Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 117

By April

Click on the video above to watch Episode 117 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.






Adam: Hello, Bradley. All right.

Bradley: Hi, Hernan.

Hernan: Hey, everyone.

Adam: Hey, everybody. Welcome to episode 117 of Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts. Today is the first of February. We've got almost the whole crew here. Chris is out in the Alps I believe doing fun things. Yes. Doing fancy things. I think he's out snowboarding. He's taking some well deserved time off, but we're holding down the fort so let's go around and say hi to everybody. Let's start. Marco, how's it going?

Marco: What's up man?

Adam: What's the weather Marco?

Marco: Warm and sunny. Warm and sunny until May. Sorry for you guys wearing all those sweaters and hats and all that stuff, but it is how it is. You got to pay the price for the life you live. We deal with volcanoes, a few earthquakes. On the upside, it's always warm and sunny.

Adam: Fair enough. Fair enough. Hernan, how's it going?

Hernan: Hey, everyone. Hey, it's really, really good to be here. I'm super excited. Still getting use to this platform, but I think it's growing up on me. Looking good.

Adam: All right. Bradley, how's it going man?

Bradley: Good and happy to be here.

Adam: Good deal. All right. Well, we're going to get into it pretty quick. Real quick I wanted to say a couple of this. Wanted to let everybody know that Video Powerhouse is expanding. I know we mentioned it a couple times. We are going to have a launch later in the month. We've been keeping kind of quiet about it, but it's been growing and it is freaking awesome. I'm going to leave it at that. I'll drop the link if you're interested in checking that out. There's going to be some closed off going off that. I'm just going to say many more sites at this point and there's a lot of cool features coming to it. If you're interested, by all means, please check it out. While I'm doing that, I think … Marco, have you been doing something? What's going on?

Marco: I've been jumping around the web looking at stuff, trying to see how much trouble like I'm trying to break the web guys. I'm having fun. I'm trying to break literally. I don't know of any of the work, but what's coming is I don't know. It's like taking a howitzer to a fistfight. You might be a good fighter, but when you got that big barrel facing you, it's not going to do you much good, right? No matter how good a fighter you are.

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Adam: Yeah. Don't bring a knife to the howitzer fight.

Marco: There you go. That's what I'm doing.

Bradley: You were calling it originally the Make Google Puke Project.

Marco: Yeah.

Bradley: MGPP.

Marco: It's gone beyond that.

Bradley: That's great.

Marco: I'm trying to make the web puke man.

Adam: Awesome. Awesome. Awesome.

Bradley: Well, give it hell Marco.

Marco: Yeah. That goes man. We're in the lab. We're having fun.

Adam: Also more information for people, stuff keeps going on. We're going to have some interesting stuff happening. I'll just leave it at that. Let's see. You guys got anything else or should we dive into it?

Bradley: Let's get into it. We got questions already.

Adam: All right. Let's go.

Bradley: All right. I'm going to grab the screen and whenever I do this, my audio drops so hang tight for a second guys. If somebody can confirm that you're seeing my screen now.

Adam: Great. Yes, we are seeing just the browser.

Which Among Ahrefs, Moz, Etc. Provides Accurate SEO And Ranking Data?

Bradley: Okay. That's good. That's fine. All right. Let me open it up a little bit. All right. Let's get into it. It looks like a Red Pulse comment here a minute ago. I guess Paul had a question attached to his wonderful comment about Mega-Ray last week that I missed apparently. I read the comment, but I apparently missed the question so I'll get to that in a second. Brian's up first. He says, “It seems that Ahrefs, Moz, et cetera, all have different ranking number. Which do you feel is the most accurate ranking site?” As far as you mean like what? Brian, I'm assuming that you mean like the metrics that they give you as far as for Moz it would be … Excuse me Moz. For Majestic it would be Trust Flow and Citation Flow. Is that what you mean?

Ahrefs and Moz have one of the ones that … It's been so long since I've used either Ahrefs or Moz, but they a is it trust factor or rank? What are the metrics for that, Hernan, that they assign to it? I'm not talking about Domain Authority and Page Authority, but they're like trust ratings.

Hernan: Yeah. They have MozRank.

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Bradley: MozRank. Okay. That's one of them.

Hernan: The MozRank and then they have a new kind of a spam metric or something like that that I've noticed and I came across it. It's still highly I would say inaccurate because I've gone through it and I throw completely spam domains and they came back lower than real money sites. That they have a lower threshold of spam signals if you would. They have these spam metrics, whatever, and then they have the MozRank which is another metric as well.

Bradley: As far as those, most of the time, Brian, and we've been talking about this for months if not more than that, those metrics really … I don't pay attention to those metrics anymore and I haven't for quite some time because they're all proprietary. Like Hernan just said, they're wildly inaccurate in my opinion. I've seen sites with terrible ratings ranked really, really well and then I've seen sites with great ratings ranked very poorly. I just don't trust those metrics anymore. I mean they're an indication … Like Trust Flow for example and Topical Trust Flow, it's something that we used for quite some time.

Prior to using that, we were using Moz's Domain Authority and Page Authority for quite some time as a way to identify or measure the strength of domains or links for that matter or pages instead of just domains. A lot of that stuff is not nearly as effective as it used to be because Google caught on to all of our manipulations that we would do with those, right? I'm not taking about us. I'm talking about us like SEOs in general. People would manipulate those numbers in such a way … Like I remember we used to do … I'm sure you guys have heard Domain Authority Stacking and that's something that we did that as well. We would manipulate Domain Authority and Page Authority. Doing all kinds of evil stuff. That worked for quite some time, about a year and a half.

