00:02:27].
Bradley: Sorry guys. Yeah. Okay. It’s good.
Adam: We’re good.
Bradley: Anyways, I dropped the links on the page, but we’re having a webinar with him tomorrow night at 7:00 p.m. eastern, I believe. Is that correct? I’m looking at-
Adam: Yeah.
Bradley: Yeah. 7:00 p.m.
Adam: Yes. 7:00 p.m.
Bradley: 7:00 p.m. eastern. It’s a great product and I was originally going to just do two projects as a case study, as a bonus for anybody that purchases through our link, but knowing two wasn’t enough, apparently. I’ve actually got like four separate, or excuse me, four local case studies and another one, which is a near me case study that I’ve been working on diligently since Saturday. Literally, I’ve spent the last four days working on these case studies and I hope to have them 90% complete by the webinar tomorrow. If not, we’ll just setup a membership site or something, or whatever that we can add the additional remaining content into. It’s working really, really well. I absolutely love it.
It’s a really simple software to us, there’s a very little learning curve, and it does what it’s suppose to do and it does it well. It basically pokes keywords, but what’s great about it is it pokes keywords using scheduled live events, which means you don’t have to actually stream any videos, so essentially it just creates the live events and then it goes and it ping’s them, it gets them indexed. It’s a you bot, guys, so the bot just runs in the background and it will go schedule the events, use a spintax, you can add geo coordinates like the location meta tags, that kind of stuff.
Tags, I said, I think I mentioned spintax, already, but you can schedule, you can add unlimited accounts, YouTube accounts to the software, which means you can, I think it does, I think Peter says it does 15 live event’s persona, or per account that’s added to the software, but I’ve been testing it heavily over the last few days, and I’ve seen it go up to as much as 25, so I’m not sure exactly what the number is, but the point is that it goes out and schedules all these events, and then it ping’s them, and then [inaudible 00:04:38] anyone that lands on page one or two of the indexed scheduled events then it will put them into a text file.
Then, you can actually use the software to stream a prerecorded video directly to that live event, if you’d like, or you can just delete everything and you know, which keywords are going to rank, because it’s just like any other poking software in that respect. I like it, because it doesn’t require any video uploads at all, but you can use it for money channels, which is what one of the sites in the case studies that I’m working on, or one of the YouTube channels is an actual money channel. I didn’t see any reason, I mean, I’ve used about 25 different YouTube channels in the last four days, because I’ve got batches of five.
I’ve got one group of seven channels, and all the other groups are five channels per campaign, essentially. That allows me to do up to 75 videos in one round. It’s really amazing. I really like the software a lot. I’ve been using it real heavy the last few days and I can see that becoming more and more a part of my normal strategy. Once poking has been done and I’ve identified keywords, depending on how I set the campaign up originally, I may do that through the money channel, so that I can just stream prerecorded videos, that works great for client channels, guys, because if you’ve got good videos from clients that can be ranked, using livestreams then that’s a great way to do it.
Because remember, you can take the same video and livestream it over and over again and it’s going to be unique every time. [inaudible 00:06:10] that way, but if you’ve got decent quality videos anyways then it wouldn’t really be considered spam in my opinion, unless your competitors complain about it. Other than that, if you want to test keywords, it does it very quickly.
You don’t have to worry about any videos, and then you can go back through, if you’re using like persona channels, for example, you can go back through, delete everything, but you’ll have a record of what ranked, and then you can use other software, or other programs, or whatever you want to actually upload or publish the videos for those keywords. It’s entirely up to you, but I’ve been working on it heavily for the last few days. It’s called, Live Rank Sniper, Scott, I just saw your question come in, or your comment. Yeah. It’s really, really cool, and again, we’re going to be on a webinar with Peter, tomorrow night and anybody that purchases through our link is going to get access to the case study details that I’m going to be sharing. Check it out. Okay?
Adam: Yeah. Awesome. By all means go signup for the webinar. Check it out. It’s one of those, obviously we don’t tell people to buy stuff that they’re not going to use, but come check out the webinar, see if it’s something you can put in your toolbox.
Bradley: Yeah.
Marco: I have an announcement, if I may.
Bradley: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Marco: I’m going to be doing another webinar. Another one of those, just super secret spicy hot type shit webinars, where I tend to give the farm away. If people want to learn more about the knowledge graph, knowledge panel, RankBrain, how you can even train the bot to see whatever you want it to see. I talk about that, and ambiguity, and complexity, and get some more of my secrets. It’s being setup, we don’t have the webinar page ready, yet, as soon as we have it ready we’ll mail it out, and I’ll also post it in our group, so that it’s available to everyone. Now, here’s the caveat. Right?
