Click on the video above to watch Episode 90 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.
Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.
The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.
Announcement
Adam: Hello everybody and welcome to episode 90 of Hump Day hangouts. Today is the 27th of July and we’ve got almost the full group here, so we’re going to do our thing and go down the line. Hernan, how’s it going man?
Hernan: Woo! Doing good. Excited to be here.
Adam: Cool man, good deal. Marco, what’s the weather?
Marco: It’s warm and sunny man, and it’s the rainy season.
Adam: Oh nice. Bradley, what’s up?
Bradley: Hi guys. Happy to be here.
Adam: Good deal. We just got off a webinar. It was really awesome. Speaking of webinars, tomorrow, who we were just talking to, I’m going to butcher his last name probably, but Abbas Ravji. You guys might know him from [Soshisend 00:00:43]among many other products. He’s got some really awesome stuff, and he’s going to be talking to our MasterMind members about his product Video Marketing Blitz. They’re going to get first crack at talking to him, and getting some one on one time talking to him and learning about what he’s doing. That’s going to be tomorrow during our mastermind webinar. Other than that, I think that’s about it for right now. Hernan, do you have anything?
Hernan: No, I think we’re good.
Marco: I have the first Hump Day Hangout question for you guys, when the hell are you guys going to start Rant Mastery? Inquiring minds want to know.
Adam: We’re supposed to start. I said last week that we were going to wait until we got entries from last week before we started. I haven’t even checked, I’ve been so damn busy.
Bradley: I checked. We got a few. I think the first Rant Mastery is going to be a rant about too much shit to do and too little time.
Adam: We will begin that shortly. Once we start, we’ll keep it going. It’s just a matter of that initial, everything has inertia. The only announcement that I had was, if we can grab the link and drop the link for the replay of how to live stream with OBS.
Bradley: I think I’ll have it in there in a minute.
Adam: On the event page so people can go view that in case they didn’t. We did the webinar last week on it and it went pretty well. I was able to edit it. It’s the replay, so it’s about 45 minutes of pure content. No pitch, there’s nothing to buy guys. There’s no sales pitch at the end, nothing, it’s just pure content. Go check it out if you haven’t already, it’s pretty cool. That said, I’m going to go ahead and grab the screen, unless anybody has anything else?
Bradley: Good.
Adam: Okay, let’s do it. Let’s grab it and go. Today we’re not live steaming the Facebook because we just finished another webinar and I didn’t have time to set it up. It’s just on Google today. Okay, let’s get into it.
Does Having A Category Page Cause Duplicate Content Issues As It Is Displaying Full Text?
All right, so Mark O’Connell is the first one up, and he says, “Hi guys, hope you are well. Got a quick question for you. I have a site and I’m using a free theme, not so much customization there, but I’m not too bothered about this. But for my blog, I have it on a certain category page so I can have blog/post name. My question is, will this cause duplicate content issues as it is displaying the full text on the category page? Do I need to find a way to no index the blog category page, or should I just leave it alone? Many thanks.”
Yeah, Mark, actually that can cause problems. There’s a couple things that you can do to resolve that issue. Yes, one would be to no index the page, which you should be able to do that, I’m trying to think, you should be able to do that with Yoast, with the Yoast plugin if you’re using that. Most of the SEO plugins now will have that option, to be able to no index it.
You can also, I would say you could use a canonical, but the problem is with a category page, is that the content is going to constantly update. With a category page, it’s a blog role page, right? Every time you post a new post it’s going to publish at the top and push the previous post down. You could use a canonical, but I don’t know that that would work so well for that.
Typically for category pages, I just no index them, and that’s a setting inside the plugins. A Lot of the times it’s a universal, or global setting, so that you can go in and you can say, “No index category pages.”
In Yoast specifically, it’s under the titles and metas section. Then you’ll see taxonomies as one of the tabs at the top of that page. If you click on the taxonomy tab, you’ll see there’s the category pages that you can set to no index. I would leave them to follow, but no index, if that makes sense. That means the bots can crawl the page and follow the links from the blog index page, which is your category page in this case. You can set it to no index, no follow. What that means is, Google won’t index the page, and they also won’t follow any links. It tells the bots, “Don’t even worry about them.”
What I would suggest you do is leave it to follow, no index. That way the bots still crawl the category page, and find the blog posts and then the internal links and all that kind of stuff, but they just won’t index it. That’s very important guys.
That goes for tags as well. If you guys are using tags in WordPress, which you should, there’s SEO value there. The problem with tags guys is that a lot of times people will use like exact match keywords as their tags, because they think that that’s going to help to rank their page. It makes sense to want to put exact match keywords in as a tag. The problem is, with WordPress, by default, when you create a tag, by default, WordPress creates a corresponding tag page. If you have a unique tag on a post, then it’s going to create a separate tag page with the full text post, well depending on your theme, most of the time it’s a full text post of your post on a separate tag page.
