Click on the video above to watch Episode 67 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: Oh. I thought we were just going to hang out today.
Hernan: I think [so 00:00:11].
Bradley You bastard.
Adam: I got to ask.
Bradley: You [bastard 00:00:10]. You’ve got beer, I got coffee.
Adam: Hey, everybody, welcome to Hump Day Hangouts, episode 67. Today is the 17th of February. We’re having everybody hop on, I think Chris and Marco might be … Oh, I spoke too soon, they are hopping on right now, so if they can hear me, we’ll have everybody say hello, but we’ll start with Hernan, because I know he’s here.
Hernan: Hey, everyone. Hey, Adam. It’s really, really good to be here.
Adam: Bradley, what’s up man? Thought I’d get you while you’re coughing.
Bradley: Oh, did you see me?
Adam: Yeah.
Bradley: Hey, guys.
Adam: Hey. Chris, you there?
Chris: Yeah.
Adam: Hey, good deal. Good to have you.
Chris: Sweet.
Adam: Marco, how’s it going?
Marco: Hey, man. What’s happening?
Adam: Not much. I’m having, you guys missed, I’m cracking a cold one here. I’m tired of the cold, so I’m pretending that it’s nice and warm here. I’m pretending that I got your weather, so …
Bradley Wow.
Hernan: Yeah, [boring Marco 00:01:05] weather.
Bradley: Adam’s drinking on the job.
Marco: Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Let me go grab a beer then.
Adam: Okay, here you go.
Adam: Yes, [you 00:01:08] go.
Male: [You know that 00:01:09].
Bradley: If I’d have known it was going to be that kind of party …
Adam: Hey, somebody’s got to stay sober and answer the questions.
Bradley: I guess. You know I can’t have fun; I got work.
Adam: The announcements going, while Marco’s grabbing a beer. Okay, so here we are. You guys can hold us to it, March 28th, IFTTT 2.0 is going to drop so …
Bradley: Boom.
Adam: Boom, there we go. Sorry, I should have just pointed at Hernan but he would … It’s hard to point at people.
Bradley: You got, we got …
Adam: All right, let’s try that one more time, Hernan, I’ll point at you this time, so on the 28th of March, IFTTT 2.0 …
Hernan: Boom.
Adam: All right. Stay tuned, we’ll be giving some more information out about what’s going to be happening with that, but we’re obviously pretty pumped about that. There’s going to be a cool community with it, and we got some more updates coming on that. As always, head over to SerpSpace.com, sign up for your free account. Bunch of good stuff, like we’re always saying, it’s in the works, this stuff doesn’t happen overnight, but we are getting closer to press releases and some other exciting stuff going on over there. I think that’s about it from me. You guys got anything?
Hernan: Good.
Bradley: No, I can’t think of anything off the top of my head, other than …
Marco: Beer’s good.
Bradley: What did you say?
Marco: The beer’s good.
Bradley: Yeah …
Bradley: Nice.
Bradley: … other than, in MasterMIND, just to kind of tease that a little bit, we are working on what we call MasteryPR. It’s an affiliate division, and we’ve taken some volunteers that wanted to participate, from the MasterMIND. We’re building affiliate businesses, kind of, together, and it’s a small group thing. If anybody’s interested in learning about affiliate marketing and building a scalable affiliate business, that’s what we’re doing. We’re doing it from the ground up, so like, we’re laying the foundation for it now.
We’ve got about 20 of our MasterMIND students or members, I should say MasterMIND members, in the group with us, and we’re basically going to be building the affiliate business in a scalable fashion, in other words, with the foundation in place to be able to add virtual assistants and that kind of thing, right off the bat. We’re taking a small group of our MasterMIND members that want to build an affiliate business and doing that with them; so if anybody’s interested in that, I would say, get into the MasterMIND and come check it out. Because it’s going to be like hands-on watching a business being built, a full on business being built from the ground up, so it’s pretty powerful, and I’m really, really excited about it. That’s where a lot of my passion is right now, so …
Hernan: Yeah. In fact, I don’t know … Sorry, Bradley, but I don’t know of any other like MasterMIND of this kind, that’s actually offering, showing you live how to build a business, and not only showing you, but being part of the business, like being part of the earnings, and all those kind of things, so I think it’s pretty powerful.
Bradley: Yeah, it’s really cool, because we’ve got people participating, and it’s not just us giving lessons, it’s a full on, hands-on experience, and that’s what’s really cool about it, because in order to even be a part of the MasteryPR group, you have to be willing to participate and do your share of the work in order to build the scalable business; but it’s really powerful and some of the members that have joined are really, really excited about it, and it’s not an additional cost, it’s just part of the MasterMIND, so if it’s not something you’d be interested in, then don’t. That goes for MasterMIND members, too. We stated very specifically: If this would distract you from building your business the way that you had already planned on building it, then don’t do it.
This is only for people that were looking to get into affiliate marketing and do it, build a real business out of … Not where you’re just Joe Schmo sitting behind your computer as a solo act doing everything yourself, but building a true business with people doing work for you, and you’re just being the manager, so you can work on your business instead of in it.
Chris: Yes, with the help of good working procedures built by us, so we fully implement what we learned from [wreck 00:05:07] the system and everything, so priceless actually, for that amount that you’re going to pay.
Bradley: Yeah. It’s really exciting. It’s probably one of the most exciting projects I’ve worked on, in recent … In a long time actually, so I’m pretty excited about it. That said, let’s go ahead, and get into questions. I think we got quite a few, so I’m going to jump into that. Anything else, guys?
Hernan: I think we’re good.
Male: Sounds good.
Feedback on WordPress Plugin SEM Easy Double Agent for Overlaying Sites
Bradley: We’re good? All right, so Mark O’Connell, he’s a weekly attendee. He’s always got questions, which is good. Glad to have you, Mark. He says, “Hi guys, would like your take on SEMeasy plugin DoubleAgent, would you stay away from it? Love the idea of ranking multiple pages in easy niches and renting them out by overlaying someone else’s site. Looks like a good way to generate some quick revenue. Do you think Google will be able to work that one out and what precautions would you take if you were to do it? Thanks.”
