In episode 146 of the weekly Hump Day Hangouts by Semantic Mastery, one viewer asked for the team’s opinion on using data highlighter from Google Webmaster Tools to improve search appearance.
The exact question was:
Hey guys, what do you guys think of using Data Highlighter from Google Webmaster Tools to improve search appearance? I currently use the Project Supremacy plugin for all schema-related tasks, but it’s missing article schema which the Highlighter has. Or is Article schema not in the plugin because it’s useless?
In episode 146 of our weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked which company is the best for hosting many domains with as much IP diversity as possible.
The exact question was:
whats your best suggestion (Amazon, cloudflare, etc ) to host many domains as one can with as much ip diversity as possible?
Related… I have a local biz client who has 6 sites, each is a location, not yet merged and siloed. Id like to merge and silo, but Im hesitant because some lesser locations are mail boxes, at risk of shut down. I’d like to mitigate risk here. if one were to be shut down by big G, if the site were merged and siloed, could the shut down jeopordize entire site?
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: Live.
Adam: We are live. Hey, everybody. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts. This is episode 147, the event where we talk about RYS. You know it was coming. We’re going to talk to you some more about it. We’re really excited. We’ve had some really good feedback so far. Hernan and Bradley whipped up a quick little contest that we wanted to get going as well as wanted to obviously spread the news about RYS. We’re small. We understand a lot of people don’t hear about us. We’re trying to get the word out. Hernan, you want to tell people what’s going on on Facebook?
Hernan: Sure, yeah. We had a little contest over there. We’re going to drop the URL for the free Facebook group. You can win an Amazon gift card for 250 bucks. That is two day thank you guys for the amazing support that we have been having for RYS academy. It’s been mind blowing. A lot of people joining, a lot of people are already working on it. That’s pretty much it. We’re going to drop the link over there on the events page.
Adam: Awesome, yeah. Pay attention, click the link, read it. All you’ve got to do is a quick share, text some people, and then we’ll put you in the winning for, I think, it’s 250 bucks, right?
Hernan: Yup.
Bradley: Yup.
Adam: Nice. I’m going to go enter after we get done with Hump Day Hangouts and you should too. Let’s see. On the other end of things, we had, obviously, a lot of questions. It’s a big launch. People are wondering what’s going on. They’ve heard about RYS. They’ve heard about RYS reloaded. We know a lot of people see the price and you wonder if this is a training that’s going to help you do what it is you want to do and we get that. This is the place. Obviously, Hump Day Hangouts is a great place to ask this. Also, the Facebook group, which Hernan will also post the link to. It’s the same one. Our free group that you can go and join and ask us questions if you want to know if this is for you. We want to make sure, obviously, the people who join RYS reloaded are the people who are going to put it to use.
But if you’re on the fence, you’re thinking, “Damn, I’d like to get some good rankings, I’d like to get a quick … ” whatever it is you’re thinking about, just let us know. Obviously, we’re here. We’re real people. These aren’t robots. We’ll talk to you and let you know whether or not this is a good fit for you. On that note, too, I think Marco, we had some questions for people, right? That you had some answers to?
Marco: Yeah, I believe so. Let me just see. Someone wanted to know how RYS and drive stacks and whatever it is that we’re doing would affect big established site, right? With traffic and many keywords. But a site that wants to grow. The best thing about this is that the site already has trust. What we borrow from in RYS academy is Google’s trust. They’d be pushing trust back and forth and growing that trust into the drive stack and then it would simply be targeting the keywords, just targeting other keyword targets, so to speak, so that they could grow the website. More traffic and even better rankings. If you have keywords that are harder to push up, you could push them up and get more traffic that way. It’s all about trust, it’s all about authority, it’s all about building it up so that you can rank sites faster, better, and longer because RYS rankings tend to stick when they hit that first [inaudible 00:03:36] and they tend to stay.
They stay for a long time. The second question that I have is who is the creator of RYS academy? I am not going to take full credit for that. The theory, the concept is mine. I didn’t invent SEO, guys. I won’t take credit for it. I can’t do that. I didn’t invent Google. I didn’t invent Drive. I didn’t invent ranking with drive stacks or anything like that. What I did is when I saw what Dr. [Gary 00:04:10] was doing in our mastermind, he’s my co conspirator for the original RYS academy was and is a mastermind member who I saw was just doing some nasty things and finding all of these incredible things in Google.
I started thinking how do I put this together? What can we do with this? I pulled him in. We had the talk. We started meeting on Saturdays. About seven months later, RYS academy was born. Who is the creator? I am one of the originators. What is it that they say? Often imitated, never duplicated. My partner in crime is Dr. Gary [Curlin 00:04:59].
Bradley: Awesome.
Adam: Outstanding. I think, also, we had talked about this earlier last week, I think people had heard about this, at least for the existing RYS academy members, people who joined from 2015 up to now who have been put in RYS academy to work and wanted to give us a quick video review, we were going to give away a complete done for you RYS stack courtesy of [Surfspace 00:05:21]. I think we had talked about this. Do we have a winner or a best of for those?
Marco: Yeah. I think that the one that really explains the concept really simple … We should drop the playlist, by the way, so that people can go look at actual people who are members of RYS academy and RYS reloaded, just doing what it is that they’re doing. Andrew [Adare 00:05:51], he’s one of our members. He’s in Australia. I think that his video exemplifies the simplicity of RYS academy. I think for that reason, he should get that awesome drive stack.
Adam: Awesome. Andrew, if you’re listening, shoot us an email. If we don’t hear from you first, we’ll be sending one out after this.
Bradley: He’s in Australia so he’s not listening.
Adam: You never know. He might be up. What is it? 16 hours? You never know. We’ll see. But yeah, we’ll be in touch buddy. I think Hernan’s going to drop the link in there and check those out if you’re on the fence. If you want to hear what other people accomplished, again, these are people who joined and got results on their own based on the training and the help. These aren’t people who are profiting from this. They used RYS and made their own results. Other than that, I think Hernan, you’ve got the links in there for Facebook, right? We’re good to go on that?
