For this month's webinar, Clint and Dori goes through the following tests and make recommendations on how the results apply for you as a business owner or as a SEO agency.
Test 571: If I Analyze Query Results For A Given Phrase, Can I Extract Something Meaningful Using The NLP API And Python?
Test 572: Do Blogger Blogs Provide a Ranking Boost?
Test 573: Will A Bitly Shortener Pass Juice?
Test 574: Is A New Google Site A Good Backlink?
Test 575: Will A PBN Homepage Link Outrank An Inner Page And An Orphan Page?
Test 576: Does an Excerpt Post Syndication To Blogger Help Rankings?
Test 577: Will Using The Words 'Promoted Post' Negatively Affect Rank?
Test 578: Does A Full Post Syndication To Blogger Help Rankings?
Test 579: Do Nofollow Pages Pass Juice?
Test 580: Does Blogger Provide A Ranking Boost When Used As A T1?
Test 581: IFTTT To Twitter, WordPress, and Tumblr
Clint discussed the results of his blogger tests, this is definitely a must-watch as this is a ranking technique that you could be doing which can be causing detriment to your page.
February 2021 Dossier
Transcription below:
Hey everyone, Dori Friend here with Clint Butler for our SIA February. Already, it's the end of the month. It's a presentation. I know, that went fast. I mean, February just went bang. Over. You know, months go by slow when you're old, any money goes by fast.
It's seriously, especially in the summertime for me, they were just go so slow, I suppose when I was a kid. So weird. So in everybody, we have the February dossier in the handout section, so you can go ahead and download that. So you can follow along with Clint in case you can't see his screen or it's blurry or whatever. That's always a good thing to do. I've just changed the presenter. So quit, you have the screen. And there we go. See everything good. There you go.
So how are you doing Dori?
I'm doing really awesome. We had baby goats the other day, which is always fun. And SEONitro is doing well. So that's always awesome. And what else? It's sunny, I don't know.
Well, I'm doing a lot of garden outside building my raised garden beds. And we tell you all these stories, kind of like, fills gaps, right? So you were clicking around and stuff, but also just kind of let you know, get out from behind the damn computers every once in a while and use something else. And it'll make you better when you're focusing on your business or your SEO or whatever.
So and now that we filled the whitespace, let's get on these tests. Test 5721. If I analyze query results for a given phrase, can I extract something meaningful using the NLP API and Python. And this is from James Goldsmith, I will give you a nerd alert. Right now, James has gone pretty deep into this and kind of, you know, chase the rabbit hole, as it were, in regards to NLP and the application of entities in your content. He does reference Bert, which if you're not aware, it's a machine learning.
That's, as far as I can tell. And as tech advice could tell, it's designed to help Google answer search queries more than it is designed to analyze your content. And then James references Smith, which is another machine learning application. At Google has a patent for however, Danny Sullivan from Google has indicated that they're not using it in the search algorithm at all. Maybe it's a baby thing, maybe they've just kind of, you know, getting the whole bunch of patents so they can lock in technologies, etc. which totally makes sense.
What James did is actually, he's looking at the application and the process of natural language processing in regards to search results, and how Google is taking those and turning them into, for a lack of a better explanation is high quality, user intent focused results based off of the websites that they have in their index and their card catalog. And then he's looking for patterns to see, you know, kind of like what we're doing with the phrase or surfer or even Cora, looking at patterns and trying to discern which of those entities in this case is we're talking entities would be the most applicable for that search topic.
Is that something that you can look at on a per page or per result basis? Determine and then say, these are the ones that should rank the highest, or these are the one that should be used the most often. And I'm not going to go too deep into this because like I said, this is more I won't say this is test more than it is is here's the process. And if you understand the process, then you kind of understand why you're getting the results you get in page optimizer pro surfer phrase market views whatever tool you happen to be using, they're pretty much all based off of the Google NLP API.
With exception that I know as a fact, the clear scope, which is probably the first one of these content editors that come out, is actually using the NLP API and IBM Watson combined, doing their own math and determining their own feelings. So James went the extra mile and actually got someone to clean up a Python code that he found. Here's the link in here. For the open source Python code, here's some more data information, you can see that yourselves and look it up.
He got Ivan, I'm not even going to pronounce his or even try to pronounce his last name suck. Because I'm going to get to rewrite this pythons code. If you're into Python, if you want to play with it, you want to do this kind of thing yourself. James provided the code for you. So I can just copy paste that. For normal human beings, just kind of scroll down here to the bottom. And you can look at the CSV results and see the returns etc. and then make a little bit of judgments for yourself.
If you're a Cora user, this kind of looks similar because Cora is doing a little bit of the same thing with text razor, and Tex razor is connected to the Google NLP API.
So then you see, you can see the patterns in here and the salience The higher the number, the more important, right, and it goes up. And you can kind of look at the top 10. And pick out the ones that are of high salience, they can pull in twos, point fours, and the know that you should probably have those in your content. That's the implication here is that you should have those in your content.
Then these add ons provided some great examples, you can kind of just look at that, in the math sense, and make your own determinations. And really, the determinations are what those tools are trying to do there. They've gone through, they've been taught that. Let's just say for example, that's the low bar, anything below that we're not going to show anything above that we're going to show and then the more you have it, the more it's highlighted in your tool to be considered relevant and that you should have it. There are some questions in there.
