Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 58 Replay

Click on the video above to watch Episode 58 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 58 of Hump Day Hangouts. Today is the 16th of December. As you can hopefully tell, we are slowly approaching the holiday season, and I’ll let everyone show off their gorgeous headwear here as we go through it. How’s it going, Chris? Sorry, no headwear for Chris, but how’s it going?

Chris: Excellent. I’m the Grinch that stole Christmas.

Adam: Hey, Hernan, what’s up, man?

Hernan: Hey, everyone, it’s really good to be here. I have no hair wear, but I have some hair, so that should do.

Adam: And the soul patch, so I think that’s in competition with my beard. I see a lot of comments about … hey, Marco, what’s up?

Marco: Dude, there’s no way to make a Santa hat look cool. I was trying to get the headwear, but it ain’t happening, man.

Adam: Fair enough, fair enough. Bradley’s killing it with the troll ears, or the elf ears.

Bradley: Elf ears. I got this with my daughter at Christmastown over the weekend. She got a really tall Christmas tree hat that stands straight up. It was awesome, except that whenever we sat down in front of people, she had to take it off, because people couldn’t see around it. I wasn’t going to leave it on for the entire webinar, because it’s hot, but I did want to get a laugh out of it, and give Wayne Clayton a meme opportunity.

Marco: He gives Wayne too many meme opportunities.

Adam: I’m keeping mine on for the entire conference. I kind of like it. I’ve worn this to parties before, so I don’t know, it feels comfortable. I’ll put on my running hat here in a minute.

Bradley: You just wear that casually around the house, don’t you?

Adam: Yeah, you know, July, August, whatever. Out in the woods, freak people out. All right, let’s get the announcements out of the way and then we’ll get started. Real quick, I think we’ve mentioned it before, want to tell everybody we’re getting underway with IFTTT 2.0. We’ll have some more information about that coming up probably more towards the New Year and after that. Our MGP secret project is coming through, and we will have some more information about that after the New Year. Right now, all you get is an acronym and nothing else.

Let’s see, what else. Good news. Hump Day Hangouts are going to continue through December, so we’re going to have a Hump Day Hangout every single Wednesday through the year, and just keep rolling. Then I just want to remind everybody, head over to serpspace.com, sign up, it’s a free account, we’re going to be having some good things going on. All right, I’ve got to do better than that. We’re going to have some freebies and some good stuff coming up, so you want to have an account. That’s all I’m going to say for now.

Bradley: And that’s it for announcements?

Adam: I think so. Anybody else?

Chris: Yeah, get in while it’s free.

Bradley: You’re right, good idea. All right, so we’ve got a lot of questions already, it looks like. This should be a pretty packed webinar, and I want to go ahead and jump right on them, so I’m going to go ahead and grab the screen, and we’ll get to it. Okay, you guys see my screen okay?

Hernan: Yes.

Bradley: Okay. Let me lock it on there so it’s not bouncing around. There we go. We have Ryan, he’s got a very thorough question, as he often does.

Adam: Holy moly.

Direct Blog Posting/Link Building with Exact Match Keyword to Optimize Video in Tier 1 Networks

Bradley: Hello, Ed. Number one, I have a tier one blog post on a high PA/DA site, original content and images not part of an IFTTT network. I’m afraid it might get deleted if it senses related content, RSS feeds and auto-posting going on. With one exact match keyword contextual anchor in that post pointing to my money video, is it okay to build things directly to that blog post, URL directly from Syndwire, et cetera, to push the video up to page?

I’m assuming you mean you’ve got a link tier one blog post … I’m not quite following. Does somebody else follow on this?

Hernan: Yeah, I think it’s a third-party property. Not inside the IFTTT network but probably a web 2.0 property or a PBN post that he had somehow besides IFTTT network.

Bradley: Yeah, I mean, you should be able to. For example, if it’s a PBN site, and I’m not saying it is, but if it were, you can always build links to the PBN sites. That’s going to certainly help to the post where the link is is pointed back at your site. It’s a good way to do it. In fact, that’s also a good way to start theming the PBN in case it wasn’t themed properly, is to start building inbound links to the PBN that are topically relevant. That’s one way to do it, but it really doesn’t matter whether it’s a PBN or another Web 2.0. It could be a guest post somewhere. You can absolutely do that. In fact, one thing that I like to do for client work or for lead gen sites is find where, mainly client work, because for lead gen sites, they’re sites that I built, so I mainly go unresponsible for any links built to them.

But for client sites, there’s oftentimes links that get built to the sites either naturally or from previous SEO work that was done before I took over. I’ll go find those, and then I’ll start building links to those, because it’ll help to increase the power of those links. Sometimes you don’t need to build any links at all to the website, you just build them to the links that are already existing. That’s definitely something that you can do. You know, if it’s a property that you own, there’s certain things that you’d want to be careful with, and you don’t want to destroy somebody else’s. For example, you don’t want to spam somebody’s site with a bunch of spam links because you’re trying to juice that link.I wouldn’t recommend it, it’s not a very nice thing to do, but I don’t think you have to worry about that, Ed.

Adam: Yeah, that, and it might backfire on you, depending on where you’re doing it.

Bradley: Correct.

Hernan: Yeah, and that’s something that I wanted to say. If it’s a tier one, and you care about that tier one, the best thing that you can do is to actually take care of that tier one. If you are with an IFTTT property, take it really slow, really easy if you want to power that up. Please remember, guys, that sometimes, websites, they just lost rankings because of the fact of link loss. Link loss not only for your website, but also for your tier one. You can see that they slowly start going down in ranking, so if that’s your case, then you can reboost your tier ones, and that usually helps a lot.

Original Article with Related Keywords for Optimization Plus Other Strategies

Bradley: Yes, that’s correct. The next part would doing another new original article on another blog platform with another related keyword also helped move this up page one? Of course. I mean, again, that’s the whole point. We like to use IFTTT networks and automate as much as possible because obviously we’re looking to be able to scale. If you’ve only got one property or a couple of properties, something that you’re working on, only a handful of things that you’re working on and trying to rank, then you can do stuff a lot more manually, and that’s certainly going to help.