The URL would be domain.com/tag/the tag as a slug. If it was like plumbing Atlanta, it would be plumbing-Atlanta. The problem is, that post that had Plumbing Atlanta as the tag is going to be a full text post on that separate tag/plumbing Atlanta page. Now you have 2 pages on your site with the exact same content. The only difference is the URL, it’s the exact duplicate content. That does cause problems guys. Duplicate content on the same domain does cause problems.
It doesn’t mean don’t use tags, it just means you have to first of all understand that. Second of all, if you’re not using tags as an advanced SEO tactic, which we talk about inside the mastermind, with using canonicals. You can do some real ninja stuff with tag pages if you’re using canonicals. We’re not going to get into that here, because that’s MasterMind level stuff anyways and we don’t want to confuse a bunch of people. If you’re not doing that kind of stuff with tags, then my suggestion is, you either globally set the tags to no index, so that it doesn’t cause duplicate content issues, or you only use tags that are more general, or broader keywords, that will be used across more than one post.
Here’s the thing, if you were to take a broader tag, using the example I’ve just mentioned. Let’s say plumber is your tag, and it’s a plumbing site. Every single post on your site could use that plumber tag. If somebody clicks on that tag page, that tag page is going to show all the posts. It’s just like another blog index page. That’s not duplicate content, because you have the single post, and then you have the post which is showing up on a tag page along with other posts. It’s not duplicate content, because it’s 2 separate, there might be the same content on 2 pages, but the tag page has additional blog post entries as well, so it’s not duplicate content. Does that make sense?
My point is, if you’re going to use categories, or tags, or both, just be aware of that and you can set them, for most people, unless you’re doing advanced SEO work, I recommend that you just set your categories and your tags to no index. If you’re going to leave your tags to index, just be aware of it and make sure that every tag that you create is used for more than just one post. Hopefully that was clear and I didn’t just cause a bunch of problems. Hopefully that helps, Mark.
How To Fix Medium To RSS Feed Syndication Due To 5XX Server Error?
Beau says, “A question from Joss Bailey in master class …” This is a thread in the, I thought it was in the IFTTT SEO community, but anyway. It’s saying the medium is showing RSS feed is showing a 500 survey, it might be, Josh. I don’t do a lot of medium syndication, so I haven’t tested that since I developed the V2 training. If that’s the case, consider using medium as the trigger, instead of the RSS feed. You have to set up another recipe, and you would select if this, and your trigger would be medium, then, and then you set up your syndication trigger, or your syndication action, to whatever property you want to syndicate to. That’s what I recommend.
Every now and then, if you run into issues where the RSS feeds are giving you trouble, you can often times use the actual property itself as the trigger instead of the feed. I don’t recommend that you do that. I like to use, on a regular basis, because we’ve tested it, like using Blogger as a trigger, or Tumbler as a trigger, or WordPress as a trigger, and some strange things occur at times with those. It’s better just to use the feed. It seems to be more reliable. This is over 4 years of testing, guys. Sometimes, in a unique situation like what Josh is talking about here, you might be better off just using medium as the trigger instead of the feed, if that makes sense.
How To Use Scrape Box For Yellow Pages?
Beau says, “Is anyone using ScrapeBox? Would love to learn how to use it to scrape Yellow Pages. I know there’s a plugin, but my country it is not supported.” I have not, which is like blasphemy as an SEO, I know. I’ve never used ScrapeBox ever, which should be a tool in everybody’s toolbox, I hear, but I’ve just never actually used it. I can’t help you with that. Hernan, you want to comment on that, or Marco?
Hernan: Yeah, it’s like a Swiss Army knife, so you need to have it. I haven’t used it specifically for scraping Yellow Pages, so I’m not entirely sure what you want to do on that. If you want to post that on the mastermind, maybe we can go through it together and see what we can do with it. If you’re searching for outbound links, you can go through back links. If you’re searching for, for example, contact details and whatnot, we can make it happen. I’ve done it in the past, for Yellow Pages in my country.
Adam: Yeah. There’s also some yellow Pages scrapers out there too that you can probably buy, that are just standalone scrapers. I agree though, if you can learn how to use Scrape Box. I just never wanted to go through the learning curve of using it. I would just hire somebody off Odesk, well it used to be Odesk, now Upwork. It’s been a long time since I’ve hired somebody for that specifically, but I would just hire somebody from Upwork to do Scrape Box stuff for me.
How To Silo A Website With Multiple Services Pages?
Okay Dan says, okay this is a question that came from the Facebook group, and I asked him to post it over here. Dan says, “Starting to use silos more because of the obvious benefits and had a question for Bradley, or one of the other guys. I have a new client that has a small site that is already established, but is fairly small, just 43 pages. It’s a telecommunication site that has a services page, that then lists out dozens of services. They do have sub-categories already created for just 4 of the services. The existing structure goes like this. Home, then services and then as a sub-category, service 1, 2, 3 and 4. I’d like to create a silo using the services as a top level page.
My question is, should I make the services page the top level and then create sub-categories for the services, or should I create separate silo structure for the services, IE, keywords I’m targeting, and then link back to the services page already created? It gets a little messy for already established sites, as to where you should start the silo structure. Any help, advice, is greatly appreciated.”
