For this month of November, Clint made his debut as SIA's very own head of SEO. This is where we have a shift of focus of not only talking about the test results but also sharing how you can implement the results.
Tests this month
Test 372: Can “Keyword in City” Outrank “Keyword City” When Searching “Keyword City”? Part 1
Test 373: Can “Keyword in City” Outrank “Keyword City” When Searching “Keyword City”? Part 2
Test 374: Will a Link to an Internal Link Speed-up The Positive Impact of a Link
Test 375: Can NoFollowing a Link Retain Link Juice on a Page?
Test 376: Is Article Schema a Ranking Factor?
Test 377: Does Having AdSense on a Site Help with Rankings?
Test 378: Does the Number of Words per Sentence Help with Rankings?
Test 379: Does a Branded Link Rank Better than a Naked URL?
Test 380: Press Release Services Compared
November 2019 Dossier
Transcription Below:
Hey SIA, It’s Clint Butler here. The reason I am re-recording the weekly webinar we had last Friday is because GoToWebinar took a dump on us. It is what it is. No big deal. I wanted to go over the test results and then I also wanted to look at some things that you can access inside of the SIA membership.
Let me open that site up real quick so you can see some points… As you guys all know, the site was having some issues before Dori got it all figured out. But basically, long story short, the developer took an unnotified extended vacation and then the site went slow and now the developers back and the site is fast again. It's one of the joys of having a purely custom platform. No one else is using this website code to facilitate a website. As such, once things ago wrong, you have to seek out and find somebody.
One of the benefits of using a non custom platform ie a WordPress or something like that is that you find anyone to fix it. When your are doing custom like this, it's the issue. Not making excuses, just kind of pointing it out as to why the website was slow. There is some thought about switching to a different platform maybe in the near future for at least providing the courses.
Dori is still reviewing that and seeing where she wants to go in that area. The reason is that she's got the tools in here that are all hers. They're all custom coding and they're built within the CMS just for ease of integration. Which makes total sense to me. So that might be a challenge down the road.
SIA Membership Walkthrough
If you don't know how this [the SIA membership site] works… you see the [S.I.A. Test Results left sidebar] and you click on that and they're all in here. You see the coming soon tests. Once the video is ready, the team will edit and drop those in and then it’ll switch over from “coming soon” to done.
Inside each one of those tests is a video and a quick summary that is done by the team based off of the transcript and then broken down into audio etc. So it's not only audio. I've seen some complaints that some can only see the audio; that might be something you want to email support if that's the case. All the tests are broken down with the video as well.
Then they have the playlist here [on the right side]. We are already topping 380 tests. Most of those were done before I even came on board. But as we get more and more tests, we have to look at a better way to organise this now Dori’s trying to figure that out.
And there's some guides and infographics in here. [Look under the section titled Guide and Infographics]. These also need to be updated. Particularly one that was requested is this 2017 on-page SEO guide.
Two things… One is on-page pretty much is the standard. So obviously after the medic or their recent health sites update some things might change in that market but for the most part on-page is really the basics. So what we're thinking of doing is actually just creating another on-page course and then adding that for the SIA members. And we'll use that to draw more people into the SIA. And have it in a video format versus that PDF guide that's in there.
When we can update sections of the video format as test results come, it’s a lot easier than doing a PDF. Obviously PDF, you go in, type in it and publish it. But we'll just change the videos out and make it easier for everyone. I think that would be the best option there. We're probably gonna go do that.
I have not personally gone through and checked out any other set of stuff to see what we can update. But my guess is that we're gonna be able to do that pretty much for everything. So look out for that and add more stuff.
The Putting It Together section.. what we're gonna do or what the plan is kind of as you can see just dropping these tests in as they go and kind of make a nice repository for you of all the things that are going on and things you can change that’s backed up by the tests. And you can just kind of instead of go through there and searching one by one. You can go look for linking that's going here. You can go through and check out that particular test. Right now it's just videos. If you want us to let us know and we'll talk about putting transcriptions there.
This also give us not only a repository but we can actually go through here and update. So let's say we are search the keywords in title test. We have the original test and then if we redid it, this would be a good place to keep stuff updated.