This one is going to be offered live only, barring technical difficulties, once it’s done, and I’m sorry for those who cannot attend live, but if you do not attend live it goes on pay per view, no, we’re not going to make any exceptions, there won’t be any reason, nothing. It’s going into the Marco retirement fund, excuse me, it’s a pay per view, and that’s it. I suggest try to get it live, try to be there, it’s going to rock. Again, I’m going to give everything away that I can and I hope to see you all there. April 3rd, tentative. We will be giving more information during the week, as I said in the groups, in email, so just stay tuned.
Bradley: Yeah. Cool. All right.
Adam: One more quick one, real quick. Also, next week we’ve had a lot of questions about this and with the RYS Stack, stuff that you can now get through Serp Space, and it’s something that we offered for a while, we’re going to be explaining more about that, how you can apply it, how you can order it, when to order it, things like that. That’s going to be next week, so if you’re interested in that just keep your eyes open, we’ll be holding, it’s going to be a short kind of informational webinar about RYS Stacks and how you can do that. That’s going to be awesome. That will be late next week.
Bradley: Yeah. That’s next Thursday, correct?
Marco: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Adam: Yeah. We’ll be sending out some more info, so you can decide if that’s something, you know, if you’re doing client work, or your own stuff, why you would want to do it, stuff we’re going to cover in the webinar.
Bradley: Yeah. Okay. All right. The last thing, I think, well, somebody had a question about Live Rank Sniper, “Will it work for launch stacking?” Yeah. It will probably work really well. I haven’t tested it with that, yet. I’m testing it with near me keywords, which are national. It’s doing fairly well with that, it’s working like crazy for local. For near me keywords it’s working okay, but I just started really heavy testing it. The last thing about that is, but for launch stacking stuff, because those keywords are new, they will probably perform will, but you’d have to play with it, I suspect it would perform more, but I don’t know. One last thing, guys, we started our livestreams on a daily basis, we’re doing, each one of us, Monday is my day. Hernan has Tuesday. I know, I think Chris, do you have Wednesday?
Adam: Chris is being oddly silent.
Bradley: Okay. No, but it’s Wednesday. I think, Adam has got Thursday and Marco’s got Friday.
Marco: [crosstalk 00:10:36].
Bradley: Okay. We started doing our Facebook livestreams and it’s just once, Monday through Friday, each one of us are going to jump on and just do a quick livestream rant about whatever we want to talk about, but I know we talked about this months ago and we never actually got it started, but we started it this week. Monday, was the kickoff of that. So, if you guys have anything that you would like for us to talk about, this is not a Q and A, like a marketing question and answer like a how to, if you have questions about high level stuff, mindset strategy, or anything else, whatsoever outside of technical questions then you can post them at rant.semanticmastery.com, it’s a 100% anonymous, so we won’t even know who’s submitting comments or stuff for us to rant about, but anything that you guys would like for us to talk about outside of technical answers, like how to stuff, just post there. Again, that’s rant.semanticmastery.com. It’s a Google form, you can submit anonymously and then that will give us stuff that we can pull from for content for our daily livestreams. Okay?
Marco: Okay. Yeah. I just want to add that if you’re sensitive and you’re offended easily, and you don’t want to cry then don’t be there on Friday when I’m on.
Bradley: Yeah. Their raw, guys, these aren’t going to be polished, at all. The occasional cuss word is going to, in some cases the frequent cuss word is going to slip. It’s rant mastery, you know what I mean? If we want to rant about something, we’re going to rant. Just know that it’s going to be unfiltered, so if you have sensitive, if you’re sensitive to that kind of stuff just don’t watch. That’s all. All right. Okay. Cool. We’re going to go ahead and jump into questions guys, unless there’s something else.
Adam: Yeah. Let’s do this.
Bradley: Hello?
Adam: Yeah. You’re good.
Bradley: Okay. Finally, it’s slow. This is the Rant Mastery page that you’ll be taken to, guys, if you go to rant.semanticmastery.com. All you got to do is put in your comment right there and watch this lovely video, that has become the motto of Semantic Mastery. All right. With that said, let’s get into questions. You guys seeing my screen okay? Hello?
Adam: Good to go. I’ve got your whole screen.