Okay, Marc. Yeah, that’s a good question. I use … I haven’t used that particular plugin, because I use another plugin that does something very similar, it’s pretty much the same thing. The only problem I have with it is that I don’t ever recommend overlaying a money site URL on top of one of those rank and rent type pages, and the only reason why, is because you can get that money site in trouble. I’ve had it happen with some of my ATM sites, or, for those of you that aren’t familiar with what I’m talking about, if they’re similar to Serp Shaker, if you guys know what Serp Shaker is, I just use the ATM or lead gadget, which is kind of an industrial strength Serp Shaker, and I’ve had that money site de-indexed because of, thank God it wasn’t a client site, it was just an affiliate site that I was using, that I had built.
I’ve had it de-indexed because of that, and it’s called “cloaking,” in Google’s eyes, is what they call it, and it’s against the Terms of Service, so I never recommend overlaying a client’s money site on a rank and rent. What I do recommend you do is, if you find a client that is willing to rank it or to rent the page, or pages, then you build a landing page; because that’s all you need anyways, is a landing page that has, it’s set up for conversion, strong call to action. The conversion can be to pick up the phone and make a phone call, or the call to action could be to pick up the phone and make a phone call, or to submit a contact request form, whatever the, or both, whatever it may be, but set up a landing page that you can put on your own domain or subdomain of the client’s domain, but I would recommend that you keep control anyways. Just put it on your own domain and use that as the overlay, right?
Something like, there would be a throwaway domain that you could, something that you don’t care about if it ends up getting de-indexed, it’s not a big deal; but I don’t recommend ever using the client site, because of that reason. Hernan, have you ever had any bad experiences with it, or heard of other people with bad experiences?
Hernan: Yeah, well, it’s kind of a fact that you’re using a cloaking technique, so I wouldn’t advise doing anything that matters to you, or using that with anything that matters to you. Now, with that being said, I know that SEMeasy plugin, the DoubleAgent plugin, it’s a good one. I’ve been using it for foreign niches, where you can get away with murder, pretty much, and the site, both the rank site, which is a Serp Shaker site, and the … It’s an affiliate offer, so, and the affiliate offer site, they are both on good standing, because again, it’s on a foreign niche; but the point is that I think that DoubleAgent will somehow cloak what it’s showing the bots, meaning that it wouldn’t show what’s being iFramed to the bots, to Google bots, but it will show being iFramed to the visitor. However, that’s all good and it’s kind of more granular than any other plugin that I have tested, and it’s pretty good because you can overlay per page as well, per categories etc.
Bradley: Wow. Will it pass manual review?
Hernan: Well, yeah. That’s the thing. That’s what I was about to say, that it won’t escape a manual review.
Bradley: Right.
Hernan: Because it will serve to whoever is manually reviewing your website, it will serve the cloaked version of the website. Again, it’s all good, it will work for a while if you’re doing some affiliate stuff that you don’t care about, that’s fine; but if you deem the website worthy, both the website being overlaid, and the one you’re using the plugin in, be careful.
Adam: Yeah, There’s some other stuff you can use, though, right, Hernan? If you, I’m just thinking, if you wanted to do something, I know the ZeroBounce power plugin does something like this, right? You can … This doesn’t guarantee you safety by any means, but you can choose who you want to display, or, basically in the ZeroBounce plugin, who you want to bounce based on the referral, so because someone who’s like doing a manual review of your site, it’s highly unlikely that they’re going to search for it, right? They’re going to type it directly, they’re going to be a direct visitor.
Male: Right.
Adam: I know what, ZeroBounce does that, and I think there’s some overlay plugins that do that as well. I’m not sure, I haven’t used the SEMeasy one, but I think Super Cloaker might do it, and there might be a couple others, so that’s … Anyways, that’s something to think about.
Bradley: … but just to be on the safe side, though. I mean, if you’ve got a landing page builder, whether you’re using lead pages or click funnels, or you’re using a plugin like OptimizePress or WP Profit Builder, or any sort of landing page builder, you could create a simple landing page for …
Adam: Oh, yeah.
Bradley: For that site, you could create an HTML landing page and upload it to an Amazon S3 Bucket, and use that as an actual lander that has the call to action, the customer, whoever you’re renting the page to, you could have their call to action on it, a web contact form, their logo, their branding, the list of their services, blah blah blah, but it’s on a throwaway domain or a [niche 00:11:01] … Like, if you were using Amazon, it would be an S3 Bucket URL.
Male: Yeah.
Bradley: All I’m saying is, I would just purchase a separate domain for that, that you would use, and just set up pages or subdomains for each new site that you are going to be using, or actually probably just pages, because it would be too much work setting up a bunch of different sites, unless you were just using an HTML page, which would … That way you protect your client from any potential damage.
Adam: Yeah. I think that’s the way to do it, and you could even copy their page, like you’re saying, just do an HTML upload on a page or a subdomain, or something.
Bradley: Right, just take their home page and copy the HTML, and upload it as an HTML file, and there you go. Now it looks, and it’s an exact copy of the customer’s site.
Hernan: Yeah. The added benefit, also, to that is that you can, actually you could put tracking links or tracking numbers on the HTML that you are uploading, so instead of having the client’s website, you could have a tracking number, the way we’re doing it with lead gen sites, or YouTube, whatever you’re doing, so being … It’s still your property, you’re just overlaying the client’s website, and at some point, if he says that, “I’m not getting any calls,” or whatever, you can prove him, like, you have the call records, and the call logs, and whatever.
Bradley: Yeah.
Adam: Yeah, it gets real fun when you start thinking about tracking and you’re cloaking.
Hernan: Yeah.
Bradley: Yeah.
Adam: Doing overlays, then … I’ll wait until a question comes up about that. I’ve had to do some workarounds.
Male: Don’t confuse people, Adam.
Bradley: That’s right, Adam’s drinking. I forgot.
Adam: I’m just going to start pontificating on tracking, so …
How Does Press Releases Help in Diluting Anchor Texts?
Bradley: Kevin says, “Hey guys, could you briefly explain to me how press releases help dilute anchor text, when 90% of the links you get are nofollow? Does the anchor text count towards your backlink anchor profile but not for ranking a particular keyword since press links are nofollow and don’t pass keyword relevance? Thanks again.”