That worked really, really well and then it started to stop working. It started to decline. Then we switched over to Trust Flow. We were manipulating Trust Flow metrics and that would work really, really well and then that started to decline. Then we started focusing more on Topical Trust Flow which is a measure of Topical Relevancy. That seem to work better than any of the other ones and we still focused on Topical Relevancy, but we don't use the Majestic metric as a measure of Topical Relevancy so much anymore. On a large broad scale, yes. If I'm going to be analyzing a list of domains for purchase, then I'll look at Topical Trust Flow as kind of just an idea of what the inbound links are for a particular domain, but then I'll still go in and analyze it individually, each domain individually, and look at the inbound link profile, look at the content, what the content of the site was, all that kind of stuff.

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Now I focus more on topical relevancy than I do on any one metric. That's what we teach at Semantic Mastery and we have been for many, many months now is to not focus so much on domain metrics or any of those proprietary metrics and focus more on relevancy. That can be done just with a quick review of the sites that you're trying to get links from if that make sense or domains that you're going to purchase. It's just a matter of looking at them and seeing what was the content about. Does this relate to something that I can use? How can I make it relate in some way that would be beneficial and pass relevancy, if that make sense. The only backlink analysis tool that I use and it's the only one I've been using for probably about two years now is Majestic.

I stopped using all the others. I know Ahrefs is good, but I just specifically stuck with Majestic when we stopped using Domain Authority and Page Authority metrics and we started focusing more into Trust Flow and Topical Trust Flow and I've just stuck with that one every since. Now that I don't really use any of those metrics in my analysis anymore, it doesn't really matter. I just keep the subscription to Majestic so that when I do have analysis, I have at least one tool available if that make sense. You guys want to add to that?

Hernan: Go ahead, Marco. Go ahead.

Marco: This was in a blog post that I did in December of 2015, right? The distance graph. It was the death of the PBN and then what you needed to do in order for your PBN not to die which is to find something with high trust, high authority, but not what Majestic and what do you call it, Moz tell you. Real authority, real trust and relevant to whatever it is that you're doing. If it's not relevant, then it's practically become useless. We've mentioned this before tons of times, it has those metrics that are out of this world, right? 60 to 80 Domain Authority and Trust Flow. When you're in that area, I mean if you can get something like that, you have the holy grail of links.

Otherwise, you just look for something that maybe has lower metrics, but is relevant to whatever it is that you're doing. You make sure that it's linked to something that's relevant and that's considered either a seat site or a seat sit. We did a whole webinar on seat sites and seat sets and iframes and everything that you could do to gain the system, but I guess nobody was paying attention unless you're in RYS Academy and making tons of money.

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Bradley: Yup.

Adam: Right.

Hernan: What I wanted to say real quick to add what you guys were saying is that I've been talking to Roman I think it was last week or the week before that. They were having great results. We're finding these kind of domains when they switch the focus from metrics into backlinks on history. They were finding maybe the metrics weren't that high, but the backlinks were like pure gold, backlinks from Wikipedia, backlinks from CNN, backlinks from those kind of things. Even you're using something like Bluechip backlinks or whatever, since we have our own … We're developing our own down for you PBN and down for you scrapes if you want.

On SERP Space I think that when we switch something super simple like the approach to scrape from quality of backlinks and quality of history and quality of domains, it goes way further and the competition is slower because again everyone else is looking metrics. Metrics are something … What we need to understanding is that metrics are third party tools. That's what's something that I want to say. The guys were finding really, really good domains just by switching the approach to this.

Bradley: Like you just mentioned, they're a third party or proprietary metrics guys so it's their best guess as to what Google is looking for. Granted they're educated guesses. I get that, but it's still proprietary. They don't work for Google. They don't have direct access to Google's metrics. It's what they determine, they think and from vast amounts of data. I get that, but again it's still proprietary. We stopped focusing on that and like Hernan mentioned, even like for the domains that we've been purchasing for our own stuff, as well as for scraping domains to be sold in SERP Space and that kind of stuff, we switched the focus over to looking at the inbound links guys. Here's the thing.

Even if you're using Bluechip Backlinks or whatever, a domain scraper, and you're scraping your own domains, typically everyone looks for the metrics, right? They're looking for trust phone numbers within a certain threshold or above a certain threshold and that kind of thing. That's great. I get that. You can find domains that have zero Trust Flow that have maybe five or six inbound links, but they're five or six inbound links from really relevant sources. That's more valuable to me. Even though the metric isn't there, the metric doesn't say that it's a very powerful domain to purchase.

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Because it has inbound links that are relative to what I'm going to be linking to from that domain, then obviously that's a good link for me or a good domain to purchase to use to build a link to whatever site that I want if that make sense because it's got the element inbound links. That to me is more important now than any metric. Good question there there Brian.

Will Semantic Mastery Offer Training On Megarray?

Next is Paul and this is the one I mentioned earlier. He says, “Last week Bradley read my comment, but didn't answer my question.” Sorry, Paul. I must have missed the question part of it. “My question last week was are you, Bradley, going to do training on how to use Megarray?” No, I'm not. The only reason why I'm saying no, Paul, is because there's training in Megarray.

