February 11, 2020 - Weekly Dossier and Webinar

Hey, everyone! How you doing today? Welcome to the February 11th Weekly Webinar for SIA. Some test results, questions and answers and then I'll show you how to implement this week's test results using SEO AutoPilot. I was going to say I'll wait for a couple minutes but I think we've announced this webinar pretty regularly to everybody so show up on time, you.

This week, as I've said, we got three new tests, got some new test requests, questions and answers and then how to implement the test. We're going to look at the SEO AutoPilot's forum links, the URL shorteners and the authority links. Again, these are all part ones or part As.

Basically, what I did was -- for these tests, just like the old testing style you know, like and love - the fake domain, fake keyword and then pick the one in the middle and see what happens up or down.

Part B, I'll do that on 10 different sites all at the same time and then part C we will just pick a random URL inside the real search results just to verify because links can be tricky and the algorithm and we want to make sure that we're setting you all up for success and letting you pick the right ones versus not. This will show those off.

SIA Test Results

Then, the new test request we got is the Whois count as a ranking factor.

Now, I don't know if you are in a lot of Facebook groups. I happen to be in quite a few of them whether I get added or added myself and some have more value to me than others but one of the groups that I'm in, the Moderator... He's not very well-liked in some groups.

Personally, I'm not really a fan of his style but that's ok because he asked some decent questions. One of those theories that he hypothesized was that having your Whois private is a negative indicator in your search results for SEO. Basically, what he's saying is if you should have your Whois public so everyone can see it and then that, in and of itself, is a SEO factor. That's the theory.

Then, the justification behind his theory was Matt Cutts... And really, at this point, if you're still going matt cutts you get some problems but, Matt Cutts said that they do look at Whois and if all of your backlinks, in a manual review, all look and have Whois privacy turned on it's safe to say it might be a PBN in there.

But that, in and of itself, isn't a thing but it creates an obligation to look closer at your link or your link profile. So, that's where this guy ~ came up with the idea that Whois is a ranking factor. This is going to be really easy to test. All you gotta do is buy a ten different domains, turn the Whois on for them and optimize them for one single keyword and see what happens.

The follow-on to that one would be the search console counts for as an SEO factor, i.e will a site in search console perform better just because it's in search console than one that doesn't? I'll do that follow-on test from that Whois thing. I'm pretty sure I'm going to see nothing from this. I think we can all assume that we're not going to see anything from this. The search console one's kind of interesting. We'll see how that works out.

The next one is does html versus text ratio matter?

There are some tools -- I think it's Page Optimizer Pro but don't quote me on it because I don't know for sure, that it's saying your text versus html the ratio was too far or is not compared to everyone else's, etc. Does that matter? I think this would be pretty interesting.

Jesper says, it's SEMRush html text. We'll look at that and see what it does. Honestly, I could probably do this using like a 300-word article or a 500-word article and then add html in the form of schema. Start with the organization then add local and then add a whole bunch of entity schema and places and events and all that stuff and throw it all in there and just see at what point does it jack it up.

So, I'll look at that. If you know a tool that measures this really well -- if SEMRush says it maybe SEO Quake measures it I'll check that out, but if you know a tool that measures that let me know in the Slack so I can get that test set up. It's pretty interesting.

Does keyword stuffing and html code help rankings?

This one's mine. I think, SIA has done a test where the accordions, the carousels and all that stuff and we all are in agreement that Google reads it and then it's counting positively or negatively. Google's reading it and counting that as part of your page and it's helping or hurting your rankings just because it's there.

We all know that and we all know that the concept of keyword stuffing which when you read it like this and the old concept is repeating the keyword a whole bunch of times inside of a piece of code that's no displays and/or is hidden, i.e. the font is the same color. So, if I have keyword like a hundred times in white, for example. You can't see it but it's there. Everyone says it's doesn't work anymore. Google knows about it that it is there. When you look at websites like under gaming, for example... Ted shares this search a lot.

Let's look at The Verge. We'll see "gaming", there's 26 references to gaming inside of the code. Let's see Addicting Games. So, there's 681 references to games inside of the code. So, can we keyword stuff inside of the code? Can we find ways in tags and title attributes of links and all that stuff and just keywords stuff the crap out of our stuff and have this normal, readable, well converting article inside the front side and then the back side is all of our optimization and intentionally stuff that and see what happens. If you go through these games sites you'll see this representation.