One that I've asked and James asked here is, at what point is the low bar? Like who says, what the low bar is? And how do you determine that and I think that's a really good question. That needs to be asked probably not as a test, but more as just so we can all know. And then we can learn to trust our tools, a whole lot better. As I said, this is you can read the rest of James's analysis and application here. But really at the end of the day, this analysis of the information and how that works, brings up some great tests for us. And we'd like to hear some feedback from you guys is one, the 10 testing with entities is going to be harder than everyone makes out to be.
I mean, on this single variable thing, you're obviously we're working with fake keywords, if we will work for with real keywords, we can't be in single variable anymore, we have to be in multivariable because in order to rank at all for those, those keywords either have to be really stupid, low competition, or we have to build backlinks to test pages to rank all the test pages equally with equal backlinks, etc. and then apply the entities.
Or we can do some single example sets like finding 10 really easy keywords, optimizing the contents the normal way on nine of them and then optimizing with entities and see which one goes a little bit better. That kind of works more in local than it was in a national kind of keyword set. So you know, like Phoenix SEO, Yuma Tucson Scottsdale, I can kind of get away with doing that kind of stuff in those because there's similar competition, similar content, etc. And I can see the differences. Is it scientific? No, but it's really good testing. It's really good information.
I want to see about reaching out to you guys as members and we need keywords we need easy to rank, real keywords where we can test this entity stuff and take it to its full drive. And the other one that I think is really important for si is the testing in different languages. We have members from Greece, France, England, Spanish speaking languages, countries, Portugal's Portuguese speaking countries. And so it would be no good to know if we can leverage this in those other languages as well, as best as possible.
And then the other question is, how much is NLP stuff? is Google actually using? And how deep down that rabbit hole can we get? Do we have any questions on this one? I don't see any. No questions. Good.
Okay, next, I hinted on this in the Skype. And I don't know how to say like a user's warning here. I am not bashing products. I know there's a lot of products that are focused around these blogger blogs, I am not attacking them. I simply tested it to see if these are working. I came in with the assumption that all of these blogger blogs work, Google's not going to penalize themselves, Google's not going to do anything to their own products to hurt them. And these make good backlinks.
You can figure out the cats out of the bag blogger, I would recommend you guys stay away from them. And through the course of this dossier, you're gonna see, you're gonna see why. So the first one is, do the blogs actually provide a ranking boost at all? In general, there's no, you know, just by themselves, can I put a link on the blog or blog and expect my site to get some kind of ranking boost, some it did go from five to three, that's I'm totally happy with that, because it's part of typically these are part of my brand networks, right? So you build a brand you want to take over for the brand name interlink all these things.
Then your new ranking helps establish entities. That's all old school thinking. It's all old school stuff that used to work great. So I built it out and built the test out. And all these tests were set the same way 10 domains, one page, each domain. All the pages contain 2000 words with a keyword density of 10%. Students sharing good consistent indexing.
The blog site was created much the same pattern 2000 words on the page with 10% density, I created all of these blogspot tests on the same day. So I didn't have to worry about messing that up like age of the blogspot and all that stuff kind of interfering, and all that stuff. I just eliminated it by doing all these tests at once. And then they were all submitted URLs for the test and the blogspot were all submitted to an indexer.
The test URLs were all submitted to Google Indexing API SP links and omega and then obviously the blogspot speedlings to me. And the result is the test page. The test page dropped and then drop kind of dropped, it dropped like this is five to eight is like having a bad day. Right. So that's it's it drops significantly. However, liquid the gut the blogger did, as this the link the patient link to it dropped the blogger and the homepage of the blogger both to over one and T positions.
So just having the link not doing anything slick, just putting a link in the piece of content on a blogspot blog actually dropped a rink, I expected it to drop, as always. And then three weeks later, I kind of expected a raise. And as you can see, just by the timeline there, it's right here. None of that happened. It dropped in and it stayed down.
I anticipate that's gonna stay now, wherever the anchor text in here, just in case you guys don't know because it is a tier one. It is exact match. All my tier ones as a matter of course, because they're all high value. They're all PB ends are all guest posts are all really really good sites. In theory, I typically do brand or exact match in the purpose of these tests. That's all, exactly!
Right now just having the link, doing nothing cute with it, just having the link is a bad thing. So I'll take these out of I won't necessarily take them out of my brand networks, but I certainly won't link to the money sites from them. And I will link to my other websites from just based off with this test right here. Just kind of scary, because there's a lot of programs that are transitioning and using these blogs bots, actually, quite widely. So we'll see how that works out for those.
Yeah. I even have a lot of customers using blogspot and wordpress.org as tier ones. So I wonder if WordPress and some of the others are doing the same thing?
Yeah, I get it. I get a test and there's no trickiness in the code. There's no it's they're all 200 backlinks. So Google's not doing any of that. I think they literally, they just devalued their site, from a linking perspective. And we'll see some more of that. And I and I mix them all up too. So I need some time to digest those and ask questions.
All right, test. 573. Well, Bitly shortener past juice, it's a 301. If you guys are ever used to using Bitly. Sometimes they changed it to three twos, like just randomly, they'll change the three T's and go back to three oh ones, etc. Right now, during the course of the test. This is a Bitly shortener that is set up as a 301. If you've never done the process before, you just go to Bitly. drop this in there and you can create this URL. I believe, if you have a paid account, you can make these keyword related. I haven't used Bitly in quite some time, though.