Hernan: Yeah. I got the Facebook link and we will put the link for RYS, for the sales patient, the coupon, which is an $800 off coupon. That coupon expires tomorrow, 9 a.m. eastern. If you’re watching this right now live you can go take action now. If you’re not and if you try that coupon, I’m sorry but that’s the way we have it set up. We’re going to drop the coupon and the URL so that you guys can join RYS reloaded right now for that discount, which is the second lowest discount that we will do for that.
Bradley: What’s it going to tomorrow after this coupon expires?
Hernan: $1,500.
Bradley: $1,500. It’s going up 300 bucks, essentially.
Hernan: Yeah. [crosstalk 00:07:34]
Marco: Hang on a second. Tell them where it’s going to end up, please.
Bradley: $3,000. It’s going to end up at $3,000 after the launch is over. Again, now is the best time to get in. We will offer a split pay option, I believe, after the launch. Is that correct, guys?
Adam: Yeah, we will do that and we mean it. If you’ve got questions, if you’re on the fence, I know there’s a lot of people who watch Hump Day Hangouts and they don’t say anything and that’s cool. I do that with different areas where I’m learning or I’m watching stuff, but if you’re out there and you’re thinking about this like, “Man, is RYS for me? I’ve heard about it. I want these results.” Pop into the Facebook group and post it. Post a question, we’ll get back to you tonight and help you out so you can make the choice before the price goes up. We’re here to help. We think it’s a good course. We know it’s a good course. The students know it’s a good course and training.
We want you to make the right choice, too.
Bradley: It’s super damn valuable. It really is. We’re trying to keep it to where it doesn’t become a saturated technique so that’s in part why we’re asking for that kind of money for it and because there’s been three years in development now, so it’s totally worth it.
Adam: That and the results you can get, it literally pays for itself. You’re not signing $5 contracts with that stuff.
Hernan: Sorry Adam, but it’s going to be [inaudible 00:08:55] training, right? We have a bunch of material in there already. There’s all the archives, the new stuff, the Facebook group, and also Marco is going to be doing upcoming webinars and there’s going to be Q&A. We’ve had things supporting RYS academy for the past two years for a one time fee. Everyone that has been following us for awhile, you know that we deliver, that we support our products, that we always try to over-deliver, make them better. We try to keep up and to be out there in the trenches, testing stuff so you don’t have to go out there and chasing every shiny object.
We have some testimonials already about people that have been spending anywhere from $30,000 to $50,000 on software that doesn’t work and once they got into RYS, they cut it immediately because you forget about PVN’s, you forget about proxies, BPS’s, all of those kind of things that not only takes time but money. Anyway, that’s what I wanted to say also. You’re actually saving money. I agree with Adam, you can nail some really juicy contracts with this.
Adam: You guys got anything else?
Bradley: Nope.
How Would You Fix A Renegade Page That Returns 404 Errors When Redirected To The Homepage?
Adam: Sweet. I’m looking here first too. This is awesome. Columbia is the first person up so I’m pretty pumped. She’s usually got some good questions so let’s get going.
Bradley: I had a Skype chat with her yesterday, a phone call with her just because she’s always coming to our Hump Day Hangouts and engaging and participating and so I gave her about 20 minutes of time just to chat with her. It was nice meeting her. She’s out there taking action every week from the stuff that she learns right here. She’s growing her business, which is amazing, guys, just from free information that she’s getting from the Hump Day Hangouts, which is awesome.
That was the best we could come up with after extensive hypothesizing, analyzing, and testing. I worry that Google with have issues with all this 404’s and there could be 200 or so of them since each book title is a separate extension.” Oh, another lead just came through. Let’s see, “This website has a lot of content. I was in the process of sending up a reloaded version of it. It has six letters broken and two short essay remember words, which apply perfectly to the product. I really don’t want to drop [inaudible 00:12:07]” Columbia, one of the easiest things you could do is just put a 404 redirect plugin on the site.
Here’s a couple things I would suggest. Number one, you can contact the host and ask the host, if it’s a decent host, they should be able to go in and clean up those rogue files. A lot of hosts, the better, higher end host will provide that sort of support because actually any sort of hacked WordPress site on their servers is a security risk for them. If it’s a good host … If you’re dealing with Hostgator or GoDaddy or something like that, forget it. But if you’re dealing with a decent host, then I would contact the host and ask them to do it, an easy fix for the 404’s.
I would still try to get rid of those rogue files. An easy fix for the 404’s is just a simple 404 redirect plugin. You could use something like 404 to Start is one of the plugins. There’s a bunch of them. Link Juice Keeper is an old one. I don’t know if that still is available, but that would be another one. There’s a bunch of them. You could just do a Google search for 404 redirect plugins and just select one. I would look for one that was updated recently because that means it shows that it’s continually updated. Lastly, there’s something else that you can do. I always recommend this to clients. This is called security.net.
All my clients that are running WordPress, I typically recommend that they install this. They purchase it. I think it’s 300 bucks a year. This is a great service. I’ve got one client in particular. They get hacked about once every three or four months. I’m not sure why, it’s probably a competitor causing that. But security always catches it right away and sends a notification. We just submit a support ticket and they go in and they do all the cleanup. It’s usually done within about 24 hours. Again, they get hacked about once every three or four months and all I do is I’ve got to submit a support ticket and it’s taken care of.
If you’re doing this for client work, then I would recommend that this is an expense that you pass to the client. It’s not something that you pay for. If it’s your own site, it depends on how much revenue it’s generating for you. Personally, I like easy. When anytime I can do something like this to prevent having to go through all the headache of trying to track down rogue files and remove them myself or dealing with the hosting company, to me it’s worth it. Anybody have any other comments on that?
Adam: Not here.
Bradley: Hopefully that’s helpful. Again, if you’ve got a good host, though, Liquid Web will do it. But they don’t have shared hosting anymore. They’ve just got VPS’s and dedicated hosting. I use Terry Kyle’s, what is it? WPX Hosting? I use that a lot now for WordPress sites as well. That’s a really good host. Their support is really good as well. That’s something else that you can contact them. I’m just saying HostGator and GoDaddy, those crappy hosts, they’re not going to do it for you. It’s likely they won’t. You can always contact them and ask.
What Type Of Schema Would Be Best To Use To Rank An Affiliate Offer To A Local Medical Spa?
I don’t know because I’ve never spammed local structure data for an affiliate offer. I’ve spammed maps before for an affiliate offer. Years ago, I did that a lot. I haven’t done that in several years now. Has anybody tried to do this and, if so, can you comment?
