It has now been six months since the launch of Penguin 4.0. In my opinion, Penguin 4.0 was awesome. It took ages for Google to release this update, but when they did, it was much more fair than previous versions of Penguin. Previous versions of Penguin would cause entire sites to be suppressed if the algorithm thought that you'd engaged in manipulative link building. Even if a site did a thorough link cleanup, the suppression would remain present until Google re-ran the Penguin algorithm and recognized your cleanup efforts. It was not uncommon to see situations like this:
I saw many businesses that had looooooong periods of time of suppression — even years!
According to Google spokesperson Gary Illyes, the new version of Penguin that was released in September of 2016 no longer suppresses sites:
Now, instead of causing a sitewide demotion when Penguin detects spam, they’ll simply devalue that spam so that it can’t help improve a site’s rankings.
I’m guessing that it took a lot of brainpower to figure out how to do this. Google now has enough trust in their ability to find and devalue spam that they are comfortable removing the punitive aspect of Penguin. That’s impressive.
This change brings up a question that I am asked several times a week now:
If Penguin is able to devalue spam, is there any reason to disavow links any more?
I've been asked this enough times now that I figured it was a good idea to write an article on my answer to this question.
You can use it by uploading a file to Google that contains a list of either URLs or domains. Then, as Google crawls the web, if they come across a URL or domain that is in your disavow file, they won’t use links from that page in their calculations of PageRank for your site. Those links also won’t be used by the Penguin algorithm when it decides whether your site has been involved in webspam.
For sites that were affected by Penguin in the past, the disavow tool was an integral part of getting the suppression lifted off the site. It was essentially a way of saying to Google, “Hey... in the past we made some bad links to our site. But we don’t want you to use those links in your calculations.” Ideally, it would be best to remove bad links from the web, but that’s not always possible. The disavow tool was, in my opinion, super important for any site that was hit by Penguin.
For more in-depth information on using the disavow tool, see this Moz post: http://ift.tt/1LmoM7S
What does Google say about using the disavow tool now?
It wasn’t long after the release of Penguin 4.0 before people starting asking Google whether the disavow tool was still necessary. After all, if Google can just devalue spam links on their own, why should I have to disavow them?
Here are some replies from Google employees:
Now, the conspiracy theorists out there will say, “Of course Google wants you to disavow! They need that data to machine-learn for Penguin!”
Google has said that Penguin is not a machine learning algorithm:
And even if they ARE using disavow data for some kind of machine learning training set, really, does it matter? In my opinion, if Google is saying that we should be still using the disavow tool, I don’t think they're trying to trick us. I think it still has a real purpose.
Three reasons why I still recommend using the disavow tool
There are three main reasons why I still recommend disavowing. However, I don’t recommend it in as many cases as I used to.
Google employee Gary Illyes commented during a podcast that, when a Google webspam team member looks at your site’s links, they can often see labels next to the links. He said the following:
“If the manual actions team is reviewing a site for whatever reason, and they see that most of the links are labeled as Penguin Real-Time affected, then they might decide to take a much deeper look on the site... and then maybe apply a manual action on the site because of the links. ”
In other words, if you have an unnatural link profile and you leave it up to Penguin to devalue your links rather than disavowing, then you’re at risk for getting a manual action.
Of course, if you actually do have a manual action, then you’ll need to use the disavow tool as part of your cleanup efforts along with manual link removal.
2) There are other algorithms that use links
Link quality has always been important to Google. I believe that Penguin is just one way in which Google fights against unnatural links algorithmically. One example of another algorithm that likely uses links is the Payday Loans algorithm. This algorithm isn’t just for payday loans sites; it also affects sites in many high-competition verticals.
Bill Slawski recently posted this interesting article on his thoughts about a recent patent filed by Google. In one place, the patent talks about a situation where a resource may have a large number of links pointing to it but there is a disproportionate amount of traffic. In cases like that, the page being linked to might actually be demoted in rankings.
Now, that’s just a patent, so it doesn’t mean for sure that there's actually an algorithm behind this... but there could be! Makes you think, right?
Google is always trying to fight against link spam and Penguin is just one of the ways in which they do this. If there are links that are potentially causing my link profile to look spammy to Google, then I don’t want them to count in any calculations that Google is making.
3) Can we trust that Penguin is able to devalue all spam pointing to our site?
The official announcement from Google on Penguin is here. Here's what it says about devaluing as opposed to demoting:
"Penguin is now more granular. Penguin now devalues spam by adjusting ranking based on spam signals, rather than affecting ranking of the whole site."
This statement is not clear to me. I have questions:
When Google says they are “adjusting ranking,” could that also be negative adjustments?
Can Penguin possibly demote rankings for certain pages rather than affecting the whole site?
Can Penguin possibly demote rankings for certain keywords rather than affecting the whole site?
As posted above, we received some clarification on this from Google employees in a Facebook post (and again via tweets) to tell us that Penguin 4.0 doesn’t penalize, but rather devalues spam. However, these are not official statements from Google. These statements may mean that we never have to worry about any link pointing to our site ever again. Perhaps? Or they could mean that there's less need to worry than there was previously.
Personally, if my business relies on Google organic rankings in order to succeed, I'm a little leery about putting all of my trust in this algorithm’s ability to ignore unnatural links and not let them hurt me.
Who should be disavowing?
While I do still recommend use of the disavow tool, I only recommend it in the following situations:
For sites that have made links for SEO purposes on a large scale – If you or an SEO company on your behalf made links in low-quality directories, low-quality article sites, bookmark sites, or as comment spam, then these need to be cleaned up. Here's more information on what makes a link a low-quality link. You can also run links past my disavow blacklist if you're not sure whether it’s a good one or not. Low-quality links like this are probably being devalued by Penguin, but they're the type of link that could lead to a manual unnatural links penalty if you happen to get a manual review by the webspam team and they haven’t been disavowed.
For sites that previously had a manual action for unnatural links – I've found that if a site has enough of a spam problem to get an unnatural links penalty, then that site usually ends up collecting more spam links over the years. Sometimes this is because low-quality directories pop up and scrape info from other low-quality directories. Sometimes it's because old automated link-generating processes keep on running. And sometimes I don’t have an explanation, but spammy links just keep appearing. In most cases, sites that have a history of collecting unnatural links tend to continue to collect them. If this is the case for you, then it’s best to disavow those on a regular basis (either monthly or quarterly) so that you can avoid getting another manual action.
For sites under obvious negative SEO attacks – The key here is the word "obvious." I do believe that in most cases, Google is able to figure out that spam links pointed at a site are links to be ignored. However, at SMX West this year, Gary Illyes said that the algorithm can potentially make mistakes: If you have a bunch of pharma and porn links pointing at your site, it’s not a bad idea to disavow them, but actually in most cases I just ignore these. Where I do recommend disavowing for negative SEO attacks is when the links pointing at your site contain anchors for keywords for which you want to rank. If it’s possible that a webspam team member could look at your link profile and think that there are a lot of links there that exist just for SEO reasons, then you want to be sure that those are cleaned up.
Who does NOT need to disavow?
If you look at your links and notice some "weird" links that you can’t explain, don’t panic!
Every site gets strange links, and often quite a few of them. If you haven’t been involved in manipulative SEO, you probably do not need to be disavowing links.
When Google takes action either manually or algorithmically against a site for unnatural linking, it's because the site has been actively trying to manipulate Google rankings on a large scale. If you made a couple of directory links in the past, you’re not going to get a penalty.
You also don’t need to disavow just because you notice sitewide links pointing to you. It can look scary to see in Google Search Console that one site is linking to you thousands of times, especially if that link is keyword-anchored. However, Google knows that this is a sitewide link and not thousands of individual links. If you made the link yourself in order to help your rankings, then sure, go ahead and disavow it. But if it just appeared, it’s probably nothing to worry about.