As far as how to use the tool, it's for strategy and stuff. It's no different than strategy I would use for any other tool, like mass video tool. We've done various trainings over the years based on that. Mega-Ray is just a tool that can perform a particular function, several functions, but there are other tools out there that will do that as well. We've covered that a lot in various trainings. I don't plan on doing any specific training on Megarray. No. Basically guys it's the same thing. You can use it to poke, to find, to test keywords. You can also add your own. You can add themed networks which is what I recommend that you do so that you can mass publish videos to multiple networks.

You can use it for building backlinks and Paul, I know Paul you said you're already having really good results with not only ranking videos, but also ranking money sites with using the tool Megarray. It sounds like you already know what you're doing anyway.

How Can I Copy Content Off Of A Youtube Closed Captions (CC)?

Edward's up. He's got multiple questions here so let's run through them. “Hi, Bradley. How can I copy content off of YouTube creative commons?” Well, okay, I don't know what the terms of what the actual like proper terms of use are for that. I can tell you obviously if you use Firefox, you can download pretty much any video ever on the web. If you use Firefox, all you got to do is install a Firefox extension. There's many, many of them that will do that where you can just download a video.

You could do it that way. I don't know that that's proper use of creative comments. It's probably not, but that's certainly one way you can do it. The other thing you do is use the YouTube Editor. Go to YouTube.com/editor. Let's just show this real quick. You guys are seeing my screen, correct? To make sure.

Adam: Yup.

Marco: Yup.

Hernan: Yup.

Bradley: Go to YouTube.com/editor and then from here if you click on the CC for creative commons, you can search creative commons videos. Then if you find one like let's just say “Man on a Rowboat” is something that I wanted which I don't know why I would, but let's just say that I did, then you just drag it down and drop it into the editor. Then you can do that with multiple creative commons. You can splice videos together. You can mix and match. You can cut them. You can edit them. You can use the YouTube editor to do this. For example, if I pause this and I zoom in a little bit, you can see that it zooms the timeline out and then I can cut if I want. I can cut. I can cut pieces out. I can trim the front, trim the end. I can add audio.

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By clicking on audio, you can change tracks and use creative commons tracks or royalty free tracks which is … It's interesting because even some of the tracks in here sometimes though you'll use them and it'll be fine and then later on at some point down the road you end up getting a copyright claim or one of those yellow warning signs or whatever that will put an ad over top of your video and that kind of stuff. It's interesting that happens from time to time. You can add text. You can do all kinds of stuff with the YouTube Editor. I know that's legal as far as YouTube's concerned. It's not against the terms of service to use creative comments in the YouTube Editor.

It maybe against terms of service to downloading using your own editing software and then reupload, but again it's up to you as to how much risk you're willing to take. Using creative commons in YouTube Editor is a quick and easy way to slap some videos together. “Do you have any contact templates that I can use for new clients?” No, because I don't work on contracts. I never have. I don't want to say I never have, I have worked … Excuse me?

Marco: Can you hang on a second? If he's meaning get the closed caption content on his own videos, then he could just go to subtitles, right, CC, on his own video?

Bradley: Well, I read CC as creative commons. He's talking about closed captions? I don't know. Go ahead and finish answering Marco because that might have been what he was asking about.

Marco: Yeah. All you have to is in creator studio, in full on settings and then go to the subtitles and closed caption. Then what YouTube will do is it'll automatically give you the subtitles.

Bradley: Okay.

Marco: The closed caption. It'll do it for you.

Bradley: That's true. If you got to video manager … Let's just pick on real quick. I'll show them where to do that too. I was reading CC as creative commons. Maybe he was talking about closed captions though. Subtitles or CC guys. You see this? Click on that. Select video language. In this case it's going to be English. I'm going to say default for new uploads and click set language. Then where do you download them again? I forget.

Marco: Click on that green …

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Bradley: There you go.

Marco: I mean you have right there actions that you can download it.

Bradley: It's still loading. Hold on.

Marco: If you click on actions, you'll get a dropdown menu.

Bradley: Okay. There you go. Now you can download as either one of these files here or any one of these three file extensions. You guys see that? If you were talking about closed captions which again I must have misinterpreted or I may have misinterpreted the question, then yeah, do what Marco just said. Just go to a video, has to be your own video I think. I don't think you can download closed captions from somebody else's video, can you?

Marco: Yeah. You could always upload and keep it unpublished and do it all. It's not really ethical. I mean I'm not recommending that you do it. I'm saying that in a hypothetical world, this is what you could do.

Do You Have Any Contract Templates I Can Use For New SEO Clients?

Bradley: Wink wink. All right. “Do you have any contract templates that I can use for new clients?” No. Again, I've worked on contracts a few times with some really large clients because that's what they wanted. For the most part, I don't work with contracts. I never prefer to do it. I always would my pitch my services to prospects and say, “Look, I'm not going to lock you in a contract. If you're happy with the services that I'm providing, you should be happy to continue paying me. If you're not happy with the services provided, then you should be able to suspend services and we can part as friends or not as friends whichever you prefer.” That's how I've worked since the beginning of my career. That's how I prefer to do it. I don't like to work on contracts.

The only time I've ever worked on a contract is when the client required it and typically if it was a larger company, a larger business that I was doing services for that would cause 1,500 or $2,000 plus per month if that make sense. A lot of the smaller clients that I work for or do work for are typically $1,500 or less per month. For that, I just do a month to month.

How Do You Assign Someone As Google Page Manager?

