Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 79

Click on the video above to watch Episode 79 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

Chris: [inaudible 00:00:00]

Marco: Wait a minute, wait a minute.

Bradley: We’re live.

Marco: We’re live.

Bradley: They caught us in mid-discussion. Hey everybody! Bradley Benner, Semantic Mastery. This is Hump Day Hangouts for May 11th. This is actually episode 79. Wow, that’s crazy. We’ve got Chris, and Hernan, and Marco on today. Adam is “running in the woods,” so he’s not here today. What’s up Chris?

Chris: Hello. I’m doing great! Excellent.

Bradley: Hey, Hernan. How are you?

Hernan: Hey guys. Hey what’s up?

Bradley: And last but not least, Marco in sunny Costa Rica.

Marco: Well it’s about to be rainy Costa Rica, but it’s nice and warm. That doesn’t change.

Bradley: You asked for me to … where the hell is it? I’m looking for the … Maybe I’ve got to change…

Chris: [inaudible 00:00:58] link?

Marco: I can grab the quick link.

Bradley: Are we share that events page now? Have we solidified the time for Monday?

Marco: Yes. The time is set.

Bradley: All right, so bare with me one minute I’m grabbing the link. We’ve got a webinar guys… If you want to tell them what it’s about, Marco, while I get the link?

Marco: It’s just some secret squirrel type stuff, man. Some Morocco mole thrown in there. No. JavaScript links, I-frames, double I-frames, overlaying I-frames, stacking I-frames. You name it. We’re going to get into it. I’m going to be telling people, “this is totally free. You’re not obligated to buy any of our stuff. Our stuff of course will come up in the webinar because that’s how we’re doing that. How we’re discovering these things is through [MyTest 00:01:52] for RYS Academy, what we were calling the ‘Make Google Puke Project’. Just a ton of things that we’re doing where we’re finding out that we can rank just like we were back in 2005. Right? The SEO time machine. Two weeks to number one, or to top three in the three pack. Two weeks to top fifteen, excuse me, top ten. Right? That’s fifteen days or less. That’s how it’s working right now and we’re going to tell people what it is that makes it all tick, or some of it, some of it. I’m not going to reveal everything, but I …

Bradley: I was going to say. You better not reveal all of it for free. Shit.

Marco: No, no, no. I will be revealing … It’s free. I want people to have value. I want them to know what’s going on, what’s working. I want them to see that we turned SEO on its head. Whatever they heard about SEO and penalties on it. You can make it not apply at all to whatever it is that you’re doing. So that’s what it’s all about.

Bradley: Well I posted the link on the event page guys. It’s Monday the 16th at 1:00 pm eastern. I think it’s 1:00 pm. Is that what it was? I was just looking at it. Just a moment. Yeah 1:00 pm. Monday May 16th at 1:00 pm eastern. So yeah. Join us if you can. It’s mostly going to be Marco. Is Dr. Gary coming on, or is it just you?

Marco: I hope to have Dr. Gary on. He’ll be my wing-man, but if he comes on, I hope he does because he’ll have some great stuff to share. Some of the stuff that he’s been doing.

Bradley: Okay.

Marco: Yeah. I hope to have him on.

Bradley: Cool. Okay. Other than that, Chris we don’t have anything else to mention do we?

Chris: I think we’re good for today.

Bradley: All right. Well I’m going to go ahead and grab the screen, and we’re going to get right into questions. I should be locking this on me. Okay you guys tell me if everything is coming through okay.

Hernan: Yeah. Yeah we’re seeing it.

Bradley: We’re good? Okay.

Hernan: Yep.

Bradley: I fucking love the memes, man.

Hernan: [inaudible 00:04:07]

Bradley: Wayne’s back to meme-ing again. It’s awesome.

[inaudible 00:04:14][crosstalk 00:04:14]

Did you say something?

Hernan: Yes. Is the cameraman on?

How To Perform Keyword Research For New Site/Niche?

Bradley: Yes it’s done. All right.

Randy M. Can you go over how you go about doing keyword research when tackling a new site or niche?

Yeah. What I can do is I can point you to a resource, Randy, that is going to give you pretty in-depth training as to what it is that I do for when I’m doing keyword research. And let me actually … Here I’ll pull up the link and then I’m just going to drop it on the page. Guys this is a free … Let’s see just a second. Keyword. I set this up as a funnel awhile back. Last year actually. I set this up as a funnel when I first started testing some affiliate funnel stuff, and this was the first one that I’d set up and all … I’m running traffic to it with YouTube ads, and that’s it. But there’s a … So just opt in guys you’ll be put on my list for this, but I don’t do much mailing off this or anything. But anyways, go here and it’s ‘keywordsuggest.co‘ I’m going to drop the link on the page here in just a moment.

You can go here and opt in and then it will send you to the actual training site where I’ve got, I don’t know. It’s been awhile since I actually even looked at the training site, but it’s got like six or eight, maybe even ten videos on there about how I go through keyword research. Of course, some of them are a little bit dated, but it won’t matter because it’s the same exact process that I use now.

I haven’t change my keyword research in the last three years. Other than the addition of ‘Power Suggest Pro,’ which is my favorite keyword research tool of all time. And that I actually have a couple videos on this training site about how to use ‘Power Suggest Pro’ as well as another that I use called ‘Rank Spy.’ So those are the two addition keyword tools that I use, but everything you can do … You can without either one of those paid tools, and I teach how to do that in this. So let me just this link on the page. There’s no sense in me going through that right here when you guys all have access to keyword research training here. Just one moment.