Duplicate Content Issues From Copying Product Description And Canonical URL Tag Of Original Product Page To A WooCommerce Affiliate Site
As far as for ranking purposes. Right? Google is going to look at your page and it’s going to recognize the canonical is pointed to the original product page and it’s going to pass the credit to there. If that makes sense, so you don’t want to canonicalize something to another domain unless you’re intentionally trying to push the relevancy to that page. Right? Because canonicals are typically used within the same domain. You can do cross domain canonicals there’s no doubt, but there’s really no reason to do that, unless their both your domains and you’re trying to push credit from one domain to another, but in this case as an affiliate you don’t want to push the credit to the original product page, because if so then you’re basically passing any authority that you had over to there. Does that make sense?
Yeah, again, I wouldn’t do that. I would not canonicalize it. You can take the product description, I mean I don’t know what the legalities of that are, I’m not an attorney, but personally I just copy the damn product description, I might add a couple of lines of text above it, or below it to make it somewhat unique, but other than that, I would definitely not canonicalize it. Okay.
Redirection & Duplicate Content Concerns WIth SEO Switchbox Strategy
This is something that would probably be difficult to find on our YouTube channel, but there is something that I did want to point this out for people that are new, if you go to our YouTube channel, guys, for example, if you just go to YouTube and you search, I’m going to just walk you guys through this, and then Dean, I’ll finish answering your question. Excuse me. Why did I just type that into there? If you just go to Semantic Mastery, search it, and then just go to the channel, so click on the channel button, and Dean, I know you probably know this, but this is more for the benefit of new people.
If you click this little search icon here, guys, and search, because of all the Hump Day Hangouts and because we actually have a team that splits up our Hump Day Hangouts in the individual questions and answers, a lot of the times some of these questions can be answered just by going to search channel. You just type in your query, here, and hit enter, and then you can kind of look through there. Again, Dean, I’m going to answer your question in just a minute. The other thing is guys remember at the support.semanticmastery site, so support.semanticmastery.com we have a knowledge base, if you click on that, you’ll see that we have, by the way, Adam, we need to change that, just as a side note.
Adam: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Bradley: Our knowledge base, we have categories here that you can go into and look for frequently asked questions. Okay? Because that kind of stuff comes up often. Now, Deans question isn’t really a frequently asked question, so I just wanted to point that stuff out guys, because people that are new to us might not know this, and this will give you a way to find answers to a lot of common questions. All right. Back to Dean, Dean when you do a-
Marco: If I may before you get into answering his question, I think, Dean just joined our Mastermind. If he did, then, he’s more than welcome to post questions, more advanced questions in the Semantic Mastery Mastermind for webinars, or for us to answer them there. He has more availability to it.
Bradley: I know he joined RYS, I didn’t know that he joined Mastermind, but that’s awesome if he did. Okay. All right. Dean, to get back to your question, and I apologize for that, all right, so with the Switchbox SEO strategy or when you’re cloning a client site, I’ve mentioned this before, but you don’t, there’s certain things that you’re not going to do through your domain. Okay? Number one, is when you’re syndicating content from the client’s domain, it’s going to be pushed out to the clients branded network, and the back links are going to point back to the client’s domain.
There’s really no other way around that, well, there is one other way around it, which would be to publish the post on your cloned domain that would go out to their network, then you’d have to 301 the post URL to the clients post URL, but you’d have to duplicate the post on the client site. You can see how quickly this gets out of hand. That’s why we don’t bother with that. My point is you don’t, you cannot do the content marketing from your domain, because there’s no way without having to publish the post twice, once on your domain, and then once on the client’s domain, and then redirect from your domain to the clients, your post URL to the clients post URL.
Then, if the client ever looks at their branded syndication network and they see your domain, that’s going to bring up a question. Right? You cannot do that. Remember, the client is paying you for content marketing, too, if that’s part of your SEO strategy. That is absolutely part of my SEO strategy. Right? Content marketing and SEO are one and the same in my opinion. They go hand in hand. When I do content marketing, it goes from the client’s domain out to the clients network. There’s just no way around that, but that’s what they’re paying for, so it’s not a problem. Right? To me, it’s not an issue.
The other thing is when you’re building citations, when you build citations, you got to build them directly in the client’s domain, not to your domain, or else you will screw up the NAP. Right? If you’re listing your domain in the name, address, and phone number, the NAP, if you put your domain in there then it’s going to screw up the NAP data, so you cannot do that either. You got to build citations directly to the client’s domain. Does that make sense? Those are two examples, or two instances where the Switchbox strategy doesn’t work.
