In episode 283 of Semantic Mastery’s weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one viewer asked if one should add the Gsite to Google Search Console of the main GMB email.
The exact question was:
can we or maybe also should we add the gsite to search console of our main GMB email?
Posted by David_Farkas
If you’re a link builder, you know how tough it can be to persuade other site owners to link to your site with “out-of-the-blue” pitches. This is true even if you have great content or have been building links for years.
That’s why the mantra “link building is relationship building” exists. Often, before you build a link, you have to build a relationship with the site owner first. This means anything from following them on Twitter, commenting mindfully on their posts, writing emails to them to discuss their content without pitching links, etc. It’s a productive strategy, but also a time-intensive one.
However, there’s another — relatively quick — link building strategy.
Is your ear itching? If you’re the superstitious type, this means that someone is talking about you.
Sometimes a webmaster will publish your brand name, products, or target keywords on their site without actually linking to your site. In SEO, these are known as “fresh mention” opportunities. These are typically some of the easiest link building opportunities available, since you don’t really have to explain yourself to the site owner. Mostly, you just have to ask them to put an <a href> tag in the code.
But how do you find these fresh mentions? There are multiple methods and tools, but today I’m going to highlight the one I use most often: Google Alerts.
Google Alerts is beneficial in a myriad of ways beyond the world of link building and SEO, but there’s no doubt that it’s the best way to stay on top of your fresh mention opportunities. Allow me to explain how you can use it!
First off, the obvious: you need the correct link. To start using Google Alerts, head over to Google Alerts. You can technically set up alerts without a Gmail account, but I would recommend having one. If you don’t have one, click here to find out how to set one up.
When you have an account set up and land on Google Alerts, you will see a page that looks like this:
No, there’s not much to see. Not yet anyway.
Let’s take a basic example. Say you want to create an alert for mentions of link building. Simply type the phrase into the bar at the top.
You will see something similar to the image above, even before you click on anything else. The first box asks for which email address you want to receive the alerts (I’ve erased mine for the purpose of this article, but trust me, it’s there). Below that will be examples of recent alerts for your query.
Click the “Create Alert” button, and alerts will be sent to your selected inbox going forward. However, you can customize a few settings before you do so. Click the “Show options” dropdown next to the button to see a list of settings you can adjust:
Each item is auto-filled with the default setting. You can adjust the settings so that you only get alerts from specific regions, for certain types of content, and more. In general, I have found the default settings to suffice, but there are valid reasons you might want to change them (if you’re only interested in video content, for example).
When you’re done with the settings, you can create the alert!
From that point on, assuming you stuck with the default option of once-a-day emails, you'll get an email every 24 hours that looks like this:
Notice the returns in this example include pages that talk about each individual word from your query (in this example the word “link” and the word “building”). Obviously, this isn’t helpful, and it’s a waste of time to sift through these results.
So, how can you make sure that you only get results for an exact phrase? Quotation marks!
I (intentionally) made this mistake when setting up this alert. Notice in the image from the first section that “link building” didn’t include quotation marks around it. Without them, Google Alerts will return results like the ones in the image above.
The quotation marks indicate that you’re looking for an exact match of that phrase, so when you set up an alert using them you will get something that looks like this:
Much better, right?
Note that you can combine terms with and without quotation marks in one alert. Say for example I was looking for content related to link building around images. Instead of “link building images,” a phrase not likely to occur too often, I could use:
This will return results that include both the exact phrase “link building” AND the term “images”.
If you’re using Google Alerts for link building, I recommend setting up more than one alert. Consider some of the following:
If you’re concerned about all the emails flooding your inbox, adjust the settings to decrease the frequency or stagger delivery days. You can also set up a separate Gmail account that only serves to receive these emails. I personally find the former to be the better option, but I know people who do the latter.
Consider setting up alerts for your competitors as well. Doing so may give you a window into their link building and publicity strategies that you can learn from. Along with that, you might find new potential target sites that aren’t mentioning you. If they mention your competitor, it’s likely they are relevant to your niche.
Also include common misspellings of any of the list items above. While Google’s algorithm is typically smart enough to correct such misspellings in its search, a few valuable results may seep through even still.
Google Alerts can be helpful for other purposes other than link building. Certainly, if you’re engaged in an online reputation management campaign, they’re a necessity. Some use Alerts to track the kind of publicity their competitors are getting as well.
There are other excellent link building tools out there that can complement your “fresh mention” strategy if you are a link builder, but Google Alerts is an essential. I hope you find Google Alerts as helpful for link building as I have. If you have other tools or suggestions, please mention them in the comments below.
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In episode 283 of our weekly Hump Day Hangouts, one participant asked how to exclude the SEO Powershield GSite from Google SERPs.
The exact question was:
thanks for answering my question last week guys, appreciate it. One last question before I order the shield (just so I’m completely clear). Can I make sure that only my site appears in the SERPS and the G-site doesn’t appear in the results pages? Cheers, Alex
Posted by AnnSmarty
Somehow, many businesses I’ve come across online have one glaring problem in common: a very weak and unconvincing About Us page.
This doesn’t make any sense in my mind, as the About page is one of the most important brand assets, and unlike link building and social media marketing, it doesn’t require any ongoing effort or investment.
An About page is often part of a buying journey. It can drive people to your site and help convince them to deal with you. And, in these uncertain times, you can use it to help build trust in you and your business.
