Live SEO Support 3/23/22 – 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:

[7:12] Do bad links (or PBN links) punish your website? Or are you safer when mixing bad links with pillow/diversified links?

We don’t consider PBN links to be bad at all. Having said that, you need to be smart about how you use them these days. Definitely maintain a variation in your PBNs and use them sparingly. 

Low-quality (bad) links don’t appear to punish your site that much in general because Google is looking at your entire backlink profile to get a better picture of your site and look for trust signals. Sometimes having some links with spammier link profiles (i.e., “Bad” links) actually adds to diversity. It’s almost impossible for a site to never receive bad links.

Building diversity to your link profile is always a good idea and will make your site stronger and less susceptible to penalties.

[19:11] What is more important for site growth: links or content? For example, a 100-page site with 10 links or a 10-page site with 100 links?

Chris:

I feel like you could get away with a lot more in the past by emphasizing backlinks. Even 5 years ago I would say backlinks were way more useful than good content. Now I’m starting to consider quality content that matches search intent to be almost as important as backlinks.

Nick:

I think content is more important. Content definitely has priority when building a fresh site. If I had to spend 100% of my budget on either content or backlinks when starting a site, I would definitely go for content. 

[27:38] What’s your view on tiered links to boost a PBN network? Would you use one domain with a decent independent backlink profile to link out to 10 domains in the PBN network (and repeat for more domains)?

No, because it would leave a big footprint. Remember that you are sourcing PBN domains to manipulate your backlink data, so they should already have decent link profiles to begin with. The only reason you should use tiered links to a PBN domain is to update their relevance for web crawlers.

 You have to make sure that you’re not revealing any connectivity between the PBNs when you use tiered links (i.e., very diversified) to avoid de-indexation.

[33:16] Hey guys, can you 301 redirect an aged domain to a hub page that connects a topic cluster?

Nick:

Good question. I used to like 301’ing to category pages (which became popular) but stopped after Google started to pick up on it. So I wouldn’t advise you to do it. Best practice is redirecting very relevant 301’s to your homepage and rebuilding their inner page URLs to point to similar content on the target site.

[35:57] Is it easy to switch hosting and will it cause you to lose positions in the SERPs?

No, there shouldn’t be any issues. But there are some things to consider:

• Is the new host provider associated with lower quality websites?
• You lose SSL (or any kind of error during the migration process)
• Does the new host provider have indexation issues?

[39:33] How important is domain age for ranking (or outranking competitors)?

Chris:

Domain age per se isn’t much of a ranking factor. What’s more important is how long the content and backlinks have been live/indexed. In my opinion, article age and overall domain authority have a bigger impact when it comes to resonating in the SERP.

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