Borderline cases
There are some cases where it can be difficult to decide whether or not to disavow. I sometimes have trouble advising on cases where a company has hired a medium- to high-quality SEO firm that's done a lot of link building — rather than link earning — for them.
Here's an example of a case that would be difficult:
Let’s say you've been getting most of your links by guest posting. These guest posts are not on low-quality sites that exist just to post articles, but rather on sites that real humans read. Are those good links?
According to Google, if you're guest posting primarily for the sake of getting links, then these are unnatural links. Here's a quote from Google employee John Mueller:
"Think about whether or not this is a link that would be on your site if it weren’t for your actions…When it comes to guest blogging it’s a situation where you are placing links on other people’s sites together with this content, so that’s something I kind of shy away from purely from a link building point of view. It can make sense to guest blog on other people’s sites to drive some traffic to your site… but you should use a nofollow."
If you have a small number of guest posts, Google is unlikely to go after you. But what if a webspam team member looks at your links and sees that you have a very large number of links built via guest posting efforts? That makes me uncomfortable.
You could consider disavowing those links to avoid getting a manual action. It’s quite possible, though, that those links are actually helping your site. Disavowing them could cause you to drop in rankings.
This article could easily turn into a discussion on the benefits and risks of guest posting if we had the space and time. My point in mentioning this is to say that some disavow decisions are tough.
In general, my rule of thumb is that you should use the disavow file if you have a good number of links that look like you made them with SEO as your primary goal.
Should you be auditing your disavow file?
I do believe that some sites could benefit from pruning their disavow file. However, I have yet to see any reports from anyone who has claimed to have done this and seen benefit that we can reasonably attribute to the recovery of PageRank that flows through those links.
If you have used your disavow file in the past in an effort to remove a manual action or recover from a Penguin hit, then there's a good possibility that you were overly aggressive in your disavow efforts. I know I've had some manual penalties that were really difficult to remove and we likely disavowed more links than were necessary. In cases like those, we could go through our disavow files and remove the domains that were questionable disavow decisions.
It’s not always easy to do this, though, especially if you've done the correct thing and have disavowed on the domain level. If this is the case, you won’t have actual URLs in your disavow file to review. It’s hard to make reavowing decisions without seeing the actual link in question.
Here's a process you can use to audit your disavow file. It gets a little technical, but if you want to give it a try, here it is:
(Note: Many of these steps are explained in greater detail and with pictures here.)
Get a list of your links from Google Search Console. (It’s not a bad idea to also get links from other sources, as well.)
On your CSV of links, make a column for domains. You can extract the domain by using this formula, assuming your URLs are in Column B:
=LEFT(B1,FIND(“/”,B1,9)-1)
You can then use Find and Replace to replace the http, https, and www. with blanks. Now you have a list of domains.
On your disavow file, get a list of domains you've disavowed by replacing domain: with blanks. (This is assuming you have disavowed on the domain level and not the URL level.)
Put your new list of disavowed domains on the second sheet of your links spreadsheet and fill Column B down with "disavowed".
Now, on the links list, we’re going to use a VLOOKUP to figure out which of our current live links are ones that we've previously disavowed. In this formula, your domains are in the first column of each spreadsheet and I've used 1000 as the total number of domains in my disavow list. Here goes:
=VLOOKUP(A1,sheet2!$A$1:$B$1000,2,FALSE)
Now you can take the domains that are in your disavow file and audit those URLs.
What we’re looking for here are URLs where we had disavowed them just to be safe, but in reality, they are probably OK links.
Note: Just as in regular link auditing work, do not make decisions based on blanket metrics. While some of these metrics can help us make decisions, you do not want to base your decision for reavowing solely on Domain Authority, spam score, or some other metric. Rather, you want to look at each domain and think, “If a webspam team member looked at this link, would they think it only exists for SEO reasons, or does it have a valid purpose outside of SEO?”
Let’s say we've gone through the links in our disavow file and have found 20 links that we'd like to reavow. We would then go back to the disavow file that we downloaded from Google and remove the lines that say "domain:example.com" for each of those domains which we want to reavow.
Upload your disavow file to Google again. This will overwrite your old file. At some point in the future Google should start counting the links that you've removed from the file again. However, there are a few things to note:
Matt Cutts from Google mentioned in a video that reavowing a link takes "a lot longer" than disavowing. They built a lag function into the tool to try to stop spammers from reverse-engineering the algorithm.
Matt Cutts also said in the same video that a reavowed link may not carry the same weight it once did.
If this whole process of reavowing sounds too complicated, you can hire me to do the work for you. I might be willing to do the work at a discount if you allow me to use your site (anonymously) as a case study to show whether reavowing had any discernible benefit.
Conclusions
Should we still be using the disavow tool? In some cases, the answer to this is yes. If you have links that are obviously there for mostly SEO reasons, then it's best to disavow these so that they don’t cause you to get a manual action in the future. Also, we want to be sure that Google isn't using these links in any sort of algorithmic calculations that take link quality into account. Remember, it’s not just Penguin that uses links.
I think that it is unlikely that filing a disavow will cause a site to see a big improvement in rankings, unless the site is using it to recover from a sitewide manual action. Others will disagree with me, however. In fact, a recent Moz blog post showed a possible recovery from an algorithmic suppression shortly after a site filed a disavow. I think that, in this case, the recovery may have been due to a big algorithm change that SEOs call Fred that happened at the same time, rather than the filing of a disavow file.
In reality, though, no one outside of Google knows for sure how effective the disavow tool is now. We know that Google says we should still use it if we find unnatural links pointing to our site. As such, my advice is that if you have unnatural links, you should still be disavowing.
I’d love to hear what you think. Please do leave a comment below!
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The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://ift.tt/1NZu6N2.
Announcement
Bradley: Come on.
Adam: All right, we are live. Everybody to Hump Day Hangouts. This is episode 125. Today is the 29th of March, 2017 and we’ve got almost the full group here, so we’ll go round and do what we do. I’ll start off with Bradley today. How’s it going man?
Bradley: Hey man. Glad to be here. Got a lot of really good questions on the page already, so looking forward to it.
Adam: Cool deal. Marco, how you doing?
Marco: Hey man, good to be here. I was just, it just hit me when you said 125, we actually have 125 hours of free stuff on our YouTube channel. All people have to do is go to our YouTube channel, use the channel search for anything that they’re looking for and we probably already answered the question. How good is that?
Adam: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Bradley: That’s 125 hours of just Hump Day Hangout content, because there’s a lot of hours of other content as well.
Adam: That’s true. That’s true. All right, Hernan, how’s it going man?
Hernan: I’m good. I’m good. I’m excited to be here. Yeah, 125, it’s a great number. Also I’m excited because we’ve had a great testimonial early so it’s good to see that all of these hours we’re pumping out and we’re dedicating a bunch of work to [inaudible 00:01:26], but it’s actually getting great results this year. I’m really excited to see those kinds of things.
Adam: Why don’t you tell people. We said we’re not going to tell by name, but why don’t you tell everybody a little bit, like the outline of what we just found out this morning.
Hernan: Yeah sure. We got a message from one of our students telling us an actual business income, like a real screenshot. It’s a bank statement actually about making one year of SEO. I think it adds up to 100 …
Bradley: Just under 140K.
Hernan: Yeah. Just under 140K for the last year. That’s pretty amazing. He’s saying well, of course he’s taking action, he’s taking massive action. He’s moving forward, closing clients, et cetera, et cetera, so I think that’s amazing. Also it’s kind of what we’re trying to do here. It’s funny because you’re out there trying to put a lot of content, put eh best that you can do and trying to actually impact lives and change lives. That’s something that I really like seeing.
