Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 83

Click on the video above to watch Episode 83 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: All right. Welcome everybody to Hump Day Hangouts. Today is the 8th of June, and this is Hump Day Hangouts 83. We are chugging right along. Every time I see it in the 80’s, even though it’s once a week, I’m like, “All right, we’re getting close to 100.” It’s going to be a little bit. Let’s go down the line and say hello. We’ll start with Chris. How are you doing Chris?

Chris: Doing excellent. How are you?

Adam: Good deal. Hernan, what’s up?

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

Adam: It’s now progressed from sweater to sweatshirt with a hood weather. Is it getting colder down there?

Hernan: Getting colder. You won’t see me at some point, you won’t even see me.

Adam: Speaking of weather. Marco, how’s it going?

Marco: Nice and warm, man. About to get some rain, so I probably won’t be able to participate in Hangout, but you know, that’s how it goes.

Adam: Okay. We’ve got a comment saying that nobody could be heard. You guys can’t be heard on Facebook Live.

Bradley: I know you didn’t introduce me, sorry but I had to come in. We’re trying an experiment. We’re trying to do Facebook Live broadcast at the same time that we’re doing Hump Day Hangout, but it’s weird because my mobile device is pointed directly at me and showing just my face. Nobody can see the screen and apparently other people can’t hear you guys when you talk. Anyway, some behind the scenes stuff.

Adam: Let’s just go through, I’ve got a couple of announcements real quick, and then we’ll get rolling. The first one I wanted to share is if you’re in IFTTT SEO Academy 2.0, we wanted to let you know you can submit your video case studies and share the results. I’m going to put the URL in here, or Hernan, if you’ve got that handy. I actually think I chopped it off when I copied it. We just wanted to let you guys know that there’s some opportunities there for some pretty cool stuff. We’re going to say that. V2 members, you got the opportunity there to get some awesome stuff. We’ll be talking more about that. Hernan will drop the link if you’re in there. By all means, go check it out.

All we’re looking for is some short videos, good quality guys, don’t be doing some selfie 240p resolution stuff, but it doesn’t have to be professional recording quality. About two minutes, maybe two to ten minutes. There’s a variety of stuff you can do. What we’re doing basically, in a nutshell, is we’re going to be going through and choosing the best each month for a free month of MasterMind access. Pretty cool stuff.

Chuck Norris approved. All right. Then one other one. This is for everybody, whether you’re a member of our groups or not, just if you’re available and you’re paying attention during the, I believe the 20th to the 29th of June, we’re going to be having a contest that we’ll be talking more about next week, but just keep your eyes and ears open for that. We’re going to be giving away some awesome prizes, including yearly access to some of our memberships, as well as some cool, well they’re freedom journals. I don’t know, Hernan, what you would want to describe them as, kind of personal accelerator type of books.

Hernan: Yeah, it’s kind of something that would allow you to, let’s put it this way, to achieve your objectives faster and keep you on track. It’s 100 day journal, I think it’s pretty cool. We’re giving away that with a bunch of other goodies. Stay tuned because it’s going to be good.

Adam: Awesome. Cool. I’ll have to post that picture soon. I’ve got them, they’re actually sitting in a box in the closet right now, it’s kind of sad, but I’ve got one on my desk. That’s all I’ve got, you guys got anything?

Bradley: Nope, as far as I know we can get into questions.

Adam: I was going to say, I guess it’s too late, but I’ll go ahead and say it. If you missed out on the presentation, the webinar Marco did on Monday, that was awesome. Then we did end up having a replay up for 24 hours, but I think that’s probably over by now.

Bradley: Yeah. We might end up opening up those webinars again if we polish them up and package them properly, but we haven’t decided that yet. If we do, we’ll make sure we let you guys know.

Adam: Awesome. All right, let’s get to it.

Bradley: Let’s get into it. All right, I’m going to grab the screen and lock it onto me. Make sure you guys are seeing everything all right. Are we good?

Hernan: Yes.

Bradley: Okay cool. All right, here we go, Mark O’Connell. There’s a big photo here, I’m not sure why.

Adam: I like to think that that’s an introduction without words.

Is It Over-Optimized To Use Different Industries As SubDomains In The Same Root Domain?

Bradley: Hey. Hi. All right. Mark O’Connell says, “Hi guys. First, big thank you to Marco for the wonderful information given on Monday. Really enjoyed it, I’ll plus one that. My question is, let’s say I have a domain, plumbersnearme.com, and I have one like this but not for plumbers, is that over optimized? This is now a keyword, I mean industry, near me.” No, not really. It would be if you had a city name in there, but having plumbers in there, that’s pretty standard, that’s normal. Think about it, I know you said it’s not plumbers, but I’m just saying this as an example. A lot of businesses will use what industry they’re in as part of their brand name. That’s not abnormal at all, or over optimized.

