#( ;; does anyone know how to freaking mute notifications. )

[redemn]

not me posting a tiktok that took 3 seconds and finding out the r.dr2 fandom is alive and well there ( and also odd )

[hyunjilicious]

that night [harry styles]

A best friends to something else type of story. Exactly 7.8k (literally 7800 words which is scary) and you know I can’t write that much without SMUT. This takes place during a sleepover at the end of quarantine! Maybe tell me what you thought? :) (I promise I’ll edit this soon!)

-

“Show me yer phone, love” Harry groaned, sending you the coldest of death stares. The night started off as usual, you two just watching some old documentaries, paying more or less attention to them as you mostly just sat and talked. Things took a turn when your phone started blowing up with messages. Being the kind of person who always replies in an instant, suspicions arose when you decided to completely ignore the texts. Although Harry never violated your privacy and never pushed you for answers you didn’t want to give, when you started laughing and got nervous about whoever it was that kept texting you, he figured it would be worth it to push your buttons.

“I said no” you repeated yourself, standing up from the couch. There were two main reasons you didn’t want to talk about the person texting you, and these 2 reasons were also probably the only two things in the world you wouldn’t want to discuss with him.

“Why no’?” he asked offended, following you into the kitchen, like a small child begging his parents to let him have his way, “What can be tha’ bad? I wouldn’t have asked any questions if yeh hadn’t been so off about it from the start”

You turned and looked at him dead in the eye, contemplating what to say next. He beat you to it.

“Is it a guy? Have you been seein’ someone?” Harry asked as he walked over to you, completely ignoring your personal space. “Is tha’ it? I don’t wanna read yeh texts, just tell me yes or no, and I’ll drop it. Promise”

You took a deep breath. “Yes, it’s a guy” you said calmly, “But we’re not seeing each other”

“Then why does he keep texting yeh like crazy?”

“Crazy…” you sighed, tapping your chin, “Good description”

“Come on, Y/n” Harry whined, tapping your shoulder as he walked past you and towards the refrigerator, “Just tell me, I’m really curious, crazy how?”

“Promise you’re not gonna freak out?” you laughed, grabbing whatever he was pulling out of the fridge and handing to you. You stopped paying attention after three cups of pudding and one bottle of wine.

“When have I ever freaked out?” he joked, mocking himself. He was usually a calm person, more composed than anyone you’ve ever met, and he less than rarely got angry. And from those times when he did lose his temper, 90% of cases were mild and he was still calmer than anyone else in that kind of situation, but that 10% left was pure terror. When his friends told you years ago that nothing’s scarier than Harry when he was truly mad, you didn’t quite believe them. You had to see for yourself to accept it. It only happened a few times in almost 5 years, but you always still did everything you could to keep him from going off again.

“Ok, so” you started speaking as you rummaged around your kitchen for bowls and glasses, “His name is Marcus and we actually met on Tinder-”

“Wait a second” he cut you off, “During the lock down?”

“Oh, no. It happened before all of this madness. Around january, I think”

It was obvious he was already bothered by how this conversation started, but he did his best to control himself so you wouldn’t decide to drop it. “Pretty serious, then, huh?” he said eventually.

“Literally the opposite” you laughed, pouring the pudding into the bowl, “We saw each other once-” and it hurt you to say the following part but you did it nonetheless, “hooked up, and didn’t talk since”

Pure annoyance was readable on his features. “Apparently haven’t talked until now?”

“Yeah, I mean-” you cringed, “He texted me like a week or so ago and we didn’t - vibe, and he got weird, so like I muted the conversation for 7 days because I didn’t want him to bother me anymore but he got so defensive it was funny so I didn’t really wanna block him”

“Yeh muted the guy a week ago and he still keeps trying?” Harry asked, completely taken aback, “Can’t blame him, but still, tha’s a bit much”

“It is” you nodded in agreement, and motioned for him to open the bottle of wine for you.

“He must have liked yeh a lot” he mumbled, twisting the corkscrew into the top of the bottle, “Maybe you two had a really great time, and he-”

“Harry” you stopped him, leaning your head to the side, “I know you’re squeezing information out of me right now, but I honestly don’t think you want to hear more of this”

“Ok” he sighed defeated, “I’m gonna stop pushin’ yeh. Thanks for tellin’ me tho. And sorry if I crossed any lines''

“You haven’t, H” you smiled, giving him a hug from behind. “It’s fine”

After gathering everything you had fixed up to take into the living room, the pudding and the wine, as you passed the threshold of the kitchen, you heard Harry speak up, traces of amusement audible in his voice. “But like… At least was the sex good?”

“You want me to answer that?” you chuckled, plopping down on the couch. “Do you seriously want me to answer that?”

“Yeah” Harry shrugged, smiling innocently.

“It was horrible” you said bluntly and watched his grin wilt away. “Probably the worst sex I’ve ever had. No, no, no.. Definitely the worst sex I have ever had in my entire life”

His mouth fell agape. “Seriously? Why?”

“Well, i got to his house… And you know, up until then everything was fine, like he seemed like a completely normal and fun guy while we texted but like, as soon as i got to his place he became really… I don’t even know how to put it, he was um.. Very clingy and weird and we talked for a bit but then when we went to his room he turned into literally the biggest asshole I met”

“What?” Harry exclaimed, “Tha’s not wha’ I expected”

“Exactly!” you laughed, “Neither did I!”

“Then wha’ happened?”

“I went down on him and he didn’t do the same because apparently he finds that gross? That’s what he told me but I didn’t wanna get into it because I went there to get dick so I was like let’s just fuck, and we did… We made out a bit, got him worked up again, and when we fucked I literally thought something was wrong with me, because he just.. I don’t know. Bumped into me and after he finished I was there like… What just happened?”

“Yeh were right when yeh said I didn’t wanna hear this”

“Told you” you giggled, grabbing your pudding and toying with your teaspoon.

“Jus’ stop using Tinder, please” Harry eventually shook his head.

“A girl has needs, ok?”

He was enraged and completely ignored your words, “And wha’ does he want from yeh now? He really thinks yeh’d see him again? Really?”

“I don’t even know what he’s been saying, honestly” you shrugged.

“Can I see?” 

“Can you like, read from the notification box? I don’t wanna leave him on seen”

Harry nodded in agreement and you gave him your phone. He pressed the lock button, the screen lit up, and it was instantly flooded with texts from him. Since you put the conversation on mute a week ago, you had no idea what he had been saying. It seemed that he didn’t appreciate your lack of interest and that he didn’t bother to hold back.

‘You pathetic whore, u really think ur gonna find someone better than me? U think ur so high and mighty and hot but  ur gonna die alone you bitch. Do u feel better about yourself if u juts ignore my texts???? Well good for fucking u-’ and Harry locked the phone, the screen going black.

“The fuck did I just read?” he questioned, his annoyance from earlier, now morphing into pure anger.

“You said you wanted to read” you shook your head.

“Why does he think he can talk to yeh like that?”

“I don’t honestly care” you sighed, “It’s not like I’ll ever see him again, so he can go and say anything he wants”

“‘S not how that works, darlin’” he said.

"Can we drop this, please" you sighed, unable to quite look in his direction, "I don't like this"

"Well-" Harry erupted and judging by the way his voice instantly died down, you could tell he almost lost control, "I don't fucking like it either, ok? But yeh shouldn't jus' accept tha'!"

"I wouldn't call it acceptance, H" you shook your head, discarding your bowl of pudding and jumping straight to the bottle of wine. "I told him I'm not interested, and I stopped replying. It's not acceptance... he just keeps trying"

"But for some reason yeh're letting him talk t' yeh like tha'"

"Well-" you shrugged, and took a big gulp of red wine, "He talks by himself"

"Y/n…" Harry called, his voice soft and you could tell that there was anger hidden somewhere deep inside, but you still appreciated the fact that he managed to keep it contained. He extended his arm, his fingers brushing against the side of your thigh. It was a soft, delicate touch, that made every hair on your body stand up. He did it to get your attention and boy, did it work. Instantly, your eyes snapped to his, and were met with something you did not see coming. "Can I say something?" he asked cautiously, his eyes shining with genuine worry.

"You're making this into something much more significant than it actually is"

"I'll drop it" he eventually nodded, "If you promise me something"

"What?"

"If anythin' similar to this happens again, tell me"

"And what are you gonna do about it?" you giggled, trying to lighten the mood. As you kept staring into his green eyes, you brought the wine bottle up to your lips, took a long sip, and then handed it to him.

He took the bottle out of your hands, seemingly not giving more than two shits about it. The warmth in his eyes accentuated as his eyebrows gathered into a concerned furrow, "Make sure it doesn't get to yeh"

"It doesn't" you smiled.

"Lemme make sure" 

"Ok, Harry" you laughed, "I promise you that the next time a guy from Tinder gets mad about me not reciprocating the feeling, and he starts sending me that kind of texts, I will tell you"

The sarcasm just flowed out of you, and he was not impressed.

"I meant in general, love"

"Any guy?" you taunted, "Not just from tinder?"

"Fucking put on tha’ movie" he shook his head, "I know yeh too well. Won't get anywhere until you get some wine in tha’ belly"

"That's your plan?" you laughed, "Get me drunk and make me spill all my secrets?"

"I never assumed you had any secrets, but yeah, now I wanna know those too" Harry grinned, throwing his arm around you and pulling you to his chest. Although this kind of intimacy was something you've been somewhat used to, tonight it was just a bit more difficult to bear. And it may all have been due to the way he mentioned he wouldn’t want anything to get to your head, and the way he said he’d make sure of it. Even though you weren’t truly clear how he’d do that and what exactly was going through his head, it was crystal clear how you’d have him do that.

But now was not the time. You glued your eyes to the TV screen, and begged your brain to focus on the movie in front of you and not whatever Harry was thinking about, mere inches away from you.

There had been something in the air that night, because neither of you managed to pay any kind of attention to the movie anymore. You talked, the conversation not going back to the previous topic, you laughed, gossiped like there was no tomorrow, and now it was almost 4am, and you and Harry were 3 bottles of wine in. Deciding to cut the alcohol before it was too late, you settled for water, as Harry went on to finish a weird story he once heard from a hippie touring the states in his van. He was completely smitten, his eyes shone with admiration for the old man. Harry spoke with words of great respect about a life he wished he could once live. It was only a matter of time until it would get to you.

“But,” you sighed, laying down and placing your head into his lap, “You really seem like the kind of guy to pack his bags and just leave. Like get a couple of friends or something, leave a note saying you’ll eventually be back, and just travel around the world”

“I kinda already do tha’ love” Harry laughed, double chin showing as he looked down at you.

“Not what I meant” you shook your head, “And you know it”

“Wha’ did yeh mean, then?”

He looked down at you, his hands finding their way into your hair as you contemplated how to put the words together. “I don’t know… Less social interaction-” you finally said, “Make it less about living the same songs in front of thousands of people, and more about living a completely new experience as you really get to know just a handful of people”

He didn’t look convinced. His dimples were showing, and a chuckle was threatening to escape his lips.

“That didn’t make any sense, did it?” you laughed.

“It did” Harry smiled, “Might have’ta resume this in tha’ morning, but i think i got the idea”

You pointed your finger to him, “Best”

“Me?” he grinned, grabbing your hand, “Oh, stop it!”

“Not you, your idea”

“Nice save, love”

You wanted to object and keep this topic going as the butterflies in your stomach started to riot, but just as you opened your mouth to speak, the sound of your phone receiving another text filled the air. In an instant, your eyes locked with Harry’s and you knew he wasn’t gonna let any of that shit slide. Not wanting to give him the chance to protest, you sprung up and leaned towards the coffee table, your fingers barely managing to brush against the side of your phone before Harry grabbed your waist and yanked you back, pressing you against the cushions of the sofa as he hovered above you.

The intimacy and urgency of this whole charade made your skin crawl, and you couldn’t help but let a few giggles escape, “What are you doing?” you laughed.

“Not lettin’ tha’ asshole ruin your night, love” Harry smirked, tilting your head so that you had to face him. 

“I’ll see the text in the morning and it will ruin my whole day” you played along, but as it turned out, you dug your own grave.

“Oh?” he grinned, “So it does get to you”

“No!” you belted, “That is not what I meant, Jesus harry”

“Come on, hon” 

His head tilted to the side, before he leaned down and nudged the tip of your nose with his. “Jus’ say the word”

That sent burning chills down your spine, and your cheeks couldn’t do anything but to comply and turn an erotic shade of pink.

“I’m not sure what to say” you mumbled, fighting against the urge to jump on him.

“I’m yer best friend, love-” he made a small pause, for dramatic effect, and just stared down at you while your blood boiled, “Lemme show yeh how good yeh can feel”

“I-”

He cut you off, obviously proud of himself, “I obviously wouldn’t have asked twice if I hadn’t felt you squeeze your thighs around me”

“Fuck, Harry-” you said, embarrassment rushing all over you as you threw your hands in the air.

He leaned down, and brushed his lips along your jaw, “Yeh could be screaming tha’ name”

Regaining your composure, you grabbed his chin and forced him to make eye contact once again, “What does this mean to you?”

“It doesn’t have t’ mean anything we don’t want it to” he nodded, “Just friends looking out of one another”

“Mhm..” you choked, “Yep”

“Tell me, and I’ll get off of you”

Your answer came a short second later. “Yeah, get off” you said sternly.

His features barely got a chance to show the disappointment that enveloped him, because as soon as the words left your mouth, you pushed yourself up. Excitement started showing on his face as you pushed yourself up. With a devilish smile on your lips, you grabbed the hem of his shirt; not giving him a chance to secure his balance on his knees before you pulled the material up his body. He clumsily shuffled out of it, his tattoos coming into full view.

“Is that a new one” you asked, pointing to his left shoulder.

To your surprise he took you seriously, and looked down, obviously confused, “Which one, love?”

“This one” you grinned, pushing yourself up and against his chest, this way, giving yourself a chance to press your lips to the base of his neck.

Harry’s whole body shivered under you as he let out a small chuckle. Instantly, his hands found your waist. Once your lips grazed his sensitive skin, the muscles of his neck relaxed as if under a spell and his head fell back. Harry’s fingers dug into your sides as your teeth sunk his flesh, sucking profusely. Having waited for this so many years, it felt all too real and completely unreal at the same time. There was a fire burning inside of you and the soft moans slipping past his lips were no help with taming it.

“Having fun?” Harry laughed, but his confidence and usual air of self control were shaking.

As a response, you bit into his ear lobe and delighted yourself with the whimpers of pleasure he didn’t even try to hide.

Although burning for it, you didn’t have it in you to go for his lips, so when he was the one to do it, all your radars went crazy. The way he grabbed your chin and pulled you closer, it was all you wished for. Years worth of pent up emotions dripped from your lips and onto his.

How ungrateful and inappropriate would it have been for you to beg for more and guide the situation in a different direction? Even if his gentleness made your knees weak, the heat between your legs begged for a less kissing and a lot more biting. 

It was when he pressed you down against him that made you forget about everything that held you back. His erection was rubbing against your thigh as you grinded down on him, and you couldn’t help but break the kiss and sink your teeth into his lower lip.

Harry threw his head back against your touch, and a proud smile lifted up the corners of your mouth.

“Come on” you moaned, kissing your way down to his ear, “Show me how you should treat a girl”

His fingers snuck into your hair and pulled your head back, forcing your eyes to meet his’, “Is it me? Or are yeh a bit more excited for this than you initially let on?”

Your eyes sparkled as you let out the fib, “It’s just you”

Grinning, he shook his head in mock approval, and secured you in his hold, before effortlessly spinning the two of you around. Now, a mess of limbs, you looked up at Harry with what could only be described as pure lust. And it all reflected on his features. His ridiculously messy curls framed his face perfectly, allowing his proud gaze to fuel your engines.

With all your might you wanted to let him take the lead and not show too much enthusiasm, but it felt next to impossible. Before you knew it, your hands were cupping his cheeks again, forcing his body flush against your own. He kissed you back with no hesitation, as if he too waited years for this to finally happen, as if this was his dumb way of confessing to you that he too, was head over heels for you. But that was a scenario that regardless of its likelihood, was sure to ruin your mood. 

So you pushed it aside, forced your mind to fall on standby, and instead, you concentrated on the way his hands explored every single inch of your body. When he broke the kiss, you wanted to protest, your tongue crying from the sudden loss of contact. But his lips traveled lower, kissing all the way over down your neck, along your collarbones, and across your chest. It was all aggravated and hungry, as if he couldn’t get enough. 

“Yeh good?” Harry asked, looking up at you, cheeks all flushed.

“Yep, yeah” you whispered, the weight of the moment turning your voice into a light chuckle. Breathless and innocent, you were on cloud nine, and all your struggles to keep that hidden were in vain.

Delicately, as only he could, Harry pushed your shirt over your head, leaving you exposed, a fact which sent a whole new wave of pleasure down your body. This gesture alone shook your whole world, but he wasn't wasting any time. You barely even got a chance to catch your breath before he lowered himself, and cupped your breasts into his palms. Your back arched in an instant, and when his warm lips connected to your skin, goosebumps propagated all over your whole body. As circled his lips and caught your nipple between his teeth, your mind went crazy, muscles sizzling with anticipation. A suggestive moan slipped from your throat, and you could tell it surely tickled his ego.

“Gettin’ there?” he questioned even if he already knew the answer.

You threw him half a shrug, tilting your head to the side and pressing your cheek to your shoulder.

“So fuckin’ cute, angel” Harry chuckled, shaking his head as he crawled up your body, “Why’re yeh so cute?”

“How would I know?” you blushed, playing along with his overly teasing approach, “You’re the one who sad it”

“Don’t know why I think yeh’re cute?”

You nodded no.

A small but sure fire lit up his features, and he knew it was on. He did maintain the eye contact for a while, but when he finally looked down at your body, nonchalantly staring at your chest, that was when your breath got caught in your throat. The pressure was building up, yet Harry kept pushing your buttons. 

In desperate need to pick up the pace, you nudged his chin with the back of your fingers, and when his eyes caught yours; you raised one eyebrow, motioning for him to continue. “Wha’ do yeh want me t’ tell yeh, love?” Harry grinned, leaning down to kiss your neck.

“Tell me what you like about me” you laughed, linking your fingers in his hair. While you laughed due to the amount of different emotions that coursed through you, Harry made it all the more difficult for you to keep it together. His kisses were light enough for you to feel the ounces of love that dripped from his lips, but carnal enough to keep you on your toes.

“I love everything about yeh” he murmured against your skin, his chain of passionate kisses crossing over to the other side of your neck, “I mean, wha’s there not t’ like?”

“Word” you giggled, your sarcasm coming in perfect contrast to the weakness his question brought to your knees.

“Fuckin’ love every inch” Harry said, having completely ignored your joke, “Every single part of yeh, yer body and god, yer mind”

His hands cupped the sides of your rib cage, as his lips traveled down your sternum. He seemed lost, completely absorbed. Every time he looked up at you, it was impossible not to notice how out of this world his eyes seemed. Glossy and dark, extravagant green looking to explore more of you. And those were only the times you managed to catch him staring. The pleasure this man provided surpassed the moaning level, he got you working hard not to scream in ecstasy, as his tongue ran laps around your nipples, and the way his lips sucked with that specific amount of pressure. It looked as if he already knew where all your buttons were, he acted as if he knew your body better than you did. And for you, that was a new experience, which would’ve already been too much, even without Harry involved. But seeing your fingers get lost in his absolutely perfect in a messy kind of way locks, as he treated your skin with such refined skill, you found yourself way too close to the edge.

In the high of the moment, probably following an unidentifiable stimulus, you found yourself concentrated on the way his palms felt against your skin. He held you in his arms as if you were the most precious thing he ever laid eyes on. And for some reason, that feeling alone had you skyrocketing.

It was when you moaned out loud, for the first time not holding back, that he finally decided to give you what he promised. 

“Yeh sure this is ok, angel, yeah?” he murmured, looking up at you. 

His light stubble tickled the lower side of your abdomen as his breath barely managed to reach your skin. 

“Yeah” you clumsily nodded, your words coated in fervid enthusiasm.

Something happened. Something clicked inside of him. You saw it in the way his eyes warmed up. For a second he didn’t move, instead he just took in everything that was happening. When he eventually pushed himself up, you expected him to help you or motion for you to undress, but he didn’t. Harry lowered himself on top of you, pressing his chest against your own.

His fingers locked themselves against your chin, “I really wanna fucking do this right for yeh”

His confession took you aback. The seriousness in this tone was not something you anticipated. At first, he was the one who made it all seem like a meaningless game, yet right now, it seemed as though he fell into his own trap. 

All you could do was nod. Nod in approval, nod as a sign for him to keep going. As a promise that it was all ok. This attitude of his was not something you signed up for. Even if it looked like the beginning of what you always wanted, it also felt a little bit too sudden.

“Come here” you cooed, cupping his cheeks in a loving manner.

In an instant, he leaned into your touch, his skin burning against your damp palms. For the x-th time that evening, his lips melted onto yours, but something felt different. But you kept going, allowed the moment to carry you further without giving yourself the burden of dictating a direction. 

And seconds passed, and with each one, his touch became more and more aggravated. You could feel his need, and you have loved to think that what you were feeling from him was love, but it was just too big of a step to take right now. Not too shortly after, the situation escalated towards the point you left off earlier. You let him take the lead, and he soon returned to his usual self.

Harry made his way down your body through a chain of lingering kisses, each one of them awakening yet another side of you. This time, you were given no time to prepare. His experienced hands grabbed your thighs, groping their way up to your hips. Although it was fairly fast, it felt like an eternity. You breathing picked up when his fingers hooked themselves into the waistband of your leggings, and without even thinking about it, you pushed yourself up, allowing him to take them off. 

Now, you hadn’t seen this coming, because if you had, you probably would have chosen to wear something less embarrassing than your Superman underwear. Your cheek heated up as if it was the first time a man had seen you naked, and all your insecurities washed over you. None of those thoughts crossed Harry’s mind though. 

He just smiled - a gesture whose roots you’d never know. 

Harry positioned himself between your legs, his fingers gingerly tracing up and down your outer thighs. “Really fucken gorgeous, yeh know tha’?”

His compliments have never been this hard to receive, “Shut up” you chuckled, rolling your eyes as you couldn't help but squirm under his stare.

“Wha’?” Harry grinned, leaning his head to the side as he let his teasing side take over, 

“Tha’ tinder fuckface never told yeh just how perfect yeh look?”

“This is still about him, huh?”

“It’s about yeh, love” Harry rolled his eyes, letting his nails graze your skin, “Always been about yeh, always will be”

With each word that let his mouth, he leaned down, lower and lower, until every inch of his body was pressing against your own. He dominated the moment, and you love it.

When he engulfed your lips into a kiss, his right hand traveled between your legs. That alone made your core vibrate, and knowing there was no way to hide your enthusiasm, made you smile.

You felt the back of his fingers trace up and down your opening, and his words confirmed your suspicions. He pulled away from your lips just enough so he could speak, but he was still too close for you to properly see his features - he was just a few literal inches away, “I can’t wait to taste yeh, doll”

The grin on his lips and the pride of his tone, had a visible effect on you. The hairs on your body stood up in anticipation, and you couldn’t help but arch your back and close your legs around him. You kissed him back, and this time, it was on.

As his tongue pushed past your lips, Harry’s hands lewdly traveled down your sides, caressing every inch of exposed skin they found in their way. You didn’t see the eagerness coming, but when he reached between your legs, the flimsy material of your underwear didn’t even begin to come in his way. He shoved his hand under your panties, his fingers instantly coming in contact with your opening.

It was solely the emotional value of the moment that made you nearly gasp. Harry took his sweet damn time, as if you needed any more foreplay. The pads of his fingers gingerly traced up and down your opening a few times, before coming back up again to rest against your clit. It was soft and easy at the beginning, but the feather light touch of his fingers started gaining more and more pressure as subtle circular movements started to form.

When you looked up at him, you were met with the mess of curls that had fallen onto his forehead as he had his head hanging low, with his eyes trained between your bodies. With a gentle nudge against his chin, you prompted him to look up. At first he seemed a bit disoriented, but a wicked grin shortly appeared on his lips. It made you smile.

He was the one to resume the kiss, making it gentle this time - in perfect contrast with the action of his fingers, as he slowly made his way past your folds. When the first finger went in, you curled the corners of your mouth in anticipation. It felt fine, but it was just the tip of the iceberg and you knew it. Eager for more, you allowed your teeth to lewdly sink into his lower lip, willing to show him you wanted more. 

With a grunt, Harry shuffled a bit, his knees bucking into your hips. The deep breath he released tickled your skin, but you weren’t going to let this go. As you forced your teeth just a bit deeper into his plush skin, Harry let his forehead fall against yours. 

His tongue neatly traced along your upper lip, and you thought it was in response to your actions. And this erroneous thought kept you from anticipating his next move. When Harry pushed one more finger in, your senses went mad, and the simple fact that he didn't give you too much time to adjust before he pushed a third finger in, rocked you completely. 

You moaned in return and arched your back.

"I got yeh, baby girl" he whispered softly, "Look at me, I got yeh, ok?"

After receiving an enthusiastic nod from you, Harry made his way down your body. This time, he swiftly shuffled to the side, pulling your legs together and riding you of the unnecessary piece of underwear you still had on.

Not waiting for him to take control, you spread your legs, and feasted on the carnal look he had in his eyes as he looked down at your body. He didn’t waste any time before finding the perfect spot between your legs. Your whole body shivered as he leaned his head to the side, his light stubble tickling its way down the inside of your thighs. 

And following the rough feeling of the still shy beard you didn’t think he was able to grow, when his soft lips brushed against your skin, you involuntarily clenched. You bucked your hips and your legs tried, but to no avail, to close the distance between one another. You wanted more - needed more. And he noticed it.

Looking down along your body, you could only see the top of his head. And his fingers, pressing into the skin of your legs. And the tip of his nose as he proceeded to tease you into oblivion with millions of kisses, each of them nothing less than heavenly, but still, nothing compared to what you knew was coming next. The only warning he gave you as a hurried grin, and it was nowhere near enough.

It was on. Elegantly, but with traces of dominance in his touch, and with two fingers, Harry spread your pussy wide open, his tongue lewdly slipping right inside you. The contact and the buildup made you gasp. Had you not been so over the moon and distracted already, you’d have heard him snicker in response to the sound you just made. But you were too caught up. You felt him on every inch of your body, and the signals your core were sending you, were not what you wanted.

You wanted this to last. To have him go at it, lapping at your core for hours. To feel his tongue wag until your senses went numb.It might have been the dry spell that was forced upon you as the pandemic overtook your life, or the timeless, painful crush you’ve had on him for years, but you were already on the edge.

Trying hard to make the moment last, you curled your pointer finger and shoved it into your mouth, biting down hard. Your back arched dangerously as your head flew back, but it all just worked in his favour. Your pleasure was building up, and the careful, experienced movement of Harry’s tongue against your clit was only gaining momentum.

“Yeh taste like fucking heaven but I think yeh already knew tha’” he said, for a second pulling away from your core and giving you a chance to catch your breath.

All you managed was a pathetic excuse of a nod, along with a shy roll of your eyes.

“None of tha’” Harry laughed, licking his lips, “Don’t care how close yeh are, ‘m not gonna stop until yeh moan my name, love”

“Jesus christ, Harry!” you panted, shaking your head.

He responded in a similar manner, and again, with no warning whatsoever, he went back in. This short break allowed you to regain your composure, even if it was just a tiny bit. Your excitement, although still there and just as consuming, was easier to control now. You felt his touch all throughout your body, his tongue tickling all your senses.

What brought you closer into the moment was the feeling of his hands, as he grabbed your thighs and pushed your legs up onto his shoulders. For whatever reason, this felt even more intimate, and as his fingers sank into your flesh, you felt your engines start up again.

The delicate flicks of his tongue were getting more and more aggravated by the second, and now it was close to impossible to keep calm. Sweaty palms gripping tirelessly into the cushions under you, your back under constant strain, your eyes squeezed shut - he had you entirely.

And as if that wasn’t enough, he went further. Harry pushed one finger inside of you, moving his lips up to fully concentrate on your clit. His tongue prepared you, got you all ready and wanting, and then, he wrapped his lips around your bundle of nerves and sucked - gently and with a minimal amount of pressure, but god-

“Fuck, Harry-” you called out. It was more of a cry, choked back in the depths of your throat, all breathy and muffled.

“Come on, angel” Harry whispered.

As you looked down, past your heaving chest, your eyes landed conveniently on the top of his head. Complete chaos - his unruly curls tickled the inside of your thighs, as his fingers dug into your flesh. The two rings he never takes off were sure to leave proud indents on your skin.

Harry sucked at your bundle of nerves, the eager touch of his tongue awakening absolutely every need inside your being. Add the experienced pumps of his fingers and the fact that this was Harry Styles and none other, and you were done.

With each passing second you started to lose more and more of the control you had on your body. Sweating nervously out of every pore of your body, you squirmed under his weight hoping you’d make the moment last.

“‘S good, love, isn’t it?” Harry smirked for just about a second, “I can see yeh, yeh’re a mess fo’ me”

“Fuck” you whined, covering your face with your right palm as your head tilted backwards, “Shut up”

“Oh!” Harry faked surprise, “Gettin’ cocky?”

As he spoke, Harry curled his fingers inside your pussy; maybe intentionally - maybe by chance, hitting all the right spots and making you moan out loud.

“I’ll take tha’ as an apology”

You scoffed.

Harry shook his head. When you looked down at him again, you caught him licking his lips. It was obvious he waited for you to catch him doing that.

Already at the edge of your self control, you curled your fingers into his hair, motioning for him to resume his work. He followed your lead without any complaints, and when his bottom teeth grazed your clit, even if it was light as a feather you lost it.

Your mind became numb, drunk on the pleasure he provided. Your eyes rolled back as you enjoyed every second of your high. Harry kept you spiraling, continuing to lap at your core as the muscles of your legs tensed uncontrollably around his frame.

“Holy fuck-” you breathed out, voice shaky and wounded.

He made sure to milk every ounce of pleasure out of your being, leaving you a heaving mess under his stare.

Harry pushed himself up, nonchalantly wiping his chin, his eyes not allowing yours to look away.

As you gathered yourself and worked on bringing your breathing back to normal, there was only one thought going on inside your head - that it would only be fair if you reciprocate the gesture. Thinking about it was enough to make your core buzz again, but you didn’t have it in you to bring it up, and instead hoped he’d show he wished things didn’t stop either.

But he didn’t.

However, you got to kiss him again. And no matter how badly you wanted to keep the atmosphere on fire, he had other plans. 

“Did I take good care of yeh?” Harry asked as he leaned down beside you. His hand found your cheek, keeping you in place for another longing kiss, “Did I do yeh right?”

You nodded against his lips, not willing to actually word the answer.

His chuckle made it clear that the point got through. And for a second it seemed as if the night wasn’t done. None of you was willing to pull away, and allowed the minutes to go by without a care in the world, lost in each other’s arms.

“Freakin’ love yeh, angel” Harry said.

It wasn’t the first time you’d hear this coming out of his mouth, but you couldn’t help but smile thinking this time it was meant in a different manner. You answered him by cuddling deeper into his chest, and that was a moment you wouldn’t have traded for the world.

And you fell asleep like that. No matter how big and luxurious your couch was, you still spent the night glued to one another. Harry felt every calm breath of yours on his skin and everytime he moved a bit to adjust his position, his hold tightened around you to make sure he wasn’t pushing you away.

After what was probably the best sleep you’d gotten in the whole year of 2020, morning came around. Actually it was lunch time, if we’re being generous. The sun was high up, proudly making its way into your living room, past the curtains to forgot to draw the other night.

When you awoke, Harry wasn’t there anymore. However, panic didn’t have the time to settle in as you heard movement coming from the kitchen, and the strong smell of coffee reached your nose in no time.

You got up from the couch, with herds of butterflies in your stomach. Harry’s words from last night still echoed in your head, and even now, with no alcohol in your system, they managed to bring goosebumps all over your skin.

“When did you get up?”

That was how you made your presence known.

Harry turned around with a smile on his face. He had a bag of avocados tucked under his arm, as he typed away on his phone. His undone pants were hanging onto his thighs for dear life, and the only other piece of fabric on his body was a thin, brown hair tie around his wrist. There were a few purple marks along his collar bones and his hair looked rougher than usual, things which deep down, shook you up a bit.

 “Wanted to take yeh out fo’ breakfast, but I gotta leave in like an hour, so I figured this should do”

“Yeah, yeah sure” you agreed, “It’s perfect”

“Would’ve done mo’, but Y/n, yeh have no food in this house”

You laughed, walking over to slump down into one of the chairs, “Didn’t get a chance to get any perishables”

“You got some” Harry chuckled, “You got weeks’ worth of everything you need to make guacamole and pancakes”

“I have no idea how that happened, those will spoil” you shook your head, “You can take some of them actually”

“Or I could just come over”

“Even better”

The food was ready in no time. Harry had everything done and set while you washed up a bit, and after that, you both sat down to eat. Minimal and light, but still, there was a weight in the pit of your stomach.

“About last night-” Harry began to say, but you tried to stop him.

“You don’t have to-”

“We kinda do, love” he smiled, “I need to apologise, angel”

You squinted your eyes, “For?”

“I don’t really have t’ apologise fo’ what I said because I meant every word” Harry slowly said, as if he has a hard time putting his thoughts together, “I jus’ wish I hadn’t said it like tha’ though”

“Like what?” you questioned, a bit lost.

“Like I had the right to say that kind of crap” he laughed. It was nervous laughter, like he was afraid of what was coming next, “I do fucking love yeh, but I shouldn’t have assumed you wanted to hear that”

“What are you talking about, I don’t understand” you groaned, growing a bit tired of the impatience he brought upon you.

“You’re my best friend, ok?” he sighed, “That’s all we are, Y/n, and that was not supposed to happen”

The food got lodged in your throat, and you felt like if you didn’t stand up, you’d no longer be able to breathe. “It was your idea” you scoffed.

Harry’s eyes followed your frame, but he remained seated, “I know”

“So what changed? If anything even changed. I don’t understand what the problem is. You regret we did what we did-”

“I don’t regret anything” Harry butted it.

“You said it was not supposed to happen!” you exclaimed, rolling your eyes as you walked over to the sink, just to make yourself useful and to stop just standing in front of him.

“The things I said to you-” he said sternly, pushing his chair back and throwing his hands into the air, “I shouldn’t have said those, ok? It doesn’t matter who meant what, I told you things that-”

“What did you tell me that’s bothering you so much?” you almost yelled, annoyance dripping out of your pores. You walked over to him, and he closed the distance by standing up.

“I-” Harry stuttered, playing with his hair to buy himself some more time. “All the-”

“What?” you pushed, “That you like everything about me? That’s what you regret saying? And what else?”

“God” he groaned, “I don’t regret saying tha’, it’s just tha’ it wasn’t my place to say it”

You fell silent.

“If I were you... I’d want to hear those things from someone that is more than just a friend to me” he confessed.

“And you can’t be that to me? More than a friend?”

After a few seconds of painful silence, realization hit him, “Y/n…”

He did reach out. He took a step towards you but you stepped back. The remorse in his tone was too painful to ignore. So you moved away from him and slowly made your way out of the kitchen.

“Y/n!” Harry called, following you.

“Just go”

“Please...”

“Please what?” you shook your head, but he didn’t have the words you needed to hear.

“I’m sorry”

“It’s fucking fine” you sighed, walking backwards towards your room, “Just show yourself out”

[gureishi]

Hello! Hope you are well! I love the new prompt list! I was hoping to ask for Zen with “You left your mark on me” thank you so much and have a good day 🤗

Thank you for this wonderful request, my dear!

Did I take this prompt too literally? Perhaps. But boy did I GRIN the whole time i was writing about it. I really hope this brings you a lil joy today~

thirteen: left your mark on me

Zen X Reader, T, words: 1928

・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・

He’s already long gone when you wake up. You have a vague, sleepy memory of him kissing you goodbye when it was still dark out—now, the sun pours through the window and your alarm jolts you violently from a dream.

It’s 8 am on a Sunday—in other words, a wildly inappropriate time to be awake, in your opinion. You rub your tired eyes with one balled fist. Why on earth did you even set an alarm today?

You’re yawning and considering just curling back up under the covers when you remember: the interview! Of course.

You stumble out of bed, dragging your blanket with you, and make your way into the living room. There are several shirts draped over the back of the couch; you can picture him so easily, with his languid early-morning eyes and his hair untied, trying on each shirt in turn and peering into the mirror—anxiously twisting to see himself from every angle, agonizing over the choice.

You turn on the TV and flop onto the couch, pulling the blanket around your shoulders. You check your phone: it’s only 8:05, so they should still be doing the intro.

The TV’s already on the right channel, and you smile, certain he set it that way before leaving this morning. He doesn’t always tell you how important it is to him that you watch—“Nothing would make me happier,” he says, “but I don’t want you to feel any pressure”—but you know what it means to him. And this is a big national news program, the kind millions of people will watch. He’ll be checking his phone right now, pacing in the studio, looking for a message from you.

You swipe to your first contact and send him a text. “I’m watching, babe,” you write. “Can’t wait.”

Just as you’re weighing whether or not you have time to make some coffee before he’s on, you hear his name; as usual, and even after all this time, your stomach does a little somersault.

He strides on screen, positively resplendent in a corduroy double-breasted blazer (good choice, you think), his hair tossed over his shoulder, glistening under the studio lights. He reaches for the host’s hand and shakes it gently. He’s got it down, you think: the amiable manner, the cool handshake, the half-smile.

The host makes a joke and he laughs lightheartedly, tossing his head back in way that’s somehow as natural as it is artful. And that’s when you see it.

Your mouth falls open. You shoot up off the couch, automatically moving closer to the screen for a better look. You rub your eyes; try rubbing the spot on the TV screen, too. But it’s undeniable

There is, without a doubt, a small, circular bruise on the side of his neck—just the size and shape of your mouth.

You lift a shaking hand to your face. No way. NO WAY.

You fall back onto the couch; he’s saying something now, answering a question about his transition from stage to film, but you barely hear him. If he was anyone else, this would be meaningless—he’s an adult living with his partner, after all, and there’s nothing particularly noteworthy about a little love bite. But he’s him. And he’s on national TV.

Your phone is already buzzing. Nervously, you swipe away the new notifications and return to your thread with him.

“Zen,” you text him. And again. “Zen. Zen. Zen.”

He doesn’t answer, of course; on screen, he’s grinning, nodding as the host makes a comment about his last movie. Reluctantly, you swipe back to your notifications.

There are several text from his publicist, of course. The first one says “Are you serious?!” and the second says “How did you let this happen?” You don’t look at the third or fourth.

There are texts from his agent and her assistant, too. His agent’s text just says “Why????” and her assistant has followed up with a longer and more formally-worded message.

You groan. This is tricky territory: as his manager, it’s at least partly your responsibility to keep him from going on TV with a freaking hickey on his neck. And as his partner, it’s certainly up to you to not bite him.

You set your phone down, deciding to give everyone a few minutes to calm down before you answer. What can you even say? You honestly have no memory of leaving the bruise on his neck, but you imagine (blushing a little) that it must have happened the previous night, or you would’ve noticed sooner. If you’d just woken up when he was leaving this morning, maybe you would have seen it, would have warned him…?

Your phone is still buzzing and you glance down at it, hoping—inexplicably—that it’s him, though you can see clearly that he’s still live on air. It’s his publicist again.

“Check twitter,” she says. Oh no.

With a mixture of dread and an almost masochistic fascination, you open the twitter app. You’re already following his hashtag, of course, and—oh no—you see his name again and again on your feed.

You scan the top tweets, your heart thudding hollowly in your chest. The tone is generally amused—“Zen on tv with giant hickey lolololol”—but still, you’re horrified. He’s trending.

Begrudgingly, you start to answer the texts from his team. No, you didn’t notice it; yes, you would have told him if you had; no, you haven’t heard from him yet—he’s literally still on live TV.

You try to focus on the interview. He’s talking about his new movie now, gesturing with those long, beautiful hands. If you squint, you can’t really see the mark on his neck, and you wonder if it’s really that noticeable. Based on your twitter feed: yes.

He’s standing now, shaking the host’s hand again, and the studio audience is clapping, and oh, you’re so relieved it’s over. You twist the blanket nervously between your fingers as the screen goes to a commercial. You mute it, let your eyes drift shut. Maybe this was all a dream.

Your phone buzzing again startles you—not a dream. It’s him, calling you mere seconds after stepping off camera, and you answer right away, nervous fingers slipping over your phone screen.

“Hi, babe!” he chirps, full of energy. It’s his just-got-off-stage voice.

You hate to burst his bubble, but: “Did you, by any chance, look at your texts, hun?” you ask him.

“Nope! I wanted to call you right away! How was it? How was I?”

“Zen…” It’s not like him to be so oblivious; is it possible that, nervous as he was this morning, he really just didn’t notice? “Um, you didn’t happen to…that is, the makeup artist didn’t say anything to you, did they?”

“Makeup artist?” He hums in confusion. He’s going to make you say it.

“There’s a huge hickey on your neck and everyone is talking about it,” you blurt out in one breath. He pauses and you think he’s going to react with surprise, shock, concern.

Instead, he laughs. Laughs.

“You saw it, huh?” He’s talking quietly, probably now in the dressing room, but there’s no anxiety in his voice. He sounds almost…pleased.

“Yes, baby. Everyone saw it.”

He’s still laughing, a kind of satisfied chuckle.. “Good,” he says.

You don’t know what to do with him. You feel your phone continuing to buzz even as you’re talking to him—it’s got to be the publicist, the agent, all the assistants.

“So just so we’re clear,” you say slowly. “You knew it was there and you intentionally didn’t try to cover it.”

“Yep!” You hear people chattering behind him; you can picture him smiling to himself as he strolls through the dressing room, packed with people, colorful and chaotic. Inexplicably, in the midst of all this, he sounds so very calm.