Bradley: It’s great to see 2015 about 12K, 2016 about 140K. He says, “I love you guys. It’s from SEO work.” That’s amazing.
Marco: No, but the interesting thing is this isn’t an agency. This isn’t an SEO guy doing SEO for somebody else. This is a guy who took our stuff and applied it to his own business and is making this kind of money. He’s in a major metropolitan area, but he applied it to his business, grew his business. This is amazing to me. This is an amazing …
I see this and the possibilities for you guys, for everyone listening, they’re endless because we just keep finding new ways to make ranking easier. They tell you it’s harder. Google tells you so much shit and you guys believe it. I’m like please, please, don’t make that your mantra, Google said so. If they said so, go and do the opposite.
Bradley: The opposite, yeah. See what happens.
Adam: That’s right. For the record I just want to say that this is one of our Mastermind members, but if you’re listening and you’re somewhat newer to the Semantic Mastery or you’re just coming across us, please check out the Syndication Academy. That’s a great place to get started, combined with the Hump Day Hangouts. I’ll pop the link on the page in a minute.
Excuse me, a quick review of the last week. We did want to say that the Live Rank Sniper replay is still available. That was the webinar with Peter Drew. A lot of people really into that, popped it into their toolbox and having some cool results so by all means, go check out the replay. Again, that’s just a free replay. We’re going to put that on there, some really good information.
Bradley: A couple things.
Adam: Yeah, go ahead.
Bradley: You mind if I jump in on that for a minute Adam?
Adam: No, go ahead.
Bradley: One, you mentioned Syndication Academy. That’s really simple guys, for those of you that are new so you don’t have to go searching for it, it’s Syndication.Academy. Very, very simple. Okay, as far as Live Rank Sniper, awesome product. It really is. It’s so simple to use and it’s great for identifying keywords that you can rank for very easily.
I like it a lot. I’ve been using it a lot. I added several cases studies as a bonus for anybody that had purchased. That case study is pretty much done. I’ve got one more video to add still to the bonus site guys. If you haven’t checked the bonus site for a couple days, go back and check it again because I added another training or a another case study update yesterday. Anyways, I’ve got one more to do which is going to be like I’m going to be talking about the strategy and what’s next after those case study results came back from using Live Rank Sniper.
I’m just going to give you a little tease right now because what I’m doing with those case studies is I’m extending them onto another product that we’re going to be holding a webinar for in about two weeks that I’m seeing. Essentially what I did was I took Live Rank Sniper, the case study results or whatever Live Rank Sniper showed me as the keywords that I could rank for and then I plugged them into another software, and other YouTube tool. We’re going to be again, introducing that to you guys in about two weeks.
I’m seeing some incredibly good results with it right now, so the case studies from Live Rank Sniper are going to carry on into this next tool that we’re going to be showcasing and I’m going to show you what I’ve done with the Live Rank Sniper keywords that I found. Then using the new tool and the results that I’ve been able to get and it’s really, really powerful. I’m actually pretty excited. I’ve only got one out of five of those case studies completed right now, so I’ve got four more to do. If the other four perform like this first one did, then we’re really onto something. We’ll be announcing a little bit more about that next week guys.
Just know that there’s something that’s coming very, very soon. If you don’t have Live Rank Sniper and you don’t know what I’m talking about with the case studies, well, go pick it up because it’s inexpensive and you can get access to the case studies just by purchasing it. There’s a whole bunch of unannounced bonuses in that bonus site that we’re not even going to tell you about, but if you purchase you’ll be pleasantly surprised. Okay? Okay Adam, carry on. Sorry.
Marco: Why are we always giving so much stuff away?
Bradley: I know. I know.
Adam: You get one and you get one and you get one. All right, that’s about it but we do want to say we sent out some emails about the RYS Stack Webinar that’s happening tomorrow. I’ll put the link on the page. This is going to be a really cool and shorter webinar where we’re going to go over some information about RYS stacks. Where you can use them, when you can use them, why you should be using them. Trust me, this is important.
Then on top of that how you can do this through search base and get the done for you option. If you haven’t heard of RYS Academy or you aren’t sure what this is, well, I don’t know, do you guys want to go over that? Just a quick elevator pitch on why people should be aware of the done for you services for RYS?
Bradley: Yeah, because it’s a huge time saver. They’re done to our specifications and the way that we build them so it eliminates so much additional work. Look, if you want to learn how to build your own stacks, especially if you’re running … Well, you know what? I used to say if you were running an agency that you should hire your own team members and then put them through the training courses so that they can produce them for you. To be honest with you, there’s a lot of learning curve and a lot of time that goes into first of all hiring and firing, hiring and training somebody.
If you use out Outsource Kingpin product it will streamline that quite a bit. There’s still a lot of time involved in actually getting them up to speed and trained well and then managing them and all that kind of stuff. We’ve already got all that stuff done. The heavy lifting is done for you guys. If you order through us it’s going to be done. You don’t have to worry about training or hiring or monitoring and managing and all of that. It just gets done. We’re going to be showcasing how, what our RYS stacks or drive stacks are, why they’re so effective and how to order them through Serp Space. Marco you want to comment on that at all?
Marco: Yeah. It took me a month to train Jason, to get Jason up to speed on building these. Unless you want to spend the time to learn RYS and then an extra month to train the VA who might or might not work out, because you have to pick out the right VAs, right? If you don’t have the course that teaches you how, it’s like hit or miss. We have a way to identify the best of the best and then get those into the training area so that we finish with the very best. Unless you have all that, we’ve done it for you. That’s a very big deal as far as I’m concerned.
We’re going to give away part of why it works tomorrow. That flows right into the one that I’m doing on Monday which is I’m going into the overall reason of IFTTT or excuse me, Syndication Academy and RYS Academy and why both should be part of the toolbox. It can be RYS Academy or done for you RYS, either one. It should be part of every build. We’ll follow that up tomorrow. We’ll follow that up on Monday. I want to get into questions.
Adam: Awesome. All right, one just quick one that I saw this week, I don’t know if you guys noticed, but it looks like on May 2nd YouTube’s ditching annotations, so anybody who’s using annotations out there, you’ve got till May 2nd to edit or delete them and then they way they are is the way they are. If you use those and you want to change them or update now is the time to do it.
Hernan: Yup, they’re moving into the mobile friendly version of the annotations, the end of the year annotations and then you can use cards. That’s clearly a move into more mobile optimized version of YouTube.
Adam: Yup. Got you.
Bradley: Scott mentioned that he had not found the Live Rank Bonus case study. Scott, if you purchased through us you should have been added to the bonus site already. Check your spam folder. If perhaps you purchased it before we had the automation setup, just contact us at support@semanticmastery.com and provide the PayPal transaction ID so that we can verify the purchase and then we’ll add you to the membership site, the bonus site manually, okay? Anybody having any issues with that just contact us at support@semanticmastery.com. All right?
Adam: Okay cool. Can we get into questions now?
Marco: Let’s do it.
Bradley: Let’s do it. I’m going to grab the screen. My audio dropped for a minute. Bear with me.
Adam: We’ll just chat while Bradley’s not here.
Hernan: We can talk about him because that’s a good connection and he’ll come back. Hey Bradley: Here we go.
Bradley: Hey, shh, here he comes. Here he comes. Stop talking about him. All right, you guys can see my screen now?
Hernan: Yup. Got the whole screen.
Best Practices In Re-Publishing And Linking Out Expired Domains
First and foremost look at what the content was on that site originally from the domain that you’re picking up and make sure it’s relevant. If it’s relevant to the niche that you’re going to be placing the link on that rebuilt domain pointing to your money site you want to make sure that it’s a relevant, that it’s topically relevant first and foremost. That’s the most important thing to look at.
