Live SEO Support 2/2/22 – 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:

[7:00] In regards to backlinks – One website has a DR of 25 with RD of 1500, and another website has DR of 50 with RD of 1000. All else equal, which is better and why?

It’s going to be hard to determine which site is truly better than the other if trying to base the assessment solely on Ahrefs’ proprietary metrics of DR (Domain Rating) and RD (# of Referring Domains). It also depends on how relevant the backlinks are for your target site. 

Having said that, we think the DR metric is accurate / reliable enough to base quick decisions on, and all equal (i.e. similar traffic, quality, niche relevance), we would choose the site with the higher DR of 50. This is because DR is a reflection of the quality of backlinks and we value quality over quantity (i.e. # of RD).

[13:22] I want to change my brand (i.e. rebranding) and execute an SEO migration from the old domain to a new domain via 301’ing. Do we need to rebuild the new brand anchor after the migration, and is it safe to keep adding power links toward the inner pages? What’s the best approach?

In this case, a search engine such as Google is going to view this maneuver as a rebranding (like you said), and that’s how you’ll want to approach the situation. Yes, you will definitely want to keep building new backlinks that target the new brand anchor. Don’t change the old links for the previous brand name. 

You won’t really need to change anything if your link building process is going normally. Just keep doing what you’ve been doing. We would focus on adding homepage links, for example. But building some inner page links is a good idea too (and safe) if you don’t have any issues before the migration.

[19:02] Have you guys changed your strategy since the Google affiliate review update was released? My site traffic started to decrease and eventually flatline.

Just because a site loses traffic after a Google update doesn’t necessarily indicate the site was penalized. Quite often, the site taking a hit isn’t being rewarded as much anymore, and is losing ground to other sites that are better adhering to the new updates.

We haven’t had to change anything after the update. Having said that, we would focus our keyword research on broader terms and avoid going after the narrow keywords that use words like “best” or “review”, which are obviously geared towards only selling specific products while lacking additional valuable content. Google calls these types of sites thin affiliates.

[33:07] Regarding interlinking. When you publish a new article, do you add links to older related articles that point to the new article?

Yes, we always add inner links to all of our new content. We usually do this after the article has been published and the rest of its on-page SEO is complete. We feel that the minimum # of links should be 1 or 2. If it’s a larger site with 100 pages or more, then 4 – 5 is a good amount.

[56:05] How long does it usually take a new site to index in Google?

It’s getting harder for sites to get indexed, and even sites with foundational pillow links (such as citations and social profiles) can take awhile before they get crawled by Google. Having said that, how long a site takes to get indexed largely depends on how many backlinks it has (and whether those links are coming from popular and trusted web sources). 

A fresh, new site (without any technical issues) that’s sitting around without any backlinks pointing to it is going to take longer to get indexed compared to a site which has pillow links and homepage links. Still, if a newly built site with content and a GSC submission (for example) doesn’t get indexed within a month, then there is probably something wrong.

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