There's actually a couple sites in here that well over a thousand 1500 – I think there's one that was 2000 repeated instance of the term games. To me, it's feasible to pull it off but I want to see it and I want to prove it and if it would that'll be a pretty good trick.

Downside to that is if you're in a competitive market and you have a lot of other SEO in there who practice narc SEO you might get in trouble but most people will probably wouldn't catch on to that or even think that that is a thing. So, if it works we'll keep that one to ourselves, use it the SIA crew here and you will use it to profit at least as long as it's working.

So, those are the three I came up with. I think I added a couple more to the Trello board but those are the three that were really cool and that I'm excited about looking at as soon as possible.

Let me get to the test results that we got going on here. Test 404 is SEO AutoPilot forum profile links. I think we've all heard it that forum profile links don't work. They are useless. John Mueller, specifically, every time he talks about how Google's smart enough to filter bad links out he mentions forum profile links.

So, my complete expectation when I started this test was that they would fail. That's kind of where I got ~ is I'm wasting my bandwidth, wasting my time setting these up but it's testing so let's see what happens.

I set up the pages, obviously, the same way as always - unique keywords, picked out the one in the middle. I used Omega Indexer to index all the forum profile links. I selected #5 out of 10. I wanted to see if it would go up or down. This type of links within the software does not use anchor text. So, it's just a URL link and there's 22 links created.

They got submitted automatically to the indexer around 27th inside of the test results. When you get this you can see the exact setup I used. I'll show this again inside the software in case you have any questions while we're here. This is like one of the more simpler ones and then you put in a bio. I'll show you how I generate that with SEO Content Machine. Crazy easy.

Here's the starting point on the 27th. Again, I expected this to drop instantly or not move at all because if Google is smart and Google knows and ignoring forum profile links because those are low quality links then it shouldn't drop, right? It's ignoring them so it has no effect. ~ ignoring so it shouldn't move.

Well, what happened? They went up to #3 by the 31st and then it locked up at #1 position on the third. It was actually like the first, second and third it was #1. It went there and it stayed there. It's still there. I get to the point where I just stop having Sweet check the rankings for these because it was locked in at #1. So, clearly Google is not filtering them and they're actually using them as credit.

That's a good thing for us because 1) honestly, we're not making a lot of them. There's 22 and it will be interesting when we get into the real search portion of this test. Maybe I'll reach out to the community and pick a hard, medium and low competition keywords set and we'll see what the movement is of those. It's going to be harder on the hard and the medium keyword set because there's going to be other stuff in there like how are we going to optimize for the page and then what domain they're going to put it on and all the other stuff.

So, it would be a little bit more complicated to pull it off but I would go ahead and say that it's ok to build at least one of these to your money site and use those to pillow up your links. You're going to give it a little benefit of it. You can't over optimize an anchor text and again there's only 22 of them so I think you're going to be safe.

If you read the list here you can see the list inside of there there's not a lot of well-known forums that are always getting spammed. Obviously, with this in SIA now everyone's using this. A lot of people are using the SIA. They're not going to get spammed out but Bill update those I'm sure. So, that was pretty cool.

The URL shorteners. This one is the same set up. No anchor text used. I actually got 223 links out of this. I expected that we're creating a new shortened URLs so essentially new pages that have zero value. 0 x 0 = 0 so they shouldn't see any rankings. Just like the other one they set up – there are pictures around here. Literally, that's all it is. Put your URL in there, tell them how many threads you want and then pick an indexer.

At this time, I didn't have an indexer setup. Well, I had one setup I just didn't use it directly. I submitted manually to Omega.

January 25th they went, January 27th they went to the indexer. January 31st they were #1. At February 3rd they were still at #1. Still there to this day I'm sure. I haven't checked today but I think it's pretty obvious that they're working based off of the domain authority where the URL shorteners are at.

While I wouldn't say that it would be a good idea to buy one of those softwares it does this like at the scale of a thousand, doing it at this scale here which is 223 not necessarily a bad thing and you could probably add those... Again, you're going to get those indexed and pillow your other links. Hide some of your PBN stuff if you're doing that or whatever.

On that last test, Matthew said, "What we do if you pick the exact match anchor?"

