For this month's webinar, Clint and Dori go through the following tests and make recommendations on how the results apply for you as a business owner or as a SEO agency.
Test 544: Does JobPosting Schema Increase Indexing When Using Google Indexing API?
Test 545: Does JobPosting Schema Increase Ranking When Using Google Indexing API?
Test 546: Which Is Better - .com/.net/ or .org?
Test 547: Does A 404 Page Pass Link Juice When The Target Page URL Is On It?
Test 548: Are Alt Tags Important?
Test 549: Can We Pass Juice Through Staykeen.com Posts?
Test 550: Will Just Having The Words ‘Guest Post’ On A Page Harm Rank?
Test 551: Will Just Having The Words ‘Sponsored Post’ On A Page Harm Rank?
Test 552: Will Social Shares Boost Rank?
Test 553: Does CloudFlare's APO Service Speed Up Your WordPress Site?
October 2020 Dossier
Transcription below:
Dori: Hey everyone, I'm starting the broadcast. Although, I don't know if I can hear anybody. Can you hear me? Because I can't hear Clint. I don't think he's on, he was on. So if somebody out of our huge audience could type in the questions. Okay, you can hear me. Terry can hear me. Where's Clint? Okay, he must be having problems. We'll give him a couple more minutes.
All these are his tests, but I do have something to share. Although I don't wanted him to see it, but I can share it. If he doesn't come on in a couple of minutes. He was here, we were talking a little bit before and then all of a sudden he dropped off. So he might be restarting his computer or something.
I have dm him in slack. I can't hear him. But no response. He can watch the replay, I like that. Yeah, seriously, although these are all his tests, I would have no idea. I would just be reading them. And that is hella boring. And some of this stuff has code in it. Ooh, some of these pictures look cool though.
So I uploaded the October dossier, which you can download from the GoToWebinar interface. So you can see some of the nice pictures. That looks like something that Clint did it. I thought maybe Joe did it. Because it looked like something Joe would do. But these are pretty and Clint did them.
Dori: Clint
Clint: You can hear me now
Dori: Well, I wanted to get on. Well, I started at one on one just so y'all know. We were here. Oh, I see staff coming on. You can hear Clint. I cannot hear Clint. So I'll let her know.
Dori: Can you hear me, Clint? You're gonna have to type into the question box. So you can hear me? I think we're both signed in and under the same admin. Because we're both SIA organizers. There's me and then there's another one. So I'm Clint, if you can hear me slack me.
I'm gonna change my audio output. So it's from back here and then I don't think he can hear me. Professionals here, folks. Oh, that I can hear you. Can you hear me? Now? I can. Okay. Let me try to change my audio. I mean, my Hold on. Okay, so say something, testing something. Okay, good. You're now in my headphones. Yay. Here we are.
Welcome to the October SEO Intelligence Agency monthly webinar. And like I was talking about prior to you getting on is that all seeing all these pretty pictures in the dossier. And I figured Joe had done them and it was, lo and behold, it was you. So I'm going to change the presenter to you. And then you can show your screen and we can get going.
Clint: You can hear me now
Dori: Yep, gotcha.
Clint: Okay. Man, this, like, we do this all over again.
Dori: I know right? It's like the first time every month
Clint: Okay, so this month we have, if you're looking at the dossier, we have 10 tests that we went over. And also on top of that, you have now access to some new videos, which is kind of timely because I got Hunter and I are gonna start doing some more GMB testing. And we needed a good reference point to where to kick off.
So I reached out to Jordan Pierce, if you follow him, he was closing down his local business training local SEO stuff, and he's kind of moving on to national. At least that was last week. He's kind of ADHD. So he might need something else now but/and what he did is he downloaded and he closed down his course. And he actually gave us the course for your all of you guys. So you can see that in your members area, just click under SIA dashboard, GMB optimization.
And there's 11 videos in there roughly 40 minutes of training, just to kind of get yourself familiar with the dashboard. Get yourself familiar with machine IDs, which you guys should know already, if you've been messing around with the schema course you have access to. And some other things. If you don't see this inside of your panel, like under my account, I can't see it yet. It's kind of funny. But if you don't see it, just hit up support, and they'll hook you up and turn it on.
Dori: But you have to turn those on individually per user. But that was extraordinarily generous of Jordan to give us his course or donate his course.
Clint: Yeah, I really appreciate it. I hate messing with maps, to be honest. After you've, you do all the lead gen maps, and then you try to rank them. And then Google comes and kills them. And you gotta rinse and repeat. And it's just, it's a game. It's kind of not one that I choose to participate in very often, right? So. But this is good to get you going and help you out with some of your own issues, if you're trying to rank here and stuff and all that there's some good night tips in there. So make sure that you check that out.
Dori: And if you see or talk to Jordan, tell him thank you from us.
Clint: Definitely.
Dori: Okay, we've already told them but yeah, so it's good that other people?
Clint: Yeah
Dori: Reference it too.
Clint: All right. I'm gonna close them. things here real quick. Okay, so the indexing. I think we've been talking about indexing probably three consecutive months now, in the monthly webinars talking about the changes that Google has made, etc, I hinted that was going to record this because I didn't want it to really get out to the public's, but it's not fair to everyone who just can't make it to the live thing.
So I will ask you that once I give you this information, you don't go to other people and tell them, you don't go share it on your Facebook and social media, you don't go telling people how Google Indexing API works. And it's awesome. And he should do it. Because once that becomes popular, inevitably, there's gonna be some toolbox who decides to go to a Google rep like john Mueller, or Barry Schwartz or whatever and say, Oh, well, this, I heard this method is working, it's true, you should test it, and then it gets shut down. So we don't want them to do that.