What I do with the Switchbox strategy, where I clone the site, it’s strictly for pages, not for posts. It’s the core of the site that gets cloned, and then everything is on a one to one ratio, so it’s a page by page redirect to the clients site, and then I do external link building to that page, so you guys know that the majority of the SEO work that I do, or the kind of SEO that we practice is we do mostly the IFTTT networks, and other tier one links like citations, and press releases, and things like that. But, the majority of external link building that we do, or inbound link building that we do is too the tier one properties, not directly to the money site.
That’s what I’ll do with the 301 domain, that’s my own domain, is if I’m going to be doing additional external link building, which we do from time to time, when it’s needed, then I will do that to my domain, that’s 301 to the client’s domain. In the event that the client decides that they don’t need me anymore, I can lift the 301 or remove the 301 redirects from my domain. The client still gets to keep much of the SEO work that was done, because all the content marketing is going to benefit their site. All the citation work that you did is going to benefit their site.
The only thing that you’re going to end up recovering is any external inbound links that you built. Right? That’s going to be pointed at your domain, when you lift those redirects it’s going to remove them from the client’s domain and their going still be pointing at your domain. It doesn’t mean that when you remove the redirects your clients domain drops out of the index, and yours is replaces it. That’s not the way it works. Chances are if you’ve done everything right the client’s domain may see a little bit of drop, but they’ll probably still be strong, anyways, because of the content marketing, the citation building, everything else that you’ve done. Right?
The client’s domain will probably still be strong. However, your domain, now has already has a bunch of SEO work done from any external link building already in place, so you are not starting from scratch. You’re starting from a position, a well placed position already, as far as, how much SEO work has been done to your domain. Does that make sense? It just gives you like a jumpstart on setting up a new site, because now you have a site that’s already had SEO work done.
Of course, you’re going to have to go in and change some graphics, you’ll probably have to reword the content, somewhat, change contact information, stuff like that from the cloned site, it cannot be a copy of the clients site, obviously. When you revive it as your own, I mean, if that makes sense, but you can change all that stuff out, swap out some details and then you can sell that site or lease that site to another provider, another contractor, another business in that same industry in that same city. Right?
Or, you can keep it as your own and use it as a lead gen site, that’s what I do. That’s typically what I will do, and it’s only happened a handful of times in my career, but I’ve done that where I’ve ended up turning the cloned site, with some editing, or some modification into a lead gen site, and that way it’s my asset, and that’s why I do that guys, so that as I’m building up client asset, at the same time I’m building my own assets with no additional work on my part. Does that make sense? Okay. Well, hopefully that was clear, Dean. We’re going to keep moving we’ve got a lot of questions to get through today.
Anyways, with that said, let’s see … It’s up to you, you’re going to get more authority out of it, Wayne, I just had to read the question a couple of time and process it. You’re going to get more authority out of it. It will be better if you swap out the Google accounts with the ones that you already had. It’s a little bit of manual work on your part, I know that. Depending on the service provider, I know at SerpSpace, we will go in and make changes, we charge a service fee for it, but we’ll go, we’ll have our builders, if we built the network for you, you can submit a support request, and ask for it to be, the network to be reworked a bit, if you explain that kind of stuff, and provide the details, and we will do it.
Now, if we didn’t produce the network for you, if you bought it from another provider, don’t send it to us and ask us to fix it, because we’re not going to. If you bought it from us then I know you can submit a support ticket and just pay a service fee. I don’t know what that is off the top of my head, I think it’s 20 bucks, but I could be wrong, to go back in and edit it and swap those profiles out. What I mean by that YouTube, Google Plus, the GMB, and Blogger, you can swap those out if the details our provided. All right. Again, we charge a service fee for that, unless that was made up front when you ordered the network. Even then, I think we still charge a service fee for custom stuff like that. Okay.
Adam: Also, real quick, just something to say, because I saw a couple of support tickets about this, and people are like, “Hey. You know, why should we buy network via SerpSpace,” and I’m not going to say that we never make mistakes, obviously it’s a human process, but our quality is very high and if there are mistakes they get fixed.
Bradley: Yeah.
Adam: That’s just one of the reasons why buying through SerpSpace makes sense. I mean, it’s the process that Bradley developed and we’ve ported that over so that other people could take advantage of that. I just wanted to put that out there, too, since there are questions people ask and fairly so, “Why should we buy through SerpSpace?”
Bradley: Yeah.