This would make it easier for everybody to get the implications of the test and then how to implement it. This is what I bring to the table as the new head of SEO. I'm bringing the so what for you. We're gonna do the tests. The testers are led up by Ryan and Dori. I'll do some as well but those two are heading up the testers. And then I'll bring it to you.
This is the test. This is the result they get. Now what? Or what should I be thinking about this? Or how should I apply this? And it is from my perspective, your may be different but at least you get to hear it. I get the old brain juices flowing and maybe pull something out of that.
As always, Bill will continue with his podcast. [You’ll find them under Bill’s Blogcasts in the S.I.A. members area.] He's got guests scheduled all the way up until March so we're excited to have Bill keep that going here in the SIA and looking forward to what he's got coming.
And then you see the Chats With Kyle [left side of the page in the menu column]. We will probably maybe put these recordings somewhere. We're also looking at myself starting another podcast type show for everybody. I don't know if I want to do the podcast or not but it'll be a podcast format for sure. We'll just interview some of amazing people. Dori's got some amazing connections. Just being able to talk to these people and pull out some of their information. I think that'd be a great value added for everyone.
Next is the SEO courses. [You can find that link across the top of the page.] We're going to start bringing some more of these out for you see. I have a lot of these courses Dori has put out. I have Page One Engine. You’ll find all your course recordings for the SIA or Rockstars here. We're gonna start putting out SIA courses. As paying members, you will get members access to all of the courses that come out. But we'll also be using those to sell courses to people and it’s another revenue stream and another pull to get more people in the SIA.
It’s time for us to grow! We have 280ish members I think. At least the last numbers I saw. I know that’s gone up since then. I think it’s time to increase that. We have a valuable resource here and we're putting together some cool stuff for the community. It’s awesome.
[In the Tools section - link can be found across the top.] We're also going to be adding some more tools. Dori has a set of tools in here. I'm actually gonna get hers recorded… we have this recording already. I don't know if you've gone through and played with this section but I completely failed to leverage these links. There's content links and blogroll links that are accessible to us. I'm gonna get Dori to show me how to use this - what her intent behind this tool is so I can show you and then maybe run some tests behind it and see the best implementation of these things.
We're getting them as members of the SIA so might as well leverage them. You can play with some of her link ratio stuff and you can add your own PBN sites in here and push it into this etc. We need a really good tour of what we have in here.
There'll be some new tools coming in. I have an anchor text analyzing software. I’m not looking to make a lot of money off of that for sure. Just kind of want to make my money back from making it. It was my first dive into software.
And then Dori has another SAS that is all web-based that is just missing the anchor text and analysis portion that I have. But has everything else that mine is missing so we're looking at combining those two tools and creating a SAS that'll be webbase that I think people will appreciate. I've seen the website and I've seen the software that Dori has. It's not a software. It's just a web-based application and it's really cool. It kind of takes link building and like monitoring to a whole new level.
I’m looking forward to putting that together and her releasing that. It will be part and parcel with the SIA and then it'll also be sold and promoted separately from the SIA. So when that comes up, we'll be sure to let you know and make sure you're not buying something twice or that you already have access as part of your membership.
Google Forms
I also wanted to go over it open this up forms.google.com. We have two of these created. I created them first as soon as I started as the SIA test request. I posted the links inside of the Slack so make sure you fill that out. https://forms.gle/5fUFTE45hvj9BEcf8 We have some great testers and they're coming up with some great ideas and you guys are giving us some ideas. But to get the most out of the SIA, you should be filling this form out as much as possible.
When you run into an idea or just a thought, just put it in there. It doesn't even matter. Even if you think it's stupid, just do it. There might be something that we can test and figure out. Feed the beast. Does it work? Don't leave us up to our own devices because our thoughts on SEO might not be the same as yours. I mean it may not be aligned with the type of SEO that you're doing so we can test all that stuff.
The next one [Google form] is the SIA Q&A. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeQudqdaHoD5BCOJnl1bhw_iM-6MHLstWc7uNZCWPQ42ULEsQ/viewform?usp=sf_link When a webinar is live there will be a Q&A portion I'll go through there and answer any questions that you guys ask. Make sure you're filling that out on a weekly basis. I’ll open it up, answer the questions and delete all the responses and start over for the next week. If there's no questions in there, there's no questions in there.