And what the method I'm talking about is adding jampa schema to your pages in order to leverage the Google Indexing API to get your pages indexed. And the reason this is important, if you unless you've been living in Iraq, you may or may not know that they shut down the request for indexing feature inside of the Google Search Console. And this was in response to although they later denying it was it's in response to all the indexing issues that they've had.
Coming up to this point where IE caffeine was getting too many URLs, a cause the backup and etc. Well, they're trying to walk that back and say that they are shutting it down, not because of caffeine, which is kind of interesting, but the the one method or there's two methods that are working. And then there's one is the sitemap. And having dates in your sitemap, Google's actually doing a whole lot better reading the Sitemaps than they were doing before and their indexing pages pretty much are good sites right away.
The slowest I've seen is probably a day and a half. And that's on digital year. And if you've been following the over the shoulder series, it's not a brand new site, but it's not. It's not been maintained very well. So the crawl rates really low and I'm getting stuff indexed from the sitemap just fine.
The key with the sitemap is to make sure that you have an XML sitemap that has the URL and the date that the page or post was updated, the date has to be in there. If you don't have a date in there, Google's not going to know you did it. And then I can read your sitemap they don't care. That's despite the fact that text file Sitemaps are perfectly acceptable in a tool right now. They're just not reading the text file Sitemaps. They're using the XML ones.
And then the second way is to add job post schema to your page and then use the Google API Indexing API to submit your pages. Under the terms of service, the API is set so that it's is only allowable if you have job posting schema, or video object schema with broadcast event. If you're using the job posting, and you don't have a job, you are now doing blackhat. SEO, how dare you, you're a horrible person.
But this is kind of no harm and no foul in the application of what we're doing it. And if you are like a, like I have SEO this week, for example, technically, I can use the video object and broadcast schema, and be fully in compliance with the terms of service for this API. Because I'm doing a broadcast, it's a live broadcast, but I can only use it on one page. So this is something that you just kind of have to balance your risk. First reward are gonna catch us is the big green monster coming get you etc. I could tell you, the next one well over 1000 pages right now.
And I actually gave this method to the people at omega indexer, Elias. And that's how omega indexers getting 100% indexing. And how I'm doing is they've automated this system. Don't ask me what they did in the background, or how they figured it out. But it all works now. And we're getting 100% indexing after three to four days. When you submit to us,
Dori: That was pretty nice of you to give it to omega. I hope they don't share it.
Clint: No, he won't realize Yeah, they won't. Yeah, no, by the people in America, they don't even know how they're doing. I just told Elias, and Elias and Christoph and then the automated and took quite a while actually. Alright, so how do you use this, basically, you put this schema code in your head, in this case, we I just created one for SCA, and this is kind of my default for most of them now.
And he just joined SIA. And the job is for the testing and what we pay $100 per test. So I put that in there, the max value is 1500. We have a max value, just in case. And the the idea is that the since the job is there, Google Indexing API is picking up the URLs and then airgo indexing.
If you don't remember the last test, if you just send it to the Google Indexing API, Google will ignore it. They've turned the switch on. And they're specifically looking for these two versions of schema, if they're not in there that you're going to kick your URL out of their queue. Okay, so if you have a job, that's even better, if you have a job listing, like you're looking for web designer or whatever, make one of these, put it on your sites when you're making the new pages and then take it off after it's indexed. So that's how I use it.
To prove that it works. October 5, that did it and you can see I got all 10 of the test domains inside the test pages indexed, and it took three days so I submitted a here 123 And then third day everything kicked in. After the indexing feature was shut off, I tested it again just to make sure you can see all 10 of them actually made it in and then as of the day I made this the the 27th to the domains dropped out, which is kind of normal for test pages.
Anyway, they're not, let's be fair, they're not the highest quality. So you kind of expect that to drop out. I'm not going to reuse this again. So I didn't bother resubmitting it. But you see that the indexing works with the Google Indexing API with that in there.
One thing of note is if you don't want to use this method, and you still want to use the Google Indexing API, as I said before, you can. But what you should do at the same time is you got to put it into Google Search Console, you have to submit your URL in there. And it's not doing the request indexing right now.
So I haven't checked to see if you can run that through either Rich Snippets testing to the mobile friendly testing tool, or the indexing tool, or the URL inspect tool, I mean, and just kind of like, Hey, you Google, check this out. But that might be something to look at, for yourself. But right now what I would, what I would say is, if you're not going to use this, and you have a whole bunch of pages, you need indexed, and you need to get on omega indexer. And they figured this stuff out for you. So you're not risking your site's at all the safest course of action. anyone got any questions on that?
Dori: I don't see any so but I have one. Okay. So that code is just something that we can copy and paste into our pages, of course, changing the URL and some of the other the name and things like that. Correct? Yeah,
Clint: You change technically, I don't even need to have to you can copy it exactly out of your dossier if you want to use just the job to really basic job post schema.
Doi: Okay, awesome.
Clint: If they wanted to, they can use this. Exactly.
Dori: Perfect. Nice find Clint.
Clint: Yeah, so everyone's kind of sticker I give you one.
Clint: When everyone's complaining about indexing, I can tell you that since I've tested that I have not found I haven't had an instance where I had any issues with indexing.