The second most important thing, very next thing that you do is go look at the backlink profile and make sure that they’re clean backlinks. No spammy shit. You want to look at, one thing I like to do with Majestic is look at the map. When you look at the backlinks the map, it will show you where backlinks are coming from. Typically if it’s got backlinks coming from Russia or China or Korea a lot of the times I won’t even pick those domains up because it means it’s been spammed for the most part. The vast majority of the time it means it’s been spammed.
You also just want to scroll through and take a look at the backlinks. Guys, I’ll pick up expired domains. I don’t do it near as much as I used to, but I will pick up expired domains that only have one backlink because that’s all that matters to me. What I like to do, obviously the more referring domains it has the better. As far as, and let me try to explain this a little bit better.
It used to be the more referring domains the better, but that’s not the case anymore because what you’re looking for is quality. It’s not quantity, it’s quality, right? What I worry about with buying domains with only a couple of backlinks pointed to them or a couple of referring domains, it could have more than just handful of backlinks, but if they’re only coming from a couple of domains, is what happens if the webmaster of the site that’s linking to that domain finds out that the domain has been expired or that the content has changed or whatever and they can go in and remove that backlink and now especially if you’ve got a domain that has only got one or two referring domains pointed to it, then you’ve just lost whatever SEO value that it really had, right?
What I do is I go back and look at the way back machine for the linking domain. In other words, the domain that’s linking to the domain that I’m about to pick up or purchase, I’ll look at that backlink and the history of how long that backlink has been there. If it’s been there for let’s say five years or two years or whatever, if it’s been there for any length of time then I’ll suspect that it will likely stay there. It’s unlikely that that backlink is going to be removed.
I just want to make sure that the linking domain has some history for how, like that backlink has been there for some period of time. Depending on how desperate I am for expired domains for that particular niche will determine how far back I’ll go to cross that threshold to where it will make it worthy of my purchase or let’s say I abandon it because the backlink’s too new. You know what I mean? The other part of that is it used to be also that you would look at the backlink profile and you would worry about backlinks dropping from the domain if you picked up an expired domain and then rebuilt the site, which is how we used to it, right?
We used to do that private blog networking sites or PBN sites, right? We would go out, buy expired domains because of their metrics, strip the … We would install a new WordPress site, install new content. A lot of the times it wouldn’t even be in the same niche. Well then that’s very, very likely that other linking domains that are pointing to it are going to remove the backlink if the webmaster goes and views that link and takes a look at the destination site which ends up being the domain that you rebuilt.
It’s got some other content on it, it’s not in the same niche or whatever, they’re going to remove that link. When you’re building expired domains, when you’re rebuilding expired domains with the content that was on them when they expired then even if a webmaster were to look, they’re going to see the same site that they linked to originally anyways. Does that make sense?
My point is when it comes to buying what I call PLN or private link network sites instead of private blog network sites or private link network sites because they’re not really blogs, they’re not WordPress, right? They’re HTML sites. As I look for relevancy number one, number two, a clean backlink profile and if it meets those two criteria then I’ll research the backlinks that are pointed to it to see what their age is on that. If they’ve got any length of time or history then I’ll go ahead and pick up that domain. It can be used for money site or tier one properties.
The cleaner, the more relevant, the closer you can get to your money site or even point directly to your money site. If there’s any question or if it’s not necessarily in the same niche, if it doesn’t cover the same topic, it’s a little bit broader or it’s like a tangent market or something like that then I would use it as a tier one, a link to tier one properties instead. You guys have a comment on that?
Marco: If I could just add something. I have two, or three they turn in to be three things. We now have Adela and a Dr. Gary who are really good at spotting the domains that we need and they’re niche-relevant. They add the relevance that we want. We don’t go through that process any longer unless we have to or unless we want to.
The second thing is if you don’t do your due diligence with these domains you’re going to tank your rankings. If you point it at your money site and you didn’t do it right, you’re going to see it go in the shitter. It’s almost overnight. You have to make sure that you know what you’re doing. If you don’t and you still pick one up, go to tier one. Go where you at least have a layer of protection until you actually know what you’re doing because you learn over time. You learn to spot them and you learn to spot what’s actually spam and what isn’t.
Once you’re that good, then you can say okay, I’m going to pick this one up and I’m going to point it at the money site and you’re going to see wonderful results. Once you’re experienced. If you’re not, don’t do it. Don’t do it unless you want to see your site go in the dumper, then by all means go ahead.
Yeah Ivan, to be clear, yes it would help to put, for your branded properties especially, like you said, to treat your branded properties like money sites. Guys, you should be doing that anyways. Try to flesh out your branded properties as much as possible and if you can add markup then do it. Now listen, let’s be real clear. I want to make it clear to you guys I don’t do that on all the properties that I set up because a lot of the networks that I set up don’t require that. They’re used for syndication or SEO purposes only, whatever.
For client sites, and I’ll be honest with you, a lot of my lead gen sites I don’t even have that setup because it’s just so time consuming. I probably should have a VA that does it for me, but I don’t. I only do it for client sites really and a few of my lead gen sites. I don’t do it on all of them. Absolutely you can.
Now here’s the thing though, a lot of those are going to strip any sort of structured data out anyways. That’s the problem is trying to add structured data to these because it ends up getting stripped out by the editor, right? By the platform itself. That’s really where it’s tricky. Now if you can, like for example if you can go in and add like where you would add analytics code for example in the header and things like that, if you can go in and edit those fields within the platform, then yeah, you can add JSON-LD code. Whether it validates or not you’d have to check, okay?
Yeah, absolutely. One thing that I’ve been able to do in the past, it’s been a while since I’ve done it so I can’t even remember which platform it was on, but not using JSON-LD, but you had to use micro-data. Which micro-data is like, it’s structured data but in HTML format so you can markup elements within an editor, but like I said, a lot of the times it depends on the platform. I can’t remember which ones they were off the top of my head, but it will strip it right out.
Don’t waste your time without checking first. Go test a few of the sites and see unless Marco or Hernan, if you guys know the ones off the top of your head that will accept that, I don’t know them off the top of my head.
Marco: No, not off the top of my head. The ones that I do know are not ones that I care to talk about at this point.
Bradley: Okay.
Hernan: Right. For example if I may Marco, Blogger, I know that it will accept JSON-LD, JavaScript, pretty much everything that you throw at it on HTML because you can actually edit the template.
Bradley: The theme.
Hernan: You know? Yeah, the theme. You can edit the template, you can edit the theme. Weebly will do it too in case you are syndicated to Weebly. There’s a bunch of those that they will accept HTML. Blogger for sure, Weebly pretty much. I think Tumblr as well, but we have abused Tumbler and for that reason it’s not that permissive anymore. We are 100%, we are 100% responsible about that, so sorry about that guys.
Yeah, basically those three I think will accept HTML. In any case on the update webinars we are always looking for new platforms and what’s good about it is that we will uncover either Web 2.0 or live stream sites or Semantic Hubs as we call them where you can actually add schema or you can actually embed a bunch of things like my maps. Well, a bunch of things, so stay tuned of that and go through the past trainings, the past update webinars because there’s a ton of gold in them and there’s a ton of properties that will actually accept that if you need a push or if you need to rank those properties on page one as well.
Bradley: Yeah. I’m going to name one here guys, and before Marco and the crew all get mad at me, I’m now going to name … You have to be in Syndication Academy to get the full training on this. I’m just going to make a mention of one that’s really, really powerful that you can do all kinds of nasty stuff with Ivan. Since you’re on Syndication Academy you can find it. It was in the update webinar from like I don’t know, three or four months ago.