Another thing that helps a lot is doing press releases. I’m a huge fan of press releases, especially right now. They’re just really working well. We’re going to be doing some basic training on how to use press releases when we open that up inside of SERP Space, which is going to be soon. You’ll be able to order press releases, have them written and distributed right from inside of SERP Space. We’re going to do some training on that for best practices, how to optimize them and that kind of thing.

Press releases would be a great way. If you’ve got, for example, you could actually build links to that blog post that you mentioned in the first part of your question using press releases which will really boost it, or you could actually use press releases to link directly to the video itself, that’s another great strategy. Some press release distributions will allow you to actually embed a video. Not many, but some will, so that would help, as well. There’s a lot of things that you can do for that. Anything like that, Ed, it’s kind of common sense. You’re kind of answering your own question. Can you do this on another original article, on another blog platform, with another keyword? Yes, it will help.

Contextual Links for Video and Blog Optimization

Getting ready, couple weeks to order another IFTTT ring for use for WP video embeds as the trigger for older videos, as Adam suggested to me earlier in an earlier Hump Day Hangout. I’m seeing contextual links, anchors being given more power for rankings now, even with video now versus just pounding out embeds and bookmarks to the embeds. Do you guys feel the same way regarding using a few articles on a few different blogs and blog platforms with contextual anchors and raw URLs? Yes. Of course. I always say diversify. Embeds is very powerful, and social embeds is very powerful, and also social engagement, which is actually having people click on the video, watch it, that sort of thing is very powerful, but backlinking, too.

You always want to diversify your signals, period. That’s going to give you a boost if you diversify. Building links to the video itself is also going to help, okay? Again, if you do a combination of all of them, that’s the best, because that looks most natural. All right. If the answer is yes, I’m also assuming I can use long-tail exact match search keywords other than the one already in the post for the new anchors and the new bookmarking post description using Syndwire, et cetera … yeah, you always want to diversify your anchors, as well. You can’t hammer a YouTube video anymore, or you shouldn’t, with an exact match anchor, they’re the same keyword over and over again.

You’ll see that it won’t rank as well, or if it had been ranking, it can actually drop. Using the raw URLs is a great strategy. That’s what I typically do the most of, and then I’ll mix in some keyword anchors, but they’ll be a pretty good variation of keywords, if that makes sense. If I’m going after a local term, and it’s “plumber Dallas,” for example, I’m going to mix in different variations of that. Plumbing contractor, Texas plumbing company. I’m going to do all kinds of different variations of that keyword so that it’s not just hammering away on that one set keyword.

Hernan: That’s why we are asking you guys, when you purchase the IFTTT link building service, that’s why we are asking you guys for 300, 500 keywords. You can use something like Keyword Shitter, for example, which is free, I love that name, by the way. You can use that to put out an entire huge list of keywords that you can use for tools like GSA, for example. Yep, and that’s actually the strategy that we are using when powering up IFTTT networks, for example, on our link-building service.

Bradley: You can do that direct to a YouTube video, as well.

Hernan: Yeah.

Bradley: Although, just to let you know, I know Hernan will second this, is that I see good results with embedding the videos and in building links to the embedded properties instead of linking directly to the video. Once you have your embeds on your network or on even third-party sites outside of your network, if you start building links to that page where the video is embedded, that seems to work even better than building links directly to the video..

Hernan: You can even build links to the playlist. That’s usually safer if you’re going to build links to the playlist, or if you’re mild with your link building, you can do it to the YouTube channel itself. Not to the video, because I’ve been testing a lot with [inaudible 00:11:44], for example, with playlist that has 300, 400 videos, and it’s really hard to build links to these 300, 400 videos. When you’re trying to front that many videos, you need to build links to the playlist, or you need to link to the embedded network list, like Bradley was saying.

Bradley: Yeah, and let me jump in for a minute. I’m going to show something here in video playlists, because I want to demonstrate something here for a minute. Let’s find, where’s the Hump Day Hangouts playlist right here, let’s open this up. Th URLs that you should be building links to, and playlists, there’s multiple URLs, there’s multiple entry points, right? You can build the link directly to the playlist index page, which is what we’re looking at here. If you go to the share and grab the URL, that’s considered the playlist index page. You can build links directly to here. Typically, that’s what most people will do, but you can also, for example, if I wanted to rank this particular video, if I clicked on this video, pause it, this is going to open up this video.

Right here, this is another point with which you can build links to, and it’s going to build links to this specific video, but it’s still going to power up the entire playlist, because you see this? All of these are links, and it’s also got a link to the channel right here, everything else. This is a very powerful way to build additional links to the same video, because you can build links to the individual video URL, but then you can also build links to the video URL when it’s in a playlist, you can build links to the playlist index URL, so there’s multiple variations that you can build links to.

You want to do that, because it gives you more variety, but it’s still pushing juice to the same locations, if that makes sense. All right? Good question.

Using Mashup Versions of RSS Feeds

Number two. Is it better to get three or four very relevant related content RSS feeds and match them up and use that URL for the feed, or is it more viable to just use three individual feeds? Better to just use three individual feeds. Let me finish that question, though. To populate related content on tier one blogs on our video syndication network as you have shown us. Well, I don’t talk about doing that for tier one. Tier two, yeah, but you don’t even have to do that for video networks, at least you still don’t to this day. It may come to a point where we have to, but at this point, we currently don’t.

I don’t recommend using match feeds, and in the training, I specifically state that. The reason why is because if there’s problems, for example, if you’ve got three feeds and one of them doesn’t have an attribution link already coded into the RSS feed, when you match them together, now you’re going to have two of the content sources will have attributions pointing to the source, and one of them won’t. Then you’re plagiarizing content. That’s copyright infringement, you don’t want to do that. By being able to create the recipes for individual content feeds, additional content feeds that you set them up as separate triggers, then you’re able to manually code in through the IFTTT recipe your own attribution link to the content source. You don’t want to attribute it to your own blog or your own YouTube channel, you want to attribute it to the source.

