Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 72

Click on the video above to watch Episode 43 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: I know we’re live but I have to tell myself every time before we start, I can’t move. I got told that I move a lot when I start talking. Now I have to mentally tell myself. I just thought I’d share that with everybody. If you see me wiggling around or moving, you can type something in there and say ‘stop.’

Bradley: Sometimes people move too much when they talk and it gets a little bit annoying.

Adam: I don’t know what you’re talking about. Moving to announcments. Hey everybody, welcome to Hump Day Hangouts. Today is the 23rd of March until midnight here. This is going to be Episode 72. We got almost everybody here. I think Chris was busy doing something. We’ll go down the line like we do and we’ll start with Hernan. How’s it going man?

Hernan: Hey Adam, hey everyone. It’s really good to be here.

Adam: Hey Marco, what’s up? How’s the weather? Sorry, that’s what I should have said.

Marco: Warm and sunny.

Bradley: He was going to tell us that anyways.

Adam: Bradley, how’s it going man?

Bradley: Good man, good. Glad to be here.

Adam: Good deal. As far as announcements go today, not much. We want to let everybody know who doesn’t know … Hopefully most of the people here already do know. IFTTT 2.0 coming out Monday morning. 9AM EST. Sales page is going to be live. We’re going to have a special discount available for the first week. [inaudible 00:01:15]

Hernan: And a bonus.

Adam: What’s that?

Hernan: And a bonus.

Adam: Yeah, for the first 7 days, significant price reduction. On the first 24 hours, we’re tossing in a free course. You can find out about that once we go live. We’re going to keep it pretty hush-hush until then. Go check it out. As always, we highly recommend you join. Regardless, we’re always going to be here for the Hump Day Hangouts to help you out. In case you’re not aware of how to get notifications from us, I’m going to pop a link in here that you can go and sign up and we’ll let you know about the launch when it happens and keep you in the loop on that. That’s what I’ve got. Did you guys have anything else you wanted to tell people about?

Bradley: Just excited to get the course out. We put a lot of work into it. Both Hernan and I tag-teamed it. It’s damn strong. It’s actually ridiculous how cheap we’re selling it compared to what’s in.

Hernan: 120 something videos guys. It’s crazy.

Bradley: It’s not really that many, is it? Is it really that many? I know it was 100 and something. I didn’t realize it was that many, damn. We need to renegotiate this price, guys.

Adam: We’re launched, we’re done.

Hernan: You’re right. We’re selling it really cheap in the initial launch phase, then it’s going to go up substantially because of the course and the material and the amount of time that we put into it. Also there’s the community which is I think a great asset to it. It’s going to be up. If you want to jump, you better jump in quick.

Adam: Awesome. Also, it looks like Chris showed up. Chris, are you here?

Chris: Yay.

Adam: How’s it going man? Good. We were just going down the line and done our announcements. I said, ‘I don’t know, I guess Chris is busy.’ Glad to have you.

Bradley: Chris and I were partying it up down in Orlando at Marketing Mayhem together.

Adam: Yeah, if anybody didn’t see it … Did you guys keep the video up? Was that on your page Bradley, or Chris’? The Facebook live video?

Bradley: I believe it was on my personal Facebook page because we had to stream it. How did we do that, Chris? We had to log in through your iPhone didn’t we?

Chris: Yeah, because Androids can’t handle it yet.

Adam: I thought [crosstalk 00:03:43] launched it live? Anyways, we’ll have to try it out.

Bradley: I don’t care for Apple products or Facebook, so.

Adam: We’ll be in San Diego next week so we’ll give it a shot.

Chris: If anybody is in San Diego next week too, it is on.

Adam: Let us know if you’re going to the Click Funnels Conference or if you’re in San Diego for any other reason, we’re amenable to free beers. Just saying.

Bradley: Will meet for beer, I’ll be wearing that shirt. Will consult for beer.

Adam: That’s a lot of beer.

Bradley: I guess we can get in to doing some work now. Let’s start.

Adam: I guess so. Let’s get started.

Bradley: You ever watch the show with, was it Rob Deidrich or whatever his name is?

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: Robin Begg. Remember Robin Begg, that show?

Adam: Yeah, that was awesome.

Bradley: He goes, ‘Time to do work.’ Let’s get into to it. I know there’s a bunch of questions already. Let’s lock the screen. You guys should be seeing everything all right, I hope.

Adam: Yeah.

Bradley: There’s one question that got marked as spam. I figure we’ll go ahead and try to run through that one first because that’s in a special screen. You have to click a button to go to a special screen to see it. I can’t get it to restore to the actual page. I might be a little bit out of order. I’m going to …

Adam: [inaudible 00:05:03] so I can … because I can’t see that.

Bradley: You can see me though, correct?

Adam: Yeah, but I just want the text. I’ll find it later.

Bradley: I’ll drop the link in Slack. I don’t know if you’ll be able to actually enter that.

Hernan: I think you’ll need to log in as Semantic Mastery.

Bradley: Yeah, I don’t think you’ll be able to see it. Might just have to wing this one.

Adam: That’s all right, I’ll get it later.

How to Avoid Footprint Issues With Images Online?

Bradley: ‘Hey guys. Thanks for letting me in. I had spent hours listening to all f your latest Hump Day Hangouts and have started to build a small group of PBNs supported by their own IFTTT networks to eventually point to a money site or top level site that links to a money site. I have one question which I have not seen covered online and wondered if you guys could advise. I use private internet access every time I log in to a PR to visit a PBN of mine and each one associated with different WhoIs info and hosts spread across various countries on the main well known host, so I’m being careful. I have just noticed the properties, ie. meta data, of the images pulled from search to use as content have the owner and computer listed and it described the machine, ie. my desktop, and its serial number or whatever. Once the pic is downloaded, it has this attached it would seem. Right click image to properties. I know one could only ever link to external images but it is that not a quality footprint juice leak problem.’