It’s called Pearl Trees. That’s a great tier one property because you can do all kinds of nasty stuff in there. Go back and watch that webinar. It’s one of the Semantic Hub or additional properties inside of the update webinar from I want to say three or four months ago. Just go back and take a look. You’ll see what I’m talking about. There’s some real ninja stuff you can do with schema markup and all kinds of stuff with the Pearl Trees site. Okay. Guys, I didn’t just give away too much, did I? I tried to tread lightly.
Hernan: I know that you feel like giving more, but we’re fine. That’s a nugget.
Using Google’s Trust Indicator To The Landing Pages Of Adwords Campaigns
Yeah okay, I see what you’re saying. I have not tested that, but you’re talking about taking your landing page URL and shortening it with a GOO.GL short link and then using that as your landing page URL in AdWords. Now I haven’t tested that. My initial thoughts or assumptions would be that it wouldn’t have an effect on quality score only because what I have seen through my own testing for the last year with AdWords stuff is that quality score is a function of two things really.
Number one, your bid, your max bid is one and then the other thing which has the most effect on quality score is going to be your click through rate of the ad itself. Those are the things. Now your landing page experience, like honestly, I have played with multiple versions of landing pages trying to affect the quality score from that. It has a very minimal effect on quality scores. As long as your landing page has basically some basic or some basic elements to it, that’s all that’s required.
Then obviously you want to have the keyword, especially in the SEO title or whatever. Even though it’s in AdWords you still want the meta-title of the page. That’s really it. As far as everything else, the bid, the max bid amount, that’s going to have an effect on quality score to a degree, but the vast majority of the quality score metric is calculated by click through rate.
That’s going to be determined by always rewriting, always split testing ads and trying to improve your click through rate. Just as a side note, there’s a lot of industries, guys, that you’ll get into, and I know because as my experience continues to grow in AdWords I see it now more and more. At first I didn’t understand why sometimes I would set up ads in one campaign and they would have quality scores of three and four and then I would set up the same type of ads with the same type of landing page as far as the elements, but for different keywords, so in a different industry, and I would start off with quality scores of five or even seven.
Sometimes within a day or two they’d go up to eight or nine or even quality scores of 10. I would wonder why is that. That’s when I started really playing around with different things that I would try to manipulate quality score with and your max cost per click bid is one. Another one that Marco gave me a hint at, I wasn’t able to prove it, was increasing your budget, your daily budget as well.
I wasn’t able to prove that and it’s probably because I didn’t go extreme enough, so we won’t talk about that much. I tried playing with landing pages as well and I couldn’t manipulate quality score more than just like a point from landing pages. Once I started really honing in click through rates which is always … The strategy for that is just constantly always be split testing your ads and trying to achieve the highest click through rate.
Run two ads concurrently. Split test your ads, so run two concurrently and let it run until you’ve generated either a certain number of clicks or you’ve allowed them to test against each other for a certain amount of time. It’s usually a function of volume of clicks, right? Let’s say I want to allow 30 clicks to this ad and I’m going to go back and take a look and see which ones have the higher click through rate. Then you keep the one with the higher click through rate and you pause or eliminate the one that has the lower click through rate.
Now you write a new ad to split test against your control, right? The one that just performed better. You constantly refine until you get your click through rate up. Here’s the thing, what I was saying just a moment ago about starting off with different ad groups and seeing how some would have low quality scores right off the bat and other ones would have higher, and that’s based on when you start a new campaign, guys, AdWords will give you a mean or a baseline, a quality score based upon the industry average or the average for, the quality score average for that industry.
If you’re in a space where you’re running AdWords campaigns where there’s a lot of shitty advertisers, in other words advertisers that don’t know what they’re doing and aren’t optimizing their campaigns, your campaign’s going to start off with a low quality score and that’s only because that’s like the mean or the median in the industry of the industry average, if that makes sense.
The only way to get your click through rate, or excuse me, your quality score up is to start improving your click through rate to get well above and beyond what the industry average is. Once you do that, and I don’t know, that number various depending on every industry. For example if I can get a click through rate up to say like 30% in the tree service industry, my quality scores are going to be eight to 10 hands down every time.
If I keep my click through rate down around the 10 to 15%, which I believe is pretty standard for the industry, then my quality scores are going to be, they’re going to range between five and seven. Once you get to seven and eight, eight and above, you really get much lower costs and you get the higher quality, the higher ad rank and all of that. I know that was kind of a long winded answer, but I wanted to explain. I haven’t tested using the GO, excuse me, the Google short link as the landing page URL.
I don’t think it would have an effect, but I haven’t tested it. I just wanted to explain really what the quality score, the biggest influence on quality score is going to be click through rate.
Marco: All right, so can I just mention something that I picked up from what you just said and from what he’s trying to say?
Bradley: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Marco: If click through rate is a factor for quality score and you have a Google URL showing, that's…
Bradley: [inaudible 00:30:16] more clicks, is that what you’re going to say?
Marco: Hey. Wouldn’t it thereby increase your quality score? We actually show that inside our RYS Academy. Isn’t that something?
Bradley: That’s a really great idea and that’s something that I wasn’t even considering when I was answering this, but that’s a good point Paul, if you have that GOO.GL short link it’s going to be basically a Google URL. That might be deemed more trustworthy by the searcher or the visitor, right? It might end up generating a higher click through rate like Marco just said.
Test it, Paul. Test it and let me know. In fact I might even test that on a couple campaigns just to see. In which case I’ll, I don’t know where I’ll share it. Ask me again at a later date, Paul. I just want to give a quick recommendation. This is not an affiliate link guys, but there is, this is a really cool site. I think it’s, what’s it say? Ten scores.
Okay, tenscores.com. Check this out. They’ve got this big pop-up here. Let me close this. I forget how to close this damn thing. Right there. Okay, so Ten Scores. This is a great service. It’s like really cheap. It’s like 25 bucks for 5,000 keywords or something like that. It’s ridiculous. You can view plans and pricing here. Fifty thousand active keywords, up to five AdWords accounts fro $25 a month.
Guys, this is really cheap. Most of the AdWords optimization platforms are really expensive. This one is dirt cheap. I really like it because this is really what turned me on to … I finally started believing that click through rate was the biggest influencer of quality score once I started following the Ten Score blog. Then I ended up purchasing it and I’ve started using it for some of the AdWords accounts that I manage.
I started seeing actual, real results by just manipulating click through rate. I saw real improvements in quality score just by doing what this blog tells me to do and then I started using the service on some of my accounts. It absolutely is true. For a while there I just didn’t believe that click through rate was the biggest influencer on quality score until like I said, and by the way there’s a great blog on this site too. Read our blog. Right there.
The guy, his name’s Christian I think, I guess the guy that owns this or whatever. It’s a great blog. He’s got some awesome, awesome articles in here about how to improve AdWords campaigns. I highly recommend that you guys, even if you don’t purchase the product or whatever or subscribe to it just go through and start paying attention to these blog posts. Subscribe to the blog because he really has got some great stuff. Okay?
Marco: That’s information from a paid webinar. I’m not sharing it here.
Bradley: Okay. There you go. Let’s see. “Also what’s your take on using exact geolocation keyword phrases that would otherwise cause over-optimization with regular SEOs?” Okay, same thing. Paul, we’re going to have another webinar on Monday, right? Is that right?
Marco: Yes we are, but it doesn’t involve IFrames. It’s a followup.
Bradley: Okay.
Marco: He can ask questions at the end of the webinar. I might answer it.
Previous Business Shows Up When You Google Your Client’s New Business Address
Let’s see, oh, “I just got a new client, just got a new location. Okay, client just got a new location. Wants me to build citations but when I Google the address the old business that occupied the spot shows up.” Okay, so what you’re saying is there’s still citations out there. Okay, I see what you’re saying, James. All right, I’m going to share with you a link. It’s http://ift.tt/2bbLT53. In fact let’s just type it out.