“Babe, everyone on the internet is panicking. Your publicist is panicking. You know she wants you to be more private, wants you to stop, like…throwing my name around in interviews.”

“I never said your name,” he says proudly.

“Zen…”

“Listen,” he says, his voice taking on a more serious tone. He’s practically whispering now; you suppose he’s hidden himself away in a back corner of the dressing room to talk to you. “I know how my publicist feels, and I don’t want to upset her or anything. But I can’t stand it anymore.”

That’s a private voice, a “just us” voice—one you’re used to hearing murmured into your shoulder as he lays in bed beside you at night.

“Can’t stand what?” You don’t know why, but now you’re whispering, too.

“All this secrecy,” he says. “Babe, I want to…I want to run through the streets shouting about you. I want to tell everyone in the world how desperately I adore you.”

You can’t help it: you smile. 

“You just want to break the rules,” you tease, and he laughs again, more quietly.

“No,” he says. “I just want to make sure everyone knows who I belong to.”

“Babe…” You know you should argue; you’re his manager, for god’s sake. You should scold him, apologize for leaving the mark in the first place, make him promise not to pull something like this again. But you don’t have it in you.

“I’ll take the blame,” he says. “I’ll tell my publicist and my agent and anyone else who asks that it was just a silly mistake, that I didn’t even notice it. I’ll tell them whatever I have to, and it’ll blow over. But I just…I needed to do this. Do you understand?”

And you do. How could you not?

Much as you’d like to, you can’t deny the twinge you feel in your gut when interviewers ask him about his on-screen chemistry with some glamorous co-star or other and he has to laugh and smile politely and give them a vague response; you can’t deny, either, the sinking feeling you get when you read speculations online about whether he looked at so-and-so for a moment too long in whatever behind-the-scenes footage. It makes you want to scream.

But this…

Today, a huge percentage of the country saw him live with the imprint of your teeth on his skin. And they can wonder and deliberate about who gave him that mark all they want; it doesn’t matter, because you know. You were the one who grazed his sensitive skin with your teeth, making him squirm, moaning your name.

“I do,” you tell him. “And you did look very cute.

“Just cute?” he whines.

“Beautiful, and charming, and clever, and captivating. As always.”

“If you say so.” You can hear the kind of face he’s making—soft smile, eyes sparkling. “And don’t worry about twitter or whatever, darling. What’s that saying? Any press is good press.”

He’s not wrong, you think—trending on twitter can only help him, in the long run; his publicist will come around sometime tomorrow when she sees the inevitable bump in ad revenue. It’s not like he’s caused any harm.

Suddenly, you want to see him. You want to throw yourself against his chest and feel those long fingers on the exposed skin at the back of your neck.

“When will you be home?” you ask him.

“Maybe an hour. You need something, babe?”

You clutch your phone with buzzing fingers, anticipation pooling in the pit of your stomach. “Yes,” you say. “You.”

★・・・・・・★・・・・・・★・・・・・・★

Let me know if you’d like to be added to my taglist!

@currentlyprocrastinating @thesirenwashere  @ultrasupernini @cro0kedme @otomefoxystar @dawn-skies06 @nad-zeta @hunterelys

[vb-hcs]

first years x groupchats

hii （‐＾▽＾‐）i have a quick question i was wondering if anyone has the answer to !! i’d really like to make those fake texts posts/memes (?) but idk how 👉👈 i thought it was an app but i can’t seem to find it. if anyone knows i’d really appreciate if you could lmk !! thank you for reading <3

hinata

sends 3 memes to the chat and gets ignored

he texts waaaay too much, if he doesn’t need a reply to whatever he’s saying he’s probably not getting one

always has to send his “gm” and “gn” 🥺 it’s too sweet so usually yachi and maybe yamaguchi will reply

he !! replies !! to !! every !! text !! he !! sees !!

vv dependable if someone needs something !! even if it’s tsukishima

he keeps trying to add his friends kenma into that chat but no one knows who they are and it’s vv awkward

tsukishima

he does not want to be here

he’s tried to leave but yams keeps adding him back

will almost never respond unless he’s mocking someone

will also almost never text first unless he’s making fun of someone

“pff i just saw kageyama buy a drink from the vending machine and drop it and spill it everywhere lmaoo” “he’s just standing there staring at lmaooo he’s holding up line in fromt of te vendin mac”

the only time he’ll usually text first is if he’s complaining about something that happened during the day and just wants to spread the negativity around

had the chat muted for a reeeeaaaallly long time

kageyama

like tsukki, almost never uses the groupchat (he tries his best)

but there’s v little expectation for him to ever be in the groupchat

he only ever uses it if he 1) is not busy and has time to chat [not often] or 2) has a question/needs help w something

other than that he’s pretty quiet

he’s definitely the type to reach out to one person through the group chat. “hey yamaguchi do you kno-“

like you could just text them instead of using the groupchat

especially when you left hinata on read six hours ago :/

yamaguchi

uses the gc pretty often and chats w hinata and yachi a lot

100% for hinata’s nonsensical memes

will often encourage him by sending some back

he’s a little bit of a spam texter especially if he’s in the middle of a conversation w someone

other than that he will not hesitate to send like six texts in a row if he’s lonely and wants someone to respond

yachi

in the gc pretty often, usually one of the first to respond

also lowkey puts the gc on mute sometimes

(she just doesn’t like the spam notifications when ppl are arguing, it always happens when she’s in the middle of something important)

the queen of reaction memes !! everyone steals them from her and reuses them !!

she’s the second most likely to spam text but only if she’s freaking out about something

[lawrenceseitz22]

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 191

Click on the video above to watch Episode 191 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 https://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

  Announcement

Adam: Hey everybody. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts, episode 191, the question where I guarantee it, if you’re watching this, you can get your question answered, because right now there are almost no questions because of a little error that somebody made. It’s not important who, but let’s go and say hello to everyone real quick. Hopefully, you’re getting an announcement on YouTube or you’re getting a notification. You might be watching this later, in which case, just ignore all this stuff about people making mistakes. Chris, how you doing, man?

Chris: Good. Happy to have summer finally in Europe.

Adam: Oh, nice. It’s finally warming up there?

Chris: Yep.

Adam: Good deal, good deal. Hernan, how about you? Is it nice and cold down there?

Hernan: Yeah. Over here, it’s freezing, man. I’m freezing my ass and overdressed, whatever, but I’m super excited to be here anyway, so that doesn’t stop us.

Adam: Marco, you’re not freezing your ass off, are you?

Marco: Never. Guys, for some reason, we’re not transmitting this Hangout into the Google Plus page. It’s still 190.

Bradley: That’s my fault. Standby.

Adam: Got you. Well, we won’t ask Bradley how he’s doing, because I don’t want to divide up his attention, but we do have a few announcements. Real quick, I wanted to say we’re going to put the link on the page and you’ll be able to find it in the description if you’re watching this later on YouTube, but our live event is a go, The Semantic Mastery Live.

October, the weekend of October 20th, 21st, we’ve already announced one of the special guest speakers. In addition to seeing all of our lovely faces at some point during the event, also Jeffrey Smith of SEO Boot Camp will be joining us and we’re going to have a couple more that we’re holding back.

We’re teasing it a little bit, but that is a go, so I’ll pop the link on here if you want to go and grab your ticket now. Ticket prices are definitely going to go up as time goes on. We want to help out the people who jump on this early and it is capped at a total of 25. Don’t put it off too long. It will be in the Washington DC area and we’re getting ready to lock down our event venue probably in the next week or two.

Bradley: Page is updated.

Adam: All right. As far as other announcements, you guys, we got a lot. I’m going to pass it off. Marco, is there anything we want to say specifically?

Marco: No. We’re moving forward, guys. The Google My Business auto-poster is ready. It has some awesome features. People have a long way to catch up. I know there’s some stuff being put out. It’s [inaudible 00:02:42]. You can get an RSS feed on anyone who’s in Syndication Academy or knows about us. You know how wicked RSS feeds can be, how they can help amplify your content, how they can help you with backlinks, but the most interesting thing we’re doing is we’re pulling in or we should have the ability in the next few days to pull in the RSS feed from the website so that all you would literally have to do is post from your website and you can amplify that content into post. If not, we do have the auto-poster, where you can go in and setup posts well ahead of time.

We also have YouTube views. That’s currently working. It’s working really well to push up videos, to get it ranked. Now, of course, once you start pushing videos, you should continue pushing videos to it to keep it ranked until it picks up its own steam. It’ll pick up steam and stay where it’s supposed to stay. It’ll stay ranked. The great thing about this is that since it’s real people, they’ll interact with your channel, so they’ll send all kinds of signals.

I keep telling people, the caveat in this is that you have to send them to a quality video. I always ask the question, “What’s a quality video?” Well, a quality video, if you look at your competition as a video that has a bunch of likes, it has a bunch of watch time, it has a bunch of subscribers, that’s a quality video. Look at what your competition is doing for that keyword and you mimic that, but do them one better. Better production, a better speaker, better audio quality, whatever it is that you need to do to grab the attention of your viewers.

There’s so many things coming. Video carpet bomb is coming. We were just talking about it. The done for you Google My Business services, that’s coming. The VA is almost trained. I’m working with her daily on this task. Cora reports are going to be available. What else do we have? Drive Stacks, guys. Drive Stacks, the Semantic Mastery way, with my original VA, the VA that I originally trained will be available through our marketplace. Market, it’s coming. Just stay tuned. Keep coming back and we’ll have news as everything develops, but we hope to have at least some of the products available by the end of the week. That’ll be on you to send the email to let people know, “Hey, it’s ready, so go get it.”

Adam: Awesome. Sorry about that. I was muted real quick. Also, I wanted to let everyone know, if you missed the webinar, we have a webinar replay. I’m not going to post the link here because if you’re on our email list, then you are very special and you’re going to get a link to check out the bundle, but there was a great webinar on Monday going into detail about how you can use some of the most powerful training that we have and really combine that.

We’re going to have some more information coming out about that. We’ll just post the link so you can go and grab that if you’re interested in taking advantage. It’s a special Fourth of July kind of holiday offer, and then we’ll have a little bit, like I said, of followup in the coming days. A lot of people are taking some time off, heading out to the beach, doing whatever. If you got some time you can squeak away from the family or make an excuse, you might want to go check out the replay over the next couple of days.

Bradley: I can tell having changed Hump Day Hangouts from Wednesday to Tuesday for this week, we’ve got a lot less viewers on it right now than we typically do, so it’s just timing. I’m glad that unfortunately, we didn’t have all the questions directed to the right place this time. That’s on our end, but we got a few questions. Do we have any other announcements, guys?

Adam: I’m good. How about you guys?

Hernan: I just wanted to reiterate that go ahead and grab your tickets for the [inaudible 00:06:51] Live 2018 because it’s going to depend on that. It’s going to depend on that. I’m really looking forward to seeing you guys, so yeah, I just wanted to repeat that once again.

Adam: Okay, cool.

Bradley: That’s it. We can get into it, huh?

Adam: Yeah, let’s do it.

Bradley: Let’s do it. All right, well, we don’t have a lot of questions, so we’re hoping that some of you guys that are here have some questions and you post them on the page. Again, that was our fault, but it is what it is, so we’re going to run with what we got. I know Adam posted a couple questions that he yanked from one of the Facebook groups, so we’ll start with those. I’ll grab the screen.

Is It Possible To Spread Authority To Multiple Root Domains From One Authority Domain Via Subdomain Redirects?

All right, so from the Facebook group. “Looking for insights on an idea. I wanted to test this, but asking is more efficient. Is the following possible? I have site.com and site.com has authority.” IDA, DR, okay. “I have a sub-domain on site.com, subdomain1.site.com. Sub-domain carries authority from site, correct?” Carry domain authority, but not necessarily page authority, but you’re right.

“Can I create a redirect from subdomain1.site.com to secondsite.com while site.com stays live and then secondsite.com gets authority from subdomain1.site.com?” Questions like this are hard to read. “Both secondsite.com and site have authority. In other words, is it possible to spread authority to multiple domains from one authority domain via sub-domain redirects?” Yes. “I’m doubting this works, but also read some things that indicate it might work.”

It does work. It does absolutely work. There’s a little bit of a loss. That’s called domain authority manipulation, guys. That’s like 2012 stuff. That’s the stuff that we did that worked really freaking well in like 2012, ‘13 timeframe. There’s still a little bit of benefit to pushing domain authority, guys, but honestly, you can set that up. It will work. There’s a little bit of a loss between redirects when pushing domain authority. It will absolutely increase your domain authority from your sub-domain that you direct to another root domain.

My point is, I’m not sure what your end goal is. Why do you want to push this domain authority to that other domain? Domain authority manipulation as a ranking factor is almost obsolete. I guess there might be some benefit to it, but you have to have really high DA numbers for that to really have an effect. It’s much more about relevancy than it is about domain metrics, which are proprietary metrics, right? Marco, I’ll let you comment on that a little bit, but again, look, if you want to do it, yes, it will help to boost domain authority from the second site.

There is a little bit of a loss, so what I’m saying is if you’ve got a 42 domain authority on your root domain and you try to push that over to a second site via sub-domain or any way you want to do it, it really doesn’t matter, but via a sub-domain redirect, you’ll likely fall somewhere in the 30s, the mid 30s with domain authority. It’s not going to happen overnight. When I used to do a lot of domain authority manipulation, we used to do a lot of it. The maws numbers would refresh, I can’t remember, I think it was every other month, every two months.

Marco: Every 90 days.

Bradley: Every 90 days. Okay. If we would do a redirect, like for example, we called it link laundering, and we’d do double 301 redirects from spam domains. We would go find expired domains that were on the closeout because they went through auction and they were really shitty, spammy domains. A lot of the times, they’re Chinese domains that would have hundreds, sometimes thousands or even tens of thousands of sub-domains. The dropped domain would have tens of thousands, sometimes, anywhere between hundreds to tens of thousands of sub-domains.

This is what we used to do and it worked really well. We would go buy a domain, buy one of those domains, and then we would set up a redirect script, a catch all or wild card redirect via HT access. We’d point the domain to a host, a C panel, and then we would set up an HT access file that would do a wild card sub-domain redirect to whatever we wanted to, and we would push domain authority.

We would do what’s called a double 301 redirect, so we would redirect it through one domain first and then push it over to our final target URL. I’d get domains that had 55, 60 domain authority mostly because of all the accumulated domain authority from all the sub-domains, right? We’d do the redirect and then push it over to a brand new domain and I could get my domain authority to jump from one, which is a brand new registered domain, to mid-40s usually within one maws cycle refresh, but sometimes it would take two. It would take anywhere between 90 days, so three months, to six months, to see that kind of a push. Again, I’ve found over the years that using that is purely like a ranking method, which used to work phenomenally. It really is ineffective at this point.

The only thing I would suggest is like I said, or what I would add to this, is that if you have really high domain authority and you can push some of that to another domain, it will help it to respond better to other off page signals, but that’s about it. Again, it’s not something that I even bother doing anymore. I don’t even look at domain authority and page authority numbers anymore, honestly. If you want to do it, it will work. Marco, what are your comments on this?

Marco: I would say he’s better off concentrating on relevance. If they’re relevant, then you can throw DA and domain authority and page authority out the window and push relevance. You could even throw a Drive Stack. Wherever you’re directing, you could put a Drive Stack as buffer and redirect to the Drive Stack and the Drive Stack will then push the power over to the new site with even more relevance. In the Drive Stack, you could push just tons of relevance in there whether you want keyword relevance, what do you call it, keyword plus URL, brand plus keyword relevance. What you really want is that brand plus keyword relevance.

Bradley: Right.

Marco: What you want to become is you want to become the keyword for whatever that niche is, so when people start thinking about those keywords, they don’t necessarily think about the keywords, but they think about your brand. This is where I tell people, Coca-Cola, Xerox, Band-Aid, Scotch Tape, all of these people have done fabulous branding where they become the brand for those keywords.

I know it’s not simple to do and we don’t have the deep pockets, but a way to start doing that is by relevance. How we do it, how we take advantage of it is by going into a Drive Stack and creating all of that keyword relevance which relates to the brand, and then we push maybe [inaudible 00:14:11] which will flow into the website, or maybe we’ll go direct to the website. We’ll go to the Google My Business thing.

There are so many ways to take advantage of this, but you’re pushing relevance. Think metrics. DA is a third party metric. Trust flow and citation flow, third party metrics. We don’t bother with that. What we look for is relevance and as long as the on page is tight on both websites, they will both benefit.

I could go even further, but then I’d be getting stuff that’s only in RYS Academy Reloaded. I could start talking all kind of things about embeds and the nasty stuff that you can do with embeds, but again, as I always say, we’d be doing the people that pay for the information a disservice by giving it away for free.

Hernan: If I may add real quick, that was one of the main reasons, the spam, when we just throw spam on the domain, we’ll rank. We will get higher domain authority, or we would do the sub-domain manipulation and whatnot, and that was one of the reasons why we stopped paying attention that much to domain authority and page authority, because they were so easy to manipulate.

That’s why we migrated to [inaudible 00:15:28] initially, and then we had to develop, as Marco was saying, relevancy and trust and authority as our own metics, our own way of doing things, because it was so easy. Again, you would have these Chinese domains with, I don’t know, 60 domain authority, and they were all spam. That’s one of the reasons, one of the many reasons that we stopped going through those domains.

Also, because maws will start delaying the updates and whatnot, and at some point it became a lot like waiting the page rank update, the public page rank update from Google that would go out every month or so. It became like that, so we stopped paying attention to that altogether and we started focusing a lot more on rankings and actual results.

Bradley: Again, yeah, it’ll work, and what I would recommend if you were trying to push it a second site anyway, guys, remember, if you push domain authority to a sub-domain, it will benefit the entire domain. Remember, domain authority, it’s a site-wide or domain-wide, including all sub-domains, including all inner pages and posts, all of them will benefit from that, will receive the same domain authority.

Instead of pushing from a redirect to a secondsite.com, you could push to a non-indexed sub-domain on that secondsite.com, all right? You do that so that you can set up a sub-domain. You don’t even need to really put a piece of content up on it, but you could. You could set an HTML file to say no index or whatever, and then just point all of it to that specific sub-domain because it will benefit the root without people really being able to see what you’re doing.

Again, I really just think that’s a waste of time unless you’ve got some massive amount of authority on your first site that you’re trying to push, in case it would help a little bit, but you’d have to be really, really high domain authority numbers for that to make much difference now in my opinion based on how the algorithm works now.

Do You Pay For Articles Or Use A Plugin To Pull In Content?

All right, Adam, the next one that he posted was, “Do you guys pay for articles or use a plugin to pull in content? Looking for an alternative for test site than buying articles.” Yeah, content curation. We have a training course specifically all about that. It’s what I’ve been using. I had to figure out a way to develop content for my clients that was cost-effective and efficient without having to be subject matter experts, so I developed a process years ago that I’ve been using ever since 2012.

We’ve got it as a product right now called Content Kingpin, but that’s the same exact content production process that I used for my own agency and countless amount of our members and students have also implemented that into their business for their primary content methods. We just get across the board good results from even our members that have implemented it, as well, or adopted that process, because it works.

It’s basically hands-free content marketing. You could teach a VA to do it, and they don’t have to be subject matter experts. All they have to do is be able to identify and locate content, authority content or just good, relevant content about whatever topic they’re going to be blogging about and then organizing that content in a logical manner and injecting a small amount of their own commentary. That content is more efficient and way better than any sort of shitty content, farmed content that you could buy from the dime a dozen content farms that are out there, that is just spun, rehashed garbage.

Guys, that’s all the content farms do. They don’t write original content. Even if they do, they’re not subject matter experts. If they are, you’re going to pay a premium for it, but even then, a lot of times, guys, all they do is do mashups where they’ll go, scrape five or 10 articles or whatever about whatever topic it is that you requested the article for, and then they’ll put bits and pieces of each article, put them through a spinner, and sometimes they’ll manually edit the spin text or the output file to where it’s a little bit more readable, but a lot of those content farms, you’ll get a lot of errors and stuff that you can clearly see that a spinner was used and they didn’t take the time to manually edit it.

My point is you’re not really buying original content from content farms, anyway. You’re buying garbage. You’re much better off using curated content where you can reference and cite other people’s authority content that is highly relevant from subject matter experts and you’re giving them credit via the attribution link. You’re citing the source, which is required and ethical. It’s the ethical thing to do.

Now, you’ve got good content from subject matter experts that you’re quoting on your own site, giving them credit, and injecting your own commentary. Again, a VA can do that. That’s why we call it Content Kingpin Hands-Free Content Marketing, because it truly is. You can generate a stream or revenue just from selling content marketing services and managing it. It just requires a very, very small amount of management.

Again, that training, Content Kingpin, teaches exactly how to hire the VAs, what to look for, what type of output production you should expect, what to pay them, how to manage it, all of that, guys. All of that is covered in great detail in that course. I highly recommend anybody that needs content for their clients or their own assets, their own digital assets, check that out because it’s the exact same method we use, all right?

Do We Have To Worry About Stock Photo Copyright Issues When Posting To Social Media Like Twitter?

Jeff, what’s up, Jeff? He says, “Do we have to worry about stock photo copyright issues when posting to social media, like Twitter, the same way we do with our website?” I don’t know, Jeff. I wish I did. I wish I had definitive answer. Maybe somebody else on here knows. Anybody?

Hernan: I had some issues when it comes to posting on Facebook, so yeah, short answer is yeah, because I had to take down an ad that was performing super well just because I was lazy and I didn’t check the stock photos stuff. The actual owner of the photo contacted me and said, “Hey dude, you need to take off the ad,” and I lost the entire social proof and everything on the Facebook side of things.

Yeah, short answer is yes because you can get in trouble. It doesn’t really matter if you’re using it on Twitter, Google. Google, maybe you would have a bigger exposure because you’re being indexed, but on Twitter, people can still see it, right? I think it’s just a matter of photos are still an asset, so it’s like you saying a piece of a song or a piece of a movie, something like that, all of that is copyrighted. You need to have that in mind, no matter where you’re using it.

When you’re doing it on your website, you’re a bit more exposed because anyone can get access to that, while on Twitter it’s not the case, but just to avoid issues, I would say don’t do it. Plus, there are so many deals and having stock photos has become really, really cheap. If you go to [inaudible 00:22:51] for example, you can get deals, like, I don’t know, for 100 photos for 10 bucks or something like that. It’s not even worth the trouble of getting through it.

Bradley: Yeah. Yeah, and usually for my clients, what I have them do is I use StockFresh.com. That’s our primary stock photo site, and so I just have my clients go setup an account or I set it up for them in their name and then I send them the login details and then they go in and fund it by just purchasing credits. We usually purchase 100 credits at a time. I think it’s $79 or something like that at Stock Fresh. It’s not bad. It’s decent.

Every couple of months or so, my curators, my VAs who are doing all of the content marketing for my clients will contact me and say, “Hey, we need this account refilled,” and I’ll just contact the client and say, “Hey, I need you to add another $100, refill the account with credits.” That’s it. That’s how it works, and that’s just to be safe.

That’s because I’ve been hit with extortion letters from Getty Images and their various subsidiaries and I’ve had to pay fines, copyright fines, settlement fees, basically for not having each client having their own licenses. In other words, even if I had my own account for my marketing agency with stock photos, if I published those stock photos on clients’ websites, the client needs to have a license for that photo. Even though I did it on their behalf, I was the license holder, not the client.

I’ve had to pay settlement fees for copyright infringement issues for client sites that they received the extortion letter, but I paid it on their behalf because it was my fault for not having them setup properly. That’s why I talk about that, again, in the Content Kingpin training that I was just talking about, I go into great detail about all of that because it’s very, very important. I would follow Hernan’s advice about social media and really try to have proper licensing for photos that you’re using.

Hernan: Yeah. Yeah, I would do that, too, and for example, there’s some websites that they’re explicitly royalty-free photos like Flickr, for example. You can search for royalty-free photos, then I think Unsplash.com, Unsplash.com. There’s another called Pixabay.com. Those are all royalty-free photos, but you’re limited to what you can find over there.

Sometimes for ads it will work, but if I’m looking for a specific way or specific photo that will convey a specific message that I want to send, then it wouldn’t work, so I’ll need to go out and actually purchase the picture. It’s specifically important with social media. Twitter has become super, super visual. If you go through the Twitter app on mobile, it’s super visual, so photos play a big role.

Would SEO Content Be Okay Or Should You Use The Research Quality Content For An Affiliate Money Site?

Bradley: Okay, Dominick’s up. What’s up, Dominick? He says, “I need some good content for an affiliate money site. I’ve tried Natasha Nixon, but it’s a little pricey. Would SEO content be okay or should I use the research quality content?”

No, if it’s for a money site, I would recommend that you do authority content because the SEO content is exactly what I just mentioned about a content farm. That’s what it is. It’s spun shit. It’s garbage. I can tell you that. That’s to be used for link building and stuff like that. It’s not money site content. I could tell you that even the authority content that you purchase sometimes isn’t going to be very good.

For the most part, I’ve had good experiences with Natasha Nixon for authority content, but the last article I got was complete garbage. It was for Mario’s Cab Service for the GMB Pro case study, and it was complete garbage. I ordered a 1500 word authority content article, paid like $120 for it, and it was complete garbage. I had to go through and manually edit. If I had time, I would’ve requested a rewrite, but I didn’t because I wanted to get it up, so I just edited about 500 or 600 words of it myself and then used that as the actual GMB website article.

Again, guys, remember, your best bet, Dominick, if you need really good authority type content or money site content on a regular basis would be to hire your own writer from Upwork or something. That is a much better way than going to the content producers. Honestly, you’re better off developing a one on one relationship with an individual writer.

Here’s the thing. Well, most of my writers are now curators, but I still can rely on them for article writing at times, but most of the stuff we do is like I said, curating for blog posts and such. The idea is once you’ve developed a relationship with a particular writer, you get to know their voice, so to speak and how they write, and you can help to mold or shape how you want them to write for particular clients, for example. That’s the benefit of doing it.

One of the other benefits of having a relationship with an individual writer is that a lot of times, you get better treatment. You don’t have to wait in queue for a week to get a piece of content back, that kind of stuff. You can have direct message. I use Upwork a lot. There’s desktop notifications and all that kind of stuff, so I recommend doing that.

If you’re going to buy it from a content farm, Natasha Nixon being one of them, then authority content is your better bet. It is a bit more expensive, but again, for money sites, I don’t recommend putting up any kind of SEO articles because they’re literally trash. It’s junk. You yourself will spend more time editing them and making them readable than it’s worth. If that’s the case, why not just write it yourself? Anybody want to comment on that?

Hernan: Yeah. Real quick, I totally agree with what you’re saying, Bradley, in terms of having someone that you can always refer to, even further if you’re offering this on a regular basis. I think that there’s some types of professionals, if you would, or some types of work that you always need stuff done, for example, graphic design, that you would be better off just hiring somebody to do graphic design.

For example, on our end, we hire a graphic designer. He would take over the entire graphic design side of things. He would do thumbnails for YouTube. He would do this and he would do that. He already knows how we work and what types of things we want and if we need a logo, we ask him for it, and if we need banners, sometimes he would do it.

I think that’s part of the team that you want to start putting together. That’s part of the team because you’re providing service and if you’re providing content creation services for your clients, that’s something that you really want to have in mind. For example, if you’re doing, I don’t know, video services, right, you’re doing YouTube services, maybe you need a video editor or maybe you need the tools to actually provide the client with a good service. That will position yourself as a much more valuable asset because you have the tools.

It’s not like you’re getting out there and grabbing the content, the articles, the logos from what everyone else is doing. You become a much more valuable asset because you’re developing your own team. I think that having that long-term relationship and having that long-term view when it comes to the collaborators that work with you, people that help you, helps a lot, helps you save time, money, and helps you position yourself better.

Bradley: Yeah, and the last thing about that I want to mention is I said earlier about you get to know a writer’s voice, and that’s good because especially if you’re providing content for your clients, then you already know what the quality is going to be. When you buy content from places like content farms or a Natasha Nixon, even when you’re buying the authority content which costs more money, you don’t know which writer’s going to get it, so you don’t know what the quality’s going to be like.

The tone of the writing can be different from article to article, can be vastly different. If you’re providing content for webpages, not posts, but pages for client sites, you want consistency in tone because you don’t want one page to have a tone that’s vastly different than another page, because it would be off putting to a visitor. Again, you get to know how the writer writes. You get to come to expect a certain level of quality, a certain tone, a certain voice to speak. That kind of stuff makes you more confident in being able to sell content marketing, right? Good question there, Dom. A great question, actually.

Vincent, doesn’t look much of a question. Let’s see if there’s a comment somewhere. No. Okay, so, well, congratulations. I don’t know what this means.

Adam: Oh, you’ll see it in a minute. He posted after that.

Does Adding A PR Link Helps In Generating Review Snippets Of A GMB Review Page?

Bradley: Okay, cool, cool. Let’s see. “Hey guys. Do you know if adding a PR link to our GMB review page will cause our GMB listing to show a review snippet as shown below?”

No. Adding a PR link to your review page, no. This is a maps thing. You have to have I think five, at least it used to be, you had to have a minimum of five ratings for the stars to show. I think that’s still the case. This is a maps listing that you show here in the picture, so that’s not something that we can manipulate by adding code because we can’t add code to the maps profile.

You can on a website. You can have structured data for review schema, but we can’t do that in the maps profile. The maps profile will show review stars once you have a total of five reviews. Whatever the star ratings are is irrelevant. Your ratings stars will show up once you have a total of five reviews. Does that make sense? That’s it. It’s not something that you can force or trigger by linking to it or adding code because you can’t edit the code of the GMB or maps profile like you could on a website, right? You just need to get five reviews.

Who Do You Recommend For Google Phone Verified Accounts?

Okay, Jim’s up. He says, “Hey, SM team. I’m glad you were able to hang out during the holiday week.” Yeah, us, too. We’ve only missed one in 191 episodes and it was a scheduled miss. “I know you’ve spoken about Google phone verified accounts in the past a lot, but I was wondering who you’d recommend of late. Also, is it worth paying $3 per account for aged accounts instead of 35 cent per newer account? Have you had better ratio on sites sticking with the older accounts?”

I buy aged accounts for very particular projects. Let’s put it this way. I’ve bought some aged accounts. I haven’t tested, I haven’t setup an actual test to test a brand new account versus an aged account anytime in the last three or four years, so I don’t know if having an aged account really makes a difference or not. I can’t tell definitively.

People seem to think it does make a difference. There’s probably some evidence out there to support that. I would just assume that that may be the case. For very particular accounts or projects, campaigns, whatever, I will sometimes buy the aged accounts and I’ll pay as much as $50 per account depending on how old it is. I’ve bought some 12 year old created in 2006 Google accounts and I’ve paid as much as $50 per account for those, and then I still had one of them terminated rather quickly, which pissed me off.

I can’t tell you, Jim, whether it’s really worth it or not. Maybe some other people have some data to prove one way or the other. I don’t. Usually, guys, we try to test everything to give you a definitive answer and this is something I have not tested. Adam, or excuse me, Hernan and or Marco, have either of you have any data to back up one way or the other?

Hernan: No, not on my end, honestly.

Marco: No, I don’t think it makes a difference.

Bradley: Okay. Yeah, I didn’t think so. Honestly, I know people say it does. Jim, I would say proceed at your own risk, whichever way you want, but this is the guy that I’m recommending right now for my aged accounts. [inaudible 00:35:52] is his name. At least that’s what I think it is, BulkPVA.com. I still use him. He’s really responsive on Skype if you connect with him on Skype, and if you go to contact, I think his Skype username is right there. Yeah, it is, BulkPVA.com. You can email him, all that. Just tell him I sent you. He knows because I’ve referred a lot of people to him.

He usually takes very good care of us, as well as anytime accounts get terminated and stuff, if they’re new, obviously if you have accounts terminated two weeks after he delivers them to you, that’s your fault, but if they’re within three days, within 72 hours or something like that, see, look, it takes 24 to 72 hours to deliver each order. Let’s see. After delivery of accounts, if the account is banned within 48 hours, replacements will be given to you.

What I do is whenever we order a new batch, and a lot of these, I buy the double phone verified YouTube accounts, and we do that because we do a lot of video spam for clients and all kinds of stuff, and I’ve got a VA that runs a video spam tool, Ab’s Video Carpet Blitz tool. We have to have dozens, if not 100 plus YouTube accounts at all times. Obviously, because we’re doing a shit ton of spam, a lot of accounts get terminated from overuse, and so I buy accounts from this guy all the time.

What I do is my VA will go in and immediately open up Browseo and just start adding profiles and logging in to bind it to his IP, but they each have their own browsing session because they’re all separated or segregated via Browseo, which you can do that with Ghost Browser, I think is another one. It doesn’t have to be Browseo, guys. It doesn’t matter. All I’m saying is the best way to get these accounts to stick is to bind them to your IP, but make sure they have their own unique browsing session in history.

Start allowing cookies to accrue and search history and allow Google and the websites that that profile visits start to build a customer profile, like an avatar or whatever, for that particular profile. In other words, you want it to look real, and so one of the things that I’ve found is these bulk accounts, when you buy them, if you do a hard reset on your browser to clear all cache and cookies and then log into four, five, six accounts from the same IP all from a 100% virgin browsing session each time you do it, that’s going to look spammy and those accounts tend to get terminated.

If you log into each of them, even from the same IP, as long as they have their own unique browsing sessions that maintain, they stay, in other words they don’t get wiped clean and then use that same IP to log into another profile, with Browseo or Ghost Browser or any number of those apps that do that that will keep browsing sessions per profile, that’s a much better way to do it. That tends not to trigger the red flags that do from using 100% clean browsing sessions each time. Hopefully that makes sense. This is the guy I still recommend. Just tell him I sent you only because he tends to take care of the people that we send to him. You get put the top of his priority list, all right? That was another good question.

Would You Recommend Making The Least Number Of Location Pages For Each Facebook Accounts?

Oh, cool, we’re almost out of time, almost out of questions. Marco says from YouTube, [inaudible 00:39:23], “For multiple location websites, I know normally you guys recommend having one ring of social media that is going to syndicate posts, but in Facebook, you can have multiple location pages linked to one account. Would you recommend making at least the Facebook accounts for every location at least?”

Yeah, you can. Honestly, I would, because multiple location businesses should each have their own Facebook page. Each location should have its own Facebook page, so yeah, absolutely. What I was talking about was a branded Tumblr, a branded Blogger, a branded WordPress, and all the other web twos and stuff that we syndicate and we use as part of the syndication networks. You really only need one branded network that you can publish content to from the root domain, from the blog that’s typically going to be on the root domain. Essentially you can silo the root domain to have categories for each one of the locations.

Let’s say you got six locations. I would set up a category for each location, and then what I would do is publish content, just publish posts from the blog on the root site, make sure it’s the correct category selected. When you’re targeting, let’s say location number one, you’re going to optimize the content and have the call to action link, the link that you’re going to be linking to that sub-domain site or location page, whatever, however you’ve got it configured, but that’s going to be selected and placed into that location category, which helps to optimize it. You can do that for each location from the root blog. You don’t need to have a separation syndication network for each location, but Facebook pages, you can have a separate location page and I would encourage that because that’s a powerful citation.

That’s the thing, guys. When it comes to any of the [inaudible 00:41:20]. I’m sorry. I’ll come back to that question, Vincent. I got sidetracked. The other thing about this is if you have a particular location that is not responding as well to the blog post, the syndication from the root domain, then you can always go in and setup a location specific syndication network where you would just use the same branding, but you would add a local modifier.

In other words, if it’s Joe’s Plumbing and there’s six locations and one of them happens to be, I don’t know, Fairfax, Virginia, then if he has a Joe’s Plumbing syndication network that he’s using to blog for all of the locations, but Fairfax, Virginia isn’t really responding as well to the blogs from the root domain, then you could put a Joe’s Plumbing Fairfax syndication network up and then syndicate content directly from that particular category on the root domain to just that network, or you could even transfer and put a separate blog on that location specific site, if that makes sense.

Guys, remember, categories in WordPress do have their own feeds. You can get a category feed, so you could essentially use the root domain for let’s say if you had six locations, you could literally have six location, so brand plus location modifier networks, and have six individual category RSS feeds each triggering their own geo-specific network. Does that make sense?

Again, you can get really complex with this stuff. I like to keep one branded syndication network to try to accomplish what I desire for all of the locations because that’s less work and it’s easier. I like easy. I like efficiency, but you can make it complicated or add additional geo networks specific to a location when needed, but lastly, like I mentioned, as far as the actual Facebook page, I would have a location page for each location, absolutely, because it’s a very powerful citation.

You could also create location pages on LinkedIn, Crunchbase, if you’re using Crunchbase, which you should because Crunchbase is a very powerful citation as part of the semantic database. What I would recommend with Crunchbase is setup an organization and then you setup sub-locations for each location, which you can link to individually. That becomes very, very powerful. That’s a good question, though.

Vincent said, “The line below reviews that has the blue icon, it’s a review snippet.” Yeah, but that’s something that Google pulls in automatically. That’s not something that you can force. This is a Google Maps listing, Vincent. You can’t manipulate this. Google decides what they’re going to list and show right here, not you. That’s not something that we have the option to edit right now or to change.

Those reviews that are pulled in, like the snippet from a review, that’s just what Google determines that they’re going to pull in and display to the searcher, the user, the Google user. That’s it. It’s not something that you can edit. You can’t force that. Google just does that, at least as far as I know, you can’t. If I’m wrong, I’m sure somebody will correct me. Okay, well, should we give it another minute and see if any other questions come in or should we just wrap up a little bit early?

Adam: I think we should give them a minute because I know there’s definitely a lag, but I want to talk a little bit more about the live event in October.

Bradley: Okay.

Adam: We narrowed it down. It’s going to be in Washington DC like we said, which honestly, I’m kind of pumped about because when we first thought of that, the first thing I thought about was heat and humidity, but I realized it’s going to be in the middle of October and it’s going to be freaking awesome there. You can speak to that. That’s a great time of year around there, isn’t it?

Bradley: Absolutely. It should be really nice. There’s a ton of stuff to do in Washington DC. Besides our event, we’re going to have a VIP event I believe, which we’re going to have to find something good to do. DC, it’s the nation’s capital, right? There’s a lot of stuff to do that.

Adam: Yeah. You’re within striking distance of a lot of stuff, so if you come join us, if you can take a couple days on either side, maybe go do something. If you’re traveling, there’s a lot of neat stuff in that area to do.

Bradley: Yeah. Yeah, there is. Okay, well, I don’t see any other questions coming in, guys. It’s Fourth of July holiday week. For those of you in the US, happy Fourth of July, and go get a cold beer.

Adam: Those of you in England, I’m not watching the game, but hopefully England’s doing well in the soccer match I guess it is right now. I’m going to check that out, and then yeah, I hope everyone has a great Fourth of July. I’m going to head out and enjoy that tomorrow.

Bradley: I’m still working tomorrow for a few hours in the morning. I’ve got to coach Crossfit for two hours in the morning, and then I’m going to work for a couple hours before I go heavily drink.

Marco: Well, England is still sweating.

Hernan: [inaudible 00:46:14] penalties. Very fun. Thank you guys.

Bradley: All right guys. See you later. Happy Fourth.

Marco: Bye everyone.

Chris: Bye.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 191 posted first on your-t1-blog-url from Blogger https://ift.tt/2ueMKwE via IFTTT

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 191

Click on the video above to watch Episode 191 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 https://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

 Announcement

Adam: Hey everybody. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts, episode 191, the question where I guarantee it, if you’re watching this, you can get your question answered, because right now there are almost no questions because of a little error that somebody made. It’s not important who, but let’s go and say hello to everyone real quick. Hopefully, you’re getting an announcement on YouTube or you’re getting a notification. You might be watching this later, in which case, just ignore all this stuff about people making mistakes. Chris, how you doing, man?

Chris: Good. Happy to have summer finally in Europe.

Adam: Oh, nice. It’s finally warming up there?

Chris: Yep.

Adam: Good deal, good deal. Hernan, how about you? Is it nice and cold down there?

Hernan: Yeah. Over here, it’s freezing, man. I’m freezing my ass and overdressed, whatever, but I’m super excited to be here anyway, so that doesn’t stop us.

Adam: Marco, you’re not freezing your ass off, are you?

Marco: Never. Guys, for some reason, we’re not transmitting this Hangout into the Google Plus page. It’s still 190.

Bradley: That’s my fault. Standby.

Adam: Got you. Well, we won’t ask Bradley how he’s doing, because I don’t want to divide up his attention, but we do have a few announcements. Real quick, I wanted to say we’re going to put the link on the page and you’ll be able to find it in the description if you’re watching this later on YouTube, but our live event is a go, The Semantic Mastery Live.

October, the weekend of October 20th, 21st, we’ve already announced one of the special guest speakers. In addition to seeing all of our lovely faces at some point during the event, also Jeffrey Smith of SEO Boot Camp will be joining us and we’re going to have a couple more that we’re holding back.

We’re teasing it a little bit, but that is a go, so I’ll pop the link on here if you want to go and grab your ticket now. Ticket prices are definitely going to go up as time goes on. We want to help out the people who jump on this early and it is capped at a total of 25. Don’t put it off too long. It will be in the Washington DC area and we’re getting ready to lock down our event venue probably in the next week or two.

Bradley: Page is updated.

Adam: All right. As far as other announcements, you guys, we got a lot. I’m going to pass it off. Marco, is there anything we want to say specifically?

Marco: No. We’re moving forward, guys. The Google My Business auto-poster is ready. It has some awesome features. People have a long way to catch up. I know there’s some stuff being put out. It’s [inaudible 00:02:42]. You can get an RSS feed on anyone who’s in Syndication Academy or knows about us. You know how wicked RSS feeds can be, how they can help amplify your content, how they can help you with backlinks, but the most interesting thing we’re doing is we’re pulling in or we should have the ability in the next few days to pull in the RSS feed from the website so that all you would literally have to do is post from your website and you can amplify that content into post. If not, we do have the auto-poster, where you can go in and setup posts well ahead of time.

