Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 57 Replay

Click on the video above to watch Episode 43 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.

The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

 

 

Announcement

Adam: Hello everybody and welcome to Hump Day Hangouts. Today is the 9th of December and this episode 57. I going to go down the list here like we usually do. We’re going to give it our best shot at saying hello to everybody. How’s it going, Chris?

Chris: Hey everybody.

Adam: Good, he’s here. I was starting to wonder if I was talking to myself. Hey, Hernan, what’s up?

Hernan: Hey everybody, it’s good to be here.

Adam: Hey, Marco, how’s it going?

Marco: Hey, what up everybody?

Adam: Bradley, how goes it, man?

Bradley: What’s up guys? I see that Marco joined the meme business? Did you see the events page?

Adam: Not yet. I just flipped over. I was writing down notes [crosstalk 00:00:44] …

Bradley: I thought it was Wayne at first. When I started scrolling down, I saw it, I was like, “Oh, Wayne.”

Adam: That’s good. I saw that on Facebook or Google+ earlier. I liked that.

Bradley: I was like, wow, we’re expanding our talent base.

IFTTT Version 2

Adam: Good deal. I just got a few announcements. We’ll get through this pretty quick and then we’ll get going. I think we mentioned it a week or 2 ago but we wanted to let you know that IFTTT 2.0 is getting under development. We had, or I had, dealt with few question people were asking us. When’s the date when you’re releasing it when you’re video’s updated? We don’t have that yet. I promise you we’ll let you know when we do. We’re looking sometime here in the near midterm. We’ll get you some more information on that.

Bradley: Let me jump on that for a minute if you don’t mind. IFTTT version 2, that’s going to be coming out. I had posted on the Facebook group about doing some updates but really there’s nothing to update, guys. Nothing that is worth updating until the new course comes out.

I was going to try to do some update videos about the new Google +, but I highly recommend, and maybe this is what I’ll post in there because I haven’t done it yet, but I highly recommend that you continue using classic Google + for now until they force us to go to the new version because the new version is lacking some of the features that we currently have.

They’re probably going to be integrated before it comes out of beta, but currently it’s on beta. I just wanted to let you guys know that we’re not … provided we can get through the end of this year, we’ll be working on setting up version 2 or 2.0 for next year. Probably January, February at the latest, to be launched. If we can make it until then without any major updates, we’re not going to do much for updating the current version if that makes sense. Unless something else really pressing comes out.

SERP Space

Adam: Cool, good deal. Sorry, getting weird, echo. On the notes of other areas we’re working on. Obviously, SERP Space is one of the areas where we’re working on getting more features and functionality for everybody. If you haven’t yet, please check it out. SERPSpace.com. It’s a free account to register and check it all out. You don’t need to pay for anything to check out the services.

Our video powerhouse is open right now for our students. I’ll be dropping that link in here. You can go check that out. We’re looking to bring some more people on in December. The service is working out really well. Actually we just talked to Dan Anton about that. Yesterday, we had an interview webinar with Dan Anton. If you missed that, you’ll be able to catch the reply shortly. You can find it down our YouTube channel or I’ll send out a link to it. We’re going to have a blog post with some more information and we’ll send that out on Friday.

Crowdsearch.me

If you’re not familiar with Dan, Dan is the creator of Crowdsearch, which we are huge fans of. On top of that, he’s got several other great products. We talked to him a lot on the webinars was about how he built his business. He’s very successful, he’s had a lot of great launches, great products, solid products. It’s interesting to talk to him and get his view of how he went about building his business. I don’t know if you want to add anything to that, Bradley.

Bradley: It was a no pitch webinar, guys. It wasn’t promotional of any sort. Seriously, there was no affiliate links dropped or any … It was literally just an interview with Dan to talk about how he became successful and to share some knowledge with anybody trying to build a business. It was a good session. It was only an hour long too.

Adam: I don’t want to make Bradley a liar. I totally dropped affiliate links on there.

Bradley: Oh, did you?

Adam: Yeah. That was at the end when we were talking about … especially Crowdsearch. We all use it, as ourselves. It’s not like we sell it as affiliates and then use that money to buy it. We use it ourselves for our own uses outside of Semantic Mastery, and happy to. At the end I dropped that, I think Backlinks and [inaudible 00:04:23]. Like you said, it was mostly talking to Dan about how he’s built his business. Like I said, he’s been successful and had a lot of really great products.

Bradley: Then I didn’t entirely lie. It wasn’t a pitch webinar, but there were affiliate links dropped …

Adam: That’s what I’m saying. I just want to correct it so somebody doesn’t see this later and is like, “I saw something.” We’re promote to promote his products. They’re high quality. Like I said, we use them. What were you saying, Hernan?

Hernan: It was basically a pitch fest.

Adam: Whoever is watching, you can decide for yourself. We’ll send that link out on Friday with the round up email of what we got going in the week. Next week, correct me if I’m wrong you guys, but Monday I believe at 7PM, we’re going to be talking to Andres Tobar about some SERP Shaker business.

Chris:  Mm-hmm (affirmative), that’s correct.

Adam: Awesome. If someone else wants to fill that in a little bit more, I don’t have all the details so I don’t want to put my foot in my mouth too much, more than usual. It’s going to be based around that and then some additions to that. I don’t know if I want to give too much away or if we want to …

Bradley: Hernan, expand on that a bit would you.

Hernan: Yeah, sure. We can say that Andres has been combining RYS with SERP Shaker technology. He’s been doing some crazy stuff. He ha is developing his own scripts to automate the whole thing. He is going to be presenting how’s he using the SERP Shaker methodology or approach in combination with RYS. It’s some of his own scripts so it’s going to be fun. It’s going to be a lot of fun.

Adam: All right. One last thing … Obviously I’ll be sending out something, people will see that. We’ll post it on Facebook and Google + and send out the invite to that stuff. The Mastermind, just so you’re aware, we’re adding to our Mastermind. We’re going to be giving our members a chance to get in the hotseat and answer some questions.