Creating a solid About page is a one-time task, but it will boost both brand loyalty and conversions for many months to come.
Whether you’re a business owner or blogger, your About page tends to rank incredibly well for brand-driven search queries (those that contain your name or your brand name). If nothing else, it shows up in your sitelinks:
Or your mini-sitelinks:
This means your customers will often enter your site through your About page. Is it making a good first impression to convince them to browse your site further (or engage)?
Let’s not forget that branded queries have high intent, because people typing your brand name in the search box already know you or have heard about your products. Failing to meet their needs equals a missed opportunity.
How often have you checked a business’s About page before buying anything from them? I always do, especially if it's a new brand I haven’t heard of before.
Or maybe it’s not even about buying.
Anytime someone approaches me with a quote or an interview request, I always check their About page. I refuse to deal with bloggers who don’t take themselves seriously.
Likewise, I often look to the About page when trying to find a press contact to feature a tool in my article.
On a personal level, I always open an About page to find a brand’s social media profiles when I want to follow them.
A lack of a detailed, well-structured About page often means leaked conversions as well as missed backlinks or follows.
We don’t know exactly how Google decides whether a site can be considered a brand, but we have well-educated theories so we can help Google in making this decision. The About page is a perfect entity optimization asset.
First, what we know: An About page is mentioned in Google’s human rating guidelines as one of the ways to determine the “expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness”, or E-A-T, of any page.
Human raters don’t have a direct impact on search results, but their assessments are used to teach Google’s algorithm to better rank pages. So if the About page comes up in their guidelines, it’s likely they use it as a ranking signal.
Second, Google is using information you choose to put on your About page to put your business inside their knowledge base, so it’s important to include as much detail as you can.
With all of this in mind, how should you put together a great About page?
This step is not unique to this particular page, but that doesn’t make it any less important.
Treat your About page as a business card: People should be willing to learn more as soon as they see it. Your page should be eye-catching and memorable, and grab attention at first sight without the need to scroll down.
For example, Cisco starts with a powerful picture and message:
Nextiva starts with their main tagline:
Slack tells us exactly what they are doing and sums up its most impressive stats:
Telling your brand’s story is a great way to make your About page more memorable and relatable. Terminus does a very good job at starting their page with some history about the company that leaves you wanting to know more:
And Zoom starts with a video and a list of the company’s values:
Starting your page with a quick, attention-grabbing video is probably the best idea because video has been proven to convince visitors to linger a little bit longer and start engaging with the page.
You can create a short and professional video within minutes using web-based video editors like InVideo (in fact, InVideo is probably the most affordable solution I’m aware of).
To create a video intro using InVideo:
It’ll take you just 30 minutes to create a captivating video to put on your landing page:
With all that Google-fueled nonsense going around about nofollowing external links, or even linking out in general, marketers and bloggers tend to forget about one important thing: A link is the only way for Google to crawl the web.
More than that, Google needs links to:
This is where linking out to other “entities” (e.g. brands, organizations, places, etc.) is so important: it helps Google identify your place within their own knowledge base.
To give you some ideas, make sure to link to:
For personal blogs, feel free to include references to your education, past companies you worked for, etc.
To give you a quick example of how useful this may turn out to be, here’s my own Google Knowledge Graph:
How did I get it?
To start, “Shorty Awards” is Google’s recognized entity. When I was nominated, I linked to that announcement from my blog, so Google connected me to the entity and generated a branded Knowledge Graph.
This nomination is hardly my only — or even most notable — accomplishment, but that’s all Google needed to put me on the map.
Google may know you exist, but without making a connection to a known entity, you can’t become one yourself. So start by making those associations using your About page.
To help Google even more, use semantic analysis to create copy containing related concepts and entities:
Text Optimizer will run your query in Google, grab search snippets, and apply semantic analysis to generate the list of related concepts and entities you should try and include in your content. This will make it easier for Google to understand what your business is about and what kinds of associations it should be building:
Using some structured markup is also a good idea to help Google connect all the dots. You can point Google to your organization’s details (date it was founded, founder’s name, type of company, etc.) as well as some more details including official social media channels, awards, associated books, and more.
Here are a few useful Schema generators to create your code:
For Wordpress users, here are a few plugins to help with Schema integration.
Most About pages I’ve had to deal with so far have one issue in common: It’s unclear what users are supposed to do once they land there.
Given the page role in the buying journey (customers may be entering your site through it or using it as a final research touchpoint), it is very important to help them proceed down your conversion channel.
Depending on the nature of your business, include a CTA to:
Apart from your CTAs, there are helpful ways to make your About page easier to navigate from. These include:
Whatever you do, start treating your About page as a commercial landing page, not just a resource for information about your business. Turn it into a conversion funnel, and this includes monitoring that funnel.
On Wordpress, you can set up each link or button on your About page as an event to track using Finteza’s plugin. This way, you’ll be able to tell which of those CTAs bring in more customers and which are leaking conversions.
Finteza allows you to keep a close eye on your conversion funnel and analyze its performance based on traffic source, user location, and more.
For example, here’s us tracking all kinds of “Free Download” buttons. It’s obvious that the home page has many more entries, but the About page seems to do a better job at getting its visitors to convert:
[I am using arrows to show “leaked” clicks. The home page us obviously losing more clicks than the “About” page]
You can absolutely use Google Analytics to analyze your conversion funnel and user journeys once they land on your About page, but it will require some setup. For help, read about Google Analytics Attribution and Google Analytics Custom Dimensions — both resources are helpful in uncovering more insights with Google Analytics, beyond what you would normally monitor.