We also have YouTube views. That’s currently working. It’s working really well to push up videos, to get it ranked. Now, of course, once you start pushing videos, you should continue pushing videos to it to keep it ranked until it picks up its own steam. It’ll pick up steam and stay where it’s supposed to stay. It’ll stay ranked. The great thing about this is that since it’s real people, they’ll interact with your channel, so they’ll send all kinds of signals.

I keep telling people, the caveat in this is that you have to send them to a quality video. I always ask the question, “What’s a quality video?” Well, a quality video, if you look at your competition as a video that has a bunch of likes, it has a bunch of watch time, it has a bunch of subscribers, that’s a quality video. Look at what your competition is doing for that keyword and you mimic that, but do them one better. Better production, a better speaker, better audio quality, whatever it is that you need to do to grab the attention of your viewers.

There’s so many things coming. Video carpet bomb is coming. We were just talking about it. The done for you Google My Business services, that’s coming. The VA is almost trained. I’m working with her daily on this task. Cora reports are going to be available. What else do we have? Drive Stacks, guys. Drive Stacks, the Semantic Mastery way, with my original VA, the VA that I originally trained will be available through our marketplace. Market, it’s coming. Just stay tuned. Keep coming back and we’ll have news as everything develops, but we hope to have at least some of the products available by the end of the week. That’ll be on you to send the email to let people know, “Hey, it’s ready, so go get it.”

Adam: Awesome. Sorry about that. I was muted real quick. Also, I wanted to let everyone know, if you missed the webinar, we have a webinar replay. I’m not going to post the link here because if you’re on our email list, then you are very special and you’re going to get a link to check out the bundle, but there was a great webinar on Monday going into detail about how you can use some of the most powerful training that we have and really combine that.

We’re going to have some more information coming out about that. We’ll just post the link so you can go and grab that if you’re interested in taking advantage. It’s a special Fourth of July kind of holiday offer, and then we’ll have a little bit, like I said, of followup in the coming days. A lot of people are taking some time off, heading out to the beach, doing whatever. If you got some time you can squeak away from the family or make an excuse, you might want to go check out the replay over the next couple of days.

Bradley: I can tell having changed Hump Day Hangouts from Wednesday to Tuesday for this week, we’ve got a lot less viewers on it right now than we typically do, so it’s just timing. I’m glad that unfortunately, we didn’t have all the questions directed to the right place this time. That’s on our end, but we got a few questions. Do we have any other announcements, guys?

Adam: I’m good. How about you guys?

Hernan: I just wanted to reiterate that go ahead and grab your tickets for the [inaudible 00:06:51] Live 2018 because it’s going to depend on that. It’s going to depend on that. I’m really looking forward to seeing you guys, so yeah, I just wanted to repeat that once again.

Adam: Okay, cool.

Bradley: That’s it. We can get into it, huh?

Adam: Yeah, let’s do it.

Bradley: Let’s do it. All right, well, we don’t have a lot of questions, so we’re hoping that some of you guys that are here have some questions and you post them on the page. Again, that was our fault, but it is what it is, so we’re going to run with what we got. I know Adam posted a couple questions that he yanked from one of the Facebook groups, so we’ll start with those. I’ll grab the screen.

Is It Possible To Spread Authority To Multiple Root Domains From One Authority Domain Via Subdomain Redirects?

All right, so from the Facebook group. “Looking for insights on an idea. I wanted to test this, but asking is more efficient. Is the following possible? I have site.com and site.com has authority.” IDA, DR, okay. “I have a sub-domain on site.com, subdomain1.site.com. Sub-domain carries authority from site, correct?” Carry domain authority, but not necessarily page authority, but you’re right.

“Can I create a redirect from subdomain1.site.com to secondsite.com while site.com stays live and then secondsite.com gets authority from subdomain1.site.com?” Questions like this are hard to read. “Both secondsite.com and site have authority. In other words, is it possible to spread authority to multiple domains from one authority domain via sub-domain redirects?” Yes. “I’m doubting this works, but also read some things that indicate it might work.”

It does work. It does absolutely work. There’s a little bit of a loss. That’s called domain authority manipulation, guys. That’s like 2012 stuff. That’s the stuff that we did that worked really freaking well in like 2012, ‘13 timeframe. There’s still a little bit of benefit to pushing domain authority, guys, but honestly, you can set that up. It will work. There’s a little bit of a loss between redirects when pushing domain authority. It will absolutely increase your domain authority from your sub-domain that you direct to another root domain.

My point is, I’m not sure what your end goal is. Why do you want to push this domain authority to that other domain? Domain authority manipulation as a ranking factor is almost obsolete. I guess there might be some benefit to it, but you have to have really high DA numbers for that to really have an effect. It’s much more about relevancy than it is about domain metrics, which are proprietary metrics, right? Marco, I’ll let you comment on that a little bit, but again, look, if you want to do it, yes, it will help to boost domain authority from the second site.

There is a little bit of a loss, so what I’m saying is if you’ve got a 42 domain authority on your root domain and you try to push that over to a second site via sub-domain or any way you want to do it, it really doesn’t matter, but via a sub-domain redirect, you’ll likely fall somewhere in the 30s, the mid 30s with domain authority. It’s not going to happen overnight. When I used to do a lot of domain authority manipulation, we used to do a lot of it. The maws numbers would refresh, I can’t remember, I think it was every other month, every two months.

Marco: Every 90 days.

Bradley: Every 90 days. Okay. If we would do a redirect, like for example, we called it link laundering, and we’d do double 301 redirects from spam domains. We would go find expired domains that were on the closeout because they went through auction and they were really shitty, spammy domains. A lot of the times, they’re Chinese domains that would have hundreds, sometimes thousands or even tens of thousands of sub-domains. The dropped domain would have tens of thousands, sometimes, anywhere between hundreds to tens of thousands of sub-domains.

This is what we used to do and it worked really well. We would go buy a domain, buy one of those domains, and then we would set up a redirect script, a catch all or wild card redirect via HT access. We’d point the domain to a host, a C panel, and then we would set up an HT access file that would do a wild card sub-domain redirect to whatever we wanted to, and we would push domain authority.

We would do what’s called a double 301 redirect, so we would redirect it through one domain first and then push it over to our final target URL. I’d get domains that had 55, 60 domain authority mostly because of all the accumulated domain authority from all the sub-domains, right? We’d do the redirect and then push it over to a brand new domain and I could get my domain authority to jump from one, which is a brand new registered domain, to mid-40s usually within one maws cycle refresh, but sometimes it would take two. It would take anywhere between 90 days, so three months, to six months, to see that kind of a push. Again, I’ve found over the years that using that is purely like a ranking method, which used to work phenomenally. It really is ineffective at this point.

The only thing I would suggest is like I said, or what I would add to this, is that if you have really high domain authority and you can push some of that to another domain, it will help it to respond better to other off page signals, but that’s about it. Again, it’s not something that I even bother doing anymore. I don’t even look at domain authority and page authority numbers anymore, honestly. If you want to do it, it will work. Marco, what are your comments on this?

Marco: I would say he’s better off concentrating on relevance. If they’re relevant, then you can throw DA and domain authority and page authority out the window and push relevance. You could even throw a Drive Stack. Wherever you’re directing, you could put a Drive Stack as buffer and redirect to the Drive Stack and the Drive Stack will then push the power over to the new site with even more relevance. In the Drive Stack, you could push just tons of relevance in there whether you want keyword relevance, what do you call it, keyword plus URL, brand plus keyword relevance. What you really want is that brand plus keyword relevance.

Bradley: Right.

Marco: What you want to become is you want to become the keyword for whatever that niche is, so when people start thinking about those keywords, they don’t necessarily think about the keywords, but they think about your brand. This is where I tell people, Coca-Cola, Xerox, Band-Aid, Scotch Tape, all of these people have done fabulous branding where they become the brand for those keywords.

I know it’s not simple to do and we don’t have the deep pockets, but a way to start doing that is by relevance. How we do it, how we take advantage of it is by going into a Drive Stack and creating all of that keyword relevance which relates to the brand, and then we push maybe [inaudible 00:14:11] which will flow into the website, or maybe we’ll go direct to the website. We’ll go to the Google My Business thing.

There are so many ways to take advantage of this, but you’re pushing relevance. Think metrics. DA is a third party metric. Trust flow and citation flow, third party metrics. We don’t bother with that. What we look for is relevance and as long as the on page is tight on both websites, they will both benefit.

I could go even further, but then I’d be getting stuff that’s only in RYS Academy Reloaded. I could start talking all kind of things about embeds and the nasty stuff that you can do with embeds, but again, as I always say, we’d be doing the people that pay for the information a disservice by giving it away for free.

Hernan: If I may add real quick, that was one of the main reasons, the spam, when we just throw spam on the domain, we’ll rank. We will get higher domain authority, or we would do the sub-domain manipulation and whatnot, and that was one of the reasons why we stopped paying attention that much to domain authority and page authority, because they were so easy to manipulate.

That’s why we migrated to [inaudible 00:15:28] initially, and then we had to develop, as Marco was saying, relevancy and trust and authority as our own metics, our own way of doing things, because it was so easy. Again, you would have these Chinese domains with, I don’t know, 60 domain authority, and they were all spam. That’s one of the reasons, one of the many reasons that we stopped going through those domains.

Also, because maws will start delaying the updates and whatnot, and at some point it became a lot like waiting the page rank update, the public page rank update from Google that would go out every month or so. It became like that, so we stopped paying attention to that altogether and we started focusing a lot more on rankings and actual results.

Bradley: Again, yeah, it’ll work, and what I would recommend if you were trying to push it a second site anyway, guys, remember, if you push domain authority to a sub-domain, it will benefit the entire domain. Remember, domain authority, it’s a site-wide or domain-wide, including all sub-domains, including all inner pages and posts, all of them will benefit from that, will receive the same domain authority.

Instead of pushing from a redirect to a secondsite.com, you could push to a non-indexed sub-domain on that secondsite.com, all right? You do that so that you can set up a sub-domain. You don’t even need to really put a piece of content up on it, but you could. You could set an HTML file to say no index or whatever, and then just point all of it to that specific sub-domain because it will benefit the root without people really being able to see what you’re doing.

Again, I really just think that’s a waste of time unless you’ve got some massive amount of authority on your first site that you’re trying to push, in case it would help a little bit, but you’d have to be really, really high domain authority numbers for that to make much difference now in my opinion based on how the algorithm works now.

Do You Pay For Articles Or Use A Plugin To Pull In Content?

All right, Adam, the next one that he posted was, “Do you guys pay for articles or use a plugin to pull in content? Looking for an alternative for test site than buying articles.” Yeah, content curation. We have a training course specifically all about that. It’s what I’ve been using. I had to figure out a way to develop content for my clients that was cost-effective and efficient without having to be subject matter experts, so I developed a process years ago that I’ve been using ever since 2012.

We’ve got it as a product right now called Content Kingpin, but that’s the same exact content production process that I used for my own agency and countless amount of our members and students have also implemented that into their business for their primary content methods. We just get across the board good results from even our members that have implemented it, as well, or adopted that process, because it works.

It’s basically hands-free content marketing. You could teach a VA to do it, and they don’t have to be subject matter experts. All they have to do is be able to identify and locate content, authority content or just good, relevant content about whatever topic they’re going to be blogging about and then organizing that content in a logical manner and injecting a small amount of their own commentary. That content is more efficient and way better than any sort of shitty content, farmed content that you could buy from the dime a dozen content farms that are out there, that is just spun, rehashed garbage.

Guys, that’s all the content farms do. They don’t write original content. Even if they do, they’re not subject matter experts. If they are, you’re going to pay a premium for it, but even then, a lot of times, guys, all they do is do mashups where they’ll go, scrape five or 10 articles or whatever about whatever topic it is that you requested the article for, and then they’ll put bits and pieces of each article, put them through a spinner, and sometimes they’ll manually edit the spin text or the output file to where it’s a little bit more readable, but a lot of those content farms, you’ll get a lot of errors and stuff that you can clearly see that a spinner was used and they didn’t take the time to manually edit it.

My point is you’re not really buying original content from content farms, anyway. You’re buying garbage. You’re much better off using curated content where you can reference and cite other people’s authority content that is highly relevant from subject matter experts and you’re giving them credit via the attribution link. You’re citing the source, which is required and ethical. It’s the ethical thing to do.

Now, you’ve got good content from subject matter experts that you’re quoting on your own site, giving them credit, and injecting your own commentary. Again, a VA can do that. That’s why we call it Content Kingpin Hands-Free Content Marketing, because it truly is. You can generate a stream or revenue just from selling content marketing services and managing it. It just requires a very, very small amount of management.

Again, that training, Content Kingpin, teaches exactly how to hire the VAs, what to look for, what type of output production you should expect, what to pay them, how to manage it, all of that, guys. All of that is covered in great detail in that course. I highly recommend anybody that needs content for their clients or their own assets, their own digital assets, check that out because it’s the exact same method we use, all right?

Do We Have To Worry About Stock Photo Copyright Issues When Posting To Social Media Like Twitter?

Jeff, what’s up, Jeff? He says, “Do we have to worry about stock photo copyright issues when posting to social media, like Twitter, the same way we do with our website?” I don’t know, Jeff. I wish I did. I wish I had definitive answer. Maybe somebody else on here knows. Anybody?

Hernan: I had some issues when it comes to posting on Facebook, so yeah, short answer is yeah, because I had to take down an ad that was performing super well just because I was lazy and I didn’t check the stock photos stuff. The actual owner of the photo contacted me and said, “Hey dude, you need to take off the ad,” and I lost the entire social proof and everything on the Facebook side of things.

Yeah, short answer is yes because you can get in trouble. It doesn’t really matter if you’re using it on Twitter, Google. Google, maybe you would have a bigger exposure because you’re being indexed, but on Twitter, people can still see it, right? I think it’s just a matter of photos are still an asset, so it’s like you saying a piece of a song or a piece of a movie, something like that, all of that is copyrighted. You need to have that in mind, no matter where you’re using it.

When you’re doing it on your website, you’re a bit more exposed because anyone can get access to that, while on Twitter it’s not the case, but just to avoid issues, I would say don’t do it. Plus, there are so many deals and having stock photos has become really, really cheap. If you go to [inaudible 00:22:51] for example, you can get deals, like, I don’t know, for 100 photos for 10 bucks or something like that. It’s not even worth the trouble of getting through it.

Bradley: Yeah. Yeah, and usually for my clients, what I have them do is I use StockFresh.com. That’s our primary stock photo site, and so I just have my clients go setup an account or I set it up for them in their name and then I send them the login details and then they go in and fund it by just purchasing credits. We usually purchase 100 credits at a time. I think it’s $79 or something like that at Stock Fresh. It’s not bad. It’s decent.

Every couple of months or so, my curators, my VAs who are doing all of the content marketing for my clients will contact me and say, “Hey, we need this account refilled,” and I’ll just contact the client and say, “Hey, I need you to add another $100, refill the account with credits.” That’s it. That’s how it works, and that’s just to be safe.

That’s because I’ve been hit with extortion letters from Getty Images and their various subsidiaries and I’ve had to pay fines, copyright fines, settlement fees, basically for not having each client having their own licenses. In other words, even if I had my own account for my marketing agency with stock photos, if I published those stock photos on clients’ websites, the client needs to have a license for that photo. Even though I did it on their behalf, I was the license holder, not the client.

I’ve had to pay settlement fees for copyright infringement issues for client sites that they received the extortion letter, but I paid it on their behalf because it was my fault for not having them setup properly. That’s why I talk about that, again, in the Content Kingpin training that I was just talking about, I go into great detail about all of that because it’s very, very important. I would follow Hernan’s advice about social media and really try to have proper licensing for photos that you’re using.

Hernan: Yeah. Yeah, I would do that, too, and for example, there’s some websites that they’re explicitly royalty-free photos like Flickr, for example. You can search for royalty-free photos, then I think Unsplash.com, Unsplash.com. There’s another called Pixabay.com. Those are all royalty-free photos, but you’re limited to what you can find over there.

Sometimes for ads it will work, but if I’m looking for a specific way or specific photo that will convey a specific message that I want to send, then it wouldn’t work, so I’ll need to go out and actually purchase the picture. It’s specifically important with social media. Twitter has become super, super visual. If you go through the Twitter app on mobile, it’s super visual, so photos play a big role.

Would SEO Content Be Okay Or Should You Use The Research Quality Content For An Affiliate Money Site?

Bradley: Okay, Dominick’s up. What’s up, Dominick? He says, “I need some good content for an affiliate money site. I’ve tried Natasha Nixon, but it’s a little pricey. Would SEO content be okay or should I use the research quality content?”

No, if it’s for a money site, I would recommend that you do authority content because the SEO content is exactly what I just mentioned about a content farm. That’s what it is. It’s spun shit. It’s garbage. I can tell you that. That’s to be used for link building and stuff like that. It’s not money site content. I could tell you that even the authority content that you purchase sometimes isn’t going to be very good.

For the most part, I’ve had good experiences with Natasha Nixon for authority content, but the last article I got was complete garbage. It was for Mario’s Cab Service for the GMB Pro case study, and it was complete garbage. I ordered a 1500 word authority content article, paid like $120 for it, and it was complete garbage. I had to go through and manually edit. If I had time, I would’ve requested a rewrite, but I didn’t because I wanted to get it up, so I just edited about 500 or 600 words of it myself and then used that as the actual GMB website article.

Again, guys, remember, your best bet, Dominick, if you need really good authority type content or money site content on a regular basis would be to hire your own writer from Upwork or something. That is a much better way than going to the content producers. Honestly, you’re better off developing a one on one relationship with an individual writer.

Here’s the thing. Well, most of my writers are now curators, but I still can rely on them for article writing at times, but most of the stuff we do is like I said, curating for blog posts and such. The idea is once you’ve developed a relationship with a particular writer, you get to know their voice, so to speak and how they write, and you can help to mold or shape how you want them to write for particular clients, for example. That’s the benefit of doing it.

One of the other benefits of having a relationship with an individual writer is that a lot of times, you get better treatment. You don’t have to wait in queue for a week to get a piece of content back, that kind of stuff. You can have direct message. I use Upwork a lot. There’s desktop notifications and all that kind of stuff, so I recommend doing that.

If you’re going to buy it from a content farm, Natasha Nixon being one of them, then authority content is your better bet. It is a bit more expensive, but again, for money sites, I don’t recommend putting up any kind of SEO articles because they’re literally trash. It’s junk. You yourself will spend more time editing them and making them readable than it’s worth. If that’s the case, why not just write it yourself? Anybody want to comment on that?

Hernan: Yeah. Real quick, I totally agree with what you’re saying, Bradley, in terms of having someone that you can always refer to, even further if you’re offering this on a regular basis. I think that there’s some types of professionals, if you would, or some types of work that you always need stuff done, for example, graphic design, that you would be better off just hiring somebody to do graphic design.

For example, on our end, we hire a graphic designer. He would take over the entire graphic design side of things. He would do thumbnails for YouTube. He would do this and he would do that. He already knows how we work and what types of things we want and if we need a logo, we ask him for it, and if we need banners, sometimes he would do it.

I think that’s part of the team that you want to start putting together. That’s part of the team because you’re providing service and if you’re providing content creation services for your clients, that’s something that you really want to have in mind. For example, if you’re doing, I don’t know, video services, right, you’re doing YouTube services, maybe you need a video editor or maybe you need the tools to actually provide the client with a good service. That will position yourself as a much more valuable asset because you have the tools.

It’s not like you’re getting out there and grabbing the content, the articles, the logos from what everyone else is doing. You become a much more valuable asset because you’re developing your own team. I think that having that long-term relationship and having that long-term view when it comes to the collaborators that work with you, people that help you, helps a lot, helps you save time, money, and helps you position yourself better.

Bradley: Yeah, and the last thing about that I want to mention is I said earlier about you get to know a writer’s voice, and that’s good because especially if you’re providing content for your clients, then you already know what the quality is going to be. When you buy content from places like content farms or a Natasha Nixon, even when you’re buying the authority content which costs more money, you don’t know which writer’s going to get it, so you don’t know what the quality’s going to be like.

The tone of the writing can be different from article to article, can be vastly different. If you’re providing content for webpages, not posts, but pages for client sites, you want consistency in tone because you don’t want one page to have a tone that’s vastly different than another page, because it would be off putting to a visitor. Again, you get to know how the writer writes. You get to come to expect a certain level of quality, a certain tone, a certain voice to speak. That kind of stuff makes you more confident in being able to sell content marketing, right? Good question there, Dom. A great question, actually.

Vincent, doesn’t look much of a question. Let’s see if there’s a comment somewhere. No. Okay, so, well, congratulations. I don’t know what this means.

Adam: Oh, you’ll see it in a minute. He posted after that.

Does Adding A PR Link Helps In Generating Review Snippets Of A GMB Review Page?

Bradley: Okay, cool, cool. Let’s see. “Hey guys. Do you know if adding a PR link to our GMB review page will cause our GMB listing to show a review snippet as shown below?”

No. Adding a PR link to your review page, no. This is a maps thing. You have to have I think five, at least it used to be, you had to have a minimum of five ratings for the stars to show. I think that’s still the case. This is a maps listing that you show here in the picture, so that’s not something that we can manipulate by adding code because we can’t add code to the maps profile.

You can on a website. You can have structured data for review schema, but we can’t do that in the maps profile. The maps profile will show review stars once you have a total of five reviews. Whatever the star ratings are is irrelevant. Your ratings stars will show up once you have a total of five reviews. Does that make sense? That’s it. It’s not something that you can force or trigger by linking to it or adding code because you can’t edit the code of the GMB or maps profile like you could on a website, right? You just need to get five reviews.

Who Do You Recommend For Google Phone Verified Accounts?

Okay, Jim’s up. He says, “Hey, SM team. I’m glad you were able to hang out during the holiday week.” Yeah, us, too. We’ve only missed one in 191 episodes and it was a scheduled miss. “I know you’ve spoken about Google phone verified accounts in the past a lot, but I was wondering who you’d recommend of late. Also, is it worth paying $3 per account for aged accounts instead of 35 cent per newer account? Have you had better ratio on sites sticking with the older accounts?”

I buy aged accounts for very particular projects. Let’s put it this way. I’ve bought some aged accounts. I haven’t tested, I haven’t setup an actual test to test a brand new account versus an aged account anytime in the last three or four years, so I don’t know if having an aged account really makes a difference or not. I can’t tell definitively.

People seem to think it does make a difference. There’s probably some evidence out there to support that. I would just assume that that may be the case. For very particular accounts or projects, campaigns, whatever, I will sometimes buy the aged accounts and I’ll pay as much as $50 per account depending on how old it is. I’ve bought some 12 year old created in 2006 Google accounts and I’ve paid as much as $50 per account for those, and then I still had one of them terminated rather quickly, which pissed me off.

I can’t tell you, Jim, whether it’s really worth it or not. Maybe some other people have some data to prove one way or the other. I don’t. Usually, guys, we try to test everything to give you a definitive answer and this is something I have not tested. Adam, or excuse me, Hernan and or Marco, have either of you have any data to back up one way or the other?

Hernan: No, not on my end, honestly.

Marco: No, I don’t think it makes a difference.

Bradley: Okay. Yeah, I didn’t think so. Honestly, I know people say it does. Jim, I would say proceed at your own risk, whichever way you want, but this is the guy that I’m recommending right now for my aged accounts. [inaudible 00:35:52] is his name. At least that’s what I think it is, BulkPVA.com. I still use him. He’s really responsive on Skype if you connect with him on Skype, and if you go to contact, I think his Skype username is right there. Yeah, it is, BulkPVA.com. You can email him, all that. Just tell him I sent you. He knows because I’ve referred a lot of people to him.

He usually takes very good care of us, as well as anytime accounts get terminated and stuff, if they’re new, obviously if you have accounts terminated two weeks after he delivers them to you, that’s your fault, but if they’re within three days, within 72 hours or something like that, see, look, it takes 24 to 72 hours to deliver each order. Let’s see. After delivery of accounts, if the account is banned within 48 hours, replacements will be given to you.

What I do is whenever we order a new batch, and a lot of these, I buy the double phone verified YouTube accounts, and we do that because we do a lot of video spam for clients and all kinds of stuff, and I’ve got a VA that runs a video spam tool, Ab’s Video Carpet Blitz tool. We have to have dozens, if not 100 plus YouTube accounts at all times. Obviously, because we’re doing a shit ton of spam, a lot of accounts get terminated from overuse, and so I buy accounts from this guy all the time.

What I do is my VA will go in and immediately open up Browseo and just start adding profiles and logging in to bind it to his IP, but they each have their own browsing session because they’re all separated or segregated via Browseo, which you can do that with Ghost Browser, I think is another one. It doesn’t have to be Browseo, guys. It doesn’t matter. All I’m saying is the best way to get these accounts to stick is to bind them to your IP, but make sure they have their own unique browsing session in history.

Start allowing cookies to accrue and search history and allow Google and the websites that that profile visits start to build a customer profile, like an avatar or whatever, for that particular profile. In other words, you want it to look real, and so one of the things that I’ve found is these bulk accounts, when you buy them, if you do a hard reset on your browser to clear all cache and cookies and then log into four, five, six accounts from the same IP all from a 100% virgin browsing session each time you do it, that’s going to look spammy and those accounts tend to get terminated.

If you log into each of them, even from the same IP, as long as they have their own unique browsing sessions that maintain, they stay, in other words they don’t get wiped clean and then use that same IP to log into another profile, with Browseo or Ghost Browser or any number of those apps that do that that will keep browsing sessions per profile, that’s a much better way to do it. That tends not to trigger the red flags that do from using 100% clean browsing sessions each time. Hopefully that makes sense. This is the guy I still recommend. Just tell him I sent you only because he tends to take care of the people that we send to him. You get put the top of his priority list, all right? That was another good question.

Would You Recommend Making The Least Number Of Location Pages For Each Facebook Accounts?

Oh, cool, we’re almost out of time, almost out of questions. Marco says from YouTube, [inaudible 00:39:23], “For multiple location websites, I know normally you guys recommend having one ring of social media that is going to syndicate posts, but in Facebook, you can have multiple location pages linked to one account. Would you recommend making at least the Facebook accounts for every location at least?”

Yeah, you can. Honestly, I would, because multiple location businesses should each have their own Facebook page. Each location should have its own Facebook page, so yeah, absolutely. What I was talking about was a branded Tumblr, a branded Blogger, a branded WordPress, and all the other web twos and stuff that we syndicate and we use as part of the syndication networks. You really only need one branded network that you can publish content to from the root domain, from the blog that’s typically going to be on the root domain. Essentially you can silo the root domain to have categories for each one of the locations.

Let’s say you got six locations. I would set up a category for each location, and then what I would do is publish content, just publish posts from the blog on the root site, make sure it’s the correct category selected. When you’re targeting, let’s say location number one, you’re going to optimize the content and have the call to action link, the link that you’re going to be linking to that sub-domain site or location page, whatever, however you’ve got it configured, but that’s going to be selected and placed into that location category, which helps to optimize it. You can do that for each location from the root blog. You don’t need to have a separation syndication network for each location, but Facebook pages, you can have a separate location page and I would encourage that because that’s a powerful citation.

That’s the thing, guys. When it comes to any of the [inaudible 00:41:20]. I’m sorry. I’ll come back to that question, Vincent. I got sidetracked. The other thing about this is if you have a particular location that is not responding as well to the blog post, the syndication from the root domain, then you can always go in and setup a location specific syndication network where you would just use the same branding, but you would add a local modifier.

In other words, if it’s Joe’s Plumbing and there’s six locations and one of them happens to be, I don’t know, Fairfax, Virginia, then if he has a Joe’s Plumbing syndication network that he’s using to blog for all of the locations, but Fairfax, Virginia isn’t really responding as well to the blogs from the root domain, then you could put a Joe’s Plumbing Fairfax syndication network up and then syndicate content directly from that particular category on the root domain to just that network, or you could even transfer and put a separate blog on that location specific site, if that makes sense.

Guys, remember, categories in WordPress do have their own feeds. You can get a category feed, so you could essentially use the root domain for let’s say if you had six locations, you could literally have six location, so brand plus location modifier networks, and have six individual category RSS feeds each triggering their own geo-specific network. Does that make sense?

Again, you can get really complex with this stuff. I like to keep one branded syndication network to try to accomplish what I desire for all of the locations because that’s less work and it’s easier. I like easy. I like efficiency, but you can make it complicated or add additional geo networks specific to a location when needed, but lastly, like I mentioned, as far as the actual Facebook page, I would have a location page for each location, absolutely, because it’s a very powerful citation.

You could also create location pages on LinkedIn, Crunchbase, if you’re using Crunchbase, which you should because Crunchbase is a very powerful citation as part of the semantic database. What I would recommend with Crunchbase is setup an organization and then you setup sub-locations for each location, which you can link to individually. That becomes very, very powerful. That’s a good question, though.

Vincent said, “The line below reviews that has the blue icon, it’s a review snippet.” Yeah, but that’s something that Google pulls in automatically. That’s not something that you can force. This is a Google Maps listing, Vincent. You can’t manipulate this. Google decides what they’re going to list and show right here, not you. That’s not something that we have the option to edit right now or to change.

Those reviews that are pulled in, like the snippet from a review, that’s just what Google determines that they’re going to pull in and display to the searcher, the user, the Google user. That’s it. It’s not something that you can edit. You can’t force that. Google just does that, at least as far as I know, you can’t. If I’m wrong, I’m sure somebody will correct me. Okay, well, should we give it another minute and see if any other questions come in or should we just wrap up a little bit early?

Adam: I think we should give them a minute because I know there’s definitely a lag, but I want to talk a little bit more about the live event in October.

Bradley: Okay.

Adam: We narrowed it down. It’s going to be in Washington DC like we said, which honestly, I’m kind of pumped about because when we first thought of that, the first thing I thought about was heat and humidity, but I realized it’s going to be in the middle of October and it’s going to be freaking awesome there. You can speak to that. That’s a great time of year around there, isn’t it?

Bradley: Absolutely. It should be really nice. There’s a ton of stuff to do in Washington DC. Besides our event, we’re going to have a VIP event I believe, which we’re going to have to find something good to do. DC, it’s the nation’s capital, right? There’s a lot of stuff to do that.

Adam: Yeah. You’re within striking distance of a lot of stuff, so if you come join us, if you can take a couple days on either side, maybe go do something. If you’re traveling, there’s a lot of neat stuff in that area to do.

Bradley: Yeah. Yeah, there is. Okay, well, I don’t see any other questions coming in, guys. It’s Fourth of July holiday week. For those of you in the US, happy Fourth of July, and go get a cold beer.

Adam: Those of you in England, I’m not watching the game, but hopefully England’s doing well in the soccer match I guess it is right now. I’m going to check that out, and then yeah, I hope everyone has a great Fourth of July. I’m going to head out and enjoy that tomorrow.

Bradley: I’m still working tomorrow for a few hours in the morning. I’ve got to coach Crossfit for two hours in the morning, and then I’m going to work for a couple hours before I go heavily drink.

Marco: Well, England is still sweating.

Hernan: [inaudible 00:46:14] penalties. Very fun. Thank you guys.

Bradley: All right guys. See you later. Happy Fourth.

Marco: Bye everyone.

Chris: Bye.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 191 posted first on http://beyondvapepage.blogspot.com

[howardkuester22]

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 191

Click on the video above to watch Episode 191 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 https://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

  Announcement

Adam: Hey everybody. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts, episode 191, the question where I guarantee it, if you’re watching this, you can get your question answered, because right now there are almost no questions because of a little error that somebody made. It’s not important who, but let’s go and say hello to everyone real quick. Hopefully, you’re getting an announcement on YouTube or you’re getting a notification. You might be watching this later, in which case, just ignore all this stuff about people making mistakes. Chris, how you doing, man?

Chris: Good. Happy to have summer finally in Europe.

Adam: Oh, nice. It’s finally warming up there?

Chris: Yep.

Adam: Good deal, good deal. Hernan, how about you? Is it nice and cold down there?

Hernan: Yeah. Over here, it’s freezing, man. I’m freezing my ass and overdressed, whatever, but I’m super excited to be here anyway, so that doesn’t stop us.

Adam: Marco, you’re not freezing your ass off, are you?

Marco: Never. Guys, for some reason, we’re not transmitting this Hangout into the Google Plus page. It’s still 190.

Bradley: That’s my fault. Standby.

Adam: Got you. Well, we won’t ask Bradley how he’s doing, because I don’t want to divide up his attention, but we do have a few announcements. Real quick, I wanted to say we’re going to put the link on the page and you’ll be able to find it in the description if you’re watching this later on YouTube, but our live event is a go, The Semantic Mastery Live.

October, the weekend of October 20th, 21st, we’ve already announced one of the special guest speakers. In addition to seeing all of our lovely faces at some point during the event, also Jeffrey Smith of SEO Boot Camp will be joining us and we’re going to have a couple more that we’re holding back.

We’re teasing it a little bit, but that is a go, so I’ll pop the link on here if you want to go and grab your ticket now. Ticket prices are definitely going to go up as time goes on. We want to help out the people who jump on this early and it is capped at a total of 25. Don’t put it off too long. It will be in the Washington DC area and we’re getting ready to lock down our event venue probably in the next week or two.

Bradley: Page is updated.

Adam: All right. As far as other announcements, you guys, we got a lot. I’m going to pass it off. Marco, is there anything we want to say specifically?

Marco: No. We’re moving forward, guys. The Google My Business auto-poster is ready. It has some awesome features. People have a long way to catch up. I know there’s some stuff being put out. It’s [inaudible 00:02:42]. You can get an RSS feed on anyone who’s in Syndication Academy or knows about us. You know how wicked RSS feeds can be, how they can help amplify your content, how they can help you with backlinks, but the most interesting thing we’re doing is we’re pulling in or we should have the ability in the next few days to pull in the RSS feed from the website so that all you would literally have to do is post from your website and you can amplify that content into post. If not, we do have the auto-poster, where you can go in and setup posts well ahead of time.

We also have YouTube views. That’s currently working. It’s working really well to push up videos, to get it ranked. Now, of course, once you start pushing videos, you should continue pushing videos to it to keep it ranked until it picks up its own steam. It’ll pick up steam and stay where it’s supposed to stay. It’ll stay ranked. The great thing about this is that since it’s real people, they’ll interact with your channel, so they’ll send all kinds of signals.

I keep telling people, the caveat in this is that you have to send them to a quality video. I always ask the question, “What’s a quality video?” Well, a quality video, if you look at your competition as a video that has a bunch of likes, it has a bunch of watch time, it has a bunch of subscribers, that’s a quality video. Look at what your competition is doing for that keyword and you mimic that, but do them one better. Better production, a better speaker, better audio quality, whatever it is that you need to do to grab the attention of your viewers.

There’s so many things coming. Video carpet bomb is coming. We were just talking about it. The done for you Google My Business services, that’s coming. The VA is almost trained. I’m working with her daily on this task. Cora reports are going to be available. What else do we have? Drive Stacks, guys. Drive Stacks, the Semantic Mastery way, with my original VA, the VA that I originally trained will be available through our marketplace. Market, it’s coming. Just stay tuned. Keep coming back and we’ll have news as everything develops, but we hope to have at least some of the products available by the end of the week. That’ll be on you to send the email to let people know, “Hey, it’s ready, so go get it.”

Adam: Awesome. Sorry about that. I was muted real quick. Also, I wanted to let everyone know, if you missed the webinar, we have a webinar replay. I’m not going to post the link here because if you’re on our email list, then you are very special and you’re going to get a link to check out the bundle, but there was a great webinar on Monday going into detail about how you can use some of the most powerful training that we have and really combine that.

We’re going to have some more information coming out about that. We’ll just post the link so you can go and grab that if you’re interested in taking advantage. It’s a special Fourth of July kind of holiday offer, and then we’ll have a little bit, like I said, of followup in the coming days. A lot of people are taking some time off, heading out to the beach, doing whatever. If you got some time you can squeak away from the family or make an excuse, you might want to go check out the replay over the next couple of days.

Bradley: I can tell having changed Hump Day Hangouts from Wednesday to Tuesday for this week, we’ve got a lot less viewers on it right now than we typically do, so it’s just timing. I’m glad that unfortunately, we didn’t have all the questions directed to the right place this time. That’s on our end, but we got a few questions. Do we have any other announcements, guys?

Adam: I’m good. How about you guys?

Hernan: I just wanted to reiterate that go ahead and grab your tickets for the [inaudible 00:06:51] Live 2018 because it’s going to depend on that. It’s going to depend on that. I’m really looking forward to seeing you guys, so yeah, I just wanted to repeat that once again.

Adam: Okay, cool.

Bradley: That’s it. We can get into it, huh?

Adam: Yeah, let’s do it.

Bradley: Let’s do it. All right, well, we don’t have a lot of questions, so we’re hoping that some of you guys that are here have some questions and you post them on the page. Again, that was our fault, but it is what it is, so we’re going to run with what we got. I know Adam posted a couple questions that he yanked from one of the Facebook groups, so we’ll start with those. I’ll grab the screen.

Is It Possible To Spread Authority To Multiple Root Domains From One Authority Domain Via Subdomain Redirects?

All right, so from the Facebook group. “Looking for insights on an idea. I wanted to test this, but asking is more efficient. Is the following possible? I have site.com and site.com has authority.” IDA, DR, okay. “I have a sub-domain on site.com, subdomain1.site.com. Sub-domain carries authority from site, correct?” Carry domain authority, but not necessarily page authority, but you’re right.

“Can I create a redirect from subdomain1.site.com to secondsite.com while site.com stays live and then secondsite.com gets authority from subdomain1.site.com?” Questions like this are hard to read. “Both secondsite.com and site have authority. In other words, is it possible to spread authority to multiple domains from one authority domain via sub-domain redirects?” Yes. “I’m doubting this works, but also read some things that indicate it might work.”

It does work. It does absolutely work. There’s a little bit of a loss. That’s called domain authority manipulation, guys. That’s like 2012 stuff. That’s the stuff that we did that worked really freaking well in like 2012, ‘13 timeframe. There’s still a little bit of benefit to pushing domain authority, guys, but honestly, you can set that up. It will work. There’s a little bit of a loss between redirects when pushing domain authority. It will absolutely increase your domain authority from your sub-domain that you direct to another root domain.

My point is, I’m not sure what your end goal is. Why do you want to push this domain authority to that other domain? Domain authority manipulation as a ranking factor is almost obsolete. I guess there might be some benefit to it, but you have to have really high DA numbers for that to really have an effect. It’s much more about relevancy than it is about domain metrics, which are proprietary metrics, right? Marco, I’ll let you comment on that a little bit, but again, look, if you want to do it, yes, it will help to boost domain authority from the second site.

There is a little bit of a loss, so what I’m saying is if you’ve got a 42 domain authority on your root domain and you try to push that over to a second site via sub-domain or any way you want to do it, it really doesn’t matter, but via a sub-domain redirect, you’ll likely fall somewhere in the 30s, the mid 30s with domain authority. It’s not going to happen overnight. When I used to do a lot of domain authority manipulation, we used to do a lot of it. The maws numbers would refresh, I can’t remember, I think it was every other month, every two months.

Marco: Every 90 days.

Bradley: Every 90 days. Okay. If we would do a redirect, like for example, we called it link laundering, and we’d do double 301 redirects from spam domains. We would go find expired domains that were on the closeout because they went through auction and they were really shitty, spammy domains. A lot of the times, they’re Chinese domains that would have hundreds, sometimes thousands or even tens of thousands of sub-domains. The dropped domain would have tens of thousands, sometimes, anywhere between hundreds to tens of thousands of sub-domains.

This is what we used to do and it worked really well. We would go buy a domain, buy one of those domains, and then we would set up a redirect script, a catch all or wild card redirect via HT access. We’d point the domain to a host, a C panel, and then we would set up an HT access file that would do a wild card sub-domain redirect to whatever we wanted to, and we would push domain authority.

We would do what’s called a double 301 redirect, so we would redirect it through one domain first and then push it over to our final target URL. I’d get domains that had 55, 60 domain authority mostly because of all the accumulated domain authority from all the sub-domains, right? We’d do the redirect and then push it over to a brand new domain and I could get my domain authority to jump from one, which is a brand new registered domain, to mid-40s usually within one maws cycle refresh, but sometimes it would take two. It would take anywhere between 90 days, so three months, to six months, to see that kind of a push. Again, I’ve found over the years that using that is purely like a ranking method, which used to work phenomenally. It really is ineffective at this point.

The only thing I would suggest is like I said, or what I would add to this, is that if you have really high domain authority and you can push some of that to another domain, it will help it to respond better to other off page signals, but that’s about it. Again, it’s not something that I even bother doing anymore. I don’t even look at domain authority and page authority numbers anymore, honestly. If you want to do it, it will work. Marco, what are your comments on this?

Marco: I would say he’s better off concentrating on relevance. If they’re relevant, then you can throw DA and domain authority and page authority out the window and push relevance. You could even throw a Drive Stack. Wherever you’re directing, you could put a Drive Stack as buffer and redirect to the Drive Stack and the Drive Stack will then push the power over to the new site with even more relevance. In the Drive Stack, you could push just tons of relevance in there whether you want keyword relevance, what do you call it, keyword plus URL, brand plus keyword relevance. What you really want is that brand plus keyword relevance.

Bradley: Right.

Marco: What you want to become is you want to become the keyword for whatever that niche is, so when people start thinking about those keywords, they don’t necessarily think about the keywords, but they think about your brand. This is where I tell people, Coca-Cola, Xerox, Band-Aid, Scotch Tape, all of these people have done fabulous branding where they become the brand for those keywords.

I know it’s not simple to do and we don’t have the deep pockets, but a way to start doing that is by relevance. How we do it, how we take advantage of it is by going into a Drive Stack and creating all of that keyword relevance which relates to the brand, and then we push maybe [inaudible 00:14:11] which will flow into the website, or maybe we’ll go direct to the website. We’ll go to the Google My Business thing.