Mastermind members are getting a chance to get someone to many feedback. They’re going to sit down with us via a Hangout and ask us questions or we are going to be able to ask them questions and be able to figure out how we can push them forward. If that type of action sounds like something good for you, now’s a good time to hop in to the Mastermind. We’re going to start doing at least one of these a month, probably more than that.

Bradley: Unfortunately the first one’s supposed to be tomorrow at 4PM. It’s only an hour long, but I didn’t post it yet in the community. I haven’t cleared it with Robbie and Wayne yet to if they’re … By the way, if you guys are on, let us know if you guys are cool with tomorrow, starting tomorrow between 4 and 5.

Adam:  If not, we’ll work around you guys and get the first one out of the way.

Bradley: Yeah, we’ll have to reschedule. I was supposed to post it in the group yesterday and get with you guys and I completely dropped the ball. I apologize for that. If you guys are available though, we’d like to do that tomorrow between 4 and 5PM Eastern.

Adam: Sounds good. That’s all I’ve got. If anybody else has anything, now’s the time.

Bradley: One thing, Justin Sardi’s new course. Marco, if you’ve got that link …

Marco: Yeah, I’ll drop the link in there.

Bradley: Justin Sardi’s new course for video advertising YouTube ads, which again, I can’t say enough about them. It’s just everything that we do. All of our sales funnel product stuff, building our email list, I do it for local. I also use video ads for video SEO, believe it or not. That’s just something that I do when I need an additional push on the video that I’m trying to rank. I learned how to do video ads from Justin. I did some 1 on 1 coaching with him at the beginning of this year, so I got that hands on with him.

He’s new course coming out, it’s called Video Extreme. It comes out on Friday, 11AM Eastern. It’s a $300 course but it’s a really in depth course. I’ve been through it. He gave me review access. I’ve been through that course and actually picked up several more techniques and nuggets of information that I haven’t learned before. I do a lot of YouTube ads stuff.

Anybody who’s interested in using YouTube ads for driving traffic, it’s really a very under used traffic source right now, and it won’t be that way for long, guys. Just like Facebook ads, it’s going to saturated at some point. Right now, it’s still a golden opportunity to get in, learn how to use Facebook adverting and drive traffic for pennies per click. It’s very targeted traffic. You can get so precise with your targeting to where you only show your ads in front of specific videos, which is fantastic because it’s so targeted. Conversion rates are good.

Anyways, enough of that. There’s a link. If you guys want to get, there’s a free download, a PDF download if you go to … it’s a cheat sheet, YouTube Ads cheat sheet where he also discusses how you can get free ad credits for testing YouTube ads if you wanted to. If you go sign up for that, you’ll get the email on Friday when it’s launched. You can check out the product if you want.

We have some bonuses that we lined up if anybody purchases through out link. We have that URL too.. I don’t know … Do you have that ready, Adam?

Adam: Yeah, I’ll drop that in there.

Bradley: The MasteryPR.com link?

Adam: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Bradley: If anybody is interested in purchasing and they end up punishing purchasing through our link, we got several bonuses lined up for that as well. Again, it’s something that I highly recommend. We don’t typical promote a lot of products unless it’s stuff that we use, and I stand behind Justin’s product no question.

All right, other than that, do we have anything else, any body else?

Adam: Let’s get started.

Hernan: Let’s do the …

301 Redirection for Expired Domains to Push PA and DA

Bradley: All right, here we go. We’ll start with Kevin at the bottom and work our way up. “My site is 2 months old …” Excuse me, let me lock my screen so that it’s not bouncing. “My site is 2 months old with around 20 backlinks that I’ve created. Can I now 301 a few expired domains to my site to help push PADA and number of backlinks?” Here’s that PADA question again. “Oh, my site already has pretty good trust vote, 15+ on those pages with close to a 1 to 1 ratio.” That’s good. “Also, should I set up WordPress plus a Link Juice Keeper first on the expired domain before I 301 or should I just do it through the registrar or HTAccess? Do you have any suggestions on whether I do this for my money home page or interpages or how many 301s and how many interpages? Oh, and the expired …” There’s a lot of ohs. “The expired domain be the exact same niche or subniche or just same main niche?”

There’s several questions in that one. We’ll start with the top. It’s okay to do that, to do some redirects to your main money site. I don’t like to do a redirect from an expired domain even if it’s from the same niche, which is really important guys. If you’re going to be doing this type of thing, unless you’re just pushing juice, which you can do with some double 301 redirects and stuff that we talked about in the Mastermind, we’re not going to reveal all of it here, but unless you’re doing those types of methods where it’s just about pushing juice, then I commend that you do find expired domains that are within the same niche.

They don’t have to be the exact same sunniche, it doesn’t have to be really granular. What you’re looking of r is topical trust flow relevance. If you can find those, then by all means, it’s okay to redirect to your main money site. Here’s where I find an issue with redirecting expired domains direct to the money site. It looks odd if you have too many of them. I don’t recommend that you do a bunch of them, if you got a couple then that’s fine. That’s not an issue, I do it myself. But if I have …

Let’s say i have 8 domains that have got decent metrics, clean inbound link profiles and they’re on the same topical trust flow, the same topic, so they have that same topical trust flow relevance, the I wouldn’t redirect all 8 domains to my money site. What I’d do is I would take 1 or 2 of those and redirect them to my money site and redirect the others to those first redirects to where it’s only showing in the backlink analysis tools and search consul and things like that. Only those two redirects. But I’m still pushing additional topical trust flow through because I’ve got a chain of redirects setup, if that makes sense. It looks odd if you start pushing a bunch of redirects all of a sudden to your money site. I don’t like to do that. If I’m going to do something like that, then I spread it out over time. Hernan, you want to comment on that part of it?

Hernan: Yes, I agree with you on the 301. Too much of a good thing can become the other way around. I have found depending on the niche, I have found for example for local that just a couple of them will give you good results, but it has to be congruent with whatever, anything else that you’re doing.

For example, you can check the backlinks that your competitors have, the top 5, and you can try and run, for example something like [inaudible 00:13:28] or Screaming Frog if you have their resources and try to scrape your competitor’s backlink profile and see if you can emulate their profile. It will have to be consistent with your link building strategy overall. I wouldn’t start just from right off the bat with 301s, I would maybe do it some … let it age a little bit and add the trust flow before starting doing 301. Usually I do 301s when I need a push.