Kevin, that’s a good question, but honestly I don’t look at follow and nofollow anymore, as far as keyword or anchor text ratios, because there’s so many keywords are … Excuse me, so many links are nofollow now, that I think that they’re being counted. I don’t have any hard proof on that, but I just kind of look at the overall link profile, follow and nofollow, to look at anchor text ratios, and I try to always keep all my anchor text ratios in balance, or in check with what my ratios, my threshold or criteria are, regardless of whether they’re follow or nofollow so …
When I talk about using press releases, it can help to dilute anchor text with nofollow links, yes. If you’re one of those that highly rely on just follows for a keyword, in keyword relevancy, or any anchor text, counting against anchor text ratios, then you wouldn’t get that from the nofollows; but the way that I do things, the way that I look at all my sites now, and analyze all the sites that I manage now, is just looking at the overall anchor text profile, regardless of follow or nofollow tags.
I don’t care anymore. I just want to make sure that I have a diverse, or not, non-over-optimized anchor text profile, and part of what press releases also do is give you IP diversity, and domain diversity, for your link profile, which is natural as well, so … You want to add to that, Hernan, or anybody?
Hernan: Yeah, I just use [it then 00:14:31] anyway, not only because of the links, but because of the traffic and the exposure, so I just use it anyways, and it’s a great way to kick-start a website from scratch if you want to, or if you want to equalize a little bit the anchor text. It doesn’t really matter that they are nofollow, because all of the big websites are nofollow, like IFTTT rings will have nofollow links, and I think it’s like a healthy, it’s a healthy balance between dofollow and nofollow.
You can still create your own dofollow links with some other sources of link building, but I think it’s a healthy balance, and it still helps. It doesn’t really matter if they are dofollow or nofollow, [in my opinion 00:15:19].
Bradley: Yeah, that’s what I … I mean, guys … Gone are the days … It used to be much more of an issue, but it’s not so much anymore, and the reason why is because nofollow links are so common now that it’s really part of a natural anchor text profile anyways, like … It’s harder to get dofollow links now than it ever has been, is my point, and so I stopped worrying about all of that, because it takes too much additional effort to try to focus all your attention on just dofollow stuff all the time, so I just look at it overall now to keep it simple, as an overall link profile, regardless of follow or nofollow text. Doesn’t matter to me. Okay?
Now, when I, once I have a link profile, I can identify which are my follow … Which backlinks are pointing at me, that have dofollows. Then, I can do some pretty strategic things with those, but I don’t worry about it in any link building campaign. For example, there was a case study that … Well, not really a case study, but a client of mine, that provides limo services, decided that they wanted to build out a second site specifically targeting wine tours. They had that page on their site, but it wasn’t performing all that well.
I told them that we could build another, subdomain sites, targeting wine tours, and we’re using Bluechip Backlinks, which we’ve talked about few weeks in a row now. I really like that tool for finding expired domains that are 100% topically relevant. I found out a couple domains that were on Wikipedia pages that had … Wikipedia was linking to these domains that had had expired or dropped, and they were on wine pages or winery pages, so they were basically 100% topically relevant to what I was looking for, and some, like one of the pages, I bought 2 of them. One of them was on a PR6 page, and I know, before everybody says, “Well, PR doesn’t matter anymore,” yeah, but it’s still the metric that you can still use from whenever the last time was updated, but it was a PR6 Wikipedia page, and it was a nofollow link, because all outbound links on Wikipedia are nofollow; but I purchased that domain, and I did a redirect to, a 301 redirect, to the client’s money site, which was a brand new site, and I did that with …
There was 2 domains that I purchased. One I set up as like a PBN. It was just an HTML site that had a link on that homepage of that site to my client’s subdomain, and then I had the other one which I did a 301 redirect. I did 2 nofollow Wikipedia links, and it went from page 4 to page 1 in a matter of like 3 days, 4 days. It went to, like position number 27, I guess it was page 3, position 27, to position 9; and it was only those 2 links. It’s the only thing that I had built to it other than a couple IFTTT posts, posts that went out across the syndication network, and it jumped 2 whole pages from just those 2 Wikipedia links which are nofollow; so before people say that nofollow links don’t matter, I disagree.
I think now the algorithm is such that it does … Nofollow links are counted a hell of a lot … Given a lot more weight than they used to be, so I wouldn’t worry about it so much, Kevin. I would just look at just trying to dilute your … Look at your overall keyword anchor text ratio, and just try to just even it out, regardless of either follow or nofollow. Okay? That’s how I would recommend doing it, because otherwise you just spend too much time trying to … Segment those different type of link types out; and I think that’s just too much work.
Putting Schema Structured Data on Video Descriptions
Paul says, “Hi, guys. Can you put schema structured data in video descriptions to help them rank? Will Google see this the same as on a website?” No, they’ll get stripped out. Unless you’re talking about … I’ve never tested putting them in the meta description, like I’m talking about the video file itself. I haven’t tried that.
Hernan: No, me neither. On YouTube …
Bradley: It’ll strip it out.
Hernan: … you don’t have a [niche 00:19:23]. Yeah, it’ll strip it out because you didn’t have an [HT 00:19:25], an actual HTML editor, but maybe, Paul, you could try and meta of the video itself, when you are [done 00:19:35] or you are saving it or making it on … Yeah, saving it or editing it in your PC.
Bradley: Yeah, so the metadata of the actual video file itself. That would be worth attempting. I haven’t tried that yet; but yeah, as far as putting it in the video description area in YouTube, it will get stripped out, or even if it doesn’t get stripped out, it’s not going to be read as HTML.
The Impact of Authority Backlinks in Video Descriptions
“Hey guys,” Ed says, “Authority backlinks in video descriptions or not, when there is no branded website associated with or available for this particular video” … Ed, I don’t care about putting authority back … Outbound links within a YouTube video. I’ve never seen that make any difference whatsoever. I know some people tell you to do it. Just play with it. I don’t ever do it. I just use the YouTube videos to … The description area to link to whatever I’m trying to drive traffic to, and potentially IFTTT properties as well, the branded properties for that whatever campaign I’m working on.