There are so many ways to take advantage of this, but you’re pushing relevance. Think metrics. DA is a third party metric. Trust flow and citation flow, third party metrics. We don’t bother with that. What we look for is relevance and as long as the on page is tight on both websites, they will both benefit.

I could go even further, but then I’d be getting stuff that’s only in RYS Academy Reloaded. I could start talking all kind of things about embeds and the nasty stuff that you can do with embeds, but again, as I always say, we’d be doing the people that pay for the information a disservice by giving it away for free.

Hernan: If I may add real quick, that was one of the main reasons, the spam, when we just throw spam on the domain, we’ll rank. We will get higher domain authority, or we would do the sub-domain manipulation and whatnot, and that was one of the reasons why we stopped paying attention that much to domain authority and page authority, because they were so easy to manipulate.

That’s why we migrated to [inaudible 00:15:28] initially, and then we had to develop, as Marco was saying, relevancy and trust and authority as our own metics, our own way of doing things, because it was so easy. Again, you would have these Chinese domains with, I don’t know, 60 domain authority, and they were all spam. That’s one of the reasons, one of the many reasons that we stopped going through those domains.

Also, because maws will start delaying the updates and whatnot, and at some point it became a lot like waiting the page rank update, the public page rank update from Google that would go out every month or so. It became like that, so we stopped paying attention to that altogether and we started focusing a lot more on rankings and actual results.

Bradley: Again, yeah, it’ll work, and what I would recommend if you were trying to push it a second site anyway, guys, remember, if you push domain authority to a sub-domain, it will benefit the entire domain. Remember, domain authority, it’s a site-wide or domain-wide, including all sub-domains, including all inner pages and posts, all of them will benefit from that, will receive the same domain authority.

Instead of pushing from a redirect to a secondsite.com, you could push to a non-indexed sub-domain on that secondsite.com, all right? You do that so that you can set up a sub-domain. You don’t even need to really put a piece of content up on it, but you could. You could set an HTML file to say no index or whatever, and then just point all of it to that specific sub-domain because it will benefit the root without people really being able to see what you’re doing.

Again, I really just think that’s a waste of time unless you’ve got some massive amount of authority on your first site that you’re trying to push, in case it would help a little bit, but you’d have to be really, really high domain authority numbers for that to make much difference now in my opinion based on how the algorithm works now.

Do You Pay For Articles Or Use A Plugin To Pull In Content?

All right, Adam, the next one that he posted was, “Do you guys pay for articles or use a plugin to pull in content? Looking for an alternative for test site than buying articles.” Yeah, content curation. We have a training course specifically all about that. It’s what I’ve been using. I had to figure out a way to develop content for my clients that was cost-effective and efficient without having to be subject matter experts, so I developed a process years ago that I’ve been using ever since 2012.

We’ve got it as a product right now called Content Kingpin, but that’s the same exact content production process that I used for my own agency and countless amount of our members and students have also implemented that into their business for their primary content methods. We just get across the board good results from even our members that have implemented it, as well, or adopted that process, because it works.

It’s basically hands-free content marketing. You could teach a VA to do it, and they don’t have to be subject matter experts. All they have to do is be able to identify and locate content, authority content or just good, relevant content about whatever topic they’re going to be blogging about and then organizing that content in a logical manner and injecting a small amount of their own commentary. That content is more efficient and way better than any sort of shitty content, farmed content that you could buy from the dime a dozen content farms that are out there, that is just spun, rehashed garbage.

Guys, that’s all the content farms do. They don’t write original content. Even if they do, they’re not subject matter experts. If they are, you’re going to pay a premium for it, but even then, a lot of times, guys, all they do is do mashups where they’ll go, scrape five or 10 articles or whatever about whatever topic it is that you requested the article for, and then they’ll put bits and pieces of each article, put them through a spinner, and sometimes they’ll manually edit the spin text or the output file to where it’s a little bit more readable, but a lot of those content farms, you’ll get a lot of errors and stuff that you can clearly see that a spinner was used and they didn’t take the time to manually edit it.

My point is you’re not really buying original content from content farms, anyway. You’re buying garbage. You’re much better off using curated content where you can reference and cite other people’s authority content that is highly relevant from subject matter experts and you’re giving them credit via the attribution link. You’re citing the source, which is required and ethical. It’s the ethical thing to do.

Now, you’ve got good content from subject matter experts that you’re quoting on your own site, giving them credit, and injecting your own commentary. Again, a VA can do that. That’s why we call it Content Kingpin Hands-Free Content Marketing, because it truly is. You can generate a stream or revenue just from selling content marketing services and managing it. It just requires a very, very small amount of management.

Again, that training, Content Kingpin, teaches exactly how to hire the VAs, what to look for, what type of output production you should expect, what to pay them, how to manage it, all of that, guys. All of that is covered in great detail in that course. I highly recommend anybody that needs content for their clients or their own assets, their own digital assets, check that out because it’s the exact same method we use, all right?

Do We Have To Worry About Stock Photo Copyright Issues When Posting To Social Media Like Twitter?

Jeff, what’s up, Jeff? He says, “Do we have to worry about stock photo copyright issues when posting to social media, like Twitter, the same way we do with our website?” I don’t know, Jeff. I wish I did. I wish I had definitive answer. Maybe somebody else on here knows. Anybody?

Hernan: I had some issues when it comes to posting on Facebook, so yeah, short answer is yeah, because I had to take down an ad that was performing super well just because I was lazy and I didn’t check the stock photos stuff. The actual owner of the photo contacted me and said, “Hey dude, you need to take off the ad,” and I lost the entire social proof and everything on the Facebook side of things.

Yeah, short answer is yes because you can get in trouble. It doesn’t really matter if you’re using it on Twitter, Google. Google, maybe you would have a bigger exposure because you’re being indexed, but on Twitter, people can still see it, right? I think it’s just a matter of photos are still an asset, so it’s like you saying a piece of a song or a piece of a movie, something like that, all of that is copyrighted. You need to have that in mind, no matter where you’re using it.

When you’re doing it on your website, you’re a bit more exposed because anyone can get access to that, while on Twitter it’s not the case, but just to avoid issues, I would say don’t do it. Plus, there are so many deals and having stock photos has become really, really cheap. If you go to [inaudible 00:22:51] for example, you can get deals, like, I don’t know, for 100 photos for 10 bucks or something like that. It’s not even worth the trouble of getting through it.

Bradley: Yeah. Yeah, and usually for my clients, what I have them do is I use StockFresh.com. That’s our primary stock photo site, and so I just have my clients go setup an account or I set it up for them in their name and then I send them the login details and then they go in and fund it by just purchasing credits. We usually purchase 100 credits at a time. I think it’s $79 or something like that at Stock Fresh. It’s not bad. It’s decent.

Every couple of months or so, my curators, my VAs who are doing all of the content marketing for my clients will contact me and say, “Hey, we need this account refilled,” and I’ll just contact the client and say, “Hey, I need you to add another $100, refill the account with credits.” That’s it. That’s how it works, and that’s just to be safe.

That’s because I’ve been hit with extortion letters from Getty Images and their various subsidiaries and I’ve had to pay fines, copyright fines, settlement fees, basically for not having each client having their own licenses. In other words, even if I had my own account for my marketing agency with stock photos, if I published those stock photos on clients’ websites, the client needs to have a license for that photo. Even though I did it on their behalf, I was the license holder, not the client.

I’ve had to pay settlement fees for copyright infringement issues for client sites that they received the extortion letter, but I paid it on their behalf because it was my fault for not having them setup properly. That’s why I talk about that, again, in the Content Kingpin training that I was just talking about, I go into great detail about all of that because it’s very, very important. I would follow Hernan’s advice about social media and really try to have proper licensing for photos that you’re using.

Hernan: Yeah. Yeah, I would do that, too, and for example, there’s some websites that they’re explicitly royalty-free photos like Flickr, for example. You can search for royalty-free photos, then I think Unsplash.com, Unsplash.com. There’s another called Pixabay.com. Those are all royalty-free photos, but you’re limited to what you can find over there.

Sometimes for ads it will work, but if I’m looking for a specific way or specific photo that will convey a specific message that I want to send, then it wouldn’t work, so I’ll need to go out and actually purchase the picture. It’s specifically important with social media. Twitter has become super, super visual. If you go through the Twitter app on mobile, it’s super visual, so photos play a big role.

Would SEO Content Be Okay Or Should You Use The Research Quality Content For An Affiliate Money Site?

Bradley: Okay, Dominick’s up. What’s up, Dominick? He says, “I need some good content for an affiliate money site. I’ve tried Natasha Nixon, but it’s a little pricey. Would SEO content be okay or should I use the research quality content?”

No, if it’s for a money site, I would recommend that you do authority content because the SEO content is exactly what I just mentioned about a content farm. That’s what it is. It’s spun shit. It’s garbage. I can tell you that. That’s to be used for link building and stuff like that. It’s not money site content. I could tell you that even the authority content that you purchase sometimes isn’t going to be very good.

For the most part, I’ve had good experiences with Natasha Nixon for authority content, but the last article I got was complete garbage. It was for Mario’s Cab Service for the GMB Pro case study, and it was complete garbage. I ordered a 1500 word authority content article, paid like $120 for it, and it was complete garbage. I had to go through and manually edit. If I had time, I would’ve requested a rewrite, but I didn’t because I wanted to get it up, so I just edited about 500 or 600 words of it myself and then used that as the actual GMB website article.

Again, guys, remember, your best bet, Dominick, if you need really good authority type content or money site content on a regular basis would be to hire your own writer from Upwork or something. That is a much better way than going to the content producers. Honestly, you’re better off developing a one on one relationship with an individual writer.

Here’s the thing. Well, most of my writers are now curators, but I still can rely on them for article writing at times, but most of the stuff we do is like I said, curating for blog posts and such. The idea is once you’ve developed a relationship with a particular writer, you get to know their voice, so to speak and how they write, and you can help to mold or shape how you want them to write for particular clients, for example. That’s the benefit of doing it.

One of the other benefits of having a relationship with an individual writer is that a lot of times, you get better treatment. You don’t have to wait in queue for a week to get a piece of content back, that kind of stuff. You can have direct message. I use Upwork a lot. There’s desktop notifications and all that kind of stuff, so I recommend doing that.

If you’re going to buy it from a content farm, Natasha Nixon being one of them, then authority content is your better bet. It is a bit more expensive, but again, for money sites, I don’t recommend putting up any kind of SEO articles because they’re literally trash. It’s junk. You yourself will spend more time editing them and making them readable than it’s worth. If that’s the case, why not just write it yourself? Anybody want to comment on that?

Hernan: Yeah. Real quick, I totally agree with what you’re saying, Bradley, in terms of having someone that you can always refer to, even further if you’re offering this on a regular basis. I think that there’s some types of professionals, if you would, or some types of work that you always need stuff done, for example, graphic design, that you would be better off just hiring somebody to do graphic design.

For example, on our end, we hire a graphic designer. He would take over the entire graphic design side of things. He would do thumbnails for YouTube. He would do this and he would do that. He already knows how we work and what types of things we want and if we need a logo, we ask him for it, and if we need banners, sometimes he would do it.

I think that’s part of the team that you want to start putting together. That’s part of the team because you’re providing service and if you’re providing content creation services for your clients, that’s something that you really want to have in mind. For example, if you’re doing, I don’t know, video services, right, you’re doing YouTube services, maybe you need a video editor or maybe you need the tools to actually provide the client with a good service. That will position yourself as a much more valuable asset because you have the tools.

It’s not like you’re getting out there and grabbing the content, the articles, the logos from what everyone else is doing. You become a much more valuable asset because you’re developing your own team. I think that having that long-term relationship and having that long-term view when it comes to the collaborators that work with you, people that help you, helps a lot, helps you save time, money, and helps you position yourself better.

Bradley: Yeah, and the last thing about that I want to mention is I said earlier about you get to know a writer’s voice, and that’s good because especially if you’re providing content for your clients, then you already know what the quality is going to be. When you buy content from places like content farms or a Natasha Nixon, even when you’re buying the authority content which costs more money, you don’t know which writer’s going to get it, so you don’t know what the quality’s going to be like.

The tone of the writing can be different from article to article, can be vastly different. If you’re providing content for webpages, not posts, but pages for client sites, you want consistency in tone because you don’t want one page to have a tone that’s vastly different than another page, because it would be off putting to a visitor. Again, you get to know how the writer writes. You get to come to expect a certain level of quality, a certain tone, a certain voice to speak. That kind of stuff makes you more confident in being able to sell content marketing, right? Good question there, Dom. A great question, actually.

Vincent, doesn’t look much of a question. Let’s see if there’s a comment somewhere. No. Okay, so, well, congratulations. I don’t know what this means.

Adam: Oh, you’ll see it in a minute. He posted after that.

Does Adding A PR Link Helps In Generating Review Snippets Of A GMB Review Page?

Bradley: Okay, cool, cool. Let’s see. “Hey guys. Do you know if adding a PR link to our GMB review page will cause our GMB listing to show a review snippet as shown below?”

No. Adding a PR link to your review page, no. This is a maps thing. You have to have I think five, at least it used to be, you had to have a minimum of five ratings for the stars to show. I think that’s still the case. This is a maps listing that you show here in the picture, so that’s not something that we can manipulate by adding code because we can’t add code to the maps profile.

You can on a website. You can have structured data for review schema, but we can’t do that in the maps profile. The maps profile will show review stars once you have a total of five reviews. Whatever the star ratings are is irrelevant. Your ratings stars will show up once you have a total of five reviews. Does that make sense? That’s it. It’s not something that you can force or trigger by linking to it or adding code because you can’t edit the code of the GMB or maps profile like you could on a website, right? You just need to get five reviews.

Who Do You Recommend For Google Phone Verified Accounts?

Okay, Jim’s up. He says, “Hey, SM team. I’m glad you were able to hang out during the holiday week.” Yeah, us, too. We’ve only missed one in 191 episodes and it was a scheduled miss. “I know you’ve spoken about Google phone verified accounts in the past a lot, but I was wondering who you’d recommend of late. Also, is it worth paying $3 per account for aged accounts instead of 35 cent per newer account? Have you had better ratio on sites sticking with the older accounts?”

I buy aged accounts for very particular projects. Let’s put it this way. I’ve bought some aged accounts. I haven’t tested, I haven’t setup an actual test to test a brand new account versus an aged account anytime in the last three or four years, so I don’t know if having an aged account really makes a difference or not. I can’t tell definitively.

People seem to think it does make a difference. There’s probably some evidence out there to support that. I would just assume that that may be the case. For very particular accounts or projects, campaigns, whatever, I will sometimes buy the aged accounts and I’ll pay as much as $50 per account depending on how old it is. I’ve bought some 12 year old created in 2006 Google accounts and I’ve paid as much as $50 per account for those, and then I still had one of them terminated rather quickly, which pissed me off.

I can’t tell you, Jim, whether it’s really worth it or not. Maybe some other people have some data to prove one way or the other. I don’t. Usually, guys, we try to test everything to give you a definitive answer and this is something I have not tested. Adam, or excuse me, Hernan and or Marco, have either of you have any data to back up one way or the other?

Hernan: No, not on my end, honestly.

Marco: No, I don’t think it makes a difference.

Bradley: Okay. Yeah, I didn’t think so. Honestly, I know people say it does. Jim, I would say proceed at your own risk, whichever way you want, but this is the guy that I’m recommending right now for my aged accounts. [inaudible 00:35:52] is his name. At least that’s what I think it is, BulkPVA.com. I still use him. He’s really responsive on Skype if you connect with him on Skype, and if you go to contact, I think his Skype username is right there. Yeah, it is, BulkPVA.com. You can email him, all that. Just tell him I sent you. He knows because I’ve referred a lot of people to him.

He usually takes very good care of us, as well as anytime accounts get terminated and stuff, if they’re new, obviously if you have accounts terminated two weeks after he delivers them to you, that’s your fault, but if they’re within three days, within 72 hours or something like that, see, look, it takes 24 to 72 hours to deliver each order. Let’s see. After delivery of accounts, if the account is banned within 48 hours, replacements will be given to you.

What I do is whenever we order a new batch, and a lot of these, I buy the double phone verified YouTube accounts, and we do that because we do a lot of video spam for clients and all kinds of stuff, and I’ve got a VA that runs a video spam tool, Ab’s Video Carpet Blitz tool. We have to have dozens, if not 100 plus YouTube accounts at all times. Obviously, because we’re doing a shit ton of spam, a lot of accounts get terminated from overuse, and so I buy accounts from this guy all the time.

What I do is my VA will go in and immediately open up Browseo and just start adding profiles and logging in to bind it to his IP, but they each have their own browsing session because they’re all separated or segregated via Browseo, which you can do that with Ghost Browser, I think is another one. It doesn’t have to be Browseo, guys. It doesn’t matter. All I’m saying is the best way to get these accounts to stick is to bind them to your IP, but make sure they have their own unique browsing session in history.

Start allowing cookies to accrue and search history and allow Google and the websites that that profile visits start to build a customer profile, like an avatar or whatever, for that particular profile. In other words, you want it to look real, and so one of the things that I’ve found is these bulk accounts, when you buy them, if you do a hard reset on your browser to clear all cache and cookies and then log into four, five, six accounts from the same IP all from a 100% virgin browsing session each time you do it, that’s going to look spammy and those accounts tend to get terminated.

If you log into each of them, even from the same IP, as long as they have their own unique browsing sessions that maintain, they stay, in other words they don’t get wiped clean and then use that same IP to log into another profile, with Browseo or Ghost Browser or any number of those apps that do that that will keep browsing sessions per profile, that’s a much better way to do it. That tends not to trigger the red flags that do from using 100% clean browsing sessions each time. Hopefully that makes sense. This is the guy I still recommend. Just tell him I sent you only because he tends to take care of the people that we send to him. You get put the top of his priority list, all right? That was another good question.

Would You Recommend Making The Least Number Of Location Pages For Each Facebook Accounts?

Oh, cool, we’re almost out of time, almost out of questions. Marco says from YouTube, [inaudible 00:39:23], “For multiple location websites, I know normally you guys recommend having one ring of social media that is going to syndicate posts, but in Facebook, you can have multiple location pages linked to one account. Would you recommend making at least the Facebook accounts for every location at least?”

Yeah, you can. Honestly, I would, because multiple location businesses should each have their own Facebook page. Each location should have its own Facebook page, so yeah, absolutely. What I was talking about was a branded Tumblr, a branded Blogger, a branded WordPress, and all the other web twos and stuff that we syndicate and we use as part of the syndication networks. You really only need one branded network that you can publish content to from the root domain, from the blog that’s typically going to be on the root domain. Essentially you can silo the root domain to have categories for each one of the locations.

Let’s say you got six locations. I would set up a category for each location, and then what I would do is publish content, just publish posts from the blog on the root site, make sure it’s the correct category selected. When you’re targeting, let’s say location number one, you’re going to optimize the content and have the call to action link, the link that you’re going to be linking to that sub-domain site or location page, whatever, however you’ve got it configured, but that’s going to be selected and placed into that location category, which helps to optimize it. You can do that for each location from the root blog. You don’t need to have a separation syndication network for each location, but Facebook pages, you can have a separate location page and I would encourage that because that’s a powerful citation.

That’s the thing, guys. When it comes to any of the [inaudible 00:41:20]. I’m sorry. I’ll come back to that question, Vincent. I got sidetracked. The other thing about this is if you have a particular location that is not responding as well to the blog post, the syndication from the root domain, then you can always go in and setup a location specific syndication network where you would just use the same branding, but you would add a local modifier.

In other words, if it’s Joe’s Plumbing and there’s six locations and one of them happens to be, I don’t know, Fairfax, Virginia, then if he has a Joe’s Plumbing syndication network that he’s using to blog for all of the locations, but Fairfax, Virginia isn’t really responding as well to the blogs from the root domain, then you could put a Joe’s Plumbing Fairfax syndication network up and then syndicate content directly from that particular category on the root domain to just that network, or you could even transfer and put a separate blog on that location specific site, if that makes sense.

Guys, remember, categories in WordPress do have their own feeds. You can get a category feed, so you could essentially use the root domain for let’s say if you had six locations, you could literally have six location, so brand plus location modifier networks, and have six individual category RSS feeds each triggering their own geo-specific network. Does that make sense?

Again, you can get really complex with this stuff. I like to keep one branded syndication network to try to accomplish what I desire for all of the locations because that’s less work and it’s easier. I like easy. I like efficiency, but you can make it complicated or add additional geo networks specific to a location when needed, but lastly, like I mentioned, as far as the actual Facebook page, I would have a location page for each location, absolutely, because it’s a very powerful citation.

You could also create location pages on LinkedIn, Crunchbase, if you’re using Crunchbase, which you should because Crunchbase is a very powerful citation as part of the semantic database. What I would recommend with Crunchbase is setup an organization and then you setup sub-locations for each location, which you can link to individually. That becomes very, very powerful. That’s a good question, though.

Vincent said, “The line below reviews that has the blue icon, it’s a review snippet.” Yeah, but that’s something that Google pulls in automatically. That’s not something that you can force. This is a Google Maps listing, Vincent. You can’t manipulate this. Google decides what they’re going to list and show right here, not you. That’s not something that we have the option to edit right now or to change.

Those reviews that are pulled in, like the snippet from a review, that’s just what Google determines that they’re going to pull in and display to the searcher, the user, the Google user. That’s it. It’s not something that you can edit. You can’t force that. Google just does that, at least as far as I know, you can’t. If I’m wrong, I’m sure somebody will correct me. Okay, well, should we give it another minute and see if any other questions come in or should we just wrap up a little bit early?

Adam: I think we should give them a minute because I know there’s definitely a lag, but I want to talk a little bit more about the live event in October.

Bradley: Okay.

Adam: We narrowed it down. It’s going to be in Washington DC like we said, which honestly, I’m kind of pumped about because when we first thought of that, the first thing I thought about was heat and humidity, but I realized it’s going to be in the middle of October and it’s going to be freaking awesome there. You can speak to that. That’s a great time of year around there, isn’t it?

Bradley: Absolutely. It should be really nice. There’s a ton of stuff to do in Washington DC. Besides our event, we’re going to have a VIP event I believe, which we’re going to have to find something good to do. DC, it’s the nation’s capital, right? There’s a lot of stuff to do that.

Adam: Yeah. You’re within striking distance of a lot of stuff, so if you come join us, if you can take a couple days on either side, maybe go do something. If you’re traveling, there’s a lot of neat stuff in that area to do.

Bradley: Yeah. Yeah, there is. Okay, well, I don’t see any other questions coming in, guys. It’s Fourth of July holiday week. For those of you in the US, happy Fourth of July, and go get a cold beer.

Adam: Those of you in England, I’m not watching the game, but hopefully England’s doing well in the soccer match I guess it is right now. I’m going to check that out, and then yeah, I hope everyone has a great Fourth of July. I’m going to head out and enjoy that tomorrow.

Bradley: I’m still working tomorrow for a few hours in the morning. I’ve got to coach Crossfit for two hours in the morning, and then I’m going to work for a couple hours before I go heavily drink.

Marco: Well, England is still sweating.

Hernan: [inaudible 00:46:14] penalties. Very fun. Thank you guys.

Bradley: All right guys. See you later. Happy Fourth.

Marco: Bye everyone.

Chris: Bye.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 191 published first on your-t1-blog-url

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 191

Click on the video above to watch Episode 191 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 https://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

  Announcement

Adam: Hey everybody. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts, episode 191, the question where I guarantee it, if you’re watching this, you can get your question answered, because right now there are almost no questions because of a little error that somebody made. It’s not important who, but let’s go and say hello to everyone real quick. Hopefully, you’re getting an announcement on YouTube or you’re getting a notification. You might be watching this later, in which case, just ignore all this stuff about people making mistakes. Chris, how you doing, man?

Chris: Good. Happy to have summer finally in Europe.

Adam: Oh, nice. It’s finally warming up there?

Chris: Yep.

Adam: Good deal, good deal. Hernan, how about you? Is it nice and cold down there?

Hernan: Yeah. Over here, it’s freezing, man. I’m freezing my ass and overdressed, whatever, but I’m super excited to be here anyway, so that doesn’t stop us.

Adam: Marco, you’re not freezing your ass off, are you?

Marco: Never. Guys, for some reason, we’re not transmitting this Hangout into the Google Plus page. It’s still 190.

Bradley: That’s my fault. Standby.

Adam: Got you. Well, we won’t ask Bradley how he’s doing, because I don’t want to divide up his attention, but we do have a few announcements. Real quick, I wanted to say we’re going to put the link on the page and you’ll be able to find it in the description if you’re watching this later on YouTube, but our live event is a go, The Semantic Mastery Live.

October, the weekend of October 20th, 21st, we’ve already announced one of the special guest speakers. In addition to seeing all of our lovely faces at some point during the event, also Jeffrey Smith of SEO Boot Camp will be joining us and we’re going to have a couple more that we’re holding back.

We’re teasing it a little bit, but that is a go, so I’ll pop the link on here if you want to go and grab your ticket now. Ticket prices are definitely going to go up as time goes on. We want to help out the people who jump on this early and it is capped at a total of 25. Don’t put it off too long. It will be in the Washington DC area and we’re getting ready to lock down our event venue probably in the next week or two.

Bradley: Page is updated.

Adam: All right. As far as other announcements, you guys, we got a lot. I’m going to pass it off. Marco, is there anything we want to say specifically?

Marco: No. We’re moving forward, guys. The Google My Business auto-poster is ready. It has some awesome features. People have a long way to catch up. I know there’s some stuff being put out. It’s [inaudible 00:02:42]. You can get an RSS feed on anyone who’s in Syndication Academy or knows about us. You know how wicked RSS feeds can be, how they can help amplify your content, how they can help you with backlinks, but the most interesting thing we’re doing is we’re pulling in or we should have the ability in the next few days to pull in the RSS feed from the website so that all you would literally have to do is post from your website and you can amplify that content into post. If not, we do have the auto-poster, where you can go in and setup posts well ahead of time.

We also have YouTube views. That’s currently working. It’s working really well to push up videos, to get it ranked. Now, of course, once you start pushing videos, you should continue pushing videos to it to keep it ranked until it picks up its own steam. It’ll pick up steam and stay where it’s supposed to stay. It’ll stay ranked. The great thing about this is that since it’s real people, they’ll interact with your channel, so they’ll send all kinds of signals.

I keep telling people, the caveat in this is that you have to send them to a quality video. I always ask the question, “What’s a quality video?” Well, a quality video, if you look at your competition as a video that has a bunch of likes, it has a bunch of watch time, it has a bunch of subscribers, that’s a quality video. Look at what your competition is doing for that keyword and you mimic that, but do them one better. Better production, a better speaker, better audio quality, whatever it is that you need to do to grab the attention of your viewers.

There’s so many things coming. Video carpet bomb is coming. We were just talking about it. The done for you Google My Business services, that’s coming. The VA is almost trained. I’m working with her daily on this task. Cora reports are going to be available. What else do we have? Drive Stacks, guys. Drive Stacks, the Semantic Mastery way, with my original VA, the VA that I originally trained will be available through our marketplace. Market, it’s coming. Just stay tuned. Keep coming back and we’ll have news as everything develops, but we hope to have at least some of the products available by the end of the week. That’ll be on you to send the email to let people know, “Hey, it’s ready, so go get it.”

Adam: Awesome. Sorry about that. I was muted real quick. Also, I wanted to let everyone know, if you missed the webinar, we have a webinar replay. I’m not going to post the link here because if you’re on our email list, then you are very special and you’re going to get a link to check out the bundle, but there was a great webinar on Monday going into detail about how you can use some of the most powerful training that we have and really combine that.

We’re going to have some more information coming out about that. We’ll just post the link so you can go and grab that if you’re interested in taking advantage. It’s a special Fourth of July kind of holiday offer, and then we’ll have a little bit, like I said, of followup in the coming days. A lot of people are taking some time off, heading out to the beach, doing whatever. If you got some time you can squeak away from the family or make an excuse, you might want to go check out the replay over the next couple of days.

Bradley: I can tell having changed Hump Day Hangouts from Wednesday to Tuesday for this week, we’ve got a lot less viewers on it right now than we typically do, so it’s just timing. I’m glad that unfortunately, we didn’t have all the questions directed to the right place this time. That’s on our end, but we got a few questions. Do we have any other announcements, guys?

Adam: I’m good. How about you guys?

Hernan: I just wanted to reiterate that go ahead and grab your tickets for the [inaudible 00:06:51] Live 2018 because it’s going to depend on that. It’s going to depend on that. I’m really looking forward to seeing you guys, so yeah, I just wanted to repeat that once again.

Adam: Okay, cool.

Bradley: That’s it. We can get into it, huh?

Adam: Yeah, let’s do it.

Bradley: Let’s do it. All right, well, we don’t have a lot of questions, so we’re hoping that some of you guys that are here have some questions and you post them on the page. Again, that was our fault, but it is what it is, so we’re going to run with what we got. I know Adam posted a couple questions that he yanked from one of the Facebook groups, so we’ll start with those. I’ll grab the screen.

Is It Possible To Spread Authority To Multiple Root Domains From One Authority Domain Via Subdomain Redirects?

All right, so from the Facebook group. “Looking for insights on an idea. I wanted to test this, but asking is more efficient. Is the following possible? I have site.com and site.com has authority.” IDA, DR, okay. “I have a sub-domain on site.com, subdomain1.site.com. Sub-domain carries authority from site, correct?” Carry domain authority, but not necessarily page authority, but you’re right.

“Can I create a redirect from subdomain1.site.com to secondsite.com while site.com stays live and then secondsite.com gets authority from subdomain1.site.com?” Questions like this are hard to read. “Both secondsite.com and site have authority. In other words, is it possible to spread authority to multiple domains from one authority domain via sub-domain redirects?” Yes. “I’m doubting this works, but also read some things that indicate it might work.”

It does work. It does absolutely work. There’s a little bit of a loss. That’s called domain authority manipulation, guys. That’s like 2012 stuff. That’s the stuff that we did that worked really freaking well in like 2012, ‘13 timeframe. There’s still a little bit of benefit to pushing domain authority, guys, but honestly, you can set that up. It will work. There’s a little bit of a loss between redirects when pushing domain authority. It will absolutely increase your domain authority from your sub-domain that you direct to another root domain.

My point is, I’m not sure what your end goal is. Why do you want to push this domain authority to that other domain? Domain authority manipulation as a ranking factor is almost obsolete. I guess there might be some benefit to it, but you have to have really high DA numbers for that to really have an effect. It’s much more about relevancy than it is about domain metrics, which are proprietary metrics, right? Marco, I’ll let you comment on that a little bit, but again, look, if you want to do it, yes, it will help to boost domain authority from the second site.

There is a little bit of a loss, so what I’m saying is if you’ve got a 42 domain authority on your root domain and you try to push that over to a second site via sub-domain or any way you want to do it, it really doesn’t matter, but via a sub-domain redirect, you’ll likely fall somewhere in the 30s, the mid 30s with domain authority. It’s not going to happen overnight. When I used to do a lot of domain authority manipulation, we used to do a lot of it. The maws numbers would refresh, I can’t remember, I think it was every other month, every two months.

Marco: Every 90 days.

Bradley: Every 90 days. Okay. If we would do a redirect, like for example, we called it link laundering, and we’d do double 301 redirects from spam domains. We would go find expired domains that were on the closeout because they went through auction and they were really shitty, spammy domains. A lot of the times, they’re Chinese domains that would have hundreds, sometimes thousands or even tens of thousands of sub-domains. The dropped domain would have tens of thousands, sometimes, anywhere between hundreds to tens of thousands of sub-domains.

This is what we used to do and it worked really well. We would go buy a domain, buy one of those domains, and then we would set up a redirect script, a catch all or wild card redirect via HT access. We’d point the domain to a host, a C panel, and then we would set up an HT access file that would do a wild card sub-domain redirect to whatever we wanted to, and we would push domain authority.

We would do what’s called a double 301 redirect, so we would redirect it through one domain first and then push it over to our final target URL. I’d get domains that had 55, 60 domain authority mostly because of all the accumulated domain authority from all the sub-domains, right? We’d do the redirect and then push it over to a brand new domain and I could get my domain authority to jump from one, which is a brand new registered domain, to mid-40s usually within one maws cycle refresh, but sometimes it would take two. It would take anywhere between 90 days, so three months, to six months, to see that kind of a push. Again, I’ve found over the years that using that is purely like a ranking method, which used to work phenomenally. It really is ineffective at this point.

The only thing I would suggest is like I said, or what I would add to this, is that if you have really high domain authority and you can push some of that to another domain, it will help it to respond better to other off page signals, but that’s about it. Again, it’s not something that I even bother doing anymore. I don’t even look at domain authority and page authority numbers anymore, honestly. If you want to do it, it will work. Marco, what are your comments on this?

Marco: I would say he’s better off concentrating on relevance. If they’re relevant, then you can throw DA and domain authority and page authority out the window and push relevance. You could even throw a Drive Stack. Wherever you’re directing, you could put a Drive Stack as buffer and redirect to the Drive Stack and the Drive Stack will then push the power over to the new site with even more relevance. In the Drive Stack, you could push just tons of relevance in there whether you want keyword relevance, what do you call it, keyword plus URL, brand plus keyword relevance. What you really want is that brand plus keyword relevance.

Bradley: Right.

Marco: What you want to become is you want to become the keyword for whatever that niche is, so when people start thinking about those keywords, they don’t necessarily think about the keywords, but they think about your brand. This is where I tell people, Coca-Cola, Xerox, Band-Aid, Scotch Tape, all of these people have done fabulous branding where they become the brand for those keywords.

I know it’s not simple to do and we don’t have the deep pockets, but a way to start doing that is by relevance. How we do it, how we take advantage of it is by going into a Drive Stack and creating all of that keyword relevance which relates to the brand, and then we push maybe [inaudible 00:14:11] which will flow into the website, or maybe we’ll go direct to the website. We’ll go to the Google My Business thing.

There are so many ways to take advantage of this, but you’re pushing relevance. Think metrics. DA is a third party metric. Trust flow and citation flow, third party metrics. We don’t bother with that. What we look for is relevance and as long as the on page is tight on both websites, they will both benefit.

I could go even further, but then I’d be getting stuff that’s only in RYS Academy Reloaded. I could start talking all kind of things about embeds and the nasty stuff that you can do with embeds, but again, as I always say, we’d be doing the people that pay for the information a disservice by giving it away for free.

Hernan: If I may add real quick, that was one of the main reasons, the spam, when we just throw spam on the domain, we’ll rank. We will get higher domain authority, or we would do the sub-domain manipulation and whatnot, and that was one of the reasons why we stopped paying attention that much to domain authority and page authority, because they were so easy to manipulate.

That’s why we migrated to [inaudible 00:15:28] initially, and then we had to develop, as Marco was saying, relevancy and trust and authority as our own metics, our own way of doing things, because it was so easy. Again, you would have these Chinese domains with, I don’t know, 60 domain authority, and they were all spam. That’s one of the reasons, one of the many reasons that we stopped going through those domains.

Also, because maws will start delaying the updates and whatnot, and at some point it became a lot like waiting the page rank update, the public page rank update from Google that would go out every month or so. It became like that, so we stopped paying attention to that altogether and we started focusing a lot more on rankings and actual results.

Bradley: Again, yeah, it’ll work, and what I would recommend if you were trying to push it a second site anyway, guys, remember, if you push domain authority to a sub-domain, it will benefit the entire domain. Remember, domain authority, it’s a site-wide or domain-wide, including all sub-domains, including all inner pages and posts, all of them will benefit from that, will receive the same domain authority.

Instead of pushing from a redirect to a secondsite.com, you could push to a non-indexed sub-domain on that secondsite.com, all right? You do that so that you can set up a sub-domain. You don’t even need to really put a piece of content up on it, but you could. You could set an HTML file to say no index or whatever, and then just point all of it to that specific sub-domain because it will benefit the root without people really being able to see what you’re doing.

Again, I really just think that’s a waste of time unless you’ve got some massive amount of authority on your first site that you’re trying to push, in case it would help a little bit, but you’d have to be really, really high domain authority numbers for that to make much difference now in my opinion based on how the algorithm works now.

Do You Pay For Articles Or Use A Plugin To Pull In Content?

All right, Adam, the next one that he posted was, “Do you guys pay for articles or use a plugin to pull in content? Looking for an alternative for test site than buying articles.” Yeah, content curation. We have a training course specifically all about that. It’s what I’ve been using. I had to figure out a way to develop content for my clients that was cost-effective and efficient without having to be subject matter experts, so I developed a process years ago that I’ve been using ever since 2012.

We’ve got it as a product right now called Content Kingpin, but that’s the same exact content production process that I used for my own agency and countless amount of our members and students have also implemented that into their business for their primary content methods. We just get across the board good results from even our members that have implemented it, as well, or adopted that process, because it works.

It’s basically hands-free content marketing. You could teach a VA to do it, and they don’t have to be subject matter experts. All they have to do is be able to identify and locate content, authority content or just good, relevant content about whatever topic they’re going to be blogging about and then organizing that content in a logical manner and injecting a small amount of their own commentary. That content is more efficient and way better than any sort of shitty content, farmed content that you could buy from the dime a dozen content farms that are out there, that is just spun, rehashed garbage.

Guys, that’s all the content farms do. They don’t write original content. Even if they do, they’re not subject matter experts. If they are, you’re going to pay a premium for it, but even then, a lot of times, guys, all they do is do mashups where they’ll go, scrape five or 10 articles or whatever about whatever topic it is that you requested the article for, and then they’ll put bits and pieces of each article, put them through a spinner, and sometimes they’ll manually edit the spin text or the output file to where it’s a little bit more readable, but a lot of those content farms, you’ll get a lot of errors and stuff that you can clearly see that a spinner was used and they didn’t take the time to manually edit it.

My point is you’re not really buying original content from content farms, anyway. You’re buying garbage. You’re much better off using curated content where you can reference and cite other people’s authority content that is highly relevant from subject matter experts and you’re giving them credit via the attribution link. You’re citing the source, which is required and ethical. It’s the ethical thing to do.

Now, you’ve got good content from subject matter experts that you’re quoting on your own site, giving them credit, and injecting your own commentary. Again, a VA can do that. That’s why we call it Content Kingpin Hands-Free Content Marketing, because it truly is. You can generate a stream or revenue just from selling content marketing services and managing it. It just requires a very, very small amount of management.

Again, that training, Content Kingpin, teaches exactly how to hire the VAs, what to look for, what type of output production you should expect, what to pay them, how to manage it, all of that, guys. All of that is covered in great detail in that course. I highly recommend anybody that needs content for their clients or their own assets, their own digital assets, check that out because it’s the exact same method we use, all right?

Do We Have To Worry About Stock Photo Copyright Issues When Posting To Social Media Like Twitter?

Jeff, what’s up, Jeff? He says, “Do we have to worry about stock photo copyright issues when posting to social media, like Twitter, the same way we do with our website?” I don’t know, Jeff. I wish I did. I wish I had definitive answer. Maybe somebody else on here knows. Anybody?

Hernan: I had some issues when it comes to posting on Facebook, so yeah, short answer is yeah, because I had to take down an ad that was performing super well just because I was lazy and I didn’t check the stock photos stuff. The actual owner of the photo contacted me and said, “Hey dude, you need to take off the ad,” and I lost the entire social proof and everything on the Facebook side of things.

Yeah, short answer is yes because you can get in trouble. It doesn’t really matter if you’re using it on Twitter, Google. Google, maybe you would have a bigger exposure because you’re being indexed, but on Twitter, people can still see it, right? I think it’s just a matter of photos are still an asset, so it’s like you saying a piece of a song or a piece of a movie, something like that, all of that is copyrighted. You need to have that in mind, no matter where you’re using it.

When you’re doing it on your website, you’re a bit more exposed because anyone can get access to that, while on Twitter it’s not the case, but just to avoid issues, I would say don’t do it. Plus, there are so many deals and having stock photos has become really, really cheap. If you go to [inaudible 00:22:51] for example, you can get deals, like, I don’t know, for 100 photos for 10 bucks or something like that. It’s not even worth the trouble of getting through it.

Bradley: Yeah. Yeah, and usually for my clients, what I have them do is I use StockFresh.com. That’s our primary stock photo site, and so I just have my clients go setup an account or I set it up for them in their name and then I send them the login details and then they go in and fund it by just purchasing credits. We usually purchase 100 credits at a time. I think it’s $79 or something like that at Stock Fresh. It’s not bad. It’s decent.

Every couple of months or so, my curators, my VAs who are doing all of the content marketing for my clients will contact me and say, “Hey, we need this account refilled,” and I’ll just contact the client and say, “Hey, I need you to add another $100, refill the account with credits.” That’s it. That’s how it works, and that’s just to be safe.

That’s because I’ve been hit with extortion letters from Getty Images and their various subsidiaries and I’ve had to pay fines, copyright fines, settlement fees, basically for not having each client having their own licenses. In other words, even if I had my own account for my marketing agency with stock photos, if I published those stock photos on clients’ websites, the client needs to have a license for that photo. Even though I did it on their behalf, I was the license holder, not the client.

I’ve had to pay settlement fees for copyright infringement issues for client sites that they received the extortion letter, but I paid it on their behalf because it was my fault for not having them setup properly. That’s why I talk about that, again, in the Content Kingpin training that I was just talking about, I go into great detail about all of that because it’s very, very important. I would follow Hernan’s advice about social media and really try to have proper licensing for photos that you’re using.

Hernan: Yeah. Yeah, I would do that, too, and for example, there’s some websites that they’re explicitly royalty-free photos like Flickr, for example. You can search for royalty-free photos, then I think Unsplash.com, Unsplash.com. There’s another called Pixabay.com. Those are all royalty-free photos, but you’re limited to what you can find over there.

Sometimes for ads it will work, but if I’m looking for a specific way or specific photo that will convey a specific message that I want to send, then it wouldn’t work, so I’ll need to go out and actually purchase the picture. It’s specifically important with social media. Twitter has become super, super visual. If you go through the Twitter app on mobile, it’s super visual, so photos play a big role.

