Live SEO Support 8/25/21 – 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:

[9:20] For newly created service landing pages, would it be better to get some low profile diversity links and then add some niche edits / guest posts afterwards, or is it safe to add a few niche edits right away?

Diversity links are a good alternative to pillow links when starting a campaign and can be applied naturally to link to your inner service pages. Diversity is always key in the beginning of any campaign. One small downside to pillow links in the context of your situation is that not all pillow links are natural to use when dealing with inner pages. For example, general blog comments, directory links, social profiles, and some Web 2.0 links are typically used to point to homepages rather than specific inner pages. Ofcourse, this isn’t a rule.

Regarding niche edits / guest posts – yes, you can safely add these authority links in the beginning when mixed with diversity or pillow links. This combination helps to create a robust and diverse link profile that fares well with Google. Now, do you always need to pillow your new landing pages? Not really. Does it help? Yes, it can, because it’s a signal of more press / attention being shown to a new page / article. Having said that, some less competitive niches won’t require you to construct such a layered link profile throughout your page hierarchy. Adding too many superfluous links would be overkill in the sense of consuming your valuable time and resources.

Basically, a pillow building campaign should be seen from a more general domain level, rather than being highly focused on specific inner pages. Deploy a variety of pillow links where they are most needed throughout the domain to buttress your entire site. Don’t add more than what you feel is necessary.

[16:57] Do you update content on PBNs? If so, how frequently?

Nick:

I wish we had more questions about PBNs. This is my favorite type of link even though I don’t use them as much as other authority links. PBNs are great surgical tools that can be used in a variety of ways after you’ve built up and established a solid network. PBNs are not only used for homepage contextual backlinks (which is where the most Power comes from). For example, you can use inner pages to resonate like niche edits or you can add guest post-style links to inner pages. When you use the PBN in a variety of ways it begins to register as a real and purposeful website that is doing more than just recycling contextual homepage links.

It seems to me that most websites appear to be small and static, acting as business cards or small repositories of information. They aren’t updated very often, if at all. So, it’s not absolutely necessary to update content on a PBN in order for it to resonate. But if you never updated content on the network it may eventually lose traction. We run PBNs to sell our links on. As a result, our PBNs are constantly being updated with fresh content (which is good for their longevity). This is always the better scenario if given a choice between maintaining a static or dynamic PBN. At the bare minimum, for a small / modest PBN that you’re personally maintaining, it’s a good idea to add some fresh content (a handful of cheap articles) every 4, 6 or 12 months.

[27:00] I stumbled upon an amazing site in an Indian niche, which is not that old, and built on an expired government domain (www.mpnrc.org). It is ranking on page 1 for any topic and has 8M visitors. Have you ever come across this kind of expired backlink profile that seems to rank instantly?

Yes, we have seen this happen a lot. One example that comes to mind is someone who utilized an expired domain that was very general to the overall niche, and had a very spammy link profile, and made it rank with extreme success (tons of traffic). The question is how long can it sustain this level of success before it may come crashing down, and how much did it cost?

The domain mentioned in the question appears to have a lot of authoritative backlinks that have allowed it to resonate with Google for a long time. Its aggressive owners appeared to procure a ton of referring domains this year (in a short amount of time) and thus gained a lot of traffic. The site has around 1400 URLs registered in Google search. It also has a very diverse anchor profile (and a lot seem to be Web 2.0 spam).

[56:15] When I look at a site like SEMRush, it gives me a lot of backlinks that do not show up in Moz. Which tool is more accurate and how do I get the links to register with Moz?

No link crawling service is going to be 100% “accurate”. Actually, they are all inaccurate for the most part. There are way too many backlinks on the internet to be efficiently captured by any single tool. The most complete way to search for backlinks is to gather them up with every link crawling tool available, loading them in a database, and removing the duplicates. Of course, this takes time and may not always be necessary.

This applies to other data / metrics as well, such as traffic. You’re going to get different traffic numbers from different tools. You just need to explore each tool, understand its capabilities / limits, and gather information from it within the context of its design.

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