Great question Dan. This is something that we’ve covered a lot over the last year or so, in the mastermind and the master class. I don’t mind covering it here, that’s why I asked you to post it, but I don’t want this to open up a big can of worms. What I’m going to tell you is that the services page has absolutely no value to the silo structure. I never recommend using something … I see this mistake being made all the time with people trying to silo sites.
They’ll use something like a services page, or a locations page, or something like that as the top of the silo. Then they’ll use their keywords as sub-categories. That’s not the best way to do it. The services page makes sense for a navigational point of view. For visitors, the services page makes sense because for example, let’s say that you’re just going to target four services, like you’re showing here. Just main 4 service. Then from the home page, it could be that there’s not enough room in your navigation menu to list all four services. In fact, that can just look messy anyways, if you have all 4 services listed at the top in your main navigation menu.
What I always do, is I put a services page, just like what you’re talking about, but it’s not part of the silo, it’s just a navigational page. In other words, there’s a services tab on the top at the navigation menu, people click on that, it takes them to a page which then lists the services and a link to each of the top level pages. Each one of the services would actually be the top of the silo, they would each get its own silo. Each one of the service 1, service 2, service 3 and service 4, would be the top of the silo. The services page itself is only a navigational page for visitors. Meaning, they click on the services page, it takes them to an index page with maybe a brief description of each service, and a link that links to the top of the silo. They click that, and from there the silo structure begins. The services page does not need to be included in the silo structure, because it has no value to the silo itself.
The only time that it would make sense to have that is if this was a top level keyword, and you had sub-services that reinforced that. What do I mean by that? Let me try to kind of draw this out a little bit. Every time I break out the notepad or Snag It, you guys know you’re in trouble. Let’s try to clear this up a little bit.
All right, you know what, I’m going to use the remodeling keywords as the example, from like the Gainesville Home Pros master class case study. We’ll use something like that. We’re just going to say domain.com, can everybody see this well? Hopefully that’s coming through all right. Should I make the font bigger?
Hernan: Yeah, just in case, because we see it likely bigger than the guys actually see it.
Adam: How about that?
Hernan: Yeah, that works.
Adam: All right, so domain.com, then we’ll say domain.com/services, which would be just a navigational page. Then we’re going to say, keyword1, which is service 1. You guys get that. Just pretend for a minute. Domain.com/keyword2. These would be what I consider the top level silos, the silo heading. Then from here you would put your supporting articles beyond that. The problem that I see, or the mistake that I see a lot of people making, is where they would put this services as part of the silo structure. It doesn’t need to be because it doesn’t make sense. Occasionally it does, actually the service page itself really would never make any sense, I’ll give you an example, another way to structure this in just a second.
This is what I’m talking about, is where I see it like this. Where I see keyword1, and then make this the sub-category, and this be in the top level category. The thing is, the services page itself really doesn’t fit into any silo structure, especially if you’re listening for fairly unique services that aren’t closely related. Does that make sense? It doesn’t make sense to have 4 different types of services on one service page, and then have that be the top of the silo, because then you dilute all of your sub-silos. All of the sub-categories become diluted because the top level page isn’t reinforcing any one of the sub-categories, because it’s too broad, it’s too general. It’s listing 4 other services. You bleed the theme of the silo that way, and I see that mistake being made a lot.
Instead, what you want to do is just use that as a navigational page. People click on this page, it takes them to a page where it lists these 4 services, and a blurb about each one of them, and a link that they can click which then takes them to the top of the silo page. You want to keep each silo page separate, each category from there. The only time that I would recommend that you would do something like that, is if you have a broad category, that then you have sub-categories within.
What do I mean by that? Let me explain. For example. Domain.com, let’s say remodeling. Remodeling as an example. Remodeling is a very broad term, because aren’t there sub-categories within remodeling? Yes there are, of course. Like kitchen remodeling, bathroom remodeling, basement remodeling. Those are just 3 examples. My point is, instead of having a services pages, if I was building a remodeling site, like what I’ve done for, you guys can go look at GainesvilleVA.localhomepros.net, something like that. I can’t remember off the top of my head. Gainesville Home Pros, just go look that up in Google and you can take a look at an example of a mono-siloed site, which is using this exact same method here, the structure that I’m sharing.
Remodeling would be the services page here, but then there’s sub-categories. This makes sense for this to be the top of the silo when it looks like this. Remodeling, let’s say kitchen, and we’ll do remodeling bathroom. Then lastly, remodeling basement. These right here would be sub-categories in which all of these would link back up to the, and I’m using air quotes now, but the services page, because this is the broader category.
Just having a services page in general, to listing the others, doesn’t make sense to a silo. Again, if it does, it’s typically not going to be a services page, it’s going to be the top of a silo anyways. Hopefully that makes sense. I hope, Dan, that that was clear. We’ve got some really in depth training covering this inside of the MasterMind. Also I do have some videos. I think you might have seen them, but if not we can drop the simple silo and complex silo videos on the events page here and you can take a look at those. That will kind of explain some more of this as well, in more depth. Was that a decent explanation? I feel like sometimes I confuse more people.