That’s one reason. The other reason is because oftentimes, there will be significant differences in frequency of publishing between feeds, and you can use something like Feedrents or something like that. You used to be able to use pipes, but can’t use pipes anymore. There are some other services you can use to set up filters to reduce the amount of posts that are coming from a particular feed or only allow certain posts with tags or certain keywords in the titles to pass through. You can’t do that when you have a blended feed. Well, you can, but it can cause problems. I’d just as soon set up three separate trigger feeds, and that’s it, and be done with it.

Hernan: A good one that I found is feed.informer.com. It has an DA, a nice DA, domain authority, and it will allow you to add some filters at the end of the process, so it’s feed.informer.com. It’s a good service, and it will allow you to add those filters that Bradley was talking about.

Different Feed URLs for Related Contents

Bradley: Yep. I’m assuming the related content feeds we need for the other two blogs and the IFTTT rings should all be different feed URLs, feed sources, than the one used in the first blog in the ring. Correct, yes. Again, those are for tier two rings. I always recommend that you have, because otherwise, it would look kind of stupid to have the same content feeds posting to three different rings. It just doesn’t make sense. It’s better to mix it up. If you’re doing a full tier two network, and you’re going to use related content feeds on your tier two networks, and let’s say you’re going to use three, right, so you’re going to have your own feed plus three additional related content feeds triggering that network, then I would have a total of nine additional content feeds.

Three for each, plus your own for each, right? So it’s going to be a total of nine, plus your own feed, does that make sense? Absolutely, I keep it separate. Sometimes that’s difficult to do. It depends on how narrow you are with your niche, but remember, on tier two, you can be a hell of a lot more broad, as long as it’s in the same ballpark. The same top-level category. Again, if you’re doing plumbing stuff, I wouldn’t try to find plumbing feeds, I would just try to find home improvement feeds. That makes sense, because that’s going to be a hell of a lot more broad, but it’s still going to be in the same ballpark. Give you more options.

Manual Seed Posting for Web 2.0s in IFTTT Network to Avoid Termination

When we purchase aged high PA Tumblrs or Bloggers and convert the themes, homepage styles, etc., is it safe then to connect an IFTTT for autoposting and connect related RSS feeds, or will the blogs mots likely get terminated? With doing one or two manual seed posts to each blog, the IFTTT ring helped to avoid that from happening. Yeah, in the training, that’s why we do that. Absolutely, yeah, you can still hook up to it, but I always recommend it, and it’s why it’s laid out in the training that you should do a seed post on every single one of them. In fact, you should strip out any links whatsoever on the seed posts except for the attribution link to where you got the seed post. Typically from the same source. There’s a couple ways to do that.

When we post seed posts, we either go to BuzzSumo and find a popular article that’s got a lot of social signals, a lot of activity, and post it on the blog, and then we link back to the original source, but we’ve even had some times those accounts get terminated, because it’s just posting that first post with a link somewhere. When that’s the case, and it does happen sometimes, when that’s the case or if we find a particular stretch of time where it’s happening more often, then one of the ways that we’ve gotten around it is to find an article related to whatever topic you’re theming your site for on the same platform. For example, find a Blogger blog post on Blogger and repost it on your Blogger blog with only a link pointing to the original Blogger blog that it was posted from so that you’re linking within the same domain instead of outbound linking to some other property.

That makes sense, even if there was already other links in the article, you want to strip those out and only link back to the original blog post source, which would be also on that same platform, Blogger, in this case. Same thing with Tumblr. Same thing with WordPress.com. We’ve found that oftentimes will pass any kind of manual review. Then give it time. Let it sit, let your sites age for at least three days, but I’ll typically wait closer to seven days before I’ll start hooking up an autoposting through IFTTT. Okay? Anybody want to add to that?

Hernan: I think it was beautiful.

Bradley: Sweet. Okay, Kevin says that I missed a SERP Shaker and drive script interview. Is there a replay? Kevin, if you were in the SERP Shaker group, Andre’s group, then I’m sure the replay’s posted in there inside of Facebook, so just check-

Adam: I’ll post the link, like if you’ve been interested in SERP Shaker, and you want to check it out, you’ve got to be a part of the group, which means buying SERP Shaker to get in there, but I don’t know, I, for one, recommend it if you’re interested in it. If you’re not, don’t worry about it, but I’ll post the link, and it’s inside the group, so if you purchase, enjoy the group. You can check out the replay.

RSS Trigger for YouTube Video Optimization in IFTTT Networks

Bradley: Robbie says … Bradley, you hit on this in an earlier post, but I need more help. I purchased a two-tier network using my personal Google e-mail. In the order form, it’s branded for NJ Business Video Broadcasting Network a la VA hangouts. Okay. I’m ordering my second network specifically related to the cosmetic surgery niche. I want to syndicate cosmetic videos to its own network, as well as my New Jersey Video Broadcasting Network, because the networks will be topically related and provide more links. I’ll use the cosmetic RSS feeds as the trigger to my tier one New Jersey biz to syndicate those videos. Is that right?

Well, are they both video networks? Yeah, they’re both video networks, so there’s nowhere, you wouldn’t be using RSS feeds. The trigger would be your YouTube channel, so that’s not correct, unless I’m misunderstanding the question. I want to syndicate the cosmetic videos to its own network on as well as my New Jersey Video Broadcasting Network, because the networks will be topically related, and provide more links. I’ll use cosmetic RSS feeds as the trigger to my New Jersey biz [inaudible 00:21:36] is that right? No. Again, because there’s no RSS feed there. You’re talking about syndicating videos, you want to use YouTube as your trigger.

It used to be that we could use a YouTube RSS to syndicate videos, but it’s not the case anymore. Now it just syndicates links to the videos, so we have to use YouTube as the trigger. You can do that, but what you need to do is set up another IFTTT account and connect all the same New Jersey biz properties to that new IFTTT account, and then connect the cosmetic dentistry YouTube channel to that one, as well. Essentially, you would have the same properties that they’re syndicated to, you would just have two different IFTTT accounts syndicating to the same one ring, right, but you’d have two separate triggers. One YouTube trigger from your New Jersey Business Video Broadcasting channel, and the other IFTTT account would be the YouTube trigger for your cosmetic dentistry channel.