I’ve tested it, because people have said that they’ve had good results with linking out to other content sources. If it makes sense to link out to something, sure, but you know how the traditional SEO garbage that everybody spews about. How, when you create a PBN post, you’re supposed to link to Wikipedia, or dot gov sites and all that crap, which I think is a bunch … It’s a load of crap; so as far as putting an outbound authority link into a YouTube video to help it rank, I would say test it on your own if you want, but personally I’ve seen absolutely no difference in that by doing that. If you have supporting documents that help to reinforce the content of the video description, then, by all means, link to them, because that’s adding relevancy; but as far as doing it just purely for SEO purposes, I don’t see any benefit in it, and if anybody else does, then by all means try it and see for yourself.
What is the Best Way to Rank a Locally-Targetted and Authoritative YouTube Channel using IFTTT Networks?
“When attacking a new niche for local and we want to keep using our same authority aged YouTube channel, should we just build a new secondary tier 1 and tier … Second tier persona networks and new playlists themed to the new niche, or just build new relevant niche-specific inbound links to all the existing property URLs in our existing networks to aid in SEO ranking in the new niche? Thanks very much.”
Okay, if you’re going to be using the same channel to target different niches, then you’d have to silo it out via playlists, or else you’ll dilute the overall power of your channel, because it wouldn’t be themed well, so it wouldn’t make sense. The relevancy would actually go down. Now, if you want to, you could create like an authority channel by using playlists. Just always make sure that you keep everything separated via playlists so that … You can do that, because it’s just like siloing a website, guys. YouTube Silo Academy teaches how to do that, so you can just silo out your YouTube channel using playlists. In that case, Ed, you could set up separate syndication networks. The only problem is that your … I’m not sure how you would segregate …
It used to be where you could use the playlist RSS feeds to publish content to specific networks, but it doesn’t work that way since YouTube screwed up the RSS format. Because the RSS feeds no longer send a video embed out. They just post a link to the video; so you can’t use that to create your … Syndicate your embeds or your videos out to an embed network via playlist like you used to be able to do. However, I’m wondering, and I’m working on IFTTT version 2 right now, guys, the training videos for that, but let’s just check something real quick …
I just want to try something real quick and see if we can create … I don’t think so, but new watch later, new public video. Yeah, okay, so there’s no filter here. There’s no way to create a filter, that I know of, to only allow specific videos with containing a keyword or going into one particular playlist to go out across a network. Does that makes sense? Even if you silo out your YouTube channel, every time you upload a video to the channel, or live stream a video to your channel, it’s going to go out across whatever networks are attached to it. You know what I’m saying?
There’s no way to separate and say, “Okay, I’m going to have this silo pushed to this one network, and this silo pushed to another network.” It doesn’t work like that. The only thing that I could suggest doing, if you wanted to do that, would be to set up a WordPress site which would be your associated website with your channel, and not connect your IFTTT networks to your channel directly, but connect them to your WordPress site that you’re using as a content distribution point, and then you could segment it that way, because you’d be using the RSS feed from the WordPress to trigger the syndication network, so you could set up category-specific RSS feeds, and going to different networks that way; but then again, you’d be using …
As far as for video embed networks and broadcasting, I haven’t had any problems with doing that. You could stack multiple IFTTT networks to a WordPress site if you’re using it only for video syndication. I wouldn’t recommend doing it for like money sites, guys, I’ve talked about that many times. You just want to stick with a branded tier 1 ring for a blog, if you’re using it for blog syndication; but if all you’re using the WordPress site is for video syndication as a broadcasting site or broadcasting network, then I would say, yeah, you could do that.
You could put, like for example, if you say you had 4 different top-level categories, you could create 4 different IFTTT networks, each one themed around its own particular category, and then you could use the category RSS feeds to feed each one of those networks, so therefore whenever you posted a video to your YouTube channel, it wouldn’t syndicate from YouTube. You would then copy that embed code, go create a post on your WordPress site, put it in the proper category, and when you publish it, it would trigger the syndication to that specific category network. Does that make sense? Was that clear as mud, guys, or what?
Adam: Yeah. Yeah, I think that makes sense.
Male: Yeah, it was clear as mud.
Bradley: All right, so hopefully that makes sense, Ed; because otherwise, if you do it across just your YouTube channel alone, then it’s just everything that you upload is going to get syndicated out; so if you’ve got 4 tier 1 networks, all 4 networks, there’s no sense in theming the networks at that point, because every time you upload a video in any one of those categories, it would go to all 4 networks, so there’d be no sense in theming the networks. Okay? “When attacking a new niche for local, I want to keep using” … I guess I already answered that one, so we’ll move on.
Male: Yeah.
Is Diluting Anchor Text Effective when Building Web 2.0 or High DA Profile Links with Naked URL Anchors?
Bradley: Let’s see … “If I may, I have another quick question. To dilute anchor text cheaply, would be building Web 2.0 / High DA profile links with naked URL anchors be effective?” Yes, Kevin, absolutely. Naked URLs, as long as it’s not an exact match domain, that will absolutely dilute the anchor text profile; so will brand anchors. In fact, about 80 to 90% of your overall anchor text profile should be branded naked URLs, really. That’s, I’d say, as much as 90%. That’s what I’m seeing a lot of; so if you want to build links from additional Web 2.0 properties, anything that you have a bit more control over, as far as the link types, then yeah, I would just build them with brand names and naked URLs do a lot of that. That’s what most of them should be now anyways.
Hernan: Yeah, in fact, Web 2.0s and high DA profiles, that’s exactly what we are using with IFTTT, and usually the attribution link will have a brand on itself. That’s how we teach it, anyways; but do not overlook the power of Web 2.0s, aged Web 2.0, guys. They can be really, really deadly. If you have a couple of Web 2.0s that you have opened in the past, and they’re still alive, you can retheme them, because I think the age is kind of a keyword there, same as the age on an IFTTT network, and the theme, of course, but you can reuse them to push those pages, those internal pages that are on bottom page 1 or top page 2; they can have a really, really, really good boost, and then you can go nasty with some sort of RYS or tweeting them and spamming them or whatever you want to do, but for the time being, they still work really, really well.
Male: Yeah, you can just go nasty.
Hernan: Yeah. Go nasty. [Let’s do 00:28:29] links.
When to use the YouTube Manager and Google Plus Page Login?