What Are Some Training Resources For Online Reputation Management (ORM)?
All right, Greg says, “I enjoyed the ORM video.” Okay, that’s the online reputation video that Hernan created in IFTTT training. “Can you guys recommend any other training resources for online reputation management? Or your favorite tools along with IFTTT, for someone like me that wants to master the reputation business? Thanks as always, and glad to be here.”
As far as I know, I know that David Sprague has a lot of good online reputation management tools. What’s it’s called? Reputation Kahuna and stuff like that. I know he’s got a few tools that are pretty powerful.
Adam: Yeah. I’ve not done a lot of that work. I’ve touched on it for existing clients, if something pops up. I’s not a specialty of mine, but I know that David Sprague has got some pretty good stuff. Like Hernan just said, Local Client Takeover, they’ve got some good stuff too. Anything that they put out is really good too.
Will Having A YouTube Red Upgrade Helps A Video Ranks Faster?
Dr. Josh Bailey, he’s going to be on the MasterClass today, in the hot seat actually. That’s kind of cool. He says, “Will having a YouTube Red upgrade help give my account a boost and rank the video faster?” That’s a great question. I saw this earlier, Josh, and I don’t know the answer to that because I haven’t started playing with it yet. I’m not even going to speculate, but it’s something that I think would be worth testing. I, unfortunately, have not tested it just yet, but at some point I will, and I’ll let you guys know.
Don’t let that stop you. Check it out. I’m not sure if you have to sign a contract with that, because I haven’t really looked into YouTube Red that much. If it’s just like a month to month thing, where you pay for subscription services or whatever, then it may help, and why not give it a shot and try it and see? That’s something we will test, I just haven’t had time to do it yet. Once I do, I’ll certainly let you guys know.
What Are Some Best Practices In Selling An Old Domain?
Tom says, “After 41 years in business …” Wow Tom, good for you buddy. “I’m looking to retire at the end of the year. My 11 year old domain, FinePhotos.com, has some good metrics I believe. How can I best prepare to sell something like this?
You know I’ve never flipped an actual website. I’ve flipped domains, that’s how I made my first dollar online, believe it or not, was flipping domains many years ago. I’ve never actually sold full blown websites. I know you can.
Bradley: I’m going to find something. Somebody asked this the other day, and While you’re talking I’m going to go an pull this up. I think it’s Empire Flippers did a podcast, either that or the Tropical MBA, and they went through a whole due diligence thing over 2 or 3 podcasts, which is really good. I’m going to take a look and see if I can find that.
Adam: I know you can use like Flippa, and then there’s like Ebay, people sell sites on Ebay. Go ahead Hernan.
Hernan: I was about to say, Empire Flippers, Flippa, those are like the go to places. I had good results, Tom, putting that and being open about it, on Facebook groups. Recently I sold, I think it was a batch of 30 Amazon sites. They were doing some decent amount of money but I didn’t have the time to dedicate to them, so I sold them as a batch. I had good response from the guys on Facebook groups. Like the Proper PBN Group, and maybe Niche Hacks group. If you’re out there looking for SEO groups and you say, “Hey guys, where can I sell this?” You’ll get contacted by a ton of people. You will need to weed out the serious bids and the serious offers, from everyone else, but I think those are extra places. It was like my first time flipping a website as well.
Bradley: Yeah and I know using a site flipping website, like Flippa, for example, is pretty good because it’s like an escrow company. In other words, you put your thing up for auction, people bid on it, then the transfer goes to the Flippa company, like in escrows basically. Then the money comes to them. Once the money has cleared, then they release the site to the buyer, and then they release the funds to you. It kind of protects you as a seller, and it protects the buyer too.
Doing something like that, there’s a fee associated, there’s no doubt, but at least it protects. If you’ve never done it before, I don’t know that I’d want to sell direct to a buyer on my own. I would probably kind of want to have a mediator or an escrow company in the middle, kind of moderating it and handling it for me. Personally, that’s how I would do it, but I’m sure you could probably make more money selling it direct, but then there’s some danger in that too. Good question.
How To Place Schema On A Locations Page?
Beyond Measure says, “Was curious about placing Schema on locations page. If I have a locations page on the main domain with links to multiple sub-domain locations, how would you add structure …” Here I’m going to show you actually. Instead of me trying to explain it to you, give me a second while I locate, there’s a really good article, it’s funny because I had saved this into my Pocket account, and I use this often when people ask me about multiple location schema code. Then Marco posted the same article in the MasterMind just a few days ago. This was Schema, or maybe it’s micro-data, let’s see. This is it here.
This is a great article about multiple locations and how to do the schema and the JSON. This is with micro-data here. It looks like he just covered it as micro-data, but the same thing should occur. Yeah, you would probably what to do this anyways, especially if it’s going to be on a specific page. If you have a locations page, I’ll post this link on the events page, guys in just a second. This is micro-data and see that’s how I do it.