Would SEO Content Be Okay Or Should You Use The Research Quality Content For An Affiliate Money Site?

Bradley: Okay, Dominick’s up. What’s up, Dominick? He says, “I need some good content for an affiliate money site. I’ve tried Natasha Nixon, but it’s a little pricey. Would SEO content be okay or should I use the research quality content?”

No, if it’s for a money site, I would recommend that you do authority content because the SEO content is exactly what I just mentioned about a content farm. That’s what it is. It’s spun shit. It’s garbage. I can tell you that. That’s to be used for link building and stuff like that. It’s not money site content. I could tell you that even the authority content that you purchase sometimes isn’t going to be very good.

For the most part, I’ve had good experiences with Natasha Nixon for authority content, but the last article I got was complete garbage. It was for Mario’s Cab Service for the GMB Pro case study, and it was complete garbage. I ordered a 1500 word authority content article, paid like $120 for it, and it was complete garbage. I had to go through and manually edit. If I had time, I would’ve requested a rewrite, but I didn’t because I wanted to get it up, so I just edited about 500 or 600 words of it myself and then used that as the actual GMB website article.

Again, guys, remember, your best bet, Dominick, if you need really good authority type content or money site content on a regular basis would be to hire your own writer from Upwork or something. That is a much better way than going to the content producers. Honestly, you’re better off developing a one on one relationship with an individual writer.

Here’s the thing. Well, most of my writers are now curators, but I still can rely on them for article writing at times, but most of the stuff we do is like I said, curating for blog posts and such. The idea is once you’ve developed a relationship with a particular writer, you get to know their voice, so to speak and how they write, and you can help to mold or shape how you want them to write for particular clients, for example. That’s the benefit of doing it.

One of the other benefits of having a relationship with an individual writer is that a lot of times, you get better treatment. You don’t have to wait in queue for a week to get a piece of content back, that kind of stuff. You can have direct message. I use Upwork a lot. There’s desktop notifications and all that kind of stuff, so I recommend doing that.

If you’re going to buy it from a content farm, Natasha Nixon being one of them, then authority content is your better bet. It is a bit more expensive, but again, for money sites, I don’t recommend putting up any kind of SEO articles because they’re literally trash. It’s junk. You yourself will spend more time editing them and making them readable than it’s worth. If that’s the case, why not just write it yourself? Anybody want to comment on that?

Hernan: Yeah. Real quick, I totally agree with what you’re saying, Bradley, in terms of having someone that you can always refer to, even further if you’re offering this on a regular basis. I think that there’s some types of professionals, if you would, or some types of work that you always need stuff done, for example, graphic design, that you would be better off just hiring somebody to do graphic design.

For example, on our end, we hire a graphic designer. He would take over the entire graphic design side of things. He would do thumbnails for YouTube. He would do this and he would do that. He already knows how we work and what types of things we want and if we need a logo, we ask him for it, and if we need banners, sometimes he would do it.

I think that’s part of the team that you want to start putting together. That’s part of the team because you’re providing service and if you’re providing content creation services for your clients, that’s something that you really want to have in mind. For example, if you’re doing, I don’t know, video services, right, you’re doing YouTube services, maybe you need a video editor or maybe you need the tools to actually provide the client with a good service. That will position yourself as a much more valuable asset because you have the tools.

It’s not like you’re getting out there and grabbing the content, the articles, the logos from what everyone else is doing. You become a much more valuable asset because you’re developing your own team. I think that having that long-term relationship and having that long-term view when it comes to the collaborators that work with you, people that help you, helps a lot, helps you save time, money, and helps you position yourself better.

Bradley: Yeah, and the last thing about that I want to mention is I said earlier about you get to know a writer’s voice, and that’s good because especially if you’re providing content for your clients, then you already know what the quality is going to be. When you buy content from places like content farms or a Natasha Nixon, even when you’re buying the authority content which costs more money, you don’t know which writer’s going to get it, so you don’t know what the quality’s going to be like.

The tone of the writing can be different from article to article, can be vastly different. If you’re providing content for webpages, not posts, but pages for client sites, you want consistency in tone because you don’t want one page to have a tone that’s vastly different than another page, because it would be off putting to a visitor. Again, you get to know how the writer writes. You get to come to expect a certain level of quality, a certain tone, a certain voice to speak. That kind of stuff makes you more confident in being able to sell content marketing, right? Good question there, Dom. A great question, actually.

Vincent, doesn’t look much of a question. Let’s see if there’s a comment somewhere. No. Okay, so, well, congratulations. I don’t know what this means.

Adam: Oh, you’ll see it in a minute. He posted after that.

Does Adding A PR Link Helps In Generating Review Snippets Of A GMB Review Page?

Bradley: Okay, cool, cool. Let’s see. “Hey guys. Do you know if adding a PR link to our GMB review page will cause our GMB listing to show a review snippet as shown below?”

No. Adding a PR link to your review page, no. This is a maps thing. You have to have I think five, at least it used to be, you had to have a minimum of five ratings for the stars to show. I think that’s still the case. This is a maps listing that you show here in the picture, so that’s not something that we can manipulate by adding code because we can’t add code to the maps profile.

You can on a website. You can have structured data for review schema, but we can’t do that in the maps profile. The maps profile will show review stars once you have a total of five reviews. Whatever the star ratings are is irrelevant. Your ratings stars will show up once you have a total of five reviews. Does that make sense? That’s it. It’s not something that you can force or trigger by linking to it or adding code because you can’t edit the code of the GMB or maps profile like you could on a website, right? You just need to get five reviews.

Who Do You Recommend For Google Phone Verified Accounts?

Okay, Jim’s up. He says, “Hey, SM team. I’m glad you were able to hang out during the holiday week.” Yeah, us, too. We’ve only missed one in 191 episodes and it was a scheduled miss. “I know you’ve spoken about Google phone verified accounts in the past a lot, but I was wondering who you’d recommend of late. Also, is it worth paying $3 per account for aged accounts instead of 35 cent per newer account? Have you had better ratio on sites sticking with the older accounts?”

I buy aged accounts for very particular projects. Let’s put it this way. I’ve bought some aged accounts. I haven’t tested, I haven’t setup an actual test to test a brand new account versus an aged account anytime in the last three or four years, so I don’t know if having an aged account really makes a difference or not. I can’t tell definitively.

People seem to think it does make a difference. There’s probably some evidence out there to support that. I would just assume that that may be the case. For very particular accounts or projects, campaigns, whatever, I will sometimes buy the aged accounts and I’ll pay as much as $50 per account depending on how old it is. I’ve bought some 12 year old created in 2006 Google accounts and I’ve paid as much as $50 per account for those, and then I still had one of them terminated rather quickly, which pissed me off.

I can’t tell you, Jim, whether it’s really worth it or not. Maybe some other people have some data to prove one way or the other. I don’t. Usually, guys, we try to test everything to give you a definitive answer and this is something I have not tested. Adam, or excuse me, Hernan and or Marco, have either of you have any data to back up one way or the other?

Hernan: No, not on my end, honestly.

Marco: No, I don’t think it makes a difference.

Bradley: Okay. Yeah, I didn’t think so. Honestly, I know people say it does. Jim, I would say proceed at your own risk, whichever way you want, but this is the guy that I’m recommending right now for my aged accounts. [inaudible 00:35:52] is his name. At least that’s what I think it is, BulkPVA.com. I still use him. He’s really responsive on Skype if you connect with him on Skype, and if you go to contact, I think his Skype username is right there. Yeah, it is, BulkPVA.com. You can email him, all that. Just tell him I sent you. He knows because I’ve referred a lot of people to him.

He usually takes very good care of us, as well as anytime accounts get terminated and stuff, if they’re new, obviously if you have accounts terminated two weeks after he delivers them to you, that’s your fault, but if they’re within three days, within 72 hours or something like that, see, look, it takes 24 to 72 hours to deliver each order. Let’s see. After delivery of accounts, if the account is banned within 48 hours, replacements will be given to you.

What I do is whenever we order a new batch, and a lot of these, I buy the double phone verified YouTube accounts, and we do that because we do a lot of video spam for clients and all kinds of stuff, and I’ve got a VA that runs a video spam tool, Ab’s Video Carpet Blitz tool. We have to have dozens, if not 100 plus YouTube accounts at all times. Obviously, because we’re doing a shit ton of spam, a lot of accounts get terminated from overuse, and so I buy accounts from this guy all the time.

What I do is my VA will go in and immediately open up Browseo and just start adding profiles and logging in to bind it to his IP, but they each have their own browsing session because they’re all separated or segregated via Browseo, which you can do that with Ghost Browser, I think is another one. It doesn’t have to be Browseo, guys. It doesn’t matter. All I’m saying is the best way to get these accounts to stick is to bind them to your IP, but make sure they have their own unique browsing session in history.

Start allowing cookies to accrue and search history and allow Google and the websites that that profile visits start to build a customer profile, like an avatar or whatever, for that particular profile. In other words, you want it to look real, and so one of the things that I’ve found is these bulk accounts, when you buy them, if you do a hard reset on your browser to clear all cache and cookies and then log into four, five, six accounts from the same IP all from a 100% virgin browsing session each time you do it, that’s going to look spammy and those accounts tend to get terminated.

If you log into each of them, even from the same IP, as long as they have their own unique browsing sessions that maintain, they stay, in other words they don’t get wiped clean and then use that same IP to log into another profile, with Browseo or Ghost Browser or any number of those apps that do that that will keep browsing sessions per profile, that’s a much better way to do it. That tends not to trigger the red flags that do from using 100% clean browsing sessions each time. Hopefully that makes sense. This is the guy I still recommend. Just tell him I sent you only because he tends to take care of the people that we send to him. You get put the top of his priority list, all right? That was another good question.

Would You Recommend Making The Least Number Of Location Pages For Each Facebook Accounts?

Oh, cool, we’re almost out of time, almost out of questions. Marco says from YouTube, [inaudible 00:39:23], “For multiple location websites, I know normally you guys recommend having one ring of social media that is going to syndicate posts, but in Facebook, you can have multiple location pages linked to one account. Would you recommend making at least the Facebook accounts for every location at least?”

Yeah, you can. Honestly, I would, because multiple location businesses should each have their own Facebook page. Each location should have its own Facebook page, so yeah, absolutely. What I was talking about was a branded Tumblr, a branded Blogger, a branded WordPress, and all the other web twos and stuff that we syndicate and we use as part of the syndication networks. You really only need one branded network that you can publish content to from the root domain, from the blog that’s typically going to be on the root domain. Essentially you can silo the root domain to have categories for each one of the locations.

Let’s say you got six locations. I would set up a category for each location, and then what I would do is publish content, just publish posts from the blog on the root site, make sure it’s the correct category selected. When you’re targeting, let’s say location number one, you’re going to optimize the content and have the call to action link, the link that you’re going to be linking to that sub-domain site or location page, whatever, however you’ve got it configured, but that’s going to be selected and placed into that location category, which helps to optimize it. You can do that for each location from the root blog. You don’t need to have a separation syndication network for each location, but Facebook pages, you can have a separate location page and I would encourage that because that’s a powerful citation.

That’s the thing, guys. When it comes to any of the [inaudible 00:41:20]. I’m sorry. I’ll come back to that question, Vincent. I got sidetracked. The other thing about this is if you have a particular location that is not responding as well to the blog post, the syndication from the root domain, then you can always go in and setup a location specific syndication network where you would just use the same branding, but you would add a local modifier.

In other words, if it’s Joe’s Plumbing and there’s six locations and one of them happens to be, I don’t know, Fairfax, Virginia, then if he has a Joe’s Plumbing syndication network that he’s using to blog for all of the locations, but Fairfax, Virginia isn’t really responding as well to the blogs from the root domain, then you could put a Joe’s Plumbing Fairfax syndication network up and then syndicate content directly from that particular category on the root domain to just that network, or you could even transfer and put a separate blog on that location specific site, if that makes sense.

Guys, remember, categories in WordPress do have their own feeds. You can get a category feed, so you could essentially use the root domain for let’s say if you had six locations, you could literally have six location, so brand plus location modifier networks, and have six individual category RSS feeds each triggering their own geo-specific network. Does that make sense?

Again, you can get really complex with this stuff. I like to keep one branded syndication network to try to accomplish what I desire for all of the locations because that’s less work and it’s easier. I like easy. I like efficiency, but you can make it complicated or add additional geo networks specific to a location when needed, but lastly, like I mentioned, as far as the actual Facebook page, I would have a location page for each location, absolutely, because it’s a very powerful citation.

You could also create location pages on LinkedIn, Crunchbase, if you’re using Crunchbase, which you should because Crunchbase is a very powerful citation as part of the semantic database. What I would recommend with Crunchbase is setup an organization and then you setup sub-locations for each location, which you can link to individually. That becomes very, very powerful. That’s a good question, though.

Vincent said, “The line below reviews that has the blue icon, it’s a review snippet.” Yeah, but that’s something that Google pulls in automatically. That’s not something that you can force. This is a Google Maps listing, Vincent. You can’t manipulate this. Google decides what they’re going to list and show right here, not you. That’s not something that we have the option to edit right now or to change.

Those reviews that are pulled in, like the snippet from a review, that’s just what Google determines that they’re going to pull in and display to the searcher, the user, the Google user. That’s it. It’s not something that you can edit. You can’t force that. Google just does that, at least as far as I know, you can’t. If I’m wrong, I’m sure somebody will correct me. Okay, well, should we give it another minute and see if any other questions come in or should we just wrap up a little bit early?

Adam: I think we should give them a minute because I know there’s definitely a lag, but I want to talk a little bit more about the live event in October.

Bradley: Okay.

Adam: We narrowed it down. It’s going to be in Washington DC like we said, which honestly, I’m kind of pumped about because when we first thought of that, the first thing I thought about was heat and humidity, but I realized it’s going to be in the middle of October and it’s going to be freaking awesome there. You can speak to that. That’s a great time of year around there, isn’t it?

Bradley: Absolutely. It should be really nice. There’s a ton of stuff to do in Washington DC. Besides our event, we’re going to have a VIP event I believe, which we’re going to have to find something good to do. DC, it’s the nation’s capital, right? There’s a lot of stuff to do that.

Adam: Yeah. You’re within striking distance of a lot of stuff, so if you come join us, if you can take a couple days on either side, maybe go do something. If you’re traveling, there’s a lot of neat stuff in that area to do.

Bradley: Yeah. Yeah, there is. Okay, well, I don’t see any other questions coming in, guys. It’s Fourth of July holiday week. For those of you in the US, happy Fourth of July, and go get a cold beer.

Adam: Those of you in England, I’m not watching the game, but hopefully England’s doing well in the soccer match I guess it is right now. I’m going to check that out, and then yeah, I hope everyone has a great Fourth of July. I’m going to head out and enjoy that tomorrow.

Bradley: I’m still working tomorrow for a few hours in the morning. I’ve got to coach Crossfit for two hours in the morning, and then I’m going to work for a couple hours before I go heavily drink.

Marco: Well, England is still sweating.

Hernan: [inaudible 00:46:14] penalties. Very fun. Thank you guys.

Bradley: All right guys. See you later. Happy Fourth.

Marco: Bye everyone.

Chris: Bye.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 191 published first on your-t1-blog-url

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 191

Click on the video above to watch Episode 191 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 https://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

  Announcement

Adam: Hey everybody. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts, episode 191, the question where I guarantee it, if you’re watching this, you can get your question answered, because right now there are almost no questions because of a little error that somebody made. It’s not important who, but let’s go and say hello to everyone real quick. Hopefully, you’re getting an announcement on YouTube or you’re getting a notification. You might be watching this later, in which case, just ignore all this stuff about people making mistakes. Chris, how you doing, man?

Chris: Good. Happy to have summer finally in Europe.

Adam: Oh, nice. It’s finally warming up there?

Chris: Yep.

Adam: Good deal, good deal. Hernan, how about you? Is it nice and cold down there?

Hernan: Yeah. Over here, it’s freezing, man. I’m freezing my ass and overdressed, whatever, but I’m super excited to be here anyway, so that doesn’t stop us.

Adam: Marco, you’re not freezing your ass off, are you?

Marco: Never. Guys, for some reason, we’re not transmitting this Hangout into the Google Plus page. It’s still 190.

Bradley: That’s my fault. Standby.

Adam: Got you. Well, we won’t ask Bradley how he’s doing, because I don’t want to divide up his attention, but we do have a few announcements. Real quick, I wanted to say we’re going to put the link on the page and you’ll be able to find it in the description if you’re watching this later on YouTube, but our live event is a go, The Semantic Mastery Live.

October, the weekend of October 20th, 21st, we’ve already announced one of the special guest speakers. In addition to seeing all of our lovely faces at some point during the event, also Jeffrey Smith of SEO Boot Camp will be joining us and we’re going to have a couple more that we’re holding back.

We’re teasing it a little bit, but that is a go, so I’ll pop the link on here if you want to go and grab your ticket now. Ticket prices are definitely going to go up as time goes on. We want to help out the people who jump on this early and it is capped at a total of 25. Don’t put it off too long. It will be in the Washington DC area and we’re getting ready to lock down our event venue probably in the next week or two.

Bradley: Page is updated.

Adam: All right. As far as other announcements, you guys, we got a lot. I’m going to pass it off. Marco, is there anything we want to say specifically?

Marco: No. We’re moving forward, guys. The Google My Business auto-poster is ready. It has some awesome features. People have a long way to catch up. I know there’s some stuff being put out. It’s [inaudible 00:02:42]. You can get an RSS feed on anyone who’s in Syndication Academy or knows about us. You know how wicked RSS feeds can be, how they can help amplify your content, how they can help you with backlinks, but the most interesting thing we’re doing is we’re pulling in or we should have the ability in the next few days to pull in the RSS feed from the website so that all you would literally have to do is post from your website and you can amplify that content into post. If not, we do have the auto-poster, where you can go in and setup posts well ahead of time.

We also have YouTube views. That’s currently working. It’s working really well to push up videos, to get it ranked. Now, of course, once you start pushing videos, you should continue pushing videos to it to keep it ranked until it picks up its own steam. It’ll pick up steam and stay where it’s supposed to stay. It’ll stay ranked. The great thing about this is that since it’s real people, they’ll interact with your channel, so they’ll send all kinds of signals.

I keep telling people, the caveat in this is that you have to send them to a quality video. I always ask the question, “What’s a quality video?” Well, a quality video, if you look at your competition as a video that has a bunch of likes, it has a bunch of watch time, it has a bunch of subscribers, that’s a quality video. Look at what your competition is doing for that keyword and you mimic that, but do them one better. Better production, a better speaker, better audio quality, whatever it is that you need to do to grab the attention of your viewers.

There’s so many things coming. Video carpet bomb is coming. We were just talking about it. The done for you Google My Business services, that’s coming. The VA is almost trained. I’m working with her daily on this task. Cora reports are going to be available. What else do we have? Drive Stacks, guys. Drive Stacks, the Semantic Mastery way, with my original VA, the VA that I originally trained will be available through our marketplace. Market, it’s coming. Just stay tuned. Keep coming back and we’ll have news as everything develops, but we hope to have at least some of the products available by the end of the week. That’ll be on you to send the email to let people know, “Hey, it’s ready, so go get it.”

Adam: Awesome. Sorry about that. I was muted real quick. Also, I wanted to let everyone know, if you missed the webinar, we have a webinar replay. I’m not going to post the link here because if you’re on our email list, then you are very special and you’re going to get a link to check out the bundle, but there was a great webinar on Monday going into detail about how you can use some of the most powerful training that we have and really combine that.

We’re going to have some more information coming out about that. We’ll just post the link so you can go and grab that if you’re interested in taking advantage. It’s a special Fourth of July kind of holiday offer, and then we’ll have a little bit, like I said, of followup in the coming days. A lot of people are taking some time off, heading out to the beach, doing whatever. If you got some time you can squeak away from the family or make an excuse, you might want to go check out the replay over the next couple of days.

Bradley: I can tell having changed Hump Day Hangouts from Wednesday to Tuesday for this week, we’ve got a lot less viewers on it right now than we typically do, so it’s just timing. I’m glad that unfortunately, we didn’t have all the questions directed to the right place this time. That’s on our end, but we got a few questions. Do we have any other announcements, guys?

Adam: I’m good. How about you guys?

Hernan: I just wanted to reiterate that go ahead and grab your tickets for the [inaudible 00:06:51] Live 2018 because it’s going to depend on that. It’s going to depend on that. I’m really looking forward to seeing you guys, so yeah, I just wanted to repeat that once again.

Adam: Okay, cool.

Bradley: That’s it. We can get into it, huh?

Adam: Yeah, let’s do it.

Bradley: Let’s do it. All right, well, we don’t have a lot of questions, so we’re hoping that some of you guys that are here have some questions and you post them on the page. Again, that was our fault, but it is what it is, so we’re going to run with what we got. I know Adam posted a couple questions that he yanked from one of the Facebook groups, so we’ll start with those. I’ll grab the screen.

Is It Possible To Spread Authority To Multiple Root Domains From One Authority Domain Via Subdomain Redirects?

All right, so from the Facebook group. “Looking for insights on an idea. I wanted to test this, but asking is more efficient. Is the following possible? I have site.com and site.com has authority.” IDA, DR, okay. “I have a sub-domain on site.com, subdomain1.site.com. Sub-domain carries authority from site, correct?” Carry domain authority, but not necessarily page authority, but you’re right.

“Can I create a redirect from subdomain1.site.com to secondsite.com while site.com stays live and then secondsite.com gets authority from subdomain1.site.com?” Questions like this are hard to read. “Both secondsite.com and site have authority. In other words, is it possible to spread authority to multiple domains from one authority domain via sub-domain redirects?” Yes. “I’m doubting this works, but also read some things that indicate it might work.”

It does work. It does absolutely work. There’s a little bit of a loss. That’s called domain authority manipulation, guys. That’s like 2012 stuff. That’s the stuff that we did that worked really freaking well in like 2012, ‘13 timeframe. There’s still a little bit of benefit to pushing domain authority, guys, but honestly, you can set that up. It will work. There’s a little bit of a loss between redirects when pushing domain authority. It will absolutely increase your domain authority from your sub-domain that you direct to another root domain.

My point is, I’m not sure what your end goal is. Why do you want to push this domain authority to that other domain? Domain authority manipulation as a ranking factor is almost obsolete. I guess there might be some benefit to it, but you have to have really high DA numbers for that to really have an effect. It’s much more about relevancy than it is about domain metrics, which are proprietary metrics, right? Marco, I’ll let you comment on that a little bit, but again, look, if you want to do it, yes, it will help to boost domain authority from the second site.

There is a little bit of a loss, so what I’m saying is if you’ve got a 42 domain authority on your root domain and you try to push that over to a second site via sub-domain or any way you want to do it, it really doesn’t matter, but via a sub-domain redirect, you’ll likely fall somewhere in the 30s, the mid 30s with domain authority. It’s not going to happen overnight. When I used to do a lot of domain authority manipulation, we used to do a lot of it. The maws numbers would refresh, I can’t remember, I think it was every other month, every two months.

Marco: Every 90 days.

Bradley: Every 90 days. Okay. If we would do a redirect, like for example, we called it link laundering, and we’d do double 301 redirects from spam domains. We would go find expired domains that were on the closeout because they went through auction and they were really shitty, spammy domains. A lot of the times, they’re Chinese domains that would have hundreds, sometimes thousands or even tens of thousands of sub-domains. The dropped domain would have tens of thousands, sometimes, anywhere between hundreds to tens of thousands of sub-domains.

This is what we used to do and it worked really well. We would go buy a domain, buy one of those domains, and then we would set up a redirect script, a catch all or wild card redirect via HT access. We’d point the domain to a host, a C panel, and then we would set up an HT access file that would do a wild card sub-domain redirect to whatever we wanted to, and we would push domain authority.

We would do what’s called a double 301 redirect, so we would redirect it through one domain first and then push it over to our final target URL. I’d get domains that had 55, 60 domain authority mostly because of all the accumulated domain authority from all the sub-domains, right? We’d do the redirect and then push it over to a brand new domain and I could get my domain authority to jump from one, which is a brand new registered domain, to mid-40s usually within one maws cycle refresh, but sometimes it would take two. It would take anywhere between 90 days, so three months, to six months, to see that kind of a push. Again, I’ve found over the years that using that is purely like a ranking method, which used to work phenomenally. It really is ineffective at this point.

The only thing I would suggest is like I said, or what I would add to this, is that if you have really high domain authority and you can push some of that to another domain, it will help it to respond better to other off page signals, but that’s about it. Again, it’s not something that I even bother doing anymore. I don’t even look at domain authority and page authority numbers anymore, honestly. If you want to do it, it will work. Marco, what are your comments on this?

Marco: I would say he’s better off concentrating on relevance. If they’re relevant, then you can throw DA and domain authority and page authority out the window and push relevance. You could even throw a Drive Stack. Wherever you’re directing, you could put a Drive Stack as buffer and redirect to the Drive Stack and the Drive Stack will then push the power over to the new site with even more relevance. In the Drive Stack, you could push just tons of relevance in there whether you want keyword relevance, what do you call it, keyword plus URL, brand plus keyword relevance. What you really want is that brand plus keyword relevance.

Bradley: Right.

Marco: What you want to become is you want to become the keyword for whatever that niche is, so when people start thinking about those keywords, they don’t necessarily think about the keywords, but they think about your brand. This is where I tell people, Coca-Cola, Xerox, Band-Aid, Scotch Tape, all of these people have done fabulous branding where they become the brand for those keywords.

I know it’s not simple to do and we don’t have the deep pockets, but a way to start doing that is by relevance. How we do it, how we take advantage of it is by going into a Drive Stack and creating all of that keyword relevance which relates to the brand, and then we push maybe [inaudible 00:14:11] which will flow into the website, or maybe we’ll go direct to the website. We’ll go to the Google My Business thing.

There are so many ways to take advantage of this, but you’re pushing relevance. Think metrics. DA is a third party metric. Trust flow and citation flow, third party metrics. We don’t bother with that. What we look for is relevance and as long as the on page is tight on both websites, they will both benefit.

I could go even further, but then I’d be getting stuff that’s only in RYS Academy Reloaded. I could start talking all kind of things about embeds and the nasty stuff that you can do with embeds, but again, as I always say, we’d be doing the people that pay for the information a disservice by giving it away for free.

Hernan: If I may add real quick, that was one of the main reasons, the spam, when we just throw spam on the domain, we’ll rank. We will get higher domain authority, or we would do the sub-domain manipulation and whatnot, and that was one of the reasons why we stopped paying attention that much to domain authority and page authority, because they were so easy to manipulate.

That’s why we migrated to [inaudible 00:15:28] initially, and then we had to develop, as Marco was saying, relevancy and trust and authority as our own metics, our own way of doing things, because it was so easy. Again, you would have these Chinese domains with, I don’t know, 60 domain authority, and they were all spam. That’s one of the reasons, one of the many reasons that we stopped going through those domains.

Also, because maws will start delaying the updates and whatnot, and at some point it became a lot like waiting the page rank update, the public page rank update from Google that would go out every month or so. It became like that, so we stopped paying attention to that altogether and we started focusing a lot more on rankings and actual results.

Bradley: Again, yeah, it’ll work, and what I would recommend if you were trying to push it a second site anyway, guys, remember, if you push domain authority to a sub-domain, it will benefit the entire domain. Remember, domain authority, it’s a site-wide or domain-wide, including all sub-domains, including all inner pages and posts, all of them will benefit from that, will receive the same domain authority.

Instead of pushing from a redirect to a secondsite.com, you could push to a non-indexed sub-domain on that secondsite.com, all right? You do that so that you can set up a sub-domain. You don’t even need to really put a piece of content up on it, but you could. You could set an HTML file to say no index or whatever, and then just point all of it to that specific sub-domain because it will benefit the root without people really being able to see what you’re doing.

Again, I really just think that’s a waste of time unless you’ve got some massive amount of authority on your first site that you’re trying to push, in case it would help a little bit, but you’d have to be really, really high domain authority numbers for that to make much difference now in my opinion based on how the algorithm works now.

Do You Pay For Articles Or Use A Plugin To Pull In Content?

All right, Adam, the next one that he posted was, “Do you guys pay for articles or use a plugin to pull in content? Looking for an alternative for test site than buying articles.” Yeah, content curation. We have a training course specifically all about that. It’s what I’ve been using. I had to figure out a way to develop content for my clients that was cost-effective and efficient without having to be subject matter experts, so I developed a process years ago that I’ve been using ever since 2012.

We’ve got it as a product right now called Content Kingpin, but that’s the same exact content production process that I used for my own agency and countless amount of our members and students have also implemented that into their business for their primary content methods. We just get across the board good results from even our members that have implemented it, as well, or adopted that process, because it works.

It’s basically hands-free content marketing. You could teach a VA to do it, and they don’t have to be subject matter experts. All they have to do is be able to identify and locate content, authority content or just good, relevant content about whatever topic they’re going to be blogging about and then organizing that content in a logical manner and injecting a small amount of their own commentary. That content is more efficient and way better than any sort of shitty content, farmed content that you could buy from the dime a dozen content farms that are out there, that is just spun, rehashed garbage.

Guys, that’s all the content farms do. They don’t write original content. Even if they do, they’re not subject matter experts. If they are, you’re going to pay a premium for it, but even then, a lot of times, guys, all they do is do mashups where they’ll go, scrape five or 10 articles or whatever about whatever topic it is that you requested the article for, and then they’ll put bits and pieces of each article, put them through a spinner, and sometimes they’ll manually edit the spin text or the output file to where it’s a little bit more readable, but a lot of those content farms, you’ll get a lot of errors and stuff that you can clearly see that a spinner was used and they didn’t take the time to manually edit it.

My point is you’re not really buying original content from content farms, anyway. You’re buying garbage. You’re much better off using curated content where you can reference and cite other people’s authority content that is highly relevant from subject matter experts and you’re giving them credit via the attribution link. You’re citing the source, which is required and ethical. It’s the ethical thing to do.

Now, you’ve got good content from subject matter experts that you’re quoting on your own site, giving them credit, and injecting your own commentary. Again, a VA can do that. That’s why we call it Content Kingpin Hands-Free Content Marketing, because it truly is. You can generate a stream or revenue just from selling content marketing services and managing it. It just requires a very, very small amount of management.

Again, that training, Content Kingpin, teaches exactly how to hire the VAs, what to look for, what type of output production you should expect, what to pay them, how to manage it, all of that, guys. All of that is covered in great detail in that course. I highly recommend anybody that needs content for their clients or their own assets, their own digital assets, check that out because it’s the exact same method we use, all right?

Do We Have To Worry About Stock Photo Copyright Issues When Posting To Social Media Like Twitter?

Jeff, what’s up, Jeff? He says, “Do we have to worry about stock photo copyright issues when posting to social media, like Twitter, the same way we do with our website?” I don’t know, Jeff. I wish I did. I wish I had definitive answer. Maybe somebody else on here knows. Anybody?

Hernan: I had some issues when it comes to posting on Facebook, so yeah, short answer is yeah, because I had to take down an ad that was performing super well just because I was lazy and I didn’t check the stock photos stuff. The actual owner of the photo contacted me and said, “Hey dude, you need to take off the ad,” and I lost the entire social proof and everything on the Facebook side of things.

Yeah, short answer is yes because you can get in trouble. It doesn’t really matter if you’re using it on Twitter, Google. Google, maybe you would have a bigger exposure because you’re being indexed, but on Twitter, people can still see it, right? I think it’s just a matter of photos are still an asset, so it’s like you saying a piece of a song or a piece of a movie, something like that, all of that is copyrighted. You need to have that in mind, no matter where you’re using it.

When you’re doing it on your website, you’re a bit more exposed because anyone can get access to that, while on Twitter it’s not the case, but just to avoid issues, I would say don’t do it. Plus, there are so many deals and having stock photos has become really, really cheap. If you go to [inaudible 00:22:51] for example, you can get deals, like, I don’t know, for 100 photos for 10 bucks or something like that. It’s not even worth the trouble of getting through it.

Bradley: Yeah. Yeah, and usually for my clients, what I have them do is I use StockFresh.com. That’s our primary stock photo site, and so I just have my clients go setup an account or I set it up for them in their name and then I send them the login details and then they go in and fund it by just purchasing credits. We usually purchase 100 credits at a time. I think it’s $79 or something like that at Stock Fresh. It’s not bad. It’s decent.

Every couple of months or so, my curators, my VAs who are doing all of the content marketing for my clients will contact me and say, “Hey, we need this account refilled,” and I’ll just contact the client and say, “Hey, I need you to add another $100, refill the account with credits.” That’s it. That’s how it works, and that’s just to be safe.

That’s because I’ve been hit with extortion letters from Getty Images and their various subsidiaries and I’ve had to pay fines, copyright fines, settlement fees, basically for not having each client having their own licenses. In other words, even if I had my own account for my marketing agency with stock photos, if I published those stock photos on clients’ websites, the client needs to have a license for that photo. Even though I did it on their behalf, I was the license holder, not the client.

I’ve had to pay settlement fees for copyright infringement issues for client sites that they received the extortion letter, but I paid it on their behalf because it was my fault for not having them setup properly. That’s why I talk about that, again, in the Content Kingpin training that I was just talking about, I go into great detail about all of that because it’s very, very important. I would follow Hernan’s advice about social media and really try to have proper licensing for photos that you’re using.

Hernan: Yeah. Yeah, I would do that, too, and for example, there’s some websites that they’re explicitly royalty-free photos like Flickr, for example. You can search for royalty-free photos, then I think Unsplash.com, Unsplash.com. There’s another called Pixabay.com. Those are all royalty-free photos, but you’re limited to what you can find over there.

Sometimes for ads it will work, but if I’m looking for a specific way or specific photo that will convey a specific message that I want to send, then it wouldn’t work, so I’ll need to go out and actually purchase the picture. It’s specifically important with social media. Twitter has become super, super visual. If you go through the Twitter app on mobile, it’s super visual, so photos play a big role.

Would SEO Content Be Okay Or Should You Use The Research Quality Content For An Affiliate Money Site?

Bradley: Okay, Dominick’s up. What’s up, Dominick? He says, “I need some good content for an affiliate money site. I’ve tried Natasha Nixon, but it’s a little pricey. Would SEO content be okay or should I use the research quality content?”

No, if it’s for a money site, I would recommend that you do authority content because the SEO content is exactly what I just mentioned about a content farm. That’s what it is. It’s spun shit. It’s garbage. I can tell you that. That’s to be used for link building and stuff like that. It’s not money site content. I could tell you that even the authority content that you purchase sometimes isn’t going to be very good.

For the most part, I’ve had good experiences with Natasha Nixon for authority content, but the last article I got was complete garbage. It was for Mario’s Cab Service for the GMB Pro case study, and it was complete garbage. I ordered a 1500 word authority content article, paid like $120 for it, and it was complete garbage. I had to go through and manually edit. If I had time, I would’ve requested a rewrite, but I didn’t because I wanted to get it up, so I just edited about 500 or 600 words of it myself and then used that as the actual GMB website article.

Again, guys, remember, your best bet, Dominick, if you need really good authority type content or money site content on a regular basis would be to hire your own writer from Upwork or something. That is a much better way than going to the content producers. Honestly, you’re better off developing a one on one relationship with an individual writer.

Here’s the thing. Well, most of my writers are now curators, but I still can rely on them for article writing at times, but most of the stuff we do is like I said, curating for blog posts and such. The idea is once you’ve developed a relationship with a particular writer, you get to know their voice, so to speak and how they write, and you can help to mold or shape how you want them to write for particular clients, for example. That’s the benefit of doing it.

One of the other benefits of having a relationship with an individual writer is that a lot of times, you get better treatment. You don’t have to wait in queue for a week to get a piece of content back, that kind of stuff. You can have direct message. I use Upwork a lot. There’s desktop notifications and all that kind of stuff, so I recommend doing that.

If you’re going to buy it from a content farm, Natasha Nixon being one of them, then authority content is your better bet. It is a bit more expensive, but again, for money sites, I don’t recommend putting up any kind of SEO articles because they’re literally trash. It’s junk. You yourself will spend more time editing them and making them readable than it’s worth. If that’s the case, why not just write it yourself? Anybody want to comment on that?

Hernan: Yeah. Real quick, I totally agree with what you’re saying, Bradley, in terms of having someone that you can always refer to, even further if you’re offering this on a regular basis. I think that there’s some types of professionals, if you would, or some types of work that you always need stuff done, for example, graphic design, that you would be better off just hiring somebody to do graphic design.

For example, on our end, we hire a graphic designer. He would take over the entire graphic design side of things. He would do thumbnails for YouTube. He would do this and he would do that. He already knows how we work and what types of things we want and if we need a logo, we ask him for it, and if we need banners, sometimes he would do it.

I think that’s part of the team that you want to start putting together. That’s part of the team because you’re providing service and if you’re providing content creation services for your clients, that’s something that you really want to have in mind. For example, if you’re doing, I don’t know, video services, right, you’re doing YouTube services, maybe you need a video editor or maybe you need the tools to actually provide the client with a good service. That will position yourself as a much more valuable asset because you have the tools.

It’s not like you’re getting out there and grabbing the content, the articles, the logos from what everyone else is doing. You become a much more valuable asset because you’re developing your own team. I think that having that long-term relationship and having that long-term view when it comes to the collaborators that work with you, people that help you, helps a lot, helps you save time, money, and helps you position yourself better.

Bradley: Yeah, and the last thing about that I want to mention is I said earlier about you get to know a writer’s voice, and that’s good because especially if you’re providing content for your clients, then you already know what the quality is going to be. When you buy content from places like content farms or a Natasha Nixon, even when you’re buying the authority content which costs more money, you don’t know which writer’s going to get it, so you don’t know what the quality’s going to be like.

The tone of the writing can be different from article to article, can be vastly different. If you’re providing content for webpages, not posts, but pages for client sites, you want consistency in tone because you don’t want one page to have a tone that’s vastly different than another page, because it would be off putting to a visitor. Again, you get to know how the writer writes. You get to come to expect a certain level of quality, a certain tone, a certain voice to speak. That kind of stuff makes you more confident in being able to sell content marketing, right? Good question there, Dom. A great question, actually.

Vincent, doesn’t look much of a question. Let’s see if there’s a comment somewhere. No. Okay, so, well, congratulations. I don’t know what this means.

Adam: Oh, you’ll see it in a minute. He posted after that.

Does Adding A PR Link Helps In Generating Review Snippets Of A GMB Review Page?

Bradley: Okay, cool, cool. Let’s see. “Hey guys. Do you know if adding a PR link to our GMB review page will cause our GMB listing to show a review snippet as shown below?”

No. Adding a PR link to your review page, no. This is a maps thing. You have to have I think five, at least it used to be, you had to have a minimum of five ratings for the stars to show. I think that’s still the case. This is a maps listing that you show here in the picture, so that’s not something that we can manipulate by adding code because we can’t add code to the maps profile.

You can on a website. You can have structured data for review schema, but we can’t do that in the maps profile. The maps profile will show review stars once you have a total of five reviews. Whatever the star ratings are is irrelevant. Your ratings stars will show up once you have a total of five reviews. Does that make sense? That’s it. It’s not something that you can force or trigger by linking to it or adding code because you can’t edit the code of the GMB or maps profile like you could on a website, right? You just need to get five reviews.

Who Do You Recommend For Google Phone Verified Accounts?

Okay, Jim’s up. He says, “Hey, SM team. I’m glad you were able to hang out during the holiday week.” Yeah, us, too. We’ve only missed one in 191 episodes and it was a scheduled miss. “I know you’ve spoken about Google phone verified accounts in the past a lot, but I was wondering who you’d recommend of late. Also, is it worth paying $3 per account for aged accounts instead of 35 cent per newer account? Have you had better ratio on sites sticking with the older accounts?”

I buy aged accounts for very particular projects. Let’s put it this way. I’ve bought some aged accounts. I haven’t tested, I haven’t setup an actual test to test a brand new account versus an aged account anytime in the last three or four years, so I don’t know if having an aged account really makes a difference or not. I can’t tell definitively.

People seem to think it does make a difference. There’s probably some evidence out there to support that. I would just assume that that may be the case. For very particular accounts or projects, campaigns, whatever, I will sometimes buy the aged accounts and I’ll pay as much as $50 per account depending on how old it is. I’ve bought some 12 year old created in 2006 Google accounts and I’ve paid as much as $50 per account for those, and then I still had one of them terminated rather quickly, which pissed me off.

I can’t tell you, Jim, whether it’s really worth it or not. Maybe some other people have some data to prove one way or the other. I don’t. Usually, guys, we try to test everything to give you a definitive answer and this is something I have not tested. Adam, or excuse me, Hernan and or Marco, have either of you have any data to back up one way or the other?

Hernan: No, not on my end, honestly.

Marco: No, I don’t think it makes a difference.

Bradley: Okay. Yeah, I didn’t think so. Honestly, I know people say it does. Jim, I would say proceed at your own risk, whichever way you want, but this is the guy that I’m recommending right now for my aged accounts. [inaudible 00:35:52] is his name. At least that’s what I think it is, BulkPVA.com. I still use him. He’s really responsive on Skype if you connect with him on Skype, and if you go to contact, I think his Skype username is right there. Yeah, it is, BulkPVA.com. You can email him, all that. Just tell him I sent you. He knows because I’ve referred a lot of people to him.

He usually takes very good care of us, as well as anytime accounts get terminated and stuff, if they’re new, obviously if you have accounts terminated two weeks after he delivers them to you, that’s your fault, but if they’re within three days, within 72 hours or something like that, see, look, it takes 24 to 72 hours to deliver each order. Let’s see. After delivery of accounts, if the account is banned within 48 hours, replacements will be given to you.