“If a client has no clue how or where his Gmail account use for GMB, how can I get to be a manager?” Well, I know in Google My Business there is a way to request access. I don't have it off the top of my head. I usually have to dig around in Google My Business in order to find that. Essentially what you can do it you can go to a listing and then try … Again, I'd have to do some digging to figure it out.

I'm not going to do it on this live webinar. You have to play around inside of Google My Business and there should be an option at some point where it says … It'll give you the option to request transfer of ownership for the site. The only thing that you can do or excuse me, for the listing. The only thing you can do then is send that request and hope that somebody replies. I can tell you right now. I've had that happen probably about, I don't know, eight or 10 times over the course of my career where I've taken on a new client and somebody had set up the GMB locations page for them. They don't know who did it, so nobody had access. I have tried on all eight to 10 occasions to request a transfer of ownership through that method that I just described.

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I had been unsuccessful on 100% of the attempts. I have never had it transferred. Nobody's even ever replied to me. Usually what happens is as I will end up going in and contacting … I used to do it through v. I haven't done it for quite some time. If I could not get access to the Google My Business page, I would close it like basically say that that listing had been closed and then wait until it had been approved. Then go back in and start a new one all together. That can create a hell of a mess too. I've had that happen. I've had it happen where I've closed a listing or reported the listing's closed and then gone in. Once it had been taken out of maps, it never gets really taken out of maps. It just gets kind of like archived really.

When you go to create a new listing with the same information, it can end up causing some crazy like ghosting troubles. In other words, sometimes the old closed listing will popup. It can be quite a nightmare. I've dealt with that too, but that's sometimes the only way that I've been able to get access to it. Unfortunately, I can't give you any other advice on that. It's just really shitty that if somebody else can create an account and then not give anybody the details and then you're stuck, what do you do? What does the business owner do? You guys have any suggestions for that?

Hernan: No, I tried it once or twice as well Bradley and I didn't have any results as well.

Marco: Same here. I don't know what to advice because it's … It's impossible to get an answer. You can't get an answer, how can you move on?

Bradley: Other than just close the damn listing and start a new one, but again that can create some new problems on its own. I've got a limo service client that we've … When I first took over their SEO, it was five years ago now, it was right after I opened my agency actually in 2012. It's been five years and I've been doing work for them ever since. We had that issue. We had to close the listing because they had moved, but Google would not honor the updated request for the new address. It was an address, not the phone number. Google would not honor it. They wouldn't update it. Months I dealt with that and I wasn't able to get it fixed. Finally, I just closed the damn listing and I waited about two months for it to stop appearing all together in the maps results.

Then I went in and set up a new one. Six or eight months later, all of a sudden the new one stopped appearing in the maps and the old one started appearing again. Then we ended up going through like four months of troubleshooting with Google engineers, no kidding. It's just because Google's slow. They're like the federal government. They're just a huge big bureaucracy, right? They don't move very, very fast. It took them like four months to finally get that corrected. They admitted it was their fault and their engineers were working on it, but it took like four months. For four months that client was furious. He was furious and I don't blame him, but it certainly wasn't my fault. It was Google's fault, but Google doesn't move very fast for us little guys.

How Do You Track Success Of An SEO Project?

Unfortunately, I can't give you anymore help with that, Edward. Next, he says, “I've been giving new clients a trial period on my ability to rank. After six months, I give them an option to stop the year contract. I don't know how to track my success for them and prove they need me. What do you do?” First of all, I'd never agree to something like that. Second of all, since I don't work on contracts, it's not an issue for me. If after six months a client isn't happy with me, then usually we won't make it six months anyways. If they're not happy with me, they're going to be unhappy with me prior to that six months and they're going to say, “We don't need you anymore.” That doesn't happen very often, but sometimes it does. Go ahead.

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Hernan: I was about to ask Edward are you working six months for free?

Bradley: If so, that's crazy.

Hernan: Because I don't understand like your ability to rank because you could be better off building your own assets if you're not going to be charging anything for six months. I feel like you could be working on your own assets and nobody can fire you from that. You know what I mean?

Bradley: Sure.

Hernan: Unless you a, billing your own asset or you're getting some sort of partnership in the company, that could be fine. Six months you invest in the company, but you're investing in the company. Not even in term of money, but you're investing your work. I hope you're not doing that. If that's the case, then I would advise that you start thinking on building your own assets either a or b, you can say, “Okay. I can work six months for free, but you need to give me a partnership.” I think that would be a better approach in my opinion.

Marco: As far as tracking success, what you take to clients, you go into Google Analytics. You go into Google search console. You go and make sure you have an 800 number that you have it ringing to the clients so much so that you can track the calls. You get copied on any emails that the client gets. All of that information put together gives you … You have a lot of evidence on what your success is. Don't focus on rankings. If you're ranking focused, you're lost. You should be focused on success. This is what I've done. Correct. This is what I've done. These are the visitors that you're getting. These are the people that are filling out your contact form and calling you. I don't know how else.

You can freaking try me, but there's just no other way unless you're there to close the deal which you don't want to do that for your clients. They have to do something, right? As far as tracking, that's what I would do. They would have to go through my number where I can see the amount of calls going through. I would get copies of the contact form, how many times it's filled out. Maybe even the whatever you're using for email marketing. You can build the list there. That's how you track your success and that's what you present to the client.

How To Create RSS Feed For Any Website?