For example, I’ll use a root domain as my corporate site, so to speak, for my lead gen properties. Then I create sub-domains for different cities, and those are the actual locations. What I’ll do is on my corporate site I’ll have a locations page, and that’s micro-data added to that page, which is like HTML. It’s not JSON code that’s in the header, it’s actually HTML on the page, it’s micro-data. That’s what this is here, and that’s how I recommend that you do it. This is a great article about that, so I’m going to copy and paste it on the events page. Micro-data for multiple locations.
In all of your sub domain sites, that’s where you would just go ahead and put JSON LD in the header, that’s how I recommend doing it. By the way, if you’re going to be coding this out on your locations page, on your WordPress site, keep in mind that your WordPress theme is most likely going to strip the micro-data from it when you save the post, or publish the post. If you switch between HTML editor and the visual editor, it will strip the code. A lot of themes do that, it’s just kind of a default WordPress thing. There’s a plugin that you can use that will prevent that from happening, it’s called Raw HTML. Any time you’re doing micro-data work on, it’s a WordPress plugin called Raw HTML, guys, so just go Google Raw HTML and you can download the plugin. You can actually find this from inside your WordPress dashboard too. Just go to the plugins page, the screen, and search for it.
What you do is basically you wrap the text. You use the text editor in WordPress, and then you’re going to wrap all the micro-data into these short codes, which is square bracket raw, and then you close the tag too with square bracket close the tag raw. Does that make sense? That’s all you do. You wrap it in these tags, and then save the post or publish the post, and it will prevent WordPress from stripping the micro-data from the post. Hopefully that was helpful.
How To Redirect The Category Page To The Location Page If It Was On The Root Domain?
Okay, second question. “If time, when building out location pages … Let’s see, I have a category on the main domain for each location, for the category page on the root domain. Yup we 301, redirect the category page to the sub-domain location that corresponds to, similar to how you would redirect the category page to the location page if it was on the root domain.” Sure you can do that. Yeah, you absolutely can, because the beautiful thing about that is if you’re syndicating content from the root domain, if you’re using your root domain as your content distribution engine, to build links to all your sub-domain sites, which is what I do.
I only build a network around a sub-domain site if I need it. If I have a particularly stubborn sub-domain site that’s not ranking as well as I would like it to, then I’ll build a separate sub-domain specific network. I would just use the same brand, but what I’ll do is I’ll add the local modifier to the brand name, and then build my network out that way. Then I’ll actually syndicate content from that sub-domain site to its own network.
For the most part, for multiple location sites, I’ll just use the route domain as my content distribution engine. My blog will be on the root domain, and I’ll use that to 1 branded tier 1 network, that will then build links. I’ll use the main blog to build links to all my sub-domain sites. You can absolutely do that. The way you’ve got this set up right here is how I would do it. You set up the categories on your root domain, and then you publish posts within each location specific category. You’re going to always want to link back up to that location page, which you could have 301 redirected to the sub-domain, and that would absolutely work. That’s a good strategy you’ve got there man. Let’s see, we do 301 redirect to city.nn, then widget category city 2, yes, that’s exactly how I would do it. That works, so good job.
How Many Rankfeedr Feeds To Create Per Page To Rank Locally In Medium Competitive Niches?
Kevin says, “Hey guys. How many rank feeder feeds should we create per page? We are trying to rank locally and medium comp niches.” I would just do one. The thing is, if you make it a sticky, if you want to insert the page into the feed and make it sticky, those of you that have Rank Feeder, you know what I’m talking about. Those of you that don’t, just tune out for a minute. If you have Rank Feeder, you can create a sticky item in the feed. Then I would just create 1. Personally that’s what I would do, and I haven’t tested other methods yet, so I don’t know. Maybe creating more than one feed would work, but I don’t know why you would need to.
The thing is, if you make that page, or that item, sticky in the feed, then all of the other feeds that you splice into that rank Feeder feed, that are going to update that feed with content, without you having to do anything because you let other people’s feeds update the Rank Feeder feed with new content. Then all of that new content, every time a new item gets inserted into that feed, from all the other content sources, it’s going to ping that feed to be re-crawled, by the directories and the aggregators that the feed’s been submitted to, and every time that feed gets crawled, your sticky URL, your page in this case, is going to get crawled too. It’s going to be that association is going to be made, that’s co-citation guys.
That co-citation will be made because every single time that feed gets pinged and crawled, it’s going to also notice your page URL. It’s going to associate, via co-citation, your page with all of that other content reinforcing the theme. Personally I don’t see why you would need to create additional Rank Feeder feeds. There is the law of diminishing returns, and that’s the same thing as like, in the advanced RSS training inside of the IFTTT SEO Academy, where people ask questions and they say, “How many feeds should I splice? Once I create a splice feed, should I create a feed burner feed out of it? Then should I go back and splice the feed burner feed in with other feeds that I’m splicing together?”