Marco: Yeah. That’s exactly what I was going to, well, one of the things that I was going to say is we have the experience. We’ve been doing this for years and years. We have it down to a process. If we get it wrong, we do what we have to, to fix it. Now, if it’s something like this, where I don’t see any wrong in this, it’s just that he wants the clients Gmail account to be the one that’s triggering everything and in charge of everything, we do go in and fix it. We charge a minimal fee of 20 bucks. I mean, come on, it’s like, yeah, sure go get it fixed, but what sets us apart? Why should you buy from us? We’re the originators, guys. We do it right.
Bradley: Yeah. And, it’s 100% manual, guys. These are completely hand built. Everything that we do in SerpSpace is 100%, as far as the network building, 100% hand built there’s no automation involved, whatsoever. Because of that they’re stronger. They stick longer, for the most part, unless you’re doing some really nasty spammy stuff. Also, in case something goes wrong or you have a custom request like this it’s easier, because it just gets routed back to the original builder, so they’re already with the project, because they built it and they can go in and make those changes very, very quickly. Right?
Otherwise, the only other thing, Wayne, is again, if it’s another service provider they probably won’t do that for you, but you can do it on your own. To do something like that on your own it would take you probably about an hour. Depending on how much you think your time is worth, if you have, again, if you bought it from SerpSpace and asked us to fix it then it’s a small nominal fee, and in my opinion it’s definitely worth the money, because if it takes you an hour, I think an hour better spent doing something else.
It is kind of a pain in the ass, because you have to go in and not only update the applets inside of IFTTT, but you got to go through all of the properties that are interlinked, if they’re interlinked properly and swap the URL’s out. If that makes sense? Okay. Again, a little bit of a pain in the ass, but it can be done manually. It would probably take you about an hour, or you could ask your service provider, chances are they’re going to deny that, but you could always ask. I think, it’s going to be stronger if you swap those out, you can proceed the way that it is, but just know that you’re not going to be pushing authority into that one profile, or brand account as much as you would if you were using the actual client accounts that were set up, originally. Okay.
Let’s take a look at that real quick. What I would suggest is using multiple DNS services, so that you’re not just using one. If you look at IP ranges, so go to cloudflare.com IP’s guys, here’s the IP ranges. Okay. That’s what you got. Right? These are ranges, here, so you can see zero to 20, so there’s 20 IP’s, but those are class D, so that you’d get, these are all on the same, the only thing that’s unique is the last part, what do they call that? Subnet, or whatever. My point is you do have a good list of IP’s, but I won’t recommend doing, because we’ve done that, too.
For example, in the Mastermind we talked about hybrid PBN’s, I cannot get into the details of that, but hybrid PBN’s are where you buy an expired domain, you build a PBN on the site, on the root domain, and then you build a bunch of sub domains, and you can host the sub domains on various IP’s. Right? Remember guys you can create sub domains and map them using third party DNS services to other IP’s they don’t have to be on the same IP as the root domain. We talked about using various sources, you can use Amazon S3, you can use other Cloud storage accounts to host HTML files, you could do other hosting accounts.
You could do all of that and map the IP’s, so that you have multiple IP’s for a PBN cluster that’s built off of one domain, with a bunch of sub domains all having unique IP’s. Does that make sense? The way that you can do that is using multiple third party DNS services. My two preferred ones are CloudFlare [inaudible 00:30:38] and Amazon Route 53. Okay? They will give you a range of IP’s and you can do what you’re mentioning, but I recommend using more than just one, like more than just CloudFlare, is my point. Okay.
Marco: If I could just add. I hate this word, PBN, because it’s not really PBN, what he’s doing is he’s probably buying either expired domains or domains with metrics, resurrecting them, setting it up, and then driving a link from that to whatever the destination is and that’s not the definition of a PBN, because a PBN is a set of websites that are linked to each other and built for the sole purpose of providing a link. You had big PBN networks taking down where you go in and you’d get your URL and multiple, it depended on how much you paid.
What the tests are showing, right now is that a lot of these domains that you guys are buying, especially if they’re expired, if you don’t do your due diligence and if you don’t look carefully at the back link profile, all you’re going to do when you link over from that PBN to the destination is you’re going to tank the rankings of the destination website. Remember, I’m warning you. I’m telling you what’s happening. I’m not telling you from what I heard. I’m telling you from what I tested and what I know.
Bradley: Yeah. Now, what about, though, as far as using them as second or third tier links to power up first or second tiers?
Marco: That’s what we would do-
Bradley: Right.