Okay, Dean. Click to view the image on your computer. Don’t download it. Click to view the image into a separate browser window or whatever, browser tab. Take a screenshot of it. We talked about this last week I think. When you take a screenshot of an image, you’re not downloading any meta data because it’s a brand new image. Save the image as a JPEG or JPG because then you can add your own meta data to the image which gives you some additional opportunities to optimize the image. That’s what I would do. I don’t typically download images from online anymore for various reasons, but one of them being the meta data issue.

Says, ‘I know one can attach meta data via Google Picassa but again that’s not machine data.’ As far as the machine data, I haven’t seen any issues with that. I just take screenshots. It may say something about the computer on there but I think you’re being a bit paranoid if that’s the case. To be honest with you, I think that’s a little bit tin hat stuff, tin foil hat stuff. I wouldn’t worry about it. It’s not something I worry about. I take screenshots of images, use those on PBNs. I have my own meta data so I can optimize for different keywords. I can have my own EXIF data if you’re using GeoSetter or some sort of tool like that where you can coordinates, latitude, longitude and things like that. Just upload those images to my WordPress sites. I think that’s pretty much it. Very good. There’s your answer.

Building Backlinks Directly to Money Site Without the Use of IFTTT as a Buffer

On to the questions not marked as spam. Tim1991 says, ‘Hey guys. I know that you like to use your branded IFTTT properties as a buffer between your money sites and your manually built backlinks, PBNs or SAPE links.‘ That depends but that’s a fair statement. ‘I was wondering if you build links only to your branded IFTTT properties or if you build backlinks directly to your money site as well. Also, which are your preferred properties to hit with backlinks and why, or do you build them evenly to ll of them?’

First part of that question. No, if you have highly themed PBNs, they’re well themed, the entire site is topically related to what it is that you’re going to be linking to … and it can be a bit broader. For example, if you’ve got a roofing site you’re trying to rank and you have a home improvement style PBN, a PBN that’s themed around home improvement, then you could use that PBN to link to your roofing site and link to an HVAC site and a landscaper site and a painter site, carpet cleaner site, all that because it makes sense to do so. What I don’t recommend is if you have a PBN, I wouldn’t link directly to my money site from a PBN is if it’s one of those general PBNs that have 15 different categories that are really unrelated on them. In that case, then I will only link to my tier 1 properties instead so that I’m not linking directly to the money site.

If it’s well themed, you can link directly to your money site. When it’s not well themed and you are linking to your tier 1 properties, it’s important … You’ll get more benefit or more bang for your buck if you can link to properties that have do follow links, particularly your blog properties, like Blogger, Tumblr, WordPress. Tubmlr’s got the redirect now so there’s a little bit of a loss. Blogger and WordPress, you can have contextual links. You can have links that get a little bit more keyword relevancy or topical relevancy based on them being anchor text links within the content of a post that’s topical related to your money site. Those are the one that I would typically link to.

Don’t get me wrong, I link to all of my IFTTT properties, not just the do follow link ones, but if I have a particularly strong link that I want to use to push juice through a do follow … to push juice to my money site without linking directly to my money site, then I will strategically use that through a do follow link and most likely a contextual link within the content body of a post, if that makes sense. You want to add to do Hernan?

Hernan: I was about to say that a great way to build backlinks to, for example PBNs, is to have their own IFTTT syndication networks to each of your PBNs. That way, you’re powering them up. Also, as you were saying, even with Tumblr having the new redirect, we’re using Weebly now on the updated training. I think that’s fine. I don’t know, have we figured out if they were indexed or not?

Bradley: You can get the page or the post indexed but the robots.txt will block like any meta data, meta description coming through. However, you know there’s still SEO value there.

Hernan: Definitely. It’s still a contextual link. I would do those. Even further, if you have one-off links, PBNs or SAPE links when you are building to one-offs, what I like to do is to grab for example, let’s say if you have a page that you want to power up, I will write a blog post pointing backlinks to that page. The blog post will syndicate. I will grab the individual URLs for each of those blog posts and power those URLs with SAPE or PBNs. They are one-off, and that will power up the blog posts which in turn will power up the page that you want to rank for because that blog post as well, it will have a link back to the page, provided it’s internal linking. That’s something that I like doing. For general powering up purposes, we will power up the home page.

Bradley: Of the IFTTT properties.

Hernan: Of the IFTTT property, yeah, of the IFTTT property. If you want to push some extra juice on those stubborn internal pages or internal posts, that’s something that I recommend doing and it works really well. You’re powering up the internal URL where that blog post has been syndicated up.

Bradley: That’s a good strategy. That’s part of our SEO strategy and the whole use of the networks is to build links internally from your blogs. Use content marketing from your own blogs. Publishing posts to your blog which have contextual links within the body of the post that point to the pages that you’re trying to rank, those posts then syndicate to your branded network properties which case will each get their own post URL from WordPress, Tumbler, Blogger, Weebly and Medium, if you’re using Medium, which is covered in the new training as well. Each one of those, you can extract the individual post URLs from each of those platforms, that would give you a total of 5 URLs that now you have as additional targets for PBNs or SAPE links that aren’t well themed to begin with.

Is it Important to Have Backlink Diversity for Money Sites?