Bradley: There you go. Okay. The last part of the question. I'm kind of doing this while Marco and Hernan were answering. Somebody said, I guess he was asking about creating an RSS feed from any webpage. You can see why I have these bookmarks. Typically what I would do in your situation and I don't know if these will work for you Edward. I'm going to post them up here anyways. Let's see. These are RSS feed generators. I don't know if any of these will work for you. I haven't played with these in quite some time. However, typically when I'm looking for something like this guys, the only reason why I have these because I always bookmark stuff that maybe useful to me at some point in the future.

All I do is go to Google and search create RSS feed from webpage and just start clicking on links and seeing which one will end up working for you, Edward. I just shared three that hopefully will work, but I don't know if anyone of those will work. Honestly, if none of those work, all I would do to answer your question is go to Google and find it for you. Just go play around guys. When in doubt, use Google. It's funny how we as SEOs often times forget that sometimes the easiest way to find an answer is to Google it. If anybody's ever seen that “let me Google that for you” website, that's freaking funny. What is it? Let's see. LMGooglethatforyou.com. I think that's it. Yeah. I love this. I love this because it's like okay, create RSS feed.

Adam: Nice. Can you let someone Ask.com that for you and start using that?

Bradley: Create RSS feed from webpage is what I would do. Then you say get link and now watch. If I take this link and I shared this at the top of the event page, this is what it would look like. Go to Google. I'm not doing this. This is doing it. Create RSS feed from webpage. Google search. That's it. Was that so hard? Anyways, that's just being a jerk about it, but I like to do that occasionally when I've got somebody that ask me a question that could very easily be answered by googling it. Because it's like how long did it take you to type the question out and then wait for me to reply when you could answer it yourself. I'm not picking on you, Edward. I'm just making a joke. Okay? Next is Toby. I know that because I remember now.

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How Do You Setup A 3-Tier IFTTT Ring To Blast Web.20 & Other Nefarious Things To The Correct Rings?

“If you have a three tier IFTTT ring, how do you set it up to blast Web 2 and other nefarious things to the correct rings?” Well, I don't ever use three tiers, Toby, just because it's too much work to set up and too much maintenance. In case anything breaks down, there's a lot of … It's a logical chain, right? It's an if this, then that. It's a linear progress. If at any point one of those links in that chain breaks down, then everything downstream is going to be offline. It's not going to help you at all. Because of that, I never do three tier rings. If you're going to use three tier rings, that's fine. It's no different than using two tier rings in that you just take all of your profile URLs from each ring, your each network, IFTTT network, and just blast the shit out of them with links.

Preferably with contextual links to the IFTTT networks. Even at tier 3, I don't recommend like just pure spam at the network properties. I would still try to keep the first tier links clean. Somewhat clean. Make them contextual type links. Then you could throw kitchen sink spam behind that. I don't know if I should say this, but Marco's … Yeah. We're not revealing anything. Marco's in the lab right now testing a bunch of shit and he just told us today that he's noticing Google seeing even out to tier 4 now on backlinks. Is that correct, Marco?

Marco: Yeah. We've noticed that they're going out quite a bit, but it might have to do with the iframe. Might have to do that they're reaching out. Because it's being seen as a link, but all the others aren't. The initial link in what we call the slipstream is being revealed, but not the in-betweens. The in-betweens are iframe.

Bradley: That's interesting.

Marco: That iframe stack it's really interesting. Again, this is from all the testing that we're doing and that we've done before on iframe stack. I think the iframe stacks protect the destination anyway in the slipstream. Even you stack the iframes one after the other and you hid it with a link which we're using high trust and authority, please not in the way the Majestic and … Fuck them all in the way that we're using. We're teaching you what's right guys. We're teaching you what works. We're going to show you what works come August. That's what's happening inside that stream and the iframe actually protects the destination and they kind of cleans whatever is going into it. We're laundering …

Bradley: Laundering links.

Marco: I don't know if I gave way too much.

Bradley: Laundering links. Again Toby, just … I don't know whether you've got your own link building tools or if you're just going to hire that out. One thing that you could do is you could hire a link building package from SERP Space. Order a link building package from SERP Space and then just kind of analyze it once you get it delivered. If you've got your own tools, then you could always mimic that but that's what I would recommend is kind of look at your reports that you get after a link building package from SERP Space and kind of mimic that. I am not the spam expert because I hired somebody many years ago to run all the spam tools for me. I know Hernan's spam expert. Well, he's a spam tool expert although I don't think you use it nearly as much as you used to now Hernan, do you?

Hernan: Well, yeah, that will be a correct statement. I do mingle with spammers and I do have my own [inaudible 00:35:06] At some point I needed to … I would say I was running several dedicated servers at one point, but as usual you need to keep doing what the company needs you to do. At some point it was that. Then we decided to bring up our resident spammer. Basically now we're just strategizing with Marco and Derdia, our guy that's running all the GSA while I'm running PPC. Yeah, I definitely love that. I'm into projects that require some spam at some point so yeah, definitely.

How To Integrate A Persona Into An IFTTT Branded Network?

Bradley: Tom's up. Tom says, “Absolutely love Hump Day Hangouts and haven't missed an episode since I started watching. That deserves a plus one. For some reason probably overthinking, I'm having trouble wrapping my brain around the concept. I'm starting a two author blog, both pen names, and I'm trying to figure out the best way to structure IFTTT networks. I'm familiar with creating persona networks to separate identities from the brand, but I'm not sure how to integrate persona into the brand. Since I already have two Google accounts set up for the pen names, the persona accounts are already started. My thinking is to use one account to create a branded network and the corresponding persona network and then use the other Google account to set up the second persona network.