Dori: And when you hear people complaining about it, you can just go hahaha
Clint: Yeah, well, now at this point I do. So this is probably the last time I've talked about it. Because I've actually have given dropped a lot of hints in other groups, groups that would shall not be named, but they just don't know. They're still fighting with indexing for some reason. So they're, you know, you guys are in the new stay that way and keep your competition dumb.
Dori: Yep.
Clint: Since I was doing that test, and I was messing with job posting schema, I was like, What the heck, why don't we do another one. And what I did was I turn one of those URLs that we index with the API into a test page. And I modified the schema and essentially stuff, the schema with our test keyword is I wanted to do see if Google would read that description part, see that extra stuff in there, and then give us ranking boost.
Now, we know that that works. And for other schemas, we're not sure which ones Google's accepting and which ones are good, they're ignoring. So that's from a ranking perspective. So that's why this is actually valuable information.
And in this case, what happened was, I actually didn't get any boost from it at all. You can see the pages all indexed. And then I applied the schema to the number five, and it just sort of just stayed there. And then this test, domain, this test page, here, you can see just kind of went up. And that's because two of the domains were on top of it actually dropped out of the Oh, no, it makes all that much of difference at all, which is pretty interesting.
And honestly, it kind of makes sense that they're not using job schema for indexing. Because it's specifically for that that type is was specifically for the Google jobs platform. And so I would assume that it's beating that aggregate database, but it's not playing into effect inside.
Dori: It's not taking account to ranking, not indexing, because it's this job schema that just got two pages indexed, or did I miss something?
Clint: Yeah, it's not taken into account for ranking.
Dori: Okay. Got it.
Clint: And then there's a message from gurgly. How does Google omega index index pages without those pages in the schema on these make these make pages? Like I said, I'm not going to tell you how they did that. I have no desire whatsoever tell you how they did that, how they automated it. Just know that they took the test results. They automated it, and it works now. And if they tell you, they'd be done. And I'm not gonna do it, because I like 100% index.
Dori: I gave you a free account at least.
Clint: So in the end, job post schema is good for indexing
Dori: I didn't hear your response. I got a phone call coming in. Okay, so did they give you a free account? Yeah.
Clint: Yeah, I get free credits. But I had that already. Because I was the I'm doing si a testing on their stuff, and they appreciate.
Dori: Okay.
Clint: Jobs posting. If you have legit jobs, you want to get into Google jobs use it if you want to use it for your indexing, use it. But if you want to use it for ranking, and to boost your ranking purposes, you can see Google is ignoring that for ranking purposes and ignoring the stuffing. Pretty interesting knowledge and get to know from a ranking position perspective. Let me see if there's any questions on that. Nope, no questions on that, Let's see.
Okay, this one is from Hunter. The idea behind this test is we did a test for Bill. And one of his presentations. Believe it was a big domainers conference that we did the test form for, where we tested the various tlds and how they stack up and which ones he should buy and which ones they indexed. And in his particular test, the purpose of that was to check for indexing.
And here, we wanted to test the big three, to see if Google had any preference for it and the way it was set up is 1000 keywords for each page, three pages on each domain.com dotnet.org, and it's nine pages in total. And this is kind of how they set up after indexing started kicking in. And they were doing pretty much consistent dotnet core dotnet.com.org. As you can see, they went in that way that net.com that org and stay that way throughout the course of the test that net.org.
So based off of this test, there's a couple things that we kind of figure out now I'm just gonna leave it here is one for this particular keyword, the dotnet one, right, and then the.com and the org. But when you look at the search results, .com is kind of the winner. For the most part, depending on the keyword type in the market area, like for software and SAS type IO seems to be.
So take this test is kind of a grain of salt. And when you're buying domains for a new brand, or partial match, or exact match for any product launch, or whatever, by the dotnet and the.com, set up a test page and see which one of them for your term Google prefers. And you may find that, as in this case, you see that the dotnet actually indexed a lot better index first and then then over the .com.
So you may find that there's just a preference. It's called the ranking random domain factor that Google has for that dotnet that you bought versus the.com. So this is more of a idea that you should be paying attention to the variations in your domains and I'm gonna stick with a .com again, also keep in mind that users kind of are stuck on .com right.
I have a little bit more trust with dot coms. They accept dot nets now they're becoming more prevalent. And then some of those other tlds are just kind of like fancy. So keep that in mind tune your selections in how to get around this random ringing. Dory, I want to ask you, if you see this when you're doing PBN, and you're let's say you're building a network Do like stick with coms? You go with the other ones?
Dori: I go with anything that has high trust flow. I don't care what it is.
Clint:That makes sense.
Dori: But, now if I want to, once I see this, if I'm going to do an affiliate site, I'm going to get the .net, because, I'll test it. And I did, one time I did actually test, the Big Four, actually, it was dotnet.com.org and dot info for an ASM product launch that we were trying to rank for. And the.org was the first one it was it. It just totally, this was five, six years ago, it had totally beat out the rest. So that's the domain that we used.
So it is a good idea to buy the top four, do a test and see which one rises to the top, especially if you're doing product, launch affiliates, stuff like that. But for branding, because of that trust, I'd probably still always stick with a .com if you can get it.
Clint: Yeah, I would probably go with the.com, too. But I'll never shy away from it dot net. As a matter of fact, you can do a lot of if you're looking around and you're shopping for domains long enough, you'll find that the dot coms are registered as premiums, and you know, 235 10 $20,000, and then the dotnet, 10 bucks, so why not get .net? Right?