Like any other top- and middle-of-the-funnel pages, you’re welcome to reinforce your CTA by using social proof (recent reviews, testimonials, featured case studies, etc.). Here are a few ideas for placing testimonials.
Creating and optimizing your About page is a fairly low-effort initiative, especially if you compare it with other marketing tasks. Yet it can bring about several positive changes, like more trust in your brand and better conversion rates.
You should treat this page as a business card: It needs to create a very good impression in an instant. Put something attention-grabbing and engaging in the above-the-fold area — for example, a quick video intro, a tagline, or a photo.
Consider using links, semantic analysis, and structured markups to help Google associate your brand with other niche entities, and put it into its knowledge base.
Add CTAs (and experiment with different kinds of CTAs) to prompt your page visitors to follow your conversion funnel. An About page is often an underestimated, yet a very important part of your customers’ buying journeys, so make sure it’s clear where you want them to proceed.
Thanks for reading, hope it was helpful, let me know your thoughts/questions in the comments. Let’s discuss!
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In Semantic Mastery’s weekly Hump Day Hangouts episode 282, one viewer asked about the best MGYB done for you link package for podcasts.
The exact question was:
Hope you guys and you families are all doing well. BLESSINGS & THANKS GUYS!! What is the best DFY Package specifically for Podcasts and in your opinion(s) what are three (3) MUST DO things for podcast specifically?
In Hump Day Hangouts episode 282, one participant asked if having the SEO shield mean that guest blogging and other hard backlinks methods become ineffective|.
The exact question was:
4) Just for clearing: guest blogging and other hard backlinks methods basically dead by using the shield, right? (No more money site links)
Click on the video above to watch Episode 288 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.
Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.
The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.
All right, we are live Welcome everybody to Hump Day Hangouts. This is Episode 288. Today is the 20th of May 2020. And we’ve got everyone here. We got a couple of announcements but we’re gonna introduce everyone says hi we got things shuffled up today Bradley is on the road but joining us audio-only, and Hernan is driving the ship today so we’ll check in with Hernan first that really messed me up. I just looked and saw that your name is Bradley Benner on there so Hernan Benner. How are you doing today?
Good, man. Thank you for picking me first. And thank you for picking me first while I’m operating. But I’m good, man. I’m good. I’m really good. So we’re live. We’re live on Hump Day. hangouts is good. Everything is good. Don’t panic. Good. So don’t freak out. Whatever you are good, man. I’m impersonating Bradley, so don’t get used to it, buddy. Yeah. Well, let’s move on then to Bradley. How are you doing man? Where are you at?
I’m doing well. I’m in Grundy, Virginia and it’s like being a monsoon of rain. I came down here to camp and get away for a week and I didn’t realize it was gonna be cold and rainy for three days, or else I probably would have postponed it for another week. But it is what it is. And I’m here and I was able to make it so just glad to be here. Good deal. All right, Marco. How you doing? I’m gonna take it you’re not having cold rainy weather. Uh, let me check.
It’s kind of raining.
It’s a little dark. Can you tell? I don’t even have lights on.
Awesome.
Chris, how you doing man?
It’s raining here. Not the usual one. It’s raining money.
Man. That’s good dad’s job. Well done.
Well, before we get into it now, Hernan I believe he’s got he’s gonna be doing some screen share and we’re gonna jump in and answer
Some questions. First of all, just want to say thanks to everyone for your questions. We appreciate people I know we get a lot of regulars who show up here. But if you’re watching this for the first time welcome you know, ask your questions we just ask that you ask one question at a time. Just so we can go through if you ask a bunch of questions, there’s a chance that you know, we’re going to have to skip over them so we can get to the rest and if you catch them this replay on YouTube, go ahead and hit the subscribe button and you can always come and join us at semanticmastery.com/HDquestions, and watch interact live as well as of course, catching the replay on the YouTube channel.
Few things want to tie everybody into and let it what know let you know what’s going on. Marco, I’m gonna pass it over to you in a second. Because there’s some interesting stuff going on. I know Marco just did a webinar earlier this week. But I want to say if you’re an agency owner or a consultant and you’re like us and you want to get more clients, you want to grow your revenue, you want to scale your team, then you need to be checking out 2xyouragency.com
If you want to get step by step processes with SEO then that battle plan is where you should be if you haven’t already grabbed it came out just a few weeks ago but you can grab that battle plan dot semantic mastery com we’ve got some killer bonuses we’re adding content as we go and we’ve got a lot of good stuff over there I’m not going to bore you by reading it go check it out a battleplan.semanticmastery.com. And last but certainly not least, you know done for you services This is a big one we get people asking us a lot for things like what we did get questions like where do we get syndication networks done? We started that done for you service. A long time ago and over the past couple of years, we’ve created mg y B and grown that from its beginnings with syndication networks Our way is drive stacks now we offer a lot of services link building, embeds press releases, tons of good stuff over there. And of course the SEO shield as well as some free best practices webinars. So even if you’re not sure what the best product is for you or what the best results or maybe the best way to position it, you can go over
There, check out those webinars and get speed real quick. But speaking of webinars, Marco, you did one earlier this week, right? Monday and I can’t believe it was public dude, the amount of free information that went out I mean, Jordan was in the, in the public Facebook group kind of joking, but kind of seriously shut it down, like put it away, put it in the archives. It’s just too much information. And what happened was, we had Jeffrey Smith on and he was talking about structuring content, structuring, cutting to listen to the structuring content for the Semantic Web. Usually, when we talk about structuring, instruct structures, we talked about structured data, which goes directly to the button, but I have been talking about it for a while now, how you can also structure your content so that you give the bot better relationships that better data relationship, better content, relationships, better semantic relationships. And Jeffrey went in Monday and killed it. I mean, just drop the mic, forget everything else, listen to what I’m telling you. And he’s showing exactly how those relationships are created. He’s telling people how to reference it, how to tie it all together. Now you add that to our loop, the loop at it entity loop, right that we do, where we give the but all of the information about our organization. And I was just talking to rob this morning about putting that on steroids. So that we can actually stack. So think about it. We already have an @ID loop or an entity loop. And it’s a stack, it’s an empty stack. But we’re going to stack the stack, which you guys you know, I love that just stacking all of these iframes and all of these things to create all of these different relationships and just keep about looping. In that information. Well, we were just talking about the services and then do it it’s gonna be a service and then do it. It’ll never be made public how not nothing. It’s never getting out because it’s just too much. Too much time too much.