“If I sub-domain out per city, london.plumbersnearme.com, Manchester.plumbersnearme.com, can I have the business name as londonplumbersnearme for a Google maps listing under the same root, but sub-domain cities out to target other areas, or should I just use a completely separate domain?” Let’s see, that would be, yeah I would just use different sub-domains on the same domain, the same root. Am I reading that question wrong? Is he just asking about should he keep building out on the same domain? I think that’s what the question is, Mark, if I’m misunderstanding the question, please forgive me. It seems like you’re asking, should you continue building out cities on the same domain, or use different domains entirely. I would say keep building out cities on the same domain.

Chris: Yeah, I read it the same way, Bradley, so yeah.

How To Fix Videos Without Thumbnails In Search Results Page?

Bradley: Okay. He says, “If I can be cheeky and ask one more quick one. Do you ever have videos on page one with no thumbnail?” Yes, it happens often. I have one here with just a black screen, yes, that’s been kind of a glitch that’s been going on for a few months. “For another keyword the same video on page two shows my thumbnail, very weird. Is there a way to fix this?” No, as far as I know there’s no way to fix it. It’s just an anomaly with Google’s algorithm. I know some videos will show with a black thumbnail for some reason. It’s odd, because sometimes they’ll show with a black thumbnail and then other times they’ll show with the actual thumbnail. It’s kind of hit or miss. Some keywords show it, some don’t. I’m not sure what’s causing it, but I do not know how to fix it. I believe it’s just a glitch with Google. They’re going to have to fix it.

I’ve also had videos that index, but no thumbnail shows. Not even a placeholder, like the black placeholder that you’re talking about. I’ve had videos index, but it looks like just a regular text listing. That’s weird too.

Which Bitly Link To Use When Building Tiered Links In IFTTT Network?

Okay, Ed says, “Hey guys, with regard to the new Bitly Profile link …” Ed, I read your question earlier. I’m assuming you’re not in IFTTT V2 or SEO Academy V2, because if you were, we did a update webinar on Bitly already. Go check the update section of the members area, and there’s a video about that. There’s a video in the updates section as well as during the update webinar that we did. There’s actually, it’s been mentioned twice already. Bitly sun setted their public profile pages, it’s not a big deal. It just means you don’t add a Bitly profile link in with all your other links when you’re interlinking properties. That’s all. You still use Bitly, you just don’t have a profile link anymore. That’s all.

Chris: Right. What I wanted to add to that is that Bitly will still turn your 301’s into 302’s if you spam them. That’s still the case. We have been advising, time and time again, if you’re doing some advanced stuff, like 301’s and spam and those kind of things, do not use Bitly, because Bitly will turn your 301’s into 302’s, and all of your link building will be pointless. At that point, I wouldn’t use Bitly if you’re building tier links or something like that, just because they will still show that spam notice, whatever it is.

Bradley: Yeah. What’s interesting is Bitly will do that too, arbitrarily. It’s weird. Sometimes without even spamming a Bitly link, it will add a spam attribute. It basically just makes it a 302 link. Sometimes, it could be the cleanest, most pristine link that you’ve never done anything questionable with, and they’ll still sometimes just add a spam tag to it. I don’t know why that is, so just keep that in mind.

What Are Some Precautions When Using Authority Sniper With Google’s Feedburner?

Next question. R. Bacon says, “Just purchased the authority sniper. I was wondering if there was any precautions I should take with regard to the feed burners, since that is connected to Google?” I don’t think so, but you can add multiple accounts to it. If you are worried about it. The way that I typically do things is that I have persona accounts anyway, that are themed. If I’m going to be creating a feed about plumbing, then I’m going to pick the persona account that’s a plumber. All of the feed burner feeds that I create, or it could be a bit broader, it could be home improvement related, or whatever. That persona’s account that I’m going to be using has most likely been already themed around that particular topic or niche. Again, you can add multiple Google accounts to it. That’s what I would do, is just grab one of your persona accounts from one of your IFTTT networks, or a few of them, and kind of theme them. Make sure you label them properly in your RSS Authority Sniper software so that you know what they are when you go to select them.

How To Generate Content For E-Commerce Sites?

Laurie says, “Hi everyone. We have a potential client asking for help with their website. They have a domain name that redirects to an e-commerce site. It has no capability of a blog, so it is very thin with content. Short of a paid advertising campaign, do they have any suggestions? Thanks so much.” They have a domain name that redirects, well yeah, if they have a domain name sure you can put a sub-domain on that domain and install WordPress and use that as a blog. Laurie, even if the domain itself redirects, I’m assuming it’s probably a masked redirect. In other words, when it redirects to that URL that you’re listing here, it’s probably still showing their domain name. Am I right?