Hernan: No, but I can see it. I can see him branding. It’s going to take a lot of work. I don’t know if it’s really worth it for an ebook. But you create the brand, whatever the spot is. What you’re looking to do is for people to end up in that ebook offer. In that ebook offer, the schema that you would add is for whatever that book … I don’t know the schema for book. I don’t keep track of all of it, or the image or whatever. You would benefit from both, from having the business schema and then schema on the page with the offer. As far as schema, that’s how I would pursue this. I don’t see any other way that you can do it unless someone else has an idea.
Bradley: Yeah. I don’t see. He doesn’t mention maps in here. What I would suggest is if you’re trying to rank organically, that’s one thing. But maps, I wouldn’t try to do. Again, he didn’t mention maps in his question, but what I’m saying is, just for everybody’s benefit, I would not recommend trying to do something like this with a map listing because, with this, it’s a point of sale or a storefront type business, right? You wouldn’t want to do that. You would quickly get reported, I’m sure, if you were to rank in maps. Again, I know he didn’t mention it, I’m stating it for everybody’s benefit that may be thinking about doing this. I used to do maps spam for affiliate offers years ago but they stopped doing it because people started catching on and it would get reported to Google for storefront offers that didn’t show a storefront.
In other words, if you hid the address but it should be a type of business that has a storefront where customers come to the business location, and if the address was hidden, then competitors would report it. Or if you would leave the address showing and it was going to a post office or a home address or something like that, then oftentimes it would get reported as well. I just stopped doing it because it was too much work for it just to be taken down within a few months or a few weeks, sometimes. Again, if you were going to do it organically, that’s different. I’m assuming that’s what you’re going to do. I don’t know what the actual structured data would be for something like that other than you would still want to create the schema markup or structured data markup for the local business, if you’re trying to rank it locally.
But, again, I wouldn’t try to rank in maps. I would just try to rank organically. In which case, I would use your made up address or PO Box or whatever it is that you’re using as the actual business address in the structured data, but then you would just want to mark up the proper elements on the page. If you’ve got a book or an ebook or whatever, I’m sure there’s book mark up. You would just mark it up that way. You could also mark up reviews if you have reviews for the book and that kind of stuff. You could put all those on the page, too, and use the review mark up for that. Interesting, though. Again, I’m not sure I’d put a lot of … It depends on how profitable your offer is for you, your funnel.
How Would You Change The Categories And The Name Of A GMB Page?
No, Kevin, you don’t have to reverify. You can have two categories. In fact, landscaping and tree service companies are typically the companies that do snow removal in the winter. I know because I’ve been dealing with tree service businesses for seven years now. They oftentimes, because there’s no tree work and landscaping work during the winter, or very, very little anyway, they often make ends meet through snow removal projects and get contracts with shopping centers and stuff like that for snow removal. You just add both. What I would do, because remember, I’m not sure where you live, Kevin, but in my area in Virginia, it’s three seasons of tree and/or landscaping work. It’s spring, summer, and fall. It’s only in the winter season that it’s slow for them.
I would make my primary category landscaping and a secondary category snow removal. By the way, if it’s already a verified listing, you can go in and change the category or add a category and it won’t ask to … At least, the majority of the time it’s not going. There’s always anomalies, there’s always exceptions to the rule. It may trigger a reverification, but it’s unlikely. I know because I’ve gone in recently and made edits, all kinds of edits to map stuff. It hasn’t triggered a reverification for me. Again, a lot of those listings are more established, so that may be part of it. But I would recommend that you would stick with your landscaping …
Depending on where you are. If snow removal is the primary service, then you would want to make that your primary category. But if landscaping is the primary service, then make snow removal a secondary category. Does that make sense? Anyway, Google understands that, by the way. It’s not like you’re the first landscaping company that also does snow removal. What I’m saying is that Google understands that as part of a norm for that industry. It’s not going to be out of the ordinary for you to set it up that way. “Oh, I am also thinking of changing the business name to contain the word Snow and Lawn to help further rank in the maps pack.” That’s not necessary, Kevin. It’s really not. I recommend that you don’t. I would keep it to just the brand. Branding is the better way to go for long term projects. If you’re going to put the effort in, you should try to get them to stick or become long …
You should do them with the intent of them being long term projects. I personally don’t like to stick the keywords in the title unless it’s literally the brand name, which is normal too. Joe’s Snow and Lawn Service or whatever. That would make sense. But if you’ve already got a brand set up, I would just leave it as is. Anybody else?
Hernan: I agree with you Bradley, pretty much.
How Do You Link One Press Release To Others To Achieve The Stacking Effect?
Dan, I’ll talk on a conceptual level about my press release strategy but I’m not going to go into the nitty gritty details because that is reserved for mastermind members and also for the product that we’re going to be releasing about this. I can’t reveal all of that here on a Hump Day Hangout, Dan. If you want the skinny details, we have a lead gen accountability group that we are solely focused on this particular strategy inside the mastermind and we meet every two weeks. I think about eight more people joined yesterday. We’re all doing various forms of the press release strategy for local so that we can test it to death before I release the product. It’s going to give me a bigger dataset to use and examples and case studies for when we release that product, which will be in a month or two or three, whatever.
Again, I can’t reveal it. I can talk on a conceptual level. That said, let me answer the second question, the last part of this question first. Will a Fiver gig suffice? I don’t know because I don’t use Fiver gigs for press releases. You’d have to test. I would assume that they’re going to be rather shitty.
Chris:I assume no.
Bradley: Chris jumped in and said no. I would assume that they’re probably not very good. I use Fiver gig for design projects and stuff but not necessarily for SEO and distribution or writing projects or any of that kind of stuff. You’d have to test, Dan. I use various press release services, guys. We use our [Serverspace 00:24:23] service, I use Press Advantage. I also use Press Cable, which is Chris [Munch’s 00:24:28] press distribution service. I also have used Newswire.net quite a bit. I meant to talk to my partners yesterday about EIN presswire. EIN presswire is located in Washington DC and they keep emailing me because I do a lot of press release stuff with offers and they sent me an offer yesterday that looks pretty good.