Bradley: Braulio says … It’s been a while since we’ve seen Braulio. What’s up, man? “YouTube manager versus Google+ page login, when do you use which? YouTube only. I have a ton of YouTube accounts and made myself a manager of each, instead of logging in directly.” That’s smart. It’s efficient. “Haven’t had any issues or complaints from big G, but would like your take on it. Is this how you manage your channels on a daily basis? Don’t see the point of using a G+ page login in this scenario, so what would be the use of it?” Yeah, Braulio, and into follow-up questions, “I’m asking because you mentioned Google+ Page logins in your IFTTT training, but you don’t specify exactly what for, or did I miss that?”
No, okay, the reason why we create the page logins is for, there’s a couple reasons. Number 1, when we first developed the full training, it used to be you could not connect a YouTube channel, a business channel, to IFTTT; you could only connect to profile channel, so the channel associated with your profile. It wasn’t a separate page. Now you can. Now when you authorize YouTube inside of IFTTT, it gives you the option of selecting which channel that you have in your account, right; but it didn’t used to be that way, and so that’s where I created, or learned how to do the page login, was because I would log out of Google, then log in as the page only, and then connect and authorize the channel via IFTTT, and it would automatically accept that as the channel instead of having to be the profile channel, if that makes sense.
However, that said, because that was when I was, back when I was still doing everything mostly myself, but as I started to take on VAs, virtual assistants, we found that any time you tried to log into a Google profile from another IP, it would trigger reverification; but with the page login, it does not. If you try to log in using the page login, it doesn’t trigger reverification; so the page login we create whenever we create the account, so that we have the ability to send it to our VAs to log in, or also third-party apps or anything else like that that might need to connect to the Google account.
Google will block a lot of the times as a security measure, but if you log in as the page only, and then try to authorize, it will accept it; so it’s just kind of a … It’s for convenience’s sake now that we use them. Just get in the habit of doing it. As far as how I manage all … Yeah, all the channels that I do a lot of work in, I manage through my own main Google account, my main profile, because I’ve just made myself a manager, and that way I can just log in. I can just switch just by scrolling up to the top here and clicking on this icon, I can switch through all my channels accounts. See how easy that is; but as far as the page login specifically, like I said, we use that for VAs and also because originally you weren’t able to connect to IFTTT that way; so hopefully that makes sense.
What is Syndwire and How to Use it With IFTTT?
Okay, Jenny says, “Can you explain the basics of Syndwire to me and how I could use it with IFTTT? Thanks for all your hard work, guys!” Okay, sure. Syndwire is a tool by Joe Troyer. It does a lot of syndication to a lot of different properties, as well, bookmarks, blog, blog sites, a lot of the sites that we use in IFTTT, there are some additional ones in there as well. Syndwire is a bit more manual, though. That’s part of the reason I don’t use it near as much. I have it. I’ve got like 1400 accounts in there, but I use it probably maybe half a dozen times a year, and it’s only because the IFTTT networks are all automated.
With Syndwire, you have to log in to the dashboard and then create a post and then grab content, spin the content [off 00:32:15], is what they tell you to do, so that you … It creates unique variations of the content on all the different properties that it posts to. Then you have to select the profiles that you wanted to post to; and a lot of people love it, and they do well with it, and that’s fine. I don’t recommend using it as a backlinking tool for linking to a money site or a website. You can use it as a second tier link tool to link to first-year links. That’s fine, and you can also use it for video embeds or video syndication. That’s fine; but I wouldn’t recommend linking directly to the money site because of the spun content. However, again, it can be really powerful. It can be … I’m sorry, I got distracted because Hernan’s chirping me.
Hernan: Sorry.
Bradley: Don’t do that, Hernan.
Hernan: [Sorry, man 00:33:01].
Bradley: It can be very powerful for supplemental stuff. Like I said, it’s tier 2 links. If you want to like power up your IFTTT networks and you have Syndwire, that’s a good option, because you can build links to your tier 1, where you’re branded network properties. It’s also good for, like I said, if you want to do a boost to like a video that … If you have your IFTTT networks already surrounding your channel, for example, let’s say it’s for video SEO, and you upload a video or a live stream of video, and it goes out across your IFTTT networks, and it does well; but then over time it starts to slip. Well, then you can always do like another boosting campaign or whatever with Syndwire. That’s another good option for it.
There’s also, what’s pretty cool is something else that you can do is actually, with Syndwire, for those of you that do have the tool and you’re using it, is, you can actually create IFTTT networks around the accounts for your Syndwire account; so, for example, if you select the blog option to post to the blog accounts, there’s Tumblrs and Bloggers and WordPresses, and I think LiveJournal’s another one of them. You could actually have separate IFTTT networks around each Blogger account and each Tumblr account and each … It would basically automate second tier links, if that makes sense.
If you’re using Syndwire, and you’re using it as a first tier, and you’re creating the post and sending a post out, and you sent to, and you’re posting to blogs, you can have second tier networks set up on those blogs to where those blog accounts are triggering networks and create a whole second … Like a whole cascading effect; so, I mean, you can get really cool, do some pretty cool stuff with that; but there’s other tools that can do that too. There’s FCS Networker, there’s another one that’s called TurboWeb 2.0. There’s a lot of tools that do that kind of stuff now, so … Can you guys, want to add to that at all? Hernan, do you use Syndwire?
Hernan: No, not much. I used to use OnlyWire for a bit, but yeah, that’s pretty much it; and Jenny, this is a man’s-only meeting. You’re not allowed in here. I’m just kidding. I was just kidding.
Bradley: You’re going to get hate mail now. Everybody, it’s hvazquez@semanticmastery.com. All the hate mail, send to him. The last thing I want to mention about that, however, is, let’s see … “Syndwire and how I could use it with IFTTT?” Yeah, I mean, the only reason why I like to use … I mean, not the only reason, there’s a lot of reasons, but the reason I just don’t use Syndwire as much as I probably could is because the IFTTT networks are just automated. That’s all I got to do is, once they’re set up, which we have a team of VAs that set them up for us now anyways, I really don’t have to do anything except send the order details over to get done, and then I just upload content to my channel or my website, whatever, and it just automatically goes out across the networks; and so with Syndwire, again, I’m not talking bad about it. A lot of people love the tool, that’s great, and it can be very powerful, but it requires that manual aspect of creating the posts and actually publishing the posts, so …
Hernan: Yeah. You can still use it for Web 2.0s or something that you don’t really care about. Like, as I mentioned earlier, Web 2.0s are still working a lot for backlinking purposes and whatnot, so you can use it like that to syndicate whatever Web 2.0 content you’re pumping out; but yeah, IFTTT still works the best for branded and the stuff that you really care about, because we have yet still, we have yet to see a website, or, yeah, a website, mostly, penalized, knock on wood, with the IFTTT syndication series.
