Live SEO Support 11/9/22 – Full Episode

Welcome to another episode of Live SEO Support!

Live SEO Support is an hour-long Weekly Livestream where our founders, Nicholas Altimore and Chris Tzitzis, take questions from the audience on anything related to SEO.

It’s 100% free, and anyone can join us weekly in our Facebook Group or on Youtube.

But in case you missed us live this week, here’s the full episode:

This Week’s Archived Livestream:

Summary:

[07:58] If the affiliate EMD is taken, should I buy the hyphenated domain name, or should I add a word to the EMD and make it a PMD? Example: mexicocity.mx is taken, but mexico-city.mx and mymexicocity.mx are available. Which one of these two, from an SEO perspective, is better and why (suppose it has to be .mx)?

First off, if you’re trying to make a domain name that is very similar to an affiliate’s domain name, I would be careful. For our affiliate program, if someone did that, we’d kick them out. From an SEO perspective, it doesn’t really matter, but I’m not a fan of hyphens. Create your own brand. Even if you’re doing it for affiliate purposes, you could get hit with a cease-and-desist letter for being too close to another site, and it’s really annoying to have to rebrand an entire website.

[10:39] Suppose my affiliate site is gamingmonitor.com. If I write enough content to cover the topic “gaming monitor,” will Google consider that the site has achieved topical coverage, or would Google expect me to also write about monitors in general (ex: Baby monitor, portable monitor, ASUS monitor, etc.)?

I think you would be fine just writing about gaming monitors. When in doubt, check the SERPs for similar sites and see what they’re doing to rank. Note that keyword research can help you find more opportunities anyway, such as inner linking to and finding affiliates in certain general monitor-related sites.

[15:59] What are your thoughts on cloud authority backlinks from Google Cloud, Amazon S3, Asure, etc.? Do you think creating sites on these platforms and pointing them back to the money page—or tier 1 which points to the money page—will help?

Cloud stacking is a form of pillow linking. They can be alright, but we don’t base link-building strategies around them. We’d advise only using them for diversification purposes. We don’t like using pillow links for tiered link-building unless it’s something like a Web 2.0. The best practice is to use pillow links exclusively on your homepage.

[22:44] When you 301 a page, can you totally cut the content, leave the page blank (with no content), paste the content onto the new page, and then 301 redirect it to the new one? Or do you need to leave some content on the original page?

You would 301 the old page to the new page (the new permalink). You do not want to delete the old page for that reason. The content is irrelevant because all you’re doing is changing the link’s address.

[26:33] I run a localized price comparison website in my country. The site has next to no affiliate links or ads. I recently saw a massive drop in the crawling rate on my site with no ranking loss. Should I be worried? I also 301’d another shopping website to an inner page on this website recently since both are in the same niche.

Look into it to be sure. But the fact that you said there was no ranking loss tells us you might not have to worry about it. Note that 301s take a bit of time to kick in. However, we don’t advise 301 redirecting to any page but the homepage, especially on smaller sites.

[36:55] (site audit)

You removed a bunch of content after getting hit with the algorithm update. The links themselves don’t look that bad. They’re pretty relevant. A lot of your articles start with “Best…”. Start diversifying there. There is not a lot of inner linking going on, so work on that. On some articles, you’re doubling up on your Amazon links. You don’t need to do that because if you have a site that has a ton of outbound, especially to Amazon, it’s not favored in the SERPs—especially nowadays. Don’t monetize every article, either. Rather, make some purely informational and have them lead to your monetized articles. Try writing in first-person and using original images. For affiliates, you want your content to be unique.

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