Marco: While you’re doing that let me just … A word of warning. If you have “white hat sensibilities” you can still attend my webinar even though I will be going thoroughly, and deeply, into manipulation and all kinds of stuff that you can do to extend …

Bradley: So might offend people? Is that what you’re saying?

Marco: You know, people with so called “white hat sensibilities” might be offended by the stuff I have to say, but what I have to say to that is go to the webinar, listen to what I have to say so that you know what you shouldn’t be doing.

Bradley: Yeah that’s a good way to put it. “Come listen to what I have to teach you so you know not to do it.”

Hernan: Well, what’s bad about ….

Marco: Everyone else can go rank and make money.

Bradley: Randy, just to follow up on this, just to give you guys … Just for the benefit for everyone that is here. For keyword research, I’ll tell you pretty much the three things that I’ll do when I’m … And in this order, is I always go to Google trends first. That’s where I always start with keyword research guys is Google trends, and I identify … Because that way I can sort by, I can filter by location. I can go all the way down to a city level if I want, or back it out level by level if I need to to get more data. So for example I can go from city level to a regional level. From regional to state. From state to national. From national, which would be country targeting, and then I can go worldwide if I wanted.

So I usually always start with Google trends. I put my seed terms in. I identify from the related keyword phrases at the bottom. It will show you, if you scroll down to the bottom of the trends screen once you’ve searched for a keyword. Set your filters, which is what I always do. All I do is U.S. based stuff, so I always start at either U.S. or drill it down into either state or regional level.

Anyways, once you’ve identified the trends data for a keyword, if you scroll down to the bottom of the screen you’re going to see where it shows historical data for the top related keyword phrases that are related to seed term over time. There’s also a rising tab. If you click the rising tab it’s going to show you keywords that have had a significant increase in search interest recently. That’s part of the reason it’s called trends because it will show you trending terms that may not have a lot competition yet. You can get out ahead of trends.

But that’s where I always start. Make a list of the related keyword phrases, then I’ll drill down into some of the related keyword phrases by just entering them into the search field for Google trends. Once I’ve created a nice little list of seed terms then I’ll go right over to ‘Power Suggest Pro’ and I’ll start doing searches there, which is ‘Keyword Suggest.’ I’ll look into Google keyword planner too, but I don’t really care much about the keyword planner anymore for SEO. I do you the keyword planner for ‘Pay-Per-Click’ stuff now, but I don’t use it much for SEO only because those aren’t SEO metrics that you’re looking at. They’re PPC metrics. So there’s a lot of keywords that don’t even register in ad words that are actually receiving organic search traffic. And so that’s where the ‘Power Sug- … The suggest scrapers, it doesn’t have to just be ‘Power Suggest Pro’ that’s just my preferred tool for it, but you can use any sort of suggest scraper. There’s free ones online too. They’re not as robust, but they will do similar things, albeit not as much. I use the suggest tools to come back with all my long-tails, and that’s pretty much how I do it.

That’s it. That’s the extent of keyword research. I say that’s all, but a good keyword research project will take me sometimes two to four hours to complete. Once I’m done with it though, I’m done. I can go tackle that niche, and I never have to … Well I don’t want to say never, but I won’t have to do keyword research for quite some time. Unless it’s a niche that is very, very young, or new, and it has new keywords or entering into that space it … If new keywords are being invented, in other words. But for most things that are well established, once you’ve done the keyword research on time, you’re done with it. You can run with campaigns for months, or even years, off that one keyword research list that you created. Keyword research is the tip of the spear, guys, so make sure you’re doing it right.

Hernan: Yeah …

Chris: Bradley can you do the keyword research for me?

Bradley: No. Not unless you pay me lots and lots of money.

[00:11:19]

Hernan: All right. Just to add to what you were saying, Bradley, I like ‘SEMrush’ as an extra keyword research tool. My process would be to add a keyword, whatever keyword it is, whether it is a long-tail or a short-tail, into ‘SEMrush’ and check the competitors and see what they are ranking for.

Bradley: Yeah.

Hernan: Usually, that will usually tell you that’s usually down for your keyword research.

Bradley: Yeah. That’s true, and it’s funny you mentioned that because I don’t actually go on the ‘SEMrush’ but I’m using ‘Bluechip Backlinks’ now for a ton of stuff, and they integrate through ‘SEMrush’ with the keyword discovery. Where you can essentially take the URL of a website and drop it in, and it will return all of the keywords that the site has pages ranking for. That’s also great for keyword discovery because if you’re unsure, if you’re going into a new niche, one of the best ways to identify keywords that are driving traffic is to go look at the top three, five, ten, whatever organic sites listed for your main keyword, and drop them into a tool like that which will identify the keywords that those are ranking for. And since those are the top ranked sites, they’re receiving the most traffic, they’re probably being optimized. So you should … If you identify those pages, and keyword phrases, that are ranking through a tool like that, then you can target the same keywords, and make modifications for your campaign as well.

Hernan: Yeah that’s also true. When you find a [blattan 00:12:52] affiliate website, or a [blattan 00:12:53] SEO website, that’s strung with PBN’s, or something like that. That’s usually the case. When you plug that into ‘SEMrush’ it will tell you the keywords that these guys are ranking for, and they are usually optimized enough for us, so that’s a good stretch.

Bradley: And then lastly for keyword research, if you have a web property that you have already up, like this is why I love to use … I use the ‘ATM’, or ‘Lead Gadget,’ but you could use ‘Serp Shaker’ for it as well. If you create a website, and just blanket it out. Especially those kind of sites that are like mass page generators. Target a handful of keywords around your niche, and build a whole bunch of pages, and just let the site sit.