Bradley: He says it’s about 2 months old with about 20 backlinks already. Again, that’s a really new site and you don’t want to overdo it. If I was going to do anything, Kevin, I might just do one 301 to start with. If I was going to do any additional 301s, it would be to that first 301 domain instead of direct to the money site where I’d be basically building upon that first redirect instead of adding additional redirects, if that makes sense. Again, don’t push it too fast man because you’ll get penalized.

Marco, you were working on a blog post about the 20-70, did that ever get published?

Marco: I’m still editing it and I’m going to add some graphics and some other stuff. It will be done by the end of the week.

Bradley: All right, because that will be something that’s going to be really useful for all of you guys. It’s a post about how when you start making changes to your site, you need to let them sit and take effect and at least wait 20 days because if you don’t, then Google’s going to see that you keep making adjustments and making adjustments and they’re going to sandbox your site. It doesn’t mean they’re going to penalize the site but it means they just won’t promote it anymore and it will … you can end up causing problems for you, long term problems. You gotta be really careful with that kind of stuff.

As far as should you setup WordPress and Link Juice Keeper first on the expired domain before you 301. No, because that’s just additional work. If you’re going to be building those sites out like PBNs, then yeah of course, you want to setup WordPress or some sort of CMS or website, it could be HTML, whatever. You could do that, but if you’re just going to be doing 301s, I wouldn’t recommend wasting the time of setting up WordPress and putting in plugins and stuff like that on it. If you’re going to use them just for 301s, I don’t recommend doing it, it’s just a waste of time.

Make sure that if it’s your registrar 301 that it’s not GoDaddy, NameCheap will work fine. GoDaddy will sometimes give you 302 redirects even though it says 301, you need to check it. I don’t know about other registrars because those are pretty much the only 2 that I use. I’ve got some other ones but they’re not for that type of stuff, they’re just for PBN domains, Phoenix domains and some other …

Anyways, the point is, I don’t usually do domain registrars or registrar 301s with any of the other domain registrar so I don’t know about them. You have to just test it. If you setup a 301 within the registrar, just use something like redirect-checker.org and then it will show you whether it’s 301 or 302, that type of thing.

HTAccess is a better way to go. You can also do a cPanel redirect. If you point the domain to one of your hosting accounts, you can just go right into cPanel and setup a redirect there within cPanel.

Hernan: Also, sorry Bradley, we had Brian Tucker a couple of weeks ago. I think it was last Mastermind. He has been experimenting a lot with 301s as well and he was saying that usually HTAccess redirection work faster than 301 from the registrar. That’s usually what I do from the registrar itself. You need to test it out, I don’t have enough data to see if that’s correct or not but I trust Brian. I would say that you test it out.

Bradley: He said, “Do you have any suggestions on whether I do this to my money homepage or interpages or how many 301s to how many interpages?” Again, don’t do too many 301s, Kevin. Seriously, just don’t do that. You can experiment with it but I wouldn’t … I would be … I would err on the side of caution. I’d be very conservative with that.

If you’re going to be adding multiple 301s, you should do it over time so that you can allow each 301 that you add time to have an effect before you do another. You got to be patient when you start doing stuff like this.

As far as homepage or interpages, it depends what are you trying to push. If you’re trying to rank an interpage for a specific keyword … I like to use those type of tactics … I like to point them to strategic directions, if that makes sense. For example, as silo landing page because then it’s going to push throughout the entire site. Or even an interpost, a long tail post as long as it’s got, if the internal linking structure is proper, it’s going to end up pushing the juice all the way through the silo anyways.

I don’t build a lot of high powered links to my homepage. I usually push the interpages because it just makes sense. You don’t typically rank your homepage. It depends on how your site structure is. But a lot of the times, your homepage isn’t really what you end up trying to rank, it’s interpages anyways.

Hernan: If you want to be a bit more aggressive as well, I would suggest that you point it to Web 2.0s. For example, some properties are of your IFTTT, some semantic haps, those kind of things.

Bradley: Then you can go crazy. Along those lines of what Hernan just said, Kevin, if you want to get way more aggressive with how many 301s … using several 301 domains, you certainly can do that. Just point them to a buffer site first, which preferably would be your IFTTT network so that you’re juicing your branded profiles. You could also do it to citations if it’s a local site. Make sure you’re pointing them to pages where there’s do-follow links to your money site though.

In that case, you can also push some anchor text relevancy which will increase your topical trust flow. That’s one way to do it, that’s one way to inject some topical relevancy through … even if you’re using a domain that wasn’t 100% on topic.

My point is, if you’re pointing to a page that has topical relevancy and then you’ve got a keyword anchor text link that’s pointing back to your money site, essentially you’re pushing your juice first to the page itself that has the article on it that’s topically relevant what the destination is, your money site and then the juice funneling through that anchor text link back to your money site, it’s going to inject some topical trust flow right there. That’s actually a good way to do it if you’ve got some domains that don’t have … that aren’t spot on metrics as far as topical trust flow relevancy, if that make sense.

That was a bit of an advanced question, hopefully some of you guys didn’t get lost in the weeds on that. That was a good question, Kevin, though. Just be careful when you’re doing that kind of stuff. There’s ways that you can  … Protect your money site from overdoing it because trust me, your site if it’s only 2 months old, it’s still in a probationary period. You just want to be careful with what you’re doing. Take it slow.

Alternative to RSS Autoposting in IFTTT Networks

Let’s see. This one. “I know I’m about to commit heresy here but if I didn’t want to use IFTTT to auto post an RSS feed to my Facebook page, what are some favorite strategies?” I don’t know because I only use IFTTT for that, anybody else have any …? Excuse me, there’s two other options. Buffer or … Hootsuite.

Marco: We also have Zapier, it works really well. Deliver.IT and then Snap. There are several options. I tested them but I always go back to IFTTT because it just works.