I’m assuming that’s the way that it is, that it might redirect, but it’s a masked redirect. If that’s the case, you could just put a sub-domain on. You would have to use a DNS mapping service like Amazon Route 53 or Cloud Player or something like that, but you could create a sub-domain and point that to a regular hosting account. Then put WordPress on the sub-domain, and just use that as your content distribution engine, your blog essentially. It could be blog.yourclientsdomain.com. You know what I mean?

Adam: Yeah, and then you just put a link. I know some people get confused when they’re thinking about this, and get lost in the sub-domain part. You just be sure, put a link on your site somewhere, like, “Hey, this is our blog.” Or whatever.

Marco: If you guys look at that URL, it’s already on a sub-domain.domain.com, so all they have to do is add blog.domain.com, and use the blog as the content driver to rank the content on the main domain, since it’s content thin anyway. To rank the products and services, or whatever is being offered. We do that all the time.

Bradley: I think the thing is, it’s an e-commerce solution, so I’m not sure that she has access to add a sub-domain to this. If she does, yeah absolutely, then just put blog.whatever. If you don’t, if you’re using your own custom domain and it just redirects to this because you don’t have access to control this, then you could still just create a sub-domain on your root domain and just map it over to a regular hosting account. Then install Word Press there. Again, that’s just going under that assumption, if you have a custom domain and it redirects to here, it’s probably masked.

Hernan: Yeah, that’s exactly what I did for a client. They were having something like Volusion or something as their main e-commerce website, and their main e-commerce was out of my hosting. We hire another hosting just for the blog, because it was like Shopify, the main domain was maxed to the Volusion platform. Via DNS, we had to open a blog.domain.com and start blogging over there. It was an extra step that you need to take, Laurie, because Word Press, it would take a ton of time for you. In this case you do not even have blog capability, but in case some other clients come with another e-commerce project, like Magento or whatever, Shopify, et cetera. It takes a ton of time to learn Word Press, so it will be always better to work with that. Otherwise it’s not worth it, or they need a ton of money.

Bradley: That’s like when I get any client on a custom web platform and they ask me, would I be willing to optimize? I tell them no. I tell them flat out, “I’ll provide consulting services, that I can give instructions to your web master to do it, but I’m not going to learn a new platform for one client.” There’s no way they’re going to pay me enough to do that.

Which To Choose Between RYS Academy And MasterMind?

Okay Brian Dunn says, “Your road map doesn’t include RYS. For people who are already monetized and have some industry knowledge, but want to go ninja school to seriously up their game, but you can only pay for either RYS or Master Mind, can you walk through why you might choose one versus the other?” Great question Brian. I would say go with MasterMind. The reason I would say go with MasterMind is because number one, if you join MasterMind, when you are ready to purchase RYS, you get a 30% discount. That’s substantial, number one. Number two, MasterMind, every two weeks we hold a webinar. It’s the community where you have access to us, and my team members, as well as all the other SEO professionals in the group, so there’s a lot of discussions that go on. A lot of people sharing great information, results, that kind of things.

Not that RYS doesn’t have kind of an aspect like that as well, but RYS is one specific part of SEO, whereas Master Mind covers so much. There’s bits and pieces of RYS sprinkled throughout the MasterMind as well. Again, I would recommend going with the Master Mind because that’s going to give you a foundation that you can build upon. When you’re ready to join RYS, you also get the 30% discount.

As well as, you get all the other stuff that we have, included in the Master Mind membership, that’s under $300. IFTTT SEO Academy V2, Master Class, you get to attend all those webinars, and access to the members area for that. That’s all included in MasterMind, as well as all of our other products that are under $300, you get those included. Any of our products that are over $300 you get a 30% discount on, and you guys also, as MasterMind members, get first access to products when we launch. First access to services. You get to be beta testers. You get review copies of stuff before we launch. There’s a lot of benefits. Does anybody else want to sell him on Master Mind also?

Hernan: No. I was about to say that, as a disclaimer, the discount doesn’t include services.

Bradley: No, training.

Hernan: Yeah, only training.

Marco: The only thing that I would add, if you have a 22 caliber pistol, and a 50 caliber pistol, they’re both guns, and you can shoot with both, but shooting a 50 caliber is so much fun, man. One’s a pistol, and the other one you can watch stuff blow up, so come on over to the dark side when you’re ready.

Adam: Yeah again. RYS is awesome, there’s no question, but the reason I would recommend MasterMind is because of all the additional benefits that come with that, and you get the discount on RYS at a later date, or whenever you’re ready. You get the discount immediately, but you can purchase it whenever.

Marco: I agree, because it has not only everything that you mentioned, but the members, or the partners, of MasterMind are constantly in the community. We’re always providing guidance or answering questions. Just taking care of the community as best we can. You also get that benefit.

