Click on the video above to watch Episode 43 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://ift.tt/1NZu6N2.
Announcement
Bradley: Hey, everybody. This is Bradley Benner with Semantic Mastery. This is Hump Day Hangouts, Episode 101. We’ve got Adam on briefly. He’s traveling so he’s going to join us from the airport. Got Hernan and Marco. I’m going to go right down on this. Hey, Adam.
Adam: Hey, everybody. How’s it going? Sorry. Cheers. Tough day here. Yeah, I’m at the airport and wanted to hop in and say hi to everybody and let you guys go with that. I’m just going to listen and be in the background.
Marco: That’s good.
Bradley: Yeah. Life is good. Traveling, drinking on the job.
Adam: Getting work done.
Bradley: Hernan, how are you?
Hernan: Hey, guys. What’s up? It’s really good to be here and not as fine as Adam but I’m well, doing well.
Bradley: Some of us have to work for a living, don’t we?
Hernan: Yeah. It is what it is.
Bradley: Last but not least, Marco. How are you?
Marco: Good. Getting better. [Foot’s 00:00:55] better
Male: Good.
Bradley: All right. As far as announcements, we don’t have much today other than Local Kingpin launches in 2 weeks from yesterday, so we’re like 13 days out from that launch. The product is massive. There’s going to be a lot to go through and I’m having super success with the method that I’m using for that, that we’ll be revealed in the training. It’s working really, really well. On-demand lead generation, that’s what it is, Local Kingpin on-demand the generation. I turned this funnel on about a week ago and we’ve had like nine leads in the last week. In the last 2 days alone, we’ve had six leads. It’s crazy that it just works so damn well and that’s what we’re going to be sharing inside the Local Kingpin training that launches on the 25th.
If you’re interested in that, we’re going to be doing a special promotion right before the launch, so it’s going to be like a pre-launch promotion. I highly recommend you guys get on our subscriber list if you’re not already, most of you probably are but that way you’ll get notification about the special pre-launch offer.
Adam: I was going to say, too, for this one. There’s a special deal here where you’re talking about traffic generation. If anybody out there who listens to us and [about our 00:02:05] courses, if you know people who are wanting to get into this and want on-demand traffic like for a lot of people getting into this, this is a really hard thing to do. If you want to sign up and promote our products, by all means, please do that. If you’ve taken, joined any of our courses, you know how good they are. I think this is a really cool entry point for someone to come in and to be able to get this training instead of having to learn a lot of the stuff on themselves. This is no joke like you said. There’s traffic generation like that.
Hernan: Sorry. [Probably 00:02:38] we’re going to put, if you guys want to sign as JV and promote it, as Adam was saying, we’re going to put the URL on the Events page so that you guys can sign up and get everything like banner, swipes, files. Everything’s going to be there so I’m going to put that over the Event page in a second.
Bradley: Cool. Do we have anything else we need to discuss before we get into questions. We got a lot of questions.
Adam: Let’s do it.
Crowdsearch for Maps
Bradley: Cool. Let’s do it. I’m going to grab the screen. Episode 101, that’s awesome. We’re only what? 3 weeks away from the big one that we’re going to do with the big giveaway and all that stuff. Our 2-year anniversary so you guys make sure you’re there too. We’re going to start with Ryan at the bottom. He says, “Hey, Bradley. Do you use crowd search for maps? I saw they have an advanced local map search option and I don’t think that was available back when I saw your training video.”
Yes, Ryan, I do. It’s cool because what it will do is it will click on the map listings in the 3-pack if it’s there. If it’s not there, it’ll click on the See More Listings button and it’ll open up Google Maps and it will go find the listing and click on it so that then it pulls it in the maps. Then from there, it can navigate to the site from the maps listing so it can click on the website link and go to the maps or the actual website itself. Then it can still do the internal browsing from there so it is something that I use. It does help. There’s no doubt.
The problem with, the only thing that, the issue that I see with the crowd search for maps is that you have to pretty much hyper-target, like you have to narrow down, drill down to the specific geographic location. That ends up using a ton of credits but you don’t need a lot of click-throughs for that. You don’t need a lot of search and click-throughs for that to be effective. What you need is just a habit consistent over time. It’s not something that you want to jam a whole bunch of click-throughs in a couple weeks. You want to spread it out with just a handful of them over a 30-day period and just leave it be, and over time it will start to improve. It helps to improve. It’s just another signal that you’re sending to Google.
Dan has training inside the crowd search dashboard now for that, Ryan. Just check it out. If you have crowd searching, you can check out the training and he’ll explain how to do it. It’s simple to setup.
Hernan: For anyone looking to buy, you have to get on the waiting list. If you go straight to the website but I [hope that 00:05:10] we have a backdoor hack.
Bradley: There you go.
Hernan: I posted it so if you want to go there, go ahead, join. It works great.
Footprint Issues Syndicated Content
Bradley: Greg is next. He says, “I’ve added several additional blogs to my IFTTT network. For each post I’m having concern about having 15 plus network properties using the exact same anchor text back to the category page. Here’s what I’ve done to diversify the anchor text. This takes less than 5 minutes. In my post content, I use long anchor text linking up to the category page. When I publish a post to activate four of the IFTTT recipes, then I take a word out of the anchor text of the post and activate a few more and repeat. Okay? The result is the syndicated post on the network ends up with fibers and anchor text back the categories, excuse me, the category page. Do all the syndicated posts in that exact anchor text linking back to the category page? Thanks.”
Not really. First of all, Greg, if you’re just managing one site and you want to go through all that, that’s great. Continue, just keep doing what you’re doing. Personally, I think that’s way too much manual work. The whole point of the networks is to automate a [lot 00:06:17], at least in my opinion, is to automate stuff. I wouldn’t go through all that but if you’re doing that and you seem to be getting good results with it. Guys, we encourage you to test. If you’re cool with doing some additional manual work every time you do a post, so be it. Do it. Do what you do.