Yeah, seriously, especially if Google's gonna be ranking, indexing it just fine. And on the indexing thing. The the tests that we did with Bill, I went back, I want to say six months later, and the dot nets were all still there. They didn't drop out from that test. So and then a lot of the other tlds did. So that's kind of putting those two together that you shouldn't be ignoring that at all. So hopefully, value from that test.
Dori: We have a really good question from I hope I pronounced your name right. Gurgly Gurgle, Gurgle Glee. I'm sorry, if I mispronounced it. I'm horrible with pronounciation. He asks, What's your opinion on web 2.0? spam links to your tier one? If they aren't indexed? Do they still have value goggle Googlebot crawls them, but never gets to index? Do they transfer power? ever tested that? And go ahead.
Clint: Yeah, go ahead.
Dori: I don't think we've tested to see whether web 2.0 is that are not in Google search results. Still rank sites. But I do know that domains that are not in Google search results, rank sites, if they're being crawled. And they have link juice. So like when PBNs, get d indexed, they still rank. And we've tested that multiple times they still pass link juice, Google still crawls them. So my gut is saying, in theory, yes. If Google's crawling them then and if they have linked juice, then they would pass that along. What do you think?
Clint: Yeah, I've been talking and teaching that for like two years now. Elias over SEO IP teaches it, there's a bunch of people teaching that same concept. So I think this one, this question has been asked and answered 1000 times now. And the answer is, you don't have to be index.The only reason I even bother indexing my tier ones is because I get omega for free.
From my test, if I wasn't paying for an indexer, I wouldn't even mess. I mean, I would make sure they get crawled. And as soon as Google knows about them, if they liked the page good enough, they're going to index it or not. And I still bought and the database still knows about it for the backlink purposes. And I leave it at there.
Especially if you're doing what you say you're doing web 2.0 spam links, like I don't make junk. So my stuff indexes at a higher rate anyway, because when I put it out there, I actually put formatted content on it. It's not the best content, but it's not pure trashy. They're like, I got this article off article origins funded a bajillion times and in theory, and in my tool, I made 1000 links. Now I'm crying because I don't have index.
So in the way that the question was formatted, as long as it crawls it, you're fine. And if you can use good content, and then it crawls it, Google's gonna index it naturally anyway. So there's no point in wasting money, sending tier twos, threes, fours and fives to an indexer, and you just get a crawled, you get the benefit of that way.
Dori: Unless your clients want to see the links that you're creating, which a lot of them do, then you'd want to use omega.
Clint: Well, in that case, I would actually be showing them the links making to tier one, this is the links that are going to your website, for the rest of that for clients, as far as I'm concerned, is none of your business because that's my method of how I rank and how I power up their tier ones. And this is all the stuff that's pointing at your website, as a reasonable ask, right? But everything else is, that's what you pay me to know.
Indeed, and I'm not showing you know what I mean. And honestly, there's only one client and Mamath, he's the only one that I ever show backlinks to at all anyway. And because he understands it is really good client, we need to concentrate and plus. So he gets to see behind her stuff, and I like it. But for the most part, I don't talk backlinks with clients at all.
That's what you're paying me for. I don't teach you how to be a plumber and pipes and you should be using PVC or flex tubing. I mean, so don't tell me how to build a backlink or what is it good. That's how I approach in the news, right? But works.
Dori: Yeah, another question. How do you approach linking to your tier ones? Are you going with web 2.0? spam, or at plus doors? PB ns, you mix the two or stick to the PB ends up he says I'm coming from Marcos World of web 2.0.
Clint: A kind of a you can do a mix of that stuff. Right? So it depends on the tier one, you have to know that the the level of the authority that the tier one has and what it could withstand. So if your tier one is a guest posts, and you worked really hard to get a guest post from this really great site, then I wouldn't be pointing web to use that, that guest post because you could inadvertently mess up the website right and it's not your site.
So I would use those PBNs for that. But if it's a YouTube URL and the URLs in my sites in the description and I blasted all heck with you just find this work, because the authority in that website, so the ever loved it depends. Question and answers there just it depends on the target that you're doing it. Hopefully that answers, does it makes sense Dori?
Dori: Yeah. perfectly.
Clint: Let's see. I use address with the url the Blastoise. It's, it depends. Again, it depends on the website. So I'm not a DR. TF. DA kind of guy look at the site isn't strong as powerful as Google like it and if so then.
Let's see Susie. Why would one use for Okay, so yeah, this one is just kind of jumping. She's reading the PDF and asking questions. Alright, so this one is for 547 is does a 404 page pass link juice when the target URL is and I'm assuming that everyone knows what a 404 pages but I don't want to say too much.
So just gonna kind of trigger one here on digital leering, You can kind of see. So, in digital here, I have the custom for a four page set up my 404s all go to the archives, archives panes. And then art that archives page has links to my latest posts on it.
In this case, they actually the order flipped around versus newest versus oldest. What we're testing here is do those links on the four page pasties. And the reason you would do this is let's say you did a web site migration and you move like a site with 10,000 pages on it, you set up the redirects the best you can.
Eventually, at some point, you're going to find that 404 and software for is coming from your backlinks and traffic from other people's sites or what Google has in there. And having a nice custom for four page actually gets the user engaged, you don't just go to there and see like, in my case digitally, or is the archive versus a nice custom one with a video on it and maybe some links or even a search bar, just some witty comments and stuff makes the it's engaging the user right away.
But from an SEO perspective, can we leverage that and not necessarily always have to worry about redirecting the URLs to more relevant pages. Let's say it's just a page that you had it before you get some backlinks on it, you're getting some traffic, but you know, it wasn't converting. So you never did a light content. Where you can do is optimize your 404 page and put your main sales stuff on IE,things like your your main primary services or whatever.