What Are Your Favorite SEO Task Management Tools For Outsourcers?

Bradley: Jenny says, “Afternoon gentlemen. Thank you all for your hard work in these Hangouts. I will plus one that. What do you guys use for SEO task management? Any favored apps or workflow for outsources and the like?” Adam’s pinging me. Cameraman. Sorry, I’ve gotten distracted with Facebook Live this time guys. Okay. Now it should be a bigger video. Okay, SEO task management. You know what, I’ve always used, for a long time now, about two years now, I’ve been using Trello for training. Recently, within about the last four or five weeks now, I’ve been using an app called Flow, which is like, I should show a demonstration of it real quick. It’s freaking fabulous. It’s going to be highlighted in that new training course that’s launching at the end of this month, called Outsource Kingpin. We’re talking about that a lot. It’s not necessarily an SEO task management tool. It’s a workforce management app, and it’s really cool.

The reason why, any of you that haven’t done Trello yet, haven’t used Trello, I think it’s great for training and creating working procedures for specific tasks. If you guys aren’t familiar with what I mean by working procedures, that’s where you take a task and you document how to do it, both in video and with written out or documented steps. Linear steps, step one, step two, step three, in order to complete that task. With Trello, I would put tasks into Trello boards that would have the step by step process. It was hard to organize the tasks into higher level projects, at least I found it difficult to. I find Trello to be awesome for just teaching the working procedures for a particular task.

However, Flow, let me show this to you guys real quick. I think it’s called getflow.com is the name of the … It’s a paid app though, that’s the difference. Just so you guys know. Let’s go here. I’ll log in and just show you guys. I started using this about four, five weeks ago with one of the teams that I’m working on, the ATM site building team. Let me show you guys what this looks like, why I like this so much. This is like a combination of Trello along with Slack, the chat app, which we use for semantic mastery anyways, my partners and I, we’re always chatting in Slack. Slack is the developer of this, so everything integrates. They also have a time tracking software, it’s called GetHarvest.com, that integrates with this as well, so you can star to actually track the amount of time spent on each task. Like when you start to build an outsourcing team, you can monitor how much time is being spent on every task. There you can see where who’s being more efficient than others. Then you can go and ask, “Why is it taking you twice as long to do something it is somebody else? Is there something that you don’t understand? Do you need some additional tools?” Whatever.

This is the app guys, if you take a look at this. Here’s the team that I’ve been working on, what they call work spaces. This is ATM site building. You can see over here some of the projects that we work on. What I like about this is, for example, if I look at the campaign review, if I come up here and change the view to can ban, the can ban view version is the same as Trello. Any of you have seen me talk about Trello before at all, I always talk Trello up this way. This is a technique that I actually learned from Peter Garrity. That’s create these lists to do, doing, done and needs attention. When a VA comes in, in this case the team leader, this is Hazel, our team leader for this particular team. When she comes in, she grabs this card, which is a task, and drops it in here, into doing. She opens it up and it shows all the tasks that need to be completed. What they call sub-tasks, that she can go right on down the line and check it off. When she’s done she puts it in the done list.

If something happens, and she’s unable to complete the entire task. Let’s say that she gets down to this point and she gets stuck, then she can drag this over to needs attention, and I’m subscribed to this board, so that when something gets dumped into the needs attention list, I get notified of it, and I can come open it up. She can actually leave a comment if she wants, in the actual task. Let me close this and you can see it. She can leave comments and say why she had to stop at that particular sub-task. Then I can go resolve the issue for her, give her assistance, whatever, and then drag it back over to to-do, once I’ve resolved the issue. She can bring it back and work on it again. This isn’t necessarily an SEO specific work management app, and hopefully Jenny you weren’t asking specifically about an SEO management app, but this one itself, Flow, is really cool. It is a paid app.

Trello is free, but Trello I think is much more difficult to organize stuff into more general projects. Where you combine multiple tasks into overall projects or procedures, does that make sense, then this one I find to have a lot more functionality. I don’t know, hopefully you guys found this interesting. I’m going to be transitioning, trying to bring in most of all my working procedures into this, into Flow and using it. We’re paying for it right now. It’s like $59 a month for up to ten team members, or ten sub-accounts or whatever it is. It’s very valuable though. I’ve found this to be one of the easiest ways to manage a team, and I just started using it about four or five weeks ago.

Bradley: What’s good about this is it’s not only, not exclusively for SEO. It will help you a ton. I’ve been using Trello for awhile now, but what’s good about this kind of project management, or task management, is that first you will need to go through the hard work of actually splicing, or kind of dividing your main task into little tasks for your VA’s. That’s what we did with V2, et cetera. I think this goes two ways. It will allow you to actually manage your projects, but it will allow you to be actually more picky, I would say, with the tasks you’re giving to your VA’s, which I think is great.