Bradley: Especially if you just stick with the branded as your tier 1 …
Hernan: Right.
Possible Reasons on Why Some State Targetted Keywords Drop Its Rankings
Bradley: … and then do all your SEO work to your tier 1 properties instead of direct to your money site, so … Ryan says, “Hey, Bradley, I’ve got a local site that’s been ranking number 2 in Maps for the search service+city+state, and service+city. However, recently it dropped out of the 3 pack, but only when the state is included in the search; so for service+city, I’m still at number 2, but not with the state included. Could this happen if the site is over-optimized? I haven’t made any on page changes in several months, and the drop happened a couple of weeks ago. Any ideas? Thanks!”
That could be a number of things, Ryan. It could be the fact that potentially it could be over-optimized and it just really hadn’t triggered anything. Maybe Google tightened the algorithm a little bit and refreshed it, and it got caught up there. It could just be an anomaly, which happens with local. I’ve got a few local lead gen properties that do a lot of dancing, and they’re very volatile, and I’m not sure exactly why. It’s only a few of them, because others I have that are just … They’re static. They just remain where they are all the time, but there’s others that … In the same industry too, the same niche, just different cities or different towns, that’ll bounce, like they’ll bounce in and out of the 3 pack fairly regularly, or they’ll be at the top of the 3 pack, a position or a number 1 position, and then drop to number 3, and then they’ll drop out, and then they’ll come back at number 2, and so there’s the whole like local algorithm randomness, okay, or volatility, ever since Pigeon. That could be part of it as well.
Also, I would check your backlink profile and look at your citations as well, and see if there’s … Find out, maybe you’d have to do some detective work, but take a look at that. Take a look at your backlink profile and see maybe if there’s more backlinks coming in than there should be with the state included, because that’s what you call an exact match anchor, which I highly don’t recommend. I don’t recommend that you have many of those at all; so, again, it would take some additional digging to look at the specific details. If you’re in the MasterCLASS, we do site audits and stuff, and we can look at that for you if you don’t mind sharing that with the other MasterCLASS members, and we could actually do some digging for you and try to determine what the problem is; but it could be something just as simple as it’s just caught up in Google randomness, the whole random factor.
Hernan: If I can just add to that …
Bradley: Sure.
Hernan: If he’s done nothing for several months, he says, he needs to wait at least 21 days before doing anything …
Bradley: Yeah. [crosstalk 00:39:26]
Hernan: … just to make sure he clears the Google dance.
Bradley: That’s true. Yeah. He said it’s been a couple of weeks, so, but yeah. I mean, that’s what I would do. You could also double check your association between the money site, the website, and the actual page, your structured data, that kind of thing. See if you’re using structured data, you should be using the sameAs attribute and linking to all of your IFTTT-branded network properties. That’s going to help, especially the Semantic Hubs and the social data hub part sites. Okay? That’s going to make a big difference as well.
Go to crunchbase.com, if it’s a little cool site that’s been rank … If it’s a bona fide business, a real business, you can go to CrunchBase and create a profile for the business there; because that’s part of the Semantic Web that Google sources that for semantic data, and that’s very, very powerful. Then you could list that URL to the profile, the company profile, in the sameAs schema. That’s going to help as well; so anything that you can do like that, to kind of reinforce who it is, and that should help; but again, if you’re in the MasterCLASS, if you want, we can take a look at that for you. Just got to post it on the events page during the webinar.
Suggestions on How to Speed Up the Increase of Trust Flow Using Twitter SEO Academy
Marco: Yeah, have the auto-tweet recipes. He should also be creating his own tweets that will create the top of a trust flow that [he needs 00:41:08]. The trust flow. I mean, they’ll go up just because he’s tweeting on a regular basis, and everything is relevant. I mean, just recently, it’s funny, because even Google’s using the same auto-tweet recipes, I got a thank you from AdWords, or a “congratulations” from AdWords, because I tweeted that someone else had gotten certified for mobile AdWords.
Bradley: Yeah, that was funny. All right, so do some of your own tweets as well, and then, yeah, obviously, if you find a high trust flow, backlinks that you can point, that’s going to certainly juice it a lot faster too. That’s kind of like artificially inflating it; but you can do that with SAFE links, or if you buy your own domains that have topical trust flow, especially, then you can really push it up that way, and those are, in my opinion, it’s cheaper to buy your own domains now than it is to purchase safe links, if you have the tool to find them. Right? Bluechip Backlinks; that’s a great tool for that.
“Second question, if I can. I now have about 200 in my Twitter army. How do you recommend using the additional non-branded accounts most effectively?” I’m assuming you mean that you built your own profiles on Twitter and you’ve got about 200 in there. I don’t know so much, because the only … The Twitter accounts that I have are just in the syndication networks, and we set up, a lot of the times, the auto-retweet recipes, just to give them … Because they’ll start gaining followers and everything that way. As far as like using actual 200 Twitter accounts, I don’t know, because how do you post to all those? It’s not something that … I’ve never built like a Twitter army, because they’re all just part of separate syndication networks, so anybody got any experience with that?
Hernan: Well, you will need to … Tim, I’m assuming you’re using some sort of tool like Tweet Attacks or something like that. We usually do Twitter when it comes to syndication, not like themselves like … I mean, RYS is something like we could grab the Twitter feed and post to several IFTTT rings, but we’re not using them on their own. Am I right, Marco?
Marco: No, not in the note themselves, we’re not using them, and the Twitter army that we create is self-generated, meaning that people follow you naturally and they start retweeting whatever it is that you’re tweeting.
Bradley: Okay. Yeah, sorry I couldn’t be more help, Tim, specifically. It’s just, I don’t have a Twitter army. I’ve never actually used one, like built out a big, bunch of, a whole bunch of Twitter accounts, other than for just a separate Twitter account for each IFTTT network, and I didn’t used to ever try to really gain followers and stuff with them until Twitter SEO Academy, and I got schooled by Dr. Gary and Marco on Twitter Sandbox and all that kind of stuff, and now when I set up syndication networks, I’ll just set up some of the retweet recipes using IFTTT, and that’ll basically get it out of the sandbox on autopilot automatically, and make … Start gaining followers that are relevant or related to the topic, which is pretty cool; so unfortunately, I’ve never done just like straight up Twitter SEO, like using Twitter accounts for that kind of stuff, the army.