This, guys, this is the service I use for any sort of … Any time I got a citation or NAP issues I always go to these guys for this because they hands down, if it’s a US business it’s the best service for this. It’s the citation cleanup service. If you go to http://ift.tt/2bbLT53, L-O-G-A-N-I-X. It will take you over here and go to the services and it’s the citation cleanup service right here.
It’s 500 bucks for it, but it’s totally worth it guys because they will do, at least in the US market they do hands down the best job I’ve ever come across and I’ve had to do this many, many times over my career. I’ve hired virtual assistants and trained them how to do this manually. None of it has ever been as good as what these guys do. They do it very efficiently.
Again, I highly recommend that you check out Loganix. Again, it’s 500 bucks, but if you are dealing, when you’re pitching a client or prospecting and you go give the pitch, you should already know this. You should already know that there’s NAP issues if you’ve done your research and you should work the cost of something like this into your proposal. Plus we’re markup, because you’ve got to manage it. If Loganix charges 500 bucks for this then I’d be charging the client every bit of 750 or 1,000 bucks for the same thing and that citation cleanup.
That’s because you should be marking it up. You’re going to be the one managing the project. Just so you know, this is absolutely the service that I use for that. That’s the best way to get around it. Okay? James, because it’s not something, trust me, that you want to do and like I said, I’ve even hired virtual assistants and trained them how to do it. They’re still nowhere near as efficient as just having Loganix do it so it’s worth the money. Okay?
That’s the first thing I would do. I would hire them to clean that up by the way because they can go, what they’ll do is they’ll literally reach out to all the business directories that have the old business location in there or whatever, whatever the problem is and they will contact the business directories and manually and ask them to update the records.
They’ll provide the proper data and then about 70% of the business directories will update based upon their outreach, okay? I’d clean up before you even start building new citations to the client site because otherwise you’re just spinning your wheels. Building new citations when there’s NAP issues isn’t going to help. You need to clean up old incorrect NAP … Incongruent NAP data first. You’ve got to clean that up first or else you won’t see any results.
I’ve got some post offices where I’ve got several different businesses in that exact same PO, or excuse me, post office. It hasn’t caused any problems for me because it’s a unique address. Just don’t be cheap and try to get one box and use it for six businesses. Don’t do that. PO boxes are cheap enough that you don’t need to do that. You can get a separate box for every business, all right? That’s what I do. I get a separate box for every business.
Ken says, “Where can I find a Google My Business URL?” Ken, there isn’t one anymore. Well, you get the Google Plus URL. Remember, there’s brand accounts and there’s local accounts. You can get a Google Plus URL for those, but the Google My Business URL is the maps URL now. Go to Google Maps, search your business. You already know how to do this but for the benefit of everybody else, let me do it.
Go to Maps. Put your business name in. We’re going to type in Semantic Mastery in Gainesville right there. This is our local, right here, this is our local listing. Then you just click the share URL. You can use the short URL, that’s fine and it’s a GOO.GL short URL right there with the maps in it. Okay? That’s your Google My Business listing URL now.
Or you can use the Google Plus, but the Google Plus one doesn’t, this is where you want to send, this is actually your Google My Business URL now is the Maps URL because all of the data and everything is right here. Reviews, everything is all here. It’s now longer a Google Plus URL. That is I guess in the back end they’re connected somehow. In the basement of the Google building they’re connected somewhere, but it’s the Maps URL now is the GMB listing, okay?
Content ‘Curated’ And Hosted On Another Website: A Legit SEO Practice?
All right, the only thing, and I’d love to get some comments from my partners on this as well, but the only thing I can see of any value of doing that would be for the backlinks if they’re properly citing the source. In other words if this website that “curates” in air quotes, the curate content and all they’re doing is republishing your articles, if they’re attributing, giving proper attributions, so they’re citing your website as the original source and then giving you a backlink I could see that possibly having some value.
You have to check though, the domain metrics, the relevancy, all of that, but that’s the only thing that I could see. The only benefit that I could see, in fact the fact that they’re just taking your article and spinning it a little bit and then republishing it is in my opinion would throw up a red flag. I would avoid doing it altogether. What do you guys think?
Hernan: Yeah. Well, unless they are writing the domain, unless you correctly stated, unless they are citing the source, leaving a live backlink, even if it’s not a live backlink, even if it is … domain.com, that counts as a citation as well, you know? Because Google will actually input that domain even if it’s not linked. It doesn’t carry the same amount of [inaudible 00:42:07] and you need to be constantly surrounded by authority content and sorry, on an authority context if you would.
For example doctors or scientists, that they do not have a website, et cetera, et cetera, but they are, their names are being put on paper, et cetera, et cetera. For example on Google Scholar, those guys, those names become influencers at some point and the same happened, that’s the internet of things. That’s why we are called Semantic Mastery because when you start having your domain, even if it’s not linked, but surrounded by other authority domains, you start rubbing some of that authority as well.
Even, again, if it’s not linked. If it’s linked, way better. That has to be natural and that has to be mass, done in a massive way if you would for it to get any insights or any … To noticeably affect your rankings if you would. I don’t think I would do that. If anything I would just try to curate the content as Bradley was saying, but in a more curated way. Not only changing the verbs, the past tense. That doesn’t cut it. Yeah, go ahead.
Bradley: I just want to jump in real quick guys, because remember, when you curtate content you don’t change the content from the source that you’re curating. You don’t change it because then you’re not curating. Then you’re spinning and that’s bad. That’s a no no. I don’t use spun shit to link to anything, any sort of money site, right?
When curating, guys, you’re supposed to grab a piece of content and not alter it in any way. If you alter it now you’re actually plagiarizing right, because you’re changing content and rewording it and treating it as if it’s your own. If you’re citing the source and it’s different then that’s not the same either, right? You shouldn’t be altering the content at all if you’re curating. If these guys are just spinning your content and republishing, to me it seems like they’re just stealing your damn content.
Marco: Not only that, canonical points to their domain, not his. It’s just totally grabbing what he produced, as you said. It’s spun content. The metrics are great, so unless he’s getting a link, but what I’m seeing is the inter-linking and everything is to their own … They do a great job of inter-linking, but if they’re linking out to you and … The one thing that they’re really good at is picking out spun content. This can get you in a lot of trouble, especially since the canonical is pointing to their page and not yours.
Bradley: I agree.
Marco: Again, it should be your original piece that you wrote posted on their website saying this article originally appeared, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, and that tales care of everything with the canonical going over to your website. That’s the way that it should be properly done. If not then the only ones that are benefiting from this …
Bradley: Is them.
Marco: … is them. They’re making it look like your article isn’t the original article and that you actually spun because they have actually more trust and authority than you do.
Bradley: Yeah. Without doing more research, Ryan, on it myself I would suggest against it. You’re going to get contacted guys by promising, things that sound promising all the time now that you guys are, if you’re in the digital marketing space it’s going to happen. You’re going to get contacted. We get contacted all the time, Semantic Mastery does, about like with all kinds of just scammy shit that sounds promising, but when you do some real investigation you find out that it’s all, most of it is bullshit, right?
Because they contact, guys, they do this. It’s a numbers game, right? They blast blanket out these sorts of sales messages and in experienced people that don’t know any better will think oh man, this sounds awesome. They’ll do it. Well guess who? There’s only one entity that benefits from that and that’s the company that solicited for the salespeople to do that. Right? Does that make sense? Most people aren’t going to benefit from that because a lot of the times, like what Marco just looked at the site and he’s looking at the canonicals and internal linking. They’re benefiting, but I don’t see how Ryan, your site is benefiting at all.