What I do is whenever we order a new batch, and a lot of these, I buy the double phone verified YouTube accounts, and we do that because we do a lot of video spam for clients and all kinds of stuff, and I’ve got a VA that runs a video spam tool, Ab’s Video Carpet Blitz tool. We have to have dozens, if not 100 plus YouTube accounts at all times. Obviously, because we’re doing a shit ton of spam, a lot of accounts get terminated from overuse, and so I buy accounts from this guy all the time.

What I do is my VA will go in and immediately open up Browseo and just start adding profiles and logging in to bind it to his IP, but they each have their own browsing session because they’re all separated or segregated via Browseo, which you can do that with Ghost Browser, I think is another one. It doesn’t have to be Browseo, guys. It doesn’t matter. All I’m saying is the best way to get these accounts to stick is to bind them to your IP, but make sure they have their own unique browsing session in history.

Start allowing cookies to accrue and search history and allow Google and the websites that that profile visits start to build a customer profile, like an avatar or whatever, for that particular profile. In other words, you want it to look real, and so one of the things that I’ve found is these bulk accounts, when you buy them, if you do a hard reset on your browser to clear all cache and cookies and then log into four, five, six accounts from the same IP all from a 100% virgin browsing session each time you do it, that’s going to look spammy and those accounts tend to get terminated.

If you log into each of them, even from the same IP, as long as they have their own unique browsing sessions that maintain, they stay, in other words they don’t get wiped clean and then use that same IP to log into another profile, with Browseo or Ghost Browser or any number of those apps that do that that will keep browsing sessions per profile, that’s a much better way to do it. That tends not to trigger the red flags that do from using 100% clean browsing sessions each time. Hopefully that makes sense. This is the guy I still recommend. Just tell him I sent you only because he tends to take care of the people that we send to him. You get put the top of his priority list, all right? That was another good question.

Would You Recommend Making The Least Number Of Location Pages For Each Facebook Accounts?

Oh, cool, we’re almost out of time, almost out of questions. Marco says from YouTube, [inaudible 00:39:23], “For multiple location websites, I know normally you guys recommend having one ring of social media that is going to syndicate posts, but in Facebook, you can have multiple location pages linked to one account. Would you recommend making at least the Facebook accounts for every location at least?”

Yeah, you can. Honestly, I would, because multiple location businesses should each have their own Facebook page. Each location should have its own Facebook page, so yeah, absolutely. What I was talking about was a branded Tumblr, a branded Blogger, a branded WordPress, and all the other web twos and stuff that we syndicate and we use as part of the syndication networks. You really only need one branded network that you can publish content to from the root domain, from the blog that’s typically going to be on the root domain. Essentially you can silo the root domain to have categories for each one of the locations.

Let’s say you got six locations. I would set up a category for each location, and then what I would do is publish content, just publish posts from the blog on the root site, make sure it’s the correct category selected. When you’re targeting, let’s say location number one, you’re going to optimize the content and have the call to action link, the link that you’re going to be linking to that sub-domain site or location page, whatever, however you’ve got it configured, but that’s going to be selected and placed into that location category, which helps to optimize it. You can do that for each location from the root blog. You don’t need to have a separation syndication network for each location, but Facebook pages, you can have a separate location page and I would encourage that because that’s a powerful citation.

That’s the thing, guys. When it comes to any of the [inaudible 00:41:20]. I’m sorry. I’ll come back to that question, Vincent. I got sidetracked. The other thing about this is if you have a particular location that is not responding as well to the blog post, the syndication from the root domain, then you can always go in and setup a location specific syndication network where you would just use the same branding, but you would add a local modifier.

In other words, if it’s Joe’s Plumbing and there’s six locations and one of them happens to be, I don’t know, Fairfax, Virginia, then if he has a Joe’s Plumbing syndication network that he’s using to blog for all of the locations, but Fairfax, Virginia isn’t really responding as well to the blogs from the root domain, then you could put a Joe’s Plumbing Fairfax syndication network up and then syndicate content directly from that particular category on the root domain to just that network, or you could even transfer and put a separate blog on that location specific site, if that makes sense.

Guys, remember, categories in WordPress do have their own feeds. You can get a category feed, so you could essentially use the root domain for let’s say if you had six locations, you could literally have six location, so brand plus location modifier networks, and have six individual category RSS feeds each triggering their own geo-specific network. Does that make sense?

Again, you can get really complex with this stuff. I like to keep one branded syndication network to try to accomplish what I desire for all of the locations because that’s less work and it’s easier. I like easy. I like efficiency, but you can make it complicated or add additional geo networks specific to a location when needed, but lastly, like I mentioned, as far as the actual Facebook page, I would have a location page for each location, absolutely, because it’s a very powerful citation.

You could also create location pages on LinkedIn, Crunchbase, if you’re using Crunchbase, which you should because Crunchbase is a very powerful citation as part of the semantic database. What I would recommend with Crunchbase is setup an organization and then you setup sub-locations for each location, which you can link to individually. That becomes very, very powerful. That’s a good question, though.

Vincent said, “The line below reviews that has the blue icon, it’s a review snippet.” Yeah, but that’s something that Google pulls in automatically. That’s not something that you can force. This is a Google Maps listing, Vincent. You can’t manipulate this. Google decides what they’re going to list and show right here, not you. That’s not something that we have the option to edit right now or to change.

Those reviews that are pulled in, like the snippet from a review, that’s just what Google determines that they’re going to pull in and display to the searcher, the user, the Google user. That’s it. It’s not something that you can edit. You can’t force that. Google just does that, at least as far as I know, you can’t. If I’m wrong, I’m sure somebody will correct me. Okay, well, should we give it another minute and see if any other questions come in or should we just wrap up a little bit early?

Adam: I think we should give them a minute because I know there’s definitely a lag, but I want to talk a little bit more about the live event in October.

Bradley: Okay.

Adam: We narrowed it down. It’s going to be in Washington DC like we said, which honestly, I’m kind of pumped about because when we first thought of that, the first thing I thought about was heat and humidity, but I realized it’s going to be in the middle of October and it’s going to be freaking awesome there. You can speak to that. That’s a great time of year around there, isn’t it?

Bradley: Absolutely. It should be really nice. There’s a ton of stuff to do in Washington DC. Besides our event, we’re going to have a VIP event I believe, which we’re going to have to find something good to do. DC, it’s the nation’s capital, right? There’s a lot of stuff to do that.

Adam: Yeah. You’re within striking distance of a lot of stuff, so if you come join us, if you can take a couple days on either side, maybe go do something. If you’re traveling, there’s a lot of neat stuff in that area to do.

Bradley: Yeah. Yeah, there is. Okay, well, I don’t see any other questions coming in, guys. It’s Fourth of July holiday week. For those of you in the US, happy Fourth of July, and go get a cold beer.

Adam: Those of you in England, I’m not watching the game, but hopefully England’s doing well in the soccer match I guess it is right now. I’m going to check that out, and then yeah, I hope everyone has a great Fourth of July. I’m going to head out and enjoy that tomorrow.

Bradley: I’m still working tomorrow for a few hours in the morning. I’ve got to coach Crossfit for two hours in the morning, and then I’m going to work for a couple hours before I go heavily drink.

Marco: Well, England is still sweating.

Hernan: [inaudible 00:46:14] penalties. Very fun. Thank you guys.

Bradley: All right guys. See you later. Happy Fourth.

Marco: Bye everyone.

Chris: Bye.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 191 published first on your-t1-blog-url

[your-clarity-digital]

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 191

Click on the video above to watch Episode 191 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 https://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

  Announcement

Adam: Hey everybody. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts, episode 191, the question where I guarantee it, if you’re watching this, you can get your question answered, because right now there are almost no questions because of a little error that somebody made. It’s not important who, but let’s go and say hello to everyone real quick. Hopefully, you’re getting an announcement on YouTube or you’re getting a notification. You might be watching this later, in which case, just ignore all this stuff about people making mistakes. Chris, how you doing, man?

Chris: Good. Happy to have summer finally in Europe.

Adam: Oh, nice. It’s finally warming up there?

Chris: Yep.

Adam: Good deal, good deal. Hernan, how about you? Is it nice and cold down there?

Hernan: Yeah. Over here, it’s freezing, man. I’m freezing my ass and overdressed, whatever, but I’m super excited to be here anyway, so that doesn’t stop us.

Adam: Marco, you’re not freezing your ass off, are you?

Marco: Never. Guys, for some reason, we’re not transmitting this Hangout into the Google Plus page. It’s still 190.

Bradley: That’s my fault. Standby.

Adam: Got you. Well, we won’t ask Bradley how he’s doing, because I don’t want to divide up his attention, but we do have a few announcements. Real quick, I wanted to say we’re going to put the link on the page and you’ll be able to find it in the description if you’re watching this later on YouTube, but our live event is a go, The Semantic Mastery Live.

October, the weekend of October 20th, 21st, we’ve already announced one of the special guest speakers. In addition to seeing all of our lovely faces at some point during the event, also Jeffrey Smith of SEO Boot Camp will be joining us and we’re going to have a couple more that we’re holding back.

We’re teasing it a little bit, but that is a go, so I’ll pop the link on here if you want to go and grab your ticket now. Ticket prices are definitely going to go up as time goes on. We want to help out the people who jump on this early and it is capped at a total of 25. Don’t put it off too long. It will be in the Washington DC area and we’re getting ready to lock down our event venue probably in the next week or two.

Bradley: Page is updated.

Adam: All right. As far as other announcements, you guys, we got a lot. I’m going to pass it off. Marco, is there anything we want to say specifically?

Marco: No. We’re moving forward, guys. The Google My Business auto-poster is ready. It has some awesome features. People have a long way to catch up. I know there’s some stuff being put out. It’s [inaudible 00:02:42]. You can get an RSS feed on anyone who’s in Syndication Academy or knows about us. You know how wicked RSS feeds can be, how they can help amplify your content, how they can help you with backlinks, but the most interesting thing we’re doing is we’re pulling in or we should have the ability in the next few days to pull in the RSS feed from the website so that all you would literally have to do is post from your website and you can amplify that content into post. If not, we do have the auto-poster, where you can go in and setup posts well ahead of time.

We also have YouTube views. That’s currently working. It’s working really well to push up videos, to get it ranked. Now, of course, once you start pushing videos, you should continue pushing videos to it to keep it ranked until it picks up its own steam. It’ll pick up steam and stay where it’s supposed to stay. It’ll stay ranked. The great thing about this is that since it’s real people, they’ll interact with your channel, so they’ll send all kinds of signals.

I keep telling people, the caveat in this is that you have to send them to a quality video. I always ask the question, “What’s a quality video?” Well, a quality video, if you look at your competition as a video that has a bunch of likes, it has a bunch of watch time, it has a bunch of subscribers, that’s a quality video. Look at what your competition is doing for that keyword and you mimic that, but do them one better. Better production, a better speaker, better audio quality, whatever it is that you need to do to grab the attention of your viewers.

There’s so many things coming. Video carpet bomb is coming. We were just talking about it. The done for you Google My Business services, that’s coming. The VA is almost trained. I’m working with her daily on this task. Cora reports are going to be available. What else do we have? Drive Stacks, guys. Drive Stacks, the Semantic Mastery way, with my original VA, the VA that I originally trained will be available through our marketplace. Market, it’s coming. Just stay tuned. Keep coming back and we’ll have news as everything develops, but we hope to have at least some of the products available by the end of the week. That’ll be on you to send the email to let people know, “Hey, it’s ready, so go get it.”

Adam: Awesome. Sorry about that. I was muted real quick. Also, I wanted to let everyone know, if you missed the webinar, we have a webinar replay. I’m not going to post the link here because if you’re on our email list, then you are very special and you’re going to get a link to check out the bundle, but there was a great webinar on Monday going into detail about how you can use some of the most powerful training that we have and really combine that.

We’re going to have some more information coming out about that. We’ll just post the link so you can go and grab that if you’re interested in taking advantage. It’s a special Fourth of July kind of holiday offer, and then we’ll have a little bit, like I said, of followup in the coming days. A lot of people are taking some time off, heading out to the beach, doing whatever. If you got some time you can squeak away from the family or make an excuse, you might want to go check out the replay over the next couple of days.

Bradley: I can tell having changed Hump Day Hangouts from Wednesday to Tuesday for this week, we’ve got a lot less viewers on it right now than we typically do, so it’s just timing. I’m glad that unfortunately, we didn’t have all the questions directed to the right place this time. That’s on our end, but we got a few questions. Do we have any other announcements, guys?

Adam: I’m good. How about you guys?

Hernan: I just wanted to reiterate that go ahead and grab your tickets for the [inaudible 00:06:51] Live 2018 because it’s going to depend on that. It’s going to depend on that. I’m really looking forward to seeing you guys, so yeah, I just wanted to repeat that once again.

Adam: Okay, cool.

Bradley: That’s it. We can get into it, huh?

Adam: Yeah, let’s do it.

Bradley: Let’s do it. All right, well, we don’t have a lot of questions, so we’re hoping that some of you guys that are here have some questions and you post them on the page. Again, that was our fault, but it is what it is, so we’re going to run with what we got. I know Adam posted a couple questions that he yanked from one of the Facebook groups, so we’ll start with those. I’ll grab the screen.

Is It Possible To Spread Authority To Multiple Root Domains From One Authority Domain Via Subdomain Redirects?

All right, so from the Facebook group. “Looking for insights on an idea. I wanted to test this, but asking is more efficient. Is the following possible? I have site.com and site.com has authority.” IDA, DR, okay. “I have a sub-domain on site.com, subdomain1.site.com. Sub-domain carries authority from site, correct?” Carry domain authority, but not necessarily page authority, but you’re right.

“Can I create a redirect from subdomain1.site.com to secondsite.com while site.com stays live and then secondsite.com gets authority from subdomain1.site.com?” Questions like this are hard to read. “Both secondsite.com and site have authority. In other words, is it possible to spread authority to multiple domains from one authority domain via sub-domain redirects?” Yes. “I’m doubting this works, but also read some things that indicate it might work.”

It does work. It does absolutely work. There’s a little bit of a loss. That’s called domain authority manipulation, guys. That’s like 2012 stuff. That’s the stuff that we did that worked really freaking well in like 2012, ‘13 timeframe. There’s still a little bit of benefit to pushing domain authority, guys, but honestly, you can set that up. It will work. There’s a little bit of a loss between redirects when pushing domain authority. It will absolutely increase your domain authority from your sub-domain that you direct to another root domain.

My point is, I’m not sure what your end goal is. Why do you want to push this domain authority to that other domain? Domain authority manipulation as a ranking factor is almost obsolete. I guess there might be some benefit to it, but you have to have really high DA numbers for that to really have an effect. It’s much more about relevancy than it is about domain metrics, which are proprietary metrics, right? Marco, I’ll let you comment on that a little bit, but again, look, if you want to do it, yes, it will help to boost domain authority from the second site.

There is a little bit of a loss, so what I’m saying is if you’ve got a 42 domain authority on your root domain and you try to push that over to a second site via sub-domain or any way you want to do it, it really doesn’t matter, but via a sub-domain redirect, you’ll likely fall somewhere in the 30s, the mid 30s with domain authority. It’s not going to happen overnight. When I used to do a lot of domain authority manipulation, we used to do a lot of it. The maws numbers would refresh, I can’t remember, I think it was every other month, every two months.

Marco: Every 90 days.

Bradley: Every 90 days. Okay. If we would do a redirect, like for example, we called it link laundering, and we’d do double 301 redirects from spam domains. We would go find expired domains that were on the closeout because they went through auction and they were really shitty, spammy domains. A lot of the times, they’re Chinese domains that would have hundreds, sometimes thousands or even tens of thousands of sub-domains. The dropped domain would have tens of thousands, sometimes, anywhere between hundreds to tens of thousands of sub-domains.

This is what we used to do and it worked really well. We would go buy a domain, buy one of those domains, and then we would set up a redirect script, a catch all or wild card redirect via HT access. We’d point the domain to a host, a C panel, and then we would set up an HT access file that would do a wild card sub-domain redirect to whatever we wanted to, and we would push domain authority.

We would do what’s called a double 301 redirect, so we would redirect it through one domain first and then push it over to our final target URL. I’d get domains that had 55, 60 domain authority mostly because of all the accumulated domain authority from all the sub-domains, right? We’d do the redirect and then push it over to a brand new domain and I could get my domain authority to jump from one, which is a brand new registered domain, to mid-40s usually within one maws cycle refresh, but sometimes it would take two. It would take anywhere between 90 days, so three months, to six months, to see that kind of a push. Again, I’ve found over the years that using that is purely like a ranking method, which used to work phenomenally. It really is ineffective at this point.

The only thing I would suggest is like I said, or what I would add to this, is that if you have really high domain authority and you can push some of that to another domain, it will help it to respond better to other off page signals, but that’s about it. Again, it’s not something that I even bother doing anymore. I don’t even look at domain authority and page authority numbers anymore, honestly. If you want to do it, it will work. Marco, what are your comments on this?

Marco: I would say he’s better off concentrating on relevance. If they’re relevant, then you can throw DA and domain authority and page authority out the window and push relevance. You could even throw a Drive Stack. Wherever you’re directing, you could put a Drive Stack as buffer and redirect to the Drive Stack and the Drive Stack will then push the power over to the new site with even more relevance. In the Drive Stack, you could push just tons of relevance in there whether you want keyword relevance, what do you call it, keyword plus URL, brand plus keyword relevance. What you really want is that brand plus keyword relevance.

Bradley: Right.

Marco: What you want to become is you want to become the keyword for whatever that niche is, so when people start thinking about those keywords, they don’t necessarily think about the keywords, but they think about your brand. This is where I tell people, Coca-Cola, Xerox, Band-Aid, Scotch Tape, all of these people have done fabulous branding where they become the brand for those keywords.

I know it’s not simple to do and we don’t have the deep pockets, but a way to start doing that is by relevance. How we do it, how we take advantage of it is by going into a Drive Stack and creating all of that keyword relevance which relates to the brand, and then we push maybe [inaudible 00:14:11] which will flow into the website, or maybe we’ll go direct to the website. We’ll go to the Google My Business thing.

There are so many ways to take advantage of this, but you’re pushing relevance. Think metrics. DA is a third party metric. Trust flow and citation flow, third party metrics. We don’t bother with that. What we look for is relevance and as long as the on page is tight on both websites, they will both benefit.

I could go even further, but then I’d be getting stuff that’s only in RYS Academy Reloaded. I could start talking all kind of things about embeds and the nasty stuff that you can do with embeds, but again, as I always say, we’d be doing the people that pay for the information a disservice by giving it away for free.

Hernan: If I may add real quick, that was one of the main reasons, the spam, when we just throw spam on the domain, we’ll rank. We will get higher domain authority, or we would do the sub-domain manipulation and whatnot, and that was one of the reasons why we stopped paying attention that much to domain authority and page authority, because they were so easy to manipulate.

That’s why we migrated to [inaudible 00:15:28] initially, and then we had to develop, as Marco was saying, relevancy and trust and authority as our own metics, our own way of doing things, because it was so easy. Again, you would have these Chinese domains with, I don’t know, 60 domain authority, and they were all spam. That’s one of the reasons, one of the many reasons that we stopped going through those domains.

Also, because maws will start delaying the updates and whatnot, and at some point it became a lot like waiting the page rank update, the public page rank update from Google that would go out every month or so. It became like that, so we stopped paying attention to that altogether and we started focusing a lot more on rankings and actual results.

Bradley: Again, yeah, it’ll work, and what I would recommend if you were trying to push it a second site anyway, guys, remember, if you push domain authority to a sub-domain, it will benefit the entire domain. Remember, domain authority, it’s a site-wide or domain-wide, including all sub-domains, including all inner pages and posts, all of them will benefit from that, will receive the same domain authority.

Instead of pushing from a redirect to a secondsite.com, you could push to a non-indexed sub-domain on that secondsite.com, all right? You do that so that you can set up a sub-domain. You don’t even need to really put a piece of content up on it, but you could. You could set an HTML file to say no index or whatever, and then just point all of it to that specific sub-domain because it will benefit the root without people really being able to see what you’re doing.

Again, I really just think that’s a waste of time unless you’ve got some massive amount of authority on your first site that you’re trying to push, in case it would help a little bit, but you’d have to be really, really high domain authority numbers for that to make much difference now in my opinion based on how the algorithm works now.

Do You Pay For Articles Or Use A Plugin To Pull In Content?

All right, Adam, the next one that he posted was, “Do you guys pay for articles or use a plugin to pull in content? Looking for an alternative for test site than buying articles.” Yeah, content curation. We have a training course specifically all about that. It’s what I’ve been using. I had to figure out a way to develop content for my clients that was cost-effective and efficient without having to be subject matter experts, so I developed a process years ago that I’ve been using ever since 2012.

We’ve got it as a product right now called Content Kingpin, but that’s the same exact content production process that I used for my own agency and countless amount of our members and students have also implemented that into their business for their primary content methods. We just get across the board good results from even our members that have implemented it, as well, or adopted that process, because it works.

It’s basically hands-free content marketing. You could teach a VA to do it, and they don’t have to be subject matter experts. All they have to do is be able to identify and locate content, authority content or just good, relevant content about whatever topic they’re going to be blogging about and then organizing that content in a logical manner and injecting a small amount of their own commentary. That content is more efficient and way better than any sort of shitty content, farmed content that you could buy from the dime a dozen content farms that are out there, that is just spun, rehashed garbage.

Guys, that’s all the content farms do. They don’t write original content. Even if they do, they’re not subject matter experts. If they are, you’re going to pay a premium for it, but even then, a lot of times, guys, all they do is do mashups where they’ll go, scrape five or 10 articles or whatever about whatever topic it is that you requested the article for, and then they’ll put bits and pieces of each article, put them through a spinner, and sometimes they’ll manually edit the spin text or the output file to where it’s a little bit more readable, but a lot of those content farms, you’ll get a lot of errors and stuff that you can clearly see that a spinner was used and they didn’t take the time to manually edit it.

My point is you’re not really buying original content from content farms, anyway. You’re buying garbage. You’re much better off using curated content where you can reference and cite other people’s authority content that is highly relevant from subject matter experts and you’re giving them credit via the attribution link. You’re citing the source, which is required and ethical. It’s the ethical thing to do.

Now, you’ve got good content from subject matter experts that you’re quoting on your own site, giving them credit, and injecting your own commentary. Again, a VA can do that. That’s why we call it Content Kingpin Hands-Free Content Marketing, because it truly is. You can generate a stream or revenue just from selling content marketing services and managing it. It just requires a very, very small amount of management.

Again, that training, Content Kingpin, teaches exactly how to hire the VAs, what to look for, what type of output production you should expect, what to pay them, how to manage it, all of that, guys. All of that is covered in great detail in that course. I highly recommend anybody that needs content for their clients or their own assets, their own digital assets, check that out because it’s the exact same method we use, all right?

Do We Have To Worry About Stock Photo Copyright Issues When Posting To Social Media Like Twitter?

Jeff, what’s up, Jeff? He says, “Do we have to worry about stock photo copyright issues when posting to social media, like Twitter, the same way we do with our website?” I don’t know, Jeff. I wish I did. I wish I had definitive answer. Maybe somebody else on here knows. Anybody?

Hernan: I had some issues when it comes to posting on Facebook, so yeah, short answer is yeah, because I had to take down an ad that was performing super well just because I was lazy and I didn’t check the stock photos stuff. The actual owner of the photo contacted me and said, “Hey dude, you need to take off the ad,” and I lost the entire social proof and everything on the Facebook side of things.

Yeah, short answer is yes because you can get in trouble. It doesn’t really matter if you’re using it on Twitter, Google. Google, maybe you would have a bigger exposure because you’re being indexed, but on Twitter, people can still see it, right? I think it’s just a matter of photos are still an asset, so it’s like you saying a piece of a song or a piece of a movie, something like that, all of that is copyrighted. You need to have that in mind, no matter where you’re using it.

When you’re doing it on your website, you’re a bit more exposed because anyone can get access to that, while on Twitter it’s not the case, but just to avoid issues, I would say don’t do it. Plus, there are so many deals and having stock photos has become really, really cheap. If you go to [inaudible 00:22:51] for example, you can get deals, like, I don’t know, for 100 photos for 10 bucks or something like that. It’s not even worth the trouble of getting through it.

Bradley: Yeah. Yeah, and usually for my clients, what I have them do is I use StockFresh.com. That’s our primary stock photo site, and so I just have my clients go setup an account or I set it up for them in their name and then I send them the login details and then they go in and fund it by just purchasing credits. We usually purchase 100 credits at a time. I think it’s $79 or something like that at Stock Fresh. It’s not bad. It’s decent.

Every couple of months or so, my curators, my VAs who are doing all of the content marketing for my clients will contact me and say, “Hey, we need this account refilled,” and I’ll just contact the client and say, “Hey, I need you to add another $100, refill the account with credits.” That’s it. That’s how it works, and that’s just to be safe.

That’s because I’ve been hit with extortion letters from Getty Images and their various subsidiaries and I’ve had to pay fines, copyright fines, settlement fees, basically for not having each client having their own licenses. In other words, even if I had my own account for my marketing agency with stock photos, if I published those stock photos on clients’ websites, the client needs to have a license for that photo. Even though I did it on their behalf, I was the license holder, not the client.

I’ve had to pay settlement fees for copyright infringement issues for client sites that they received the extortion letter, but I paid it on their behalf because it was my fault for not having them setup properly. That’s why I talk about that, again, in the Content Kingpin training that I was just talking about, I go into great detail about all of that because it’s very, very important. I would follow Hernan’s advice about social media and really try to have proper licensing for photos that you’re using.

Hernan: Yeah. Yeah, I would do that, too, and for example, there’s some websites that they’re explicitly royalty-free photos like Flickr, for example. You can search for royalty-free photos, then I think Unsplash.com, Unsplash.com. There’s another called Pixabay.com. Those are all royalty-free photos, but you’re limited to what you can find over there.

Sometimes for ads it will work, but if I’m looking for a specific way or specific photo that will convey a specific message that I want to send, then it wouldn’t work, so I’ll need to go out and actually purchase the picture. It’s specifically important with social media. Twitter has become super, super visual. If you go through the Twitter app on mobile, it’s super visual, so photos play a big role.

Would SEO Content Be Okay Or Should You Use The Research Quality Content For An Affiliate Money Site?

Bradley: Okay, Dominick’s up. What’s up, Dominick? He says, “I need some good content for an affiliate money site. I’ve tried Natasha Nixon, but it’s a little pricey. Would SEO content be okay or should I use the research quality content?”

No, if it’s for a money site, I would recommend that you do authority content because the SEO content is exactly what I just mentioned about a content farm. That’s what it is. It’s spun shit. It’s garbage. I can tell you that. That’s to be used for link building and stuff like that. It’s not money site content. I could tell you that even the authority content that you purchase sometimes isn’t going to be very good.

For the most part, I’ve had good experiences with Natasha Nixon for authority content, but the last article I got was complete garbage. It was for Mario’s Cab Service for the GMB Pro case study, and it was complete garbage. I ordered a 1500 word authority content article, paid like $120 for it, and it was complete garbage. I had to go through and manually edit. If I had time, I would’ve requested a rewrite, but I didn’t because I wanted to get it up, so I just edited about 500 or 600 words of it myself and then used that as the actual GMB website article.

Again, guys, remember, your best bet, Dominick, if you need really good authority type content or money site content on a regular basis would be to hire your own writer from Upwork or something. That is a much better way than going to the content producers. Honestly, you’re better off developing a one on one relationship with an individual writer.

Here’s the thing. Well, most of my writers are now curators, but I still can rely on them for article writing at times, but most of the stuff we do is like I said, curating for blog posts and such. The idea is once you’ve developed a relationship with a particular writer, you get to know their voice, so to speak and how they write, and you can help to mold or shape how you want them to write for particular clients, for example. That’s the benefit of doing it.

One of the other benefits of having a relationship with an individual writer is that a lot of times, you get better treatment. You don’t have to wait in queue for a week to get a piece of content back, that kind of stuff. You can have direct message. I use Upwork a lot. There’s desktop notifications and all that kind of stuff, so I recommend doing that.

If you’re going to buy it from a content farm, Natasha Nixon being one of them, then authority content is your better bet. It is a bit more expensive, but again, for money sites, I don’t recommend putting up any kind of SEO articles because they’re literally trash. It’s junk. You yourself will spend more time editing them and making them readable than it’s worth. If that’s the case, why not just write it yourself? Anybody want to comment on that?

Hernan: Yeah. Real quick, I totally agree with what you’re saying, Bradley, in terms of having someone that you can always refer to, even further if you’re offering this on a regular basis. I think that there’s some types of professionals, if you would, or some types of work that you always need stuff done, for example, graphic design, that you would be better off just hiring somebody to do graphic design.

For example, on our end, we hire a graphic designer. He would take over the entire graphic design side of things. He would do thumbnails for YouTube. He would do this and he would do that. He already knows how we work and what types of things we want and if we need a logo, we ask him for it, and if we need banners, sometimes he would do it.

I think that’s part of the team that you want to start putting together. That’s part of the team because you’re providing service and if you’re providing content creation services for your clients, that’s something that you really want to have in mind. For example, if you’re doing, I don’t know, video services, right, you’re doing YouTube services, maybe you need a video editor or maybe you need the tools to actually provide the client with a good service. That will position yourself as a much more valuable asset because you have the tools.

It’s not like you’re getting out there and grabbing the content, the articles, the logos from what everyone else is doing. You become a much more valuable asset because you’re developing your own team. I think that having that long-term relationship and having that long-term view when it comes to the collaborators that work with you, people that help you, helps a lot, helps you save time, money, and helps you position yourself better.

Bradley: Yeah, and the last thing about that I want to mention is I said earlier about you get to know a writer’s voice, and that’s good because especially if you’re providing content for your clients, then you already know what the quality is going to be. When you buy content from places like content farms or a Natasha Nixon, even when you’re buying the authority content which costs more money, you don’t know which writer’s going to get it, so you don’t know what the quality’s going to be like.

The tone of the writing can be different from article to article, can be vastly different. If you’re providing content for webpages, not posts, but pages for client sites, you want consistency in tone because you don’t want one page to have a tone that’s vastly different than another page, because it would be off putting to a visitor. Again, you get to know how the writer writes. You get to come to expect a certain level of quality, a certain tone, a certain voice to speak. That kind of stuff makes you more confident in being able to sell content marketing, right? Good question there, Dom. A great question, actually.

Vincent, doesn’t look much of a question. Let’s see if there’s a comment somewhere. No. Okay, so, well, congratulations. I don’t know what this means.

Adam: Oh, you’ll see it in a minute. He posted after that.

Does Adding A PR Link Helps In Generating Review Snippets Of A GMB Review Page?

Bradley: Okay, cool, cool. Let’s see. “Hey guys. Do you know if adding a PR link to our GMB review page will cause our GMB listing to show a review snippet as shown below?”

No. Adding a PR link to your review page, no. This is a maps thing. You have to have I think five, at least it used to be, you had to have a minimum of five ratings for the stars to show. I think that’s still the case. This is a maps listing that you show here in the picture, so that’s not something that we can manipulate by adding code because we can’t add code to the maps profile.

You can on a website. You can have structured data for review schema, but we can’t do that in the maps profile. The maps profile will show review stars once you have a total of five reviews. Whatever the star ratings are is irrelevant. Your ratings stars will show up once you have a total of five reviews. Does that make sense? That’s it. It’s not something that you can force or trigger by linking to it or adding code because you can’t edit the code of the GMB or maps profile like you could on a website, right? You just need to get five reviews.

Who Do You Recommend For Google Phone Verified Accounts?

Okay, Jim’s up. He says, “Hey, SM team. I’m glad you were able to hang out during the holiday week.” Yeah, us, too. We’ve only missed one in 191 episodes and it was a scheduled miss. “I know you’ve spoken about Google phone verified accounts in the past a lot, but I was wondering who you’d recommend of late. Also, is it worth paying $3 per account for aged accounts instead of 35 cent per newer account? Have you had better ratio on sites sticking with the older accounts?”

I buy aged accounts for very particular projects. Let’s put it this way. I’ve bought some aged accounts. I haven’t tested, I haven’t setup an actual test to test a brand new account versus an aged account anytime in the last three or four years, so I don’t know if having an aged account really makes a difference or not. I can’t tell definitively.

People seem to think it does make a difference. There’s probably some evidence out there to support that. I would just assume that that may be the case. For very particular accounts or projects, campaigns, whatever, I will sometimes buy the aged accounts and I’ll pay as much as $50 per account depending on how old it is. I’ve bought some 12 year old created in 2006 Google accounts and I’ve paid as much as $50 per account for those, and then I still had one of them terminated rather quickly, which pissed me off.

I can’t tell you, Jim, whether it’s really worth it or not. Maybe some other people have some data to prove one way or the other. I don’t. Usually, guys, we try to test everything to give you a definitive answer and this is something I have not tested. Adam, or excuse me, Hernan and or Marco, have either of you have any data to back up one way or the other?

Hernan: No, not on my end, honestly.

Marco: No, I don’t think it makes a difference.

Bradley: Okay. Yeah, I didn’t think so. Honestly, I know people say it does. Jim, I would say proceed at your own risk, whichever way you want, but this is the guy that I’m recommending right now for my aged accounts. [inaudible 00:35:52] is his name. At least that’s what I think it is, BulkPVA.com. I still use him. He’s really responsive on Skype if you connect with him on Skype, and if you go to contact, I think his Skype username is right there. Yeah, it is, BulkPVA.com. You can email him, all that. Just tell him I sent you. He knows because I’ve referred a lot of people to him.

He usually takes very good care of us, as well as anytime accounts get terminated and stuff, if they’re new, obviously if you have accounts terminated two weeks after he delivers them to you, that’s your fault, but if they’re within three days, within 72 hours or something like that, see, look, it takes 24 to 72 hours to deliver each order. Let’s see. After delivery of accounts, if the account is banned within 48 hours, replacements will be given to you.

What I do is whenever we order a new batch, and a lot of these, I buy the double phone verified YouTube accounts, and we do that because we do a lot of video spam for clients and all kinds of stuff, and I’ve got a VA that runs a video spam tool, Ab’s Video Carpet Blitz tool. We have to have dozens, if not 100 plus YouTube accounts at all times. Obviously, because we’re doing a shit ton of spam, a lot of accounts get terminated from overuse, and so I buy accounts from this guy all the time.

What I do is my VA will go in and immediately open up Browseo and just start adding profiles and logging in to bind it to his IP, but they each have their own browsing session because they’re all separated or segregated via Browseo, which you can do that with Ghost Browser, I think is another one. It doesn’t have to be Browseo, guys. It doesn’t matter. All I’m saying is the best way to get these accounts to stick is to bind them to your IP, but make sure they have their own unique browsing session in history.

Start allowing cookies to accrue and search history and allow Google and the websites that that profile visits start to build a customer profile, like an avatar or whatever, for that particular profile. In other words, you want it to look real, and so one of the things that I’ve found is these bulk accounts, when you buy them, if you do a hard reset on your browser to clear all cache and cookies and then log into four, five, six accounts from the same IP all from a 100% virgin browsing session each time you do it, that’s going to look spammy and those accounts tend to get terminated.

If you log into each of them, even from the same IP, as long as they have their own unique browsing sessions that maintain, they stay, in other words they don’t get wiped clean and then use that same IP to log into another profile, with Browseo or Ghost Browser or any number of those apps that do that that will keep browsing sessions per profile, that’s a much better way to do it. That tends not to trigger the red flags that do from using 100% clean browsing sessions each time. Hopefully that makes sense. This is the guy I still recommend. Just tell him I sent you only because he tends to take care of the people that we send to him. You get put the top of his priority list, all right? That was another good question.

Would You Recommend Making The Least Number Of Location Pages For Each Facebook Accounts?

Oh, cool, we’re almost out of time, almost out of questions. Marco says from YouTube, [inaudible 00:39:23], “For multiple location websites, I know normally you guys recommend having one ring of social media that is going to syndicate posts, but in Facebook, you can have multiple location pages linked to one account. Would you recommend making at least the Facebook accounts for every location at least?”

Yeah, you can. Honestly, I would, because multiple location businesses should each have their own Facebook page. Each location should have its own Facebook page, so yeah, absolutely. What I was talking about was a branded Tumblr, a branded Blogger, a branded WordPress, and all the other web twos and stuff that we syndicate and we use as part of the syndication networks. You really only need one branded network that you can publish content to from the root domain, from the blog that’s typically going to be on the root domain. Essentially you can silo the root domain to have categories for each one of the locations.

Let’s say you got six locations. I would set up a category for each location, and then what I would do is publish content, just publish posts from the blog on the root site, make sure it’s the correct category selected. When you’re targeting, let’s say location number one, you’re going to optimize the content and have the call to action link, the link that you’re going to be linking to that sub-domain site or location page, whatever, however you’ve got it configured, but that’s going to be selected and placed into that location category, which helps to optimize it. You can do that for each location from the root blog. You don’t need to have a separation syndication network for each location, but Facebook pages, you can have a separate location page and I would encourage that because that’s a powerful citation.

That’s the thing, guys. When it comes to any of the [inaudible 00:41:20]. I’m sorry. I’ll come back to that question, Vincent. I got sidetracked. The other thing about this is if you have a particular location that is not responding as well to the blog post, the syndication from the root domain, then you can always go in and setup a location specific syndication network where you would just use the same branding, but you would add a local modifier.

In other words, if it’s Joe’s Plumbing and there’s six locations and one of them happens to be, I don’t know, Fairfax, Virginia, then if he has a Joe’s Plumbing syndication network that he’s using to blog for all of the locations, but Fairfax, Virginia isn’t really responding as well to the blogs from the root domain, then you could put a Joe’s Plumbing Fairfax syndication network up and then syndicate content directly from that particular category on the root domain to just that network, or you could even transfer and put a separate blog on that location specific site, if that makes sense.

Guys, remember, categories in WordPress do have their own feeds. You can get a category feed, so you could essentially use the root domain for let’s say if you had six locations, you could literally have six location, so brand plus location modifier networks, and have six individual category RSS feeds each triggering their own geo-specific network. Does that make sense?

Again, you can get really complex with this stuff. I like to keep one branded syndication network to try to accomplish what I desire for all of the locations because that’s less work and it’s easier. I like easy. I like efficiency, but you can make it complicated or add additional geo networks specific to a location when needed, but lastly, like I mentioned, as far as the actual Facebook page, I would have a location page for each location, absolutely, because it’s a very powerful citation.

You could also create location pages on LinkedIn, Crunchbase, if you’re using Crunchbase, which you should because Crunchbase is a very powerful citation as part of the semantic database. What I would recommend with Crunchbase is setup an organization and then you setup sub-locations for each location, which you can link to individually. That becomes very, very powerful. That’s a good question, though.

Vincent said, “The line below reviews that has the blue icon, it’s a review snippet.” Yeah, but that’s something that Google pulls in automatically. That’s not something that you can force. This is a Google Maps listing, Vincent. You can’t manipulate this. Google decides what they’re going to list and show right here, not you. That’s not something that we have the option to edit right now or to change.

Those reviews that are pulled in, like the snippet from a review, that’s just what Google determines that they’re going to pull in and display to the searcher, the user, the Google user. That’s it. It’s not something that you can edit. You can’t force that. Google just does that, at least as far as I know, you can’t. If I’m wrong, I’m sure somebody will correct me. Okay, well, should we give it another minute and see if any other questions come in or should we just wrap up a little bit early?

Adam: I think we should give them a minute because I know there’s definitely a lag, but I want to talk a little bit more about the live event in October.

Bradley: Okay.

Adam: We narrowed it down. It’s going to be in Washington DC like we said, which honestly, I’m kind of pumped about because when we first thought of that, the first thing I thought about was heat and humidity, but I realized it’s going to be in the middle of October and it’s going to be freaking awesome there. You can speak to that. That’s a great time of year around there, isn’t it?

Bradley: Absolutely. It should be really nice. There’s a ton of stuff to do in Washington DC. Besides our event, we’re going to have a VIP event I believe, which we’re going to have to find something good to do. DC, it’s the nation’s capital, right? There’s a lot of stuff to do that.

Adam: Yeah. You’re within striking distance of a lot of stuff, so if you come join us, if you can take a couple days on either side, maybe go do something. If you’re traveling, there’s a lot of neat stuff in that area to do.

Bradley: Yeah. Yeah, there is. Okay, well, I don’t see any other questions coming in, guys. It’s Fourth of July holiday week. For those of you in the US, happy Fourth of July, and go get a cold beer.

Adam: Those of you in England, I’m not watching the game, but hopefully England’s doing well in the soccer match I guess it is right now. I’m going to check that out, and then yeah, I hope everyone has a great Fourth of July. I’m going to head out and enjoy that tomorrow.

Bradley: I’m still working tomorrow for a few hours in the morning. I’ve got to coach Crossfit for two hours in the morning, and then I’m going to work for a couple hours before I go heavily drink.

Marco: Well, England is still sweating.

Hernan: [inaudible 00:46:14] penalties. Very fun. Thank you guys.

Bradley: All right guys. See you later. Happy Fourth.

Marco: Bye everyone.

Chris: Bye.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 191 published first on your-t1-blog-url

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 191

Click on the video above to watch Episode 191 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 https://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

  Announcement

Adam: Hey everybody. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts, episode 191, the question where I guarantee it, if you’re watching this, you can get your question answered, because right now there are almost no questions because of a little error that somebody made. It’s not important who, but let’s go and say hello to everyone real quick. Hopefully, you’re getting an announcement on YouTube or you’re getting a notification. You might be watching this later, in which case, just ignore all this stuff about people making mistakes. Chris, how you doing, man?

Chris: Good. Happy to have summer finally in Europe.

Adam: Oh, nice. It’s finally warming up there?

Chris: Yep.

Adam: Good deal, good deal. Hernan, how about you? Is it nice and cold down there?

Hernan: Yeah. Over here, it’s freezing, man. I’m freezing my ass and overdressed, whatever, but I’m super excited to be here anyway, so that doesn’t stop us.

Adam: Marco, you’re not freezing your ass off, are you?