Bradley: Yeah. Like I said, in here they’ve got a chat app. You can create chat rooms and assign specific people to it. You can assign workers, team members. Again, it will integrate with Harvest. I’m only pitching this, guys, because I think it’s such a good program. This is the other thing. Those of you that are starting to build out teams, this is something that’s going to be, I’m working on building out the management procedures right now, with Hazel. As soon as I’m done working with her in building these out, then I’m going to work on bringing the individual builders, which are her subordinates, the people that she manages. We’re going to bring all their tasks into here, and have it set up in a hierarchy.

That’s when we’re going to install this Harvest right here, which is the time tracking app that integrates with it. That way we can start to identify, from our workers, who’s being the most productive, and people that aren’t being as productive, why, we can address that. We can make sure that they’re clocking in every day, they’re giving us eight hours a day, five days a week, 40 hours a week basically, all of this. Again, this is something that we’re going to be integrating into our system. Up until now, I’ve done everything just using Trello and Google Docs, and that’s pretty much it.

Would You Disclose The Relationship Between Child Sites To The Parent Site Within A Network?

Okay, good question. Next one. Chris says, “Questions submitted via support desk. Customer prefers not to disclose their name. If you lived in Buffalo and were going to create a Buffalo home services network of sites, doing everything from landscaping to home repair, and you were going to be starting from scratch and using RYS, IFTTT to build it all, would you blatantly claim the relationship between the sites and their connection to the parent DHS network so you were 100% publicly claiming everything about how they’re related, or do you see that as just being way too risky? Is there some other reason you wouldn’t even think of doing that? If you were just going to out claim it and also have a spare LLC laying around, would just use that LLC to do it, so it’s even more legit, and use that single business to create all the pages, YouTube channel, and everything from all the different home trades? If not, which persona approach would you take?”

Okay. It’s a bit of an involved question. I would have to think about that. I don’t see a problem with having a consistent brand across all of them. However, I would try to limit my risk in a way, such as be building out sites on sub-domains and such so that I could separate liability, my exposure in other words, in case any one of my sites were to get hit. Here’s my point. If I was going to say like Buffalo Home Services, maybe I would call it like BHS.com, or BuffaloServices.com, or something like that. Let’s say you were going to go with that. Then I would build out maybe industry specific sub-domains. We already know that the site is going to cover just the Buffalo area. You’ve got that in the root domain, so that’s pretty apparent.

What I would do is probably do like landscaping, plumbing, HVAC, all of those would each be individual sub-domains. The only reason I say that, instead of putting it all on one site, you could put it all on one site, just so you know. If you were going to do that, then it would be all the same brand anyways. You wouldn’t have anything to do about linking out different sites and all that. I would all be the same site, and that’s perfectly okay. You would want to silo the site out that way too, but if you were to every do anything that Google didn’t like, then they slap your site, you’re going to lose all of it. You’ve got to keep that in mind.

What I would probably do is build it out on one domain. I understand you’re asking, “Should you be using different domains?” Personally no, I would try to build that as a brand, potentially, the Buffalo Home Services as a brand, so why not build everything out on sub-domains of that root site? The root site could then be like a billboard for your brand. In other words, it’s like an online brochure, it explains what Buffalo Home Service is, what your vision is, what kind of service you’re trying to provide to the area. Then from there it could actually link to the sub-domain sites as kind of a directory. The root domain would be almost like an index page. Then all of your sub-domain sites would be covered. From there, the only reason I would do that is in case any one of your sites were to get hit for something, it wouldn’t affect all the other ones. If your HVAC site got hit with a penalty for some reason, then your plumbing site should be fine, it shouldn’t be affected. How would you do it Hernan?

Hernan: Yeah, definitely I would go the sub-domain route. I think it was Marco who shared that Viper Chill. I’ll see if I can find it. The Viper Chill post. It was like 16 companies own, probably the first page of Google, and they are blatantly related. Those are called money block networks. Instead of private blog networks, those are called like that. There are a bunch of cases where you have even different domains all under the same IP, on the same server. Google does not penalize them, and they are all interlinked.

I think that as long as you are honest with your clients, et cetera, and you’re telling them, “Hey, we are part of these networks.” You should be fine. You are open, you are out there and you are actually owning your content, which is what we have been preaching all of this time. I would definitely go the sub-domain route, just in terms of protection and to actually leverage your own SEO efforts. If you do like landscaping.bhs.com, and then you do home repair, home repair will be easier to rank than landscaping, and so and so of the subsequent domains because of domain authority, et cetera. I think that would be the best way to go.

Marco: I went over this on Monday. You validate the entity, right? That’s why all these people can get away with it, all these other big companies. The difference between those and private blog networks is entity creation. They validate it, we don’t. That’s when we get in trouble.