Now, this takes some time because it has to season. The site has to age, or season, a bit which takes time. For the sites I’m working on they take like six to eight weeks to fully index, but then … If I’m going into a new niche, I’ll do my keyword research up front, but I like to build one of those mass page sites very quickly. It’s simple to set up. They’re easy to do once you know how to do it. Then, just let the site sit, and six or eight weeks later … By the way, just so you know, I’ll connect it to ‘Google Search Console.’ And then six or eight weeks later, once I’m waist-deep into my campaign for whatever project it was, I can go log into ‘Search Console’ for that particular site, and looks at the search queries, the search data. That’s going to reveal a lot of additional keywords that you may not have even discovered in your keyword research.

I’ve found that using those types of sites for research and discovery is almost as powerful as the traffic that they can generate. Almost as valuable as the traffic that their sites can generate because you end up identifying actual, real search queries that people were searching for that may be showing up, or registering, in any sort of keyword tool. Use Google’s own data is what I’m telling you. That is very beneficial.

Are The Domain Authority Of Web 2.0 Devalued?

Okay. Ed says, “Just wondering what’s up with the domain authority on all the web 2.0 properties? Have they been devalued now? Blogger, Word Press, and Tumblr all show a domain authority of only one now when checking the Moz toolbar. Will this have a detrimental effect on our networks? Thanks guys.”

No Ed it won’t. Domain authority … Honestly I don’t even worry about manipulating domain authority anymore. I used to. It used to be one of the main things we’d do, but I just don’t even care about it anymore, honestly. It’s not going to affect what we’re doing, and it’s probably just a glitch in the MozBar, or something, because the sites still have domain authority. It’s probably just not showing in the toolbar. I didn’t even realize that was happening.

Hernan: Yeah. And to add…

Bradley: It could just be something on your end, Ed. Honestly.

Hernan: Probably yeah. It has to do with practice, and what-not. But just to add to what you were saying Bradley, have in mind Ed that we’re doing networks mostly for traffic and backlinks, and all of those; Blogger, Word Press, Tumblr; they are social networks in and of themselves, so they will bring traffic. It’s about the backlinks and the traffic that they can get to you.

Bradley: Yeah because I’m showing Blogger 96, Word Press 97. Remember when Word Press used to be a 100.

Hernan: Yeah a hundred. Yeah.

Bradley: It used to be. It’s not anymore. Let’s look at Tumblr. So a 99. It’s still registering for me Ed, so it’s probably something wrong with your browser. Most likely that’s it.

Marco: He could also be talking about the sub-domains, or the profiles that he added under is own URLs [crosstalk 00:16:25]…

Bradley: Well, those would be page authority. Yeah.

Marco: I wouldn’t even worry.

Bradley: Yeah. But that would be page authority because even a brand new sub-domain site that you set up on Blogger is still going to have a 97 domain authority. Or whatever, 96. You know what I mean? The domain authority is always going to be the same. It’s the page authority that’s going to one if you set up a brand new account.

Would You Use Google XML Sitemaps Or Yoast In Creating A Sitemap?

Micheal Frank says, “To create an XML sitemap do you suggest using the plug-in Google XML sitemaps, or create it in ‘Yoast’?”

It depends on what you’re doing Michael. If you’ve already got ‘Yoast’ on your site why add another plug-in? Right? If you’re already using the ‘Yoast‘ SEO plug-in, then just use the ‘Yoast’ SEO sitemaps. Unless you’ve got an enormously big site for some reason. In which case you’d want to use the better WordPress sitemaps plug-in. Which will allow you to paginate your sitemaps. It will also allow to cache your sitemaps. There’s a lot of things that that will do. That’s like what I use on my ‘ATM’ sites, the better Word Press sitemaps plug-in. Other than that, if you already have ‘Yoast’ on your site why add another sitemap plug-in? It doesn’t make any sense. You’d be bogging down your site.

Keep your sites lean as possible guys. Sometimes we don’t drink our own Kool-Aid. Our own site is bogged down with way too many damn plug-ins. I bet you eighty percent of them aren’t even being used, and we’ve got to clean that shit up, which we’ve been discussing for the last week. For client sites, and sites that I’m actually actively ranking … I try to keep my sites as light as possible, and use only the bare minimum of plug-ins to accomplish what it is that I need to do. It makes the sites run better and it creates less maintenance issues; with conflicts and updates and all that kind of stuff.

What Is The Maximum Number Of Network Properties To Be Listed In SameAs Area Of JSONLD Markup?

“What would be the maximum number of network properties we should list in the ‘same as’ area of [jcld 00:18:10] the mark-up? Thank you”

Well, Michael what I do is I just try to identify … Well first of all I add all of the properties that are, what we call “semantic hubs,” any social data hub partners we put in there. And then also I identify what the most powerful links are that are linking to us based on what Google tells me, and then I add those to the ‘same as’ as well. Which includes citations too. So I’ll ‘same as’ for citations, or the ones that Google tells me are the strongest ones, and then also any kind of semantic hubs, social data hub partner sites, and the big social media networks.

I don’t know that there’s a limit. I don’t think that there is. I imagine you could put as many as you want in there, but you just don’t want to get spam-y either. I don’t know if there’s an actual maximum number though. I doubt that there is.

Hernan: No I … Yeah I don’t think there is, actually. When you start adding everywhere where your site is listed; well not everywhere, but the big ones; you can get like maybe twenty, twenty-five, in the thirty properties.

Bradley: Yeah. Yep.

How Does CrowdSearch Tool Works?