Adam: Buffer works. I really like Buffer too. You have to have a Buffer pro account, I think, to add RSS feeds. I really do like Buffer a lot. I used to use Hootsuite for that kind of stuff but I like Buffer better than Hootsuite now. That’s something that you could look into as well. Again, I think you need a pro account in order to add RSS feeds though but it’s pretty cool because you can schedule a post and all that kind of stuff.

Adam: Jason, don’t worry, that’s not a heresy, we’re not going to hunt you down.

Best Strategies to Display Affiliate Links

Bradley: Sky says, “On webpages that I’m trying to rank, what’s a good way to display affiliate links? Cloaking, no-follow or …” I always cloak the links using a redirect plugin and add a no-follow tag anyways. That’s all I ever do. Period. Anybody else have any ideas? Any other methods that they want to share? That’s all I do, is just use a good redirect plugin, preferably a meta refresh redirect instead of just a straight 301. I always add the no-follow tag to it.

Adam: Be careful with the cloaking. Check the terms of service.

Bradley: That can confuse people because Google’s definition of cloaking is different than what we as affiliates think of of cloaking.

Adam: Whatever you’re being an affiliate for, read the fine print. If it’s churn and burn, then maybe you can get away with it. Just understand what you’re doing and what they allow.

Hernan: For example, Amazon, I know that they won’t allow cloaking unless you’re using their own shortener. You need to have the AMS.to link over there otherwise it’s consider cloaking. I just want to …

Bradley: That’s all I can offer you on that, Sky. I just use a preferably meta refresh 301 plugin … excuse me, a redirect plugin and then add a no-follow tag.

Marco: I have a question for you, Bradley since you do meta refresh. What do you set your meta refresh at?

Bradley: One second or zero, whatever. It’s just the lowest setting. Is that what you mean?

Marco: Yeah. Thanks.

Best Practices for Non-Wordpress Sites like Duda in the IFTTT Network

Bradley: It’s just the lowest setting. It’s like an automatic … it counts like a 301. Rick Daws says, “A lot of your strategies discussed are for WordPress sites, for good reason, but what if someone uses a non-WordPress site like Duda, would you encourage a new site to be made or could you be just as good with the right tactics?”

I don’t know about Duda, I can’t speak specifically Rick. I’ve worked on HTML sites, believe it or not, some older versions and I’ve also worked on proprietary platform CMSs where … I flat out tell the clients if they have something that’s on a proprietary platform, that I am not going to learn that platform, period. Because they couldn’t pay me enough to do it because it’s just not the best use of my time. If they want me to do, set up SEO campaigns for them and content distribution, then I just build a WordPress site on a subdomain of their main money site. Whatever it is. Because it’s WordPress. I can go to town with it like I normally do.

That’s one way to do it. If you’re dealing with a client that’s got a site on Duda, you could just say, “Hey look, I’ll set up a WordPress site on a subdomain. You will use that as the content distribution engine and basically use that to push content out and build links back to your money site.” Because I think …

Marco: Often …

Bradley: Go ahead. I’m sorry.

Marco: I’m sorry about that. Often times, that’s even better for the website when you add a few subdomains because then you’re pushing … the root domain will feed from the subdomains but also the root domain will feed the subdomains. It’ll form a symbiotic relationship.

Bradley: That way you have full control over it too. Because again, when somebody’s on a proprietary platform or something like Duda, something that I’m not familiar with, I don’t want to take the time to learn that. I don’t want to get in there and do any sort of messing around. I just flat out say, “I’m going to set up a WordPress site on a subdomain. That’ll give me full control. I’ll have basically full control over the subdomain site and the content distribution. We’ll still be able to achieve the same results.”

Twitter Embeds and WP Tweet Plugin

The next question from Rick was Twitter questions. “Is embedding a Twitter feed into your site help SEO?” Yeah, it does. What I like about adding a Twitter feed, like a widget, which is really easy to do, you just sign in your Twitter account and on the lefthand sidebar, you’ll … or when you go to settings, your Twitter settings, you’ll see a widgets tab and you click on that and you can setup a widget right within your WordPress site.

I like to do that because it constantly adds new content, fresh content to the page. If you setup IFTTT recipes, like retweet recipes like what we have in Twitter SEO Academy, then it will constantly be updating your Twitter feed with relevant content based on hashtags, which in turn will update your WordPress site too. It keeps the bots coming and spiders crawling your pages too.

Anything else you’re can add?

Hernan: Yeah, it’s also good for PBNs, Rick. If you have a couple of PBNs that they not usually updated, if you have a Twitter feed or a Pinterest feed, or even a Facebook page feed, they will usually… they will refresh the iframe. But if you had to choose then I would suggest Twitter because of the bromance that’s going on right now.

Bradley: Bromance.

Hernan: Yup.

Marco: He says his homepage is static but you can still code the widget in there.

Hernan: Yeah.

Bradley: Because it’s just an iframe. The last part of that question, did I ever look deeper in the WP Tweet plugin. No, it’s collecting digital dust on my hard drive. It’s somewhere in the bowels of my hard drive right now waiting for me to dig it out and play with it when I find few free moments but I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime in the next 3 years. I purchased it, just like I do so many things that I see, that I like, “That looks interesting, I’ll pick that up and I’ll check it out.” Yeah, right. I don’t have the damn time to do it. I would like to, but I haven’t done it yet.

Marco: Give it to our social media manager so that he can check it out and take it for a test run and see what happens.

Bradley: That’s a good idea. I’ll give it to Gary.

Hernan: Which is also part of the mad scientist team, he could break it.

Bradley: I’m saying, I picked it up, I haven’t tried it. I know we have the mad scientist team, but anyone else, has anyone else played with it? I don’t think so. Maybe I’ll give to Gary and see. Give it to Gary, he’ll try anything.

The next one … By the way, we’re working on another division of our business now where we’re going to be doing a lot more testing of other products and stuff to vet them out. We’re actually training VAs for that kind of stuff, guys. Although it’s not something I’m able to do at the moment as far as testing other products for the most part, we are actually training a team to do that sort of thing for us and then we’ll be posting reviews on those products and things like that. That’s coming in the next few months. We’re training people for that now.