At some point, you need to move on. What I’m saying is, with the Rank Feeder, the way I have used it and the way I understand it is you only need the one feed with the sticky post, because it’s going to constantly be updated with new content from other sources, which is going to associate your content with them. Reinforces the overall theme. I wouldn’t waste time creating multiple feeds for that stuff, is my point.
Can You Mark A Penalized Website With No-Index And Then Re-use The Content On A New Site?
Greg Pippin. Hey Greg. He went MIA for a minute, but he’s back. “Hi Bradley. A site of mine got a Google penalty last year that still exists. 6 months ago I added 15 new pages with good original content to the site with no positive effect in removing the thin content penalty.” Well, if it was a thin content penalty, that means it was a manual penalty. When you get a manual action penalty, you have to resubmit for reconsideration. You have to submit a reconsideration request in order to get the penalty removed. The penalties don’t just arbitrarily remove themselves, Greg.
The thing is, even though you added content, the only way that that penalty would be removed is if, by chance, another person from the web spam team happened to just review your site a second time, at random your site got selected in the Google lottery to be reviewed, and they noticed that there was a penalty levied at some point, but now it has been resolved and then they lift it. The chances of that happening are slim to none. You probably would get struck by lightning before that ever happens.
My point is, whenever you have a manual penalty, you have to submit a reconsideration request in order to have it reviewed and then the penalty lifted. Adding new content may have solved the problem, but you have to notify Google of it. You do that in Google search console, or webmaster tools. The only way that you know you got a penalty is because it’s already in search console. Go to the messages, or just go search Google, submit reconsideration request to Google. It will walk you through the help files on how to do it.
Hernan: Hey Bradley, just before you move forward. I just saw Greg, so we can keep elaborating on this issue. He said that he sent 4 reconsideration requests, all rejected, so the site is dead. Maybe because you’re still keeping those thin content posts, or 15 pages, or whatever. What would happen if, instead of adding new pages with good original content, you should switch the content from those pages that are getting the penalty. Because most likely, you can get like a side wipe penalty, or they are penalizing a couple of pages. What would happen if you erased them, or unpublished them, or maybe even improved those pages and sent them a new reconsideration request?
I know that sometimes you just want to grab everything and run to a new domain, but you could give it a go. If it’s from last year, probably the website has some authorities still, so I think it will be, mostly because it’s something that’s within your control. Thin content penalties are really within your control. They’re not like link penalty, that you are being blasted, those kind of things, or you have been misbehaving with Google. Those are harder to solve. Thin content penalty, they are within your grasp. I think that you could actually solve them.
Bradley: That’s the thing. With on site penalties are typically able to be resolved. Off site penalties are a lot harder. Penguin penalty, link type penalties, are a lot harder to resolve usually. On site stuff can be resolved. Greg, that’s great, now that I know that you have submitted a reconsideration request several times, I would move on. What I mean is, I would go ahead and just literally take, like what you’re saying in the second part of your question. Take the content, put it on a new domain. I’ve had manual spam action, or manual penalties before. I will only try resubmitting, or submitting a reconsideration request one time. That’s it. I won’t waste any more time.
I’ll try to resolve the problems that they told me were the problems in the message, in search console. I’ll try to resolve that, and then I’ll submit a reconsideration request, and if it gets rejected, I copy the content from one site. Basically I just clone the WordPress site, install it on a new domain, and then delete the old domain. That’s all I do. Because I don’t waste any more time. You might as well bang your head against the wall. If you’ve submitted 4 different reconsideration requests, and you haven’t been able to have it lifted yet, chances are it’s never going to get lifted, so yes you can reuse the content on another domain. Just make sure that you delete the other domain once you’ve moved it. What I recommend doing is just cloning it, and inputting it on a new domain. Move on Greg, is my point. If the site and the content And everything is something that you want to keep, that’s fine. You’re just going to have to change domains, is my point.
What Is The Best Way To Download A Video From YouTube?
Okay, Jonathan says, “What is the best way to download a video from YouTube?” I don’t know if it’s the best way, but it’s the way that I use. There’s a plugin for Firefox, it’s called Video Downloader, and that’s what I use. It’s a Firefox browser plugin, it’s called Video Downloader. In fact, if I open up Firefox, I’ll just show you what it looks like real quick. You can’t do it from Chrome. Chrome won’t let you do it, at least as far as I know, Chrome won’t allow you to download a video directly from YouTube. This, up here, if you guys are seeing my full screen.
Video Downloader is this one right here, and whenever I go visit a page that has a YouTube video, or any video for that matter, this animates, and then I can click on it and it will show me the different file formats that are available for me to download. For example, YouTube has a bunch. Let’s just go over to YouTube real quick. We’ll go click on Marget Robbie, yeah, we can look at her for a minute. I can’t wait till Suicide Squad comes out, it looks like a pretty cool movie.