Bradley: That’s what I was saying. I would be trying to build that as a brand, Buffalo Home Services, because guys, brands are rewarded, in part because they’re validated entities, which is what Marco was just saying. That’s in part why they get rewarded, because there’s semantic validated entities. That’s part of it. That’s why I would say, go ahead and claim it. As far as the LLC, that’s up to you. That’s more of a business call, as to whether or not you’d want to have. IF you’re going to be building out a large network of sites all around that particular brand, then it would make sense to have a separate entity specifically for that business, for Buffalo Home Services.

For example, you guys know I run a ton of lead gen sites. I run everything under my main corporation, my local market consulting business. I just use, I’ve got some DBA’s, I’ve got to be honest, some of them I don’t have DBA’s for, but some of them I have DBA’s for. However, one of my clients is a particular contractor that I’ve got a bunch of sites for him, all over the place. That’s under a particular brand. In retrospect, I probably should have created a separate corporation for that, because I do a ton of lead gen stuff for him, and we do equity share anyway, and there’s some benefits to having a separate entity for that one particular business because we have such a network of sites, all from that same business. I don’t know if that makes sense.

What I’m saying is, I’ve got things underneath my main corporate marketing account that are in like the home services industry, a lot of different sites like that. I think for the larger sites, the larger projects that I work on that cover multiple sites, that should almost be its own entity. For accounting purposes, there’s a lot of benefits to having it like that. Again, that’s going to be a little bit more red tape on your part. It’s not hard to do though, LLC’s are easy to set up. Yeah, that’s how I would do it. I don’t see anything else left to answer in that question. That was a pretty intense question.

Greg says, “Holly just joined your IFTTT training this week, and have to say it’s …” That must be hi, it’s probably auto-corrected or something. “Just joined your IFTTT training this weekend. I have to say it’s one of the most organized courses I’ve ever seen, and I have seen many over the years. Good job.” Plus one that. Thanks Greg. Appreciate that.

How To Manage The Access Of An Account From Multiple IP?

Kevin says, “Hey guys, have a few questions about setting up networks. Do we only use one USA proxy per network, per business? Which accounts absolutely need to be phone verified? If any accounts ever need to be re-verified, does the number need to work to receive re-0verify messages, or do I need to paste the phone numbers to re-verify? What’s the best way to manage a client not being able to sign into an account to bind their IP, or client signs in for multiple different IP’s? Thanks as always.”

Okay, couple questions. One USA per proxy per network per business. No, you don’t have to do that man. You’d need a lot of unique proxies then. You don’t need to use any proxies if you’re only creating a handful of accounts. For example, the Get it Done network that I created for the IFTTT V2 training, I created that under my own IP. I showed how to use proxies, because I don’t build a whole lot of networks anymore, I have VA’s that do that for me. However, if I was building a bunch of networks, I would definitely be using proxies. I just don’t need them because I don’t build them very often anymore. If I build one network every three months, then I can create it under my own IP, it’s not an issue.

Kevin, if you’re building a bunch of networks, let’s say that you just have five dedicated proxies, then on Monday you build a network with proxy one, Tuesday proxy two, all the way through. When you get to the following Monday, you go back to proxy one again. Does that make sense? You’re just cycling through. It doesn’t matter. You can actually, we’ve tested this, but you can create two accounts, you can probably create more, but it will start to force the phone verification when you create the account. You can get away with creating two accounts, per IP, in a 24 hour period. If you’ve only got two or three IP’s or proxies, spread them out. Use it for 24 hours, create one or two account sets, and then switch to another proxy. Then in 24 hours, or more, let’s say you wait two days, you can go back and use that first IP again. That make sense?

As far as the phone numbers, what we do when we create the accounts, we record, take the phone number and copy and paste it into the spreadsheet, or account workbook. Then if we go to sign into the account and Google triggers the re-verification, which happens from time to time, most of the time all it’s going to ask you to do is paste the number in that was used when you created the account. You can just copy that phone number out of your spreadsheet, paste it in, and it will unlock your account. The other thing that you can do is create the page login, which is what I recommend, and that’s why it’s part of the process of the IFTTT, when we create the accounts and everything, is to create a Google page login. Guys, by the way, all these sign in issues that we’re talking about, pretty much are exclusive to Google. I don’t have sign in issues with any of the other accounts. It’s just Google that has this happen. Keep that in mind.

When I’m talking about a page login, I’m talking about creating a Google Plus page login, and logging in and doing everything through that, because that doesn’t trigger phone verification. If you have the page login details, you won’t get verification issues. You do get verification issues if you try to log into a profile, which is a main Google account, from a foreign IP. What I mean by foreign is I mean unrecognized, and unrecognized IP. Also, sometimes if it triggers a re-verification and it doesn’t give you the option to paste the phone number in that you used when you created the account, then it will ask you to put a new phone number in and verify that you’re human. It’ll be a text message.