So in digitalist case, like a link to the SEO page, the web design page and maybe the keyword analysis page, and then all the backlinks and anything that goes to things that are broken there, it will point to your 404 page which has those links on it. Hunter set that up for us.
Using the indexing we saw here, you just pick this last one as the test page. And then we route through it. And as you can see, it's just kind of shout out to the number two, and then went down to number three, which unnecessarily isn't really all that bad. There's another page in here that he did on but it's same domains. And I think we're messing with filtering now.
So the end result of this test was that yes, indeed that the links on your four oh four will past juice from backlinks that are pointing to you bad URLs on your website. So it's a good idea isn't a standard practice to you edit and create custom for page for your website in order to leverage that knowledge. And at the end of the day, it's really about the users, right?
So you want to have someplace for them to go, especially if you are dealing with products and sales and service. So hopefully that answers Susan's question, why would you use a 404 page put links on if you could put a link in. That's why because you're not always going to know where your backlinks end up from coming from.
Maybe you change the URL, all that stuff, you're planning ahead, and you're leveraging everything instead of just kind of waiting and see which is what most webmasters therefore for now, anyway. Alright, anything on that Dori?
Dori: No.
Clint: Test. 548 is another one from Hunter. And what we want to test here is just having the alt tags that matter. And when we say all tag, we're not talking blank, it's there's a key there's words in it, but there's not keywords for what you're doing. And this comes from the constant teachers that are around the internet where who are trying to the image SEO and they want to rank an image for the topic of the image, which is nothing wrong with that however, we wanted to see is that is doing that result in just because you rank the image does that mean your pages.
He added the images on here just left the alt tag empty on the control pages, and then the plain text in the image alt tags for the test pages. And you see, these are the test pages that he used and the result went down and then ultimately, did the index have even helped with indexing. And it's kind of what we expected is, if you're going to follow the practices that say, for your alt text, they should be descriptive.
So if you have a picture of apples, your alt text tech should be Apple's and maybe you're on it optimizing a feature website, like we're offering classes, right, then you want a picture of an apple on there, because teachers get apples, you can't put Apple for teachers, is we under that guide for that are going around with image SEO, it would just be apples, where apples for teachers would actually help you ranking in organic because that is counted. And it's not here inside with just plain text for the organic. Without that keyword relation to the page, that hopefully that makes sense.
Let's see. And then I put his recommendations in here and just kind of look at any of the page optimizer tools I use correlate and surplus zorra. Now they'll tell you if images are even important. And if they're not important in it for the organic ranking by correlation, follow the best practices one or two images that use your keyword or variations of your keyword in the images and then the rest of them go to put that descriptive anchor in there.
Maybe you have a picture that's really related to your topic and has a lot of traffic that you might be able to capture from Image Search. It's not this test isn't to discourage you from doing that process. It's just to make sure that you're doing it while accounting for the alt tags having keywords.
This test is 549 is from James and if you don't remember if we announced this mandatory was like two three months ago, we talked about this is stay clean. And this kind of Google's answered Pinterest.
Dori: Yeah, I remember us talking about that. Yeah, it's just such a weird staking
Clint: Happy yeah, it's honestly I think it's kind of the Google's part and parcel of the way things go they see the Pinterest is doing really good. So a complete mega competitor for it. They did the same thing they targeted Facebook and lost miserably with Google Plus and now they're going to pick on Pinterest but at the end of the day it's a Google property right and then where are we gonna get some power we need to get some leverage of that and so James did a test for us where he just put a link on stay clean and it didn't really do anything.
This is a follow up test on that and will stay clean actually pass link juice through it. So can I use stay clean and put my images on there and send a whole bunch backlinks? Will that go through? and rank my website? Which is a great question because it'd be a great buffer if it works. So here's him he set it all up. Here's the URL is his image.
And here's the inside of the code, you can see how the images annotated inside of the code for those of you code nerds like us. And you can see that it is a do follow. And it was using some JavaScript as a class so he used whorish pbn for this 10 pbn, network, Tuesdays things post. And then Eric, go to the page started off at number six.
And there's a whole course of these you can see it actually bounced out and then number nine, number eight, and number one, and that's October, September, October, August, August 13, and the 11th. So how much time is that. It makes sense to the one week bouncing period, you get your link, and then boom, it kind of messed it up.
So that pattern there typically is like a one to three week kind of thing those links are really, really young is kind of a testament to her is that Google's only making us wait roughly a week to see the benefits from that, and I honestly think that Google does this on purpose. Like, hey, we find this new link to your page, we're gonna drop this out.
Dori: See what you do. I mean, they have a patent on that.
Clint: Yeah. So this is a really good example of that. And it's also a good indicator that staking is a good, pure one, like, regardless of the link method, but you can see 10 links, shout out to number one. So also a testament to the value of the SEO electronic work if you're not in there. Um, yeah, so like Joe, Joe, just, he noted, it's a good buffer, I would also like to retest it, I'll probably retest it with a SEO autopilot campaign, and maybe a couple of the tools, we'll see how that plays out.
But for the most part, if you know what buffers are, and you're using buffers, you probably know that tools aren't just trying to, you know, mess with this implant. Only gonna stay clean and see what you can do with the limits that Google's gonna let you go past that power through through their own platform.