I can’t remember now, it’s like 65 press releases for … I can’t remember off the top of my head. But EIN presswire, I’m looking at buying a package from them to test. What I like about them is they will allow a video embed in the press release, which is pretty rare. I want to test that for our agency because we’re leading with video as the front end product. I’d like to test that to see if we can get some more push out of embedding a video. EIN presswire is another one. There’s another one called … Let’s just check this out. I’ll share this one with you real quick, too. This is another one that I’m looking at. It’s called Press Synergy. I have not tested them yet either.
I don’t know why their site’s not loading. Presssynergy.com. This is another one I’ve not tested yet but I’d like to because they also have, for 210 bucks, they have video embeds as well and Google Maps embeds, which is the first time I’ve seen a Google Map embed allowed in a press release. Again, I have not tested this yet, but it is on my list to test because I’m doing so much press release work right now. I want to test all the various services. I’m primarily using our ServerSpace service because, well, for me it doesn’t cost me anything. But again, I do use multiple press release services, guys. Why? Because it adds diversity.
It adds diversity. Go ahead, somebody?
Marco: What I wanted to say is that if you have a test property that you want to spam or you want to test those services, sometimes … I never experience this for link building specifically. But sometimes you will find diamonds in the rough on Fiver. For example, for logo design or for some voiceovers. People are doing a really good job for five bucks, right? It’s usually not for five bucks, you need to pay a little bit more, but just so you know. In any case, you need to try. [inaudible 00:26:49] there’s a reason why some of these press release services are that expensive. Press is expensive. If you want to get featured or if you want to get a link from Huffington Post or Ink or Entrepreneur.com, you can get it absolutely if you have somebody that is selling paid placements, but you need to pay a couple grand for a back link or for a mention or for a feature.
If you think about it, maybe it’s worth the investment because if you’re an author or if you’re really in a competitive niche, maybe it’s worth it. Who knows, right? But there’s a big difference between a $5 service and a $5,200, $300, $500 a month service, which is a press release, right? Have that in mind, Dan. I would definitely try it out on something that you wouldn’t miss, that you wouldn’t care on missing, a), or you wouldn’t care on having zero results. That would be my [crosstalk 00:27:52]
Bradley: Listen. The press release stuff, and I’ll get to the method on a conceptual level, Dan, again, I’m not going to reveal my strategy right here in a free Hump Day Hangout, guys, I can’t do it. It would ruin the product that’s coming out and all the research I’ve done. By the way, just so you know, this is that EIN presswire. This is the other one. They’ve got a deal right now for 12 press releases for 400 bucks. It does allow video embeds right here. Number of embedded videos? You get one video embed. It comes out to $33.25 per press release. I’d like to test this. I meant to ask you guys yesterday during our corporate meeting if I could purchase that, get a vote on it, and I forgot. Can we take a vote right now? No, I’m kidding. Anyway, I do want to test this because, like I said, I’m constantly testing new services now, guys.
I primarily use ours because it doesn’t cost me anything, but there’s a benefit to adding diversity to all of your back link profile, right? There’s a reason for me using multiple press release services. I’m still looking to find the best results, you know what I mean? Just so you know, one of the more recent projects that I’ve done with press releases, I took a new maps listing that I got. It was a PO box type setup and everything. I got it in the maps pack for about 12 out of my 16 primary keywords, about 75% of my primary keywords are in the maps pack, in the free pack with only four press releases. No citations. Swear, no citations at all.
No syndication network. I didn’t do a drive stack. I just did four press releases and I got it to pop in the maps pack for 75% of the primary keywords, which is insane. I’ve got multiple examples of getting those kind of results. When you combine it with the syndication networks and drive stacks and stuff like that, that’s when it’s just incredible the amount of power. It’s very, very powerful. As far as the stacking part of it, the first one always points to the money site. Most PR’s will allow you two or three URL’s, links within the press release.
What I do on the first one is I link to the money site, usually just the homepage using either the brand name of the business or a naked URL. That’s it. I’ll link to the Google Maps page, the Maps URL for the maps listing itself. Then I will usually link to something else like another property within the branded syndication network. Typically, it’s going to be a Facebook page or something like that. As long as the Facebook page is somewhat active. One of the best ways to determine what to link to within the first press release is just go do a brand search for the company that you’re doing the work for, or for your own lead gen site.
See what Google is listing at the top of the search results on page one for that business, that brand search. You’re going to link to the domain itself, you’re going to link to the maps listing, and then just select one that Google is telling you that it deems to be one of the most authoritative sites that you’re listed on, just from the Google search. Then as far as the second press release, it doesn’t like to the website. It can. I just typically don’t. What I would recommend is on a second press release, if you were going to link to the website, that you would link to an inner page or blog post or a silo header or something like that, not to the homepage.
Instead, what I like to do is link to the first press release and then link to, in the first press release, which one do you link to? Once again, use Google. Use Google to do a search on the previous press release’s title and then look at which ones are ranking the best. Or, if you were targeting a keyword specifically in that first press release, you can do a keyword search and try to find the highest ranked press release from that first distribution.
What I like to do is link to those. Now, keep in mind though, guys, a lot of the press release syndication points, the actual sites that they get republished on, those, within six months or 180 days, the vast majority of them, those press releases will be eliminated. They’ll be terminated, deleted from the site. They’re archived for up to a period of time. Some of the sites will leave them on indefinitely, but a lot of them purge after about 180 days. If you’re going to be using the press release stacking method, which is what I’ve been doing a lot of, you want to either identify the syndication points that do not purge or you want to continually stack, in other words make sure that that’s an ongoing, monthly type thing or every other month or quarterly or something so that you always have new targets that are going to be pointing to target URL’s that you’re trying to rank.
Again, when they purge those, then you’re going to lose any. To me, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to do press release stacks or link building to press releases that have been published where they’re going to eventually be purged because then all that work that you’ve done, at some point, is going to just be eliminated just like that. Here’s how you do this, Dan. Once you get the press release distribution report from whatever service you’re using, you’d have to go through and catalog which sites purge and which ones don’t.
It’s going to take some research. It’s something you can higher a VA to do and have them identify all of that and then you can go back through and select which ones you want to build additional links to. Again, what I like to do is, on the second press releases, find out the top ranked for either the keyword or either the actual title of the press release. In the following or subsequent press release, you want to link to the previous one or to just another press release within that ecosystem that you’re building out. What you’re doing is you’re passing relevancy from one to another to another and you’re linking from authority sites to authority sites that are news sites to news sites.