And then here's the tool. It's a redirect tool, just google redirect checker and you can see the same thing. Or link research tools has a tool, Link redirect trace is what it's called. And you can see this process and verify What's a 301 versus three up to excetera. In any build some links to the shortener using the same network, so we know they work right, so 20 pbn, links to the shortener to the test page. His target page was down there on the bottom and position was at say, seven, it will say seven.
That'll feel like counting up to position three, up to position two, and then up to position one. So there are passing through the three Oh, ones are passing through. This is timely, because there's a lot of people saying that three Oh, ones are failing. They're creating negativity and stuff. And there was no, some of those cases it was expired domains that were three oh ones and not necessarily 301 link shorteners.
I would think that thrill and link shorteners, if they were going to do anything about thrill ones, in general, it would be from link shorteners versus buying expired domains and recapturing backlinks. But I'm not sure but in this case, the Bitly shortener seems to be doing a good job. And you can kind of use that as a tier one. I've tested others. They work sometimes they work. They don't work at the time.
This is probably a good example of a test that we need to do on multiple domains. And across multiple tests and see what happens but games did a good job on that. Alrighty. See the questions Good. All right, as a new Google site, a good backlink. Here's another one Google classic sites are, as you may not know, you know, you used to be able to build those up until a couple months ago. And then they shut down the API. You can't build any new ones anymore. And they're forcing rollovers into the new Google the new version of Google Sites.
Over time, some of those old sites will stay the rules are kind of convoluted when they will stay when they won't. But for the most part, if you're doing a Google Sites, now you're stuck with the new version of them. So I want to test it out and see if they make as good of a link as the old Google Sites platform because yo Google Sites, they're awesome.
Let's see what the new ones are. Everyone says they're all the same. They're great and wonderful. Test it out and find out so test conducted using 10 domains, one page, each domain 2000 words with a 10% keyword density Google Indexing API and omega was the indexing service for those. And then I created a Google site with a target optimized for the target keyword, which then linked to the test page.
The Google site was also optimized for the test keyword 2000 words and 10% keyword density. So teach us a couple of things. So one is relevancy is king, relevancy and quality. Obviously, have a Google site is relevant. So it should be necessarily inferred. It's high quality. And then the link was placed in the first sentence of the article. With the first instance of the test keyword inside of the article, I tested that link coming out of Google, the new Google Sites, it's actually a 307 redirect that redirects to another URL that meta refreshes to one.
Essentially, what you got is two redirects, Mehta redirects, I know for a fact past juice 307, I'm not too sure about. And it's, I think, that that's why I kind of got this result. So the link was built on the 19th. I want to say, I put it up here. Yep, it was built on the 19th.
And there we go. So this is the day the link was built. And I think pretty sure it's the 19th. And then a you see I got a raise in rankings, and it was temporary. It went up to number two, and then down to number three to three, and then four again, and I expected if we leave it here, we'll drop right back down to six where it was. But you do notice that the Google Site actually jumped up instantly and took over the number one slot.
Is there ranking juice being passed? I it's obvious that it is, it was interesting to me that it was temporary. And so we have to play with this a little bit longer. I'm just gonna let this set this test cook a little bit more just leaving it alone and see what happens. And see if that does indeed drop to six, or eventually, like a month from now that it jumps up to the number one position since it is the only page ranking for that keyword that has any backlinks at all, including the Google site. So that's pretty interesting.
Another lesson learned out of here is like the bloggers, Google loves itself. So if you are doing some keyword fishing, or waiting for your other stuff, and you want to just see if there's some keywords out there that you could probably rank for a really easy, I'd say, Get yourself a Google site and just have one.
Just one, you don't even need to make a brand new and just make one and put new pages on it for your keyword fishing. And if you're ranked number one for it with a Google site is probably safe to say you're going to be able to jump up with your own site and take over for that eventually. So this is really interesting. So yeah, they do pass juice, it is temporary. And we might need to do some more stuff to get those a stick. That's a lesson learned out of that.
Okay. No questions. You guys are all quiet today. I know we're just in awe. Yeah. These have been really good tests.
I'm reading my notes here real quick to make sure I didn't skip anything on you guys. Yep, see the little mini network, it's long tails. And I'm gonna, I'm gonna run this test, again, separate domain, make sure I get the same things. But what I'm going to do is build the Google page out. I'm going to leave it alone for 45 days, I'm going to just have the page there.
And then I'm going to put the link in just like you would on a niche edit and see what it does to the test page. And then I'll run another test where I set it up. And I'll probably just use this keyword again, and set it up as a tier one and see what happens with that, but we'll see how I guess.
We're pretty excited to be able to use that as a tier one I think. Alright, we'll a PBM homepage link ranking page and an orphan page. This is pretty timely.
So Dori and I are laughing and if you're on our mailing list, you know. And if you watch DSA SEORockstars you can. There's another giggle right there too. But this is pretty timely. And I thought, oh my god, I should warn Dori. And I was like, man, just surprise her.
Well, we've tested them before. There's no way a home an orphan page is going to be a homepage, Link No way. on anything.
Yeah, I think we are getting there. I think we're okay. So if you don't have an orphan page, no links from the website anywhere else all by itself. Typically, as Matthew Woodward pointed out, Dori has pointing out several times, you buy a guest blog.
And more importantly, this happens a lot more when you actually buy them versus you get a guest posting author opportunity on on a legit site. But when you buy them, nine times out of 10, probably 9.5 times out of 10 is going to be an orphan page, no other page on that website will link to that, and then it'll just sit there. And that's it.