See, guys, you can take the wordpress.com, the Tumblr, the Delicious, the Diigo, all of that from one ring and connect that to multiple IFTTT accounts if needed so that you can have multiple trigger points with YouTube. What’s nice about the RSS2 recipes, which we use for RSS fed, or RSS triggers, is that you can add multiple triggers to the same IFTTT account. However, when you’re using something like YouTube as the trigger, you can only have at this point an IFTTT, you can only have one activated YouTube channel per IFTTT account, so if you want to syndicate two channels to the same network, you just have to set up two separate IFTTT accounts, which can connect to all of the same properties in one ring, if that makes sense.

For the cosmetic YouTube channel, I created a separate G account under an alias as you suggested. On the network order page, it says to provide logos for branded networks, which I have. But what about the alias photo of the new G account? I have one already uploaded that I am using, but I’m not sure if I screwed things up. Thanks for hearing me out. Well, if you’ve already got the Google account created under an alias account, you should have a Google plus page. Not a profile, and we don’t want your profile. All we want is your page, and it says that on the order form. If that’s unclear, I apologize, but all we want is your Google plus page login, so we don’t need your profile picture, because we’re not going to use it. We’re going to want to use the logo, because if it’s a branded account especially, we’re going to want to use your logo, not the profile image.

Marco: I just wanted to add to Robbie and the Mastermind, we can take care of him on the inside if he has any more issues, and he can always send in a support ticket. We’ll strain it all out, we’ll make sure it gets right.

Bradley: And we’ve got a Mastermind tomorrow, so we can talk about that more in depth there, if you want. That’s fine, I’ve got no problem with that. I don’t think Robbie’s here, anyways, because I think he still has a regular job, too. So he’s working on losing that, firing his boss, in other words.

Additional Weebly Site to Existing IFTTT Ring of Web 2.0s

Ed Ryan, again, says hey guys, I’ve been adding Weebly sites to my network, so I have four main sites instead of three in each network, and the Weeblys are surrounded by the usual suspects, app.net, Diigo, Delicious, so it’s essentially a whole other network. Is this okay to do this for more links to power my networks? Yes, Ed, it is. For blogs, it’s fine. It’s just for YouTube videos, we’re not able to send it, the embed never happens. Also, if you’re using blogs, for blog syndication, yes, it works. We just never added it because a lot of people use these specifically for video SEO, and they don’t work for embeds, for syndicating embeds to Weeblys.

Yeah, Weeblys are great for blogs, too. You can absolutely do that. Is there anything in particular I should be aware of when building and connecting in IFTTT as the training was designed for bloggers … no, nothing different. Just once you get familiar with Weebly, it’s all the same, you’ve just got to set up your Weebly site, grab the RSS feed, connect it to IFTTT, just like you would anything else, and run with it. That’s it. Nothing different. Or if you’re using an RSS feed to feed Weebly, and then Weebly’s the trigger for a tier two network, it’s the same thing. Everything’s the exact same, guys, nothing’s different. It’s just the platform itself is different.

Using Expired Web 2.0s in IFTTT Networks

Kevin says, I ran into a ton of expired Web 2.0s, PA 30+, okay, he’s naming several of them. Not sure how to use them. A lot of them have good backlinks and show N/A for the trustflow in Majestic. I’m thinking of hitting my money site, one page per one type of web 2.0, then using all the extra blogs to hit my IFTTT and social media. Is it okay to have, say, three EK blogs, a few of them have the France TLD dot fr, three webs, three Google, three Tumblrs, all hitting my IFTTT, or is three of a kind as tier two a footprint?

Yeah, I would mix it up. I would just make them random amounts if you’re going to do that. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with doing that, with using those different properties. If you have them, and they have some power already, sure. To me, that seems like an awful lot of manual setup, personally. I wouldn’t take the time to do it, but if it’s something you want to do, Kevin, and you’ve got some time to kill, you certainly could, but I would make the number of each one completely random so that it’s not leaving a footprint, and I would probably randomly interlink so that they’re not all pointed to the exact same property, or the same … I would do some random interlinking to kind of mix it up, match it up.

Hernan: It’s a good point that he’s mentioning that he’s trying to use them as a tier two. That’s what I would do, and some of these, like webs.com, I think Newsvine, and Tumblr, gypsy, football, gardens, they will enter into FCS networker, and FCS networker will be able to push content into those. I will import them as a different network into FCS networker, and use those to power IFTTT networks. Then you can go behind that with GSA, whatever, but I think that would be a good semi-automated way of populating them with content.

Bradley: I can tell you right now, I wouldn’t waste your time with Newsvine. Your accounts get terminated in Newsvine for self-promotion at the drop of a hat. I have tried with Newsvine on multiple attempts, and even with manual posts, I had a manual VA that was manually curating content on Newsvine, and they still get terminated, so I don’t even waste my time with them. I mean, if anybody else has any different experiences, by all means, love to hear them, but I was never able to get Newsvine to stay.

The accounts always end up getting terminated, because it’s heavily moderated. I just wouldn’t waste my time. How would you guys suggest, like Hernan said, just using them to link to tier one properties instead of direct to your money site? That’s much smarter, especially because of potential footprint issues, but if you’re doing it kind of more in a random fashion like I just mentioned, you should be okay. Again, especially if you’re linking to tier one properties instead of direct to your money site.

301 Redirect on the Same Servers

Next one, 301 expired domain to a money site, and also 301 a second expired to the first. Does it matter if all the domains are on the same name server, like FatCow? Yeah, I wouldn’t do that. That’s only if you’re using the C-panel redirects. You can do redirects through the registrar, as well, but if you’re going to be using C-panel redirects or htaccess redirects, I would essentially put them on different servers myself. I don’t like to double 301 redirect from the same server. What do you think, Hernan, do you have any input on that?

Hernan: Yeah, no, I wouldn’t either. If it’s just a couple of them that he’s doing, that might not be a problem. Keyword here is “might.” If he’s doing a ton of them, then it’s a clear footprint.

Bradley: Yeah, exactly. I have so many damn hosting accounts, it’s ridiculous, so I have the ability to swap out different IPs because of different hosting accounts, so here’s a better idea. Why not use, well, this is more Mastermind level stuff, but you could use like, Amazon S3 or something like that, which is going to give you a unique IP. In fact, it’s going to give you a dynamic IP, which switches, it changes. You can use Amazon S3 that way, and that’s going to give you dynamic IP on one of those 301s, or even both of them, for that matter. That’s going to give you a hell of a lot more protection.