Adam: Yeah, I’d just be curious if people, especially during Hump Day Hangouts, if people have products out there that they’re just really curious about, I’m just interested in what other people are looking at. We know what we’re interested in.

Bradley: We got a section dedicated to that inside the Mastermind for people to post requests for products or service reviews. Like outsourcing services, link building services, any software, plugins, training courses, anything like that. That’s what we’re developing that team out for now, is to start testing those types of products based on request from Mastermind members.

URL Shortener for IFTTT Syndicated Posts

Paul says, IFTTT question, “Should we be using IFTTT URL shortening feature?” No. Turn that off. That’s just a crazy footprint, Paul. That’s actually in the training by the way. That’s one of the very first videos is to, when you first up the IFTTT account, you got to go to preferences and turn IFTTT link shortening off. Again, that’s in the training.

Spam Posts in Tier 2 Properties in IFTTT Networks

Sam says, “Would you recommend firing spam at second tier properties or using a buffer?” You can add second tier properties, Sam, just be careful with your anchor text. It’s okay to do that to second tier. I wouldn’t fire spam to tier 1 but you can fire to tier 2.

Hernan: “GSA blast person at 3 person on Twitter …” I’m just trying to read the rest of the question. “GSA blast at the 3 person Twitter profiles would represent a second tier of my IFTTT?” Yeah, that would work, Sam. Try to experiment a little bit also with contextuals from GSA. I’ve seen better results with a contextual layer in between. You would do the Twitter profiles then a contextuals layer of GSA and then a GSA spam. Vary it a little bit so that you can see the results. I usually have better results with the contextual layer between whatever I want to pump in the actual spam.

Referral Traffic Campaign for Crowdsearch.me

Bradley: I’m looking for … Where is the referral traffic post? I thought I’d saved that in here.

Hernan: I’ll pull it up.

Bradley: Just tag Scott on that, Scott Rogers. Scott, I did a post on our blog. You’re more than welcome to watch that, on how to setup referral traffic campaigns for Crowdsearch. That should answer your question. If you have any additional question about that, just post in one of our groups and we’ll get to it. For anybody who doesn’t know, we’re going to drop a link. It’s on how to use Crowdsearch.me for referral traffic, which is what I’m using it for now more than anything. I still setup navigational searches, which are searches that search for the brand name of the business or the website. Remember guys, a website can be a brand. Navigational searches is what I’ll do for direct search and click traffic, but I don’t do direct … I don’t do any sort of keyword search and click traffic to websites anymore at all.

I find that referral traffic works incredibly well for both videos and for local sites as well. That’s what I’m driving … Again, other than some very small navigational search queries, search traffic direct to the money site, everything else is done pretty much through referral traffic now, which means using Crowdsearch to click through from search to social property, like Twitter or Tumblr or WordPress.com or Bloggr, something like that. From there, you direct the click from that post to the final destination, which could be your money site or a video or wherever you want it go. That referral traffic is working incredibly well.

It’s not something that gives you an immediate effect, it’s something you have to setup … Don’t overdo it, guys. If you’re targeting a keyword that gets 100 searches a month on average, you don’t want to send 300 searches a month through referral traffic because it wouldn’t look natural. You want to keep it low like maybe 30, 40% of what the search traffic … search volume is for that keyword. In this case, you’d want like 30 or 40 searches per month to go through as a referral traffic.

If you’re setting up multiple refers, which would be like sending traffic through Twitter and Tumblr, then you’d want to adjust accordingly where you’re sending 15 or 20 searches a month through Twitter, 15 or 20 searches a month through Tumblr, so that cumulatively it’s still around that 30%, 30, 40% range of the overall search volume for that keyword.

Again, don’t expect immediate results, but you set it up and you let it run. Give it about 3 or 4 weeks and you should see significant results from that. I’m having phenomenal results. That’s pretty much the only way I use it now besides some navigational queries as well.

Link Crawling with Related Niche Sites

Kevin says, “If I build links through link exchange or other niche sites, how do I get to Google to crawl?” I would, honestly Kevin, in that sort of situation, I would let those links get indexed naturally. Anybody else want to comment on that? Anybody having any other differing opinions on that?

Hernan: If they are tier 1, yeah, let them index naturally.

Bradley: Link exchange is, you just want to be careful. You don’t want to post a link and then force to crawl immediately because that looks highly unnatural and you can end up getting in trouble … the sites in trouble. Your site and the site that you’re getting the link from.

Hernan: If you’re assuming these sites, the link exchanges sites, the site where you get the link is not begin crawled very often, just take your link out of there because if it doesn’t get crawled very often means that it has low metrics, it doesn’t have enticing content so that both the visitors and the spider will [inaudible 00:34:31]. Instead of doing that, you could very well go comment on a high domain authority or high metrics blog with a lot of traffic and leave a valuable comment and that will give you a link, but it will also give you a ton of traffic. When it comes to …

Bradley: Trust flow.

Hernan: When it comes to the link, yeah, to the links that are pointing back to your site, you need to be really picky with those.

Bradley: If you’re going to use stuff like link exchange, I recommend you use … you point the links to tier 1 properties, not direct to your money site. I don’t like using those sorts of things. Like Hernan said, if you’re doing, if you’re putting your link on a page, on a site that gets good natural traffic, organic traffic or whatever, it has traffic, it’s got social activity on it, stuff like that, it’s going to get crawled often anyways. Your link will get picked up. If it’s not, again, it’s lower quality. I would use that only to link to your tier 1 properties instead of direct to money site.

Just so you know, in order to force that kind of stuff, if you … Again, I don’t recommend it in this case because a lot of the times, I would just let that kind of stuff index naturally. I only try to force links to be indexed, guys, when they’re like Web 2 links. It depends on what they’re actually linking to. That’s typically the only time I do it. For “higher quality” links, a lot of the times, just let those index naturally because you want it to be natural.

Twitter’s a great way to do that. If you have a Twitter account that’s not in a sandbox, you could always tweet the URL of the page that has your link on it. That will get the bots to come to that page. Twitter’s a great way to index links guys, if you have a good Twitter account.