Just so you guys know, we’ve been having trouble recently, even with our Philippines VA’s, being able to phone verify accounts using sim cards. I know that other people have had issues with like call fire numbers not working anymore. I know burner numbers are still working for Google, but those days are numbered probably as well. They’re getting much better at being able to determine whether they’re burner phone numbers, or throw away phone numbers or not. Just keep that in mind. I actually started buying phone verified Gmail accounts now, and that’s what our VA’s are actually using now as well, because we’re having difficulty phone verifying Google accounts the way that we had been. You can always buy phone verified accounts as well, is what I’m saying. All right. The provider that I’m using for that is listed in the IFTTT SEO Academy training. You can buy them from him.

What Are The Latest Anchor Text Rules When Building Web Pages?

Hump Day Inception. I love that. This is tag team back again. Whoop there it is. “What is the latest anchor text rules when it comes to building web pages? Iftu brought a question, what not to do when building anchor text.” Just don’t hammer away on exact match anchors, mainly. Stick with mainly brand and URL anchors. What else you want to say? Longer phrases. Use questions. Questions are great for anchor text right now, because that triggers the mobile and the rank brain and hummingbird. Right Marco? It tickles those parts of the algorithm?

Marco: It’s the Google tickle, man.

Bradley: The Google tickle.

Hernan: There’s also a great tool that I’m going to paste on the event page. It’s called Title Generator, which I have been using for, some of them make sense. You just put a keyword, whether it’s a noun or a verb, in a box and it will generate a ton of titles that you can actually use them as titles, but use them as anchors as well, from within your post, whether linking internally or externally. It’s a great tool. It’s free, it’s super simple. Some of the titles do make sense, some of them don’t, but I think it’s a great tool to generate those long anchors that we want to use to have a more natural anchor text.

Bradley: Yeah. That’s a great point. The other thing is, guys, you know one of my favorite tools of all times ever is Power Suggest Pro. This is a great tool too. Stick your keyword in there, have a handful of keywords. I’m sure you already have those anyway. Use Google. You can actually use Yahoo and Amazon and Bing, and everything else as well, YouTube if you want, it doesn’t matter. My point is, post your keyword in there, then hit search, it’ll spit out a long list of suggested phrases from any one of the search engines that you select. Those will give you great ideas for anchor text too, because they’ll be very diverse, and it’s stuff that people actually type in and search for. Those are great keywords to use. You don’t have to just stick with Google either. You can get other ideas. We’re talking about just for generating anchor text. Keep it diverse, but it’ll still have your keyword in it. These are great terms for anchor texts.

What Are The Anchor Text Rules For Citation Descriptions?

That’s Adam yelling at me again in the Slack chat. “Also, what are the anchor text rules regarding citation descriptions?” I don’t know what you mean by that? Anchor text rules regarding citation descriptions? If you just mean like, what is your keyword rules regarding citation? With citation descriptions, I try to give it like a compelling, consider it a call to action, because most citation descriptions are going to be very limited in how much you can put in there. A lot of times they’re very short descriptions. They won’t allow you more than like 500 characters, and even sometimes that’s a lot. Sometimes it’s like 200 characters, something like that. Usually when I’m doing citation descriptions, and I hope this is what you’re asking about, DC, because maybe I’m just misinterpreting the question.

Usually citation descriptions are very little, so they don’t offer a lot of room. Most of the time, obviously, I’m purchasing them from a citation building service like Loganix or Marketer Center. They will give you a little text area that you put in the short business description, and that’s what’s going to be used anyways. As far as that, I usually just try to get the main keywords into the citation description. Whatever the main services or product that I’m selling. Most of the stuff that I do is for service, you know tree service, for example, we’ll say, “Offering residential and commercial tree trimming and removal services in blah blah blah area and surrounding areas.” You get the keyword in there, the service keyword, the location keyword, that’s all I usually do. It’s very short. It’ll say, “Call for an estimate.” Whatever, very short, compelling call to action, but it has the keywords in there. Just don’t stuff it if you don’t need to.

The other thing to keep in mind, this is a question that comes up often, when people say, “Well how do you get to rank in the maps pack for your secondary keywords? If you’re ranking for your primary keywords, how do you rank for your secondary keywords?” Well that’s one way guys that you do it. Build additional citations on other directories. You’re going to have your core citation directories that you want your business in, in the business description, you’re going to want to put the main keywords, your primary keywords. When you get done, you want to go after the secondary directories, hyper local directories, things like that, where you put in the secondary keywords in the business description. That’s going to start to build that other relevancy to that listing. That will help you to start to rank, that and other things that you can do, will help to rank for other keywords in maps, as well as you can also do that same process to rank in other maps areas.