For just too many things go into this, we will go into a lot of the why and how, in the heavy hitter Club, which is where this with this webinar is still public. It was supposed to be 72 hours is supposed to be dead right now I think, Well, no, it would that would be tomorrow, the 72 hours. I can’t tell time anyway, if it’s still alive, go join the heavy hitter club, it’s free. If it’s not in the free group anymore, that you missed it, I’m sorry. But we can’t just keep giving all of that information now, for free. It’s just not going to happen up from here on all the entities, what I’m calling the entity series is going to be in the paid group only. We will come out with other public webinars where we will give you more information. But the good stuff is always gonna be going to be kept in the paid group. And the reason is simple. We need to be compensated for all of the time that we spend on this for all of the research that we’re doing for all of the testing that we’re doing it
It gets expensive, right? Running servers and running software and having to buy all of these different tools to get everything done. So I mean people don’t understand that they want it all for free. I’m sorry it’s not gonna happen but you can get a really good start by getting into a heavy hitter club. It’s in the free area right now you can watch the replay of the webinar and literally learn to rank with just content
As far as announcements, guys, that’s it. I think that’s all we got to cover. We ready to hop into questions.
Let’s do it. All right. Let me actually share my screen.
And if I can remember how to do it, Okay, there we go. You guys can see my screen right? Yeah. Beautiful awesome.
So we got the good all Webby XP 92 666. Hi, guys. Thanks for all the insights you all provide. I have a question around an older video you made talking about repurposing PBNs into embed blocks is creating video embeds Autoblog still something that is viable? If so, do you have any examples of such sites that could be built, also ordered an MGYB link building package for a G site? And appears to have been deemed x? Is this something to worry about? Do you think it’s just a Google dance and we’ll sell settle with time. So I’m repurposing in PVS into the video but blogs I don’t know if it’s a practice that we’re still doing as long as their video and bets and you know, you can get your videos embedded in there in terms of you know, like a T or like a second-tier type of embed blogs I see should be fine. But what do you think Marco? Well, it was the foundation video powerhouse maps powerhouse, right? It was buying expired domains, repurposing them for video, embeds, and then mapping events. I don’t see why it wouldn’t work as long as you’re keeping everything relevant. Right. Thank you.
would have to stretch it. Because the whole point right now of whatever it is that you’re doing should be activity relevance, trust, and authority. So if there’s an activity in that repurpose, pbn, if there’s relevance, and there are trust and authority, then you got a winner, you got a winner, because of all the power that’s behind that. And you start dropping links in there back to wherever it is that you want them, you don’t even need the links, the iframes will carry the link building back to the source. So I don’t see why that would be a problem as long as its purpose just for that when you start getting content into that when you start getting links into that. That’s when things start to devalue. Right, that’s when you start getting you to trigger other parts of the algorithm that you’re not really looking to trigger. Whereas if you just keep the iframes and you power those up, you’re good to go. And I mean, I’m still I just talked to daddy recently about building up a network just for that. So I don’t see why it wouldn’t work. We’re not doing it. We’re not currently doing it. Let me just say that but I don’t see why it wouldn’t work.
If it worked, or it still works for you, too. But people do it all the time they put a YouTube video on their website. So why wouldn’t it work if it still works for you?
Yeah, and I’m trying to think of examples. I don’t have any off the top of my head, but I would just start looking around is my advice. And like, I, I just can’t think of an actual URL right now. But I know there’s a lot of sites like this out there that you can go and see and they’re getting real traffic. So I would just start looking around
Webby and like start noticing, you know, just start clicking around with trying to find some of these, and you will definitely find some there. They’re all over the place. Yeah, yeah, those websites. In fact, like Semantic Mastery, his YouTube channel gets picked up by several of these like, websites that all they do is to combine like different feeds of videos and whatnot. And some of them are legit. Some of them are like clearly auto blogs, but some of them are legit. Some of them are like actually, you know, having good content and I know that because I have
I think it says it’s an analytics and search console do you have that attached to it is that our analytics and search console telling you that it’s not indexed because you can just, that’s what you’re supposed to do. You go in there, you go into search console and resubmit for crawling. And that’s you’re bringing it back up. Lastly, it could be the Google dance. It could be that it dropped from the index, which happens all the time. And then it comes back to settle wherever it is, is going to settle. And that’s, you know, that’s after 21 days, you look at the data, you see what happened, you see what’s going on, and when you approach it at that point to see what else you need to do to bring it into the position where you want to bring it.