Hernan: Yeah, you can still have custom name servers, but the IP will be the same, so yeah, I would try to switch it. If you don’t want to spend that much money, there will be a ton of Christmas deals coming that you can get one dollar hosting or something like that, and since it’s going to be 301, you can just have it there. You won’t be getting any traffic, anyways-

Bradley: Yeah, that’s right. I don’t recommend buying the one dollar hostings for PBN accounts or anything, guys, because they’re more trouble than they’re worth. Their uptime is terrible, there will always be plug-in conflicts, the sites will crash all the time. Even for PBNs, so I got away from doing that, because they were particularly a pain in the ass. I spent more time repairing sites and submitting support tickets to hosting accounts than the sites were live, for the most part, so I don’t do it. For something like what Hernan is mentioning, you’re going to be using them for like, 301 tricks, and stuff like that. Shit, use a bunch of, get several of them. Buy five dollar hosting accounts. Oftentimes, if you purchase for a year, you can get them cheaper.

Then you can just cycle through the IPs when you’re doing stuff like this so that you’re adding variety. All right. FatCow [inaudible 00:31:59] is it okay that the 301s come from a FatCow account and redirect to my money site that is also on a FatCow, but on a different account? It’s probably going to be the same IP. It just depends. Unless you can choose data centers, which I don’t think you can with FatCow, I don’t know for sure. Honestly, you should diversify your hosting, Kevin. I understand it’s cheap, but if you’re making money, you should be willing to invest a little bit for protection and to diversify. Again, you don’t want to put all your eggs in any one basket at any time. There’s a lot of hosting companies out there that you can use to do stuff. That’s just personally my recommendation. You can try to get away with it. I don’t recommend it.

Estimated Time of Arrival for IFTTT 2.0

Another one from Ed. Any ETA on IFTTT training video updates to hold us over until the new IFTTT SEO is complete? Started building a new network, and things with WordPress and Gravatar have changed when doing verified services like WordPress and the YouTube channel. Google plus seems to be okay. The URLs stream channel URL from Gravatar imports during the verification process for YouTube, and an incomplete URL links back to the nonexistent channel. Ed, this has been covered in the updates training. I know this question, I could have sworn you already asked this question once, but maybe it was somebody else. If you go to the updates training inside the IFTTT SEO academy, I specifically state you don’t want to add anything as a verified service anymore in Gravatar.

You just add every one of them as a website. Don’t worry about the verified services anymore. Just add them as websites, and there’s a video inside the training that specifically addresses that, okay? As far as the IFTTT 2.0, yeah, guys, that’ll be coming, but I’m not giving anybody a hard date on it, because I’ve got two really important projects that I’m working on for semantic mastery that are my top priority, and I am not diluting my time anymore until those projects are done. I can’t give any promise on that. I know we’re going to be working on it, and that’s going to come out. Until Google plus forces us to the new platform, which right now, you have the option to select or switch back to classic view, we’re not going to be updating the training.

If something else happens that needs a major update video, of course we’ll do a patchwork, a band-aid video, but the new training is not going to be coming out until we’re either forced to go to the new google plus, or until possibly January or even February, whichever comes first. It’s almost like there are too many characters in your … yeah, again, I’m not going to finish reading this question … yeah, it almost looks like it’s talking about the verified services. Ed, go back, check the update section, watch that video. That’ll answer your question. Just add everything as a website.

Splicing RSS Feeds

Sky, when you are splicing RSS feeds with related content, how do you give proper attribution to the source? I answered that already earlier, Sky. You don’t splice. If you’re using related content feeds, you’re going to want to set up separate triggers, and that was addressed in the earlier question already in this very Hump Day Hangout.

Number of Safe Domains for Serp Shaker/ATM Sites

Ray says, for SERP Shaker/ATM types of sites, how many sub-domains is safe? Is building ten sub-domains too many? No, I don’t think so, Ray. I don’t know what the limit is, I don’t even know if there is a limit. A lot of the Chinese domains for various dark headwear things that we do-

Hernan: I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Bradley: For various testing purposes, let’s put it that way, have sometimes hundreds, thousands, and even hundreds of thousands of subdomains. I typically don’t do more than 10 or 12 subdomains on a site, and usually, I don’t even go that high, but there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to do it. Just don’t link to the root, and don’t let the root link to any of the subs. You want to keep them all entirely separate.

Tips in Using Backlink Packages

Earl says, quick question, bought a couple of packages of backlinks from you. Now that they are up, what else should I do to them? Add to linklicious? Well, we submit all the URLs from the link building service to a couple of indexing services already for you, Earl, that’s just part of the process. If you have an indexing service, and you want to resubmit it, it certainly can’t hurt, because remember, a lot of those links are difficult to index because just the type of … that’s what happens when you mass-build links with tools.

We do submit to at least one, even two indexing services. I’m not quite sure it’s two indexing services. If you have one of your own indexing services, and when you get to link reports, you want to submit them, it won’t hurt. So how many a day should I do? Is it a worthwhile site to pay for to do higher volumes? Linklicious is actually fairly inexpensive, if I remember correctly.

Hernan: Yeah. Sorry, but if you’re going for big, big volume, I would suggest something like Holly Cooper’s indexer, the Incredible Indexer, which allows you 100,000 backlinks per day, something like that. Again, when doing our linkbuilding service, we are building several tiers of spam, [inaudible 00:37:22] the backlinks that we want them to be indexed. Don’t fret if any of the lower tiers don’t get indexed, because the main idea is that we push the robots upstream, but for high volumes, I just did it a lot, and the incredible indexer from Holly Cooper is one of the best.

Marco: I would also add that once you do something, you wait. I mean, this is the whole point of the blog post that I wrote a couple of days ago. You do something like this, you can’t keep going and going and going and going indefinitely without stopping, taking a breath and seeing what happened. You wait, you see what happens, and then if you need to do something else, you go back and figure out, okay, what do I need to do now? It’s going to take, we know now, 20 to 70 days for this all to clear. For whatever it is that he’s done today especially, if he caught it right in the middle of the [ghoul dance process 00:38:25], if he was inside the 70 days where he was getting some action. It’s all in the blog post. If he can go through the blog post, he’ll get a whole lot of good information on what he could do and what he should do.