You don’t need a lot of target URL’s pointing back to your money site because you have the original one pointing and you start to build downstream power. You know what I’m saying? In other words, it’s second and third tier, fourth tier links. We have somebody that’s been testing this with me in the mastermind. He’s been doing just multiple press releases linking directly to the money site. He’s been getting similar results that I’ve been getting. It’s just different types of methods. That’s part of the reason why, like I said, we’ve got a special group in our mastermind right now that we’re all collaborating on this and testing various methods and stack methods and all that kind of stuff to try to identify which is the best way to do it or the most powerful or at least give variety.
All of that will be included in the training course that [crosstalk 00:34:48]
Hernan: To sum it all up, we’re testing all this shit so you guys can get the best training possible.
Bradley: That’s correct. That’s how we do right?
Hernan: That’s how we do the do we do.
What Are Some Best Practices When Updating And Re-Writing Content Of Your Website?
“Number two, is it okay to create videos to the YouTube channel and embed them on my site pages during the dance or wait?” As far as I’m concerned, that’s fine. There might be a difference of opinion from some of my partners here, but in my opinion that’s fine because that’s just adding content, updating content. It’s not an inbound link activity thing. Any comments on that, guys?
Marco: I would think you’re correct. In fact, it’s Google property. A google bot comes in and sees a Google property, it’s going to tunnel right to the YouTube channel. I think you’re pretty safe there, also.
Bradley: “Number three, would you suggest adding new posts to the site that will syndicate out to the syndication network during the dance or wait until it’s over?” Again, Greg, that’s a perfectly normal activity to be blogging on the site even during structural changes. In my opinion, I would go for it. I would continue to blog because that’s a perfectly normal activity for a genuine website. There’s no reason to stop content marketing just because of some structural changes. You know what I mean? I would say yes to all of those. It’s okay.
How To Use Press Releases In Your Local SEO Campaigns?
Would Hiding The Address Of A GMB Service Page Would Affect Its Current Ranking?
Muhammad says, “Hey guys, I’m currently trying to get a site ranked in maps. It’s slowly getting higher. The business is a service, but the GMB currently has an address. Would hiding address by making it a service ruin the current momentum?” That’s a tricky one. I’ve seen some conflicting information on that in some of the forums and things like that. If you don’t have a storefront, based upon Google’s terms or best practices or whatever, you should hide the address if you don’t have a storefront. Google tells us to do that. However, I have noticed because of maps being more and more localized now, that if you have the address showing, you’re typically going to rank better. It’s going to depend on the searcher and where they’re located. But for mobile, especially, having the actual address show is going to make a difference in how your maps listing appears as far as where it ranks in the mobile search results.
That’s where I see having a benefit of having that address being shown, is for that. Outside of that, again, if you don’t have a storefront, if customers do not come to the business location, then you’re supposed to hide it so I always do. I also always hide it because it’s usually a PO Box, right? Anybody have any comments on that.
Marco: Yeah, I would add that if it’s moving and you’re getting results and there are no problems, I would say just let it go. Leave it. Don’t make any changes. I always tell people if it’s dancing, don’t touch it. If it’s moving, it might drop a little bit, move up a little bit more, drop, you don’t want to touch it. You don’t want to do anything that’s going to disturb a google bot deciding where you’re going to be ranked in the end. Once that happens, wherever you end up, then you can decide what your next steps are.
Bradley: Again, if it’s not a PO Box or something then I would leave it. If it’s a genuine address for that business, even though it might be a service area business, that’s what they call those, by the way, service area businesses. If it’s a service area business … It’s a genuine address, but it’s a service area business, I wouldn’t touch it. I wouldn’t change it right now because you’re starting to gain some traction, just like Marco said. But if it’s a spammed address, so to speak, then I would go ahead and hide it now anyway because you always run the risk of getting it reported. Again, if it’s a real business address, there’s no reason to hide it. Google’s best practices says you’re supposed to for service area businesses, but as Marco said, I agree with that, I wouldn’t mess with it if it’s starting to gain traction, okay?
Columbia says, “The host to use?” You’re using Liquid Web, Columbia, or WPX. Either one of those. Those are the two hosts that I use primarily now. If you’re using either one of those, then you should be fine to just contact the host and explain to them the problem, give them a sample set of URL’s that are rogue and they can usually go in and clean it up.
Marco: This isn’t a plug or anything, but Liquid Web is the best. I’ve yet to see anyone outdo Liquid Web as far as customer service, as far as helping you out with problems. If you go in there and you act like a dummy, they’ll do everything for you. I go in there and just be myself. They get everything done. Just do that. You’re going to be paying for a VPS. The costs are going to be higher. They’ll help you as much as they can. They’ll stay on the phone with you until it’s solved or they’ll do chat with you, however it is that you choose to do it.
For that, just for that, it’s really worth the price.
Bradley: If you’re doing client work, especially if you build new sites and stuff for clients, you can charge them for hosting and host everything on your own VPS. That’s how you reduce and eliminate the costs of the VPS from Liquid Web. You can also turn that into a small profit center, too. Those VPS’s, you can put a lot of sites on, especially if you get a dedicated IP then it’s specific to you. You don’t have a bunch of other shared … That’s part of the reason why they got rid of shared hosting, Liquid Web did, so that they could have more control over the IP’s and provide a better service to their user base. Pissed a lot of people off when they switched over, by the way. We stayed with them anyway.
Hernan: Definitely. I was one of the guys that was on the [inaudible 00:41:48] The new one, deluxe hosting, is not that bad actually. They’re doing a good job for a share account. But yeah, I totally agree with Marco. I used to go a lot for Hostgator until it becomes completely useless in a way that-
Bradley: I’m sorry.
Hernan: Yeah. It’s a pain in the ass and, not only that, you’re paying cheap, but at the end of the day, you need to do everything by yourself. You’re one hour in a queue for some guy to make a ticket for you because they cannot even solve the thing that you are calling in in the first place. You’re paying for a service, right? If you think about it, as an entrepreneur or an SEO if you have an agency, your time is much more valuable than the money that you’re paying for hosting, right? Because you need to be focusing on some other things, not troubleshooting your hosting. That’s the least important of your problems.