Okay, so you see how this kind of animated for a second and now it’s showing 7? If I click on that, it’s going to drop down and it’s going to show these different file formats, essentially the resolution. 1280 x 720 or 480 x 360 or whatever. If ti’s a 1080p video, it’ll give you that option as well. You just click on that and then tell it where you want to send the file on your computer, and that’s it. That’s what I use. I know there’s other plugins. There’s another browser plugin that I have right here, that puts a download button here. This is the one that I always end up using, though. Just pick one really. Go to Firefox and look for video downloader plugins for Firefox, and you’ll find one.
Hernan: That plugin in is really handy because it will allow you, not only from YouTube, but from Facebook, Vmail, whatever possible, from a ton of different media websites. That’s my point. I’ve been using it forever.
Bradley: All right, well I guess I’ll have to pause her for a minute. Moving on. Rant Mastery, we’ve got to get on that, man. Dan says, “Thanks, that’s the direction I’m going to take.” Great man. I’m glad that was helpful. I was worried that that might have confused you. That’s good. The services page is for humans, not for SEO. You’ve got to optimize for humans and optimize for SEO, and you’ve got to strike a balance between the 2. That services page would be a good navigational point for visitors, but for the bots, not a big deal. I wouldn’t put that as part of the silo because essentially you’ll bleed your theme and actually lower the overall effectiveness of your SEO.
Mike Wheaton, thank you Michael, I appreciate that, man. Simple silo structure, complex silo structure. Guys, go through both of those. Any time you’re doing a complex structure, that’s why I titled it complex silo structure. That’s an old term I just made up, and I did that seriously because that’s what it is. When you get to using multiple levels in your silos, they can become quite complicated. You’ve got to really plan out, any time you’re going to build out a silo structure with categories and sub-categories, you really have to map out your build before even attempting to build. There’s a lot of issues that can arise.
That’s why I always recommend, for 90% of the industries that you’re going to get into, a simple silo structure is all you need. Complex silo structures are for larger sites or for very competitive terms, or if you’re doing local and you’re covering a broad area, like a broad service area or something. Then complex silo structures are helpful, they’re useful. For 90% of all the stuff that our students do, doing local stuff or smaller affiliate sites and things like that, a simple silo structure is all you need. I recommend that you keep it simple guys.
Us, as SEO’s, always want to over complicate stuff. I used to do the same thing, but I’ve learned over the years to keep it simple, and try to always accomplish what I want to accomplish with the least amount of work. Simple silos are so much easier to set up, requires a hell of a lot less thought and planning. I build most of my sites under the simple silo structure method, or the model. Then the complex silo structure’s only for sites that I know can produce a hell of a lot of money, or if I’m going into a really competitive industry.
Keep it simple guys, don’t over complicate stuff. If you want to get over complicated, there are plenty of other SEO training companies out there, or groups, that will make your head spin with the way they over complicate shit. One of the things that we try to do here is keep it as simple as possible so that you can just take action and get it done.
Reputation Kahuna is closed to non-members. Well it might be Blake. Sometimes they’ll open that up, and I know I’ve contacted David Sprague’s support before, when there’s been offers closed, and asked him if he’d send me a link to join, and I have gotten it. You might be able to just contact him and get it. Anything else? I know we’ve got to go in about 5 minutes.
Adam: I think Dan had a follow up. Let’s see.
Bradley: Okay, this is a follow up to your question, “My question is, the site in question already has 4 silo pages, created with the services page as children.” They’re child pages to the services page, is what you’re saying. “Would you recommend 301-ing the services/silo1/silo1 or leave it?”
Well the problem is, if you had 4 child pages underneath the service page as the parent, then which child page would you want to 301 that services page to? Maybe I’m mis-reading, okay I get it. Services/silo1 would redirect to just the silo1 as the top of the silo. Then services/silo2 would redirect to silo 2. I get it. Okay, yeah I would do that, because if you already had links built to this silo 1 page, when you change the URL structure, you would basically lose all those inbound links. I would absolutely 301 that to this. Once you changed the URL structure, you’re going to want to 301 the old one.
One of the things that you can do is just open a spreadsheet and put your old URL structure in one column, and your new URL Structure in the next column. That will help you to keep track of it, and it’ll be easy to do. If you’ve got a lot of pages, if you’re using the simple 301 redirects plugin, there’s an add on for that, and I think it’s free too. It’s called bulk 301 redirects, or something like that. It’s just an additional plugin that you install that works with simple 301 redirects, and it allows you to upload a CSV, so that’s what I do.
When I’m doing a site restructuring, that had a bunch of pages, and I’ve got to do a whole bunch of redirects, I just create a spreadsheet. Put all the old URLs in the left column and the new URLs in the right column. Then I just upload the CSV file using that simple 301 redirects plugin with the add on, which I think is bulk 301 redirects. It does it all very quickly. All it does is it codes it and adds it to your HT Access file. It does it from within WordPress automatically.