The follow up question is, ‘Provided you build a majority of strong links to your branded IFTTT network, how important do you consider blog comments, press releases, forum posts pointing directly to your money site in regards to backlink diversity number or referring domains?‘

I think it’s important. I use press releases a lot. I do blog comments but not as much because it requires … I don’t do automated blog comments. I do manual blog comments. I usually just have a VA do that for me. They go out, find related posts that are topically related to the money site, then they’ll leave a real comment in the description or in the comment section. That’s a manual thing. I don’t do as much of that.

Press releases are so much easier for me. Just have a press release distributed. Press releases though, they will typically pull your trust flow down a little bit because a lot of the press release sites don’t … They have really poor trust flow metrics for that particular press release. The URL flow metrics are low. Just be aware of that. However, I think it’s important to have that because it does give you backlink diversity. Referring domains and IP diversity. I think press releases are important. I think it’s natural to have press releases as part of your overall backlink profile. I use a lot of press releases. Plus, they just generate traffic. I think that’s important.

Forum posts, I don’t do any forum posting. I think that if you’re posting in related forums, they can drive traffic. As far as the backlink value, I don’t know how valuable that is. For the sheer targeted traffic that it could generate, I think it’s important.

Hernan: You hit it with that Bradley. If you’re looking for blog comments opportunities or forum posts opportunities, I would rather focus on the traffic rather than the actual backlink because if you have … If you can generate traffic back form that website, it’s usually themed and it’s usually powerful because they already have traffic to that forum post or to that blog posts. However, you cannot spam them. To have have the real good benefits from this strategy, you cannot spam them. You need to be really helpful. In the blog comments, leaving a real blog comment, as you were saying Bradley. Or on the forum posts, leaving a real thread. When you are helpful, or actually leaving a link back in the signature, but you need to build those profile in time. The same with blog comments. You need to be helpful.

Even further, with something like Disqus where you have your own profile, and then you will have your own feed of comments that you have left. Those are are all linking back to your website. You’re actually building an authority profile on Disqus based on those blog comments. I would say that you focus on this strategy from a value-giving point of view and that will give you traffic, which is the most important part.

Bradley: Just remember, the targeted traffic coming in, that’s a ranking signal. Actually, just having that, because it’s engagement on your page, if your website is receiving targeted traffic and people … it’s giving you good time on site metrics and people are clicking other links, they’re basically engaging with your site,. If it’s targeted traffic, they will. They’re most likely to. That’s actually a ranking signal as well. Although the backlinks may not be … have a huge SEO benefit, the actual engagement signals well, if that makes sense.

Is it Considered Keyword Stuffing if You Add Local Keywords to Each Video Title?

Robert says he’s building a YouTube playlist and he wants to know keyword usage. He’s basically saying that if he’s building a mono silo … If you guys aren’t familiar with what I’m talking about, go pick up YouTube Silo Academy. It’s only $7. It’s still $7, right? We didn’t change that, did we? Before I out my foot in my mouth …

Adam: You’re right.

Bradley: Okay. His top level keyword is the top of the silo, which would be essentially the first video in the playlist. It’s probably the playlist title as well. Then what he’s doing is using the same keyword but just adding local modifiers at the end. Within that, he’s linking from one video to the next, to the next, to the next and essentially creating a mono silo structure within one playlist. He’s asking if this is spammy.

No, it’s not considered keyword stuffing as long as each one of your video files are unique enough. You got to be careful because YouTube is becoming increasingly trigger happy when it comes to terminating accounts. I know because I, in the recent weeks, have seen some crazy things happen with some YouTube channels, getting strikes and things like that. We’ve actually disputed a few of them and had them revered, the strikes reversed. I just want you to be careful that if you’re going to be doing that, that’s okay but just make sure that your videos are somewhat unique. In other words, not just using the same video and changing the …

What I recommend is having at least a few videos that you make each one of those … If you’re doing 20 videos for example, I would have maybe 4 or 5 different videos within those 20 videos that you could use over and over again, but the file structure should be different. It could be encoded differently, you could change the videos slightly by adding an opening slide or a closing slide, changing background music, changing the links of the videos. Try to make them unique somewhat because the point is, having those keywords like that, that’s not actually a spam signal in my opinion. It hasn’t caused me any problems in the past.

If you have the same video over and over again with only very minor changes, it’s going to look really spammy. If anybody were to actually manually review, then they’ll probably terminate that account or at least remove all those videos and give you a strike, a community strike. Personally, I would recommend that if you were going to be doing that with a lot of videos, that you have somewhat unique videos, or at least a handful of unique videos that you use over and over again, but still make them unique as far as YouTube is concerned. Does that make sense? Was that clear? Guys?

Hernan: Yeah, I think you make it clear.

Bradley: Then there’s a period here, because I guess he forgot to put the period down here. I’m going to go ahead and plus 1 that for punctuation. That’s good punctuation skills, Robert. Plus 1.

Can Personas be Used in Giving Business Reviews?

Paul say, ‘Hey guys. My question is about the personas in our networks. Can we use our personas to give reviews to our clients’ businesses? Citations, maps, packs, etc. Thanks and keep up the good work.’

You can, Paul. You certainly can. I don’t recommend doing spam reviews, but that’s what it is. You can, if you’re comfortable doing that, you’re okay with it, doesn’t keep you up at night, then feel free to do.

Hernan: Also provided that [inaudible 00:20:37] carefully built, I should say. It can pass a manual review is what I’m saying.