Brian asks about AMP Pages’ plugin, what is it used for? Don’t we have a landing page for that that gives several information, or gives information about it, Marco?
Marco: Yeah, we do have a landing page for that.
Male: Do we have a URL for that?
Marco: Let me see if I can find it.
What are the AMP Pages and the plugin what is it used for? Also what is a Twitter Sandbox?
Bradley: If you can find it and tag Brian and post on the [amend 00:44:47] page with the URL that’ll take you over to it. Brian, also, just when you have questions about something like AMP Pages, that’s a Google thing, and if you go to just google.com, when in doubt, go to Google and say, “What is AMP Pages?” “What is AMP Pages,” or whatever, something like that, and it, right here, at the very, very top, it’s that easy. Just go to Google, “What is AMP Pages,” and you can click on the actual Google blog post about what AMP is, and why we need it now, and the AMP plugin is something that we are developing out. I think it’s still in beta now, but it just basically creates AMP-compliant, or Accelerated Mobile Pages compliant, pages, and posts out of your WordPress site. It’s very, very simple. That’s all it does. I mean, we’re adding other functionality to it, but for right now, it just kind of helps, because that’s part of the requirement by Google.
What is Twitter Sandbox?
“What is a Twitter Sandbox?” Twitter Sandbox is when you have a new account and you try to do outbound tweets with an outbound link, your tweets will not show up in Twitter to other people’s profiles. They will to you, you’ll see them, but nobody else will, because it’s in a sandbox, because they want to see … Twitter wants to see your account be made relevant and real, instead of just being a spam account specifically to build links, so it will put you in a sandbox until you can prove to Twitter that you’re an actual, real, bonafide person behind the account, and so there’s a number of ways to get out of the Twitter Sandbox, which is all covered in Twitter SEO Academy, but you can automate that too.
I can get out of the Twitter Sandbox, usually … It depends on the niche, because some are more strict than others, but you can usually get out of the Twitter Sandbox in about 2 or 3 days just using auto-recipes that we developed for the Twitter SEO Academy; but the links, any kind of outbound links that you put in the tweets, if they’re not showing up in anywhere else, if you can’t find them unless you’re logged in, then that means you’re in the sandbox, and that means you’re really not getting any benefit from those tweets.
Adding Sitemaps for WWW and Non-WWW Version of the Website
Dan says, “Is it necessary to add sitemaps to the www., as well as the NON www. of your website in Search Console, or will the www. version suffice?” Dan, I only add my site as whatever version I have it canonicalized in for my site, so like if I’m using the www. version for the root domain, then I set up the … I add the site in Google Search Console as that only, and you can set that in the settings. You have to confirm both versions of the site, verify both versions of the site, but you can basically set to where Google will always recognize it as just the one version, the www. version in this case; and no, you don’t need to create 2 separate sitemaps. Right? Because that’s all, again, if you’ve got everything canonicalized, it’s only going to credit 1 of them anyways, whatever you’re pointing the canonical to, right? Hopefully that makes sense. You don’t need to do that. That’s just unnecessary work.
GSA Links and Branded URL Links for Money Site
Cesar says, “Is it bad to use GSA to build branded and URL links to a money site?”
Hernan: You’re going to go to hell, Cesar.
Bradley: You’re going to burn in hell, buddy.
Hernan: Don’t do that.
Bradley: Yeah, don’t do that. If you’re really, really skilled with the tool, and some people are, they’ll do that kind of stuff, but I just recommend you just flat out don’t do it, because even if you can do that now, and it works, at some point it’s going to bite you in the ass, so I don’t recommend you do that.
Hernan: Yeah, you need to have pristine lists, and the only way to have that is to sift through millions and millions of links and … Yeah, you need to be like really, really skilled with the tool not to fuck it up.
Bradley: Yeah. Yeah, no, I just read the rest of your question, Cesar, and I don’t … Just don’t do it, dude. Like, build your branded IFTTT network, link those to your money site, and then if you want, you can GSA those, if you want, with branded URLs and that kind of thing. I wouldn’t link directly to the money site, okay? Because you’re just asking for trouble.
Local Listing Category for Chiropractors
Greg says, “If I am building lead gen sites, for example, chiropractors or dentists in my city, what category should I choose for local citation and national citations directories like Yelp, YP, etc.? I do not want to get in trouble with Google, as I am not a chiropractor or dentist. However, no other category would seem to make sense, as I will have chiropractors or dentists on the site later, and possibly sell the site to them.”
Not sure what your question is here, though. What category should you choose for local citations? Well, if it’s a lead gen site for chiropractors, you would choose whatever chiropractor category is. There might be one specifically for chiropractors. If it’s one for dentists, I would choose the dentist category. I’m not really sure what the question is here, Greg, because it seems like you answered it with your question. You always want to put whatever site in the proper category. You don’t want to create custom categories. You used to be able to do that in Google. I don’t even think you can do it anymore, where you create custom categories. You just want to select … When you start to type in the category section, it’s going to auto-suggest in Google. If you’re talking about like Yelp and all those others, whatever the proper, the most fitting category is for the citation you’re building. Right? That’s all you want to do, is just select the most fitting category.
Number 2, “If I should only try to rank organic search, isn’t it still best to submit to citation listings and directories? Just not sure if I should even build the Google My Business page to avoid the category issue.” I don’t, I just don’t understand what the category issue is. Personally, for lead gen, I try to always rank in Maps. I don’t even try for organic anymore, guys. Just so you know. If I can’t spam a physical address into the area that I’m trying to rank, then I will go after organic, but if I can spam a physical address into whatever area I’m trying to build the lead gen site in, then I always go after local to get in the 3 pack. Because that’s, just because of the industries I work in, about 80% of all trafficking calls comes from the local 3 pack, and so I don’t even care about organic anymore unless, like I said, I can’t get a physical location, and then I’ll go after organic. Okay? All right, we’ve only got a couple more minutes. Let’s see …
Hernan: Sorry, Bradley, but something that I forgot to mention earlier is that we will be picking … If you send us a killer testimonial of IFTTT version 1.0, if you are using it, if you love the academy, and if you’re sending us a killer testimonial with some praise and some results, we will be picking 10 people to get into IFTTT V2; so if you’re interested in doing that, send us an email, drop us a private message. You can also join the IFTTT free … Sorry, if you are into the IFTTT Facebook group, you can drop, also, a link over there, or a testimonial over there. Just send me a message. I have dropped a post over there that’s pinned right now on the Facebook group.