The reason to show you the two forms and showing you the membership site is to give you a little tour or a refresher tour. It's just so that you know what you have access to how you can feed the beast and make sure that you're actually getting your return on investment from being a member of the SIA. If you're not getting that, that puts in a situation where either 1) we're not doing enough or 2) you're not leveraging the stuff that we have that access for you. If you're not leveraging the things that you're paying for, it’s kind of silly. So we're there.
Slack
Even if you don't get into the Slack. I can show the Slack. We have the Slack set up. The different channels. You don't even have to join all the channels. Just join the ones that you're interested in. If you're only into local SEO, join the local SEO, the GMB, and then the test reports etc. There's some of these that you're auto added into.
I set that up so like the events, general SEO talking channel. You can actually leave them. I just click on channels here and you can select what you want to be a part of and what you don't. I think that's very useful. And this is our primary method of communication. The SIA Skype group will remain open but we’ll actually start pushing free people into that so you'll get more value as a paid member interacting over here versus the free is a good place for this is us, Welcome Center,etc.
We can leverage that to build a membership up so that's the intent behind the switch. Better communication, more organized and we can use the Skype for other things. That's the goal behind this if you were wondering.
Test Results
Let's get into these test results. This is test 372 - Can City in keyword outrank City keyword. So SEO in Seattle versus SEO Seattle, which one of those will work. And then test 373 actually is the inverse. So this one is the page that’s optimized for keyword City and then the other one was optimized for keyword in City. And then they checked the different search results. So what the test was looking for was that see if BERT, the new update is affecting content. In particularly local because you're talking about how BERT is doing a lot of changes to local.
Ted and I surmise that BERT actually didn't change local search results at all. I know what it did is it optimized the algorithm or the math and allowed Google to determine what you're talking about inside of the search or to help determine what you're talking about. So use natural language stuff to figure out the purpose of your query so that it would result in more accurate search listings. It did not however actually go into your content and see if you match the thing.
If BERT says you wanted X, it doesn't read your site and make sure it says X before it puts you in search results. It just gives a different set of results because it's supposedly understanding your search intent better.
So this is actually going into the local because a lot of people were surmising that if you added keyword in City that you would actually rank better now because BURT understood what you're talking about and you didn't necessarily have to optimize for keyword City.
Then what we looked in here is this one - again these pages were optimized - a keyword in City. In the search keyword in City, they actually ranked number one and then if you did keyword without the in, the rank came down there at number five on the test pages. I think it's probably farther because there's some stuff hidden in here. But it ranked all the away down at the bottom, which is not the result that we, as SEOs, are looking for. So obviously, in this example, you wouldn't want to add the optimization for “in”.
But if you go to Test 373 and scroll down here at the bottom, this is the page that’s optimized for keyword City in the search results. Keyword in City the page, keyword city is number two. So that's a good result. And then number one here. So if you're looking at which one is better should I do keyword City or keyword in City… right now stick with keyword City. Obviously it's a little bit harder for that to make sense when you're typing in country and stuff but just it's just the way it is. The joy of local.
You could think that maybe the search volume is a little bit different. I would test that actually with the Adwords campaign. This the keyword in verses this. See which way people are actually searching more. You may find that in your particular market they like to use the in versus not so then it would be worthwhile to implement the in inside of your optimization. And probably make it a little bit easier on yourself versus solely just going with keyword City like everyone does.
But as you can see here, when you do that, you actually capture both those and I'm sure you can probably bust this up with some backlinking using that as the anchor text and lock that into the number one position. Then you'd be all set. But that's out of the scope of the test, just something to consider for sure.
Next one is test 374. Actually, I'll look through the questions here real quick. I don't think there are questions on that. I have the spreadsheet from the questions when we did the live webinar and just trying to make sure that everyone would get some value out of those. Nope, I don’t see any. Okay.
This is Will a link to an internal link speed up the positive impact of the link? That's a mouthful, especially this early in the morning. I need to drink some more coffee. So this test is by Ryan Hough. Basically, how it came about is he listens to Charles Floate do a presentation and talking about how he ranked his website in three months but he didn't do it by sending links directly to his money page. He sent the links to the supporting page.