Bradley: Yup. Just be careful doing it. If you got a strong profile that you built up, those are assets guys. You can use them for things like that. Remember, you’re creating an identity. That’s in part what all these IFTTT networks, interlinking and using the semantic hubs and all of it is about. If you end up picking up IFTTT v2, I hammer that home throughout the training because they are so damn powerful, especially using the new methods that we’ve cooked up.

Maps and Linking Social Media on Citation Pages

Greg says, ‘Hey everybody. My site is a lead gen site for a service business. I did not have a map showing in Google My Business page.’ Did not have a map showing. It’s a lead gen for a service business. Some questions that I build my citations, why … It’s a service business so I did not have a map showing in Google My Business page. I don’t understand that because if you’re doing a local …

If you’re doing a lead gen site, even if you’re doing a service based business which means your customers don’t come to the business, the business goes to the customers, you’d still want a local page which would have a map. You would just select the hide the address option. Maybe I’m not understanding the question. I’m not sure what he’s saying here. I’m going to move on. ‘Some of the citations provide a citation to show a map or not. Should I also not show maps in these?’ The problem is with citations, if you have … I’m assuming you do have a local page and you’ve selected the ‘don’t show my location’ option. It will still show a map, but it just won’t show the pin where the actual physical location, in air quotes, is. It will just show a round map marker in the city area. It won’t be a specific pin marking where the address is, if that’s what you’re talking about.

The citations that provide to show a map or not, if as long as you can still add your address in there, if there’s an option to not show the location, I’d just select that. A lot of the citations, here’s the thing Greg, probably 90% of the citations that you can create don’t have that option. You’re going to have to list that pseudo address regardless. That’s an issue. When I create lead gen properties and I get a physical location for those, typically a mailbox somewhere, whatever, then I still end up listing those addresses in just about every citation directory because it doesn’t give you the option. Most of them don’t give you the option to hide it. What I’m really concerned with is the Google listing, mainly. Even Yelp, for that matter. I think Yelp shows the address, and Yelp is a place that you’ll get traffic from.

By the way, just so guys know in case you’re not already aware of this, if you add a business listing to Yelp, prepare to be absolutely hammered with phone calls from Yelp, sales calls, with them trying to sell you advertising. They are relentless. I’ve got Yelp listings from 4 years ago that I set up. Every single year around spring time, because it’s their 3 service businesses, I start getting hammered, 3, 4 years calls a week form yelp. For 4 years I haven’t advertised with them and yet they still call every spring for about 3 months straight, they’ll call several times per week. It’s absolutely ridiculous. I can’t stand it.

Hernan: Tell us how you really feel, Bradley.

Bradley: So annoying dude. What I do is I keep blocking the numbers from my … keep in the block on my Verizon phone or whatever so that each time they call I block another number and then they just call from a new number. Bastards.

Marco: There’s an easy solution to that, Bradley.

Bradley: What’s that?

Marco: Just drive money to them.

Hernan: That would shut them up.

Bradley: Pay them some money. ‘A few citations will not display the street address unless a map is shown. If I choose not to show a map, will not having an address other than the city displayed introduce inconsistent listings? I want the citations to be as perfectly consistent as possible.’ Greg, you’re just going to have to use the address. If you’re concerned about it … Yeah, the citations are stronger when you have consistency, including the street address because the 3 data points are name, address and phone number. Those are the 3 most important data points so you want all of those to be consistent across as many citations as you can.

‘A few strong citations don’t provide a URL link, some offer do follow link for $10 per month which seems price too high.’ No, don’t do that. ‘For a $15 one payment, one will add what is called a true weblink, direct link to website for SEO purposes. Is that worth it in your opinion?’ No, because there’s too many out there that will give you a link. Even those that don’t give you a link, they’re called unstructured citations, it doesn’t matter. Those are still valuable for ranking in Google Maps. Don’t worry about that. There’s other ways that you can get links that don’t have a monthly fee or that are more powerful anyways. I don’t ever do that.

‘A lot have option to add Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and other property links. I’m adding these in. Isn’t this almost like a mini link network? Should I add in any of the IFTTT properties I built that can be added to the citations?’ If there’s locations for those specific properties, why not? It’s all branded, right? We’re not trying to hide our footprint with branded properties, guys. We want to just broadcast that footprint as much as possible to show how authoritative we are.

Hernan: I think he makes a good point. On the new training, on v2, we are … You are making the point of authorizing other social networks on the … when you’re opening accounts, branded accounts. That’s actually another check mark on the authority checklist. That’s another way of authorizing your network or your profile. I think that every time that you can post additional websites, not only you will be powering up your profile but also it can potentially bring you traffic to those websites. That’s what they are for.

Bradley: Last 2. ‘Two citations suggested by BrightLocal are Herald Tribune and NFW Daily News. These end up with the following URLs. Are both of these truly separate or somewhat duplicate?’ It doesn’t matter. Those are different. Those are considered different URLs. They’re unique URLs, unique referring domains, regardless. There’s nothing wrong with that. ‘Should I add the Map Quest as a citation, as a map?’ Yeah, Map Quest is a powerful citation. Again, I don’t worry about that. Again, I build all the citations that I need to rank and then is top building citations. I use a lot of pseudo addresses and it works just fine. I just hide it in maps. That’s it. In Google Maps, I mean.

How to Deal with Removed Web Properties in IFTTT V.2?

Ed says … Also in Bing maps, I choose the don’t show in Bing maps option as well. ‘Hey guys, in the wake of IFTTT now removing App.net and Diigo from the services, do we go in the recipes and shut them down or does it matter?‘ It does matter, Ed. When they actually completely remove them, they’re just not going to work. It doesn’t matter. If you want to go and log in … I personally have way too many accounts to do that so I just let them, whatever.