Marco: First we said, though, we don’t just have a website sitting there for the sole purpose of setting up, or sending a link. We’ll add interpages, we will, I don’t know if I should tell all our strategy, but IFTTT, some content marketing on the blog, so even the blogs start bringing in, the so called PBN, starts drawing traffic, starts making you money, and becomes really stronger than something just sitting there providing a link. Seriously, it’s tested and it’s what’s happening. I’m not saying PBN’s are dead, but they’re a dying breed. You better get it right.
Bradley: Yeah. I agree with that. I mean, I stopped building PBN’s months ago, probably a little over a year ago, because what I’ve been doing, and I don’t even do this much anymore, but was buying spider domains using Bluechip back links to find them, scrap them, and then buying them and just rebuilding the old site with HTML download it from Wayback Machine, or archive.org, and just hack my link into the page, and that’s it. The reason I like doing that is because they used to be real sites, right?
That way they look like real sites, still, and I don’t have to worry about content marketing and all that other shit, because remember guys, you buy a brand new domain or an expired domain. You go in and you build a WordPress blog on it with new content and all that, and the other, even if it’s in the same topical category that the old site was in, it’s still a new domain, it’s a new WordPress site, so it’s going to look like a PBN, unless you really build it out to look like a real business website.
What I like about rebuilding old sites is that they look like real business websites, because they were real business websites. I don’t have to worry about any of that stuff. Right? I don’t have to worry about content, and siloing the site properly, and adding all the social profiles and all that crap, I don’t have to do all that, but even now I don’t even do that very much anymore, because we’re able to get results, not doing it. Not having to do it as much. Anyways.
Marco: That’s without bringing up the fact that you’re linking probably from a sandbox domain over to your money site.
Bradley: Yeah.
Marco: If you don’t know how to get that so called PBN out of the sandbox quick enough.
Bradley: As far as this Cass, looking at the IP, like rocket IP’s, I mean the price looks good, it’s actually a really good price for IP’s. The problem that I have with using any sort of providers like these is that they overload the hell out of their IP blocks, so that they end up with 100’s of sites on shared IP’s and because it’s SEO hosting, it’s a ton of spammers that have just got a bunch of spammy sites hosted on these IP’s. Right? You end up, you put your sites in what they call bad neighborhoods.
All that is going to do is basically cause bad footprint issues, because links coming, and that’s pretty common, guys. Over the last couple of years that’s become more and more of a negative factor. Right? If you’ve got, that’s why we always recommend for your money sites, especially, that you go out with good, you go pay for good hosting, and we’ve been saying that for years, because you don’t want money sites being hosted in bad neighborhoods. All it takes to be in a bad neighborhood is to have a few really spammy sites in the same IP block, and that’s one of the problems with shared hosting. Right? Especially cheap shared hosting.
These type of SEO hosts, here, they literally weigh over stuff the IP’s way past capacity and the reason they do it is because they realize that the majority of those sites are used specifically for SEO purposes and don’t generate any traffic. They’re just websites sitting out there on the web, for the purpose of a back link, because of that for the most part, the vast majority of sites on the shared IP’s don’t receive any traffic, which means there’s very little bandwidth usage, so they can overload the hell out of these IP’s. Right? What happens then, is if anyone of those sites, or a number of those sites in that IP block end up receiving traffic for whatever reason, maybe the bots come crawling like crazy on a handful of sites, or maybe somebody actually strikes it lucky with a promotional campaign or something, who knows. If any amount of bandwidth, like if a number of those sites start to receive traffic it can end up tanking the whole entire block. Right? All of the sites go down.
That’s another common thing you’ll see with SEO hosting is that your sites, especially if you put uptime monitor on them, like Up Robot, or something like that, that would notify you of when the sites go down, you’ll get hammered with notifications about how often your sites go down, and it’s because, again, the IP blocks are way overloaded. I don’t recommend it.
What your actual question about using a VPS, and using Cloudflare and various DNS services is a better way to go, in my opinion, than IP hosting, or SEO hosting and the reason why is because if it’s a VPS you’re going to have essentially dedicated bandwidth for that, that’s for your particular VPS. You’ll have a lot more control over that and a lot less chance of your sites going down. Okay. Make sure if you’re going to do that, you got to get your SOA records, your name servers, your SOA records, all that stuff you have to be real careful about setting all that up Cass.
Okay. Tim’s up next, he says, “Yes. I’m the real Vasquez,” so Hernan, he’s saying that he’s the real Vasquez.
Adam: Man, good day, too, Hernan’s not here to-
Bradley: Defend himself.
Adam: Yeah.