So you got your thing on there, they're not gonna promote it, they're not gonna share it with our audience, they're just gonna be there. And they're gonna take your 125 bucks or whatever. And then the inner page, the link, in the course of this is, there's another link coming from the page to this. And then obviously, the homepage.
Alright, so here we go. Here's the numbers. page has been selected, you can see here. And then as everything starts bouncing around in your page, home page, or friend, inner page homepage, orphan. Inner page, Home Page orphan. think there's one more page orphan? I think this one should be Yep.
Wait a second. Is this on the same site? And is there a link from the homepage to the inner page as there would be from a recent blog post?
Yeah, the inner page link. So let's look at the metric. So there's a homepage and 24 and 35, inner page 27 and 35. To me, just in case, you wonder, I would consider this a better link, because the ratios a little bit closer. And then the orphan page 22 to 31.
Well, if the orphan page should not have any metrics, since there would be no links, incoming links to it. See, if you look at the External links, they're both zero. But majestic doesn't report on interlinking. So both of those are getting links from inner pages to have. Or it's making that number based off of the implied metrics from the domain.
Now, that would be the root domain, and they take the average. So they'll take the homepage, the in all the URLs and averaged them together. And that's how you get a root domain metric. Now, these metrics should be URL metrics...should be zero, but they're not.
Well, they're, they don't report internal links so that an internal page can have any type of, you know, could be linked from all the internal pages, but majestics not going to show the links but they are reporting the score. That's why you see a 35 and with zero links going into it.
So you're saying that there's links here?
Yep. He says orphan. No interlinks but it wouldn't have a trust flow unless it was a root. Yeah, it wouldn't have any trust flow. If it was a real orphan page because they don't report interlink Which is, I think, a travesty, but they don't. So you'd have to scrape those sites and see what kind of links...
So your argument is that because the metric on that orphan page says that there's numbers on it, you're saying that there's inner linking done to it. And then the test is saying, and this is the same domain ...
Inner page says, yes, there's inner links, but he says the orphan page doesn't have any inner links. But how is it having almost the same metrics as the inner page. And see the homepage in the root domain, with PBNs, with 404 to 301 redirecting all that juice to the homepage, the homepage is getting all the juice on a PBN.
Why didn't that homepage move at all? The homepage PBN link was the most surprising and me trying to tell the story....
James, is this one of my PBNs? No. So I don't know. It's one of his. So is this a blog? or HTML? Expired. Okay, I got that. What did you build on it? It was a wayback rebuild. Did you build the orphaned page? And It is a blog. Did you build the orphan page? Or was... how did you know? or why did you think it was an orphan page? Yes, he built the orphan page. But since it is a blog, and it's probably a post, it's getting some juice from the way WordPress links around. Because the post is probably being linked to from the homepage. When you have your recent posts.
In the archives, perhaps or if the homepage is set up as an archive perhaps. And if those matters, that page should have beat the homepage. It should be up there right with the interlinking.
So it says no archives, but it's possible that it has recent posts on it. So those are two different widgets that you can have up: the archives and then recent posts. On a WordPress blog, he says only main menu.Hmmm.
No recent posts. Strange, right? Yeah. Yes, it is strange. Well, it depends on where all their linkings coming from, I mean, going to on that expired domain. There could be a lot of links going into that inner page, more so than the homepage. So that would certainly qualify it to why the inner page ranked. But what's strange is that the orphan page is showing such a high trust flow. And it has, yeah, but the inner page has links coming into it from other inner pages.
He says he thinks that there's a negative signal on the homepage. Well, then, you know, we can ask Bill Hartzer or send this question into majestic but it shouldn't. If it was just a page never linked to it shouldn't be showing and this is a URL and not the path is a path will show you the highest trust flow in that path.
If you have domain slash category slash orphan page, if the category is has a high trust flow, then that page will have a high trust flow if you search for it under path slash URL. Okay, he'll send me the URL. He doesn't want to disclose it. I don't blame you for not disclosing your PBNs. But certainly, something is a mess. And I mean, obviously, the orphan page should be at the bottom. But why is it showing trust flow?
I'll spider it. And then I'll be able to tell ya.
Majestic users unite. So for the purpose of this test now, I guess the next question would be if the 404s of all the backlinks that were the backlinks that go to four or four pages from the rebuild, are all pointing to the homepage.
And as a general rule, the homepage typically has more backlinks than internal pages just because the way human beings backlink things right. So why would the inner page be the homepage? The orphan pages right where we expected it to be? Why is the homepage it didn't have any effect whatsoever? Are you gonna look for the movement?
Since it's an expired domain, I would imagine that there are more links going into that inner page. Plus, maybe you know, all the link juice coming from inside the site as well.
Are there any backlinks to the inner page? Is there any internal backlinks to the inner page?
He said he already said yes.
He said there's external backlinks going into it?
No. He said internal.
Yeah. So there's no external backlinks. So the homepage has all the external backlinks, I'm assuming. Is that correct?
That's what it looks like. Yeah.
So then that goes right back to.. if the homepage has all the external backlinks. Why didn't it provide more power? Because ultimately, all the authority, if you're into the domain authority thing, would be at the homepage? Why did the inner page to get more?
Is it only being linked to from the homepage? Or is it being linked to from other internal pages as well?
You just said totally not what I have elected, I believe so. You believe it has other links going into it from other pages? No, just through the menu.
Navigational links are Uber strong. But this is interesting. If I crawled the site and looked around and poked around, I might be able to figure out figure it out what's really going on. Because it does seem suspicious. And I don't know, maybe we found something that we need to investigate a little bit further.