This would essentially result in a tier 1 branded network and two tier 1 person accounts.” Yeah, you can do that. Listen, here's the thing, if you have … That's fine guys. In fact, we talked about this. It might have been a Mastermind or something last week or one of the other webinars we did last week, but somebody was talking very similarly about having multiple authors. You can create an author feed from WordPress. Out of WordPress guys you can pretty much get an RSS feed for everything, categories, pages, authors. You can even probably get an RSS feed from individual posts I'm sure and tags even. I'm not sure about tags, but I know that you can get RSS feeds from categories and authors for instance.

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What I would say is for a setup like what you're describing here, Tom, that's not a bad idea. I always talk about only use one tier 1 network for a money site, but that's under most conditions which are going to be where somebody has a money site that they're constantly publishing content to from basically “one author.” I'm using air quotes now from whoever that author may be, the company themselves or individual authors on the blog, whatever. However in your situation, it does make sense to have a branded network for the blog and then have two persona base networks that are the authors and then feed the persona base networks with the RSS feed, the author feeds if that make sense.

The branded network will get all posts from the money site no matter who writes them, nobody who publishes them whether it's the company itself or individual authors so to speak. The branded network would get all posts. Then the IFTTT network for persona one and person two would be updated or fed content from the respective author feeds if that make sense. That's what I would do. Because then essentially you are using multiple tier 1 rings at that point, but they're segmented and categorized or compartmentalized in such a way that is not spammy in my opinion. Now I haven't tested that myself. However, I can't see that being a problem.

I'd like to hear your guys opinion on that as well, but I think that would work very, very well is to have the individual persona or author rings being fed with their author feeds only. What do you think? That was a cue. I hear crickets. Go ahead.

Hernan: Can you guys hear me? I don't know if this is live or not. Can you guys hear me?

Adam: Yeah, we can hear you now.

Hernan: Oh, okay. I was talking to the mic. I was just muted to say, “Hey, Bradley. I agree with you.” That's funny.

Adam: All that build up just for that. All right.

Bradley: We need to have the MP3 queued up for cricket sounds, like chirping crickets.

Adam: Right. I think it'll be funny.

Bradley: All right. Let's see. Let me just finish reading this. “Is there any issue with having two YouTube channels syndicate the same content?” I wouldn't do that. Well, you can do that with the same content across two channels, but I don't like to do that guys unless I'm using them for spam purposes only. If you've got a money channel that you're going to be using to associate it with this whole set up here that we're talking about, then I don't recommend taking the same content from one channel and republishing it on other channels as well. I don't like to do anything like that to my money sites guys or money channels for that matter. If it's a spam thing that you're doing specifically for spamming, then absolutely you can do that.

I'm not saying you can't do it with a money channel and then republish the same content to another channel. I just don't recommend it. That's all I'm saying. “Would it be better to one persona as a separate identity from the brand not linked to the money site?” No. Again, I think … Honestly, I haven't tested this, Tom. I can't give you 100% definitive answers, but I can tell you that it makes sense to have those individual author rings and have all of them linked back to the same source because it's all from the same … They're authors for that blog. It's naturally looking. It's logical. Guys, just think about it. Think about what looks natural and what do like some big sites do for example and big sites that have lots of authors.

Does Having 40 Posts Per Day Too Much For The IFTTT Network?

Well, the authors have their own feeds and they probably syndicate their own content to their own social media networks, right? That's all you're doing. All right. Kevin's up. “Hey, guys. Hope everyone has been doing well. I have a question about post per day and indexing. I'm thinking of doing 40 posts per day, wow, through plugins, but I would like to know if 40 per day is too much for IFTTT to pass use since Google doesn't. Index Web 2 is very fast.” Kevin, I wouldn't do 40 posts per day to any Web 2 networks honestly. Anytime I've gotten aggressive with posting especially with an automated posting app like IFTTT, many of the accounts get terminated. I would not recommend doing 40 posts per day.

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You can test it, but honestly, it's very likely that many of your Web 2's will get terminated. I don't recommend that. “Does Google crawl index the archive posts on Tumblr bloggers, et cetera?” Yes. Yeah. You may like the paginated posts. Yes, Google will crawl and sometimes index does. Now I'm not sure about Tumblr. Tumblr might have some no index parameters for the paginated pages. Essentially guys, an archive page is nothing other than index page, right? What I mean by that is it's like a blog category page or a tag page or something like that. It's the paginated so over post those … For example in WordPress, if you're using Yoast for WordPress SEO or anyone of the SEO plugins, in the options you can always say no index paginated pages or archive pages.

You can select that option. If you leave that option unselected, in other words, if you allow them to be indexed, then you'll notice if you do a site column operator on your sites that paginated pages or archive pages will index. Unless Tumblr has a no index parameter in the header for archive pages, I'm assuming that they do index. Let's see. “Also using the advance RSS direct for submission training in IFTTT. Would the directories would be able to handle my 40?” Yes. The directory use can handle 40 posts per day. Any RSS aggregators and directories can handle as much as you can throw at it. It's the Web 2's that won't. “Will Google be able to crawl an index on my posts that are on the directories?” Again, Google won't index posts from directories, Gavin.