Really at the end, it’s nothing new. I've been talking about that. I think the first time I talked about that option was when Kyle and I were doing Tuesday chats, so if you have been in the SIA a long time, you know how long ago that was. And Kyle recently started talking about that inside his presentations and in his courses is to link to supporting pages versus not. That way if something goes wrong, you can kill the supporting page. So I coined it my kill pages.
These are my kill pages. I'm creating these and they might necessarily not be on the exact topic like the keyword. Primarily I use them for local, so they may all be city optimized. I can kill that and the link juice is gone. I just 404 the page. Link juice is gone. There's no negative repercussions and if there was a penalty then it'd be good. I tell you that I haven't had to use them since 2015.
I have not been - knock on wood- hit by an algorithm update since 2015. I have penalized myself doing dumb stuff but I've never or I had not been targeted or been subjected to a Google algorithm update since 2015. So I haven't had to delete them. I mean I’ve had to kill the pages but that's a good strategy and it protects you, protects your work. Unless people know it and talk about it, they’re not going to look for it. They're not really paying attention and it's a little harder to figure out what you're doing with your linking.
So when people talk about copy your competition, it makes it a little bit harder for Google to copy. But as that becomes more and more mainstream, other people won't understand that more than it's great. So the statement made by Floate was... and I didn't hear it specifically so I'm just kind of assuming here is that he did it in less than three months because the juice comes through faster. And the pages that get linked to get more positive impact faster. So it's a good thing.
What the tests figured out was that's not necessarily the case so they sent up five pages using this keyword. He set up another five pages using this keyword and linked each of the five pages above. So he created his money pages and created his internal link pages. Then figured out who's gonna rank first and then sent the link in a footer from his agency site. In this example to the number three spot to this one which is linking to the number three spot. What he found was it took a long time for that to come through.
I'm gonna scroll down and save you. I’ll give you the Reader's Digest version. It took 77 days for him to see a result. So the hypothesis was that the juice will pass faster. And that proves that it's not necessarily true.
Couple things here that I'd like to point out. I have been able to do this faster. I have been able to get results within like a week and depending on the links you can get it within a couple days. Which is really good so I think what is affecting the test is 1) I'm just not sure the power of Ryan's site since that's where he put this link because it was in the footer of his agency site.
1) Is the power of Ryan site a little lower?
2) Did the power get diluted a little bit because it was from the footer?
And 3) did Google have to make the test site wait because it was newer? So I’ve heard Ted Kubaitis talk about where new sites are kind of sitting in the quote unquote sandbox - I get to use air quotes today- and for like 60 days. I've seen 60 days to roughly it's time to build trust. That's where you’re branding and building stuff then Boom! 60 days Google trusts you. You have all your stuff and you can kind of rank better. You rank easily. So those are some things that could be messing with this test.
I still recommend that you follow the process. It does work and it works better the older your site site gets. So I would check this out. This is certainly something worth implementing. I teach it to this day and probably will continue teaching it for quite some time. I don't see that changing anytime soon.
And the questions, if I remember. Yes, so build better links to supporting page instead of sending to the main page? That question was from Suzy. And that’s correct. That will pass off again and will pass off to your money page depending on all those factors we just talked about make it a little bit faster or slower.
Test 375 can no-following a link retain link juice on the page? This is from James Goldsmith. He is a viewer of SEO Fight Club. Ted Kubaitis, myself and Kyle Roof do a show weekly for everyone for free. Ted mentioned that he does and recommends no-following your social media links on your website in order to maintain link juice.
As a matter of note, I don't do that but I have all my social media sites optimized. I think this is coming from the position where people are… I'm not sure that most people are doing it correctly or in Ted’s view or just something that he likes to use as a matter of course because he used to always do it. I'm not sure. But I don't no-follow mine.
I optimize my Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc. I have a link back to the money site so that the link juice is always passed around in a nice big circle. That method works for me. So why mess with it. Plus, it ranks those social properties along with my website for my brand and then I get some more out of that as well.
The argument here is that if you do it, you can actually retain the link juice and authority on your website and so much as if you're building backlinks and not promoting your social media profiles. [Gruff voice] I'm not giving my link to Facebook etc.