If not, you can send it over via whatever means you can; and we will pick only 10 people, because we have being getting a ton of response, so far, so we will only be getting 10 people; so make your offer if you want to be [grandfather 00:52:17] into V2. If you’re already into MasterCLASS, if you’re already into MasterMIND, you will get that for free, but we will appreciate if you would send us a testimony as well.
SEO Strategies for Franchising Businesses
Bradley: All right. Earl, let’s run through these real quick. I was reading the question as Hernan was talking. He says, “Advising a business wanting to franchise their operation. I’m suggesting that the new franchisers be set up as subdomains of the main site, i.e., Minneapolis.Companyurl.com StLouis.companyurl.com. Am I right about that?”
Yeah, that’s how I would do it, Earl, and the reason I like that, especially when you’re talking about … Because I’ve got a franchise, a client that has franchises, I deal with a corporate client, and then they, whenever they bring on a new franchisee, they send them to me and I build subdomains on the corporate domain for that franchisee, if that makes sense. Anyways, that’s how I do it, and I like that because that gives each franchisee their own WordPress installation, like their own separate site, and that way we can brand it with their specific NAP, put the structured data in the header of each one of the individual subdomains. That kind of thing. It’s got its own unique URL for the Google Maps listings, so that’s how I do it. I recommend you do it that way as well, okay?
He says, “I anticipate a standard video for the business to use with each franchisor as a marketing piece. I would then slap a localized front end and backend on the same video, so to include call to action and location,” so essentially you just would be taking the same video but making it unique by changing the opening and closing bumpers, essentially, and that works just fine. “The idea would be to use, to then syndicate those videos through the same 2 tier IFTTT networks.” That’s fine. You can do that. He says, “As new franchisees come on board, their new videos would help build the overall strength and network, if I understand how this works properly,” that is correct, Earl, “or should I be thinking about a separate network for each new franchise location?”
Depends. If you’re getting good results with just using the one network that encompasses all of the subdomain sites or the franchisees, then that’s all you need. Remember, always do the minimum required, guys, but if you find that you’ve got some areas that are more competitive and you’re not getting the results you want, then you can build a separate syndication network for the individual locations, so test and see; but if you can get the results off just the one network, that will save you a lot of work by just using the one network. Okay?
“Any other ideas or thoughts I should be thinking as I prepare to propose a franchisable SEO package that would be included as part of the franchisee package? Already planning on a full bore G+ page setup.” Yeah, what I would do is really take some time considering what you think you’re going to be wanting to do as each new franchisee comes on, so that you have essentially maybe a corporate package that you send, you sell to, that you propose to the corporate client, that covers branding and all the stuff for them; but then you should also have secondary proposals that will be … The proposal that you’re going to present for each additional franchisee, so that you have, kind of like that, because that’s what I’ve done with my franchise client, is, every single time they bring on a new franchisee, they already …
When they’re pitching that to somebody that’s interested in becoming a franchisee, they already have the SEO proposal for them, so I don’t have to keep doing proposals. It’s just, it’s done, and they pitch it for them and say, “Okay, by the way, as you come on to be a franchisee of the business, these are one of the expenses that you’re going to incur,” and it’s just the SEO expense, which includes all the services and stuff that I do for them; but that way it’s very scalable. It’s easy to do, because you know exactly what your front end costs are.
The worst thing that you can do is try to do custom proposals for every franchisee, because then you’re going to be killing yourself with a bunch of additional work; so you kind of want to package that up. I don’t ever do like boxed solutions for proposals unless it’s in this particular case, like for a franchise model. Okay? Because if I’m doing individual business owners, then I always do custom proposals, because I want to charge them what they’re willing to pay.
Backlink Packages for Local Business
Last part of this question, and then we’re done, guys, we got to wrap it up, we got MasterCLASS in a few minutes, is, “Backlink packages: How often do you do backlinks packages to a local business? As often as needed, of course, but is it once and done for easier local clients with an IFTTT network, or for harder or moderately hard national markets? Is it once a quarter, once a month? Any guidelines?” I usually just do backlink packages for local stuff, like I’ll do the initial boost, and then I just continue to post content to the networks through my blog. Because a lot of the time, it just takes time and consistency of regular publishing to your IFTTT networks to rank local sites, and you just juice the networks.
Then what I’ll do is, if I’m not seeing the results, within maybe 60 days, that I want to see, then I’ll do like another, I’ll do additional boosting to the IFTTT networks, but the entire time I continue publishing blog posts to the networks. Okay? If you’re talking about national stuff, you may want to just set up an ongoing link building campaign to your networks. Just something that you consistently and regularly do; but again, it’s all … Continue publishing content, because that’s what really, really … Works really, really well right now is, just a consistent publishing schedule going out across your networks. Okay?
When to Send Links in a New IFTTT Network if the Site is New?
“How soon after setting up a new IFTTT network do you send links? If it’s brand new site URL, does that make a difference?” No, not at all. I mean like basically once the network is set up, I’ll publish 2 or 3 seed posts to go out across the network, and then it goes straight over to link building team, to build links to it. That’s it. Don’t hammer your … Don’t do a shit-ton of, a kitchen sink worth of backlinks to your branded IFTTT properties. You want to do a fairly clean layer of links, as what we’re recommending right now is like 100 to 150 links max to your tier 1 properties that are clean, somewhat clean links, and then from that you throw the kitchen sink at those, that tier. Okay?
All right guys, it’s 5:00, we got to wrap it up. Sorry if anybody didn’t get their questions answered. There was a lot of good questions today, though, so everybody, thank you for being here. We will see MasterCLASS in just about 5 minutes. I got to get the event page updated and all that, so we’ll see you guys in just a few minutes. Thanks, everybody.
Male: Awesome.
Adam: See you guys.
Marco: Bye, everyone.
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