Okay Tim says, “Hi. Do you do much with tool ‘Crowd Search’?“

Yep I sure as hell do. I’ve been using that since November of 2014. I use about 45,000 credits a month, so yeah I use a lot.

“Thinking about getting it and how to use it. Thanks.”

We have a training … We did a webinar way back when. There’s been a lot of changes since. As a matter of fact, I think during next masterclass, which is next Wednesday at 5:00 pm eastern, I’m going to do a walk-through of ‘Crowd Search‘ to update the training that we did on how we use it. So I think next masterclass guys I’m going to do an actual presentation on how I’m using ‘Crowd Search’ now because the way I use it has evolved as well. Because the tools evolved, so there’s more options there.

It’s funny, but Dan Anton, he actually in some of the features that are now included inside of ‘Crowd Search’ were developed because of things that I was doing with it that I would set up manually. Like some work-arounds, and he was quite impressed with how I was using it, so he developed them into the tool. Which is pretty cool, that’s an honor for me because I was just using it to get better results. Right? I was manipulating … I was hacking different ways to use it, to just get better results, and some of those were working so damn well that he ended up including them, like coding them in.

Let me just give you … I can drop a link. Let me go to video manager. I just dropped this in Facebook earlier today as a matter of fact because somebody was asking about this. I can give you a link that’s to a training I did on how to use ‘Crowd Search’ for referral traffic, which you used to have to do manually because there was no … Now you can actually set up referral traffic campaigns inside of ‘Crowd Search’ before it used to be kind of like … You’d kind of have to hack a campaign together. This was before … This was back then when you used to have to kind of two-step it. It’s really cool. This will show you a concept of how I’m using ‘Crowd Search’ and I’ve been using this for months, and months, and months this particular way, and it works incredibly well. For both video SEO, and for local SEO. I don’t really use this much for national terms and affiliate stuff, but I do for a lot of local stuff, and also for video SEO. Okay?

Maps. It’s working well for maps, by the way, too. If you’re not in masterclass Tim, I recommend that you join because I’m going to do …

Hernan: What are you waiting for?

Bradley: Yeah. This will be next Wednesday we’re going to do this, and it’s not going to be a public webinar, it’s just going to be for our monthly coaching students. Either masterclass or mastermind. Let me add this to the top of the page for you Tim. Tim Vasquez. Okay, this is the ‘Crowd Search’ referral traffic video.

Take a look at that and like I said, next week I’ll go into much more detail. We’re going to probably do a full on update on how we use it.

Are Feeds Splicing Good For IFTTT Network Or Not?

Greg. Okay. I started reading this question earlier Greg, and I’m going to be a little harsh on you. First of all, I want to congratulate Greg for joining the mastermind, and he just joined within the last week or so, so he’s a new member of the mastermind and we appreciate having you. I did read this question, I’m going to read this out, but I’m going to be a little bit harsh on you, Greg, for the benefit of you, as well as everybody else here; after I read your question.

“I’m having problems when splicing feeds in the IFTTT advanced RSS training. All personal and outside related feeds validate individually. When combining them and then copy and paste the combined feeds in the Firefox, it shows up with yellow box at the top. All posts listed and look good, but then if I test those same spliced feeds in a validator, half of them do not validate. Does this mean the spliced feeds really are good, or not? I have been spending three hours per site re-splicing and re-burning until I get combinations to validate all the way through the process. What a pain. Lol.”

All right. So here’s where I’m going to harsh on you. Why the hell are you spending that much time on something like that? To me that is … Greg, like I said, please bare with me I’m not picking on you specifically, but we get these kind of posts often, and in support and stuff, and that is … You’ve got to think, “what kind of revenue generating activities should you be spending your time on?” Is this … Spending three hours trying to get spliced feeds to validate is that generating you revenue? Could you be working on higher level, more impactful activities that are going to have a more significant result on your business, and your income, your revenue? Right?

To me, this is complete busy work. The act of doing stuff … There’s a difference between doing shit and getting shit done. Right? Doing shit is just being busy, but getting shit done is doing stuff to progress your business. It’s going to add to your bottom line. Honestly, spending this much time … Do the spliced feeds validate? I don’t know if they do or not, you know why? Because I never tested it. I could care less. I spliced the feeds, in fact I don’t even do that anymore because I trained a VA to do it.

Guys should you be spending your time splicing feeds? When you can pay a virtual assistant $3.00, or $3.50 and hour to do it for you? I mean think about it. What is your time worth? I’m speaking to the proverbial you, not just you Greg, but everybody here, listening. Think about this guys. Your time should be spent on revenue generating activities. For something like taking three hours to splice a bunch of feeds together, which you could’ve paid a virtual assistant $3.00 or $3.50 and hour to do, you could’ve spent $10.00 and had that done.

In fact, the thing is is that with the spliced feeds I’ve never even checked to see if they validate because I don’t care if they validate, as long as the feed is intact, and the aggregators and directories that I’m submitting it to accepts it. What the hell do I care whether it validates or not? You know what I mean? Does that make any sense? So as long as the feed will be accepted by the directory or the aggregator, I don’t care if it validates because they’re not so restrictive as to not allowing a feed that’s formatted 100% correctly. As long as they accept it. I submit it, and it’s done. Again, I don’t even do that anymore. I trained a VA two years ago to do that for me. So now every time that we have an advanced RSS splice job to do, I just hand it over to a VA and it gets done, and I don’t even have to think about it. Okay?