As far as with five different anchor text, I would be a little bit concerned with it only because if you’re syndicating a post with an attribution link but some of the posts are different, then it’s not an actual copy of the original post. Right? It’s an edited version of it. I don’t know that it’s going to cause you any issues. It’s not something I’ve tested. I’ll let the other guys chime in and think because I’d like to hear their opinion on this as well. Typically, when you’re syndicating a post, it should be an exact match of the original with the links with you citing the source with an attribution link.
If you if you edit the page, then let’s put it this way, like you’re not supposed to be editing other people’s content when you use it, when you cite other people’s content in curating post, for example, because you’re not supposed to edit their content. You know what I mean? You’re supposed to post the original as it was intended. I don’t know that that’s going to cause you any issues. This is not something I’ve tested. What do you guys think?
Hernan: This is a question that I’ve gotten like three times already this week, about footprints with IFTTT because we had some people [pinging 00:07:51] me [the APM 00:07:51] and then we have Greg here. I think it was on Matt Diggity blog where we had a conversation [I think I 00:08:01] posted it about IFTTT and whatnot. The reality is that, guys, we are using highly trafficked, highly authority websites. Some people will tell me, “Well, you know, if I’m doing on PBN, wouldn’t it be a footprint if I post to, you know, if I make an IFTTT network around the PBN and I would post to Twitter, Facebook, Google+?” I would say no because those are like the three biggest social networks in the world maybe.
My point on this would be that do not sweat it that much in terms of of footprints because what you’re doing is a syndicated content out. Again, we’re doing it with highly traffic and there’s millions upon millions of people using those networks. I also think that Google’s have better things to do. The reality is that do not sweat it and if you are really, really worried about that, then just go ahead and switch a couple of networks. You do not need to use every single network. Instead of 20, you can use, I don’t know, maybe 50 or something like that. Again, we have a blueprint that has been working for what, 3 years now, maybe more? It’s still going strong. I don’t see anything wrong with sharing because that’s exactly what we are doing.
With that said, this doesn’t imply that you should not be doing some manual work on your social networks because that’s another thing that I’ve gotten. If you post automatically to Twitter or to Facebook, you’re misusing the platform. By any means, if your audience is being on Twitter, post the IFTTT but then do some manual work. Get somebody managing your Twitter and/or you manage your Twitter. This is a complementary strategy. It’s something that will go and really, really well with whatever come to market in that you’re doing but it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be doing some manual post to your Facebook page, for example, if people are [big 00:10:03] in Facebook, if your audience is on Facebook. I wouldn’t sweat it a lot because this is just trying to share content in as many platforms as possible. Just remember that we have only three or maybe five contextual links out of 20 platforms.
Bradley: Let me jump on that for a minute because, first of all, he said he added several additional blogs to his network. What I was going to say was, before I read that first part, when we syndicate a post to a branded network, let’s say there’s 20 properties in the network, the networks that I [build 00:10:42], I still just use Blogger, Tumblr, and WordPress is my three blogs. That’s it. I don’t add Medium. I don’t add, what’s the other one, Weebly. I don’t use Weebly very often so I just use the three main ones: Blogger, Tumblr, WordPress. Those are your only three contextual links other than your cloud storage links but those are those aren’t quite the same. They’re not counted quite the same.
You only get three anchor text links pointing back from any post syndication anyways unless you’re doing what Greg said, he’s done here, and that’s adding additional blog accounts to your network which I don’t recommend. I’ve never recommended that. I always recommend sticking with a branded network and that only. If you’re going to add additional blogs, do it on a two-tier based system but then you end up having additional related content triggers in as a tier two triggers. We talk about that in the training extensively as to why we do that: so that you can reduce. You can’t eliminate but you can reduce the footprint. That’s why we stress over and over and over again to just use a branded network for content syndication, for blog syndication, because then you don’t have to worry about.
First of all, you only have three, four, or five total anchor text backlinks from any post syndication, number one. Number two, it’s not a footprint because it’s a brand new property, an extension of your brand. All you’re doing is sharing your content to your profiles on other platforms. That’s it, so there’s no footprint issues. The footprint issues come in when you start to try to gain the system by adding additional blogs or adding two-tier networks for blog syndication without additional content triggers to minimize or mask your footprint.
Again, I encourage you to test, there’s no doubt, but as far as what we consider to be best practices, we teach you guys or tell you guys in the training courses what we think the best practices are. You’re free to do whatever it is you want to do beyond that but, personally, I wouldn’t do what you’re doing here, Greg, number one, because of the manual aspect of it. I don’t like manual work if I can avoid if at all possible or hire a VA to do the manual part. As far as adding additional blogs to network, I really don’t recommend doing that. If you’re going to add additional blogs, put them on tier two and make sure you have additional content triggers so that you can populate those additional blogs with other content besides just your own.
Marco: If I can just add for a second, I’ve been sharing our announcement, that HDHO, that our Hump Day Hangouts are about to take place. I’ve done it on Fridays. Now I’m down to doing it like 2 hours before which I’ve seen that it has the greatest effect. It’s always when I go on to post to all of our groups and publicly on Facebook and to everything in Google all of our groups and publicly, it’s the same exact post with Google shortenings. Exact, I mean everything is the same. Nothing changes. We have never had any issue and this is since I see the first tracking that we have is from April 1st of 2015. Here we are October 2016, no issues, same exact content being published all over, Google getting access to the Analytics from these posts so it knows exactly what the content is on those posts. I just don’t see any problem.
Google’s Latest Verification Check on Lead Gen Sites Using PO Boxes
Bradley: I agree. Good question, though, Greg. Next one is Michael Franks. He says, “Hi, all. Now that Google is doing advanced verification in San Diego for plumbers and locksmiths to ensure they have an actual physical location storefront, when and how do you think it will affect our lead gen sites for tree service, doctors, and others if we’re using PO Boxes as addresses?”