What I’m trying to say is that you need to treat your time as money, too. Most importantly, you need to make sure that you have a team on your back end and Liquid Web does a great job because the guys are really … You can feel that they are really on your team. They’re not trying to be assholes that are not on the company, if you say they’re us against them. They’re really put in your shoes and you can get a lot more done. You’re paying a little bit more, don’t get me wrong, but [crosstalk 00:43:19] Yeah, it’s worth it. That’s the service you’re paying for.
Bradley: I totally agree. Guys, I used to go for cheaper hosting as well. I think we all do when we start out. But you learn over time that the cheap hosting costs you so much money. First of all, opportunity cost as Hernan just mentioned, if you’re in there dealing with troubles that happen. PHP is outdated. PHP version is outdated so plugins or themes don’t work correctly or there are security issues. The vast majority of shared hosting over stuff the shit out of their IP’s so that there’s way too many sites sharing the bandwidth so if any particular site gets hacked or DDoS attack or something like that, all the sites on that IP go down. Then you’re screwed.
One of the worst ranking signals is a site that’s going in and out all the time. If you put an uptime on it. Columbia, I’m not talking to you specifically about this because you [inaudible 00:44:23] the host we use so it’s probably a good one. I’m talking to other people that may be using cheap hosts. If you put uptime robot or some sort of uptime monitor on sites that you have in cheap hosting accounts, you’ll see. You’ll get notifications via email or however you setup notifications about how often your sites are going down that you don’t even know it. Unless you’re on the site all the time monitoring it, you won’t know it.
That is a terrible ranking signal. Not only that, but it’s the bad neighborhood type stuff. If you go do a search on your IP from your website, from your host, and then go look at who’s hosted on this IP or whatever, you can just do a Google search and find a bunch of different sites that will show you all the sites that are hosted, the domains hosted on that particular IP. You’ll notice that there’s a lot of really shitty, bad neighbors, so to speak, on those IP’s. You don’t want to be blocked in our lumped in, guilty by association, so to speak, with those shitty sites. It ends up hurting you. It’s a bad ranking signal. If you go with a better type of managed type host, then you’re going to have a much higher quality to service as well as uptime will be better. It’s a better ranking signal, all that kind of stuff.
How Would You Recommend Changing A GMB Page That A Local Term Is Ranking For?
Here’s the thing. If you’re already ranked in maps for that, I’ve gone in for maps. Organic is different. Organic, you will see some dancing and stuff like that, but for maps, and I’ve done this multiple times. Anytime I take a single location lead gen site to multiple locations, then I end up either creating an inner page, so it’s a location page on the root domain of the original location or I break them out into sub domains, which is my preferred method, for each location. You have to go on and change the landing page URL for the Google map business maps listing. As far as maps, I’ve never had a dance occur from that, which is odd, I think. For real, I’ve literally changed the URL entirely from either the homepage originally to either an inner page URL or a sub-domain URL. I’ve had the maps listing stick. It’s not danced at all.
I’ve had that happen multiple times. I know for organic, you’re going to see some dancing. What I would recommend potentially doing, I would think you could set a canonical for the homepage to point to the inner page, at least for a period of time while you’re getting your other location pages built out and your Google map business listings verified and stuff like that and allow Google some time for it to recognize the canonical and to really identify that inner page as the new location page for that listing, so to speak.
Then, once you start adding the additional locations in, you could remove that canonical and it shouldn’t affect it. It might be some slight dancing, but it should be temporary. Anybody got a comment on that?
Hernan: No, I agree with you, Bradley.
Bradley: Okay, Marco?
Marco: No, I’m good.
Bradley: Just didn’t know if you guys had another trick or something. That’s what I would do, Cesar. That’s a good question, though. Again, for maps, usually I haven’t seen any dancing for that especially if it’s securely ranked in number one position, which it sounds like you are. I would just go ahead and change the landing page URL and take a look. If it drops out of the maps pack or drops down, then set the canonical for the homepage. You can do that using the SEO plugin. Most all SEO plugins have that option now and you can just go and set a canonical and then point to the inner page and then just give it some time for it to settle.
What’s The Effective Way To Get The GMB Listing To Pop In The 3 Pack?
Then you can always remove that canonical after you start setting the other location pages up and it should resolve. Second question is what’s the effective way to get the GMB listing to pop in the three pack? DIY RYS or Maps Powerhouse? RYS is one of the quickest ways. Like I said, a lot of press release stuff I’ve been testing lately has been incredibly effective as well. If you combine those two, that’s a slam dunk. If you can do a drive stack that’s built properly, Cesar, so either do it yourself through the new training or just buy it from us at Serp Space and it’ll be done correctly.
Then, if you also incorporate a couple press releases into that, you ought to see some significant movement very quickly. Maps Powerhouse is good. There’s no doubt. But what I do with Maps Powerhouse is I use that as a … That’s not a primary ranking method for me, guys. It’s a booster. That’s how I use Maps Powerhouse as more of a booster than a primary ranking method. There may be some others that are using that as a primary method and getting results from it. But me, personally, I use that as almost like a link building method for maps.
But it’s relatively inexpensive. You just use some credits for that. Combine that along with. But as far as my front end method, it would be definitely a drive stack and then I would, right now, I’m just crushing it with PR’s, press releases. I would do at least two, maybe three press releases over the course of the next 30 days and see what happens. You already got that, Adam. Thank you. We’re good, just about time, too. [crosstalk 00:50:31]
Marco: Before you go on, let me ask you a question. Some people are on a limited budget and press releases can get expensive. What would you do if you can’t do three, four press releases?
Bradley: I’ve done [inaudible 00:50:45] stack.
Marco: There you go.
Bradley: What I was mentioning was if you have the budget for both, I would definitely do both. But if you can only choose one or the other, I would go with a drive stack. My own personal experience with them is that I might not see movement as quickly from the drive stack as I would with the press releases, however once the movement occurs, it just sticks and it’s almost unmovable, which is pretty powerful. With press releases, like I said, I’ve noticed with the one I was just talking about a minute ago, I popped a brand new maps listing into the three pack for 75% of the terms under four weeks with only three or four press releases. I’d have to go back and look at my notes.