That’s a little bit more advanced, and we talk about that inside the MasterMind. Hopefully that makes sense to you. As far as anchor text, there is no anchor text that I know of in citation descriptions, so I’m not sure what you meant by that, other than I’m just assuming you mean keyword density, essentially.

What URL Shortener Would You Recommend In Lieu Of Bitly?

“What shortener would you recommend in lieu of …” For what, Clint? I’m not sure what you mean.

Chris: In lieu of Bitly.

Bradley: In lieu of Bitly. I don’t know, we use Google for a bunch of shit, but there’s a ton of link shorteners.

Hernan: Yeah, in fact, I pasted a link that has 25 or something URL shorteners. Some of them are 301, some of them are 302. It’s a nice resource that you can tinker with.

Bradley: Here’s another one too. This is URL shorteners that allow redirects. Here’s a bunch of list right here. You guys see this?

Hernan: Just be careful with GO or GL, you seen them? Not to spam directly. We had some issue by doing that.

Bradley: 301 link shorteners. Yeah, like I use Google Links very strategically. I want Google to know what I’m doing with those, so I don’t use them for pure spam campaigns, but I do use them for a lot of other things. Okay, we’ve got give more minutes. Anna was trying to get us out of here early.

How To Fix Issue With YouTube  Video Views Recipe On CrowdSearch?

Josh Bailey says, “Having trouble with the recipe for YouTube video views that you were using, Bradley, on CrowdSearch. Maybe it was a user error. Does it still work for you?” That recipe for YouTube video views that you were using, Bradley, on CrowdSearch. I don’t know what you mean. Sometimes the CrowdSearch clicks don’t register as views, but that’s not the point. Honestly, it’s really not the point, guys. The point is to show, if you’re talking about the referral traffic, it’s the referral traffic.

When somebody clicks on to the YouTube video link, whether it registers your view, it doesn’t matter because YouTube is aware that there was a visitor that watched the video, and they know where they came from, because they know what the referrer was. With the referral traffic, I’m assuming this is what you mean. I know sometimes your campaign will run and you’ll go back and you won’t see your view count going up, but it doesn’t matter. That’s why I use the goo.gl short links as my last hop to the video, so that I can go look at the analytics, the click analytics, on that short URL, inside of goo.gl, and I can see the clicks being delivered to the YouTube video.

It will show the referrer, the browser that they were using, where they’re located, all of that. As long as YouTube is seeing that data, which they are, you’re still getting the benefit. Whether the view registers or not, it doesn’t make a difference. Does that makes sense? Hopefully that’s clear, and I hope that’s what you were asking for. I still use the campaigns all the time, and the view count doesn’t go up, but it doesn’t matter, my videos see improvement in ranking because of it.

Would You Avoid Using Huffington Post’s RSS Feeds When Using Authority Sniper?

Sky says, “When using authority sniper would you avoid RSS feeds such as the Huffington Post?” Well it depends Sky. If you can get a category post that would be aligned with the topic, then it wouldn’t be such a bad idea, but you certainly don’t want to go with their broad, because there’s too many damn topics. It would be unrelated. Sky, but you can do something like Feed Rinse. If you go to feedrinse.com, you should be able to create. I don’t know if you can still get into it or not, but if you have a Feed Rinse account, you should be able to go in and create a filter that will only allow certain posts. It will generate a custom feed from Huffington Post. It will only allow certain posts to pass that contain a hashtag or a keyword, or whatever it is that you set up. A specific tag, whatever.

What Are Some Good WordPress Themes For Affiliate Websites?

I know we’ve got to go. We’ve got two minutes guys. “In one of the earlier Hump Day Hangouts, you recommended a Word Press theme that may be good for affiliate websites. Can you give you affiliate link to that Word Press theme? Thank you.” Don’t know which one you’re talking about Ganty, sorry.

Adam: Ganty, if you leave it on the page, type it in here, we’ll get back to you on the page afterwards, just let us know what it is.

Bradley: Probably the one that I was talking about, because I always use Ink Themes, guys. I have been for years. However, I really live Thrive’s themes now, like the whole Thrive plug ins and themes suite is really good. Ink themes, they have one in here, it’s an affiliate, product review type site. It’s not bad. I just like Ink Themes because I’ve been using them forever. You can check that one out, that’s probably the one I was talking about.

“I’m in MasterMind. What else do you need?” That’s right. Anything else guys? I know we’ve got to go. It looks like we’re just about done. All right. Sweet. We’re done.

Hernan: Yup we’re done.

Bradley: All right guys. Thanks for everybody being here, and our experiment with Facebook Live, as I look directly into the mobile phone. I don’t know how that came out. We’re going to go back and review it, and we’ll see what it’s like for next week. We’ll make it better for next week. Thanks everybody for being here.

Adam: See you guys.

Chris: Bye everyone.