Aright, test 550 was just having words guest post on a page harm rate. This was I didn't even know this test was coming, James did. And I thought it was really smart. Because if you pay attention to any of the news, John Mueller claims all we can find guest posts, we ould filter that stuff out. My response has always been okay, boy, how do that? Right? How do you gonna just identify, and then James is kind of like, Peter, Captain Obvious, you just put guest posts. Right?
So he tested that, and he added guest posts to his pages, guest posts by guest is kind of obvious, right? And here's the test page, where it started out, as you see dropped and bounce back up. Dropped in the nine again. So it's kind of got legs I that that concept of if you have the words guest post on your page, you might be already ranking. I won't take this one as a definite yet because I think this one has to be duplicated on multiple sites.
We don't have the systems in place right now. We're still waiting on Ted's testing tool to be updated, or someone to make it a new testing tool. That's better that can allow us to launch the same test multiple times and then increase the leaderboards. Right. So but I would seriously consider not using the term guest post based off of this test alone, right?
Like, why add that to the pieces of content anyway? No one else does it? Why would you have that as a standard practice to put guest post of inside of a category or inside of your titles and descriptions of your content? So I think that, well, it's not a definitive, hey, this is kind of how they're doing it. To me, anything I can move from five to nine is probably a bad thing. So I would say leave that content.
Dori: Yeah, this is really reminiscent of sponsored links, when people would say, put sponsored links on our sidebar, and then, you know, put people's links that we're paying to be there. I don't know if Google ever demoted the page that they were on, but I know that they demoted well, I don't 100% know, because I didn't test it. But they said they would demote those links
Clint. Yeah, using a associate. So sponsored link is in the same div. Okay. If it's in there, same day, we're going to reduce the level of power that's passed on. That makes sense. Yeah. That was also a really great footprint for lack of a better word because it word for to find reciprocal link networks created by plugins those things used to work like gangbusters until you will figure out the footprint and went after them and then take out site after site using fundament that way.
So be a little bit leery about that is well, I haven't I think James's test is, honestly even without the 10, very 10 separate tests and 10 separate keywords and stuff, I would just stop putting guest posts inside of here on your page.
This goes along with the thing that Ted Dobias talked about on Search Engine Journal that we're wrestling bricks out, I think they did a post where they listened to you, Gary Ellis podcast and he was talking about if you put the words page 404 not found inside of your comments or anywhere on your page in a predominant area that is not surrounded by other related information, you could inadvertently be indexed your page.
And Ted tested that on search engine journalists blog, the exact story and his comments section was indexed. And then Ted added the 404 page not found mission from the website to comments in the index. So I'm clear that they can actually pull that off with guest post by seems like a good filter to find guest posts, right?
Dori: So easy one.
Clint: All right, well, having the word sponsored posts, page harm ranked, it's kind of the same setup, same things. We hash all that stuff. What you see is test page started number four went up to number three to five, nine. I did the same thing that you were talking about. We're sidebar stuff.
Dori: Yeah, this is a double whammy. You got sponsored and guest in it.
Clint: Now you guys know there's two words to avoid sponsor posts. For I use this for words count correctly. Yeah,
Dori: I'm glad I'm not trying to rank SEO rock stars, because I have sponsored by all over the place.
Clint: I wonder that would be a good one. James, if you're looking for another test is sponsored by and is that? Is that effective? Is it different? sponsored posts, a guest post would be in line with paid or link building were sponsored by would be in line with sponsorship.
Dori: That would be interesting. You know, take the word post out, take the word guest out and see if that's sponsored word. Sponsored by.
Clint: I dont know you do guest posts that are sponsored by the company, guests guest posts, or he new posts by, article by, author sponsored by company and then the sponsor. They are just to avoid both terms.
Dorri: Yeah, well, like I said, I'm glad I'm not trying to rank that page.
Clint: And let's see what social shares boost rank. This is a good one. I don't know if you guys know back in the days, I could rank pages using triber. And essentially, that was like crowdsource social signals. You in each share other people's stuff, you get some credits, and then they share all your stuff. And then I was ranking left and right.
That was back in my network marketing days where you're doing the network marketing company like Mary Kay's spam, or scam and that those kinds of things, those kinds of posts, and they were ranking left and right just using social things.
So this is good to test this every once in a while and see if Google ever brings it back and James used a Fiverr gig for this one. You can see all the links and stuff that he got from that particular gig. If you're, you're checking it out, and maybe you want to try this out for yourself. He'll note in the comments, and you'll see this when you get the dossier that some of these are kind of like posts, not technically like Facebook and Twitter, but some of them are bookmarking websites which in turn the this kind of falls in line with the social network site. Essentially what a lot of those bookmarking sites.
I would be a little bit cautious, especially if you're looking at some of these is a lot of the TL DS are kind of the same. So if you're doing ever do a link cleanup, those things kind of stand out. Pretty good. So be careful when you're doing that is not something by in front of this particular provider to judge.
Like, I wouldn't do it just looking at the examples here. But if you see where the test page started off, and we'll scroll through and watch it jump to number one is number two. And back to number one, so worked, and then it went away, kind of like Haha, and then the shot back up and one again, that's another one of the algorithm kind of tools, they kind of freak you out.
So while he did have good results with this particular thing, I would say that maybe you would do a little bit better. Like he's got some delivery Facebook posts. Some are backlinks kind of thing. In this example, I would look at Facebook posts systems that actually share your URL, give you a little hint how to do that.
If you have Facebook account, you can make Facebook pages and if you have Facebook pages are all indexed and all the stuff on them is crawled. So make yourself your own little 100 Facebook page mini pbn, if you wanted to. And that's kind of the way that I think about it when leveraging social platform.