To me, in my opinion, that's kind of short-sighted but I pride myself to be able to take over brand names and stuff. And that's number one, the easiest thing you can show your clients is slick... “You guys weren't ranking for your brand name and I have this process now and have taken over an entire page one. Branding is in effect, let's start leveraging that branding.”
So this test was paid to set up five pages each set up for indexing and then sent some links to the page that was ranking in the middle and they added a nofollow attribute to social. So here's a link he made, kind of the process and how he did it. He emulated the social. Here’s the internal links and then the stuff that he used to send.
You see just one and it did retain more authority, which I think more had retained more link juice from the links that were provided. However, was it significant enough to do it? I'm not necessarily sure. Neither is the tester. You almost have to leave them for two months for that to mature.
I think, honestly, if you're getting up to a 3 position or 2 position just by no-following is kind of a waste of time unless you're in this crazy competitive market where that one little tiny bump is actually worthwhile.
Like I said though if you're optimizing your social media properties properly then that actually compounds upon itself any links you build your Facebook and stuff from other third party sources. Share as part of your FTTT rings if you're into that kind of thing or if you are doing domain authority stacking under that old model, which still works by the way.
On all those are interlinked and you're passing all the power through your ring through your brand so I'm not sure it was worthwhile at this time but this is a nice test. The idea is sound. The application of it is sound. I just don't know. I have not seen… like when I did it in a real world where I have no following and all that stuff. I didn’t notice a difference. It just doesn't make sense to me so why would you bother with it? So I never did. I never maintained it.
Test 376 - Is article schema a ranking factor? We're gonna test some more of these. James and there's another tester, she wants to look at this too. Actually, she's starting one on video schema. Which schema setups will actually help boost your ranking because when there's a lot of plugins out there that promote schema as this magic button. That's how they were sold and then that schema was the all powerful ranking tool.
We wanted to look at is it having it a ranking factor. And obviously, there's some optimization stuff and some questions. But it's done just to see if this schema just being there is actually a ranking factor. So that's the page. This is the schema - general article schema. Really basic. Just kind of person, places, thing and stuff.
The page actually dropped one box and then dropped to last place and then stayed in the last place so the test result is that having this schema did not itself rank the page. However, even the tester admits that there's some things that we need to look at. 1) that I would say right off the bat is keyword density. All this extra code may have lowered the keyword density of the test page when compared to the unique control pages. And this is something that Ted Kubaitis pointed out.
We were testing keyword optimization or a keyword density and we're adding all extra code but we don't adjust for that in the control pages so that may have been an issue why the page dropped from the rest of these. 2) There's the other thing is I don't think it's three weeks. So probably two weeks, maybe three weeks. It could be time.
So they change the page and then maybe later it would have bumped up. I'm not necessarily sure that would be the case or not. But I have seen it where I do on page changes and it takes three weeks to kick in and then I get a result. This is one of those on page changes that I would do is that schema to.
So those two things could certainly mess with the test result in my opinion. So the tester is gonna continue to be that and we're gonna continue to implementing these and see what we see again. Keyword density is my guess is what might be messing with this but you certainly can use schema to boost up your matches and stuff if you're using a tool like surfer SEO, POP, or CORA.
You need to find some more stuff to add this is certainly a way to do it. This one is still there but we do know just by having it this doesn't necessarily give you a boost as people were selling in their sales letters. So it is a way to set yourself apart. But it's gotta be right and all the other stuff goes into play with that as well.
This one is pretty interesting. Test 377 is by Hunter. Does having Adsense on a site help with rankings? The idea is you had Adsense, you put it on your website and then you allow the Adsense system to pull in related ads based on your keywords. And does having that in there help your rankings? I'll go ahead and skip to the results.
Adsense did not help at all! In fact, it stayed right down there at the bottom, which could be a couple things but primarily I'm thinking that 1) it's not a ranking factor and 2) it’s Adsense code and pretty much all Google codes slows down your website. So maybe you're looking at a page speed thing. Ted says the page speed is not a ranking factor.
I kind of I disagree with Ted, but I think it's a little bit harder to test that in the wild because there's so many factors that go into pagespeed minification, caching the CDN, all those things can trigger and then you have a situation where you know what is the part of page speed that actually matters. And testing those in isolation is a little rough so we all agree to disagree with Ted there. But I'm thinking that this might be a page speed issue because there's more content on these now.