By the way, there is a workaround for Diigo. It was actually posted in the first IFTTT SEO Academy as well, but it’s also being covered in the second. Diigo is a social data hub, guys. It’s too important to stop using. There’s a two step recipe workaround that works just fine for posting to Diigo. It’s been tested and it’s in the new training as well. It’s funny because actually right after I had done the training, the new training, recorded the videos, seriously during the time that I was recording the training videos is when they decided to remove those. I was like, aww, shit. Let me go back and do an update video saying, ‘By the way, Diigo’s been removed. Here’s how you fix it, blah blah.’ If it had been 2 days earlier, I would have saved a lot of additional work.

Do You Have a Course in Hiring Outsourcers?

Richard Ortiz. ‘What’s up, I have a couple questions with regards to raising page authority in the money site and on your courses. Here are my questions. Do you guys have a course specifically for hiring outsourcers like Curation Mastery and Mastermind that goes into detail?’ No. It’s either, it’s a bonus for Curation Mastery. It was also in Masterclass where we covered that. Obviously, in the Mastermind we’ve covered it multiple times as well. Those are the only 3 places you have. We do not have a stand alone course for hiring out sources yet. That may be something that we do some time this year, possibly. Don’t hold me to it.

What are Tier 1 Sites in an IFTTT Network?

‘Is the IFTTT properties surrounding my money site considered tier 1?’ Yes. ‘If not, then what is considered tier 1?’ Yes, they’re tier 1. Anything that links directly to your money site is considered tier 1. Anything that links directly to your money site is considered tier 1. Citation, IFTTT properties, backlinks, anything at all that links directly to your money site is considered a tier 1.

Can We Use FCS Networker Pointing to Money Keyword Within Syndicated IFTTT Properties?

‘Can I use FCS network to point a money keyword over to my syndicated IFTTT properties like Twitter, Yelp …’ Yelp’s not a IFTTT property, but okay. ‘… Google Places, YouTube video without a penalty?’ You have to be careful with what you’re doing. If you know how to use the tool properly, yeah. Don’t hammer away exact match keyword anchor text only to all your tier 1 properties because then you’ll pass that through any do follow links to your money site. You just got to use diversity. Just make sure you’re using diverse anchor text, mainly URL, naked URL anchors and generic keywords or very broad keywords.

Hernan: Richard, just, with FCS networker, just send a handful of backlinks links to each syndicated property, like 10, 15, 20. Just a handful of them. You do not need that many to power them up. In fact, being branded, they need to be treated as extensions of your brand. You need to be really careful, because they can actually generate sales and they are additional landing pages. I would be careful. Just send a handful of them.

Would a Money Site Gets Tier 2 Link Juice if it’s Pointing to a Naked URL?

Bradley: ‘If my tier 2 is a money keyword and has pointed to tier 1 which is a naked URL or brand URL, will my money page rank for keywords still giving the effect to tier 2?‘ Yes, in fact, especially if your tier 1 links back to your money site or do follow links, then especially … That’s back to question 3, that’s why I recommend that you keep those tier 2 links with a diverse set of anchor texts because you can overdo it. If your tier 2 links are all exact match keywords, first of all that looks unnatural. Whenever you’re linking to your tier 1 properties, just like what Hernan said, you don’t want to burn your tier 1 properties either. Yes, the relevancy, keyword relevancy passes through do follow links guys. Just keep that in mind. Do follow links, whether they’re naked URLs, brand URLs, whatever, it doesn’t matter. A do follow link will pass keyword relevancy.

Best Practices When Pointing Links to Tier 1, 2, 3 Networks in IFTTT

‘Got to say, glad to have made it for the first time.’ We’ll plus 1 that. Kenny King says, ‘Good afternoon. How’s it going?’ Good. ‘I’ve had a solid branded IFTTT network. We post regularly up to 4 times a week. Mostly 3 times. It’s nice and active. I want to boost some individual pages on our main site. I’ve not done any tier 2 links but just wanted to ask 2 questions about tier 2 and possibly 3. What types of links would you point at a tier 1 branded network? Would you maybe buy some PBN links from a forum or would you keep it even cleaner?’

No. You could. We’ve done a ton of stuff with SAPE. They’re typically cheaper than PBN links if you know where to get them or find them yourself from the SAPE network. Again, it comes down to what you’re pointing links to. If you’re pointing to no follow links, then you can get away with a lot more. You can be a little bit sloppier. I recommend, what Hernan mentioned, was that you always try to keep your tier 2 links as themed and as clean as possible. Don’t hit your tier 1 links with kitchen sink spam. Or from really poop PBN links and things like that. It will do more harm than good. You’re better off trying to find some decent links with decent metrics, particularly with … that are topically related. Therein lies the rub. That’s the hard part, is finding tier 2 links to point directly to tier 1 links that are topically related or relevant, if that makes sense. If you can, that’s your best bet.

Because guys, it’s more and more about relevancy that it is about links. Even at tier 2. What you don’t want to do is get links from completely unrelated blogs pointing to your tier 1 properties, that are most likely your branded properties anyways, which you just mentioned in the first part of your question, because then it really doesn’t make sense. Google’s starting looking to 2 hops back, they’re looking 2 tiers back now. Unrelated links pointing to your tier 1 properties just looks unnatural. It’s clear what you’re trying to do. Again, I try to keep them as relevant as possible. That can be challenging, but you can definitely do it. That’s why we recommend doing stuff like a layer of FCS or additional web 2 links pointing to your tier 1 links because then you can spam behind those or use more unrelated links to those tier 3 links if that makes sense.