So you hear a lot of stories where on social media doesn't help, it just gets traffic, it's not an SEO boost. James just proved every one of them wrong. So keep doing your social media stuff. And think about it in this way. I'm building links, and I'm building my brand at the same time, and you'll never get steered wrong.
Alright, this is the last test. I kind of wanted to take a little bit of time to explain this. So the you have the new core web vitals metrics that are out, people, when they initially launched core web vitals are like this is going to be a ranking factor. And because Google said this is going to be a ranking factor, everyone and their brother jumped on it.
And I was sitting in the background pointing and laughing because they did the same thing when HTTPS came out, is it always going to be ranking factor? And it actually was for a little bit until everyone adopted it. Now guess what it's like if it is a ranking factor, it's the least most important ranking factor ever.
That's kind of how a core webinar was weighed out. Everyone jumped on it. Everyone said, it's gonna be great. You're gonna get increased rankings and stuff. And then Google came out and said, Well, not really, it's not going to be.
But the PageSpeed is still important. I think it's still important enough that I even offer a service for 147. I'll actually optimize WordPress sites. And I was the first one to offer that that I know, we started that industry off in little local client takeover. I was the only one offering that service for the longest time and a bunch of people jumped on the bandwagon.
And now CloudFlare is on it. And they have a thing. It's called the it's an API platform. So basically, it's automatic platform optimization. So what this thing does is it takes your WordPress website and turns it into for the lack of better term pure HTML web pages.
Obviously, WordPress is PHP and HTML, right? So it takes it and turns all that WordPress code into pure HTML pages like coding. And because the the network over a CloudFlare is actually integrated into Google data centers at the same time, your pages are essentially syndicated to I want to say it's 170 different data centers. That count maybe a little bit off higher a little based on the last numbers that I saw.
So in in the idea is where if Suzy is in Brazil, and he is in Portsmouth, England, for example, Susie will get the same PageSpeed experience that James would get because James is important to England in the same time. And it's actually really cool. And so I thought I would test it out and see if you guys can actually gets value out of it.
So with that said, the test setup was actually probably one of the more detailed ones that I wrote, because the PageSpeed stuff, and I always test with web page test.org. All others are junk, as far as I'm concerned.
So if you guys are serious about PageSpeed optimization, you should be using web test that org, you can find the information here, I shared the URL on the automatic optimizations for WordPress, but it's really stupid easy, you go in there and you flip a button and you pay him five bucks a month.
Here is the page is what ranks. And this is pre optimization. I have not done anything to it yet. You can see I'm on a pretty decent server already. So I'm getting decent numbers just with without authorization. And that's probably the number one lesson here is garbage in, garbage out.
If you're on a shared $5 Hostgator plan. Don't expect to be running competitively with a dedicated server over liquid. And friends, don't let friends use good daddy. The next thing I did is I optimize a website WP rocket swish proven flying pages. WP rocket handles the minification. And caching swish pro handles my image optimization then the image CDN and then finding pages just does a much better job of prefetch and pre render than WP rocket does.
After I go through my own little process there. I just added a couple more things checking for security and stuff. You can see here the results I got from just being the PageSpeed optimization with those tools. And you see my core web vitals. Yeah, I'm green. Yay, happy me. I got the ACA for me. But at the end of the day, these numbers here start render first bite first contentful paint are the ones that matter.
What is the total blocking time? Yeah, it's essentially there's a script on the site that prevents the page from showing up until that script is loaded. and nine times out of 10, the ones that are doing that are usually Google API stuff. And I have Google Maps. And I know I have a video. I can't remember what I have on there.
But there's an API on there that just kind of slowing that down and and triggers that. So. But these two the largest contentful paint in the human layout shift, I can understand the value of these ones. This one's kind of Yeah, whatever. It's milliseconds. This is a human layout shift.
You're on your phone, and you go to a website and it kind of loads and then it moves that scheming to layout shift and the largest contentful. Paint, how long does it take is see the biggest area, you can see the difference here, largest content full versus first content, the users are looking at, ah, okay, this is coming up.
Now I want to see it. Right. And then Google's saying, Oh, no, they need to see more is that's really the difference between these two things. So I have preferred to stay on this number. And when I'm reporting for my services, that's where I'm reporting up. If you're using gt metrics, they're using mes.
And that's the entire page loaded up all the scripts in the background, load it up and all that other stuff. People are chasing this number here from gt metrics, when in fact, these are the numbers that make sense for users and for SEO purposes.
Okay, and then I went in, I added the CloudFlare plugin to it actually, I think it did one more thing. Yeah, I just turned CloudFlare on. And you can see the difference in speed, just turning CloudFlare on. CloudFlare is garbage in, garbage out, right. So if your website sucks here, and then you put CloudFlare on it.
You're not gonna see that much improvement we can see 2.2 and 1.1 down to 1.7 and one that's pretty good. And in web page optimization speak, making that so much faster just by having CloudFlare time the first bite slowed down a little bit is kind of expected from CloudFlare for whatever reason or another.
And typically that kind of filters out levels as everything gets through through the system. In this case, I actually turned on the API service. And you see the repeat views actually got a little bit faster, this is a little bit slower right here.
Actually, see this guy a little bit slower, right, but the repeat view got faster. So that just telling me that the cashes needs to be populated. A whole lot better than this is from LA, is using a desktop Chrome. Where as we go down here, you see, this is from Dallas, it's on the desktop. And the easiest speeds are significantly faster is as popular anymore and more. And you can see the cumulative list.