Marco: Never. Guys, for some reason, we’re not transmitting this Hangout into the Google Plus page. It’s still 190.

Bradley: That’s my fault. Standby.

Adam: Got you. Well, we won’t ask Bradley how he’s doing, because I don’t want to divide up his attention, but we do have a few announcements. Real quick, I wanted to say we’re going to put the link on the page and you’ll be able to find it in the description if you’re watching this later on YouTube, but our live event is a go, The Semantic Mastery Live.

October, the weekend of October 20th, 21st, we’ve already announced one of the special guest speakers. In addition to seeing all of our lovely faces at some point during the event, also Jeffrey Smith of SEO Boot Camp will be joining us and we’re going to have a couple more that we’re holding back.

We’re teasing it a little bit, but that is a go, so I’ll pop the link on here if you want to go and grab your ticket now. Ticket prices are definitely going to go up as time goes on. We want to help out the people who jump on this early and it is capped at a total of 25. Don’t put it off too long. It will be in the Washington DC area and we’re getting ready to lock down our event venue probably in the next week or two.

Bradley: Page is updated.

Adam: All right. As far as other announcements, you guys, we got a lot. I’m going to pass it off. Marco, is there anything we want to say specifically?

Marco: No. We’re moving forward, guys. The Google My Business auto-poster is ready. It has some awesome features. People have a long way to catch up. I know there’s some stuff being put out. It’s [inaudible 00:02:42]. You can get an RSS feed on anyone who’s in Syndication Academy or knows about us. You know how wicked RSS feeds can be, how they can help amplify your content, how they can help you with backlinks, but the most interesting thing we’re doing is we’re pulling in or we should have the ability in the next few days to pull in the RSS feed from the website so that all you would literally have to do is post from your website and you can amplify that content into post. If not, we do have the auto-poster, where you can go in and setup posts well ahead of time.

We also have YouTube views. That’s currently working. It’s working really well to push up videos, to get it ranked. Now, of course, once you start pushing videos, you should continue pushing videos to it to keep it ranked until it picks up its own steam. It’ll pick up steam and stay where it’s supposed to stay. It’ll stay ranked. The great thing about this is that since it’s real people, they’ll interact with your channel, so they’ll send all kinds of signals.

I keep telling people, the caveat in this is that you have to send them to a quality video. I always ask the question, “What’s a quality video?” Well, a quality video, if you look at your competition as a video that has a bunch of likes, it has a bunch of watch time, it has a bunch of subscribers, that’s a quality video. Look at what your competition is doing for that keyword and you mimic that, but do them one better. Better production, a better speaker, better audio quality, whatever it is that you need to do to grab the attention of your viewers.

There’s so many things coming. Video carpet bomb is coming. We were just talking about it. The done for you Google My Business services, that’s coming. The VA is almost trained. I’m working with her daily on this task. Cora reports are going to be available. What else do we have? Drive Stacks, guys. Drive Stacks, the Semantic Mastery way, with my original VA, the VA that I originally trained will be available through our marketplace. Market, it’s coming. Just stay tuned. Keep coming back and we’ll have news as everything develops, but we hope to have at least some of the products available by the end of the week. That’ll be on you to send the email to let people know, “Hey, it’s ready, so go get it.”

Adam: Awesome. Sorry about that. I was muted real quick. Also, I wanted to let everyone know, if you missed the webinar, we have a webinar replay. I’m not going to post the link here because if you’re on our email list, then you are very special and you’re going to get a link to check out the bundle, but there was a great webinar on Monday going into detail about how you can use some of the most powerful training that we have and really combine that.

We’re going to have some more information coming out about that. We’ll just post the link so you can go and grab that if you’re interested in taking advantage. It’s a special Fourth of July kind of holiday offer, and then we’ll have a little bit, like I said, of followup in the coming days. A lot of people are taking some time off, heading out to the beach, doing whatever. If you got some time you can squeak away from the family or make an excuse, you might want to go check out the replay over the next couple of days.

Bradley: I can tell having changed Hump Day Hangouts from Wednesday to Tuesday for this week, we’ve got a lot less viewers on it right now than we typically do, so it’s just timing. I’m glad that unfortunately, we didn’t have all the questions directed to the right place this time. That’s on our end, but we got a few questions. Do we have any other announcements, guys?

Adam: I’m good. How about you guys?

Hernan: I just wanted to reiterate that go ahead and grab your tickets for the [inaudible 00:06:51] Live 2018 because it’s going to depend on that. It’s going to depend on that. I’m really looking forward to seeing you guys, so yeah, I just wanted to repeat that once again.

Adam: Okay, cool.

Bradley: That’s it. We can get into it, huh?

Adam: Yeah, let’s do it.

Bradley: Let’s do it. All right, well, we don’t have a lot of questions, so we’re hoping that some of you guys that are here have some questions and you post them on the page. Again, that was our fault, but it is what it is, so we’re going to run with what we got. I know Adam posted a couple questions that he yanked from one of the Facebook groups, so we’ll start with those. I’ll grab the screen.

Is It Possible To Spread Authority To Multiple Root Domains From One Authority Domain Via Subdomain Redirects?

All right, so from the Facebook group. “Looking for insights on an idea. I wanted to test this, but asking is more efficient. Is the following possible? I have site.com and site.com has authority.” IDA, DR, okay. “I have a sub-domain on site.com, subdomain1.site.com. Sub-domain carries authority from site, correct?” Carry domain authority, but not necessarily page authority, but you’re right.

“Can I create a redirect from subdomain1.site.com to secondsite.com while site.com stays live and then secondsite.com gets authority from subdomain1.site.com?” Questions like this are hard to read. “Both secondsite.com and site have authority. In other words, is it possible to spread authority to multiple domains from one authority domain via sub-domain redirects?” Yes. “I’m doubting this works, but also read some things that indicate it might work.”

It does work. It does absolutely work. There’s a little bit of a loss. That’s called domain authority manipulation, guys. That’s like 2012 stuff. That’s the stuff that we did that worked really freaking well in like 2012, ‘13 timeframe. There’s still a little bit of benefit to pushing domain authority, guys, but honestly, you can set that up. It will work. There’s a little bit of a loss between redirects when pushing domain authority. It will absolutely increase your domain authority from your sub-domain that you direct to another root domain.

My point is, I’m not sure what your end goal is. Why do you want to push this domain authority to that other domain? Domain authority manipulation as a ranking factor is almost obsolete. I guess there might be some benefit to it, but you have to have really high DA numbers for that to really have an effect. It’s much more about relevancy than it is about domain metrics, which are proprietary metrics, right? Marco, I’ll let you comment on that a little bit, but again, look, if you want to do it, yes, it will help to boost domain authority from the second site.

There is a little bit of a loss, so what I’m saying is if you’ve got a 42 domain authority on your root domain and you try to push that over to a second site via sub-domain or any way you want to do it, it really doesn’t matter, but via a sub-domain redirect, you’ll likely fall somewhere in the 30s, the mid 30s with domain authority. It’s not going to happen overnight. When I used to do a lot of domain authority manipulation, we used to do a lot of it. The maws numbers would refresh, I can’t remember, I think it was every other month, every two months.

Marco: Every 90 days.

Bradley: Every 90 days. Okay. If we would do a redirect, like for example, we called it link laundering, and we’d do double 301 redirects from spam domains. We would go find expired domains that were on the closeout because they went through auction and they were really shitty, spammy domains. A lot of the times, they’re Chinese domains that would have hundreds, sometimes thousands or even tens of thousands of sub-domains. The dropped domain would have tens of thousands, sometimes, anywhere between hundreds to tens of thousands of sub-domains.

This is what we used to do and it worked really well. We would go buy a domain, buy one of those domains, and then we would set up a redirect script, a catch all or wild card redirect via HT access. We’d point the domain to a host, a C panel, and then we would set up an HT access file that would do a wild card sub-domain redirect to whatever we wanted to, and we would push domain authority.

We would do what’s called a double 301 redirect, so we would redirect it through one domain first and then push it over to our final target URL. I’d get domains that had 55, 60 domain authority mostly because of all the accumulated domain authority from all the sub-domains, right? We’d do the redirect and then push it over to a brand new domain and I could get my domain authority to jump from one, which is a brand new registered domain, to mid-40s usually within one maws cycle refresh, but sometimes it would take two. It would take anywhere between 90 days, so three months, to six months, to see that kind of a push. Again, I’ve found over the years that using that is purely like a ranking method, which used to work phenomenally. It really is ineffective at this point.

The only thing I would suggest is like I said, or what I would add to this, is that if you have really high domain authority and you can push some of that to another domain, it will help it to respond better to other off page signals, but that’s about it. Again, it’s not something that I even bother doing anymore. I don’t even look at domain authority and page authority numbers anymore, honestly. If you want to do it, it will work. Marco, what are your comments on this?

Marco: I would say he’s better off concentrating on relevance. If they’re relevant, then you can throw DA and domain authority and page authority out the window and push relevance. You could even throw a Drive Stack. Wherever you’re directing, you could put a Drive Stack as buffer and redirect to the Drive Stack and the Drive Stack will then push the power over to the new site with even more relevance. In the Drive Stack, you could push just tons of relevance in there whether you want keyword relevance, what do you call it, keyword plus URL, brand plus keyword relevance. What you really want is that brand plus keyword relevance.

Bradley: Right.

Marco: What you want to become is you want to become the keyword for whatever that niche is, so when people start thinking about those keywords, they don’t necessarily think about the keywords, but they think about your brand. This is where I tell people, Coca-Cola, Xerox, Band-Aid, Scotch Tape, all of these people have done fabulous branding where they become the brand for those keywords.

I know it’s not simple to do and we don’t have the deep pockets, but a way to start doing that is by relevance. How we do it, how we take advantage of it is by going into a Drive Stack and creating all of that keyword relevance which relates to the brand, and then we push maybe [inaudible 00:14:11] which will flow into the website, or maybe we’ll go direct to the website. We’ll go to the Google My Business thing.

There are so many ways to take advantage of this, but you’re pushing relevance. Think metrics. DA is a third party metric. Trust flow and citation flow, third party metrics. We don’t bother with that. What we look for is relevance and as long as the on page is tight on both websites, they will both benefit.

I could go even further, but then I’d be getting stuff that’s only in RYS Academy Reloaded. I could start talking all kind of things about embeds and the nasty stuff that you can do with embeds, but again, as I always say, we’d be doing the people that pay for the information a disservice by giving it away for free.

Hernan: If I may add real quick, that was one of the main reasons, the spam, when we just throw spam on the domain, we’ll rank. We will get higher domain authority, or we would do the sub-domain manipulation and whatnot, and that was one of the reasons why we stopped paying attention that much to domain authority and page authority, because they were so easy to manipulate.

That’s why we migrated to [inaudible 00:15:28] initially, and then we had to develop, as Marco was saying, relevancy and trust and authority as our own metics, our own way of doing things, because it was so easy. Again, you would have these Chinese domains with, I don’t know, 60 domain authority, and they were all spam. That’s one of the reasons, one of the many reasons that we stopped going through those domains.

Also, because maws will start delaying the updates and whatnot, and at some point it became a lot like waiting the page rank update, the public page rank update from Google that would go out every month or so. It became like that, so we stopped paying attention to that altogether and we started focusing a lot more on rankings and actual results.

Bradley: Again, yeah, it’ll work, and what I would recommend if you were trying to push it a second site anyway, guys, remember, if you push domain authority to a sub-domain, it will benefit the entire domain. Remember, domain authority, it’s a site-wide or domain-wide, including all sub-domains, including all inner pages and posts, all of them will benefit from that, will receive the same domain authority.

Instead of pushing from a redirect to a secondsite.com, you could push to a non-indexed sub-domain on that secondsite.com, all right? You do that so that you can set up a sub-domain. You don’t even need to really put a piece of content up on it, but you could. You could set an HTML file to say no index or whatever, and then just point all of it to that specific sub-domain because it will benefit the root without people really being able to see what you’re doing.

Again, I really just think that’s a waste of time unless you’ve got some massive amount of authority on your first site that you’re trying to push, in case it would help a little bit, but you’d have to be really, really high domain authority numbers for that to make much difference now in my opinion based on how the algorithm works now.

Do You Pay For Articles Or Use A Plugin To Pull In Content?

All right, Adam, the next one that he posted was, “Do you guys pay for articles or use a plugin to pull in content? Looking for an alternative for test site than buying articles.” Yeah, content curation. We have a training course specifically all about that. It’s what I’ve been using. I had to figure out a way to develop content for my clients that was cost-effective and efficient without having to be subject matter experts, so I developed a process years ago that I’ve been using ever since 2012.

We’ve got it as a product right now called Content Kingpin, but that’s the same exact content production process that I used for my own agency and countless amount of our members and students have also implemented that into their business for their primary content methods. We just get across the board good results from even our members that have implemented it, as well, or adopted that process, because it works.

It’s basically hands-free content marketing. You could teach a VA to do it, and they don’t have to be subject matter experts. All they have to do is be able to identify and locate content, authority content or just good, relevant content about whatever topic they’re going to be blogging about and then organizing that content in a logical manner and injecting a small amount of their own commentary. That content is more efficient and way better than any sort of shitty content, farmed content that you could buy from the dime a dozen content farms that are out there, that is just spun, rehashed garbage.

Guys, that’s all the content farms do. They don’t write original content. Even if they do, they’re not subject matter experts. If they are, you’re going to pay a premium for it, but even then, a lot of times, guys, all they do is do mashups where they’ll go, scrape five or 10 articles or whatever about whatever topic it is that you requested the article for, and then they’ll put bits and pieces of each article, put them through a spinner, and sometimes they’ll manually edit the spin text or the output file to where it’s a little bit more readable, but a lot of those content farms, you’ll get a lot of errors and stuff that you can clearly see that a spinner was used and they didn’t take the time to manually edit it.

My point is you’re not really buying original content from content farms, anyway. You’re buying garbage. You’re much better off using curated content where you can reference and cite other people’s authority content that is highly relevant from subject matter experts and you’re giving them credit via the attribution link. You’re citing the source, which is required and ethical. It’s the ethical thing to do.

Now, you’ve got good content from subject matter experts that you’re quoting on your own site, giving them credit, and injecting your own commentary. Again, a VA can do that. That’s why we call it Content Kingpin Hands-Free Content Marketing, because it truly is. You can generate a stream or revenue just from selling content marketing services and managing it. It just requires a very, very small amount of management.

Again, that training, Content Kingpin, teaches exactly how to hire the VAs, what to look for, what type of output production you should expect, what to pay them, how to manage it, all of that, guys. All of that is covered in great detail in that course. I highly recommend anybody that needs content for their clients or their own assets, their own digital assets, check that out because it’s the exact same method we use, all right?

Do We Have To Worry About Stock Photo Copyright Issues When Posting To Social Media Like Twitter?

Jeff, what’s up, Jeff? He says, “Do we have to worry about stock photo copyright issues when posting to social media, like Twitter, the same way we do with our website?” I don’t know, Jeff. I wish I did. I wish I had definitive answer. Maybe somebody else on here knows. Anybody?

Hernan: I had some issues when it comes to posting on Facebook, so yeah, short answer is yeah, because I had to take down an ad that was performing super well just because I was lazy and I didn’t check the stock photos stuff. The actual owner of the photo contacted me and said, “Hey dude, you need to take off the ad,” and I lost the entire social proof and everything on the Facebook side of things.

Yeah, short answer is yes because you can get in trouble. It doesn’t really matter if you’re using it on Twitter, Google. Google, maybe you would have a bigger exposure because you’re being indexed, but on Twitter, people can still see it, right? I think it’s just a matter of photos are still an asset, so it’s like you saying a piece of a song or a piece of a movie, something like that, all of that is copyrighted. You need to have that in mind, no matter where you’re using it.

When you’re doing it on your website, you’re a bit more exposed because anyone can get access to that, while on Twitter it’s not the case, but just to avoid issues, I would say don’t do it. Plus, there are so many deals and having stock photos has become really, really cheap. If you go to [inaudible 00:22:51] for example, you can get deals, like, I don’t know, for 100 photos for 10 bucks or something like that. It’s not even worth the trouble of getting through it.

Bradley: Yeah. Yeah, and usually for my clients, what I have them do is I use StockFresh.com. That’s our primary stock photo site, and so I just have my clients go setup an account or I set it up for them in their name and then I send them the login details and then they go in and fund it by just purchasing credits. We usually purchase 100 credits at a time. I think it’s $79 or something like that at Stock Fresh. It’s not bad. It’s decent.

Every couple of months or so, my curators, my VAs who are doing all of the content marketing for my clients will contact me and say, “Hey, we need this account refilled,” and I’ll just contact the client and say, “Hey, I need you to add another $100, refill the account with credits.” That’s it. That’s how it works, and that’s just to be safe.

That’s because I’ve been hit with extortion letters from Getty Images and their various subsidiaries and I’ve had to pay fines, copyright fines, settlement fees, basically for not having each client having their own licenses. In other words, even if I had my own account for my marketing agency with stock photos, if I published those stock photos on clients’ websites, the client needs to have a license for that photo. Even though I did it on their behalf, I was the license holder, not the client.

I’ve had to pay settlement fees for copyright infringement issues for client sites that they received the extortion letter, but I paid it on their behalf because it was my fault for not having them setup properly. That’s why I talk about that, again, in the Content Kingpin training that I was just talking about, I go into great detail about all of that because it’s very, very important. I would follow Hernan’s advice about social media and really try to have proper licensing for photos that you’re using.

Hernan: Yeah. Yeah, I would do that, too, and for example, there’s some websites that they’re explicitly royalty-free photos like Flickr, for example. You can search for royalty-free photos, then I think Unsplash.com, Unsplash.com. There’s another called Pixabay.com. Those are all royalty-free photos, but you’re limited to what you can find over there.

Sometimes for ads it will work, but if I’m looking for a specific way or specific photo that will convey a specific message that I want to send, then it wouldn’t work, so I’ll need to go out and actually purchase the picture. It’s specifically important with social media. Twitter has become super, super visual. If you go through the Twitter app on mobile, it’s super visual, so photos play a big role.

Would SEO Content Be Okay Or Should You Use The Research Quality Content For An Affiliate Money Site?

Bradley: Okay, Dominick’s up. What’s up, Dominick? He says, “I need some good content for an affiliate money site. I’ve tried Natasha Nixon, but it’s a little pricey. Would SEO content be okay or should I use the research quality content?”

No, if it’s for a money site, I would recommend that you do authority content because the SEO content is exactly what I just mentioned about a content farm. That’s what it is. It’s spun shit. It’s garbage. I can tell you that. That’s to be used for link building and stuff like that. It’s not money site content. I could tell you that even the authority content that you purchase sometimes isn’t going to be very good.

For the most part, I’ve had good experiences with Natasha Nixon for authority content, but the last article I got was complete garbage. It was for Mario’s Cab Service for the GMB Pro case study, and it was complete garbage. I ordered a 1500 word authority content article, paid like $120 for it, and it was complete garbage. I had to go through and manually edit. If I had time, I would’ve requested a rewrite, but I didn’t because I wanted to get it up, so I just edited about 500 or 600 words of it myself and then used that as the actual GMB website article.

Again, guys, remember, your best bet, Dominick, if you need really good authority type content or money site content on a regular basis would be to hire your own writer from Upwork or something. That is a much better way than going to the content producers. Honestly, you’re better off developing a one on one relationship with an individual writer.

Here’s the thing. Well, most of my writers are now curators, but I still can rely on them for article writing at times, but most of the stuff we do is like I said, curating for blog posts and such. The idea is once you’ve developed a relationship with a particular writer, you get to know their voice, so to speak and how they write, and you can help to mold or shape how you want them to write for particular clients, for example. That’s the benefit of doing it.

One of the other benefits of having a relationship with an individual writer is that a lot of times, you get better treatment. You don’t have to wait in queue for a week to get a piece of content back, that kind of stuff. You can have direct message. I use Upwork a lot. There’s desktop notifications and all that kind of stuff, so I recommend doing that.

If you’re going to buy it from a content farm, Natasha Nixon being one of them, then authority content is your better bet. It is a bit more expensive, but again, for money sites, I don’t recommend putting up any kind of SEO articles because they’re literally trash. It’s junk. You yourself will spend more time editing them and making them readable than it’s worth. If that’s the case, why not just write it yourself? Anybody want to comment on that?

Hernan: Yeah. Real quick, I totally agree with what you’re saying, Bradley, in terms of having someone that you can always refer to, even further if you’re offering this on a regular basis. I think that there’s some types of professionals, if you would, or some types of work that you always need stuff done, for example, graphic design, that you would be better off just hiring somebody to do graphic design.

For example, on our end, we hire a graphic designer. He would take over the entire graphic design side of things. He would do thumbnails for YouTube. He would do this and he would do that. He already knows how we work and what types of things we want and if we need a logo, we ask him for it, and if we need banners, sometimes he would do it.

I think that’s part of the team that you want to start putting together. That’s part of the team because you’re providing service and if you’re providing content creation services for your clients, that’s something that you really want to have in mind. For example, if you’re doing, I don’t know, video services, right, you’re doing YouTube services, maybe you need a video editor or maybe you need the tools to actually provide the client with a good service. That will position yourself as a much more valuable asset because you have the tools.

It’s not like you’re getting out there and grabbing the content, the articles, the logos from what everyone else is doing. You become a much more valuable asset because you’re developing your own team. I think that having that long-term relationship and having that long-term view when it comes to the collaborators that work with you, people that help you, helps a lot, helps you save time, money, and helps you position yourself better.

Bradley: Yeah, and the last thing about that I want to mention is I said earlier about you get to know a writer’s voice, and that’s good because especially if you’re providing content for your clients, then you already know what the quality is going to be. When you buy content from places like content farms or a Natasha Nixon, even when you’re buying the authority content which costs more money, you don’t know which writer’s going to get it, so you don’t know what the quality’s going to be like.

The tone of the writing can be different from article to article, can be vastly different. If you’re providing content for webpages, not posts, but pages for client sites, you want consistency in tone because you don’t want one page to have a tone that’s vastly different than another page, because it would be off putting to a visitor. Again, you get to know how the writer writes. You get to come to expect a certain level of quality, a certain tone, a certain voice to speak. That kind of stuff makes you more confident in being able to sell content marketing, right? Good question there, Dom. A great question, actually.

Vincent, doesn’t look much of a question. Let’s see if there’s a comment somewhere. No. Okay, so, well, congratulations. I don’t know what this means.

Adam: Oh, you’ll see it in a minute. He posted after that.

Does Adding A PR Link Helps In Generating Review Snippets Of A GMB Review Page?

Bradley: Okay, cool, cool. Let’s see. “Hey guys. Do you know if adding a PR link to our GMB review page will cause our GMB listing to show a review snippet as shown below?”

No. Adding a PR link to your review page, no. This is a maps thing. You have to have I think five, at least it used to be, you had to have a minimum of five ratings for the stars to show. I think that’s still the case. This is a maps listing that you show here in the picture, so that’s not something that we can manipulate by adding code because we can’t add code to the maps profile.

You can on a website. You can have structured data for review schema, but we can’t do that in the maps profile. The maps profile will show review stars once you have a total of five reviews. Whatever the star ratings are is irrelevant. Your ratings stars will show up once you have a total of five reviews. Does that make sense? That’s it. It’s not something that you can force or trigger by linking to it or adding code because you can’t edit the code of the GMB or maps profile like you could on a website, right? You just need to get five reviews.

Who Do You Recommend For Google Phone Verified Accounts?

Okay, Jim’s up. He says, “Hey, SM team. I’m glad you were able to hang out during the holiday week.” Yeah, us, too. We’ve only missed one in 191 episodes and it was a scheduled miss. “I know you’ve spoken about Google phone verified accounts in the past a lot, but I was wondering who you’d recommend of late. Also, is it worth paying $3 per account for aged accounts instead of 35 cent per newer account? Have you had better ratio on sites sticking with the older accounts?”

I buy aged accounts for very particular projects. Let’s put it this way. I’ve bought some aged accounts. I haven’t tested, I haven’t setup an actual test to test a brand new account versus an aged account anytime in the last three or four years, so I don’t know if having an aged account really makes a difference or not. I can’t tell definitively.

People seem to think it does make a difference. There’s probably some evidence out there to support that. I would just assume that that may be the case. For very particular accounts or projects, campaigns, whatever, I will sometimes buy the aged accounts and I’ll pay as much as $50 per account depending on how old it is. I’ve bought some 12 year old created in 2006 Google accounts and I’ve paid as much as $50 per account for those, and then I still had one of them terminated rather quickly, which pissed me off.

I can’t tell you, Jim, whether it’s really worth it or not. Maybe some other people have some data to prove one way or the other. I don’t. Usually, guys, we try to test everything to give you a definitive answer and this is something I have not tested. Adam, or excuse me, Hernan and or Marco, have either of you have any data to back up one way or the other?

Hernan: No, not on my end, honestly.

Marco: No, I don’t think it makes a difference.

Bradley: Okay. Yeah, I didn’t think so. Honestly, I know people say it does. Jim, I would say proceed at your own risk, whichever way you want, but this is the guy that I’m recommending right now for my aged accounts. [inaudible 00:35:52] is his name. At least that’s what I think it is, BulkPVA.com. I still use him. He’s really responsive on Skype if you connect with him on Skype, and if you go to contact, I think his Skype username is right there. Yeah, it is, BulkPVA.com. You can email him, all that. Just tell him I sent you. He knows because I’ve referred a lot of people to him.

He usually takes very good care of us, as well as anytime accounts get terminated and stuff, if they’re new, obviously if you have accounts terminated two weeks after he delivers them to you, that’s your fault, but if they’re within three days, within 72 hours or something like that, see, look, it takes 24 to 72 hours to deliver each order. Let’s see. After delivery of accounts, if the account is banned within 48 hours, replacements will be given to you.

What I do is whenever we order a new batch, and a lot of these, I buy the double phone verified YouTube accounts, and we do that because we do a lot of video spam for clients and all kinds of stuff, and I’ve got a VA that runs a video spam tool, Ab’s Video Carpet Blitz tool. We have to have dozens, if not 100 plus YouTube accounts at all times. Obviously, because we’re doing a shit ton of spam, a lot of accounts get terminated from overuse, and so I buy accounts from this guy all the time.

What I do is my VA will go in and immediately open up Browseo and just start adding profiles and logging in to bind it to his IP, but they each have their own browsing session because they’re all separated or segregated via Browseo, which you can do that with Ghost Browser, I think is another one. It doesn’t have to be Browseo, guys. It doesn’t matter. All I’m saying is the best way to get these accounts to stick is to bind them to your IP, but make sure they have their own unique browsing session in history.

Start allowing cookies to accrue and search history and allow Google and the websites that that profile visits start to build a customer profile, like an avatar or whatever, for that particular profile. In other words, you want it to look real, and so one of the things that I’ve found is these bulk accounts, when you buy them, if you do a hard reset on your browser to clear all cache and cookies and then log into four, five, six accounts from the same IP all from a 100% virgin browsing session each time you do it, that’s going to look spammy and those accounts tend to get terminated.

If you log into each of them, even from the same IP, as long as they have their own unique browsing sessions that maintain, they stay, in other words they don’t get wiped clean and then use that same IP to log into another profile, with Browseo or Ghost Browser or any number of those apps that do that that will keep browsing sessions per profile, that’s a much better way to do it. That tends not to trigger the red flags that do from using 100% clean browsing sessions each time. Hopefully that makes sense. This is the guy I still recommend. Just tell him I sent you only because he tends to take care of the people that we send to him. You get put the top of his priority list, all right? That was another good question.

Would You Recommend Making The Least Number Of Location Pages For Each Facebook Accounts?

Oh, cool, we’re almost out of time, almost out of questions. Marco says from YouTube, [inaudible 00:39:23], “For multiple location websites, I know normally you guys recommend having one ring of social media that is going to syndicate posts, but in Facebook, you can have multiple location pages linked to one account. Would you recommend making at least the Facebook accounts for every location at least?”

Yeah, you can. Honestly, I would, because multiple location businesses should each have their own Facebook page. Each location should have its own Facebook page, so yeah, absolutely. What I was talking about was a branded Tumblr, a branded Blogger, a branded WordPress, and all the other web twos and stuff that we syndicate and we use as part of the syndication networks. You really only need one branded network that you can publish content to from the root domain, from the blog that’s typically going to be on the root domain. Essentially you can silo the root domain to have categories for each one of the locations.

Let’s say you got six locations. I would set up a category for each location, and then what I would do is publish content, just publish posts from the blog on the root site, make sure it’s the correct category selected. When you’re targeting, let’s say location number one, you’re going to optimize the content and have the call to action link, the link that you’re going to be linking to that sub-domain site or location page, whatever, however you’ve got it configured, but that’s going to be selected and placed into that location category, which helps to optimize it. You can do that for each location from the root blog. You don’t need to have a separation syndication network for each location, but Facebook pages, you can have a separate location page and I would encourage that because that’s a powerful citation.

That’s the thing, guys. When it comes to any of the [inaudible 00:41:20]. I’m sorry. I’ll come back to that question, Vincent. I got sidetracked. The other thing about this is if you have a particular location that is not responding as well to the blog post, the syndication from the root domain, then you can always go in and setup a location specific syndication network where you would just use the same branding, but you would add a local modifier.

In other words, if it’s Joe’s Plumbing and there’s six locations and one of them happens to be, I don’t know, Fairfax, Virginia, then if he has a Joe’s Plumbing syndication network that he’s using to blog for all of the locations, but Fairfax, Virginia isn’t really responding as well to the blogs from the root domain, then you could put a Joe’s Plumbing Fairfax syndication network up and then syndicate content directly from that particular category on the root domain to just that network, or you could even transfer and put a separate blog on that location specific site, if that makes sense.

Guys, remember, categories in WordPress do have their own feeds. You can get a category feed, so you could essentially use the root domain for let’s say if you had six locations, you could literally have six location, so brand plus location modifier networks, and have six individual category RSS feeds each triggering their own geo-specific network. Does that make sense?

Again, you can get really complex with this stuff. I like to keep one branded syndication network to try to accomplish what I desire for all of the locations because that’s less work and it’s easier. I like easy. I like efficiency, but you can make it complicated or add additional geo networks specific to a location when needed, but lastly, like I mentioned, as far as the actual Facebook page, I would have a location page for each location, absolutely, because it’s a very powerful citation.

You could also create location pages on LinkedIn, Crunchbase, if you’re using Crunchbase, which you should because Crunchbase is a very powerful citation as part of the semantic database. What I would recommend with Crunchbase is setup an organization and then you setup sub-locations for each location, which you can link to individually. That becomes very, very powerful. That’s a good question, though.

Vincent said, “The line below reviews that has the blue icon, it’s a review snippet.” Yeah, but that’s something that Google pulls in automatically. That’s not something that you can force. This is a Google Maps listing, Vincent. You can’t manipulate this. Google decides what they’re going to list and show right here, not you. That’s not something that we have the option to edit right now or to change.

Those reviews that are pulled in, like the snippet from a review, that’s just what Google determines that they’re going to pull in and display to the searcher, the user, the Google user. That’s it. It’s not something that you can edit. You can’t force that. Google just does that, at least as far as I know, you can’t. If I’m wrong, I’m sure somebody will correct me. Okay, well, should we give it another minute and see if any other questions come in or should we just wrap up a little bit early?

Adam: I think we should give them a minute because I know there’s definitely a lag, but I want to talk a little bit more about the live event in October.

Bradley: Okay.

Adam: We narrowed it down. It’s going to be in Washington DC like we said, which honestly, I’m kind of pumped about because when we first thought of that, the first thing I thought about was heat and humidity, but I realized it’s going to be in the middle of October and it’s going to be freaking awesome there. You can speak to that. That’s a great time of year around there, isn’t it?

Bradley: Absolutely. It should be really nice. There’s a ton of stuff to do in Washington DC. Besides our event, we’re going to have a VIP event I believe, which we’re going to have to find something good to do. DC, it’s the nation’s capital, right? There’s a lot of stuff to do that.

Adam: Yeah. You’re within striking distance of a lot of stuff, so if you come join us, if you can take a couple days on either side, maybe go do something. If you’re traveling, there’s a lot of neat stuff in that area to do.

Bradley: Yeah. Yeah, there is. Okay, well, I don’t see any other questions coming in, guys. It’s Fourth of July holiday week. For those of you in the US, happy Fourth of July, and go get a cold beer.

Adam: Those of you in England, I’m not watching the game, but hopefully England’s doing well in the soccer match I guess it is right now. I’m going to check that out, and then yeah, I hope everyone has a great Fourth of July. I’m going to head out and enjoy that tomorrow.

Bradley: I’m still working tomorrow for a few hours in the morning. I’ve got to coach Crossfit for two hours in the morning, and then I’m going to work for a couple hours before I go heavily drink.

Marco: Well, England is still sweating.

Hernan: [inaudible 00:46:14] penalties. Very fun. Thank you guys.

Bradley: All right guys. See you later. Happy Fourth.

Marco: Bye everyone.

Chris: Bye.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 191 published first on your-t1-blog-url

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 191

Click on the video above to watch Episode 191 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 https://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

  Announcement

Adam: Hey everybody. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts, episode 191, the question where I guarantee it, if you’re watching this, you can get your question answered, because right now there are almost no questions because of a little error that somebody made. It’s not important who, but let’s go and say hello to everyone real quick. Hopefully, you’re getting an announcement on YouTube or you’re getting a notification. You might be watching this later, in which case, just ignore all this stuff about people making mistakes. Chris, how you doing, man?

Chris: Good. Happy to have summer finally in Europe.

Adam: Oh, nice. It’s finally warming up there?

Chris: Yep.

Adam: Good deal, good deal. Hernan, how about you? Is it nice and cold down there?

Hernan: Yeah. Over here, it’s freezing, man. I’m freezing my ass and overdressed, whatever, but I’m super excited to be here anyway, so that doesn’t stop us.

Adam: Marco, you’re not freezing your ass off, are you?

Marco: Never. Guys, for some reason, we’re not transmitting this Hangout into the Google Plus page. It’s still 190.

Bradley: That’s my fault. Standby.

Adam: Got you. Well, we won’t ask Bradley how he’s doing, because I don’t want to divide up his attention, but we do have a few announcements. Real quick, I wanted to say we’re going to put the link on the page and you’ll be able to find it in the description if you’re watching this later on YouTube, but our live event is a go, The Semantic Mastery Live.

October, the weekend of October 20th, 21st, we’ve already announced one of the special guest speakers. In addition to seeing all of our lovely faces at some point during the event, also Jeffrey Smith of SEO Boot Camp will be joining us and we’re going to have a couple more that we’re holding back.

We’re teasing it a little bit, but that is a go, so I’ll pop the link on here if you want to go and grab your ticket now. Ticket prices are definitely going to go up as time goes on. We want to help out the people who jump on this early and it is capped at a total of 25. Don’t put it off too long. It will be in the Washington DC area and we’re getting ready to lock down our event venue probably in the next week or two.

Bradley: Page is updated.

Adam: All right. As far as other announcements, you guys, we got a lot. I’m going to pass it off. Marco, is there anything we want to say specifically?

Marco: No. We’re moving forward, guys. The Google My Business auto-poster is ready. It has some awesome features. People have a long way to catch up. I know there’s some stuff being put out. It’s [inaudible 00:02:42]. You can get an RSS feed on anyone who’s in Syndication Academy or knows about us. You know how wicked RSS feeds can be, how they can help amplify your content, how they can help you with backlinks, but the most interesting thing we’re doing is we’re pulling in or we should have the ability in the next few days to pull in the RSS feed from the website so that all you would literally have to do is post from your website and you can amplify that content into post. If not, we do have the auto-poster, where you can go in and setup posts well ahead of time.

We also have YouTube views. That’s currently working. It’s working really well to push up videos, to get it ranked. Now, of course, once you start pushing videos, you should continue pushing videos to it to keep it ranked until it picks up its own steam. It’ll pick up steam and stay where it’s supposed to stay. It’ll stay ranked. The great thing about this is that since it’s real people, they’ll interact with your channel, so they’ll send all kinds of signals.

I keep telling people, the caveat in this is that you have to send them to a quality video. I always ask the question, “What’s a quality video?” Well, a quality video, if you look at your competition as a video that has a bunch of likes, it has a bunch of watch time, it has a bunch of subscribers, that’s a quality video. Look at what your competition is doing for that keyword and you mimic that, but do them one better. Better production, a better speaker, better audio quality, whatever it is that you need to do to grab the attention of your viewers.

There’s so many things coming. Video carpet bomb is coming. We were just talking about it. The done for you Google My Business services, that’s coming. The VA is almost trained. I’m working with her daily on this task. Cora reports are going to be available. What else do we have? Drive Stacks, guys. Drive Stacks, the Semantic Mastery way, with my original VA, the VA that I originally trained will be available through our marketplace. Market, it’s coming. Just stay tuned. Keep coming back and we’ll have news as everything develops, but we hope to have at least some of the products available by the end of the week. That’ll be on you to send the email to let people know, “Hey, it’s ready, so go get it.”

Adam: Awesome. Sorry about that. I was muted real quick. Also, I wanted to let everyone know, if you missed the webinar, we have a webinar replay. I’m not going to post the link here because if you’re on our email list, then you are very special and you’re going to get a link to check out the bundle, but there was a great webinar on Monday going into detail about how you can use some of the most powerful training that we have and really combine that.

We’re going to have some more information coming out about that. We’ll just post the link so you can go and grab that if you’re interested in taking advantage. It’s a special Fourth of July kind of holiday offer, and then we’ll have a little bit, like I said, of followup in the coming days. A lot of people are taking some time off, heading out to the beach, doing whatever. If you got some time you can squeak away from the family or make an excuse, you might want to go check out the replay over the next couple of days.

Bradley: I can tell having changed Hump Day Hangouts from Wednesday to Tuesday for this week, we’ve got a lot less viewers on it right now than we typically do, so it’s just timing. I’m glad that unfortunately, we didn’t have all the questions directed to the right place this time. That’s on our end, but we got a few questions. Do we have any other announcements, guys?

Adam: I’m good. How about you guys?

Hernan: I just wanted to reiterate that go ahead and grab your tickets for the [inaudible 00:06:51] Live 2018 because it’s going to depend on that. It’s going to depend on that. I’m really looking forward to seeing you guys, so yeah, I just wanted to repeat that once again.

Adam: Okay, cool.

Bradley: That’s it. We can get into it, huh?

Adam: Yeah, let’s do it.

Bradley: Let’s do it. All right, well, we don’t have a lot of questions, so we’re hoping that some of you guys that are here have some questions and you post them on the page. Again, that was our fault, but it is what it is, so we’re going to run with what we got. I know Adam posted a couple questions that he yanked from one of the Facebook groups, so we’ll start with those. I’ll grab the screen.

Is It Possible To Spread Authority To Multiple Root Domains From One Authority Domain Via Subdomain Redirects?

All right, so from the Facebook group. “Looking for insights on an idea. I wanted to test this, but asking is more efficient. Is the following possible? I have site.com and site.com has authority.” IDA, DR, okay. “I have a sub-domain on site.com, subdomain1.site.com. Sub-domain carries authority from site, correct?” Carry domain authority, but not necessarily page authority, but you’re right.

“Can I create a redirect from subdomain1.site.com to secondsite.com while site.com stays live and then secondsite.com gets authority from subdomain1.site.com?” Questions like this are hard to read. “Both secondsite.com and site have authority. In other words, is it possible to spread authority to multiple domains from one authority domain via sub-domain redirects?” Yes. “I’m doubting this works, but also read some things that indicate it might work.”

It does work. It does absolutely work. There’s a little bit of a loss. That’s called domain authority manipulation, guys. That’s like 2012 stuff. That’s the stuff that we did that worked really freaking well in like 2012, ‘13 timeframe. There’s still a little bit of benefit to pushing domain authority, guys, but honestly, you can set that up. It will work. There’s a little bit of a loss between redirects when pushing domain authority. It will absolutely increase your domain authority from your sub-domain that you direct to another root domain.

My point is, I’m not sure what your end goal is. Why do you want to push this domain authority to that other domain? Domain authority manipulation as a ranking factor is almost obsolete. I guess there might be some benefit to it, but you have to have really high DA numbers for that to really have an effect. It’s much more about relevancy than it is about domain metrics, which are proprietary metrics, right? Marco, I’ll let you comment on that a little bit, but again, look, if you want to do it, yes, it will help to boost domain authority from the second site.

There is a little bit of a loss, so what I’m saying is if you’ve got a 42 domain authority on your root domain and you try to push that over to a second site via sub-domain or any way you want to do it, it really doesn’t matter, but via a sub-domain redirect, you’ll likely fall somewhere in the 30s, the mid 30s with domain authority. It’s not going to happen overnight. When I used to do a lot of domain authority manipulation, we used to do a lot of it. The maws numbers would refresh, I can’t remember, I think it was every other month, every two months.

Marco: Every 90 days.

Bradley: Every 90 days. Okay. If we would do a redirect, like for example, we called it link laundering, and we’d do double 301 redirects from spam domains. We would go find expired domains that were on the closeout because they went through auction and they were really shitty, spammy domains. A lot of the times, they’re Chinese domains that would have hundreds, sometimes thousands or even tens of thousands of sub-domains. The dropped domain would have tens of thousands, sometimes, anywhere between hundreds to tens of thousands of sub-domains.

This is what we used to do and it worked really well. We would go buy a domain, buy one of those domains, and then we would set up a redirect script, a catch all or wild card redirect via HT access. We’d point the domain to a host, a C panel, and then we would set up an HT access file that would do a wild card sub-domain redirect to whatever we wanted to, and we would push domain authority.

We would do what’s called a double 301 redirect, so we would redirect it through one domain first and then push it over to our final target URL. I’d get domains that had 55, 60 domain authority mostly because of all the accumulated domain authority from all the sub-domains, right? We’d do the redirect and then push it over to a brand new domain and I could get my domain authority to jump from one, which is a brand new registered domain, to mid-40s usually within one maws cycle refresh, but sometimes it would take two. It would take anywhere between 90 days, so three months, to six months, to see that kind of a push. Again, I’ve found over the years that using that is purely like a ranking method, which used to work phenomenally. It really is ineffective at this point.