That’s what I’m saying, we turn down those kinds of offers all the time. Yeah, I used to actually look at a lot of them but then I realized that 99% of them are just bullshit offers that aren’t going to benefit us in any way and unsuspecting people will think oh man, that sounds awesome and then they’ll do it. All they end up doing is promoting or improving the other company’s assets and reducing their own. Okay? I recommend against it, but without any further research I can’t speak exactly to it, but I don’t think I would do that.
Power Up A PBN By Using FCS To Send Social Traffic Or Links
What I mean by that is sending traffic would absolutely help. Cue up Crowd Search, right? Adam, that’s a cue for you. Grab the Crowd Source link guys because that absolutely works. I’ve been talking about sending social traffic using Crowd Search through sending traffic through social properties as well as like PBN links and all of that kind of stuff for a year and a half or two years now because I’ve been using it that way for, that’s primarily how I use it. I use it for navigational searches which are brand searches because that helps to improve site weight and increases the authority of the site, the brand authority, okay?
I also do a lot of referral traffic, referral traffic through social media sites, through citations, through press releases and through PBNs. Or other external links is what I’m saying. They don’t have to be PBNs. For example if you have a guest post somewhere, you can send click through spam traffic to the guest post and then have them click the link over to your site. It’s within the content of the guest post.
Here’s the key guys, especially if you have access to the properties, if you control the properties that you’re sending the social traffic through to ultimately land on your money site, if you have analytics on your site it’s going to be picked up as referral traffic anyways, but if you don’t have analytics on your site, use a GOO.GL short link. Because then you’re allowing Google, you’re injecting analytics into that link. GOO.GL short links do that.
That way you can basically force Google to recognize that you’re getting referral traffic from citations or social media properties or whatever, press releases, anything. You can essentially inject analytics right into the link itself. Again, I know Adam is telling me five minutes. Again, I wouldn’t recommend just sending fake social links. Social links and social signals are different. Social links, that will help a little bit, but social signals, they really don’t … Like spam social signals, I don’t see them as having any value anymore whatsoever other than to just give the appearance of social proof for visitors, but that’s not an SEO thing. That’s a human thing, right? As far as traffic, traffic absolutely will help, so you can do that. You can use Crowd Search, that will automate it for you.
Marco: Yup. For Google to pay attention a link needs three things right? It needs activity. It needs activity on the link, relevancy of the link and the trust and authority of the link. If you’re manipulating those three it better be done right or you’re in trouble. Just to keep in short.
Linking Videos Of Different Companies Under One Main Silo
That’s a good question. I’d have to think about that one, Tom. Honestly I probably wouldn’t. I don’t know. It depends on the silo itself. What type of relevancy I’m trying to push where if that makes sense. I don’t know know that I would do it with separate companies because I typically keep my playlist silos separated by company for the most part. I have a few old directory sites that I still manage that have more that aren’t necessarily structured that way, but I’ve seen better results.
Because I try to compartmentalize. From an SEO standpoint there probably is some benefit to that, Tom. What I’m always worried about is a visitor coming. Let’s say you have company A and company B. Company A you’ve got their video ranked and company B, maybe you have their video ranked too. They’re sharing, they’re both linking to each other in the descriptions in the playlist. They’re both in the same playlist and they both link to each other.
Then I don’t want a customer viewing the video, so a lead, a lead viewing the video and the clicking the link to a competitor. Even if the competitor’s in a different city which means they wouldn’t provide services, it’s just a distraction for that. I like to try to separate that stuff, but from an SEO standpoint yeah, there probably is some benefit to that, but I don’t like commingling client accounts that way, if that makes sense. I’d have to think about that one a little bit further, Tom to give you a real definitive answer. I just can give you my preference and that would be to not do it.
From an SEO standpoint I can see some benefit. Tom says, “I know it’s technically what makes a silo, but I wonder if clients would frown upon it.” Yeah, that’s funny. I didn’t even see that part till just now. That’s exactly why I wouldn’t do it. Again guys, SEO, you want to strike a balance between doing things for SEO and doing things to keep your clients happy and humans happy, right? I try to always strike that balance. When in doubt, err of the side of humans, not machines, if that makes sense.
Images In PBN Having A Link Back To Main Site As An Additional Linking Opportunity
In this case just for the client relationship I would probably advise against it. Last one, Dr. Brian McKay, “What are your thoughts on images and PBN having a link back to the main site as an additional linking opportunity?” Yeah, sure. Brian, when I used to do a lot of PBN work I would do that a lot because guys, the anchor text for an image link is your alt text. You can use images and I did that a lot in fact. That way it would give my sites that I was linking to from the PBNs a more natural link profile anyways.
Because I would be using image links and then I would use the anchor text essentially is the alt text of the image. I wouldn’t spam them, but it just would give a nice variety. You absolutely can do that as another linking opportunity. Just remember guys, alt text is supposed to be, and I’ve been doing this for years now, but alt text is supposed to be like I know for SEO purposes we stuff keywords in there and that kind of stuff. Alt text was originally generated for people that were visually impaired.
They can’t see very well and there’s programs that will read webpages aloud so they’re audible, right? Alt text is a way for those type of programs to describe the image, what the image is. I always try to optimize my images with a descriptive phrase of what the image is about. Of course I try to work a keyword in there, but I try to make that alt text as descriptive of the image as possible. I’ve found that that has abetter SEO effect because it doesn’t trigger over-optimization. It’s more natural based upon what it was originally intended for, if that makes sense. Okay? You guys have any comment on that before we wrap up?
Marco: Not me.
Bradley: Okay, perfect. All right, well sorry we ran out of time, but it is what it is.
Adam: It’s all good. I think that was a good one. I just want to remind everybody, if you’re new keep coming to the Hump Day Hangouts. If you’re not new keep coming to the Hump Day Hangouts. If you haven’t yet, by all means check out Syndication Academy. I’ll pop the link back on there. We want you guys to check it out. I think it’s fantastic starting place. We’ve been getting good feedback from people, but we weren’t doing our part and letting enough people knowing about it so we want to fix that.
Hernan: Sounds good.
Bradley: Cool. All right everybody, no additional webinars today, so we’ll see everybody when? Tomorrow for the RYS webinar, right?
Hernan: Yeah. Yup.
Bradley: All right, you all be there.
Marco: I’ll be there.
Bradley: All right. Okay. Bye guys. Everyone have a good night.
In episode 124 of the weekly Hump Day Hangouts by Semantic Mastery, one viewer asked if it is okay to have two or more IFTTT accounts driving traffic to a website.
The exact question was:
Hi! And yes, I’m the REAL Vasquez…Lol…Is it ok to have two or more ifttt accounts directing traffic to a web site? Thanks as always!
After five years at Moz, I’ve found that I work with some of the most creative and talented people I’ve ever met. When it came time to brainstorm ideas for an April Fools video this year, rather than tricking people like every other company does, we decided instead to showcase a few of the talented folks around the Mozplex. Alongside Kristina Keyser, we shot and edited this video so you can see what makes us Mozzers tick when we aren’t building sweet SEO software.
We know a lot of you, in the community, have random hobbies like us — we’d love to hear about them! Please share them with us in the comments.
Looking for more information on all the cool stuff you just saw? We have that for you, too!
Looking to get super duper ripped like Lucas? Learn more about Bodypump.
Looking to adopt a dog in the Seattle area? Janisha recommends starting your adoption search now.
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By now, most people who follow SEO are familiar with structured data, the Schema.org vocabulary, and rich snippets. Even those who know very little about SEO appreciate the benefits of adding structured data to their websites, namely that they might be able to get rich snippets in search results.
Of course, the main benefit of structured data is that it helps search engines better understand your content, which in turn helps them rank it more appropriately in search results. But we’re not here to discuss the what and why about structured data; there are plenty of other articles online that have covered that topic nicely.