I think it was four. I haven’t touched it now in probably five or six weeks. I think the last press release that I published was at the beginning of July or maybe the middle of July. It’s been about six weeks since I’ve done any press releases for that. I’ve noticed that some of the keywords are starting to slip down to the C and D position, even falling out of the three pack. In part, I left it like that intentionally because I wanted to see if there was a drop off period at some point with the press releases. I actually have it on the schedule this week, I haven’t gotten to it yet, but to order another one or two press releases for that particular project or that campaign, to see if I can boost those keywords that started to drop back into the three pack just from another PR distribution.
Again, that’s why we’re testing right now. Columbia’s got a Liquid VPS. See? She listens. She’s doing awesome. “Everything all of you said is why I bit the bullet to cost scope for VPS. The service is really great.” Yeah, absolutely. We aren’t even dropping affiliate links for Liquid Web. We probably should.
Adam: We have one. A great service.
Hernan: What I would add, just to make sure that she goes and does it, is a 404 to 301. Add that plugin and you’re good to go. Your 404 problem will disappear.
Bradley: Yeah. Your 404 errors in search console will disappear. It’ll take sometimes about a month or so before you’ll start seeing all those start disappearing from the 404 errors in the search console, but they will disappear. You definitely want to resolve those rogue files, though. If they’ve been hacked into the database on your site, you want to get them removed. Just contact Liquid Web. They’ll square it away for you. I know for sure they’ll do it. All right, guys. Well, we’re done here. Thanks for everybody attending. We really appreciate it, guys. Don’t forget RYS Academy is going up at 9 a.m. tomorrow so if you’re interested, now is the time.
Adam: This is good, too. I was just in the Facebook group. Not going to lie, I switched over there real quick while we were doing this and there’s a thread with Kendrick and it’s like, “During Hump Day Hangouts” for 20 comments deep.
Bradley: All right, guys. That’s it. Thanks everybody for being here. We don’t have mastermind tomorrow, do we? I don’t think we do. I think it’s next week.
Marco: Let me put in a plug for our done for you services because they’re done up to the current RYS standards, RYS reloaded. The VA’s were trained. They’ve gone through the process. They know what to do. As of Monday, any orders coming in are done according to RYS reloaded standards. We won’t redo the previous ones. Sorry. That’s not the way this works. Anything ordered as of Monday will be done up to those specs. Get your orders in, because yesterday we forgot to set a new price. While we decide to get a new price in, the price will remain.
But I’m going to push for the price to go as high as possible without it just getting away from people being able to buy them. But you know me, I like to push for high end. I don’t like my stuff to sell for nothing. Guys, if you’re on the fence as far as RYS reloaded, go get it. We’re in there. We’re hammering away. If you don’t want to do the work, we have done for you according to RYS reloaded specs. And they’re the same price as the old ones, don’t forget.
Male:Thanks. Good time to get in there.
Hernan: If you happen to grab RYS reloaded before it goes up, on the checkout page you can pick an option to get an RYS stack for half off. As of right now, when we increase the price, it’s going to be even lower. For right now, you can get a steep discount on your RYS stack that you can roll over the next 30 days. You get it today, you can roll over the next 30 days, but you need to do that with RYS reloaded so [inaudible 00:55:39]
Bradley: Awesome. Thanks everybody for being here. We’ve got to wrap it up. See you all later. Thanks.
In the 146th episode of Semantic Mastery’s weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked whether the share link to news published in a Google My Business profile expires after 7 days.
The exact question was:
HI Guys,
When you publish a news on your Google My Business profile, it stays visible for 7 days, but I noticed that it’s possible to share the link to your social accounts with a goo.gl. modifier.
1- Do you think that this link will be unusable over that 7 days period ?
2- Can we use this links in some kind of press release.
In episode 146 of Semantic Mastery’s weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one viewer asked if a main domain ranks above the G-Site and sub domain if it contains the original content and holds canonical power.
The exact question was:
Hi Heroes,
I need your guidance here,
I have a Main domain and a Sub.domain,
now Sub.domain give Rel Canonical to Main Domain’s Silo pages
and Every post of Sub.Domain is Mirrored in a GSite (that is all posts replicated on GSite), and GSite has no connection to Main domain whatsoever
So, In this scenario will Main Domain Rank above GSite and Sub.Domain for targeted key-terms or not.
Does this holds any power…I’m onto it, but need your guidance.
Are you ranking pretty well in one locale, only to find out your rankings tank in another? It's not uncommon, even for sites without an intent to capture local queries. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand shows you how to diagnose the issue with a few clever SEO tricks, then identify the right strategy to get back on top.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to this edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about rankings that differ from geography to geography. Many of you might see that you are ranking particularly well in one city, but when you perform that search in another city or in another country perhaps, that still speaks the same language and has very similar traits, that maybe you're not performing well.
Maybe you do well in Canada, but you don't do well in the United States. Maybe you do well in Portland, Oregon, but you do poorly in San Diego, California. Sometimes you might be thinking to yourself, "Well, wait, this search is not particularly local, or at least I didn't think of it as being particularly local. Why am I ranking in one and not the other?" So here's a process that you can use to diagnose.
Confirm the rankings you see are accurate:
The first thing we need to do is confirm that the rankings you see or that you've heard about are accurate. This is actually much more difficult than it used to be. It used to be you could scroll to the bottom of Google and change your location to whatever you wanted. Now Google will geolocate you by your IP address or by a precise location on your mobile device, and unfortunately you can't just specify one particular location or another — unless you know some of these SEO hacks.
A. Google's AdPreview Tool - Google has an ad preview tool, where you can specify and set a particular location. That's at AdWords.Google.com slash a bunch of junk slash ad preview. We'll make sure that the link is down in the notes below.
B. The ampersand-near-equals parameter (&near=) - Now, some SEOs have said that this is not perfect, and I agree it is imperfect, but it is pretty close. We've done some comparisons here at Moz. I've done them while I'm traveling. It's not bad. Occasionally, you'll see one or two things that are not the same. The advertisements are frequently not the same. In fact, they don't seem to work well. But the organic results look pretty darn close. The maps results look pretty darn close. So I think it's a reasonable tool that you can use.