I don’t know yet, Michael. We just roll with the punches when if and when they start rolling that out nationwide, coming to a city near you, that kind of stuff. When that happens, we’ll deal with it. Right now, I’m not sweating it because I don’t worry about what-if. I just don’t worry about what-if because there’s too many what-if scenarios out there to worry about I’d never get anything done. I’m just going to keep rolling with exactly what works right now as we always do in the SEO world. When it stops working, we’ll find another hack, another workaround, another method right.
Unfortunately, I don’t do anything in San Diego and also don’t do anything with locksmiths, some plumbers but not locksmiths, so hopefully I won’t have to worry about that for a while. Hopefully, none of us have to worry about that for a while. If you’re in San Diego, it sucks, that sucks. I’m sure there’s a workaround the guys, it’s just a matter of figuring out what it is and making it happen.
Carrying DA & Ranking Power of Custom Domain
That’s a good question, Michael. Technically, no. If you were to look at the actual domain with Majestic or Ahrefs or whatever, you’re going to see that the metrics are not the same. However, I still [seeing 00:15:54] the metrics may not be the same but I’ve been able to rank custom domains with Google sites that were mapped to Google sites as if they were still Google sites, as if they were still on the Google domain because technically they’re still hosted on the Google domain. You just are mapping your own custom domain to it. Although the metrics don’t show the metrics that the Google domain would have, I still get the same ranking power as you put it here. I still see the same end result which is to rank the site.
As Marco and we have really started to to preach because the metrics aren’t everything anymore. It’s more about relevancy. Personally, I don’t really care what the metrics say as long as I can get the end result which is to get it to rank. As far as using a custom domain to webs, I’m assuming, I’ve never done anything with webs that I can remember, but I’m assuming that you’ll still see the same or similar type of results as when you map a domain to a Google site or to, for example, on Amazon S3 Bucket. If you’re hosting a HTML site or on Amazon S3 Bucket and you do a custom domain for that, same thing. I get better results with a custom domain hosted on either Google sites or mapped to either Google sites or on Amazon S3 Bucket than I would with just a standard domain with a regular hosting, if that makes sense.
What’s your take on it, guys?
Marco: I would tell him to look at the canonical or look at whether it was 301 because what one or the other had to happen. Either way, he’s still getting benefits from webs.com.
Bradley: That’s a good point. Look, Michael, that’s a really good point. I forgot to mention that. Because when you deal with Google sites, if you map a custom domain to a Google site and then you go look at the Google site URL, which is not a subdomain. It’s an actual subdirectory. If you go look at this, at the URL, go look at that page on the Google domain and then view page source. Right-click, View Page Source, and you’ll see the rel equals canonicals pointing to the custom domain. What I’m saying is and like Marco just mentioned is you’re actually pushing the relevancy over to, you’re telling Google or you’re telling them, “Hey, all the credit goes over to this domain over here, so you should still get the same results even if the metrics don’t pass.” Does that make sense?
Marco: Yeah. It shouldn’t be any different because he’ll still be using webs as a CMS.
Bradley: They know that.
Marco: It should flow [upward 00:18:23]. There will still be some loss but it won’t be significant.
Google Citations For Lead Gen Sites
Bradley: Next one as Ben. He says, “Bradley, my question is similar to Michael’s. If I’m setting up lead gen sites outside my local area, how does one deal with the [ad 00:18:37] issue for citations? I’m guessing Google knows a UPS Store box is not a real address.”
Maybe so but if you can still get away with it, which you can currently, then you can still do it. What I do, guys, and we’ve talked about this is I do service-based businesses. When you’re using a spam address, guys, when I say spam address, I mean a PO Box, UPS address, a virtual mailbox, whatever. Anyone of those or the spam addresses because they’re not actual physical locations where business is housed, right? It’s just a place to collect mail. If you’re using one of those, you should only be using one of those if you have a service-based business where there’s a service area. You, the business, goes to the customer location, not the customer comes to your location.
Once you setup your listing inside a Google My Business, there’s a checkbox that says, “I serve customers at their location.” You check that box after you received your postcard and verified the listing. Then you go, you leave your address show initially when you set up your Google My Business listing. Once you receive the card and you verified it, then you go in and edit it and uncheck the box to hide your location. What it will do is remove the street address and just put the city and the phone number in the the description area or whatever of the the listing. From there, that’s all you do with the Google listing.
For all your other citations, there are very few citation sites out there that I’m aware of that will allow you to add a citation without a physical address, a street address. I just put all my, I use the whatever address it is that I got. Typically, I use PO Boxes with the street address option. I just use those on all the other directory sites because I don’t care that that data is out there. The Google listing doesn’t show it so what difference does it make? Other than Yelp, I don’t get a lot of traffic from a lot of the other directory sites so it’s not something that I’m worried about. I’m just letting you know.
My whole entire lead gen business is built on that model and it works and it still works today. I don’t know how long it’s going to work out but I’ve been saying that for years. Hopefully, 4 years from I’ll still be saying that. Don’t worry about it. Just hide your address, so a service-based business after you’ve verified your listing or check the box that says, “I serve customers at their location,” and then just use whatever address, the real address that you got for your card, your postcard. Use that across all other directory listings. If it gives you the option to hide your address on those other directories, then you can hide your address but most of them do not even give you that option. You just use whatever address you have.
Video at Plusfeed.frosas.net
Ben, look, when you post to your Google+ profile or work to your page either way, you’re not posting videos. I mean, you might be posting videos but you’re posting a Google+ post so it’s not that it’s going to pull in just a video URL from your Google+ feed. It’s going to pull the Google+ post URL in and whatever is contained in that post URL. I saw this question earlier so I prepared this because I want to prove what I’m trying to say here. This will make more sense if I can demonstrate it so give me one second.