Now, while Schema.org is not a comprehensive vocabulary that specifically covers every type of business — and it’s not meant to be — any business can use it to mark up their website’s content. But there’s one industry that so far has been rather limited as to what they could do with schema: restaurants.
Sure, it’s true that restaurants could always mark up the usual information such as their name, address, phone number, hours and so on. But when it came to marking up the most important information on their website — their menu — the only thing available to restaurants was one lonely menu property. That property could either point to the URL where their menu could be found, or they could mark up their entire menu simply as text. There was no way of truly marking up individual menu items and their prices, let alone specifying different types of menus such as breakfast, lunch, dinner, and so on.
Well, restaurant owners (and those who do SEO for restaurants) — rejoice! With their latest release, Schema.org has added several new properties and types that will allow marked-up menus to truly be "structured" data. And while this article is addressed particularly to restaurants, any business that serves food or drinks (such as coffee shops, bakeries, cafes, bars, and so on) can use these new properties and types to mark up their menu(s).
The new menu properties & types
The first thing you'll notice when you visit the http://ift.tt/WlfUpY page is that the menu property has been replaced with the hasMenu property. But if your current markups are still using the old menu property, don’t worry — everything will still work until you get around to updating things.
Here’s what else has been added for restaurant menus:
A new menu type. Menus officially become entities in Schema.org with their own properties and subtypes.
The new Menu type includes a hasMenuItem property. This property would be used to point to the (also new) MenuItem schema type, which is what would be used to mark up individual menu items.
Since most restaurants feature a few menus such as one for breakfast, one for lunch and one for dinner, there is a new hasMenuSection property and a MenuSection type that can be used to mark up the various menus. And you can also use it to mark up the different sections of each particular menu such as the appetizers, salads, main courses, and desserts on a dinner menu.
For each MenuItem, we’re able to mark up the name, description, price, and nutritional information. And while it’s not new to schema, you can also use the suitableForDiet property to denote if the menu item is low calorie, low fat, low salt, vegan, gluten-free, or suitable for various other restricted diets.
How to mark up restaurant menus with Schema.org
As you can see, our ability to mark up menus has become much more robust. So let’s put it all together now with some examples. We’ll be using JSON-LD, since that’s what Google prefers, and we’ll be marking up the menu of an Italian restaurant.
On the home page
On every page of the website, especially the home page, we want to point search engines in the right direction as to where the menu can be found. Keeping in mind that Google’s guidelines state that we should only mark up content that’s visible on the page, we can’t exactly include the entire menu in our home page markup unless the entire menu is published there. Instead, we’ll simply use the hasMenu property on the home page to point to the menu page, like this:
In fact, on any page of your website that includes some schema markup, you could use the hasMenu property to point to the URL of the menu page.
When you have more than one menu
Now, in our example, the restaurant only serves dinner and has only one menu. But sometimes restaurants are open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and of course have separate menus for each. In that case, we would do this on the home page:
Switching our attention to the actual menu page, let’s say that the menu was only served between 5:00pm and 11:00pm. So, on the menu page, our markup would begin like this:
Next, we can begin marking up the various sections of the menu and the individual menu items. First, we’ll start with the appetizers. For the first appetizer, we’ll include in our markup the name, a brief description, and the price, which should be the minimum for any menu item. In our second appetizer markup example, we’ll also include an image, the nutritional information, and the fact that it’s gluten-free:
By the way, schema dietary restriction enumerations also include DiabeticDiet, HalalDiet, HinduDiet, KosherDiet, LowCalorieDiet, LowFatDiet, LowLactoseDiet, LowSaltDiet, VeganDiet, and VegetarianDiet. Feel free to use one or more of these enumerations when they apply.
Marking up the menu items
Let’s say we’ve marked up all of the appetizers and we’re ready to begin marking up the next menu section, which in our case are the soups. Sometimes menu items such as soups are available in two or more sizes. We can mark up the available options by using a separate offer markup for each along with the eligibleQuantity property, like this:
After we’ve marked up all of the soup items, we can move on to marking up the other menu sections and items using the same format. And that’s it. Putting it all together, our JSON-LD menu markup would look something like this:
Of course, this is just an abbreviated example of a marked-up menu; we would certainly include more information about the restaurant as well. But hopefully you now understand how to mark up the various menu sections and items.
So, after all of that, what you’re probably wondering about now is…
Will Google use this?
Good question. To be honest, providing a definitive answer to that question right now is impossible. But if pressed, I would say, "Yes, it’s very likely."
Consider what Google already knows and does with restaurant menu content. If a restaurant has published their menu on a third-party site like SinglePlatform, Google can pull the data and display it in search results:
Fortunately, SinglePlatform marks up restaurant menus with structured data, albeit the "old way" by using the ItemList and ItemListElement schema types. But the fact that Google uses SinglePlatform’s structured data bodes well for these new menu types and properties, since they were specifically created for menus and are much more robust than what we previously had. Restaurants can do things now that they couldn’t do before with structured data.
We also know that Google’s goal is to display search results that are as accurate as possible. The problem with menus that are published on third-party sites is that they’re usually not kept up-to-date. Restaurant menus constantly change; which restaurant owner or manager has the time to update the menu on their website, on SinglePlatform, on Yelp, and on any other website that their menu is published on? I’m not telling restaurants to stop publishing their menus on those sites; they definitely still should. But by using the structured data markups that have become available, restaurant websites can now become the primary source that Google uses to gather data regarding what they serve.
And perhaps Google will begin implementing new rich snippets for restaurant menus and menu items — who knows? But at least we can now provide them with everything they need if they wanted to.
Let’s also not forget about how much voice search is growing. Wouldn’t it be awesome if, say, a pizza restaurant could attract new customers immediately because someone said, “Hey Google, which restaurants in New Orleans serve gluten-free pizza?” and Google knew exactly which restaurants did and what kinds of gluten-free pizzas they offered, all because of their thoroughly marked-up menus? That’s a situation that I could foresee happening.
The future of restaurant and menu markups
I realize that not every restaurant menu scenario is perfectly covered with these new menu properties and types, but hopefully you now at least have plenty to get started with. Keep in mind, too, that the Schema.org vocabulary continues to evolve and so will this particular area of schema. You're welcome to participate in the evolution of Schema.org through the discussions on Github. If you think that you have a great suggestion, please feel free to join the conversation.
And if you have any questions about the above, don’t hesitate to ask them in the comment section and I’ll do my best to help.
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In episode 124 of our weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked for the team’s opinon on using one VPS to host PBNs.
The exact question was:
Hi all I was watching your explanations about pbn’s and ip hosting, if I need an a class ip for each pbn, why shouldn’t I host all my pbn’s in one VSP (a strong one) and use services of cloudflare like with 100 unique ip’s and nameservers?
It would b nice if you will tell me if it’s any good
In the 124th episode of Semantic Mastery’s weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked if it is okay to run an IFTTT network built from different Gmail addresses, or whether he should rebuild them and use only one Gmail account.
The exact question was:
I outsourced the build for a Tier 1 and Tier 2 network for a client. The service provider set up a new Gmail account and used that for most of the web 2.0 profiles. The client already had a Gmail account for YouTube, Google+, Google My Business and Blogger. Should I run the network as it has been built with different Gmail addresses or should I rebuild the entire network making sure there is only one Gmail account used across the board? As of right now I am moving forward as-is.
If you have a bunch of pharma and porn links pointing at your site, it’s not a bad idea to disavow them, but actually in most cases I just ignore these. Where I do recommend disavowing for negative SEO attacks is when the links pointing at your site contain anchors for keywords for which you want to rank. If it’s possible that a webspam team member could look at your link profile and think that there are a lot of links there that exist just for SEO reasons, then you want to be sure that those are cleaned up.