That is by basically changing the Google search query — so this is the URL in the search query — from Google.com/search?q= and then you might have ice+cream or WordPress+web+design, and then you use this, &near= and the city and state here in the United States or city and province in Canada or city and region in another country. In this case, I'm going with Portland+OR. This will change my results. You can give this a try yourself. You can see that you will see the ice cream places that are in Portland, Oregon, when you perform this search query.
For countries, you can use another one. You can either go directly to the country code Google, so for the UK Google.co.uk, or for New Zealand Google.co.nz, or for Canada Google.ca. Then you can type that in.You can also use this parameter &GL= instead of &near. This is global location equals the country code, and then you could put in CA for Canada or UK for the UK or NZ for New Zealand.
C. The Mozbar's search profiles - You can also do this with the MozBar. The MozBar kind of hacks the near parameter for you, and you can just specify a location and create a search profile. Do that right inside the MozBar. That's one of the very nice things about using it.
D. Rank tracking with a platform that supports location-specific rankings - Some of them don't, some of them do. Moz does right now. I believe Searchmetrics does if you use the enterprise. Oh, I'm trying to remember if Rob Bucci said STAT does. Well, Rob will answer in the comments, and he'll tell us whether STAT does. I think that they do.
Look at who IS ranking and what features they may have:
So next, once you've figured out whether this ranking anomaly that you perceive is real or not, you can step two look at who is ranking in the one where you're not and figure out what factors they might have going for them.
Have they gotten a lot of local links, location-specific links from these websites that are in that specific geography or serve that geography, local chambers of commerce, local directories, those kinds of things?
Do they have a more hyper-local service area? On a map, if this is the city, do they serve that specific region? You serve a broad set of locations all over the place, and maybe you don't have a geo-specific region that you're serving.
Do they have localized listings, listings in places like where Moz Local or a competitor like Yext or Whitespark might push all their data to? Those could be things like Google Maps and Bing Maps, directories, local data aggregators, Yelp, TripAdvisor, etc., etc.
Do they have rankings in Google Maps? If you go and look and you see that this website is ranking particularly well in Google Maps for that particular region and you are not, that might be another signal that hyper-local intent and hyper-local ranking signals, ranking algorithm is in play there.
Are they running local AdWords ads? I know this might seem like, "Wait a minute. Rand, I thought ads were not directly connected to organic search results." They're not, but it tends to be the case that if you bid on AdWords, you tend to increase your organic click-through rate as well, because people see your ad up at the top, and then they see you again a second time, and so they're a little more biased to click. Therefore, buying local ads can sometimes increase organic click-through rate as well. It can also brand people with your particular business. So that is one thing that might make a difference here.
Consider location-based searcher behaviors:
Now we're not considering who is ranking, but we're considering who is doing the searching, these location-based searchers and what their behavior is like.
Are they less likely to search for your brand because you're not as well known in that region?
Are they less likely to click your site in the SERPs because you're not as well known?
Is their intent somehow different because of their geography? Maybe there's a language issue or a regionalism of some kind. This could be a local language thing even here in the United States, where parts of the country say "soda" and parts of the country say "pop." Maybe those mean two different things, and "pop" means, "Oh, it's a popcorn store in Seattle," because there's the Pop brand, but in the Midwest, "pop" clearly refers to types of soda beverages.
Are they more or less sensitive to a co-located solution? So it could be that in many geographies, a lot of your market doesn't care about whether the solution that they're getting is from their local region, and in others it does. A classic one on a country level is France, whose searchers tend to care tremendously more that they are getting .fr results and that the location of the business they are clicking on is in France versus other folks in Europe who might click a .com or a .co.uk with no problem.
Divide into three buckets:
You're going to divide the search queries that you care about that have these challenges into three different types of buckets:
Bucket one: Hyper-geo-sensitive
This would be sort of the classic geo-specific search, where you see maps results right up at the top. The SERPs change completely from geo to geo. So if you perform the search in Portland and then you perform it in San Diego, you see very, very different results. Seven to nine of the top ten at least are changing up, and it's the case that almost no non-local listings are showing in the top five results. When you see these, this is probably non-targetable without a physical location in that geography. So if you don't have a physical location, you're kind of out of business until you get there. If you do, then you can work on the local ranking signals that might be holding you back.
Bucket two: Semi-geo-sensitive
I've actually illustrated this one over here, because this can be a little bit challenging to describe. But basically, you're getting a mix of geo-specific and global results. So, for example, I use the &near=Portland, Oregon, because I'm in Seattle and I want to see Portland's results for WordPress web design.
WordPress web design, when I do the search all over the United States, the first one or two results are pretty much always the same. They're always this Web Savvy Marketing link and this Creative Bloq, and they're very broad. They are not specifically about a local provider of WordPress web design.
But then you get to number three and four and five, and the results change to be local-specific businesses. So in Portland, it's these Mozak Design guys. Mozak, no relation to Moz, to my knowledge anyway. In San Diego, it's Kristin Falkner, who's ranking number three, and then other local San Diego WordPress web design businesses at four and five. So it's kind of this mix of geo and non-geo. You can generally tell this by looking and changing your geography in this fashion seeing those different things.
Some of the top search results usually will be like this, and they'll stay consistent from geography to geography. In these cases, what you want to do is work on boosting those local-specific signals. So if you are ranking number five or six and you want to be number three, go for that, or you can try and be in the global results, in which case you're trying to boost the classic ranking signals, not the local ones so you can get up there.
Bucket three: Non-geo-sensitive
Those would be, "I do this search, and I don't see any local-specific results." It's just a bunch of nationwide or worldwide brands. There are no maps, usually only one, maybe two geo-specific results in the top 10, and they tend to be further down, and the SERPs barely change from geo to geo. They're pretty much the same throughout the country.
So once you put these into these three buckets, then you know which thing to do. Here, it's pursue classic signals. You probably don't need much of a local boost.
Here, you have the option of going one way or the other, boosting local signals to get into these rankings or boosting the classic signals to get into those global ones.
Here you're going to need the physical business.
All right, everyone. I hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday, and we'll see you again next week. Take care.
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In episode 146 of our weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked what IP one should use when accessing multiple client PBNs from different hosts.
The exact question was:
Hey guys, could you please explain what ip I should log into my pbns with? I get the whole hosting in different companies and everything but I’m still logging into them to work from the same computer. How do I work around that?