In theory, Adsense is giving the related relevant content so why wouldn't it at least be up - you know give it a little bit of a bump because there's more stuff on the pages versus the others, right? But that's my theory.
Also the page speed is affected when you add in these scripts. Google scripts are notoriously slow. And then our own testing tools bastard their scripts when people put them on your site so go figure. So that could be an issue.
Test 378 - Does the number of words per sentence help with rankings? This is also by Hunter. Where this comes from is Kyle and the other testers did a test on the Flesch reading scale. And he found that it didn't have an effect on search engine optimization regardless if you're writing for a fourth grader, for a sixth grader or for a college graduate. However, usability is a different matter and it could Trump readability so people recommend that you're right on the flesh scale for sixth graders.
So short sentences versus long sentences, smaller paragraphs versus larger ones, smaller words versus larger ones and then you increase the readability of your page for more people. This might manipulate the user interaction signals that you're sending off.
So Hunter created a piece of content with four to eight words and then a set with nine to fifteen and then wanted to see what happened so the four to eight and nine to fifteen kind of just stuck there. He then switches around and then the four to eight ranked a lot higher so the infamous implications of this test is actually the four to eight was ranking better.
We can eliminate user interactions in this case just based off of looking at these two search results. We can say and assuming that Hunter is keeping this pure. I mean no traffic, no people going to these and I'm gonna say that that's probably what he's doing so user interaction and all the other stuff is not a play.
This is a really good test. I would also say that you want to test this specifically in a wild - in markets. So this keto diet is for people who want to lose weight. They have this problem. They want results fast. So that market is looking for fast. So a four to eight sentences makes more sense because they're reading bullet points.
They're looking for exciting things. They're looking for that magic to save them versus a professional type keyword where they are looking for that 9 to 15 sentences. They need the explanation broken down. Some of these markets need to have those big words.
This is a really cool. I would check it out. Take some of your money pages and busting out in the 4- 8 word sentences and see if you get a result from this. This is definitely something worthwhile implementing in my opinion. Congrats to Hunter on a good test result.
And Hunter is back again. Test 379 - Does a branding link rank better than a naked URL? As you can see basically branded keto diet beginning versus naked URL. At the end of the day, that's what he's testing. All these have unbranded links and it is one with the branded. Then he did the inverse with the naked and you see the results pretty much the same.
So the link is the link and the branded anchor text didn't really do anything versus the naked. I guess you can say you got a little bit of a result. So in my opinion, it doesn't really matter too much in this case because what is the quality of the link? That's not really detailed in here and then the age of the website? etc Does that play a factor?
And since it's a branded and not an exact match or a branded exact match so you know keto diet beginners may not have necessarily did this. I think if you continue to build some more of these. Regardless if they’re branded or naked it would actually push that test result page up into the number 1 position. That's what I'm going to surmise here here. So I would check does branded exact match anchor text work better than naked link anchor text. That would be the next progression of this test.
But my recommendation for real world is you should focus on these two types of links: the branded and the naked URL as your primary anchor text when building backlinks to protect yourself. And then when you figure out or use your anchor text analysis for your competitors top ten pages, see what Google was looking for in your search term and then build to match that.
And the final test is from Dori - Test 380 - Press release services compared. I rambled on during the original webinar. In this one I really won't because I think I talk too much but basically what happened here is Dori wanted to test to see which ones actually get you the most bang for your buck.
This is a real-world single variable test so just sending it to a real world real website. It’s not an easy keyword either. It’s dog training in Sacramento. If you've been in that market, even in the local, it's pretty tough. But she tested Quantum, Magic PR.net. and PressAdvantage. She wanted to compare the results for those. Here's the keywords she gave out.
The set up was a little doinks because she was supposed to give this URL but actually ended up giving Magic PR this one. So it set Magic PR back in the testing a little bit. But at the end of the day, it didn't read the test so that's good.
She submitted all the press releases to all the people who gave the fake keywords etc. One thing that kind of messed up the test but not so much really is that Quantum actually never sent the press release. They've never published it. They sent a whole bunch of support requests to them and nothing ever got done.