Yeah, I would like to add to that, guys. If you have submitted it to search console, which you can do through the same Google account that the drive stack was built under, you just go in and submit the G site to search console and then use the URL inspection tool inside of search console to just take a look at the homepage of it, which is, you know, sites google.com slash whatever your slug is forward slash and just do a URL inspection. And Google Search Console will tell you whether it’s in Google or not. If it’s in the index, and if it’s in the index, and you’re just not seeing it, it’s just doing the dance. And if it’s a newer g site, it’s likely just dancing because that happens a whole lot in the first several weeks of a G site.
There you go.
Awesome. Ah, so let’s see Ah, see gala for four is asking, Is there any SEO benefits to using a custom GMB domain? domain name versus the default one Google gives you with a business dot site extension? Thanks in advance. What do you guys think?
I haven’t tested it. I only use I always use the business. That’s the site extension that Google gives me and when do the search for your entity or the brand search. It’s one of the top sites that appears for your entity. Now, whether having your own domain over that makes a difference. I don’t know, I haven’t tested You know how much I hate to speculate. And yeah, you know, maybe my standard answer is you need to go test it and see if there’s a difference. But that means creating two different sets of data with practically the same data to GMB’s one is going to be custom. The other one isn’t to see if one ranks better than the other which is way too much work. You get to see how much work it is to go and find out that now you know, there’s really no difference. So why bother in the first place? It works really well the way it is.
Right? And I would also imagine that having the standard URL or Bendtner or domain name that the GMB is revenue would be very powerful in and of itself, right? Because you’re getting a subdomain into that business, that site, website or domain, which has, you know, hundreds of thousands of millions of websites and then all of the stuff that we’re doing to the GMB as well, but I would say that they would have a lot of power in and of itself, right? It’s like using a Google property that it’s google.com for slash whatever, right? So we’d have to check what happens underneath, right? Because it could be different than what happens to Google site. Again, it’s not something that we’ve tested, so anything else would be speculation. Awesome. Cool.
So Dustin, introduce what’s up Dustin. I would like to know if it’s enough for a citation to count as valid when only using name plus website URL plus phone number without the address because I’m not allowed to show the address. Will that be a valid citation? What do you guys think? Yes.
It’s still a valid citation.
Yeah, and in fact, Bradley has recommended it to me. Again, in this form, then you can’t use the street address to use it just the way it’s showing in the question. Perfect. Yeah. And so it’s my understanding of structured citation is the typical format, name, address, phone number, plus URL if you know When, when, when possible. But an unstructured citation is any combination of several of those data points. It doesn’t have to be all of them. So it could be name, phone number, URL, or name, address, phone number without URL or name, address URL without a phone number, you see what I’m saying? It’s just a combination of name, address, and phone number or URL. One of those are several of those four data points. And that’s why, you know, it still counts as a citation. I think, obviously, a structured citation is the most powerful, but they still absolutely counts.
Cool. All right. So let’s see Mike. What’s up, Mike? Hello, everybody. know everyone, what is the best link to share? Google Maps listing what’s going on with those read directions on the map listing? HTTPS g page forward-slash company name as a 302 redirect and a minute refresh. If I want to build links for it, how would you suggest you do it? maybe create a short link for the long regular URLs? That would be a 301 redirect? That’s a lot. That’s a good question. Yeah. But he’s like he’s looking at that wrong because adding, adding shortening to any of those three tools, it’s not gonna make any difference, because if there’s a there’s a three or two in the stream, what he has to do is, is find the endpoint of that redirect meta refresh stream, which is the one, it’s where it ends when you go into where it goes or any other redirection checker, whatever it is that you use, you’re going to see that last one meta refresh, and then it gives you that final URL, where if you take that and go to where goes, you don’t get anything else. That’s the one that you would use for link building. And that’s the one you would shorten the shorten or creates a 301 to that long URL. So if you drop that shortening to one of those three or two URLs, it stops the link flow at the three or two, regardless of what else happens down the street.
So that’s how you should be looking at that not the way that this is. Right now the way that he’s talking about Sure.
Yep. Use the gather up the Chrome extension. I just posted it in the chatbox. But it’s if you just go to search, search google and search for the gather up, review link generator, Chrome extension, add it to Google Chrome, and then from that point forward, anytime you want to share your map, all you got to do is click that button from the map from the entity page where it says the knowledge panel essentially for the entity and it will grab the GMB share URL for you.
Awesome, I just shared it on the Yeah, sure.
On the chat as well, so in the end, that’s, that’s the best URL. It’s, it’s the www.google.com/map/?cid= and so it when you take a look at that in a redirect detector, like where goes, for example, it will say test, okay, even though when the page fully loads, it will change it to the really, really long maps, you know, the really ugly URL, but you know, again, it’s, it’s, it’s kind of like a, it’s a redirect, but doesn’t count as a redirect. So it’s the best URL to use.