Hernan: Again, I’ll get the link for that.

 Best Tools with Money Making Results

Bradley: Okay, Monique says, this question is for each of you, Adam, Hernan, Marco, Chris, Bradley. What is your favorite tool to use which translates for you into the most moneymaking results? Well, it depends on what kind of business we’re working on. I’ve got things that I use for local, and then I’ve got things that we use for semantic mastery. There’s things that I use for lead gen. It just depends. I can tell you for semantic mastery, probably one of our favorite tools is Click Funnels, I know that, because that’s very important for our business. Our autoresponders. I don’t know, it just depends on what type of model you’re talking about. Specifically, Monique, there’s different tools for different business models. I don’t know, GSA, FCS Networker, those are valuable tools that we use.

Hangout Millionaire has been quite valuable for me. There’s a lot of tools that I use, I mean, I’ve got just a huge arsenal of tools that are available for me to use, depending on what it is that I’m trying to do. It’s really hard to select just one and say that’s the best.

Marco: She’s saying favorite. As far as translating directly into money, I would say Power Suggest Pro. I can go in there, drop a keyword in there, get whatever it spits out, and then pick out what keywords I’m going to go after, and pretty much know what it’s going to bring back. Once you do it enough, you know right off the bat which keywords are the ones that will be the cherry ones.

Bradley: That’s a great call, Marco, that’s absolutely true, because we use that across every business model, Power Suggest Pro, for local, for lead gen, for Semantic Mastery, for affiliate, it doesn’t matter. That’s absolutely true.

Adam: And Monique, if you want to hear Hernan and mine’s in-depth take on this, I posted the link at the top. If anyone else is interested, you can check out our podcast from last week. We actually answered this exact question. We just wanted to keep everyone else out … no, just kidding. Cool.

Podcast link on Tools with Money-Making Results – https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/semantic-mastery-podcast/id1011202829

CMS or Hard Code Site Pages?

Bradley: Next one. Do you always use a contact management system like WordPress, et cetera, or do you still hard code site pages using a template? No, I always use WordPress. I use HTML pages for very strategic reasons, but it normally has to do with link building. It’s not necessarily for any sort of actually trying to drive traffic to a particular HTML page. However, I recently picked up a tool that creates HTML sales pages. It’s a tool that creates them just by filling in details. I haven’t even had a chance to play with it yet, but I would like to. But personally, I don’t use HTML pages at the moment for anything other than link-building stuff.

Marco: WordPress has become such a big-

Bradley: Industry standard.

Marco: Yeah, an industry standard. I think it makes a lot of sense. Even if you’re developing a PBN, you need to check out the industry standard, because I think WordPress has 70 percent of the market share right now, which is crazy. If you want to emulate that on your PBNs, you can do that. We have been diving more and more for particular pages, we have been doing a lot of Click Funnels lately. I think that’s BHP, I don’t know what’s built in, but yeah, that’s BHP.

Bradley: Yeah. So, as far as being able to modify or mass-change pages, mass-edit pages, I’m not sure how to do that, Monique, because it’s not something that we do, so sorry if I can’t help you on that one. Maybe someone else can.

Hernan: Mass HTML pages … you would use something like Mass Page Creator, which is an HTML tool. I can dive in a little bit looking for some other ways to create kind of Serp Shaker/ATM sites, so it’s Mass Page Creator, I’ll dig for the link. Again, being HTML, you need to create the template, then you will roll out the entire website, and I mean, I’ve been creating 3 million page websites in a couple of minutes, it’s that big. But then again, if you screw up something, which I tend to do, then you’ll need to erase everything and start over. So that’s the only problem with HTML.

Marco: I mean, you still have old-school stuff like DreamWeaver that you can use.

Bradley: But I don’t know if that’s a mass editor, you know what I mean? Is that page by page?

Marco: Not if you set a template for it. You could always mess with the template and the upload.

Best Advice When Making Money Online

Bradley: Okay. The next one, this is a great question, too, by the way. This is for each of us, and I’m looking forward to answering this one. If you were advising someone on your recommendation of the key thing to make sure that they don’t do if they are trying to make money online, because it will impede their efforts … Okay, what not to do. My number one answer, highest priority, most important answer for this is, don’t get distracted. Focus. Don’t get distracted, and the other side of that is to focus. Cut out distractions, stop buying shiny objects, stop looking for the next best thing that’s going to make your business so much easier, the next shiny object, the next tool that’s supposed to be push-button easy, the next opportunity. Stop looking for that. Select one thing and make that your bitch, so to speak.

I mean, literally, select one thing and focus on that one particular moneymaking opportunity until you master it. Then if you want to start looking at other things, by all means, do it. But don’t go out and try to buy a bunch of different … and I know, because I’m a victim of this myself, even to this day. I struggle when I see an opportunity come by my way. I want to jump on it because I’m thinking, oh, wow, that looks like an opportunity. The problem is, it will detract from the work that you’re doing on any other project, and will end up diluting your effectiveness to where you never really succeed with any one of your projects.

You need to focus, and that’s why I mentioned earlier, right here on this Hump Day Hangout, that I’m not starting IFTTT version 2.0 until I have these two projects that I’m currently working on for us right now completed, because I am not diluting my time. I have got to focus on those, and that’s why, because you have to be very disciplined and at that, or else you will fail in your business, or you will never fully succeed. You will never reach a high level if you’re always diluting your time and attention across multiple projects, if that makes sense. So that was my answer, anybody else?

Adam: Yeah, I’m going to steal Hernan’s thunder. Can you guys see my screen?

Bradley: No, I cannot. [crosstalk 00:45:41]

Adam: I just want to make sure it’s broadcasting. There we go. There you go. Go take a look at it, go read it, just a backup of what Bradley said. This is something we recommend people read, you know. Bradley’s talking about it, but not only to incorporate it, but it’s so important that we … I mean, I’ve literally read books on focusing, cutting out distractions and productivity, because that’s the most important thing. Whether it’s a business or SEO, whatever you’re doing, you’ve got to focus, or like Bradley said, you’re just going to spread yourself too thin.