Hernan: Kenny, have in mind that when you have a branded tier 1 network and you have those big links opportunities, it makes a lot of sense for example, for an author that’s publishing a guest post, to link back to the money site and also to link back to the Twitter profile for example, or the Google+ profile or the LinkedIn profile. I wouldn’t be afraid of actually, if you have those opportunities, to actually send a link to your money site and also to your tier 1. It makes a lot of sense from an editorial standpoint. Your Twitter profile or your company Twitter profile will link back to your money site anyways. You’re powering up the entire structure that way.

That’s what I like doing when commenting on related blog posts, as we mentioned before. I usually leave a link to my Twitter profile or to Semantic Mastery Twitter or Google+. That usually, for Google+, that usually has a list of other links to your, not only to your money site but also to other links in your IFTTT network.

Bradley: The second part is, ‘For individual pages, would you point tier 2 links at an individual post or posts that point to an individual page to try to boost the page on the main money site?’ Yeah, we answered that same exact question right on this very webinar, but absolutely. Syndicate a post from your main money site that’s got an internal link within the content body that’s pointing to the page that you’re trying to rank on your site. When that post syndicates, go to your blog properties especially, go capture the post URLs from each one of those blog properties, Blogger, Tumblr, WorPress, Medium and Weebly if you’re using those. Now you can build links directly to those. That will give you essentially a tier 3 link.

Remember, you’re first link is coming from your own post on your main money site to your page. Ultimately what you’re trying to do is rank your page. The first tier link comes from an internal link from within your blog post itself. Then you got the syndicated post to your branded properties. That’s essentially a tier 2 link. Then you’d build links to those individual post URLs and that gives you the tier 3. You can be a bit more aggressive with those because you’re putting 2 hops between your page and the actual additional link building that you do. Absolutely, that’s a powerful strategy. Again, Hernan talked about doing that just earlier.

Using Tumblr Links for IFTTT Networks and Local Citation Pages

John says, ‘Hello guys. I have a IFTTT brand network for a website.’ A lot of good questions today. All about IFTTT. It’s themed for this big launch. ‘I have around 30 good aged Tumblr account that have trust flow of 10 to 21 with clean backlinks and anchor texts.’ That’s awesome, John. ‘Some have links from [inaudible 00:37:22], wikis, libraries and all have links from real non-Tumblr sites. Should I use them to backlink to the IFTTT network properties or instead link them to citations?’ You can do either, John. Those are powerful assets that you have there. Tumblrs with good metrics, guys. It’s a great strategy. It’s still very powerful, even with those redirect links. You can use them for either.

What I like to do is, again … When you have opportunities like that, assets that you can use that are clean and have good metrics guys, then that’s when I get a lot more focused with whether I’m linking to do follow or no follow links. Because you can use the do follow links that you can find from your networks very strategically when you have stuff like this.

‘Would you spread them out and use only 1 or 2 Tumblrs to link to 15 different IFTTT properties or citations or instead focus on 3 properties and link 10 Tumblrs to each of those 3 properties or citations?’ John, I would focus on finding the ones that have do follow links in building all of the Tumblrs that you have available to however many do follow links you can identify. If you have, let’s say you find 6 properties or 8 properties from IFTTT networks to citations that have do follow links, then I would just spread out the available links from your Tumblr accounts to those.

Hernan: Sorry, Bradley. What I like doing when I’m in doubt where to link to is to actually search for the brand name on Google. Google will tell you the first 10 spots. Those are the more relevant for the brand. You can get your Twitter, you can get a Medium profile, you can get a citation. You can get all sorts of different backlinks, and those are the most relevant for your brand on the Google side, so power up those.

Bradley: Let Google tell you which properties it thinks are the most valuable or important to your money site, to your brand, and then build links to those. That said guys, I do want to disclaim something here because I mentioned through other Hump Day Hangouts that the whole do follow, no follow thing is not as much of an issue. I stand by that statement. It might sound contradictory based on some of the responses I’ve given today. I want to explain that I build links to all of my properties, especially my branded properties, regardless of whether they’re follow or no follow. It doesn’t matter to me because all of those links are going to show up in your Google search consul as backlinks to your site. In my opinion, it’s absolutely natural and important to have no follow links as well.

All I’m saying here is that when you have unique opportunities such as what John has here with these Tumblrs, then that’s when I’ll take that extra step and find the do follow links that … especially the ones like what Hernan said, Google tells me are the properties that are the strongest. I usually look at the top 20, the first 2 pages, to see what Google’s telling me are the most important properties to my brand. I’ll scrape those real quick to see which ones have do follow links and those are the ones that I’ll use to build these type of opportunities, when I have these kind of assets. I’ll use those do follow links to build from these, if that makes sense.

Just so you know, it’s important to have a mix of everything, but when you have some opportunities like this that you can use, there’s obviously some benefit to identifying which are the more powerful properties in Google’s mind and the ones that have do follow attributes so you can push juice through those.

‘Do you think these Tumblrs will be strong backlinks?’ Yes, absolutely. ‘All are themed. I’m just hesitant to link any directly to my money site.’ I’d still, John, to be honest with you, I’d probably link a few of them directly to the money site. Not 10, but I might take 2 or 3 and link directly to the money site too, just with a well written post on those Tumblrs. Just make sure the content is strong if you’re going to link … Don’t do it with all of them but take a couple of them. Why not? Find some of your strongest ones, just put a well written post on that Tumblr with a link directly to your money site too. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s natural.