Marco, and his new meme ability. That’s awesome. Could you imagine that? Could you imagine that wedgie? You’d taste cotton.

Marco: I don’t.

Boosting Unranked Videos in IFTTT 

Bradley: You’re like, “No.” Robbie says, “Can you go to scenario where initial video doesn’t rank once it’s been syndicated to a full 2 tier network. What your step … What steps, I guess, would you take in order to pry an order of priority to boost the video rank in the SERPs?” All that’s covered Robby. He’s in the Mastermind. I know all that’s covered in the Masterclass Robby. That would be in the first 8 weeks when we did all SEO, I mean all video SEO stuff.

What I’d typically do is once it’s gone through the SERPs … excuse me, my networks has gone through my networks, I wait about 2 weeks, if it hasn’t been boosted then I’ll start doing some additional embed, social embeds. Preferably social embeds, like Twitter retweets, Tumblr reblogs, Pinterest repins. Those are all really good ways to get additional embeds.

Crowdsearch, again, Crowdsearch is something I always set up. Guys, my method is usually upload a video to my YouTube channel or LiveStream which is typically what I do, and then I let it wait about 2 weeks. After about 2 weeks, if it’s not where I want it to be, then I’ll setup a Crowdsearch … Actually, excuse me. Let me reframe that. Within about 3 days, I’ll setup a Crowdsearch campaign to start driving traffic to the video. Now with referral traffic it works really well because what happens is you can end up just copying some of the post URLs from the Web 2 sites that are in your IFTTT networks and using those as your refers. Again, that’s covered in the blog post that Adam dropped the link for.

After that, within about 10 days of setting up the Crowdsearch campaign, about 2 weeks from the date of upload or live stream, then I’ll start doing additional social embeds if needed. You can also do things like sape links if you want to do that. If you have access to tools like FCS or Sandwire or something like that, you can do some additional embed blast. You can also do some backlink packages to the videos themselves. Guys, make sure you’re using playlist, guys. If you’re not doing that, make sure you’re using playlist and start building links to the playlist URL that the videos included in.

That’s a huge way to get boosting, guys. I’m not going to show it right now because it’s a Masterclass thing, but I’m working on a launch jack right for Masterclass and you’ll see that I’m ranked number 1 for the two main terms with the playlist URL. It’s a brand new playlist URL, I set it up 3 days ago.

That’s what I’m saying. Playlists, guys, are incredibly powerful if you use them properly. That’s what YouTube Silo Academy … Guys, it’s 7 bucks, if you don’t have it already, go pick it up. Robbie, you’re in the Masterclass, you already have it. Make sure you’re using playlists. You can build links to that using human spam tools, for that matter.

Marco: Hey Bradley, he also doesn’t say how long it’s been…

Bradley: 2 weeks.

Marco: What?

Bradley: I said within 2 weeks. I’m sorry, no, you’re right.

Marco: It could just be that he needs to let it sit so that it can settle in whatever position it’s going to be in. Because it could be one of those things where it’s more difficult to rank a video. Once it lands in whatever spot it’s going to land, he’s going to know whether he should keep going or just leave it alone and try to look for something else.

But yeah, playlists are … they’re super powerful. You drop some topical trust flow in there and it’s just going to push up everything that’s inside that playlist.

Bradley: What’s great about playlists is you can carry other people’s video in them. They don’t have to be all your own videos. You can put your video at the top of the playlist so it’s video number 1, and then add other people’s videos that are on topic, that are similar.

Even if you’re doing local, let’s say you’re roofer Atlanta, for example, is your main keyword, you can find other roofing videos or roofing how to videos that aren’t geographic specific or promotional, in other words, they’re not promoting other roofing companies. Even if they are promoting other roofing companies, they could be other roofing companies in other states or other cities so that it really wouldn’t have an effect. You put all those into a playlist.

Also within YouTube comments now, YouTube comments are do-follow especially within YouTube so you could …

Adam: Actually comment.

Bradley: You can comment within the other people’s videos up to your video or to the playlist URL. I recommend the playlist URL because you could say, “Hey, I’ve compiled or curated some top how to roofing videos which you can check out here,” and you drop the link to the playlist. Something that’s not going to get your comment marked as spam or moderated out. That’s another thing that you could do. That’s all on page stuff, guys, it doesn’t require any additional tools. All that stuff has a huge benefit of it.

Again, like what Marco said, I total second that. Just wait. Guys when I go to rank a video now, for like local stuff especially. For affiliate stuff I’m a little bit more impatient because it’s usually I’ve got them on a deadline when the launch is going to happen or whatever. For like locals client stuff or lead gen videos, I just expect it to take 30 days for me to rank it. Sometimes I rank it in 10 minutes. That’s just great because then I feel like I don’t have to work anymore for the next 30 days on it, other than just give it a boost.

My point is, it used to be you could rank a video just like that. I’m not seeing that quite as often now so I just expect it to take 30 days. That’s why I said I usually wait about 2 weeks before I really start hammering away at other things, if that makes sense.

Reasons Why Google Sites Gets Suspended With Custom Scripts

Kevin says, “Any ideas why Google sites get suspended soon as we run any custom scripts on them?” You’re probably overdoing the scripts, Kevin. Because my sites, I haven’t had one single Google site suspended yet. Not one.

Anybody else?

Marco: I actually have an answer for this because we ran into this problem. It’s one of two things. The frequency of the script needs to be dialed down. We recommend 2 hours for the script. It could be that he’s running too many on the same account. The VA ran into this problem, the one that’s training for [inaudible 00:42:55] services for RYS Academy. The thing that he ran into is he was running too many scripts on his own drive and so Google just started suspending any new sites.

Even if you go and add the page, like we recommend so that you get extra storage, it’s still part of the same account. Google will look into that and they won’t allow it. That’s the problem.

Bradley: I think if you’ve got … if the script is trying to run too much data, if it’s too heavy, too much of a load within each run, it will also suspend it too, right? You know what I’m saying?

Marco: Yeah.

Bradley: Because I know if we have too many folders in RYS to run with the script, it can cause problems.