Come on, Firefox. I’ve got two, I’ve got a page feed here using that same service that you just mentioned. This is my Semantic Mastery page feed. I created this using that service. Here’s our post, guys. This is the one that we’re actually doing right now and you can see it. It pulls in the thumbnail image. If you hover over the title, guys, if you just look down in the bottom left corner, I know it’s small on your screen. Let me zoom in a little bit. If I hover over the title, you’ll see that it links to the Google+ post URL. If I open link in new tab, it’s going to take us to the Google+ post URL where the video resides.
I’ve cleared my cookies. Anyways, don’t worry about that but if the video resides in the Google+ post. It’s just the way an RSS feed should be. The RSS feed doesn’t include, any RSS feed doesn’t include the items in the post. It may also display the items in the post but the actual link to the title always links back to the post itself, not to the items that are contained within the post. Does that makes sense? What’s cool is that you can see that the actual, for example, this one, you can see the title: Weekly SEO Hump Day Hangouts, Episode 100 Replay. This gives us an actual direct link from that post directly to there. If I click on this, what’s this do? This takes us directly to the video so we still end up getting a link back to our video from the Google+ post.
Again, all it’s going to do, the RSS feed, is it’s just going to pull in the Google+ posts, which is fine because building links to Google+ post is still very valuable. It’s very powerful. Here’s a profile one. Here’s one done on, this is my profile. Again, you can create an RSS feed from Google+ pages and from profiles. Here it is. Again, any one of these titles is going to link directly over to an actual Google+ post. See? All right. Hopefully that helps.
ExactI Keywords at Complex Silo Structure
Chris says, “Hey, guys. In a complex silo structure, do use the exact keywords you wanna rank for as anchor text linking back up to the category page? Can you use the same anchor text more than once on different subcategory pages linking to the category page?” Yes, Chris, you can. Just remember, internal links don’t have to apply to this. They don’t have to abide by the same criteria, I guess, that off page links, inbound links do. You can get away with doing a lot more aggressive. I would still vary it somewhat though if you can. If you have LSIs and things like that, I would store [it 00:24:55], longer tail variations and things like that. I would still add some diversity to your internal linking structure as well but, yeah, you can get away with doing a lot more direct, exact match keyword anchor text as internal links.
In important branch subcategory of this complex silo, does it help or hurt to have the subcategory page when we link back up to the main category page? Thanks a lot.” I know you should in a subcategory page. You should. Guys, if you’re using a complex silo structure, should I break down the the diagram? Should I break out [Snagit 00:25:39]? Do we have time for that or no?
Hernan: We have a bunch of questions still.
Marco: I don’t think we have time [for it here 00:25:44].
Hernan: I think that you have gone through that so probably if Chris would go and search complex silo structure on our YouTube channel, he will get the diagram.
Bradley: Guys, when you’re using a complex silo structure, you’re going to have an a top level category and then you’re going to have child categories which are subcategories or child pages which are subcategories. Then you’re going to have posts. The posts are going to be specific to each subcategory. What you can do is, I always suggest that you link from each post up to the subcategory page and you can also link to other posts within the same silo if you want. It’s not necessary but you can if you want, if it makes sense. Don’t force it but if it makes sense that there’s a natural occurrence where a link would make sense to link to another post within the same silo, go ahead and do it but always link back up to the subcategory page.
The subcategory page should be linking to the category page because that’s how you get that buoyancy, that’s how you get all that juice to flow up from at any point in the silo, from any inbound links that point to any post or any page in that entire silo structure, all that juice is going to flow up to the main category page which is typically the broadest of keywords and the most competitive. The only way to push all that relevancy up to that page is through your internal linking structure so you want to make sure that you link from subcategory page to the category page and then from your posts to your subcategory page.
Guys, you can also link directly from post to your category page if it makes sense. Typically, you’re going to link to your subcategory page because it’s more specific, it’s more narrow, but if it makes sense you can always link back up because, again, it’s just about pushing all the relevancy from each individual silo back up to the main category page. That was quicker than drawing a diagram, right?
Hernan: It was.
rel=canonical For Syndicated Blog Posts
Bradley: Matt’s next. “What do you guys do in terms of rel equals canonical for your blog post prior to syndication? What are your views about that, best way to safeguard for any type of penalty?” Matt, we do nothing because rel equals canonical goes in the header. If you put in the header of your post and then your post syndicates, your header doesn’t get syndicated, only the body of the post gets syndicated. Adding a rel equals canonical to your header in your post where you originally published it isn’t going to help on your syndication post but that’s what the attribution link is for. It’s the next best thing. If we could add rel equals canonical to our post, we would, but we’re not, were unable to do that because the header doesn’t get syndicated. Therefore, we do the next best thing which is the attribution link.
Duplicate Content Penalty
“Is there even a penalty for duplicate [content 00:28:22] anymore?” There’s never been a penalty for duplicate content on other domains. It’s only on the same domain. You get penalized for duplicate content on the same domain. If you got penalized for duplicate content, then all the sharing in the world would just cause problems for everybody. Sharing content on social media sites would cause problems. Press releases wouldn’t work. We all know that press releases work and they work well. It’s always the same content. When a press release gets syndicated to 350 media sites, is it rewritten? Is it spun. No, it’s not. It’s the same content. It’s duplicate content. Does it cause problems? It works. I know.
“The reason I ask is after reading this article I’m a little confused.” I get that, Matt. I get that. There’s conflicting information out there but just test. Don’t take our word for it. Test is all I can say. When you’re syndicating your content to a branded ring of properties, all you’re doing is sharing your content to extended or your profiles on social media and Web 2.0 properties. They’re extensions of your brand. It’s your content. You should be sharing them.
That’s basically what all the big brands do as well. That’s what we’re encouraged to do is to share our content on social media and drive traffic and give those all important social signals. We’re just doing it in an automated fashion. Again, that’s a good question though about the rel equals canonical but that’s the reason why we use attribution links because there’s no way to syndicate the header, at least as far as I know.