Cool. All right, so Kieran is asking, Hey gents, hope you’re well and staying safe. I’m curious about last week’s Hump Day Hangout, Marco talked about the first webinar for heavy hitters being available to everyone. The topic being related to the public Google Drive folders and Google recent changes and how it would impact any airway stack or SEO shield user registered register on the SM Facebook group under events I register waited and as I know another day too, but nothing ever happened I listened to that part of the episode again to confirm maybe I’m just missing something but if it relates to stocks we order I would really like to make sure I’m clear on best practices recommendation. So we’re again can hear and find the replay for that. heavy hitters club. There you go. heavy hitter, hitter, heavy hitter club that that’s very sweet but we can’t we continue to make announcements in the different pages I know that Rob did an announcement just before that sharing the link to go register because once you went to the event, you had to go to the Events tab you had to go and register in zoom to attend the event. If you didn’t then just go to heavy hitters club and register you don’t have to buy it’s in the free section of the group and you can just watch it there while it while it’s available. I don’t know how long, how much longer is gonna be available and I’m not creating it.
So our thing is asking how long does it take to G site for for the G site to index? I got my back almost three weeks ago and still, has an index placing Search Console submitter URL and still have index thanks. What do you think?
How long it takes two indexes however long Google takes to index it, right? Yeah, would you if Yeah, hang on a second because it did you get it back from us. Because if so, you have to go and check that to make sure that we set it to index. Sometimes things slip by and it might be set to no index, there might be something in there, but three weeks is still not a full what it is a 30-day cycle that Google works on in caching and indexing and whatever. Now, what you might want to do is, again, go back into Search Console, and resubmit. You go through the process that Brad explained, but rather than just seeing whether it’s indexed or not just resubmit the URL for indexing.
There you go. Boom, Gordon, guys. Jump in. Just also if you have a GMB associated with that project, you can also create a GMB post with the CTA button linked to the G site and that sometimes will help too because of the G site or excuse me, the GMB post typically index very quickly and I’ll get Google comm crawl that page again.
Yeah, no, I mean, if you have an active Twitter account where your tweets are getting indexed on a regular basis, you can also pop it in a tweet and get Google to crawl and index that there’s a lot of ways to force the indexing, it just has to be something that’s active and continuously indexing.
There you go. Awesome. And also, like, it’s would you guys agree that even because of the fact that it still hasn’t been indexed yet, is not necessarily not providing power to the rest of the entity, right? Because we have tested no index type of links, and we have tested a bunch of stuff. And just because in fact, I still have some index, it doesn’t necessarily mean that is not working, you know, to the benefit of the entire entity. would you say something like that, Marco? Well, what matters is whether Google has crawled it and whether it’s in the database, that’s all that matters. We don’t care. I mean,
you get too anal about a lot of these since lead, it’s the end result that matters. Is it pushing power? And is it or is it helping all everything else that’s down the stream? is it helping that to rank as bringing traffic into your website or whatever it is that your money site is? That’s what matters. First and foremost, we should work on getting into the G site index. Yes, because it’ll take up more real estate space.
Awesome, cool.
Alright, so let’s see. I’m Gordon, I was wondering if you can find an expired domain that is niche related and has a clean backlink profile and your 301 redirect to a new local business site domain. Is there any significant benefit to pumping up the age domain by pointing MGB services like link building press releases syndication network and firewall strikes next to it? And if so, can you get away with the 10 X and the number of backlinks to it, this is not the money site. Thank you very much for your help. I mean, first off, you need to find a clean backlink profile of an H expired domain, which is not, which is kind of art. But um, the 301 redirects might make it a little bit, maybe a little bit too much. If you 301 redirect that directly to the money site, and then you start blasting that domain with stuff. That might be a little bit too much. What do you guys think?
Yeah, I mean, the reason why we went into dissecting g sites in the first place was to get away from doing this very thing that he’s talking about, would it still work? I would think so. But we, but I can’t say whether it’s still working. Because it’s been years literally since we used a 301 redirect domain. No, you go you buy it, make sure you go through all of that trouble. Get content in there for that link, then you three or not even like you 301
It to take advantage of those things that he blasts that with link building, why go through all that when you could just go and get a drive second g site from mg y B and get everything through there you have more control over that and you get more power in the end result is much better through a dry second t site then it is through an expired domain.
Right and then you can abuse those versus an expired domain that you will be 301 redirecting so because at that point you’re resurrecting the history of backlinks and also the new stuff that you’re doing so it’s better to always point you know, backlinks and prices and everything to the drive stack.
Fits what’s up Fitz Jarvis just received the keyword list and I love it awesome. Please remind me why the list does not show search volume for the commander’s commercial keywords. Thank you What What can we tell to fits?
Do we know nicely? This does not show the search for fun. We never show search volumes. We showing keyword research. Right? And nowhere in the order does it say that we will provide search volumes, because that’s not necessarily the whole point, if you read the order form, or if we go through the order form, is to either get targets for link building, or to get and relevance, of course, or just to get overall keywords that are going to give your project, whatever it is that you’re doing tons of relevance what’s considered relevant so that we start creating all of those relationships between your brand. And if you have the location, your location, and the keyword set in your niche, we try to find as many as possible, we categorize them. That’s the whole point is if you need search volumes, you go into what is Google ads and get search volumes there. That’s the only time that that would be important to me. Yeah, as nothing else would be important, we just don’t do that. We don’t provide search volumes. Yeah, you can always like if you really need it, you can always go to sem rush as well, which works in tandem with the database of Google which is kind of the same thing. So that’s another option right there.