Bradley: That’s right.

Hernan: I would say do not multitask. Multitask, it’s the biggest lie. You can brag that you’re multitasking, but that’s something that’s not cool at all. The more you focus on one step of your business at a time, the better you can make it happen, and the quicker. I’m all about speed and making things happen. Just to reiterate what my partners were saying, go an inch deep, but a mile long. That’s what I would say.

Bradley: Instead of being able to brag about multitasking, you should be able to brag about your bank account when you focus and you make a lot of money. Then you can brag about your success, because you actually focused on one thing and made it happen. Marco, you want to jump in, or Chris? Either of you?

Marco: No, because I would just add to basically the same thing you said. Don’t go into analysis paralysis. Don’t get so much stuff on your plate that you just don’t know where to go. The main thing, and you guys know this from the Mastermind, from all the Facebook groups, from G +, that my main thing is just do it. Whatever it is that you’re going to do, just do it. I’m going to write the website. Well, just do it. Go rank it. I’m going after this keyword. Just do it. Don’t tell me that you’re going to do it, don’t tell me what you want to do. Just do it.

Bradley: Yeah. The other thing is … guys, probably everyone watching this right now, unless you’re brand spanking new and this is your very first webinar about online marketing, you probably already have all the tools that you need. You probably have more tools than you’ll ever need. You probably have tools and training programs that you’ve never even used, sitting on your hard drive, as I like to say, collecting digital dust, and buying the next tool or the next product that’s being launched on [inaudible 00:48:26] that’s got, you get a hundred freaking e-mails about, because it’s supposed to be push-button simple and blah, blah, blah, isn’t going to push you forward.

You most likely will never end up using it to its full extent anyways, because as you learn it, you’re going to end up getting promoted another product that you’re going to end up buying. Unless you focus in on a very particular part of your business, a very particular avenue that you want to choose to be your vehicle to make money online, you’re going to constantly be distracted, and you’ll never accomplish much.

Adam: I will play the devil’s advocate, though, to Bradley and say that because we’re fans of automation and saving time, it’s not to say that there aren’t products out there that don’t save you time. If you’ve got something out there that’s being promoted, like several of us use Hangout Millionaire, several of us use FCS networker. This isn’t stuff we bought after selling our products. This is stuff we own, we bought with our money. Because we look at it and say, hey, this stuff is good, this stuff is quality, it works, and it saves us money. You can do all this stuff manually, but it’s a huge pain in the butt when you’re trying to do it on scale.

Bradley: All I mean is that if you’re not making money online yet, then stop buying new shiny objects. I don’t care if it could make your job easier. Wait until you start making money, and allow your business to fund those kind of purchases.

Adam: Oh, no, definitely, I agree. I’m just saying it’s not a blanket statement that hey, if you can make your life easier, then … one of your statements I really liked, Bradley, was, “When you look at this product, don’t think, how can I pay for this, how can I afford it, how can I do it cheaper?” Say, before I buy this tool, how can I use this to make more money?

Bradley: That’s right. That’s a good way to think about it, a good angle. All right, so hopefully that was helpful, Monique, that was a great question, very good question. In fact, in master class today, we’re going to spend some time talking about business building stuff for a very particular reason, so we’re going to talk about that today in master class, which is coming up in about ten minutes. I don’t know if Monique is in master class, I don’t think she is, but you’re missing out. We’re about to close that down, anyways. The live webinars are coming to an end. We’ve got almost forty weeks, next week will be fortieth week in there, and we’re graduating our members into Mastermind for those who want to come. I’m going to be talking about some business building stuff today.

Yoast WP Plugin Update

Bryan says, what did they do to the YOAST plug-in? Bryan, I’ve heard this in several groups. You can still edit everything, they just changed the way that it looks. You just click on the displayed meta title or metadescription, you just click on it, and it will allow you to edit it. It doesn’t have fields now that you enter and it has a separate display. Now it is a display that is editable. You just click on it and it will allow you to edit.

Best Services for Local Citations

Dan says, what service in your opinion is best for local citations? Great question, Dan. He says, I remember you mentioning [inaudible 00:51:27], just wondering what the latest consensus was. I’ve got two that I recommend. If you’re on a budget, Marketer’s Center. Great service, we have, I believe, semanticmastery.com/marketerscenter . I don’t know if, Adam, you want to drop a link. Either way, go to, that’s by Andrew Shearer, that’s his group, or it’s his service. He’s got a really good citation-building service if you’re on a budget. It’s still good, don’t get me wrong, just because he offers the low cost doesn’t mean it’s not a good service.

However, if you are looking for the Ferrari, the Lamborghini, the Aston Martin of citation-building services, there’s no question, Loganix is it. Those guys are incredibly good at what they do, and I’ve never found a better service than that. I’ve spent a lot of money with them recently, because I’ve got them doing multiple local projects for me. They’re really, really good. That’s Loganix. If anybody’s ever doing local, and you’re dealing with inconsistent citation data, which will kill your Maps rankings, Loganix is citation cleanup service which is now 497 dollars, is absolutely worth it, because they are the most thorough I’ve ever seen, and they just get the job done, and they do it very, very well. By the way, that is brain-dead work. I would rather watch paint dry than try to do that shit myself, and I’ve trying hiring PAs and training them how to do it, but they’re usually ineffective.

These guys have got a process and a system down that just flat-out works, and it’s very efficient. It’s totally worth the investment. All right, we’ll answer a couple more, then we’ve got to wrap it up. A lot of people here today, guys, I’m glad you guys are all asking so many questions, this is great.

Boosting DA with Only One Subdomain with a lot of GSA Links

Next one. Darryl says, in an effort to boost DA, I was considering creating a subdomain with only one page, not linking it to the main site, and then hitting it hard with a bunch of GSA links. What are your thoughts on this strategy, and if you agree it works, could you give an estimate of the number of links, type of links, such as contextuals only, [inaudible 00:53:30] Yeah, you can do that.