All those do PBNs. Let's run this test again.
Yeah. And I can crawl it and I can look at the site.
She's gonna look for an excuse.
No, I actually want to know the truth, you know about anything more than anything else. So it's found that if we found that linking to internal pages from the navigational menu, we give it give sites a better boost, then you know, I'm going to be doing that. homepage links
Jason pointed out that he's got this 301 redirect. I've seen those on expired builds, where that's all 404 redirects to the homepage. To me, that sounds like something that Google could set and find easily. I always had an issue with doing it. So I always manually redirected.
But you know, because all the people who were doing domains and teaching PBNs, were talking about using that tool, I tested it out. And around that time, that's when Google launched the old, soft 404 messages. And so that to me was an indicator that Google's like, Hey, we're onto you clown. So stop redirecting all your links to your homepage. Stop being lazy. Do this right. Because again, 404s are totally acceptable.
They're expected in website land. And if you have them, and you delete a page and you 404 and it was in the index, and Google eventually will drop it out of the index for you. It's not necessarily Oh, your site's bad quality. It's just, hey, you deleted the page. So 404 or 410 is totally acceptable. So could this be used as a bad signal?
In my opinion, I think what you need to do is put the PBN into Search Console. And if you see a lot of 404 errors, then they're probably on to you, clown. Take those off and redirect them individually to the internal pages that you want to use. For further use, versus running one of these universal 404 redirects type.
Yeah, or we do a test using the plugin and without the plugin. Maybe on 10 different sites. How can we do that? I have to think about it.
Let's see. Okay, back to blogger. Any more questions on that?
I'm surprised we're not getting any questions on that one or any questions?
Okay. All right. So the next one does excerpt post syndication to blogger help rankings? If you have been or ever used IFTTT rings to build syndication networks to your websites, one of the main platforms was obviously blogger. So you get blogger wordpress.com. And I think Tumblr was kind of the number one at the time, when those are big deal blogger and WordPress kind of turned into the de facto default, so most people use one or the other.
The idea is you have an excerpt of your post inside of your RSS feed with a link. And every time IFTTT found the new post in your RSS feed, it will post that excerpt to the blogger blog. And depending on how you did you had set up like if your theme allowed you to put unique excerpts in, that was one way or if it just took a sample of your website or your page typically the first paragraph X amount of words just depending.
They get a repost that excerpt with a Read More link or find more information whatever you change it to Yoast, for example, you can change the attribution, anchor text to whatever you want. Or you can use your own etc. So I think users were asking for this test actually, quite some time ago. So you can kind of slow me to knock this one out. But still timely, I think, especially with people migrating over to blogger with Google, the Google's API of the Google classic API shutting down and new Google Sites API there.
I created this test 10 domains 10 pages, 2000 words at a 10% key density. And then I created the blogspot page and built it like an excerpt so not an insert different content but the first paragraph of the content with a link to the target page kind of a read more anchor text it was actually a little bit longer than read more but it's the same content read more to read more information find out here something along those lines is what I had nothing exact match. No, you're Was there any of that madness.
Then I indexed using the three services. So what I got is the target page didn't drop, it actually disappeared, Google deindexed it for quite some time, as you can see here, brought it back deindexed it brought it back and then kind of let it hang around a little bit here towards the end of the test. And you can see the homepage and the actual page itself bounced in and out for relevancy until ultimately, the blogspot took the number one position, and then the test page is down here at number six.
I believe that's pretty much where it's started out. Yeah. So that's where it started out. And so excerpts are bad. Okay. Especially if the expert is going to be the first 100 if like, if you're not going to do unique excerpts, and those unique excerpts are not put into your RSS feed. Don't do this, because you'll see what happens you can get your page indexed, or your blogspot is going to take over the number one position.
This one is James, we're doing bouncing back and forth in testing. So his one is will using the words promoted postnatally affect rank? I'm not sure well, yeah, he's got Matthew Woodward talked about these promoted posts, guest posts. And to me, it seemed like an obvious filter, right? And then take to bite us. And what's the guy's name? He runs Search Engine Land. I forget his name right now.
To his argument, talking about page not found using the words page not found on your page could actually open your page. And talking about that to the extent that you can do it, and can it be a filter. And there's plenty of times where John Mueller said, we can find guest posts, we devalue guest posts. It made sense to me, if you think about it, promoted posts. Teach the algorithm and if it says, promoted posts, then we're going to demote it.
So James went and tested it out, but promoted posts right there, big bold letters, promoted posts. And then the other pages, his controls, all said my post. And here's where it started out, at, down, dropped, more drop to the bottom and stayed at the bottom. So if you have guest posts, or people are paying you to do posts, and you actually want them to rank, I would recommend not putting promoted posts on the pages. And if you have them on there now and you're linking to your other stuff, look at that.
Remove the internal links from your promoted posts to your non promoted posts and see if your non promoted posts actually increase in ranking and see if this I don't want to call it a penalty, but it sure is a demotion is not applied to the rest of your pages on your website. Pretty interesting. That was a good test, James, I can see some more variations: commonly searched, contributed by, guest post. We'll get together. James will make a whole list. Yeah, there you go. Promoted post, write for us. I got a whole bunch of them for scraping. And we'll just knock out a whole bunch of tests and see what they do.