In this case, you couldn't because it's using the SEO AutoPilot so it's just not a part of the sites that they use, the exact match. I have another one that does forum profiles that you can pick the keywords. I'll test it out again and see if those ones are done. That one is the more popular websites so I expect the results to be a little bit different but that's certainly a good test.

I can set up that one on 10 sites, 10 pages and do like 5%, 10%, 20%, 30%, 40%, 50%, 60% anchor text to each one of those separate pages and see if there's a tipping point because at that point you're messing with anchor text and the links. So, we'll see how that one works out. That would be a good test. Good idea matthew.

Test #406 is the authority links. There's 84 created. Same thing. This is exact match. It is the way the software works. You put your domain in there and even get to use exact match as a matter of fact. I put it in the title and the title happens to be the one that gets linked in these but this is the Adobe, the MySpace, Ted, Yelp. All those bigger name sites that you are thinking of. Again, I would guess because most of the tools that target these these are the ones that John Mueller was talking about saying, "Oh, we're filtering it."

27th submitted to indexer. 31st, #1 and they stayed there. Probably still there. Yes, they're still there. Let me do a search. I want to make sure. It dropped one position since all the updates. I can live with that. That's cool. I think if you notice that if you do the search you see probably a bunch of the backlinks in there to see how I did it.

There's some of the backlinks right there. So, there you go. The backlinks are ranking for the term so that's good. So then, that filtered out clearly and Google is actually ranking those as well.

I did not do any supplemental backlinks so what that means is typically what I'll do is I'll create, say, these links and then build some tier twos to those using maybe GSA or something like that. I didn't do any of that in this one. This is purely just the power of the software and that's pretty good. I think the ones that I showed last week and combined with these ones they had a decent set of links.

You can actually build safely, build smartly because most of them don't use anchor text and pillow and hide a lot of your other stuff. So, I recommend at least trying the software if you don't want to buy it yourself find someone who's using it ~ maybe a couple of times maybe do that on some test sites or something like that. But I like the stuff. It's pretty good.

I'm running it a lot directly to money sites but I'm doing it in a different cool way. I'm going to show you now and we'll do that part and we'll get to those questions and answers.

While I'm opening my VPS up if you have any questions about those tests go ahead and drop them in the chat. I want to thank all you for coming. I appreciate it being here live. So nice having someone to talk to.

There we go. There's my VPS. See here's all the tests. I did a case study here. We tested the 50 accounts diagram that they had. It actually did pretty good. I haven't looked at that one but they did pretty good and here's all the other links I tested and I got these ones. These are still waiting. But we will look at authority links. In order to do that I'm going to duplicate this so you can see inside of there.

Hopefully, everything goes and you can see everything. Basically, you just put the link in here and choose the service you want. I typically use X Evil. I have the software running on my computer then I just leave those at default depending on what I'm doing and my risk aversion for that site I'll stop at a DA 30 and nothing below that will get picked up.

Often there is not very much but there's some of these other different types of sites have a lot below DA 30 so I'll take those up. Then, you just select it -- and it's called an account preset. It basically assigns which catch-all email you're going use for that particular set up. You can send directly to the indexer all the new stuff to those. I'm just sending it directly to Omega and saving myself some time.

Again, this is the primary keyword and this is what the bio will look like so that authority link is right there and then you just run and create a bio. Don't get all wrapped up around the axle when you're creating bio for any of your link building software. I use SEO content machine, the software version.

They have a new one that is on the web as well. It's called MPX. It's a new version of the software that does not have the bio creator in it so you need the software version. If you're using it already then you get it but basically I just come over here, give it a keyword, put a URL in if you want to, click generate and then boom! There you go. It's got the bio there with the keyword inside of it. Tasty treats and ~ I don't know what that means but it sounds interesting.

So, that's literally how quick it is to create one of these campaigns. Set a thread based off of your machine. Mine's pretty good so I jack it up a lot and then click create and at the end of it that's really all you really got to do. You can send the links to anywhere you want to for the authority links.

Again, the URL goes in there. There's nothing to worry about for keywords ~ you don't have to worry about it and then you just throw a bio in there. Again, you can use SEO Content Machine for that. Create an about me or just make a bio, just invent something real quick. That's what I did, nothing special.