Google can crawl links that are posted on directories and they may index the directory pages. Typically they don't, but they will crawl the links. Just remember, your posts that you … You really only care about it being indexed from your money site and in some of your Web 2's and even then that won't have to be indexed for them to still be … All right? Lastly, “If 40 per day is too much, what would be a maximize you suggest per day to pass use and get index regularly?” Again, the whole index thing issue I wouldn't worry about that, Gavin. Honestly, stop worrying about getting your Web 2 post index. Don't worry about that. As long as your money site posts is indexed, that's all you should really worry about. Use the IFTTT networks to syndicate.

Google will see the links. They may not submit them in the index or they might them put them in the supplemental index, but it doesn't matter because they still count those links. Hernan has done testing in the past with no index PBNs that have still passed used.

Hernan: Yup. Yeah. I was just about to say that, Bradley. Of course, you want … The ideal scenario is I would say a powerful relevant link that's indexed on Google. That will be the ideal backlink because you can get traffic and you get relevancy. You can get link juice. You can get traffic, et cetera. The point is that sometimes we mess with or we mistakenly say that a non-indexed website or a non-indexed backlink will not carry this link juice. It will not carry the same amount of link juice as an indexed website, but it will carry link juice. I've made tests. Of course, the best PBNs are the PBNs that got good backlinks as we have been talking a little bit earlier today. No index PBNs will be sub ideal, but they can move the needle nonetheless.

I see a lot of people here and on Facebook groups and some Skype chats that are saying that IFTTT Web 2's, they take forever to index and that's fine. As long as you're getting traffic, you're getting traction, you're getting more exposure, I wouldn't be so worried about getting those Web 2 indexed because again, if you're Twitting them … Marco goes in-depth on how to force feed Google index, et cetera, on our RYS Academy, but the point is that the whole idea of IFTTT is to automate things, to make things easier, to have like I would say 50% or 60 or 70% of your link juice, your link building tasks taken away from you and they'll automate it. If we start overthinking, we're defeating the purpose of IFTTT as a [inaudible 00:45:40]

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Again, 40 posts I wouldn't be worried about indexing so much, but I would be worried about the life span of the accounts.

Marco: I would add just one final thing. We've ranked stuff that isn't indexed. It gets indexed then it drops off the index, so both. We've ranked before it's been indexed and then we've ranked it after it's been indexed and drop out of the index. We've done both. Just because it's not indexed, doesn't mean that Google doesn't know it's there. It doesn't mean that Google isn't paying attention to it. People will tell you anything. People will tell you anything to get you to spend your money. We test. We go everyday in the lab. We're in there. We're testing everything. We're throwing everything we can at it just to see what happens. Just to mess around and see what happens. That's what we do.

It's our job so that we can come back and tell you, “Hey, guys. This is what's working,” and we can tell you it's working because we did it. Otherwise, why even be here? Please. Just pay attention to what we're telling, to what we're saying because we actually test this shit over and over and over again to make sure that what we deliver to you is the information that actually works.

Bradley: All right. I'm going to try to run through a few more before I get yelled at by Adam. Since I don't have a Masterclass or another webinar today after this, I'm going to run until 5:55 or 4:55, excuse me. Here comes the middle finger. All right. Last part of this, Kevin says … Well, excuse me, he asked about 40 per day if that's too much how many? I usually don't go any more than about 10 or 12 posts per day, but I don't start off with those either. I will ramp that up slowly. I might do two posts per day to start with and then over the course of about a month slowly increase it up to six, eight, 10 posts per day. Again, I do that as a slow progression so that you can allow your network sites and everything to basically age a bit or season as I like to call it.

I like to season them a bit before increasing it to that rate. If you do it slowly over time, it's going to look more natural than setting up a new network and then just blasting it with 10 or 12 posts a day. That will almost surely get your accounts terminated. Again, start off with one or two posts per day and then ramp it up slowly up until about 10 or 12 posts per day. If you want to be more aggressive, feel free to do so, but just be aware that you may lose your accounts.

Is It Safe To Drip Ping Your Money Site Feed Every Single Day Using Rank Feedr?

Next, one more question, “Rank feeder to drip ping your money site feed every single day or is it risky to ping a feed once a day like that?” No, it's not risky to ping a feed at all. The ping will not risk anything.

The worst thing that can happen by excessive pinging is the ping service will blacklist your IP. That's it. Literally that's it. You can't over ping anything guys. Pinging services will just start ignoring you essentially or ignoring a particular link request for pinging. That's it. You can't over ping something. There's really no need to continually ping stuff either. If you've got it set up to auto ping once a day, that's fine. It's not going to hurt anything. Kay says, “What's a frequency to publish on YouTube to syndicate on IFTTT network?” Very similar to the question that Kevin had about how many is too many. Remember guys, publishing videos to YouTube is the same thing as publishing blog posts because you're essentially going to syndicate to a network.

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It's not necessarily that YouTube itself that you need to worry about terminated although that can be a problem too, but it's the Web 2 properties you syndicate too that often causes the problem. When I do a lot of spam testing with YouTube, I try to like for example Hangout Millionaire or Video Marketing Blitz or Megarray or anyone of the tools that I've used to massive spam YouTube. Usually I try to stay at no more than five videos per day per channel. I've gotten away with as many as 15 videos per day per channel, but that can be a bit excessive and it can basically raise a red flag so I typically don't like to do more than five posts per day to any one YouTube Channel which in turn would post five times to the network in a day.