All right. Blogger does a full post syndication the blogger help. So this is if your RSS feed contains your entire piece of content. I don't know a whole lot of people that are doing this. Now there are some blogs where the RSS feed isn't the entire thing. But I can guarantee you that the people that you see complaining about Oh, my content was stolen. A lot of the times you can actually go look at their RSS feed and other contents right there.
That's how their content is quote unquote stolen as they're publishing it for the world to reuse the RSS feed. Great, the people who take that content are making backlinks that so much of they're just taking it. In this case, we're doing it on purpose. So we have a full feed and we're gonna post the exact duplicate copy of the original because that's what's in the full feed onto a blogspot page.
Tessa same 10 domains 10 pages, 2000 words 10% density and then the blogspot. The link was placed in the first 100 words of the article. And that's just to kind of simulate it, you can do this a couple of ways. But if you're applying another essay test, we're having the link in the first 100 words back to this itself was proven to be rankings boost. And that's kind of a really early test. If you're using that, and you do that in a full copy, your RSS feed, so that link is naturally going to be there.
Doing something unnatural here, right? So, uh, and what happened was the original content was indexed before the copy, the blogger version was put up. And then it was deindexed. Ironically, the day after the blogspot was indexed. So they both got deindexed. And then the blogspot came back and the test page disappeared. And you can see the blogspot page didn't necessarily get the number one treatment this time.
But it certainly got the this is the content. And this is the original version, the content credit versus the test page. Before you ask no The canonicals were not put on the test page URLs. Could that have made a difference that interesting to read you this test to see if that makes a difference with this results. But considering the other pages and the extra where the indexing happened? I would suspect that I'm probably going to see the same result and the canonicals but we'll check that out.
So in short, right now that's case number What for? I think I meant door for blogspot so far. One, why did you shouldn't be using blogspot?
Yeah, I think so.
Okay, so this one the title is wrong. I missed Marie and we couldn't get it fixed in time. So it should say, Do nofollow pages past the juice? So nofollow backlinks. The do follow versus nofollow argument has gone on forever. And it still continues to this day, even though Google has admitted that nofollow has been used as a hint. And still to this day, people tell you, oh, just know follow the links and it won't matter. They don't they're not used for your backlink anyway.
Well, I have always contended that those people full of crap. And so James, he wanted to test it out. What he really wanted to do was see why not? No index, but you know, we fat finger settings sometimes. So he tested something else, and it's cool. So this is the page where the nofollow buffer link was passed that no index nofollow. And 20 pbn links were sent to the nofollow buffer page, and then that was sent to the test page.
As you can see, since the search engines follow the links to this page, she used dories network, because the network is awesome. And as a starting point, you see moved up, or the two down the three, and then that's kind of where it's at. So, Gary, where did it start? What? Five, six, and ultimately a three, so a three position jump from 20 backlinks through a nofollow link.
Again, the images say no index, nofollow. So what can we ascertain from that? What I think we can go ahead and clearly say that nofollow is passing juice. If the links were sent, if we could have somehow had a separate test running where the link was do follow. And the links were sent to the pbn to the do follow buffer page and compare those that have been cool.
At the end of the day, we know that nofollow is passing link juice, you can rank with a nofollow buffer, obviously, where the do follow person in my guess if there's a do follow that would be number one position on 20 links, you're probably going to need 30 to 40 links to get up there if you're doing it through a nofollow versus somebody who's doing it through do follow.
I think we've I don't know I don't know how many times We got to prove that nofollow links past use Google's head nofollow links past us. And he talked about it and talked about what they're doing with the no index and turning them indexing the nofollow, etc, etc.
These things are, they're used as hints. Google said their using hints. And we've proven it very being used as ranking marker, where you have to make more nofollow links than default links, certainly well, but at the end of the day, and they still past use. So use them though them. And James is gonna redo this, again, he is going to redo the test with no index.
I believe it's no index follow is got one and then no index No, follow the See if you can totally shut down the movement of these, which would be really good because that'll kind of lead us back into the test that SIA did. I want to say a little over a year ago where PBNs that got new indexed were still ranking pages. So we'll see if that still exists. Because there's been quite a few updates process since that testing has been done.
All right. And let's go. Does blogger blog provide a ranking boost when used as a tier one. So to to bring up your memory in case you're lost. I'm testing blogger blogs, not web 2.0. In general. So if I was doing web 2.0, in general, I would have said web 2.0 is in general, and then gave you a list. I'm testing blogger blogs.
So far, every backlink I direct link, excerpt, a full syndication has led to a rankings drop to the target page, everyone. So the last use that people are using blogger blogs is as a tier one, the tier linking system, tier one is your good ones. And then you use tier two, three and four, whatever you want. I know some people who go to tier 10. Don't ask me why. But they go to your 10 makes no sense to me, but they did.
And so I want to see if the blogger blog is actually useful. As a tier one. Can I use that to send less than I want to say junk, but like your tools? And if you know how to use tools, right? And all that stuff? Can you send that stuff too. So 10 pages 2000 words, each page 10,000 keyword density blogspot test page 2000 words with keyword density exact match anchor text sent to the test page, and then use those services and indexing my link building method, I am ranking some stupid art keywords using the exact same link building method that I did here. But I'm using a different tier one.
Now I'm not going to teach it to you, not ever because it makes me a lot of money away. Now you're not getting it. But just know that you can do that with some tiered link building. And it ranks well and I expected this to work scrolling through, you can obviously see that it absolutely did not. The tiered link building actually dropped the ranking of the page significantly.