Real short. It can only be 150 characters anyway so the about me in the SEO content machine works and then as you see I'll go back. It's at the end of it that's what it looks like and there's a link that goes in there with it. That's really stupid easy to set up. You can get some quick wins out of it and we use URL shortener. Duplicates, URL and send it to index. It's really that simple. There's a lot of those.

If you are worried about it -- in this one, this is one of those cases where if your risk aversion is a little higher and you don't want to mess around too much cut it off at 30 so you get 31 and up. You won't get the same amount of links but I think it would be probably a little bit safer than having these 10s and 15s to 20s. It's to test sites. We didn't really care but you can check that out and play with the da numbers as it were.

All right. Indexing question. Since Omega won't let me buy any credits until you get ~ what should I use?

BulkAdd URL works or if you have your own set of domains I create a redirect system on side of your new domains and put the... Which is basically, at the end of the day, what BulkAdd URL and Omega are doing, I'm pretty sure. They take your ~ domains, they take your links, set up a redirect, submit sitemap. It's a little bit technical but that's a good way to do that. I talked to the guys and they said that they were doing new servers so we'll see how that works out.

I think if you're already a member and you still have credits you keep your server space until you lose your credits. Because I can still submit links just fine. It just takes forever and then once you lose your credits you're probably lose your assignment to a server and then the next person takes in. I'm assuming that's how that technical works. It's a pure guess.

Also, you can do... If you want to I also have this one. I haven't tried it since I had an Omega. This is a Peter Drew, Gizmo.

At the end of the day what it does is you feed it an account and then give it the URLs and then it goes and creates a Google site and puts the URLs on there and you submit those to the search console, the Google sites to search console or force a crawl. Anyway you want to. You probably force a crawl with Colinkri. I still use Colinkri for tier 2s and down now so I'm not going to waste credits on tier 2s in Omega. So, I would check Colinkri as an option too.

Any other questions on the SEO AutoPilot stuff? I know I went through but it's pretty brain dead simple, honestly, setting those up. No questions. If you think of anything go ahead and drop in the questions box. There's a bunch of people here so I appreciate it. Better than fridays where it was me and dori.

Questions and Answers

First question. What is your take on blocking other sites from hot linking your images? Of course, it uses up your bandwidth which is reason enough to block them and Google says hot-linked images don't count as backlinks. So is there a downside of this to hot linking your images?

I want to see this. I want to see the reference for this statement: Google says hot-linked images don't count as backlinks. Because I can tell you that image backlinks do count. People are ~ them all day long and you can intentionally use your URL on sites that you're building backlinks on or sites that you're getting guest posts from, etc.

Send it to the image URL which redirects to the attachment page i.e. Where it's embedded on and then that passes juice and ranks that page. That's a good assertion. Let's put it in the test ideas. That's an interesting assertion. So, what is the circumstances in which you don't want hot linking them to your URLs? Bandwidth might not be the number one reason for me.

The reason I say that is if it's a high traffic website and it's hot-linked, meaning they're using it and displaying it then it potentially has the backlinks. So, I get a high traffic page with the backlink. Now, if it's not hot, if it's not linked you can't embed it without using that link to just display it. I guess you could but I'm not sure. I don't think so. If it's high traffic and it's pulling a lot of bandwidth because a lot of people are seeing it and reading it on the other site that it's embedded on I'll probably leave it alone.

The bandwidth issue wouldn't bother me. What bothers me is if they're scraping my content, like taking all the page - images and everything, and then rebuilding it and maybe rewording the article a little bit. A decent person would reword it but essentially they got my article on there. At that point, what you can do is, if you notice that's happening a lot, the ~ aren't exactly horrible and stuff, set it up in the code.

You have to get a developer to do this for you, to redirect all hotlinked images to a default image. Ted went over this in one of the SEO This Week episodes, probably like two months ago when I was seeing that another thing. But you redirect it to, like, your own ad.

So, there's ~ your cool images you did all ~ of photoshop stuff and they maybe look awesome and then you switch it for every site that is not yours, every host name that is not yours to show ad instead. That's one way to handle that and you get some sort of advertising out of that process. That's how I would do it.

Next question. Search console shows an inner page on my site as indexed. I ran it through Omega, BulkAdd and speedlinks. However, when I searched for the URL and set the filter to zero that particular page doesn't show up. It's not even for a competitive keyword. What could be going on?