Bit.ly Public URL
Larry’s next. “I’m assuming that Bit.ly doesn’t provide a public profile [you’re on 00:29:59].” No, Larry. That’s been covered in the update training, the updates of the IFTTT training. That was specifically covered. They [sunsetted 00:30:07] there are public profile pages. Again, you go check the updates in the IFTTT training. It’s there. The same seems to go with Facebook.
“It appears that there’s no longer a place to add our links. Page info doesn’t exist.” It does. It still exist, Larry. I’m not sure why you’re not seeing it but [let’s jump over 00:30:24] to Facebook because I’m already in Facebook. Let’s go jump over here for a second and we’ll go to Pages. The most recent page that I published was Get It Done for the training, the IFTTT SEO Academy training.
Come on, Facebook. What are you doing? Over here, I click on About. Right there, long description. If I click Edit, right there’s where I add all my links so I’m not sure what you’re talking about and why you’re not seeing it. Just click on the About tab on your page. You should have a long description. You should also have a short description or a company, whatever it is, the short description and a long description. I usually put the links in the long description. There it is.
Hernan: You can you can also click on that More tab.
Bradley: What, here?
Hernan: No, up.
Bradley: What do you mean?
Hernan: Up the menu. More and then you get all that, the Edit Page and page info should be somewhere in there.
Bradley: Right there, description. Are you guys seeing the popup or no?
Hernan: Yep.
Bradley: Okay. It’s still there. “You said IFTTT v2 Lesson 11 that if I wanted someone else to access my YouTube channel or go to my Google+ page, I don’t have to give up my main Google account login details. However, correct me if I’m wrong, but are they not all the same or are you talking about creating a totally new account for that purpose? In my situation, building brand and they are currently all the same and I can’t see how you get one without the other.”
Larry, because we talk about voting Google pages. You have to have a profile to have a page. You can’t create a page without having a profile. A profile is a person or a persona. A page is a business or an entity or brand or location. In order to create pages, you have to have a profile. You create pages under a profile. Whether it’s yours or persona, it doesn’t matter. You just need to create business pages then you give access to those pages. You don’t give access to your profile because you would definitely get IP locked for it. It will trigger reverification. It will lock somebody else out like a VA or whatever out because they’re going to be logging in from an unrecognized location and it’s just a real pain in the ass. Instead, you make a Google+ page login now.
We have an update webinar coming up either next week or the following week for IFTTT v2 and there was an issue that was covered in the last update webinar where Google+ page logins were no longer working. I explicitly mentioned that I believe that it’s a bug because of the new Google+ interface and that it’s probably going to be worked out. I don’t know. I haven’t been back to check on it yet to see if that’s been worked out yet. I haven’t heard anything back from our builders in the philippines yet so I’m assuming that it’s either been fixed or that they’re still doing the workaround that we had come up with for network orders, for people that purchased networks from us. Again, currently, there is, at least as of the last webinar that we did for IFTTT SEO Academy v2, that was a bug or at least I think it was a bug that you could not create Google+ third-party login details which is what it’s called. That was missing.
Now, that said, I do want to check this. We’re going to go check on pages real quick. I’m still on the old Google+ interface. In fact, it changed me over today to the new one without asking me and I switched it back and it did allow it. Thank God. If we go to here, let’s see. We’re on the page. Let’s see if this is right. I want to go to Settings. Excuse me. I might not be the owner of this page though. I bet you, I’m not. I’m not the owner of this page. I’m just the manager, I think. Actually, I am. See, okay, so it is missing. Guys, I’m sorry. I just wanted to take a look at this real quick to show.
Typically or how it has always been is on a page, if you’re the page owner, which means that page was created under your profile, there’s usually, there has been always a third-party login where you can create a third-party login and it’s always around this area here on the Settings for the page. It looks like it’s still missing so unfortunately, but when I get around to creating a training for the next update webinar, I’ll dig into this a little bit deeper and see if there’s been a fix for that yet. Apparently, it looks like there’s not.
Unfortunately, there’s not really a lot we can do other than if you need to have a VA, the workaround that we’re doing right now, Larry, just so you know, the workaround is if you have a VA, all you do is go in and add the VA as a manager to your page. Then they can access the page from their own account without any login details. It’s a little bit of a pain in the ass for us because we have all of our builders in the Philippines and so when a customer orders now, we have to send them directions on how to add the specific builder to their page as a manager so that we can set up all the recipes the way we’re supposed to.
Again, the same way guys, just go to your page, click on [manage 00:35:35]. Now, if the page was created under your profile, then you’re the page owner and you can assign managing positions or manager positions to others at your will. You have to make sure that you’re logged in the profile that owns the page, then go click on the page, then go to Managers. Then from there, you can go manage permissions and you can add people. You see the plus button up here, Inviting New Users? Then you add your VA’s Gmail address, choose a role, add them as a manager, and then click Invite.
Then they can go, when they go visit the page next, they will have a prompt or they can check their Gmail settings. I think it shows up in either the Primary tab or the Social tab. I think it shows up in the Primary tab. They can click on that and click on the Agree or Accept the Invitation or they can just go visit the page after they’ve been invited and they should have a prompt like a notification bar that shows up and says, “Hey, you’ve been invited to be a manager. Do you accept?” That’s how easy it is.
At least it looks like we still can’t create the third-party login details right now but the workaround is just add them as a manager and then you never have to worry about it anyways because they can login from their own account. If you have them doing a specific job and then that’s it, then once the job is done, go remove them as manager so that they don’t have continuous access. That’s rather a long question. I don’t know if, I think, Larry, you’re having a little bit of confusion about the difference between profiles and pages. I think, hopefully, that solved that a bit.