So my point is … And the reason why I say I’m being harsh on you is just because, Greg, you’re a smart dude, I know because the questions you ask are always very thought out, very detailed, and the questions now that you’re asking in mastermind are the same way. I can tell that you’re an analytical kind of guy, but you’re over-thinking and over-complicating stuff that you don’t need to be doing. You should be spending your time trying to figure out how to make more money, not trying to get spliced feeds to validate. If that makes sense? So anyways, that’s all I’m trying to tell you man. Honestly I’ve never checked to see if they validated or not as long as the aggregators and the directories accept the feed, that’s all I care. That’s all I care. Okay?

He says, “I’m still unable to get any Facebook or YouTube feeds to validate. Even liking others Facebook pages and then clicking on the feed in my liked pages list. Any tips, or an update on those?”

Hernan you did the training for the advanced RSS this time around. Is there anything that he needs to know? Is there any changes? Updates, anything?

Hernan: No, not in particular for the feed splicing. Last time we checked they were validating when you burn them through ‘FeedBurner’. Usually ‘FeedBurner’ will take care of all the errors, etc.

Bradley: That’s true.

Hernan: So that’s probably that has something to do with one of the feeds not being valid from the get-go. If that’s the case Greg, try doing, as I show in the advanced training, when you go into ‘FeedBurner’ you need to turn the smart feed on. That will maximize compatibility, and usually that takes care of the entire validation. I agree totally with Bradley on this case that the only way that the … The only reason that why we are splicing feeds and send it over to feed aggregators, and whatever, is to boost our networks. That’s like the icing on the cake. That’s why it’s part of the advanced training and that’s not part of the core training because you can do the core training you will still be reaping a ton of results. Do not over think it. Usually ‘FeedBurner’ again, if you activate the smart feed feature, that’s laid out in the training, that usually takes care of like 99% of the errors.

Bradley: That’s true, and you know I didn’t even think to mention that, but that’s the truth because a lot of times those feeds will validate like … Especially when you do the smart feed like what Hernan is saying, if it’s out of ‘FeedBurner’ it’ll clear it. For example, if you guys are having trouble in IFTTT, and sometimes there’s a hiccup, sometimes there’s an issue with your Word Press site, your main … Your self-hosted Word Press site, and when you go to try to use an RSS2 recipe in IFTTT it will tell your feed is incorrect, or incompatible, whatever. It won’t … IFTTT will give you a red error message and say no it doesn’t … This won’t work.

Sometimes no matter what it is that you do, your feed just won’t work, but then you go burn a ‘FeedBurner’ feed out of that same feed and go submit that, and then it works. So ‘FeedBurner’ will correct some errors. Although, again, I don’t even care if it validates or not. As long as I can submit it. That’s all that matters to me. Okay?

As far as the Facebook pages and the YouTube feeds … Facebook page feeds, I don’t know … I haven’t actually done any of that myself in, God, well over a year probably now, so I don’t know about that. But I know the YouTube feeds, I stopped even bothering with YouTube feeds because ever since they changed the format, which I listed the newer format up here that is supposed to be the format that works. They’re just not the same. Used to be that the YouTube feeds would actually … There were several different versions of the feed, but you could actually get a feed that would output the video embed, inside the XML file. Which was really cool, but they don’t do that anymore. Now it’s just a list of links with the titles, and that’s it.

So because of that, I don’t even bother using YouTube feeds anymore for anything, at all. However, I know that Lisa Allen has a product that she developed to replace Yahoo Pipes, but it does more than that believe it or not. It’s called ‘Rank Feedr’. F-E-E-D-R. I don’t know if that’s available to purchase yet? It’s been in Beta. I’m a Beta member and have been for months. I don’t know if she actually launched it yet, I think there was a delay, but that’s something that if it’s available I would highly re- … It’s going to cost you subscription, but it’s very, very powerful. There are some really cool things that you can do with ‘Rank Feedr’ like create a sticky post, you can take an individual URL from either a video or a single post, or whatever, and insert it into the feed, and cause it to be sticky, which means it will stay at the top of the feed at all times, so that you can pass relevancy, and what they call co-citations, through by just being guilty by association. Just by being adjacent to other people’s content, and that authority content, relevant content. Some of that authority will pass through to your sticky link.

‘Rank Feedr,’ if it’s not available yet, we’ll reach out to Lisa again, and find out when she plans on launching it if it’s not already available. We’ll certainly be promoting that to you guys because I use it myself, and it’s damn powerful. Okay?

All right. Let’s see. This is Rico [Suavez 00:31:19]. I’m just going to plus one him because I love his name. Facebook or where-ever it is.

How To Setup The Best Silo For A LeadGen Site For Painters?

“I have set up a new IFTTT ring for a new project Leadgen site and a niche Painters.” Okay? “I have done most keyword research.” By the way, I found Painters to be incredibly easy, but not very lucrative, just so you guys know. I’ve dabbled in that niche. I don’t … Maybe I was doing it wrong, but I was able to rank sites very easily for it, but I had a hard time monetizing the leads. So I’m not trying to pull the wind out of your sails Rico, I swear. I’m just telling you I was never very successful on that niche. Leadgen and a niche Painters. I’ve done most of the keyword research. Registered the money site domain and installed [inaudible 00:32:00] are now stuck with how the best way would be to both silo it correctly and integration with the supported IFTTT branded rings. I’m confused about all the different technical solutions I found on the internet. Even watched a video, (sorry Bradley) from ‘Network Empire,'”

He said sorry.

“about their silo plug-in. I don’t want to use their stuff. I only want Semantic Mastery stuff on my network.”

Hernan: Get out!