Again, I'm using the same method using dories pB ends, my dear ones, and a bunch of other that works in sites. And I always get a ranking boost. Not like 1015 position ranking boost like not in the top 100 to the top 13 ranking boost. That's how good my tiered system is. For right now. So that's why I'm not teaching it because I don't want people to go out and earn it. Right. But understanding the power of that ranking boost look with that blogger blog as a tier one
Scary, right? Yeah.
I did the there's the blogger. That's what happened to it. So Google said, Oh, you want to send links to my tier one. So your blogger blog is a tier one. Well, we'll rank it for you. Oh, where's the target? Yeah, we'll knock that into the dirt. And that's exactly what they did. And kill that target page.
Josh Bachynski and I'll go ahead and give credit where credit's due. He said a long time ago don't use blogspot. It's bad for your website, They'll use it as bad. Disavow and whatever. And me at the time being a nerd, that's crap. You know, you can do that you can use blogspot, because we were all using blindspots.
Well, guess what? Josh Bachynski was right. You should not be using blogspot. I've given you four or five tests now, showing clearly that blogspot is not a good link building thing. And I think Google's pretty much got that site on lock if you create a blogspot, and you link to whatever you're linking to, is going to get paid a price because, frankly, they're easy to make with tools. And Google knows that.
They like the platform and making revenue off it with Google display ads network. So why in the world, would they penalize it? So instead of penalizing blogspot, they just said, Alright, you link to it, or the blogspot you're gonna get this. There are some tests that I think kind of need to be done here. One is, if I build blog spots, and it reduces the links, what happens if my competition builds blog spots to me? Is that gonna hurt my, my, my website, and if it does, across the test that I'm going to do, probably going to give you a disavow file for the entire blogspot domain and just save yourself the drama.
That's it, we'll just kind of leave it until we really re-examine the test every once in a while and see what happens. Most of the link building tools that I know of right now I've removed blogspot, completely, but I know some other ones that are transitioning over to that. So still kind of buyer beware. Be Be cautious with what you're doing. Yeah, I think, you know, if right now, if you're using blogspot, and you have in there, just go put a disavow file blogspot.com.
And all its subdomains and everything, just be done with it. And see what happens. And I'm going to look at Can this be used negatively against you? And if so, it's kind of an unintended consequence for Google, right? They've essentially made a really good negative SEO platform. If I do my link building process, and I have my targets and a number nine, and I want to get up to number one, I need to build a blogspot link to each one of these pages and build some tier one. And I can knock them down.
Wow. I'm still really amazed.
So you know, maybe like where John Mueller and them say, Hey, we all we can find is web 2.0. And we disavow that this, is that this devalue them? Maybe this is what he meant? He did it. They did it with blogspot? And the implication could be, if I did with blogspot, can I do it with wordpress.com? So wordpress.com is the next set site that we're going to look at. See if they did it. I'm not so sure that they could do it as effectively as they did here.
So Martin had a question about using my PBNs in disavowing the blog spots from our website. If you're linking the PBNs to the blog spots? That's just from it? Yeah, yeah. And let's remove those links going out to blogspot.
The links going into as you can see, some of my links you can see in there, so Google, AWS and some of those, you can see the links going into there are not getting hurt. However, you actually even if you had good links, like those PBNs, and you're linking into a blogspot, you're still hurting your site more if I continue this, I bet you I could drop this thing right off the bat. But I just stopped link building. And I did a I did the same link building campaign, but just not as extensively because you know, I'm lazy. So if I kept going, I could probably drop this right off the map.
So why do that with pbn links? Why wasted credits. So in short, if you were linking to you Using dories network and linking to blogspot, stop. And if you have the reports and you know exactly which ones you didn't see you would send those into support and get the just delete those posts for you.
Yeah, or even don't have you know, we can we can find out which sites when which PB ends linked to the blogspot.com? Let us know. Yeah. That's a site wide audit through that. Yeah.
So here's what I asked. You guys all know this now, tell your friends, etc. That's totally fine. But please don't go out and you know, blasted on Facebook and everything. I did the Google Sites thing when I showed that, and then how the Google Drive networks were bad.
And everyone was like ticket personally, oh, he's attacking her business. He's destroying me. And they are kicking me out of masterminds and everything else, just because I told the truth. So save it for yourselves. And yeah, and definitely they'll talk about the negative SEO aspects of it. Because you guys be cleaning and playing that game for quite some time. Don't be like, Oh, I can prove this to wrong to you.
And then they'll be sending these out to your website just to be jerks. So be careful who you share this information with? Let's see, Martin. No, I meant that usually, you recommend using disavow on all money sites where PBNs are pointed to simply because the disavow communicates, though, actually, In my initial recommendation was if you're not in trouble, don't even bother with disavow. And that's for the 95% of people that just either don't want or don't have the time to go through their lists manually. And try to use a tool like link research tools, or cognitive just majestic, semrush or whatever, and let those toxic declarations fly.
What usually what happens is that you'll just do it, and then you'll lose your rankings. And then you'll wonder, oh, disavow doesn't work. That's like the number one argument i disavow links and all my rankings drop? Well, to be frank, no shit, that's what's gonna happen because you're not taking your time and doing it right, you're actually disavowing the links that are ranking for you. So if you know you're posting up PBNs, you know, you got to do a disavow file, then you definitely got to go through there your link profile before you submit to this file, make sure that you haven't hit any of those PBNs.