Kevin. ‘Hey guys, I have a few questions.’ We’re running out of time, guys. We’re going to wrap it up about 10 minutes early from now on so that we can get prepared for Masterclass. Let’s try to run through the next few. ‘I have a few questions about DA boosting with a sub domain with GSA …

Marco: Bradley?

Bradley: Yup.

Marco: If I can just jump in here real quick. This question is really advanced and it’s stuff that we cover inside the Mastermind.

Bradley: I agree. I’m reading it now.

Marco: Sometimes Masterclass. Sorry, Kevin. You can go over it a little bit. It’s just things that we keep for our Mastermind students.

Bradley: It is a bit advanced, Kevin. Honestly, this is something that probably shouldn’t be talking about on public webinars, that’s for sure.

Hernan: Otherwise, we’ll have to kill you, Kevin.

Bradley: [crosstalk 00:42:25]

Adam: This is really hardcore. This Hump Day Hangouts just escalated.

Bradley: The Google Gods will strike us dead too. Let’s just say, Kevin, doing that whole boosting method, if you do it right you can boost … I’ve gone from a DA1 to a DA47 in 2 Moz update cycles. Basically 60 days or so, doing it that way. Although I can tell you, to be honest, it’s not near as effective as it used to be. I’m sorry, if you’re following other people that tell you that DA boosting is still as effective as it was. It’s just not correct. It’s not near as effective as it used to be. It’s not something I even focus on anymore. I focus on manipulating trust flow now. Honestly, the whole DA boosting thing …

There’s still some benefit there, don’t get me wrong, guys. I’m not saying it’s useless or it’s dead. It’s not near as effective as it used to be. I try to accomplish what I want to accomplish with the least amount of work, so that’s why I focus on manipulating trust flow instead. Topical trust flow, more importantly. Just keep that in mind, Kevin. Honestly, this sounds like a lot of work for something that’s probably not going to benefit you nearly as much as you hoped that it will.

 A Quick Review on PressCable Press Release

Greg says, ‘Hey Bradley, you mentioned in a video that you’ve used Press Cable Press Releases but didn’t think they were all that good.’ They’re okay, don’t get me wrong. I’ve used many other press release services and I’m not crazy about Press Cable. There’s a few reasons why. I think their editorial guidelines are too strict, number 1. Number 2, the WYSIWYG editor sucks. It gives you absolutely no options to do anything within the content. It’s just too simple.

Anyways, it’s up to you if you want to sue it. The distribution is good. They’re just too limited in their editorial guidelines as well as their editing, their content editor. Let’s see. ‘I plan to write them in good PR format. I’m wondering how much conference I should have in the press releases.’ Greg, their service is fine. The distribution service is fine. It’s quite strong, actually. I’ll give you that I just don’t like the editorial process of the content editor.

How to Drive Traffic to Gen Videos Sites?

Jenny says, ‘i like to create a site like Genvideos. How do I drive traffic to it?’ Marco, you know about more about gen videos than I do. I can talk about the traffic end, but what is Genvideos exactly?

Marco: That’s just a website where you can watch free videos, free movies. It’s some, I don’t know, Popcorn Time was really popular …

Hernan: Yeah, kind of the Popcorn Time.

Marco: Popcorn Time is still around. You can find it even though they tried to shut it down. It still works. That’s what it’s like. You’re providing free videos and displaying ads. The ads are what will make you the money.

Bradley: That’s the revenue model.

Marco: [crosstalk 00:45:23]

Bradley: The revenue model is advertising and you’re looking to drive traffic to it. Obviously, IFTTT networks is a good way to start. Create a bunch of networks to it so that every new post or new entry, new listing, whatever it is, however it’s posted to would get syndicated out across the network. Branded networks, particularly. If it’s just a video style site, you could essentially get away with tiered networks on that as well, most likely.

Hernan: You may want to jump into v2, Jenny, when we launch. Probably next week.

Adam: You could do some RYS stuff.

Marco: I would throw the combo at this, man. IFTTT v2.0 and then some RYS Academy just to power it up because it will start ranking real quick for medium, high and lower terms. The low hanging fruit will almost rank automatically with RYS Academy, man. If you put it all together, IFTTT v2.0, the Twitter SEO Academy and then some RYS Academy magic, you’re good to go.

Hernan: What’s good about these kind of websites and these kind of models is that they are really viral. These Genvideos guys, they have the Facebook comments added. If you want to do something viral when you’re uploading free movies, the downside with that is on the legal aspect. The virality, the viral aspect is that it can bring you a ton of traffic and also a ton of good signals. I think IFTTT can bring you both, backlinks and the traffic that you need to make it viral.

Marco: Set up your servers in Panama, Jenny.

Bradley: All right guys, we got about 3 minutes. We’re going to try to run through the next couple really quickly. We’re going to cut it off at 10 until, sorry. We’re going to try to get through these very quickly.

Creating New Photo and Adding Meta Data Using Screenshot

John says, ‘I can’t find your video where you discuss geo tagging images and recommended us to take the pictures with our own phones.‘ Not with your phone, John. That would suck. Those pictures would be awful. If you try take pictures with your phones … Well, wait a minute. I could be misunderstanding.

When I talk about screenshoting an image, if you’re viewing an image on your computer and you don’t want to download it because of the meta data, take a screenshot of it. Use something like Jing. I personally use SnagIt which is also by TecSmith. It’s just an upgrade with paid … It’s a little bit better than Jing. It has more options. Whatever screenshot software you use is fine. Just download it as a JPEG or JPG. I think we talked about this earlier.