Using Multiple IFTTT Accounts To A Client Site
Bradley:“Is it okay to have to or more IFTTT accounts directing traffic to website? Thanks, as always.” Yeah. Tim, absolutely, you can have as many as you want, you just got to consider the consequences of what you’re doing. You know what I mean? It’s absolutely fine to do that. It just depends on what you’re trying to do. For a money site, I recommend always to just stick with a tier one network, a branded tier one network, only, if you’re doing blog syndication. If you’re doing YouTube syndication, you can stack as many networks as you want it makes no difference with YouTube as the trigger, it makes no difference.
But, with money sites I recommend only doing a tier one branded network only because that makes sense, that’s normal for a business to share it’s content to its own network of web 2.0 and social media accounts. Right? That’s normal. That’s logical. It’s expected. When you start sharing the same content to persona accounts, for example, and the persona accounts the only thing they have on them is content coming from one source, then that is clearly used for SEO manipulation, and there’s no way, it’s like you can smell that from a mile away. You know what I mean?
My point is you don’t want to do that, because that’s a footprint issue. It just depends on what you’re doing. There are instances where that makes absolute sense. Somebody was asking a few weeks ago on Hump Day Hangout about having a multiple authored blog, and wanting to set up a separate syndication network for each author, and was that okay, and yes that’s perfectly fine, but I would, because you have a branded network around the main blog, then you have, if you have say four authors would you want four separate persona based, or maybe there real authors, there still personas, so persona based network rings with the same content. Yeah. That makes sense to do so because an author will share their own content, no matter where it’s published to, they’ll share it to their own social media accounts, most the time, for traffic generation and to show off their work and that kind of stuff. That’s logical, as well.
They probably wouldn’t be posting across their own personal social accounts, all of the content from that site, if there is other authors, too. Right? They’d just be posting their own content. In that particular case, using the author feed, which you can get from WordPress, using the author feed to trigger those persona based networks is the way to go. That way the persona based networks are being triggered by their, the authors content only. The branded network gets triggered by all content published on the site, but the persona or the author based networks would only get triggered by the author content, alone. Does that make sense?
Again, you just got to consider what you’re doing and think about it, does it seem logical? Does it seem natural, or does it seem spammy? If it seems spammy don’t do it. If it seems logical, or you could make it to where it’s logical, and don’t justify it, it’s got to be like, in my opinion, it would be like if somebody were to review this would they come to the conclusion immediately that you’re spamming, or would they have to do some more investigation to determine that? Right? Okay.
Earl, the main thing that I would see here with this is 40 or 50 more keywords you’d want to silo that site. Right? You’re talking about a lot of different keywords that this site wants to rank for, so because of that, you’re going to want to add silo structure, build silo structure into the site, so that’s going to determine how you have your site siloed, compartmentalized. Right? How you have it siloed is how it’s going to determine your internal linking structure from within the post. In other words, you got to place the post within the proper categories, or proper silos within the site.
You don’t want to cross link from one silo to another, for navigational purposes it makes sense to do so, guys, like if you’re optimizing for the visitor, for the user, human optimization, then it makes sense to link cross silo links. Right? It makes sense to do that, but I always recommend that you do that with a no follow link, so that you’re not bleeding the theme of the silo. As far as pushing internal juice, so what they call page rank sculpting or I guess we call it equity sculpting or juice sculpting, now. Right?
You would want to use your do follow internal linking structure, internal links to only link within the same silo. Again, when you’re trying to rank, if you’re trying to rank a site for 40 or 50 more keywords as a flat site, which means no silo structure, whatsoever, that’s going to be messy anyways. Right? I recommend that you would silo this site out and then depending on how you have your supporting articles stacked within the silos is going to determine how you’re going to do your internal links.
That’s going to cut way, way down on it, because you’re not going to link from one silo to another unless you’re doing it for navigational purposes in which case you’re going to use a no follow link, and that doesn’t really effect SEO, anyways. Does that make sense? As far as if there is a number of how many, I don’t know, what that number is, I know that there is a law of diminishing returns that applies to internal links within a page or a post, but I don’t know what the threshold is, where it really starts to have a negative effect or at least not have a positive effect, like a natural effect. I’m not sure what that threshold is. Marco, do have any insight on that?
Marco: No. No, I don’t.
Bradley: Yeah. The only reason why I don’t know what that threshold is, is I’ve never tested it, because typically the post, pages and posts on a site that I’m working on don’t have anymore than two or three internal links, anyways. It’s very rare that there’s more than that. That’s just because that’s the way that the sites are siloed out. Okay? You could play with it, Earl, I recommend you should build silo structure into that site, and then you can start playing, once you have structure in place, you can start playing with posts, and link number of links within the post, and then you’ll be able to determine if you’re tracking your keywords, and you have your site siloed properly, then let’s say in silo one you do three internal links from a post, within the same silo.