As you see here, October 24th, this woman, Lynx, added this request and then December 3rd, nothing. They still haven't sent the press release so take that as it were. I don't know why they would not do that. It seems like a customer service issue for sure but it didn't necessarily ruin the value of the test because now we're testing Magic PR versus PressAdvantage.
Some things I want to point out here. 1) you're looking at this as a citation flow / trust flow from Majestic. Note, it has 25 for Magic PR and found 37 of the sights. PressAdvantage is a 14 and only found 3 of the sites.The citation flow and trust flow volume and these are all brand new links so that's pretty much expected. A lot of people get a bunch of links they see this and think they got spammed out . You just built a whole bunch of brand new links that don't necessarily have trust flow so this is velocity and this is quality.
If you have a whole bunch of branded links, you're always going to see your quality low. So you have to build links to your backlinks. Then you go over here you see the inverse. Magic PR - ahrefs didn't find very many of them. Six versus the 88 found from PressAdvantage. So the indication here is that you need both of these tools. A lot of people compare, especially when you're doing really good backlink analysis, a lot of people say, “Oh, Majestic wins” or “ahrefs wins over Majestic” but at the end of the day you need both. You gotta have both.
If you're not using both of these tools you're not seeing all of your backlinks. I would even recommend that you should also have access to a data pool from Moz and you should also be data pulling from your search console especially when you're doing a backlink analysis. This is the perfect example why they don't run and they don't search the same web sites. They don't have the resources of a Google Ad. Google, my guess, is probably not even showing half of these so get both. Look at both and don't look at them in a vacuum because you can be missing out on backlinks that you could otherwise have.
So what's the result? The end result is Magic PR did better and tested higher than PressAdvantage for the most part. You can see a little bit of bouncing around and stuff but the at the end of the day, the real world test case, the Magic PR actually ranked higher than PressAdvantage. So I think it's pretty cool.
Here's a couple reasons I suspect that to be the case is that PressAdvantage doesn't build backlinks to their press releases, whereas Magic PR does. They do your release then they build backlinks to each of the primary releases and do some iframe embeds etc and then they build backlinks to those. So you're creating the backlinks to your website boosting them up and then creating more backlinks to boost those up. And in turn was probably why you see the result here.
I have PressAdvantage. I use them. I have a plan where I pay $600 a month, they'll write twelve PR for us a month, but we can really use unlimited PR so I will still continue to use PressAdvantage but Magic PR is my go to. Especially when you're trying to rank maps and local you can almost do all SEO campaign just sticking with Magic PR.
For a little bit amount of money if you go to MagicPR.net/special - offer, that will give you the cheaper price on the press releases. Maj is also a member of SIA, you can find him in the Skype, for sure. I’m pretty sure he moved over to the Slack so reach out to him and have him talk to you more about this. His press release set up is bang for the buck. It just works. The testing validated it and you get a little bit more out of it.
And that's it for the test results and I’d like to thank you all very much for listening as always. This was the first one but every Friday 11 a.m. Mountain Standard time - that's Arizona time - is going to be the Friday roll up. We will do test results, Q&A’s, me rambling. If we don't have anything to talk about maybe I'll think of something but for the most part we're trying to have close to 5 tests per week.
It’s really hard to do if you know time and testing and test results kind of pushes through so you at least have to have something to talk about. But I think we'll be able to meet that. I don't want to promise anything on behalf of Dori. But I think that's a good number to shoot for.
You’ll get the weekly results versus having the wait monthly and you’ll get the action and stuff a lot better. Plus, we’ll be adding some leaderboard testing. That's single variable or multi variable testing using multiple sites and see how everything comes out in the wash, which is a natural progression from single variable testing. We will also do some real-world testing stuff in there too.
Link building tools is primarily where I'm going to be going after right now and you know testing the different tool sets are out there. In particular, RankerX, SEO autopilot, GSA Seer Xrumer are the ones that I'm using and testing right now. Finding new pathways to see if they're valuable or not. Or if it’s time to go ahead and kill them. And has Google done enough to stop the implementation of this.
Dori is going to be doing a lot more PBN stuff so we're all excited about the progression and that you are along for the ride. I'll talk to you next Friday.