Again, in order to try save your network or to keep your network from being terminated or sites within your network from being terminated is start slowly and ramp it up. If you want to do five or 10 posts per day, it's okay but I wouldn't come right out of the shoot or right out of the gate doing that because it's very likely you'll get terminated. Greg, “When is the next IFTTT webinar?” It's not going to be next week, but it'll probably be the following week, Greg, which will be … What date would that be? The 15th. Yeah. February 15th. It's likely going to be February 15th. It will be notified in the IFTTT Facebook group when it's scheduled, okay? Let's see. Next. We're almost done guys. Just a minute. Thanks Wayne. Yeah. Sorry Edward.

I see that you're talking about closed captions now. Well, now you've learn how to also do creative commons. Greg says to qualify question on rank feeder, “If we want one page on our site to be correlated a certain authorities … To be correlated a certain authority site, can we create multiple RSS feeds that all have our one page, but importantly each feed has a different page from the one authority site as a static page?” Main question is, “If we can associating with the same authority site … Associating it with that same authority site over multiple feeds.” Not 100% sure on the question Greg, but creating RSS feeds and using the sticky posts or sticky item feature in rank feeder should not cause any problems because they're not direct links, guys. It's co-citation.

As far as I know, there is no spamming penalty for creating feeds and associating content from one particular site or even one particular post across multiple feeds. I don't see that as ever being a problem. I can't imagine it ever becoming a problem either. Because what would stop other people from adding your content feeds into their own feeds that they create? Like in FeedBurner or something like that. If that could be a spam problem, then couldn't we negative SEO people just by creating feeds? That's why I'm saying again it shouldn't be an issue, Greg. All right. Edward, by the way just so you know, Hernan, he wasn't doing it for free. It looks like he was charging 700 and going to 1,100.

Hernan: Okay. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Now I can breath.

Bradley: Much better. Yeah.

Hernan: Yeah. Much better. Much better.

Bradley: Edward says, “Should I start off with just one tier 1 that I buy from you for clients? I go to SERP Space.” Yeah, go to SERP Space. Check it out. I mean any tier 1 networks guys, we build links to all tier 1 networks. It's just the way it is because it makes them so much more powerful. Once the network's been built and once we primed the network with a few posts, then it gets sent over to our link building manager and he just builds the same exact package that you can purchase from SERP Space. I recommend every network that … Do it yourself if you've got your own tools. That's fine. You can buy it from us which makes it hands free and it's simple to do and it's effective. Blake says, “Could you please restate the iframe approach again?” Well, we're out of time.

We don't have time and Blake, we can't reveal much of that because that is specific to RYS Academy which is a closely guarded membership. You're more than welcome to join there and then you can get all the information you want. It'll be like drinking from a fire hose. Okay. Well, we are just about … Have I heard of PinDrill? No, I'm not sure what PinDrill is. It's probably a Pinterest software I'm assuming, but I don't do anything with Pinterest.

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Marco: That's Paul confirming that something that's not indexed will rank.

Bradley: Yup. We're not indexed, but they're ranking. Yup. All right, guys. Like I said, as far as this one thing, I just want to comment on this very quickly, about charging 700 and then going to 1,100 because the one part of that question that we didn't get to finish answering is as he says, “Is there some way to track progress,” so that when that six month period comes up and he wants to elevate the price to that higher amount, well, I wouldn't work on agreements like that. If I was going to work on an agreement, Edward, where I wanted to give them a trial period as opposed to just a flat out fee, then I would charge them for lead gen. Like in other words, I would charge the client for generating leads. Now I don't know if it's the type of … I'm assuming that the business needs leads.

I don't know of any businesses that doesn't, but what I would do is on a trial basis, I would say, “Okay. Look, let me generate some leads for your businesses and you can just purchase on a pay-per-lead basis and then if you're happy with the service, we can either continue it that way or we can go to a monthly service fee instead?” That's the way I would do it because … Again like you said, when the six month time comes up … Now if you're using good reporting software or if you've got monitoring maybe inbound links that have been build, content, ranking position, traffic, make sure you have analytics installed so that you can show traffic, that kind of stuff, then you could actually show them hard data and say, “This is what I've been able to do in six months.”

This should be able to show progression throughout the time that you were working on it provided you're tracking all that stuff which you should be if you're providing client services. One of the beautiful things about lead gen guys is you don't need to provide tracking services. You don't need to show anybody any data period other than producing phone calls. You have to show the number of calls and the number of web form submissions. That's it. You don't have to show them ranking. You don't have to show them reports of anything other than number of phone calls generated and number of web forms submitted. In my opinion, a lead gen model is a much, much better model because then you're not answering to anybody.

All you're doing is producing leads. Anyways, that's it. We're out of time guys. Appreciate everybody being here.

Adam: One sec real quick. Ken had a question, “Is local included in RYS Academy?

Bradley: Yes.

Adam: Awesome. Boom.

Bradley: Guys, are there any other questions?

Hernan: No, sorry. Tom said, “I really wanted to answer that one.”

Bradley: Okay. Cool. The RYS is really good for … Well, it's good for everything, but it's in … Local's included in there as well.

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Hernan: There's a full case study on local done by Bradley step-by-step over the shoulders, so yes.

Bradley: Yup. Okay guys. Well, thanks everybody for being here. There is no additional webinars this week that I know of. Is there guys? I don't think there is.

Adam: Yeah, I think this is it for this week.

Bradley: Okay. Cool. Then we'll see everybody next week. Thanks. See you all later. Bye.

Adam: Bye everybody.

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