Then, over at silo two, in another post you do like 12 internal links and measure the kind of results that you see with your rank positioning, because if you see that one has a significant improvement over another, then you know you can start to through a process of elimination determine what’s working and what doesn’t. I mean, that’s all we do, guys. Is we just set up tests all the damn time. All right. Cool.
Yes, Paul. No, first of all, I have seen some, it’s kind of odd, I’ve been spending 10 and 12 hours a day in YouTube for the last four or five days, for real. I’m doing a lot of YouTube SEO work, right now, and I’ve noticed, it’s interesting, but if you log in to a brand new account, the interface is completely different than what we’re used to seeing, like even from this, it’s different. It’s way different. It’s weird, because I only get that on new accounts, existing accounts I’m not seeing that, yet. It could have something to do with that, it’s just that change is going on in the background.
I suspect that’s probably the problems that you’re having, Paul, so if Paul is experiencing these problems now, guys just be aware that it’s probably coming down the pipe, we’re probably all going to start experiencing them, as well. All we can do is just roll with punches. Right? It’s all we can do. Yes, annotations are going to be deprecated guys, they are discontinuing annotations, after May two. It’s going to be end screens and cards, only. Okay. All right.
We got enough time for a couple more, Tim says, “My dumb earlier question, let me clarify, how can I have two or more IFTTT wheels, I guess I should have said, and this may be just as dumb, two or more wheels on different accounts, all pushing the same money site homepage, or break it up to other pages on the site?” Yeah. Okay. I just explained that, Tim, so hopefully that makes some sense. You know, like I said, what I would prefer, I would recommend that you do is if you’re going to build another tier one network, that’s not branded obviously it wouldn’t be branded.
You don’t want two branded networks for the same site that wouldn’t make sense, but if you had a second, like a persona based network that you want to use as a tier one network, you can get away with it, but you better be posting other content to that, besides the main site. You better be posting content from related content sources to that network, so that you’re burying the content from your money site among a bunch of other content that’s related and relevant. Right? Set it up as if it were a second tier blog syndication network. You can do that, I don’t recommend it, but you can do it.
Using Generic Keywords When Sending Links To Yelp Citations
Also, guys, remember your Yelp page, depending on, at least there used to be, I don’t know now, it’s been a while since I’ve checked, but it used to be once you verified the Yelp page, the link, became a verified Yelp business, then the link would become a do follow link from Yelp. I don’t know if they stopped that, it’s been awhile since I set up a new Yelp listing, because now I outsource all that, but it used to be, so if it was a verified business listing it would turn to a do follow link from Yelp, but if it was unverified it would be no follow.
They might all be no follow now, I would suspect they most likely are. Keep that in mind, because remember no follow links don’t pass anchor ratios. You can go more aggressive with Yelp, and you don’t have to worry about it effecting your money site, negatively. I would still try to keep it so that’s a natural looking back link profile, even if your velocity is completely unnatural, I would still want to keep the anchor text ratio somewhat natural looking, so it’s not a 100% pure spam. Okay.
All right. Adam, is yelling at me, so I got to get off, guys. “What kind of links are you sending to citation sites, since they would be considered tier one sites?” The same that we always do, Ken, which is using contextual links of higher quality for tier one, to the tier one sites. In other words, your tier two links, which are pointing to tier one, use contextual higher quality links, from higher quality sites, if possible, and then you can throw a kitchen sink spam behind those, if you want. Marco’s even seen through his testing in the lab more and more, Google is looking further and further out, now at back links. I would be cautious in throwing any kind of kitchen sink spam at all, now. Okay.
All right, guys. Sorry about the rest of the questions, I didn’t get to answer. A lot of really good ones today, though. We appreciate everybody being here. By the way, don’t forget rant.semanticmastery.com, go there to post content ideas for us for the livestreams. I think that’s it.
Adam: Yeah. Everybody go ahead and sign up for the webinar if you want to find out about Live Rank Sniper and also we have these pages usually set up by Friday, at the very latest, so it’s like we said, first come first serve, and if we get too many questions, obviously, we run out of time, but post your questions early and we try to answer them.
Bradley: Okay. Cool. All right, guys. Thanks for being here. We’ll see Mastermind members in about 10 minutes. Thanks, guys.
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