Bradley: “Hope you have some basic suggestions. We all know that Google loves fresh data, and I need posts for IFTTT how to start landing pages with content supporting sub-thought pages and blog posts. I want to have a good foundation to start. The basic idea is building static content about painting in a silo structure add silo structure with ‘regioncity’ local addresses from Painters, Maps, G+, Pages, etc. and when a legion is completed the painter is posting the job on his region page, and the customer can place …”

All right. Well that sound like a bit of a complicated process. Just because it’s some of the things you want to do now … I’m trying to think. There’s a … Let me see if I can find something here. You guys, I might have to … Let’s see maybe this is it. ‘nearbynow’ maybe that’s it. Let me try something real quick because this reminds me of something that I was playing with on a site.

Yeah, go check this out. You might want to get this plug-in and use this, Richard. It’s called ‘nearbynow.co‘. This has the ability to put Maps on Pages, and it’s got a plug-in and it integrates where you can get … There’s a review function of the plug-in. There’s also a Maps function, and being able to check in, so to speak. If you got service contractors, in your case painters, whenever they complete a job all they do is … There’s an app that integrates on your phone too. So there’s an app that integrates with the plug-in, and all they do is click the button, and it automatically inserts the data from the location of the job that they’re at. Puts the GPS, the data, the KML file, all that into a Map, as well as you can ask the customers to leave reviews, and all that kind of stuff.

I’ve had some pretty good success with this. This is not something that I use on ‘legionsites,’ but I have a client that uses this, and I had to set it up for him. It works pretty well. It adds local data to Pages every time the contractor updates from a job that they’ve done. It refreshes the page with new data, and KML files, and the whole nine. This is something that if you’re going to be doing a set up like what you’re talking about, you might want to look into a solution like this that can help you with a lot of that stuff. Okay?

This is not something that I would want to piece together, or patch together, from various tools. I would try to get everything done under one tool. If that makes sense? I’d have one tool that does all of it because otherwise you’re going to have a lot of compatibility issues, and you’re going to have a bigger learning curve, and all that, so this might be something you want to take a look at. Again, guys, ‘nearbynow.co.’ I don’t have an affiliate link for it or anything like that. It’s pretty cool, and I’ve seen some pretty good results with it.

As far as the plug-ins, or the silo stuff, I don’t know how much experience you have Richard. I can tell you right now if you’re not real strong with silo structure yet I don’t recommend trying to deal with a complex silo structure because they’re just that’s… The reason I call it a complex silo structure is because it’s freaking complicated. You’ve got to take the time to map out a site prior to even starting to build it if you’re going to use a complex silo structure, or else you’re going to run into a world of issues. A whole host of issues when you start to try to build the pages out and everything. It takes a lot of time just to plan it out, map out the site ahead of time.

If you can, please try to stick with a simple silo structure. It’s going to make your life a lot easier. If you’re unable to because of the type of structure that you’re talking about with re- … What is it? Counties and cities, or regions and cities? You might have to use a complex silo structure, but again spend more time up front planning out how you’re going to build the site. Think about you’re permalink structure, you’re URLs, you’re parent and child pages, categories, sub-categories, all of that. Try to figure out how you would build it out because what you’re going to find is you’re going to run into some issues with your slugs. If you’ve got repeated categories across multiple sub- … Across multiple silos, you can run into issues with your slugs and that kind of stuff. Like your permalinks, your URLs.

That’s why I say just try to go with simple silo if you can. Also, if you’re asking questions like this? You should be in our mastermind because that’s where we can dig into this kind of stuff on a mastermind webinar where we can literally help you map it out. We can talk to you about …

We actually did a webinar, several months ago now, but very specifically about the issues that arise when using complex silo structures, and how to build out a big massive site like this when you’re talking about doing either multi-state, or multi-region with a complex silo structure. We did a whole entire webinar where we mapped that out inside the mastermind too. I don’t know if that really answers your question? Because this would really take the entire hour if we did, but this is something that we could certainly dig into a little bit more in a different venue. This Hump Day Hangouts is not really a place for that, but check out ‘nearbynow’ and then also if you’re in masterclass you can certainly post a question like this. We could probably give it a once-over inside the masterclass too. We wouldn’t be able to get as deep as did in mastermind, but I might be helpful.

“More looking for some sort of blueprint for Word Press with IFTTT categories, static pages, posts, plug-ins needed customizations like category, name, post, etc.”

Yeah. That’s an involved question, Richard. Sorry I can’t give you more data on that right here.

Where To Buy Aged Or Expired Domains?

Brian says, “Where are you guys buying aged, or expired, domains these days to 301 redirect to your web 2.0 for more juice?”

The same place I’ve been buying them for months, Brian. We’ve talked about it many, many times. I’ll be happy to drop the links for these trainings that we did, again. ‘Bluechip Backlinks.‘ Hernan, it’s ‘semanticmastery.com/bluechip‘, but I’ve got two videos here. This first one I’m going to drop is an actual interview that we did with Terry Kyle. He came on one of our mastermind webinars, and we had … He’s a developer.

I can’t say enough good things about this tool. It is absolutely amazing. I don’t know how I ever lived as an SEO without it. This is the interview with Terry Kyle. Then the next one I’m going to post is four different ways that I use ‘Bluechip Backlinks’ to find topically relevant domains to purchase for ten dollars that I can use for all kinds of nasty SEO stuff. This is four other ways that I use it. How to use ‘Bluechip Backlinks’.