“As a one-man gang SEO business at this point, I do have Google My Business. But did you say it’s good to have both a brand and a business, you mean a brand and a local page or locations page? If so, would it be best to have just one targeted and a network rank?” No. You can target both. In order to target both, you need to, let’s see, let me think about this for a second. You can syndicate to both. You just need to have two separate buffer accounts, I believe. Is that right? Can somebody refresh my memory on that one.
Hernan: Yeah. Buffer, I think, will only allow one Google+ account unless you’re on the pro version. If you’re in the pro version, will allow more than once. Again, in that case, you will need two different buffer accounts.
Bradley: That’s right. Guys, just so you understand what we’re saying like, for example, let’s go take a look at this. Right here, I’m on brand pages. If we scroll down, we have a Semantic Mastery brand page. What I want to do is click on that. This is our Semantic Mastery brand page. This is the one that we typically use. We also have a local page. That’s what he’s asking about here. If I go over to locations-come on Google-or do you see Semantic Mastery? Here we go. If we go over to locations and take a look at this, we can. See that this is our locations page.
We can actually syndicate post to both. It looks like we haven’t been syndicating your locations page but I really don’t care because I’m not trying to rank this in maps or anything. If you have both a brand page and a locations page, the difference is you’ll notice there’s always an address or an address and a phone number on the local page like you see here. Then also there on the About page, there’s no links section on local pages or locations pages but there is on brand pages.
What you can do is syndicate to both. Again, you just need to setup a secondary IFTTT account and then set up a secondary buffer account. You connect your locations page through one buffer account to your primary IFTTT account and then you set up your secondary IFTTT account and buffer account to connect your brand page. That way you’re syndicating to both. If you’re just focusing on local, then you can skip syndicating you a brand page. I think there’s benefits to that and that’s these: having the ability to add links that you don’t have on your locations page. If you’re trying to make your maps, just have a syndicate to your maps location if you only want to do one.
“When are interlinking Blogger, I wasn’t able to get my Google+ badge. Have there different problems with this or could I be doing something wrong?” Larry, probably doing something wrong because, as far as I know, that’s still working. I haven’t had any issues with it. I can’t imagine there being any issues with that. Just go back through the training, follow the instructions exactly as done. I’m not saying you haven’t but try it again, maybe clear your cache and cookies and try it again. See if maybe there was a browser issue. That can happen sometimes.
Hernan: I just wanted to add real quick, Larry and everyone else that’s on the v2 training. We also have the Facebook group for these kind of v2 specific questions. That way, you do not need to wait up until Wednesday to get your answer. You will get our answer and the peers, the guys that are in there, the moderators and the rest of the community that belongs to the v2 training. Maybe some people that, instead of the community, they can really help you out or you guys, I mean, it’s not that you cannot comment on Hump Days but I think the best way to do this, Larry, would be to join the Facebook group if you’re not already there and post your questions there because you will have a quicker response.
Possible Negative SEO Impact Of Having Different Channels In One YouTube Account
Bradley: Steve’s up. He says, “I’m an affiliate marketer and I signed up for your course to help me rank product review videos. Here’s my question: YouTube says that I’m able to create up to 50 channels under one account. If I wanna set different channels under one account within different niches, will that negatively affect the SEO of videos in the different channels? Of course, each channel would be branded for each niche.”
Technically, no, Steve. I still don’t recommend doing that and the reason why is because if anything were ever to happen to the profile, so the page owner which would be the profile account and you’ve got 50 pages or YouTube channels in your case, but YouTube channels and Google+ pages are one and the same because when you create a YouTube channel, it creates a Google+ page. My point is is if you have 50 pages and/or channels under one profile and anything ever happens to that one profile, you just lost everything. You lost it all.
It’s rare that a profile gets terminated. It’s not so rare that pages get terminated if you’re doing spammy stuff. Pages will get terminated without affecting the profile, for the most part, and it’s rare that a profile gets terminated but I wouldn’t want to build my whole entire business under one profile because that’s just a recipe for disaster. I would hate to see you go through setting all this stuff up, Steve, and then something happens one day where Google just decides what you’re doing it doesn’t like and closes your account and you lose everything.
What I always recommend is create a separate profile for every channel or at least don’t put more than two or three channels, main money channels under any one profile. That way, you just spread your risk. Remember, let’s say you want to do 50 channels and you set up 50 separate profiles which is probably how I would do it but you can always add yourself, Steve [Bell 00:42:54], as a page manager which I just showed you guys how to do that just a few moments ago. You can add your main profile, Steve [Bell 00:43:01], as a page manager to all 50 channels that are owned by 50 separate profiles. That way, you can still access everything from your login without having to worry about it, but if any one of those profiles ever gets terminated by Google, you only lose one channel and you still have 49 more generating revenue. I highly recommend that that’s what you do.
As far as technically, those channels, as long as those channels are separated, it shouldn’t affect, like it shouldn’t negatively affect the SEO of another channel under the same profile. It should not because as long as you keep that particular channel topically themed, you should be fine. Again, mitigate your risk because I’ve seen too many people lose businesses because they did something silly to save some time. Maybe you didn’t know that, Steve, that you could do that but that’s what I recommend that you do is create different profiles for every channel. That way, you’re just safer.
Cloned Site Ousting Original Site In Terms of Ranking
Zach says, “Hey, guys. I love your stuff and I’ve been following for quite some time, +1 it. This an idea I’ve never heard before but is it possible if other people are copying an original site, Google may see the original site as more valuable and rank it higher? Also, what about uncited quotes of two or more sentences?” I’m not sure what you mean about Google may see the original site as more valuable and rank it higher but if other people are copying an original site, the original site should be seen and ranked higher by Google than the copy, the duplicate. Although, there’s lots of stories out there about scraper blogs and autoblogs that outrank the original content sources. That happens.