If you’re doing local stuff, honestly the most powerful images are going to be ones that you take yourself or that you get the client to take or whatever from a phone. Those are original images and Google weights original images more. That’s something that you can do, absolutely, is take photos with your phone or camera. The place of business and that kind of stuff. That’s going to be more powerful too. I’m not sure. If you were talking about screenshoting, do not use your phone because that would be terrible. If you were trying to take a screenshot with your phone of a computer screen, it will be an awful picture. Maybe I’m misunderstanding.

Hernan: I like using LiveShot which is a Chrome extension. It’s the same for Firefox. LiveShot plugin. You can grab a portion of the screen with that. You’ll click on the print screen button and you can grab a portion of the screen and save that.

Adam: Live Screen Shot, that’s my 2 cents.

Bradley: There’s a lot of them. It doesn’t really matter what you use. I use SnagIt because I use that for all my, recording videos and everything as well. That’s personally my recommendation. Jing is free and all these other ones you’re talking about are free. Just find something, take screenshots. If you crop some of your pictures, MS Paint … MS Paint isn’t going to do anything with the meta data. If there’s already existing meta data, it’s not going to change it. Just so you know that, that’s not going to change that.

‘Did you remove the geo location data form the images? Does this remove.’ No, it won’t change. Again, if you’ve downloaded somebody else’s image and there’s meta data attached, you’re downloading the meta data. The only way to get around that is to screenshot it, so that you’re talking an original photo or shot of that image that’s only been generated on your computer. It was born on your computer. There’s no meta data attached. Does that makes sense?

‘If so, is Geo Setter a good program to add the data?’ Yes, Geo Setter is what I use to add meta data. You can add meta data if you’re on a windows computer by right clicking, choosing properties and then going to the details tab. As long as it’s a JPEG. PNG it won’t work, but for a JPEG image, you can add your own meta data there but it won’t give you the EXIF data which is where you add geo coordinates. That’s where you geo tag, by adding coordinates. Something like Geo Setter is a software program that will allow you to add geo coordinates as well. That is exactly what I use.

‘I am not sure if anything though than GPS coordinates needs to be added. Thank you for your help.’ The other thing that I add is, again, if you right click on an image and show properties and then click on details, you can add a title, subject, tags, details or description, then you can add in the author URL and copyright URL so you can actually put links in the meta data. You can add in again, with a software program, you can add in geo coordinates.

This has got to be the last one because we are already a couple of minutes over. Sorry, Jackie. I did see your question earlier Jackie. We can’t do audits. We can’t do audits on Hump Day Hangouts. It’s not what Hump Day Hangouts is for. We can answer questions. Unfortunately, we’re not going to have time to answer this one. If you want audits, join the Masterclass and do it before Monday when the price goes up. On Monday, the price is going up on that too. On Masterclass, we do audits. In fact, we have Masterclass in about 8 minutes and we have somebody that’s got 2 sites they want us to audit and we’re going to be doing it there. I apologize for that.

Deeper Tier Networks in New IFTTT

Bo says, ‘Hey team. I have a question regarding tiered networks. Has there been changes to how many tiers we deeply go with blog syndication? I think I overheard that for safety reasons, we no longer go below tier 1.’ No, Bo. In the new training, I cover this … Again, I hammer some of these points home in the new training guys because they are the same questions that come up over and over again. I say them over and over again in the new training. Some of you guys are going to get tired of hearing some of that stuff in the new training, trust me, but I don’t care. To be honest with you, I get tired of answering the same questions over …

Bo, I’m not mad at you dude. You’re one of our good students. Don’t think I’m saying that. I’m just letting you know, be prepared the new training is going to cover all this. I do not say that we don’t do tiered networks. I just say that tiered networks requires that extra level of care and attention to properly minimize your footprint. There is no footprint with branded networks guys, remember that. With tiered networks for blog syndication, there is an issue with potential problems of creating a footprint because you’re clearly trying to manipulate search results. You have to add in your additional content triggers related to content feeds as tier 2 triggers to populate your tiered networks with additional related content from other sources, which minimizes the footprint.

For that reason, because it’s additional attention to detail and work and I manage too many damn accounts, I just don’t do tiered networks for blog syndication anymore. I only do it specifically for YouTube where we don’t even need related content feeds. There’s no footprint issue with YouTube syndication. Blog syndication, there is. It’s okay to use tiered networks provided that you add in those additional steps that we teach you how to do. If you have more than just a handful of sites to manage, it’s too much work in my opinion to maintain all of that so I just don’t do it. That’s all I’m saying.

Personally, I don’t do tiered networks for blog syndication anymore, but you’re welcome to do it. They’re still very effective, still very powerful. They just require those additional steps. You must follow those additional steps or you’re setting yourself up for trouble. That’s all I’m saying. YouTube networks, go to town man. Build as many tiers out as you want, stack as many networks as you want. You don’t need related content feeds as least for now. It works like a charm.

Hernan: Add them on SERP space so that you’re constantly monitoring them.

Bradley: Absolutely. SERP space, baby. Sorry guys, we gotta wrap it up. We’ll see everybody in Masterclass in about 5 minutes. Hump Day Hangouts next week, I will not be there, neither will Adam, because we will be in sunny San Diego for the Click Funnels event. You will have our fearless cohort Hernan and Marco and potentially Chris as well to be on Hump Day Hangouts with you.

Hernan: Get ready for Monday everybody.

Bradley: IFTTT v2 baby.

Adam: Bye guys, see you in a bit.

Bradley: Bye.