Richard says, “Exactly what I was looking for.” I don’t know what you’re referring to, but plus 1 it anyways. Shannon says, “Using your example of domain.com remodeling keyword1, keyword2. If you have a keyword of remodeling in the root domain, than I’m sure it would not be good to have remodeling again in the silo, like domain.com. Yeah, exactly. That’s why I don’t use those keywords in the root domains. That’s why I always talk about buying branded domains instead of using keyword rich domains. If you already have it, then yeah, you have to adjust accordingly.
What I’m saying is, let’s say the company’s name is Joe’s Remodeling. He has remodeling in the root domain already. Then yes, I would change the slug here to something else. For example, I might say renovation or renovations, something like that. That would be the slug, because it would be different from remodeling, it’s a reinforcing keyword, so it wouldn’t be redundant, is my point. You have to keep that in mind. When I built the case study site for the Gainesville Home Pros site, I used Gainesville home Pros as the title of the domain, or it was Local Home Pros, but with Gainesville as a sub-domain. There was no remodeling in the domain, and that’s why I don’t ever recommend that you put a keyword.
I don’t use exact match domains for that reason. I’d rather be able to insert the keyword at the proper point within the silo structure, than have it in the root domain, which means that I could over optimize very easily. That’s why we always recommend using branded guides. Yeah, exact match domains still work, there’s no doubt they still work, but it just makes it trickier when you’re adding content and stuff like that to it, and building silo structures, it makes it a little bit trickier. It makes it easier to over optimize too, which can trip the filter, the Google filter, and trigger an algorithmic penalty.
So much fun here. Oh good, we’re almost done. It’s perfect timing. “I see about 12 video downloaders in the plugin area. What is the exact name of the plugin please?” I think it’s called Video Downloader.
Adam: Yeah, Hernan hooked him up with a link. He’s good to go.
Bradley: That’s called Video Download Helper.
Hernan: Video Download Helper, yeah. I just posted the link over there too.
Bradley: Do I have to close this page again? Dammit. Sorry.
Do You Stay Away From Using Google For Searches To Avoid Any Footprints On Your Online Persona?
Brianne says, “Marco shared a link about erasing info Google has about you on the Facebook group a couple weeks back. Do you suggest deleting info Google has on your profile?” I don’t, not for my main profile, because guys I do all my SEO work in Firefox under persona accounts anyways. Personally, I don’t give a shit if Google knows what my browsing history and stuff like that is. I don’t care. To be honest with you, I don’t care.
If it bothers you, yeah. Marco did. He deleted all of it. I really don’t care, because again, I do all my SEO in Firefox under persona accounts. I don’t care what they see in my activity in Chrome. You can, if you’re worried about that. You can put your tinfoil hat on. I’m just kidding with you, by the way. You could, you could put your tinfoil hat on and delete all your history. Make sure they’re not watching you.
Marco: Actually what I did was I deleted all of it, and then I’m using all kinds of different personas to see whether the information that I feed Google will influence anything that I’m doing on my website, I’m making a more positive effect. Generally I don’t care. You know me. I’ll give you any kind of track I want. I don’t care. This instance, I want to know how they’re using the information that I’m feeding them, and this is a way for me to control the information that I’m actually feeding them. It works both ways. They’re using my information, so now I want to see how I can use the information that they’re using to my advantage, if it can be used.
Bradley: Yeah, and that makes sense, to go in and look at your history that Google has on you, to see maybe if you’re leaving a footprint of some sort through your search history and browse history and stuff like that. That’s fine. It makes sense to do that. Like I said, I personally don’t. I just don’t care. The thing is, the way I look at it, my entire business is in Google Drive, literally. I’ve had so many people say, “IS that wise? Google can see everything you’re doing.” Google doesn’t give a damn about me. I’m a small fish. They’re worried about big companies and stuff like that.
I don’t really care, I’m just telling you I don’t worry about all that kind of stuff. Some people do, and by all means, do it. I’m not telling you don’t worry about it. You make your own decision, I’m just not the paranoid type. That’s why I do all of my SEO work in Firefox with personas and stuff like that. I’m always clearing cache and cookies, wiping my computer clean for the SEO work that I do, but my main profile, it’s obvious to Google that I do SEO work. To me, I just don’t worry about it so much.
Other than that guys, we’re done. It looks like it was perfect timing too. This gives us just a few minutes to get ready for the master class. We certainly appreciate everybody being here. There’s a couple new faces too, that I think came over from the webinar we just did with Abs. Welcome to you guys. We do this every single week. This is our 90th episode. We only had one week off in 90 episodes, and it was a scheduled week last year. I think we’ll take off one more week before our 2 year anniversary, which is coming up in 14 weeks. By the way, we’re going to be having a big blowout giveaway. Are we doing it on the 104th episode, the 2 year anniversary, or are we doing it on the 100th episode?
Hernan: I think we’re going to do it on the 2 year mark. The 52 week, but that’s still to be decided.
Bradley: Pay attention, that’s still 3 months out, but we’re going to give away mastermind membership, probably RYS Academy, a couple other things. Just be ready for that. Thanks everybody for being here. MasterClass starts in about 8 minutes or so. We’ll see you guys then. Thanks guys.
Hernan: Bye bye.
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