Hernan: Yeah, I was about to say that. I see it as a race. The first one that gets the content indexed is the one that gets the price. Some people are just beating you to it and they will get rewarded because of that. There are some [inaudible 00:45:10] strategies that work like that. There are also some people going through the archive content that it’s not indexed anymore and using that. I would advise against that but it’s usually I tend to see it as a race. If you get indexed being original, being your original content and the competitors then copy, they will get demoted or devalued. You know what I mean?
On the other hand, if they have a bigger blog or because it has happened with biggest, like major newspapers that they will rip off an article. There’s CNN and they will get even if it’s your article, your original article, they’ll still have the winning hand because they have all of that authority, et cetera, so that content will get indexed like in faster than yours.
Bradley: That’s why we use canonicals where possible but a lot of times we’re unable to do that so we use attribution links and that’s so that when we publish or syndicate republish our post to other platforms that the credit gets pushed back to the original source because we want to benefit the original source as much as possible. That’s why we do that.
Uncited Quotes For Curated Content
Last part of the question: “Also, what about uncited quotes of two or more sentences?” I wouldn’t do it. If you quote somebody, first of all, you should make sure that it’s very clear that it’s a quote and you should also link to, even if you don’t think like you should link to the profile of the person that you’re quoting or the article that you’re quoting or whatever, you should always cite, guys. That’s like the DMCA, Digital Millennium Copyright Act. That’s just the rules. If you’re going to be using other people’s content even two sentences, you should be citing the original source. Give the credit where the credit is due.
Follow the link if you want. If you don’t want to pass link equity, fine, but at least link to them because you should be doing that. It’s only ethical and it’s right. Just do it that way. I would not …
Marco: Thank you for that last part: give credit where credit is due.
Bradley: That’s right. Give credit [crosstalk 00:47:21]
Marco: Give people credit when they deserve it. Don’t try to steal their shit.
KW+CITY For Link Building Packages
Bradley: I agree. All right. Next [Earl 00:47:29]. “When ordering link packages, I’ve been including keyword plus city name for multiple suburban cities as well as majors. Am I blowing it by including the city names? If I should have the city names, am I blowing it by having suburbs without having separate landing pages [inaudible 00:47:42] or am I diluting my [GUF 00:47:44]?”
It’s yes, [Earl 00:47:44]. I wouldn’t do that. When you’re submitting keywords for our link building packages, I’m talking about ours. I don’t know about other people’s because I don’t know where they’re building, like what tier, what level they’re building at but the way that, we don’t build links to many sites. We only build links to IFTTT property citations, press releases, YouTube videos, whatever but we don’t build links to many sites. We just won’t allow it. It’s too much risk on our part that we don’t want to be liable for any issues that may occur. We do tier one properties only.
What we recommend always is that you go with broader terms. You don’t need to go with exact matched keywords with like keyword plus city. I would go with just keyword because the further you get from your final target URL which would be your money site, the broader you should get with your keywords. You should go with broad keywords, generics, naked URLs, that kind of stuff.
When you’re at it, when you’re ordering a link building package, go with broad terms. You don’t need to go with exact match keywords because those should be reserved for your tier one links and internal links like on page links right. Hopefully that makes sense. I wouldn’t do that, [Earl 00:48:52]. From now on, I would just keep it a lot more generic, a lot more broad on those because all we’re trying to do is push juice into our tier one properties. Our tier one properties are going to give us all the relevancy we need.
We got about 5 more minutes. We’re going to try to get through a few more. There’s a lot of questions today, guys. We really appreciate it. Rico says, “Is creating backlinks full mesh a good practices?” Can somebody tell me what that means? Anybody now?
Hernan: No.
Marco: No idea what full mesh means.
Bradley: Me neither. Sorry. I don’t know what you mean on that, Richard, so carry on with the next one.
Marco: Maybe full bore.
Bradley: I don’t know.
Marco: I don’t know.
IFTTT Networks & About.me/Aboutus.org
Hernan: AboutUs.org [crosstalk 00:50:04]
Bradley: I don’t know if that’s what he’s talking about. He might be. AboutUs.org?
Hernan: Yeah. I think that’s the one because it is About.me and then AboutUs.org so, yeah, those are two [crosstalk 00:50:15]
Bradley: He’s saying I have created a page on my money site about dash me, so what he’s doing is he created a page on his money site and put the links to all of his IFTTT properties on that page and then he’s saying, “I’ve done the exact same on about us,” and I’m wondering is that AboutUs.org or are you talking about like you have an About Us page on your site as well? If that’s the case, I would say only use one or the other. Delete one of those pages because you should. I don’t know that that’s the case, Richard, because I’m not real clear as to what it is that you did here but if I would not have been About Me and About Us page and have the same content on both, I just wouldn’t do it.
To be honest with you, you could link, having all your links on About Me page, that’s fine. You could also put them into a sidebar widget or a footer widget. We’ve had this question come up recently a couple times but people ask about, you could use the Gravatar widget if you have it or you could use a plugin. I’ve always used called Social Stickers which allows you to enter in a whole bunch of your different Web 2.0 auto social media properties and we’ll add their icons and it will give you a widget that you can put in for a sidebar or footer.
Typically, that’s how I’ll do it but, remember, if you’ve got it marked up in the header like in JSON-LD markup structured data, you don’t even need them linked on your site. It doesn’t make any difference if you have your same as a tribute other than you can push juice through to your other properties. If you have it marked up in the same as a tribute to the top, you’re still going to get basically the same result.
Hernan: I think he clarifies later when he says, “I’m not sure this will have any value up but as far as I can tell, well, I’ll already have backlinks from About Us although this is nofollow.” He put them as nofollow?
Bradley: Yeah, so he is talking AboutUs.org I bet because AboutUs.org, that’s a very powerful property that you can use to push. Even though they’re nofollow links, it is a very valuable property. If you’re using AboutUs.org, that’s great, Rico or Richard, because that’s a good property to use and you should probably see a bump in your Ahrefs metrics from it because it’s a strong property. We got time for about one or two more and that’s it.