I noticed this today as well. I did the SEO This Week episode. I searched for my URL for digitaleer, the most current episode. I didn't submit it to the search console yet alright and it was not indexed. I went into search console and did the URL inspect and it's indexed, not submitted a sitemap.

So, what does this mean? 1) it could mean that Google Search Console is jacked up. 2) is an or vs. An and, it supports the idea that Google Search Console is using an index that the SERPs are not using. If you submit to here it goes into one index right so Google Search Console found it in either by crawling your sitemaps or you submitted like this and it goes into one index and then that index is propagated to the data centers that are using the search results index.

That's my theory on why we're seeing this and that connection that is busted. It's busted hotness. So, there's a whole bunch of changes going on with search results right now. People are noticing some whacky stuff. Sites are disappearring, sites are jumping up in rankings, etc. I expect all that will settle out in the wash and I think it's all connected to this stupid search index, Google Search Console.

Every time they mess with this tool the search results go retarded and it's something that I'venoticed consistently and so we'll see how long it takes them to fix that disconnect. This tool is useless if it doesn't provide you the right information. Right now, to me it's pretty useless. So, that's why you're seeing that. If you have any other theories other than that one I'd love to hear it.

This question is I have been offered 5 links from real high traffic blogs all on the same blogspot IP address. Is this a footprint and take just 1 or blogspot is big enough and take all 5?

If it's me, if they're all high traffic and they're all ranking for some keywords and they're all legit then go for it. I get all five. Its blogspot, they're all based off of subdomains anyway, off the blogspot domain so they're all essentially treating these as different websites and it's more than likely that you could get a link from the same set of sites on one particular IP address.

So, I would go and get it. I would get all five. I would not just worry about one. There are some instances where you could probably go to the counter-argument that blogspot is so spammed out that it is a domain that has been soured but it's Google's.

So, Google is not going to sour for too much and I think they got pretty good at picking the subdomains that are fried. If the site is getting a high traffic and all that traffic was coming from organic or most of it are coming from organic then knock it out. I would get all five in a heart beat.

Site Reviews

Again, we're not going to do that this week. No one submitted one inside of the Slack channel. It's the #site-review. You can see that inside of Slack. Just drop your URL in there if you want to. Otherwise, I did one in SEO This Week's episode. I looked at is a website that was an affiliate of a clickbank product and it was pretty good.

We looked at some changes to SiteBulb that allow you to do audit per page. Then, we looked at how to use some of the features of SEO ruler which is now completely free. It used to have paid options but now it's completely free so it's slowly becoming one of my favorite tools over serpworks just because he's adding some more cool stuff to it.

That's it. Wow! 38 minutes to run this webinar. Hopefully, I didn't waste your time. Again, I appreciate you all showing up live. We were doing these on friday, no one was coming. It was like me and dori talking and we can do that in Slack.

So, if you have any questions or stuff now's the time. I can hang out here just for a couple of seconds or a couple of minutes while you think about anything you have and if you don't just let me know. No questions. We'll call it a wrap.

Carolyn says she thinks Google Search Console is totally whacked. That's right. I do agree.

No question. So, again, thank you all for coming and I appreciate you and I see you inside of the Slack. If you joined one of the masterminds or if you signed up for the mastermind and haven't joined your mastermind you need to do that as soon as possible. We have one, two, three, four, five masterminds, open five different groups to keep the numbers in each one low.

However, not everyone who signed up and said they wanted to be in the mastermind actually joined their mastermind and spoke up and started engaging with the other members so we are going to consolidate those probably down to one or two groups just so that the people who did sign up and stuff get what they paid for. ~ when they sign up for those mastermind. So, check that out.

If you haven't gotten your link let the support people know and kelly will hook you up and get you in the right place, and worst let me know and I'll help you. Just reach out to me inside of the general overall SIA Slack and I'll get you into one of the masterminds. I think they're very powerful tools. I have my own personal one. Terry power, she is in mine and you can reach out too if you need some insights on the power of a mastermind - what they gets you and how they can help you improve yourself and your business.

So, please join those, leverage those you're paying for. That's one of the features that SIA you're paying for so get signed up and start participating. With that, thank you all and have a nice day.