Marco: If it’s one of the superstacks that takes a long time, you have to dial it down even more.

What is BrowseSEO?

Bradley: Let’s see. Tim. “Have you had the opportunity to browse SEO …” No, I purchased it a week or 10 days ago and I still haven’t had time to play with it yet. That’s something else I got to get our team on when I can. I just haven’t had time to get them to it yet. We’ve got a lot of big projects we’re working on right now, guys.

I’ve heard nothing but good things about BrowSEO though, that’s why we picked it up. Again, I can’t give you my personal opinion on it yet but I’ve heard nothing but good things about it so I’m pretty sure it’s probably worth it.

Video Powerhouse is open. I didn’t know we were ready to open that up again. We’re working on the next batch of sites right now. We should have the next top level category open to start posting to within about 2 weeks. Within about maybe, I’d say, 4-6 weeks, that next category will be completed for 100 sites. Plus the…

Adam: With that, we’re going to have to change the way things are run a little bit. This is a few weeks out. Not a big deal for anyone right now, but we’re either going to … The price is either going to go up a little bit or the amount of credits you get is going to go down. For everybody, again, this isn’t ‘go do it right now’. We’ll say something before that happens.

Bradley: Obviously, the bigger the network gets and the more categories we had, the more the costs is going to go up because it’s becoming more versatile. We’re dumping a ton of money into that guys. It is what it is. That’s why we’ve been encouraging you guys, if you’re interested at all, get it now because it will lock your price in for a lifetime. Don’t get into this because you think you’re going to need it 3 months from now. Wait until you actually need it it, but if you have any need whatsoever for video ranking, a really good service for helping you to rank videos then I would recommend doing it now, or soon anyways.

Sales Lead from Google Plus Communities

Monique. It’s been a while since we’ve seen her. Hey, Monique. “Have you found that having a Google + community for Semantic Mastery results in time well spent with sales coming in directly from the group?” We’re talking about our free group? No, it’s not really for that, Monique.

Our Mastermind is a Google + community and that’s where we spend a lot of our time. That’s where our Q and A, our discussion forums are and stuff like that. That’s incredibly valuable to us as Semantic Mastery but also to our students, at least from the testimonials we get, it is. For the Google + community, the free one, SEO tutorials and case studies, no. We use it for people that have questions outside of the Hump Day Hangout format. Oftentimes, if they’re really involved questions, we direct them to post them here instead. It’s also so that we can make announcements and things like that.

There are some other, like Facebook groups for example, that are incredible active. There’s value in that. Just having that community. I would say, we don’t do it for marketing purposes directly so it’s not … What I’m trying to get at is we really haven’t analyzed it like that as, “How much revenue are we squeezing out of this community?” Because that’s not the intent of it was, if that makes sense.

Hernan: Sales comes eventually. We’re just not tracking it because it’s not the main point, as you were saying, Bradley.

Bradley: It’s more of an indirect thing. It’s just so people know that we’re there and we can post our events in there. People do ask questions in there and we reply to them when we can. A lot of the times, we direct people here to Hump Day Hangouts.

Hump Day Hangouts, guys, this what we’re doing right now, has been one of the most beneficial things to our growth and we enjoy doing it. It’s not just because we’re trying to drive people into our funnels. We truly enjoy doing this or else we wouldn’t be doing it 57 times. Today’s episode 57. Just having this weekly go to place for people to ask questions has really helped our business to grow so much and also to find out truly what you guys want and need. That’s why we try to develop stuff to solve those, to fill those gaps, in other words.

Team Management for Projects

Next one, “Please speak about having a team working with you one the same project allows you to accomplish feats that you would not be able to do as a lone worker.” Yeah, you just answered your question, Monique. I don’t know if you saw the interview that we had with Dan last night but we talked about that at length.

Guys, if you’re trying to build a real business, you need to build a team, period. You can’t do it as a solopreneur. You cannot have a true a true business as a solopreneur. You might be successful. You might make money. But in order for you to have a true business, you need to be able to step away from it and have it still make you money.

As a solopreneur, if you have to do all of the work yourself, then you’re constantly going to have to be trading hours for dollars, even if you’re really highly paid. Having a team in place means that you can step away and the business will still make you money with just a minimal amount of input from you, which is basically just managing it.

Adam: I would speak to this as far as us 5, not really speaking to our employees as much. Having a team where you can work with easily, and it’s also motivated along the same lines as almost it’s a multiplier. It’s not 1+1=2. That said, if you work with the wrong people then that can also not work out that way and 1+1 may not be equal to 2. It may be less than 2.

Marco: I think the thing that thing that worked for, I’m meaning the Semantic Mastery partners, is that we compliment each other. We each have skills that overlap, but we also have skills that compliment what every one else is doing. It just worked out that way. We started out with about 50 people and we ended up with 5. The 5 that were left, it just so happened that one is an expert in funnels, and we have the local, and Adam is the numbers guy and the glue, Chris is the programmer, and I don’t know what the hell I’m doing in the group but I’m here.

Adam: Marco does a lot. Don’t let him fool you. It’s a little bit of serendipity with a lot of hard work.

Bradley: Like Adam said though, honestly, we started off with, I don’t know if it was 50, but I think we were at 20 people originally. We were going to do what was called a business co-op with about 20 people and it was just way too cumbersome. It was like a federal government bureaucracy. It was ridiculous. We really boiled it down to just us 5.

In part, it’s because the 5 of us work so well together. These guys aren’t just my partners. This is about to get mushy. But these guys are my buddies. We’re all friends. We enjoy each other’s company. What’s funny is we got Slack chat open all the time and we’re always making jokes throughout the day and keeping each other entertained as well as progressing the business and I think that’s really important, to have that dynamic.

Adam: It’s tough to work well with people you don’t like, you can work with people you don’t like but you’re not going to work well.

Team Accountability

Bradley: “Any other helpful solutions for others to be able to set up similar accountability team of workers as you?” Yeah, it’s just … Using something like Trello as a project management application is really important for being able to monitor progress, also for training purposes. That’s originally what I set it up for, for training purposes but it’s also great for monitoring progress.