SEO Practices For HTTPS Website
Every time I’ve had to switch a site from regular to SSL, I have a person I use on Upwork to go in and edit the sights and handle all that shit for me because it can create a hell of a mess but you can go into your settings, your word processing settings, General, and you can change your site address in there to add the S to the HTTP. Settings, General, you’ll see your site address. It’s one of the first couple options at the top of the WordPress page there and you switch it to HTTPS. Just keep in mind that that can cause all kinds of CSS issues. That’s why I always, there’s a guy on Upwork that I hire every time I have to do that. I just handed over to him, say, “Here. Fix this for me,” and he does it for me because, otherwise, you can have CSS issues, you can have internal link issues. Just keep that in mind.
There’s also plugins that say that they do that for you, that they handle all that. I think one of the plugins is HTTPS Protocol is the name of it I think. If not, just go search Google for HTTPS or SSL whatever plugins for WordPress but I can’t swear to any of them because, again, I don’t handle any of that. I have somebody else do that for me. [Any of us 00:54:01] want to comment on that?
Hernan: Yeah.
Marco: [crosstalk 00:54:07]
Hernan: Go ahead.
Marco: The one thing that I do see is he definitely needs to go into the htaccess file and redirect up to the SSL version of the URL because it’s going to create like three or four different versions of the website all with duplicate content. Of course, canonical changes to HTTPS so he’s better off just hiring someone to avoid the headache.
Bradley: That’s what I do. Just go to Upward. You can get it done for cheap, a couple hours worth of work, pay somebody $7, $8, $10 an hour, something like that. Somebody’s decent with WordPress. I mean you’re paying $15 an hour and you take some two hours to do. It probably wouldn’t even take the that long but that’s $30. That’s $30 well-spent. Save yourself a whole bunch of headache. That’s why I don’t do it. It’s just too much headache for me. I just hand it over to somebody that knows what the hell they’re doing, say, “Do this for me,” I pay him. It’s done.
“What about the feed address for RSS IFTTT recipes?” I don’t think it should matter. I don’t think so but I’m not 100% sure because your RSS feed would change as well to also include the S but I don’t think it would matter. I think the old URL should resolve to the new in it anyways but test it. Once you get that HTTPS fixed on your site correctly, once it’s done right and you know that it’s completed, then just check your feed. If it looks like it’s going to cause issues, then just go update your recipes with the correct feed URL.
Evernote Public URL
I’m going to answer this one and I’m going to touch on Ethan’s very, very quickly and then we’re done because we’re almost out of time. “I’m seeing on Evernote public notes the outbound links are not a typical hyperlink. They’re a curious-looking redirective sorts. Is this worse than even a nofollow hyperlink?”
No, it’s a redirect. They’re not quite the same as just a direct link. There’s obviously some loss there. You’d have to actually check like redirect-checker.org or something like that to look at the header codes to see if they’re follow, nofollow, whatever. It really doesn’t matter because you’re still passing some authority from Evernote and Evernote’s notebooks rank, which is crazy.
Marco: Sorry about that. He needs to check that on WhereGoes. Just drop the URL in there and see whether it’s a 301 or a 302.
Bradley: You like WhereGoes. I like redirect-checker.org. We always end up battling in over that.
WordPress Pages In RSS Feeds
Last one. Ethan Rocker says, “Hey, guys. Do WordPress pages populate feeds?” No, Ethan, not unless you add a plugin to your site called, there’s one called RSS Includes Pages that will insert pages into your feed. I don’t recommend that though. There are probably some other plugins now. I just don’t ever add pages to my feed anymore. I did years ago and that was the plugin that I would use. It was RSS Includes Pages but then you would also have to install another plugin. Like I said, there’s probably a plugin that does all of this now like Exclude Categories and so I could set up rules and say, “Okay. There’s certain categories that I don’t want pages to be syndicated so that I could like eliminate pages like Contact Us and About Us from being syndicated, those types of pages, Privacy Policy, Terms of Service, that kind of stuff. Note, by default, WordPress will not add pages to feeds. RSS feeds are for posts but you can make it work by using plugins.
“If this is indeed the case, what would be your advice on building links to older pages via IFTTT network?” I would just do posts on the site. I would just add additional content as post and in point links, contextual links from within the post to the pages. That’s the IFTTT SEO strategy right there, is you use the blog to build links to the pages on your site. That’s what I would do. I wouldn’t worry about syndicating the pages. I would just add more content via the blog and link to those pages that you want to rank.
“Would it be safe to just copy and paste the content from all my pages and move them over to post as long as I keep the URL the same? Would this have any effect on rankings?” No, it shouldn’t. If the URLs are the same, it shouldn’t make any difference. That’s just way too much manual work. To be honest with you, if you really want to pop like if you just want your pages to be syndicated for whatever reason instead of just using a blog to build links to those pages, it’s what I recommend. If you want your pages to be syndicated, just use the RSS Includes Pages plugin and then use the other plugin that was called we Republish. I should have this saved as a bookmark because I always look this up. [Post 00:58:42] WordPress, there we go. It’s the first link, Republish Old Posts WordPress and you can use this plugin to basically republish old posts. If you have RSS Includes Pages on your site, then it should republish old pages too.
We’re out of time, guys. Sorry about not getting all the questions but those were some good questions. We got to as many as we could. We thank everybody for being here today [and the 00:59:04] master class [crosstalk 00:59:06]. Go ahead, Hernan.
Hernan: Sorry. No worries.
Bradley: No master class or mastermind this week but we will see you guys next Wednesday [for the 00:59:14] Hangouts.
Marco: Yep.
Hernan: Sounds good.
Bradley: Great guys. Thanks for being here.
Marco: Bye everyone.
Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 101 posted first on your-t1-blog-url