Any of you guys ever serious about SEO, if you’re not on … If you’re not using ‘Bluechip Backlinks’ you’re fighting the SEO battle with one arm tied behind your back. Let’s put it that way. Without a doubt it’s $97 a month I think. Go get it. I don’t care even if you’re on a budget. Go get it. Get rid of one or two of your other services that aren’t producing results for you that you’re paying for every month. Don’t buy a couple [JBZoo 00:39:43] products every month that you normally would buy. Do something like that. Come up with a hundred bucks a month to pay for ‘Bluechip Backlinks’ it’ll be worth its weight in gold. The amount of stuff that you can … It gives you an unfair advantage to be able to buy domains that are topically relevant to what you need. That are clean. You purchase them for the cost of registration, and you use them for whatever the hell you want. It’s a great tool.

Are PBN Domains Linked From Directory Sites Worth Renewing?

I’m not even going to try to pronounce that. It looks like it’s French. “I have a bunch of PBNs, about fifteen of them, I had set up in the early days which are not great. They are clean for sure, but just not powerful since they are getting mostly directory type links. They are still linking to one of my money sites and they have got articles. Now is the time for domain renewal, and I’m just wondering if they are worth renewing? Can I just trash them and reuse their articles on better PBNs? Will this create a problem?”

That’s a great question because I have a whole bunch of PBNs too that are in the same boat that were just … I built PBNs years ago to different standards than I do now, and so I’ve got … I have many hundreds of PBNs. I’ve still got a lot of them. A lot of them I actually do just let expire now when they come up for renewal because they’re basically worthless. But if you’ve got some PBNs like that. Those are great for second tier links, but just don’t do them for money site links, like as tier one links.

Hernan: No I was about to say the same. You can point them to social media profiles, to internal posts on you’re…

Bradley: Citations.

Hernan: Citations, internal posts. From IFTTT posts. They work really good.

Bradley: Yeah. Yeah but it’s up to you man. If you spend a lot of money on them then you might want to renew them, but like I was just mentioning with the ‘Bluechip Backlinks’, now that’s why I’m letting a lot of my stuff just expire now when it comes up for renewal. I’m cleaning out a lot of my hosting accounts because I’m just not using them anymore. They’re okay for video syndication sites if you want to use them for video embeds, or for tier two links, but I’m just … In finding the PBNs the over all effectiveness of PBNs is diminishing. Unless you’re focusing on topical relevancy. That’s really what it comes down to.

Now I’m replacing a lot of old PBNs that just weren’t themed well with new sites that I’m purchasing from ‘Blue- … New domains that I’m purchasing from ‘Bluechip Backlinks’ without going through the trouble of building PBNs. I call it a private link network, not a private blog network because with the sites that I’m rebuilding from ‘Bluchip Backlinks’ that I’m buying, I’m just rebuilding the archive.org files that are downloaded right within the tool.

That way I’m not actually creating Word Press sites and having to add content and all that other shit. I’m just finding domains that are already related to what it is that I’m going to be using them to link to, and I’m rebuilding the old sites, and just hacking a link onto the home page that points back to my money site for tier one links. That’s what I’m doing a lot of because it’s inexpensive and it’s fast. I can put up three rebuilt HTML sites from using the archive.org downloader inside of ‘Bluechip Backlinks’ in the same time it would take me to put up one traditional style PBN with Word Press and everything.

I can put up three sites in that same amount of time, and I don’t ever have to worry about updating them again. I just stick them out there and they just sit out there with a nice link pointing at my money site, and that’s it. So personally my recommendation would be to let them go and focus more on buying stuff that’s more themed well to what it is you’re using, but again it’s up to you. If you want to keep them as tier two links, you can do that too.

Hernan: Yeah. And just to answer the second part of the question, I wouldn’t … If the content is indexed, like those PBNs haven’t been penalized, I wouldn’t reuse the content.

Bradley: Yeah.

Hernan: On current PBNs because that would be duplicate [inaudible 00:43:35].

Bradley: Yeah. I totally agree, guys I stopped building PBNs. I haven’t built a private blog network site in probably five months at least. I’m building a lot of private link network sites, but they’re a hell of a lot more efficient. They’re easier to set up, and I can’t tell you … I keep repeating, I like easy. I love easy. The easier I can make my job, the better, and that’s one of the ways that I’ve really reduced a lot of labor is just by purchasing the domains and rebuilding with the Wayback machine. It just takes a few minutes to set it up and it’s done. It’s like set and forget.

By the way. With PBNs one of the things that we always did with PBNs was put an IFTTT network around it, but with the new sites with the way that I’m doing it now, what I can a private link network sites, I’m not doing that. I’m not posting to the site. I’m rebuilding the old site, and that’s it. I’m done. I’m not adding any additional content to it. If I was, which would be a private blog network site when you’re adding content to it, then I would want an IFTTT ring around it. So, it’s cut down on time, it’s cut down on cost. It’s just to me, it’s way more efficient.

What Are The Pros And Cons of GSA And FCS Networker?

Dana says, “Can you talk a little bit about GSA and FCS network?”

Eventually. One day we’re going to actually do some training on that, maybe.

Hernan: Yep. That would be a good idea actually.

Bradley: We’ve been talking about it for a year and a half now and we haven’t done it.

Hernan: Yeah.

Bradley: “And what the pros and cons are of using them. I see it in your resources page, but I don’t really understand how one would go about using those tools without screwing up. I know they are powerful, but they are kind of scary at the same time. So my next question is, are there plans to teach training through SM on those tools?”

Dana that’s a great … The fact that you are asking and saying that you’re hesitant to use it because of the learning curve, and you’re scared and all that. That’s great. Personally I can commend you on asking this question before just going and purchasing it and trying to use it because I have never used GSA or FCS a day in my life, and I never plan on it because they have a learning curve. They’re powerful tools, but I didn’t want to go through the time of learning how to set it all up, so I hired somebody to do it who’s been with us now for about two years now. He’s a ninja at that kind of stuff. I know Hernan’s really good at those tools. I never had any desire to learn how to use them, but I did have the desire to get the benefit of using them, so I hired somebody to do it.