Ah, it says video unavailable. I’ll talk to rob Thanks. Hey, I had done looks like it got the embedding option on YouTube turned off. The right might be that what channel was that on? Was that on Semantic Mastery? Yeah, hang on. But if you click on it, what’s the video on YouTube? BB. You can go there.
Yeah, I think that if we select them just let me just show him again. There’s an option here to watch the video on YouTube and you can just watch it there I don’t know I didn’t do this I forget who it was that embedded this.
Yeah. But then from there, just click on it BB just click on here and go watch it while we fix that Thanks for pointing that out. Thank you, brother, all right cool. Let me start sharing again okay cool so let’s see SEO torch great deep learning with the rest of the recent Google changes what do you use now instead of drive stack you heard it here boys drive stacks Yeah, so they can go to the webinar and hit a hit Apply right to know more about what’s going on. All right, every hitter duck club we showed how everything can still be made public. By the way, we can still set everything public. I’m not gonna say how I’m not gonna give away the farm, Of course, I’m not gonna say how we’re doing it but we’re turning over everything public to you guys when you come to order for MGB SEO, it’s public. That’s what you get from us. I know how everyone else is doing it and how they’re creating all of this chaos where they say, Oh, you will change everything. Drive stacks are dead. No, nothing’s dead. Nothing’s changed. We’re still doing drive stacks and G sites.
RYS Academy reloaded and RYS Academy still works, the way that it hit originally, or oftentimes even better. That hasn’t changed at all.
That’s awesome. Well, what if I get a drive second fiber? Yeah, right.
So um, so yeah, I mean, we can only respond to what you know the quality that you get on
Do I do to sell at a Moody’s asking if you’re an agency now? Let’s go. Let’s go. Thank you, Anna, for commenting Hold on a second.
So a BB some questions, I understand tears. But what is tier three a three B four a four B etc? Why there are sub tiers? And can you explain this a little bit broadly?
Are you there? sure if you can get this program here. Well, the way that we build multi-tiered syndication networks, which are only two tiers, deep that you can go further out if you’d like, but it would be to A to B to C. So when you’re getting out to be, you know, three and four tears, we don’t support that. You can certainly do it as long as you understand how to make the connections with the IFTTT triggers, then you can go out as many tears as you’d like. The problem with it is that it creates you know, if anything, upstream RSS feed malfunctions, it cascades through all of the networks. And so it becomes a lot of work just to maintain that many tiers when they’re all connected together. It’s not that it can’t be done and just that it creates a lot of additional management. So that’s why we stopped the two tiers, right. So we, again, your primary branded Tier, Tier One Ring would be your primary ring, syndication ring, and then we typically will have on the two-tiered rings, three triggered by the blog.
The blog accounts, the main three blog accounts from the tier one ring, right, so that would-be blogger, Tumblr and WordPress. That’s why we have two A, which is triggered by the blogger from the first tier ring to B, which is triggered by Tumblr from the first tier ring into C, which is triggered by WordPress from the first tier ring, but that’s where we stop if you want to get out to tier three, tier four all of that you’re on your own. Just understand it’s the same principle.
Connecting from your first tier to your second tier, you’re just going to connect tier two to tier three, and ultimately tier three to tier four.
There you got it.
Number two, where are the embeds? Run a link run. Excellent files.
Good question. Were the embed run on link run Excel files. Do you guys know what he means? It’s talking to that’s that should have been provided to him. That comes from Dahlia. Yeah.
embed run on link run. Oh, exoplanets? Yes, you should be able to access your link building reports and embed reports from inside the MGB dashboard. Just go to your link, link building history, or embed, embed history inside the MGB dashboard, and then take a look at previous orders. And look at where it says delivered or completed or whatever and you can view details and you should be able to pull the report up from that nice.
There you go.
Are the triggers in our testing? Yeah. Always an RSS feed. Right? If he’s running a store, and he’s not running a blog that there has to be some RSS feed. It just has to be. So there’s a blog, he’s gonna have to find a way if so many things come on what when something like this happens, isn’t on WordPress. Right, then it’s a simple thing if you’re creating pages for your products and whatever, to create an RSS feed from that. If he’s running categories, you can create an RSS feed from that. But the end result of all this is you’re going to need an RSS feed. If you don’t have one. Then you go either into a folder on the dome on in the route or into a subdomain, you create a blog. So you start blogging into your syndication network so that you have the RSS feed to trigger the network. So here’s he’s saying that he has a Shopify store. So there’s a couple that has an RSS, right it has an RSS feed, it has an RSS for blogs, however, it has an RSS for the blog it so it will allow you to blog within the Shopify store. However, I’m thinking if, you know, it wouldn’t be a better idea to just have like a WordPress website on a subfolder and a subdomain to actually get all of the power and gather all of the power that you know, you would have from that you would have from a wordpress.com website, right? Not a blogger, com, or a blogger blog, but actually, your own instance your own installation of WordPress, right. And you can again, you can enjoy it.
Install that on your domain comm slash blog or blog, your dot your domain COMM And blog out of WordPress com like every week or twice a week or whatever and then provide that as the RSS feed. So that I think will be a better idea because you can then leverage the AC ease of use that Shopify provides and you can also leverage the SEO benefits that WordPress will bring but you know worse comes to worst you can still blog from Shopify, you can still send that RSS feed from Shopify and i think that i think that that that will help initially so
alright, cool. So let’s see. We have another question from Robert. Does SEO shield include RYS Do you need the money site to have a real name address phone numbers for SEO shield to be successful? What do you guys think?