That’s standard domain authority boosting stuff that you can do. Don’t link, I would actually set the sub-domain to no index, and you can hit it with links. I would still, though, honestly, Darryl, just to be safe, I would still set up a 301 redirect with another domain, like an XYZ domain or something to point to the sub-domain, and then hit the 301 with all the links. I used to go straight to a sub-domain, but I particularly don’t like to do that. I just like having that switch there, it’s just peace of mind. Because if something happens, then you can just always remove that 301 redirect, or point that 301 redirect elsewhere, like to a competitor … I didn’t say that, did I?

I didn’t say that.

Adam: No, you didn’t.

Recommended Number of FCS Accounts/Links for Tier 1 in IFTTT Networks

Bradley: You guys didn’t hear that. That was a Freudian slip. Darryl says, the next question is when using FCS’s tier one, the IFTTT networks, what do you recommend as for the number of FCS accounts to create and type of anchor text to use? I’ll let you answer that one, Hernan, since I don’t actually use the tool myself.

Adam: Yeah. I mean, that’s kind of along the same lines. Hernan, you definitely can answer this better, but that to me is kind of the same as like, how many IFTTT networks does it take to rank? I mean, how many links are you sending, what are you looking, what terms, how many terms-

Hernan: Well, what I would say is that as a rule of thumb, and this will depend heavily on the market and the competition and your current results with SEO, as a rule of thumb, I always do 100 to 150 tier one links. That means 100 to 150 contextual backlinks to each IFTTT property, or to each tier one, for that matter. If it is a press release, if it is Web 2.0, secondary Web 2.0 or something like that, that’s as much as I would do, because I try to do contextual backlinks with high DA or high trustflow. High trustflow, mostly, that’s exactly what we’re doing with the link building service, because I don’t want to burn them. I don’t want to burn those tier one properties.

Then I can go crazy with two tiers of ten thousand links or something like that to those 150 properties. I would say you test it, but I wouldn’t push it harder than that, because really, you do not want to burn your tier one. I’m being so, so obsessed with tier one because you need to be able to close a sale on your tier one. That’s how pristine they need to be. You need to be able to drive traffic, to drive buyer traffic with your tier one. If you’re doing a dinky, shitty Web 2.0, an orphan account, it’s probably safe to call them, that’s not a good tier one. Press releases are great tier ones. IFTTT will help you sell a guest post, outreach, a comment, a forum link that will also help you sell. Those are the kind of tier one links that you want.

Bradley: Good answer. Okay, Darryl, wait a minute. Jeff, next one. We’re going to answer up until Morris, and that’s it. We’re actually probably going to run over just a minute, but I ran up to his question, and I want to answer that, as well. Jeff, I’ve been using video powerhouse for the last month. Many of the links to embeds you are posting for me are showing up in Majestic. Do you see any problem with running crowdsearch campaigns for referral of traffic to the videos?

No, not at all, Jeff. In fact, we may be actually integrating that into Video Powerhouse ourselves. Again, we’re not swearing to that, but there’s a chance that that might be something that we end up integrating anyways as part of Video Powerhouse, having that service that we can provide within the dashboard itself. Not swearing to that, but there’s no problem with that. Just as a side note, if you notice in Majestic that it says the links have been deleted, Hernan pointed this out earlier because it was brought up as a question to us, if you notice within next week, you go back and you look and it shows as links being deleted, it’s because your videos have been pushed off the homepage of that particular URL.

It doesn’t mean the link isn’t there, it doesn’t mean the embed isn’t there, it just means it’s been paginated, which means it’s been pushed off the front page. It’s still receiving the juice, so I want you guys to be aware of that. We probably need to note that inside of the dashboard so that we don’t get a ton of support tickets about it.

Switching Back to Classic Google Plus Page

Next, Kevin says, and like I said, Kevin and then Morris, and then we’re done. How do we switch back to Google Classic? There’s a button in the left-hand side when you go to the Navigation Bar that will say switch back to classic, or switch to classic google plus or whatever. Click on that, it will take you back. I recommend that you continue to switch back … if you set up a new account now, like when setting up a new persona account or whatever, I believe it’s automatically going to default you into the new version, but there’s still an option to switch back to classic. I recommend you do that, because the new version is still in beta, so there’s a lot of things that aren’t working properly. There’s features that aren’t available that are available in classic that will be available, but they’re not yet.

It’s not worth going in there and fumbling around. I don’t like the new layout, I really think it’s stupid, but again, we all resist change, we’re only human. You know, maybe it will grow on me over time. Until they get all the functionality back, I recommend switching back to Google plus. Yes, with the information button, which is a very obscure button on the bottom right-hand side of the header image for the new Google plus, there’s a little I with a circle. If you click on that, that’s going to take you to about.google.com or something like that. That’s going to be like your new links page, your profile page. It’s on a new subdomain of Google. That will still pass, but until we get into the new version of IFTTT, I recommend just going with the Google plus classic version.

All right, last one. Morris. I got a question. Do you think building PBNs will be effective in 2016 and beyond? It’s a great question, Morris, and in fact, our resident mad scientist Marco is researching and creating a blog post specifically to answer that question, so stay tuned, go subscribe to our blog, our RSS feed, semanticmastery.com/rss, or /feed, and you can be updated when that blog post gets posted. Maybe it will be available for next week, and we can post it in the Hump Day Hangout next week.

Marco: I actually want to know if he was reading my mind. [crosstalk 01:00:14] When I was doing research, man.

Bradley: Yeah, because we were talking about that today, actually.

Marco: I will answer that question in the next week or so.

Chris: You have coined a new term. I think it’s going to be big. We’re going to take over the market just with the term that you coined.

Bradley: Oh, yeah, the acronym. All right, guys, that’s it, we’re going to be late for master class, we already are. Everyone, master class starts in just a minute. You should be there if you’re a member, because we’re going to talk about some cool stuff today, and we will see you all then. Otherwise, we’ll see you guys, by the way, Mastermind is next week, excuse me, tomorrow, and tomorrow’s our first hot seat webinar, so we’re going to have some students, Mastermind members in the hot seat, talking about their business, giving them advice on how to improve their business. Other than that, we’ll see the rest of you on Hump Day Hangouts next Wednesday. Thanks for being here. [crosstalk 01:01:11]

Hernan: Bye-bye.