When you’re going to start building out a team, one of the very fist things you should do is train somebody to be a manager and have them be the one doing the monitoring. The manager is accountable to you as the business owner, but all of the subordinates are accountable to the manager, so that you’re not managing multiple employees because that’s a pain in the balls. Excuse me, in your case, ass, Monique.

Because seriously, when we first started out, our network builders, we got about 12 of them now I think, and they were all answering to me, and it just got really cumbersome. We put somebody in place that is now the team manager and they all go to her for questions and issues. If she needs to get me involved, then she approaches me.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t cut myself off from them, those other members. If they want to discuss something with me direct, they have full access to me. But I don’t get pestered with day to day operation questions because that’s what her job as a team manager is. I think that’s incredibly important, to have managers in place.

If you start hiring virtual assistants, the first virtual assistant you hire, you should … when you’re in the hiring process, you should also be looking for management qualities because since they’re going to be the first person that you hire and train, you should ask them during the interview process if they’d be open to being in a management position at some point down the road so that you can use their expertise in whatever task you’ve assigned them to and train them to do to train others and also to manage subordinates from that point forward so that it takes that management responsibility off of you.

Marco: I would also add that we get really deep into team building and business development in our Masterclass. If she’s interested, she should really look at that.

Bradley: Even more so in the Mastermind. The Masterclass would be like the stepping stone to Mastermind, but yeah, I totally agree.

Latest Browser News for SEO Tasks

We got enough time for about 1 and a half more questions if that makes sense. Monique says, “What is the latest news on which browser to use for vital tasks?” I still use Firefox for everything. I just make sure that Google is not the search engine. I make sure I’m not running any plug ins in Firefox that are leaking stuff over to Google. I just try to keep it clean.

Although what was just mentioned earlier, Brow SEO, that’s supposed to be the best SEO browser tool to use, period. Again, I’ve got it, I just haven’t used it much because most of my VAs do a lot of the real dirty stuff so I’m not really all that worried about it yet. I just use Firefox for that stuff.

Starting up with Crowdsearch.me & Reduce Bounce Rate WordPress Plugin

Chick. “If I want to help some of my client’s sites to bump up in rankings and I want to use Crowdsearch.me, does it make most sense to start by setting up both navigational and referring searches?” Yeah, Chick, that’s a great questions. I actually answered this I think in the Mastermind for somebody else. I’ll answer it for you though, that’s fine.

Yes, the second part of your questions, “Does reduce bounce rate truly help bounce rate …?” Yes it does, Chick. I usually just add the event tracking script, or whatever it’s called, myself. I usually add it manually to the footer of the site. If you want to use a plug in like that, it absolutely helps.

The first part of your question, what I like to do, especially with a new site, or even a site that’s been existing, is I’ll set up navigational searches and set them at a real low frequency rate and then ramp up over time. For example, for the first 30 days I might have its et somewhere between 5 to 15 navigational queries per month. Then month 2, from 30 to 60 days. I’ll run it up to maybe 15 to 20-ish navigational queries.

Then I might switch up the queries to where it’s like business name contact or business name phone or business name website. What I usually do is when I’m setting up navigational queries within Crowdsearch, guys, I’ll set up several of them and then I’ll turn most of them off to where I’m only running one, but that way they’re all set up at the same time. Then all I got to do is when I …  I’ll set a calendar event on Google calendar to remind me, 15 days has been up. Go in and switch it up. I’ll turn off one navigational query and I’ll turn on another so that it’s switching the terms up.

That’s something that maybe Dan can automate at some point, which we’ll be discussing with him because we’re working on some potential projects with him anyways. What I’ll do is I’ll do company name, company name phone, company name location, company name contact, company name plus service. It could be like ‘Joe’s plumbing, plumbing repair’ or something like that. So that you’re adding a keyword in there too but its part of a navigational query. I’ll just switch it up. By month 3, I might have it up to as much as 25 to 30 searches per month. But that’s it, you don’t want to overdo it.

As far as setting up referring searches, referring searches is just driving referral traffic. It really has nothing to do with the keywords. It does to a point. What I like to do is … and we got to wrap up as soon as I’m finished with this. What I like to do with referral traffic is set up for example a tweet that would have the business name plus the unique hashtag in the tweet so that …

The unique hashtag is to make it easy for Crowdsearch to find the tweet. The business name would actually be in the text of the tweet. The link that you’re going to be using as the referrer is going to point to the money site. You could use a keyword for example, or you could use the business name. Either way. But that’s going to add some relevance to that search.

The fist initial search is going to be based around the hashtag. It would be like, again let’s say it’s ‘Joe’s plumbing’, and hashtag, you’d say … Let’s just use #Joe’sPlumbing for example, then you could say ‘Joe’s plumbing emergency, plumbing repair’, #Joe’sPlumbing. You’re getting all the relevancy in there and then the link would be back to your money site. All your relevancy is there in the actual tweet. You’ve got both the brand name in there and the keyword and then you got the link to your money site.

You’d set up Crowdsearch to find that Tweet and then click that through that link over to your money site. Google’s going to see that as referral traffic form Twitter, but it was found originally through a combination of a keyword and brand search. You can switch that up too, which I recommend you do. Don’t get lazy and just use one method all the time, guys. You want to keep that stuff switched up, keep it fresh. All right?

Hernan: Yes.

Bradley: Okay, cool. That’s it. We’re done for today. Masterclass guys, we’ll see you in just a few minutes. Anybody else have anything you want to add?

Marco: Just one last thing, Monique, you had great questions that we didn’t get to. Please, when the event is posted for next week, come back early and post your questions so that we can answer them next week.

Bradley: Usually, by Friday the page is up.

Adam: We’ve gotten better. It should be up by day time tomorrow.

Bradley: Boom.

Adam: Look at that. Should be, it’s a very important …

Bradley: Usually, by Friday is the best if you just go to SemanticMastery.com/HumpDay on Friday. It should redirect you to the newest events page for the following week. We’ll see you guys on Masterclass in a few minutes, those of you that are there. Otherwise, next week. Thanks for everyone being here.

Hernan: … everybody.

Bradley: Bye.