That's how you save, protect your PBNs, there is something to be said, for doing a disavow file and teaching the algorithm because eventually, essentially, is the algorithm looking at it that people that you are actually paying attention to your link profile. And Google has not outright said it. But they imply that if you have a disavow file in place, it indicates to them to the algorithm that you're actually taking care of your link profiles, so you're less likely to receive negative impacts from, you know, onesies and twosies, or a sudden burst of blog comments and that kind of stuff.
The algorithm was less sensitive to those things for your website, because you have a disavow file and you're like, look like Google, I'm taking care of my thing. So I've actually started the practice of once a quarter just creating a disavow file and adding, you know, just junk. And as I do, the web shows, and I my websites just collect junk, because people are a holes, and that's just kind of what they do. Right. So and I. And it helps because I just keep track of it and just do the disavow file and then essentially creating trust. So when I intentionally said junk to cover up, I PBNs that I'm getting.
Yeah, part of the application process to get into SEONitro is like you've never used the disavow. And you never will, you know, so that's a tough one. If you have sites from blogspot, I would say go ahead. I mean, I don't know. Are you saying to people to disavow from blogspot?
Right now I would if you can't delete them, if you can't, like if you bought a whole bunch or you created them with software and you don't have access to the accounts anymore, I would just disavow the entire domain. If you have access to all those just go into your account your blogspot account and delete all those sites. That's the fastest way. Yeah, it's hard for a few sites that I might have something to be said enough about your site, an accident is gonna happen, but I don't think if you know 10 or 15 I don't think that number is gonna get a trigger. I mean, like, it's gotta be 1000s.
Just be smart about it. In SEONitro or most good providers give you the list of the links you got, and you paid money for them. So hopefully, you're keeping those lists. I keep those lists and I bug Dori about those lists every day. You should be keeping those lists. And then when you actually go through the process of manually reviewing your link profile, you will know eventually the pattern of how your PBN content looks and the feel of it. It's really scary.
Like, if you don't even want to touch it, you don't want to deal with it. And you got a small one. Reach out to me. And manual profiles, depending on how much you get charged, and I'll build your disavow file for you.
Yeah, do that. And we typically, you know, as someone who's just started up with SEONitro. And I don't know them, we don't automatically show them the links, they have to request that. So anybody in here, of course, who's spending the time listening to us, obviously, your request will be granted. It just usually after a month or two. I'm like, okay, they're not looking to out this network.
Okay, let's see. Everhart using this for some clients we used in the past. Yep.
Yeah, just the blogspot itself won't jeopardize a network. She's just being really cautious that if you create the disavow files. Don't go in there and add a whole bunch of PBNs so I don't have to call you anymore.
You're not gonna hurt her networking by doing it. But if all of our users went in there and did it, then that would be an issue. But if one person doesn't have an accident, it's fine. But just please don't be lazy, especially when you're building a disavow file.
All right. So now that the gloom and doom is over with let's talk about something that does work better. This is IFTTT, to WordPress and Tumblr. And this gives me hope for WordPress and Tumblr when I duplicate the blogger tests, because what she's doing is he posted an article and then she has her staff post to Twitter about her article, obviously, you want to promote right so if you read it, they will come is not apply.
You have to promote your stuff. And she has a system in place where she can promote her stuff. And when she does that it automatically programs to WordPress and Tumblr with the keyword and a link into the social media page was in return goes to Twitter, which goes to the book, great way to promote great way to build traffic. If you get enough Google or Twitter accounts to get traffic you can actually send traffic from these things on quite a regular basis.
So she sent out the tests. She's pointing at frugal marketing deals, by the way. There you go. And it jumped right up into the number one position using her method. She did not indicate either, so one, two, WordPress posts, and then one Tumblr and it says Tum Tum girl, some girl calm but it's Tumblr. And it bounced off the site to the number one position so that still works. So I have ttt Twitter, IFTTT to WordPress to Tumblr, results in number one rankings. That's good.
So that process is still safe. So if you're like oh my God, my IFTTT is killing me. Just switch it over to publish Twitter to WordPress and Tumblr. And then you're gonna be alright. I will test wordpress.com just like I did blogspot and then I'll test Tumblr, I get a couple 100 of those things though. So we'll test both of those and make sure in and of themselves are okay. And maybe we can figure out some ways to leverage those a little bit better.
But to me, this is a really good sign and I thought it was a good way to end the episode. After you know, breaking all of your hearts. You're in love with blogspot. Or you hate blogspot. Or you hate me. But Tumblr and WordPress are next. Right now. They're working really well for Karen. And that's it.
Okay, yay. And the crowd goes wild. Awesome. Yeah. For me out, was a big one. It's a good test. Really good test. Yeah. James, you outdid yourself this month.
Completely unexpected result with the blogspot? And yeah, James's PBN test was unexpected too Kind of expected the homepage to win. I'm not gonna lie.
Yeah. James. Slack me that URL so I can crawl it and look at it.
Everybody will make that test. I'm in Dori's network so maybe I'll duplicate that test with some of our sites and see.
I'll poke your eyes out. I'll cut you.
All right. Cool. So James, good tests. Grigori thanks for showing up. I appreciate you and great questions. I love it. When you guys ask questions during this, it helps us stay engaged and as far as I'm concerned, actually helps us dig, dig, dig deeper as well. So that's always good. It's what we're doing here at the SIA.
Okay, everybody, see you next month. I don't know what date that is. But we'll see you next month and inside Slack. Yep. Take care. Bye bye.