So my client is clearly faster. But supposedly, it's worse according to core web vitals, which just is another indication of how junky that tool is, my site is fast, I should be green. And this is, is populating through. And then this is the same location, I actually did it on mobile, this time, he still plenty fast, still going. Same locations, different devices, right. And I'm still getting totally different core web files, test scores.
So another reason to ignore core web battles, don't chase it, especially when you're worried about these numbers, here's the speed. And then I tested in London, because I said that you should be able to do that. And you can see, as this is propagating even more, my site is getting faster as it's getting through the data centers.
And then this is in London on a phone. So I don't think you can read. I mean, obviously, you can get much faster, but at that point is he it's you're just chasing rabbits, your sights plenty fast. So my conclusions is I would use it, it's five bucks a month. It was easy to set up. And you're only turning on that one part of CloudFlare you're not playing for a pro account or anything like that is five bucks a month. And it worked like gangbusters.
And that didn't the time between this test. And the other test was very minimal. Let me see here. leaven 19 1121 you see is propagating through the data center. That fast though, and I'll go much more fat more faster, the more traffic you have in your website, because there's more data pools and it'll populate those data centers even faster than what it did for me. So this is definitely something that I think everyone should be turning on five bucks, $5 business expense, you spend more on coffee, or every month, and then you'll spend on that service. So I would go for and track.
Dori: That's pretty cool. But why were you getting an F and security?
Clint: There is a on that tool. There is a jQuery version, that pretty much everyone in WordPress is using that that tool says is a security risk. And yeah, it's you're better off going out and trying to hunt snipe. And you're gonna find every instance of that jQuery in a WordPress installation to get rid of it. So it's not necessary.
It's kind of like a Hey, this is a security feature we added but it's turned up entirely time. And so now you get and it's not a BC up there. It's either you're all pasture you're all filled with that security stuff. So you're always gonna get it.
Dori: Cool. Okay, I don't think there's any questions on that I have something to share. I'm going to change presenter over to me it's not a test it is more of an observation. And what screen do I want to share? Main screen around trust flow. We've been looking at trust flow the last I don't know what it was months ago. But uh, with the network I started with this client about I guess, I said three weeks ago, but it was probably four weeks ago.
And we just started I put a text stream in the set it and forget it. option in SEOnitro's PNS and it's you know, totally Well, trustful of 32, which I was really impressed with, actually. And these are, where it's coming from. So eight domains had a trust flow between 21 and 40. 18 had a trust flow between one in 20.
More than, usually, so these were the root metrics of the site, and the URL metrics. If you do root, like a domain, sometimes it's lower, sometimes it's higher than the URL. So, if the even though it's the route, and you put it on URL, and majestic, you get either a higher score, or whatever, and the zeros were there, or I should, I didn't want to pull it up the pages, because that would show my client and stuff like that. But they were. I don't want to say assets, but inner pages, things like that.
But any case, the what I'm trying to get at is when we accumulate this, it was a 418. Now I know that accumulation with trust flow is not accurate. It's just isn't. But what they won't tell us how they added up, like how, how much more powerful is a trust flow 39, then a trust flow 21.
We had been doing some tests on trying to figure that out, like how many trust flow 10s would would it take to be data? fresca for 40 and we were getting to the point, but then the trust flow of forty the last, the main link it had, and so that test kind of fell apart. But in any case, I thought that was really cool that it just boosted it up that quickly.
And then even for the root domain, this is when we started, and we did not shoot any links to the root domain. They got to a 24 just by interlinking. So it that trust flow all these sites. And it wasn't all it wasn't a lot of sites, I mean, it just started had leaked over so this 32 had leaks through the site up to the root to increase the root domain as well. So interlinking, I've been doing a lot of polls and looking at that a lot more.
I may do a presentation on it at SEO Rockstars. We'll see if I can pull up what I had. But I thought that was interesting, and not a test. But observation that I wanted to share was that I think we're done and a couple people dropped off. So they're not going to be able to they're not going to be able to know that. I think they saw Oh, last test. I got it. I'm out. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't see any more questions. Oh, wait. A quick question. When is Clint's on page course coming out?
Clint: Good question. I am kind of prioritize. So the way I do businesses, clients come first in SIA and then my stuff. So which kind of pushes that unpaid stuff back and back and back and back. So I'm doing the over the shoulder series still, same time. And that's part of the homepage for so you guys get that?
I think there's a video or two that has to be uploaded, in the dropbox that Kelly's gonna get around to you for that. And then after I get that all nailed down, then I'll actually do the unpaid stuff. And then we'll start dropping into SIA and that'll be build it.
Dori: So with that, I think we're done. We'll conclude October's webinar. Unless there's anything else you'd like to say, Clint.
Clint: Seo Rockstars.
Dori: That's right. And I think three weeks. Yeah, probably about three weeks from now.
Clint: Yeah, about three weeks. You have a great sponsor now. Yes. That global stuff.
Dori: They sell domains. Pretty cool. And they make websites to work on them when they sell sometimes.
Clint: The heavier the affiliates things they make they sell affiliate sites. If you want to get some affiliate stuff in your own time to build a site, check out all these cool. Seo rockstars sent to you.
Dori: Yeah, you'll get a discount if you do.
Clint: So, that's it.
Dori: Okay, everyone. Thanks for joining us. It's always fun, always enlightening, and thanks Clint for those tests, and James, you rocked it. So that's it. I'm gonna close out now. Bye, y'all.