I would tell you Dana, unless you have the time and the desire to learn how to use those tools, don’t bother. Just hire skilled people to do it for you, or buy link packages from a provider. It can be us, or it can be somebody else. If you go to ‘blackhat forms’ you can find people that are extremely skilled with those tools that you can hire, or buy link packages from. Again, my recommendation guys is spend your time on revenue generating activities. Pay other people to do this kind of stuff for you.

Hernan: Right. Yeah I totally agree. FCS is easier actually. GSA is a rabbit hole.

Bradley: Yeah.

Hernan: A damn rabbit hole. It will suck your life because it’s so complex, but if you’re still … I would follow Brad. The suggestion if you still want to give it a go just in case when you’re experimenting with them just use them on a [inaudible 00:46:54] domain or something like that, or from tier three onwards. You would power IFTTT networks and then with FCS and then build backlinks from FCS, sorry from GSA to FCS, properties but that’s a really complex process. Hopefully, as Bradley was saying, we will be able to do some training in the near future.

Bradley: Yeah. But it’s not on our schedule anytime soon just to let you know, Dana. The last thing I want say about that is if you do plan on playing with a tool like that. Like Hernan just said, use it on test sites, or what I recommend doing is setting up a sites.google.com site. Something like that that you can basically abuse, and not have to worry about it causing any damage to any revenue generating properties. In fact, you could use the Google sites to rank by just spamming them to death. My point is …

Marco: Quit giving away the farm.

Bradley: I’m not giving away the farm, but I’m just saying use third party properties instead of direct to your money site until you become quite skilled with the tool, and then you can actually start hitting direct to your money site or tier two, or something like that. You have to be incredibly skilled. I would never even attempt it myself. That’s why I hired somebody to do it.

Hernan: Yeah usually something that has high DA will sustain the abuse. It can be Google, it can be Word Press, whatever, but yeah I still agree. I’ve been toying around with GSA for around three years now, and I … There’s always something else that you can tweak on that tool.

Bradley: Yeah. All right. I just saw the next question said something about … It’s still showing. Yeah the next question was about, “Inside of analytics, Google was showing that ‘Reddit’ has been deprecated. Any insider info on what’s going on with the social data partners?”

Now I don’t know. Maybe ‘Reddit’ has stopped sharing as much data with Google. I don’t know specifically because I don’t use ‘Reddit’ just because ‘Reddit’ is highly moderated and every time I’ve tried to use ‘Reddit’ my accounts get terminated, so I just don’t even bother with ‘Reddit.’

Hernan: That’s because you’re trying to spam.

Bradley: Yeah. That’s exactly right, but they call … Their definition of spam is very broad.

Hernan: Yes. They are really anal about the links that you post and everything.

Bradley: If you post a link to … A self-promotional link, that’s it, you’re done, you’re out.

Hernan: Yeah. ‘Reddit’ has … People do ‘Reddit’ because of the traffic. Mostly because of the traffic because if you end up on the front page of ‘Reddit’ you experiment something that’s the ‘Reddit’ cause of death of something like that. They can destroy your website because of the amount of traffic that you will get from ‘Reddit’ but it’s an art more than a science to get feature in ‘Reddit.’

Bradley: I can’t speak, Brian, exactly to what’s going on inside of ‘Reddit’ but if you’re seeing inside of Google analytics a message saying something like that, it’s probably just that that third party platform isn’t sharing as much data with Google as it used to, and that’s why it’s generating a message like that. However, if you look at the Google social data hub partners. “Our depricators are …” Oh I’ll be damned. There’s a thing up here, “only historical data.” So maybe what they’re going to do is … “To reuse these dimension metrics will be removed. See data removal for details.”

I got to dig into that. I didn’t realize that that was happening, so that must be something newer.

Hernan: Yep.

Bradley: “Only historical data after April 30th.” Okay

Marco: While you’re reading that, there’s actually a hack for that that’s really, really affective, but you can’t use it on stuff that you care about, or that you’re spamming. If you use that Google URL shortener, and you drop it in there, you’re feeding Google direct metrics.

Bradley: Yes that’s true, and that’s what … That link that I dropped for how to send referral traffic using ‘Crowd Search’ it teaches exactly what Marco’s talking about. How to use Google, goo.gl URL shortener, to inject analyticals and social traffic and all that kind of stuff. Anyways, I realize that this has got the message here. I hadn’t seen this before so this is fairly new apparently. We’ll have to dig into this a little more and we’ll maybe talk about it again next week.

Hernan: Yeah just to add to that we’ll definitely need to dig into that, but still Google will need information from third party sources.

Bradley: Yeah.

Hernan: Like Twitter, or those kind of things like Google+ and the usually suspects.

Bradley: Yep. Okay. Guys we have to close it up because we are at time. DC Glen though, whoop there it is, he’s back. Hey if you … Your questions guys remember if you’ve got questions that didn’t get answered during Hump Day Hangouts you can post them in one of our groups. Whether it’s the Google+ group, or the Facebook group, and we’ll try to get to them there when we can. Plus it will allow other people to comment on them as well. We’d love to answer your questions but we’re actually out of time right now.

Anyways, thanks for everybody being here. Happy Hump Day. Thanks Marco, and Chris, and Hernan, and we’ll see you guys next week.

Hernan: Thanks guys! Bye bye.

Marco: Bye everyone.