No. So that’s that’s the SEO shall include in our way as
I always go to two. One is yes, of course. Yeah. How is it to drive second? And, of course, number two, do you need money site to have a no look at land solutions? network? Right? That’s totally
That’s how we got a GMB for that. So no idea. You don’t even need that. There are other ways and this is one of the things that we’re going to go to in the heavy hitter club as we go into the entity series. This another way to verify and validate your entity. It’s not just about a GMB Of course, if you’re in a local setting, right, and your traffic is going to come from local where triggers a map and you’re not trying to get into that map pack then it becomes extremely difficult to get leads from that niche. I mean, you have to go with organic
But if at 90% of the action is taking place on maps, then you have breadcrumbs for one, one to 10 and 10, even, you can forget it, because there’s going to be one and two, maybe three, where they’re going to get rid of that 10%, they’re going to get most of that action where it won’t bleed even into the second page, because you’re gonna have ads, you’re gonna have the map pack, and then again, you have to go through a whole minefield.
Again, the answer to that question is no, you don’t need to have a real NAP and address mainly, it depends on what it is that you’re working on. If it’s local, then yeah, you should. If it isn’t, then no, it’s not necessary. Well, there are other ways to validate the entity. And he also asked do you need to have a money site so you don’t have to have a self hosted money site either for a for you to have, you know, an NAP or a GMB? For example, you could use the biz dot business dot site, which is the GMB website as the primary money site if you’d like, we’ve done a lot of that when we were building a shit ton of lead lead gen sites where it reduced the workload by not having to create a WordPress site or a self-hosted site. So you can do that. Plus, you can also use the G site from a drive stack as your money site. Look at the DC plumber. Case Study. That’s that’s exactly what they did there. So you don’t have to have a self-hosted web. Excuse me self hosted site for you to for your money site. You could use the G site you could use the GMB website there’s a number of things you could do
yeah, I missed that part where it says that whether you need money I don’t Yeah. So yeah.
Number three, does the money side require any history or authority to be successful with SEO shield. Yes. And the answer is simply no. Like, in fact, you can go to battleplan.semanticmastery.com and get the battle plan which is super inexpensive, and it will tell you exactly what to do. As to Hey, I haven’t
A brand new project a brand new website, brand new domain, it will tell you exactly what to do. And we are almost always starting with an SEO shield. Right? That’s the foundation. We create our own activity, relevance, trust and authority we created. The whole point behind the way that we do things is to do away with needing you know, that history with going and getting that expired domain for that history. We teach people you brand. That’s what you focus on. What about Matter of fact, in my mini mastermind on Tuesday night last night, I tell people and I’m going to give this to you for free because it’s just something that you should always have in your head. So imagine yourself, you’re watching the Superbowl, okay? You’re watching the Superbowl now you paid however many millions it costs to run that 32nd commercial in the Superbowl now you’re sitting in the armchair, and you’re watching your feet and you’re waiting for your commercial to come on.
What do you want to see on that screen? Do you want Bob the plumbers plumbing service? Best plumber, emergency plumber in whatever place in whatever state it just wherever Is that what you want to see in that screen? Or do you want it to be memorable? Do you want it to be that brand that sticks? Do you want it to be? zipper we were talking about this? The other zipper was trademarked at one point zipper, the word zipper. It became the word for what it is. It was a brand windbreaker we can go on and on. jello Xerox, you know you used to Xerox Things You Didn’t photocopy you Xerox.
Just Google hacking. What the hell is a Google Think about it, someone misspelled the number. They made it a brand. And now it’s the word for an even a verb. I’m going to go Google it.
If you’re not Google, you might be in Bing, but you’re gonna Google it. How weird is that bit Bing went to Bing and I know Bing as a cherry? I know that Yahoo or Yahoo was someone who’s unsophisticated and from the country, but it became a brand. This is how you have to think you’re in that armchair. You’re waiting for the Superbowl halftime, Here comes your commercial. You spent millions on that damn commercial, all of that market are all of these people thinking all of these eggheads? What do you want to see? Because that’s how you have to focus on your entity. Right now, even before you start, even if you have an existing project. This is how you have to think about how you’re going to start your entity because if you don’t, we’re in the Semantic Web. And Google is looking to do away with all of these spammed business names with their stuff with keywords. Not only that it is just seeing it on the screen with
That brand Geico. They have a lizard. And they have a damn lizard on the Geico commercials, man. Think about what you want to be memorable. Normally, you don’t want to be this a spammy name that takes forever to run across the screen.
So there you go. A little bit of a game for you. All right, perfect. So we’re out of questions, guys.
All right, Marco.
When it have you refreshed the page for now. Yeah, I did.
Awesome. All right, everybody. Thank you for joining us today. This was Bradley and Marco and Adam and Bradley and Chris.
Are you guys if you haven’t, don’t forget to subscribe to the YouTube channel. We go live every Wednesday. And every Wednesday. We’ve been doing this for the past five-plus years, almost six years now. And it’s completely free. So feel free to subscribe, share with your friends, tell people to come and comment and yeah
So that’s it for me. Anything else? Yeah. One more thing. Get the heavy hitter video.
There you go. All right. Bye, everybody. Cheers, guys. Bye Bye, everyone.