The only thing I would suggest is like I said, or what I would add to this, is that if you have really high domain authority and you can push some of that to another domain, it will help it to respond better to other off page signals, but that’s about it. Again, it’s not something that I even bother doing anymore. I don’t even look at domain authority and page authority numbers anymore, honestly. If you want to do it, it will work. Marco, what are your comments on this?

Marco: I would say he’s better off concentrating on relevance. If they’re relevant, then you can throw DA and domain authority and page authority out the window and push relevance. You could even throw a Drive Stack. Wherever you’re directing, you could put a Drive Stack as buffer and redirect to the Drive Stack and the Drive Stack will then push the power over to the new site with even more relevance. In the Drive Stack, you could push just tons of relevance in there whether you want keyword relevance, what do you call it, keyword plus URL, brand plus keyword relevance. What you really want is that brand plus keyword relevance.

Bradley: Right.

Marco: What you want to become is you want to become the keyword for whatever that niche is, so when people start thinking about those keywords, they don’t necessarily think about the keywords, but they think about your brand. This is where I tell people, Coca-Cola, Xerox, Band-Aid, Scotch Tape, all of these people have done fabulous branding where they become the brand for those keywords.

I know it’s not simple to do and we don’t have the deep pockets, but a way to start doing that is by relevance. How we do it, how we take advantage of it is by going into a Drive Stack and creating all of that keyword relevance which relates to the brand, and then we push maybe [inaudible 00:14:11] which will flow into the website, or maybe we’ll go direct to the website. We’ll go to the Google My Business thing.

There are so many ways to take advantage of this, but you’re pushing relevance. Think metrics. DA is a third party metric. Trust flow and citation flow, third party metrics. We don’t bother with that. What we look for is relevance and as long as the on page is tight on both websites, they will both benefit.

I could go even further, but then I’d be getting stuff that’s only in RYS Academy Reloaded. I could start talking all kind of things about embeds and the nasty stuff that you can do with embeds, but again, as I always say, we’d be doing the people that pay for the information a disservice by giving it away for free.

Hernan: If I may add real quick, that was one of the main reasons, the spam, when we just throw spam on the domain, we’ll rank. We will get higher domain authority, or we would do the sub-domain manipulation and whatnot, and that was one of the reasons why we stopped paying attention that much to domain authority and page authority, because they were so easy to manipulate.

That’s why we migrated to [inaudible 00:15:28] initially, and then we had to develop, as Marco was saying, relevancy and trust and authority as our own metics, our own way of doing things, because it was so easy. Again, you would have these Chinese domains with, I don’t know, 60 domain authority, and they were all spam. That’s one of the reasons, one of the many reasons that we stopped going through those domains.

Also, because maws will start delaying the updates and whatnot, and at some point it became a lot like waiting the page rank update, the public page rank update from Google that would go out every month or so. It became like that, so we stopped paying attention to that altogether and we started focusing a lot more on rankings and actual results.

Bradley: Again, yeah, it’ll work, and what I would recommend if you were trying to push it a second site anyway, guys, remember, if you push domain authority to a sub-domain, it will benefit the entire domain. Remember, domain authority, it’s a site-wide or domain-wide, including all sub-domains, including all inner pages and posts, all of them will benefit from that, will receive the same domain authority.

Instead of pushing from a redirect to a secondsite.com, you could push to a non-indexed sub-domain on that secondsite.com, all right? You do that so that you can set up a sub-domain. You don’t even need to really put a piece of content up on it, but you could. You could set an HTML file to say no index or whatever, and then just point all of it to that specific sub-domain because it will benefit the root without people really being able to see what you’re doing.

Again, I really just think that’s a waste of time unless you’ve got some massive amount of authority on your first site that you’re trying to push, in case it would help a little bit, but you’d have to be really, really high domain authority numbers for that to make much difference now in my opinion based on how the algorithm works now.

Do You Pay For Articles Or Use A Plugin To Pull In Content?

All right, Adam, the next one that he posted was, “Do you guys pay for articles or use a plugin to pull in content? Looking for an alternative for test site than buying articles.” Yeah, content curation. We have a training course specifically all about that. It’s what I’ve been using. I had to figure out a way to develop content for my clients that was cost-effective and efficient without having to be subject matter experts, so I developed a process years ago that I’ve been using ever since 2012.

We’ve got it as a product right now called Content Kingpin, but that’s the same exact content production process that I used for my own agency and countless amount of our members and students have also implemented that into their business for their primary content methods. We just get across the board good results from even our members that have implemented it, as well, or adopted that process, because it works.

It’s basically hands-free content marketing. You could teach a VA to do it, and they don’t have to be subject matter experts. All they have to do is be able to identify and locate content, authority content or just good, relevant content about whatever topic they’re going to be blogging about and then organizing that content in a logical manner and injecting a small amount of their own commentary. That content is more efficient and way better than any sort of shitty content, farmed content that you could buy from the dime a dozen content farms that are out there, that is just spun, rehashed garbage.

Guys, that’s all the content farms do. They don’t write original content. Even if they do, they’re not subject matter experts. If they are, you’re going to pay a premium for it, but even then, a lot of times, guys, all they do is do mashups where they’ll go, scrape five or 10 articles or whatever about whatever topic it is that you requested the article for, and then they’ll put bits and pieces of each article, put them through a spinner, and sometimes they’ll manually edit the spin text or the output file to where it’s a little bit more readable, but a lot of those content farms, you’ll get a lot of errors and stuff that you can clearly see that a spinner was used and they didn’t take the time to manually edit it.

My point is you’re not really buying original content from content farms, anyway. You’re buying garbage. You’re much better off using curated content where you can reference and cite other people’s authority content that is highly relevant from subject matter experts and you’re giving them credit via the attribution link. You’re citing the source, which is required and ethical. It’s the ethical thing to do.

Now, you’ve got good content from subject matter experts that you’re quoting on your own site, giving them credit, and injecting your own commentary. Again, a VA can do that. That’s why we call it Content Kingpin Hands-Free Content Marketing, because it truly is. You can generate a stream or revenue just from selling content marketing services and managing it. It just requires a very, very small amount of management.

Again, that training, Content Kingpin, teaches exactly how to hire the VAs, what to look for, what type of output production you should expect, what to pay them, how to manage it, all of that, guys. All of that is covered in great detail in that course. I highly recommend anybody that needs content for their clients or their own assets, their own digital assets, check that out because it’s the exact same method we use, all right?

Do We Have To Worry About Stock Photo Copyright Issues When Posting To Social Media Like Twitter?

Jeff, what’s up, Jeff? He says, “Do we have to worry about stock photo copyright issues when posting to social media, like Twitter, the same way we do with our website?” I don’t know, Jeff. I wish I did. I wish I had definitive answer. Maybe somebody else on here knows. Anybody?

Hernan: I had some issues when it comes to posting on Facebook, so yeah, short answer is yeah, because I had to take down an ad that was performing super well just because I was lazy and I didn’t check the stock photos stuff. The actual owner of the photo contacted me and said, “Hey dude, you need to take off the ad,” and I lost the entire social proof and everything on the Facebook side of things.

Yeah, short answer is yes because you can get in trouble. It doesn’t really matter if you’re using it on Twitter, Google. Google, maybe you would have a bigger exposure because you’re being indexed, but on Twitter, people can still see it, right? I think it’s just a matter of photos are still an asset, so it’s like you saying a piece of a song or a piece of a movie, something like that, all of that is copyrighted. You need to have that in mind, no matter where you’re using it.

When you’re doing it on your website, you’re a bit more exposed because anyone can get access to that, while on Twitter it’s not the case, but just to avoid issues, I would say don’t do it. Plus, there are so many deals and having stock photos has become really, really cheap. If you go to [inaudible 00:22:51] for example, you can get deals, like, I don’t know, for 100 photos for 10 bucks or something like that. It’s not even worth the trouble of getting through it.

Bradley: Yeah. Yeah, and usually for my clients, what I have them do is I use StockFresh.com. That’s our primary stock photo site, and so I just have my clients go setup an account or I set it up for them in their name and then I send them the login details and then they go in and fund it by just purchasing credits. We usually purchase 100 credits at a time. I think it’s $79 or something like that at Stock Fresh. It’s not bad. It’s decent.

Every couple of months or so, my curators, my VAs who are doing all of the content marketing for my clients will contact me and say, “Hey, we need this account refilled,” and I’ll just contact the client and say, “Hey, I need you to add another $100, refill the account with credits.” That’s it. That’s how it works, and that’s just to be safe.

That’s because I’ve been hit with extortion letters from Getty Images and their various subsidiaries and I’ve had to pay fines, copyright fines, settlement fees, basically for not having each client having their own licenses. In other words, even if I had my own account for my marketing agency with stock photos, if I published those stock photos on clients’ websites, the client needs to have a license for that photo. Even though I did it on their behalf, I was the license holder, not the client.

I’ve had to pay settlement fees for copyright infringement issues for client sites that they received the extortion letter, but I paid it on their behalf because it was my fault for not having them setup properly. That’s why I talk about that, again, in the Content Kingpin training that I was just talking about, I go into great detail about all of that because it’s very, very important. I would follow Hernan’s advice about social media and really try to have proper licensing for photos that you’re using.

Hernan: Yeah. Yeah, I would do that, too, and for example, there’s some websites that they’re explicitly royalty-free photos like Flickr, for example. You can search for royalty-free photos, then I think Unsplash.com, Unsplash.com. There’s another called Pixabay.com. Those are all royalty-free photos, but you’re limited to what you can find over there.

Sometimes for ads it will work, but if I’m looking for a specific way or specific photo that will convey a specific message that I want to send, then it wouldn’t work, so I’ll need to go out and actually purchase the picture. It’s specifically important with social media. Twitter has become super, super visual. If you go through the Twitter app on mobile, it’s super visual, so photos play a big role.

Would SEO Content Be Okay Or Should You Use The Research Quality Content For An Affiliate Money Site?

Bradley: Okay, Dominick’s up. What’s up, Dominick? He says, “I need some good content for an affiliate money site. I’ve tried Natasha Nixon, but it’s a little pricey. Would SEO content be okay or should I use the research quality content?”

No, if it’s for a money site, I would recommend that you do authority content because the SEO content is exactly what I just mentioned about a content farm. That’s what it is. It’s spun shit. It’s garbage. I can tell you that. That’s to be used for link building and stuff like that. It’s not money site content. I could tell you that even the authority content that you purchase sometimes isn’t going to be very good.

For the most part, I’ve had good experiences with Natasha Nixon for authority content, but the last article I got was complete garbage. It was for Mario’s Cab Service for the GMB Pro case study, and it was complete garbage. I ordered a 1500 word authority content article, paid like $120 for it, and it was complete garbage. I had to go through and manually edit. If I had time, I would’ve requested a rewrite, but I didn’t because I wanted to get it up, so I just edited about 500 or 600 words of it myself and then used that as the actual GMB website article.

Again, guys, remember, your best bet, Dominick, if you need really good authority type content or money site content on a regular basis would be to hire your own writer from Upwork or something. That is a much better way than going to the content producers. Honestly, you’re better off developing a one on one relationship with an individual writer.

Here’s the thing. Well, most of my writers are now curators, but I still can rely on them for article writing at times, but most of the stuff we do is like I said, curating for blog posts and such. The idea is once you’ve developed a relationship with a particular writer, you get to know their voice, so to speak and how they write, and you can help to mold or shape how you want them to write for particular clients, for example. That’s the benefit of doing it.

One of the other benefits of having a relationship with an individual writer is that a lot of times, you get better treatment. You don’t have to wait in queue for a week to get a piece of content back, that kind of stuff. You can have direct message. I use Upwork a lot. There’s desktop notifications and all that kind of stuff, so I recommend doing that.

If you’re going to buy it from a content farm, Natasha Nixon being one of them, then authority content is your better bet. It is a bit more expensive, but again, for money sites, I don’t recommend putting up any kind of SEO articles because they’re literally trash. It’s junk. You yourself will spend more time editing them and making them readable than it’s worth. If that’s the case, why not just write it yourself? Anybody want to comment on that?

Hernan: Yeah. Real quick, I totally agree with what you’re saying, Bradley, in terms of having someone that you can always refer to, even further if you’re offering this on a regular basis. I think that there’s some types of professionals, if you would, or some types of work that you always need stuff done, for example, graphic design, that you would be better off just hiring somebody to do graphic design.

For example, on our end, we hire a graphic designer. He would take over the entire graphic design side of things. He would do thumbnails for YouTube. He would do this and he would do that. He already knows how we work and what types of things we want and if we need a logo, we ask him for it, and if we need banners, sometimes he would do it.

I think that’s part of the team that you want to start putting together. That’s part of the team because you’re providing service and if you’re providing content creation services for your clients, that’s something that you really want to have in mind. For example, if you’re doing, I don’t know, video services, right, you’re doing YouTube services, maybe you need a video editor or maybe you need the tools to actually provide the client with a good service. That will position yourself as a much more valuable asset because you have the tools.

It’s not like you’re getting out there and grabbing the content, the articles, the logos from what everyone else is doing. You become a much more valuable asset because you’re developing your own team. I think that having that long-term relationship and having that long-term view when it comes to the collaborators that work with you, people that help you, helps a lot, helps you save time, money, and helps you position yourself better.

Bradley: Yeah, and the last thing about that I want to mention is I said earlier about you get to know a writer’s voice, and that’s good because especially if you’re providing content for your clients, then you already know what the quality is going to be. When you buy content from places like content farms or a Natasha Nixon, even when you’re buying the authority content which costs more money, you don’t know which writer’s going to get it, so you don’t know what the quality’s going to be like.

The tone of the writing can be different from article to article, can be vastly different. If you’re providing content for webpages, not posts, but pages for client sites, you want consistency in tone because you don’t want one page to have a tone that’s vastly different than another page, because it would be off putting to a visitor. Again, you get to know how the writer writes. You get to come to expect a certain level of quality, a certain tone, a certain voice to speak. That kind of stuff makes you more confident in being able to sell content marketing, right? Good question there, Dom. A great question, actually.

Vincent, doesn’t look much of a question. Let’s see if there’s a comment somewhere. No. Okay, so, well, congratulations. I don’t know what this means.

Adam: Oh, you’ll see it in a minute. He posted after that.

Does Adding A PR Link Helps In Generating Review Snippets Of A GMB Review Page?

Bradley: Okay, cool, cool. Let’s see. “Hey guys. Do you know if adding a PR link to our GMB review page will cause our GMB listing to show a review snippet as shown below?”

No. Adding a PR link to your review page, no. This is a maps thing. You have to have I think five, at least it used to be, you had to have a minimum of five ratings for the stars to show. I think that’s still the case. This is a maps listing that you show here in the picture, so that’s not something that we can manipulate by adding code because we can’t add code to the maps profile.

You can on a website. You can have structured data for review schema, but we can’t do that in the maps profile. The maps profile will show review stars once you have a total of five reviews. Whatever the star ratings are is irrelevant. Your ratings stars will show up once you have a total of five reviews. Does that make sense? That’s it. It’s not something that you can force or trigger by linking to it or adding code because you can’t edit the code of the GMB or maps profile like you could on a website, right? You just need to get five reviews.

Who Do You Recommend For Google Phone Verified Accounts?

Okay, Jim’s up. He says, “Hey, SM team. I’m glad you were able to hang out during the holiday week.” Yeah, us, too. We’ve only missed one in 191 episodes and it was a scheduled miss. “I know you’ve spoken about Google phone verified accounts in the past a lot, but I was wondering who you’d recommend of late. Also, is it worth paying $3 per account for aged accounts instead of 35 cent per newer account? Have you had better ratio on sites sticking with the older accounts?”

I buy aged accounts for very particular projects. Let’s put it this way. I’ve bought some aged accounts. I haven’t tested, I haven’t setup an actual test to test a brand new account versus an aged account anytime in the last three or four years, so I don’t know if having an aged account really makes a difference or not. I can’t tell definitively.

People seem to think it does make a difference. There’s probably some evidence out there to support that. I would just assume that that may be the case. For very particular accounts or projects, campaigns, whatever, I will sometimes buy the aged accounts and I’ll pay as much as $50 per account depending on how old it is. I’ve bought some 12 year old created in 2006 Google accounts and I’ve paid as much as $50 per account for those, and then I still had one of them terminated rather quickly, which pissed me off.

I can’t tell you, Jim, whether it’s really worth it or not. Maybe some other people have some data to prove one way or the other. I don’t. Usually, guys, we try to test everything to give you a definitive answer and this is something I have not tested. Adam, or excuse me, Hernan and or Marco, have either of you have any data to back up one way or the other?

Hernan: No, not on my end, honestly.

Marco: No, I don’t think it makes a difference.

Bradley: Okay. Yeah, I didn’t think so. Honestly, I know people say it does. Jim, I would say proceed at your own risk, whichever way you want, but this is the guy that I’m recommending right now for my aged accounts. [inaudible 00:35:52] is his name. At least that’s what I think it is, BulkPVA.com. I still use him. He’s really responsive on Skype if you connect with him on Skype, and if you go to contact, I think his Skype username is right there. Yeah, it is, BulkPVA.com. You can email him, all that. Just tell him I sent you. He knows because I’ve referred a lot of people to him.

He usually takes very good care of us, as well as anytime accounts get terminated and stuff, if they’re new, obviously if you have accounts terminated two weeks after he delivers them to you, that’s your fault, but if they’re within three days, within 72 hours or something like that, see, look, it takes 24 to 72 hours to deliver each order. Let’s see. After delivery of accounts, if the account is banned within 48 hours, replacements will be given to you.

What I do is whenever we order a new batch, and a lot of these, I buy the double phone verified YouTube accounts, and we do that because we do a lot of video spam for clients and all kinds of stuff, and I’ve got a VA that runs a video spam tool, Ab’s Video Carpet Blitz tool. We have to have dozens, if not 100 plus YouTube accounts at all times. Obviously, because we’re doing a shit ton of spam, a lot of accounts get terminated from overuse, and so I buy accounts from this guy all the time.

What I do is my VA will go in and immediately open up Browseo and just start adding profiles and logging in to bind it to his IP, but they each have their own browsing session because they’re all separated or segregated via Browseo, which you can do that with Ghost Browser, I think is another one. It doesn’t have to be Browseo, guys. It doesn’t matter. All I’m saying is the best way to get these accounts to stick is to bind them to your IP, but make sure they have their own unique browsing session in history.

Start allowing cookies to accrue and search history and allow Google and the websites that that profile visits start to build a customer profile, like an avatar or whatever, for that particular profile. In other words, you want it to look real, and so one of the things that I’ve found is these bulk accounts, when you buy them, if you do a hard reset on your browser to clear all cache and cookies and then log into four, five, six accounts from the same IP all from a 100% virgin browsing session each time you do it, that’s going to look spammy and those accounts tend to get terminated.

If you log into each of them, even from the same IP, as long as they have their own unique browsing sessions that maintain, they stay, in other words they don’t get wiped clean and then use that same IP to log into another profile, with Browseo or Ghost Browser or any number of those apps that do that that will keep browsing sessions per profile, that’s a much better way to do it. That tends not to trigger the red flags that do from using 100% clean browsing sessions each time. Hopefully that makes sense. This is the guy I still recommend. Just tell him I sent you only because he tends to take care of the people that we send to him. You get put the top of his priority list, all right? That was another good question.

Would You Recommend Making The Least Number Of Location Pages For Each Facebook Accounts?

Oh, cool, we’re almost out of time, almost out of questions. Marco says from YouTube, [inaudible 00:39:23], “For multiple location websites, I know normally you guys recommend having one ring of social media that is going to syndicate posts, but in Facebook, you can have multiple location pages linked to one account. Would you recommend making at least the Facebook accounts for every location at least?”

Yeah, you can. Honestly, I would, because multiple location businesses should each have their own Facebook page. Each location should have its own Facebook page, so yeah, absolutely. What I was talking about was a branded Tumblr, a branded Blogger, a branded WordPress, and all the other web twos and stuff that we syndicate and we use as part of the syndication networks. You really only need one branded network that you can publish content to from the root domain, from the blog that’s typically going to be on the root domain. Essentially you can silo the root domain to have categories for each one of the locations.

Let’s say you got six locations. I would set up a category for each location, and then what I would do is publish content, just publish posts from the blog on the root site, make sure it’s the correct category selected. When you’re targeting, let’s say location number one, you’re going to optimize the content and have the call to action link, the link that you’re going to be linking to that sub-domain site or location page, whatever, however you’ve got it configured, but that’s going to be selected and placed into that location category, which helps to optimize it. You can do that for each location from the root blog. You don’t need to have a separation syndication network for each location, but Facebook pages, you can have a separate location page and I would encourage that because that’s a powerful citation.

That’s the thing, guys. When it comes to any of the [inaudible 00:41:20]. I’m sorry. I’ll come back to that question, Vincent. I got sidetracked. The other thing about this is if you have a particular location that is not responding as well to the blog post, the syndication from the root domain, then you can always go in and setup a location specific syndication network where you would just use the same branding, but you would add a local modifier.

In other words, if it’s Joe’s Plumbing and there’s six locations and one of them happens to be, I don’t know, Fairfax, Virginia, then if he has a Joe’s Plumbing syndication network that he’s using to blog for all of the locations, but Fairfax, Virginia isn’t really responding as well to the blogs from the root domain, then you could put a Joe’s Plumbing Fairfax syndication network up and then syndicate content directly from that particular category on the root domain to just that network, or you could even transfer and put a separate blog on that location specific site, if that makes sense.

Guys, remember, categories in WordPress do have their own feeds. You can get a category feed, so you could essentially use the root domain for let’s say if you had six locations, you could literally have six location, so brand plus location modifier networks, and have six individual category RSS feeds each triggering their own geo-specific network. Does that make sense?

Again, you can get really complex with this stuff. I like to keep one branded syndication network to try to accomplish what I desire for all of the locations because that’s less work and it’s easier. I like easy. I like efficiency, but you can make it complicated or add additional geo networks specific to a location when needed, but lastly, like I mentioned, as far as the actual Facebook page, I would have a location page for each location, absolutely, because it’s a very powerful citation.

You could also create location pages on LinkedIn, Crunchbase, if you’re using Crunchbase, which you should because Crunchbase is a very powerful citation as part of the semantic database. What I would recommend with Crunchbase is setup an organization and then you setup sub-locations for each location, which you can link to individually. That becomes very, very powerful. That’s a good question, though.

Vincent said, “The line below reviews that has the blue icon, it’s a review snippet.” Yeah, but that’s something that Google pulls in automatically. That’s not something that you can force. This is a Google Maps listing, Vincent. You can’t manipulate this. Google decides what they’re going to list and show right here, not you. That’s not something that we have the option to edit right now or to change.

Those reviews that are pulled in, like the snippet from a review, that’s just what Google determines that they’re going to pull in and display to the searcher, the user, the Google user. That’s it. It’s not something that you can edit. You can’t force that. Google just does that, at least as far as I know, you can’t. If I’m wrong, I’m sure somebody will correct me. Okay, well, should we give it another minute and see if any other questions come in or should we just wrap up a little bit early?

Adam: I think we should give them a minute because I know there’s definitely a lag, but I want to talk a little bit more about the live event in October.

Bradley: Okay.

Adam: We narrowed it down. It’s going to be in Washington DC like we said, which honestly, I’m kind of pumped about because when we first thought of that, the first thing I thought about was heat and humidity, but I realized it’s going to be in the middle of October and it’s going to be freaking awesome there. You can speak to that. That’s a great time of year around there, isn’t it?

Bradley: Absolutely. It should be really nice. There’s a ton of stuff to do in Washington DC. Besides our event, we’re going to have a VIP event I believe, which we’re going to have to find something good to do. DC, it’s the nation’s capital, right? There’s a lot of stuff to do that.

Adam: Yeah. You’re within striking distance of a lot of stuff, so if you come join us, if you can take a couple days on either side, maybe go do something. If you’re traveling, there’s a lot of neat stuff in that area to do.

Bradley: Yeah. Yeah, there is. Okay, well, I don’t see any other questions coming in, guys. It’s Fourth of July holiday week. For those of you in the US, happy Fourth of July, and go get a cold beer.

Adam: Those of you in England, I’m not watching the game, but hopefully England’s doing well in the soccer match I guess it is right now. I’m going to check that out, and then yeah, I hope everyone has a great Fourth of July. I’m going to head out and enjoy that tomorrow.

Bradley: I’m still working tomorrow for a few hours in the morning. I’ve got to coach Crossfit for two hours in the morning, and then I’m going to work for a couple hours before I go heavily drink.

Marco: Well, England is still sweating.

Hernan: [inaudible 00:46:14] penalties. Very fun. Thank you guys.

Bradley: All right guys. See you later. Happy Fourth.

Marco: Bye everyone.

Chris: Bye.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 191 published first on your-t1-blog-url

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 191

Click on the video above to watch Episode 191 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 https://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

  Announcement

Adam: Hey everybody. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts, episode 191, the question where I guarantee it, if you’re watching this, you can get your question answered, because right now there are almost no questions because of a little error that somebody made. It’s not important who, but let’s go and say hello to everyone real quick. Hopefully, you’re getting an announcement on YouTube or you’re getting a notification. You might be watching this later, in which case, just ignore all this stuff about people making mistakes. Chris, how you doing, man?

Chris: Good. Happy to have summer finally in Europe.

Adam: Oh, nice. It’s finally warming up there?

Chris: Yep.

Adam: Good deal, good deal. Hernan, how about you? Is it nice and cold down there?

Hernan: Yeah. Over here, it’s freezing, man. I’m freezing my ass and overdressed, whatever, but I’m super excited to be here anyway, so that doesn’t stop us.

Adam: Marco, you’re not freezing your ass off, are you?

Marco: Never. Guys, for some reason, we’re not transmitting this Hangout into the Google Plus page. It’s still 190.

Bradley: That’s my fault. Standby.

Adam: Got you. Well, we won’t ask Bradley how he’s doing, because I don’t want to divide up his attention, but we do have a few announcements. Real quick, I wanted to say we’re going to put the link on the page and you’ll be able to find it in the description if you’re watching this later on YouTube, but our live event is a go, The Semantic Mastery Live.

October, the weekend of October 20th, 21st, we’ve already announced one of the special guest speakers. In addition to seeing all of our lovely faces at some point during the event, also Jeffrey Smith of SEO Boot Camp will be joining us and we’re going to have a couple more that we’re holding back.

We’re teasing it a little bit, but that is a go, so I’ll pop the link on here if you want to go and grab your ticket now. Ticket prices are definitely going to go up as time goes on. We want to help out the people who jump on this early and it is capped at a total of 25. Don’t put it off too long. It will be in the Washington DC area and we’re getting ready to lock down our event venue probably in the next week or two.

Bradley: Page is updated.

Adam: All right. As far as other announcements, you guys, we got a lot. I’m going to pass it off. Marco, is there anything we want to say specifically?

Marco: No. We’re moving forward, guys. The Google My Business auto-poster is ready. It has some awesome features. People have a long way to catch up. I know there’s some stuff being put out. It’s [inaudible 00:02:42]. You can get an RSS feed on anyone who’s in Syndication Academy or knows about us. You know how wicked RSS feeds can be, how they can help amplify your content, how they can help you with backlinks, but the most interesting thing we’re doing is we’re pulling in or we should have the ability in the next few days to pull in the RSS feed from the website so that all you would literally have to do is post from your website and you can amplify that content into post. If not, we do have the auto-poster, where you can go in and setup posts well ahead of time.

We also have YouTube views. That’s currently working. It’s working really well to push up videos, to get it ranked. Now, of course, once you start pushing videos, you should continue pushing videos to it to keep it ranked until it picks up its own steam. It’ll pick up steam and stay where it’s supposed to stay. It’ll stay ranked. The great thing about this is that since it’s real people, they’ll interact with your channel, so they’ll send all kinds of signals.

I keep telling people, the caveat in this is that you have to send them to a quality video. I always ask the question, “What’s a quality video?” Well, a quality video, if you look at your competition as a video that has a bunch of likes, it has a bunch of watch time, it has a bunch of subscribers, that’s a quality video. Look at what your competition is doing for that keyword and you mimic that, but do them one better. Better production, a better speaker, better audio quality, whatever it is that you need to do to grab the attention of your viewers.

There’s so many things coming. Video carpet bomb is coming. We were just talking about it. The done for you Google My Business services, that’s coming. The VA is almost trained. I’m working with her daily on this task. Cora reports are going to be available. What else do we have? Drive Stacks, guys. Drive Stacks, the Semantic Mastery way, with my original VA, the VA that I originally trained will be available through our marketplace. Market, it’s coming. Just stay tuned. Keep coming back and we’ll have news as everything develops, but we hope to have at least some of the products available by the end of the week. That’ll be on you to send the email to let people know, “Hey, it’s ready, so go get it.”

Adam: Awesome. Sorry about that. I was muted real quick. Also, I wanted to let everyone know, if you missed the webinar, we have a webinar replay. I’m not going to post the link here because if you’re on our email list, then you are very special and you’re going to get a link to check out the bundle, but there was a great webinar on Monday going into detail about how you can use some of the most powerful training that we have and really combine that.

We’re going to have some more information coming out about that. We’ll just post the link so you can go and grab that if you’re interested in taking advantage. It’s a special Fourth of July kind of holiday offer, and then we’ll have a little bit, like I said, of followup in the coming days. A lot of people are taking some time off, heading out to the beach, doing whatever. If you got some time you can squeak away from the family or make an excuse, you might want to go check out the replay over the next couple of days.

Bradley: I can tell having changed Hump Day Hangouts from Wednesday to Tuesday for this week, we’ve got a lot less viewers on it right now than we typically do, so it’s just timing. I’m glad that unfortunately, we didn’t have all the questions directed to the right place this time. That’s on our end, but we got a few questions. Do we have any other announcements, guys?

Adam: I’m good. How about you guys?

Hernan: I just wanted to reiterate that go ahead and grab your tickets for the [inaudible 00:06:51] Live 2018 because it’s going to depend on that. It’s going to depend on that. I’m really looking forward to seeing you guys, so yeah, I just wanted to repeat that once again.

Adam: Okay, cool.

Bradley: That’s it. We can get into it, huh?

Adam: Yeah, let’s do it.

Bradley: Let’s do it. All right, well, we don’t have a lot of questions, so we’re hoping that some of you guys that are here have some questions and you post them on the page. Again, that was our fault, but it is what it is, so we’re going to run with what we got. I know Adam posted a couple questions that he yanked from one of the Facebook groups, so we’ll start with those. I’ll grab the screen.

Is It Possible To Spread Authority To Multiple Root Domains From One Authority Domain Via Subdomain Redirects?

All right, so from the Facebook group. “Looking for insights on an idea. I wanted to test this, but asking is more efficient. Is the following possible? I have site.com and site.com has authority.” IDA, DR, okay. “I have a sub-domain on site.com, subdomain1.site.com. Sub-domain carries authority from site, correct?” Carry domain authority, but not necessarily page authority, but you’re right.

“Can I create a redirect from subdomain1.site.com to secondsite.com while site.com stays live and then secondsite.com gets authority from subdomain1.site.com?” Questions like this are hard to read. “Both secondsite.com and site have authority. In other words, is it possible to spread authority to multiple domains from one authority domain via sub-domain redirects?” Yes. “I’m doubting this works, but also read some things that indicate it might work.”

It does work. It does absolutely work. There’s a little bit of a loss. That’s called domain authority manipulation, guys. That’s like 2012 stuff. That’s the stuff that we did that worked really freaking well in like 2012, ‘13 timeframe. There’s still a little bit of benefit to pushing domain authority, guys, but honestly, you can set that up. It will work. There’s a little bit of a loss between redirects when pushing domain authority. It will absolutely increase your domain authority from your sub-domain that you direct to another root domain.

My point is, I’m not sure what your end goal is. Why do you want to push this domain authority to that other domain? Domain authority manipulation as a ranking factor is almost obsolete. I guess there might be some benefit to it, but you have to have really high DA numbers for that to really have an effect. It’s much more about relevancy than it is about domain metrics, which are proprietary metrics, right? Marco, I’ll let you comment on that a little bit, but again, look, if you want to do it, yes, it will help to boost domain authority from the second site.

There is a little bit of a loss, so what I’m saying is if you’ve got a 42 domain authority on your root domain and you try to push that over to a second site via sub-domain or any way you want to do it, it really doesn’t matter, but via a sub-domain redirect, you’ll likely fall somewhere in the 30s, the mid 30s with domain authority. It’s not going to happen overnight. When I used to do a lot of domain authority manipulation, we used to do a lot of it. The maws numbers would refresh, I can’t remember, I think it was every other month, every two months.

Marco: Every 90 days.

Bradley: Every 90 days. Okay. If we would do a redirect, like for example, we called it link laundering, and we’d do double 301 redirects from spam domains. We would go find expired domains that were on the closeout because they went through auction and they were really shitty, spammy domains. A lot of the times, they’re Chinese domains that would have hundreds, sometimes thousands or even tens of thousands of sub-domains. The dropped domain would have tens of thousands, sometimes, anywhere between hundreds to tens of thousands of sub-domains.

This is what we used to do and it worked really well. We would go buy a domain, buy one of those domains, and then we would set up a redirect script, a catch all or wild card redirect via HT access. We’d point the domain to a host, a C panel, and then we would set up an HT access file that would do a wild card sub-domain redirect to whatever we wanted to, and we would push domain authority.

We would do what’s called a double 301 redirect, so we would redirect it through one domain first and then push it over to our final target URL. I’d get domains that had 55, 60 domain authority mostly because of all the accumulated domain authority from all the sub-domains, right? We’d do the redirect and then push it over to a brand new domain and I could get my domain authority to jump from one, which is a brand new registered domain, to mid-40s usually within one maws cycle refresh, but sometimes it would take two. It would take anywhere between 90 days, so three months, to six months, to see that kind of a push. Again, I’ve found over the years that using that is purely like a ranking method, which used to work phenomenally. It really is ineffective at this point.

The only thing I would suggest is like I said, or what I would add to this, is that if you have really high domain authority and you can push some of that to another domain, it will help it to respond better to other off page signals, but that’s about it. Again, it’s not something that I even bother doing anymore. I don’t even look at domain authority and page authority numbers anymore, honestly. If you want to do it, it will work. Marco, what are your comments on this?

Marco: I would say he’s better off concentrating on relevance. If they’re relevant, then you can throw DA and domain authority and page authority out the window and push relevance. You could even throw a Drive Stack. Wherever you’re directing, you could put a Drive Stack as buffer and redirect to the Drive Stack and the Drive Stack will then push the power over to the new site with even more relevance. In the Drive Stack, you could push just tons of relevance in there whether you want keyword relevance, what do you call it, keyword plus URL, brand plus keyword relevance. What you really want is that brand plus keyword relevance.

Bradley: Right.

Marco: What you want to become is you want to become the keyword for whatever that niche is, so when people start thinking about those keywords, they don’t necessarily think about the keywords, but they think about your brand. This is where I tell people, Coca-Cola, Xerox, Band-Aid, Scotch Tape, all of these people have done fabulous branding where they become the brand for those keywords.

I know it’s not simple to do and we don’t have the deep pockets, but a way to start doing that is by relevance. How we do it, how we take advantage of it is by going into a Drive Stack and creating all of that keyword relevance which relates to the brand, and then we push maybe [inaudible 00:14:11] which will flow into the website, or maybe we’ll go direct to the website. We’ll go to the Google My Business thing.

There are so many ways to take advantage of this, but you’re pushing relevance. Think metrics. DA is a third party metric. Trust flow and citation flow, third party metrics. We don’t bother with that. What we look for is relevance and as long as the on page is tight on both websites, they will both benefit.

I could go even further, but then I’d be getting stuff that’s only in RYS Academy Reloaded. I could start talking all kind of things about embeds and the nasty stuff that you can do with embeds, but again, as I always say, we’d be doing the people that pay for the information a disservice by giving it away for free.

Hernan: If I may add real quick, that was one of the main reasons, the spam, when we just throw spam on the domain, we’ll rank. We will get higher domain authority, or we would do the sub-domain manipulation and whatnot, and that was one of the reasons why we stopped paying attention that much to domain authority and page authority, because they were so easy to manipulate.

That’s why we migrated to [inaudible 00:15:28] initially, and then we had to develop, as Marco was saying, relevancy and trust and authority as our own metics, our own way of doing things, because it was so easy. Again, you would have these Chinese domains with, I don’t know, 60 domain authority, and they were all spam. That’s one of the reasons, one of the many reasons that we stopped going through those domains.

Also, because maws will start delaying the updates and whatnot, and at some point it became a lot like waiting the page rank update, the public page rank update from Google that would go out every month or so. It became like that, so we stopped paying attention to that altogether and we started focusing a lot more on rankings and actual results.

Bradley: Again, yeah, it’ll work, and what I would recommend if you were trying to push it a second site anyway, guys, remember, if you push domain authority to a sub-domain, it will benefit the entire domain. Remember, domain authority, it’s a site-wide or domain-wide, including all sub-domains, including all inner pages and posts, all of them will benefit from that, will receive the same domain authority.

Instead of pushing from a redirect to a secondsite.com, you could push to a non-indexed sub-domain on that secondsite.com, all right? You do that so that you can set up a sub-domain. You don’t even need to really put a piece of content up on it, but you could. You could set an HTML file to say no index or whatever, and then just point all of it to that specific sub-domain because it will benefit the root without people really being able to see what you’re doing.

Again, I really just think that’s a waste of time unless you’ve got some massive amount of authority on your first site that you’re trying to push, in case it would help a little bit, but you’d have to be really, really high domain authority numbers for that to make much difference now in my opinion based on how the algorithm works now.

Do You Pay For Articles Or Use A Plugin To Pull In Content?

All right, Adam, the next one that he posted was, “Do you guys pay for articles or use a plugin to pull in content? Looking for an alternative for test site than buying articles.” Yeah, content curation. We have a training course specifically all about that. It’s what I’ve been using. I had to figure out a way to develop content for my clients that was cost-effective and efficient without having to be subject matter experts, so I developed a process years ago that I’ve been using ever since 2012.

We’ve got it as a product right now called Content Kingpin, but that’s the same exact content production process that I used for my own agency and countless amount of our members and students have also implemented that into their business for their primary content methods. We just get across the board good results from even our members that have implemented it, as well, or adopted that process, because it works.

It’s basically hands-free content marketing. You could teach a VA to do it, and they don’t have to be subject matter experts. All they have to do is be able to identify and locate content, authority content or just good, relevant content about whatever topic they’re going to be blogging about and then organizing that content in a logical manner and injecting a small amount of their own commentary. That content is more efficient and way better than any sort of shitty content, farmed content that you could buy from the dime a dozen content farms that are out there, that is just spun, rehashed garbage.

Guys, that’s all the content farms do. They don’t write original content. Even if they do, they’re not subject matter experts. If they are, you’re going to pay a premium for it, but even then, a lot of times, guys, all they do is do mashups where they’ll go, scrape five or 10 articles or whatever about whatever topic it is that you requested the article for, and then they’ll put bits and pieces of each article, put them through a spinner, and sometimes they’ll manually edit the spin text or the output file to where it’s a little bit more readable, but a lot of those content farms, you’ll get a lot of errors and stuff that you can clearly see that a spinner was used and they didn’t take the time to manually edit it.

My point is you’re not really buying original content from content farms, anyway. You’re buying garbage. You’re much better off using curated content where you can reference and cite other people’s authority content that is highly relevant from subject matter experts and you’re giving them credit via the attribution link. You’re citing the source, which is required and ethical. It’s the ethical thing to do.

Now, you’ve got good content from subject matter experts that you’re quoting on your own site, giving them credit, and injecting your own commentary. Again, a VA can do that. That’s why we call it Content Kingpin Hands-Free Content Marketing, because it truly is. You can generate a stream or revenue just from selling content marketing services and managing it. It just requires a very, very small amount of management.

Again, that training, Content Kingpin, teaches exactly how to hire the VAs, what to look for, what type of output production you should expect, what to pay them, how to manage it, all of that, guys. All of that is covered in great detail in that course. I highly recommend anybody that needs content for their clients or their own assets, their own digital assets, check that out because it’s the exact same method we use, all right?

Do We Have To Worry About Stock Photo Copyright Issues When Posting To Social Media Like Twitter?

Jeff, what’s up, Jeff? He says, “Do we have to worry about stock photo copyright issues when posting to social media, like Twitter, the same way we do with our website?” I don’t know, Jeff. I wish I did. I wish I had definitive answer. Maybe somebody else on here knows. Anybody?

Hernan: I had some issues when it comes to posting on Facebook, so yeah, short answer is yeah, because I had to take down an ad that was performing super well just because I was lazy and I didn’t check the stock photos stuff. The actual owner of the photo contacted me and said, “Hey dude, you need to take off the ad,” and I lost the entire social proof and everything on the Facebook side of things.

Yeah, short answer is yes because you can get in trouble. It doesn’t really matter if you’re using it on Twitter, Google. Google, maybe you would have a bigger exposure because you’re being indexed, but on Twitter, people can still see it, right? I think it’s just a matter of photos are still an asset, so it’s like you saying a piece of a song or a piece of a movie, something like that, all of that is copyrighted. You need to have that in mind, no matter where you’re using it.

When you’re doing it on your website, you’re a bit more exposed because anyone can get access to that, while on Twitter it’s not the case, but just to avoid issues, I would say don’t do it. Plus, there are so many deals and having stock photos has become really, really cheap. If you go to [inaudible 00:22:51] for example, you can get deals, like, I don’t know, for 100 photos for 10 bucks or something like that. It’s not even worth the trouble of getting through it.

Bradley: Yeah. Yeah, and usually for my clients, what I have them do is I use StockFresh.com. That’s our primary stock photo site, and so I just have my clients go setup an account or I set it up for them in their name and then I send them the login details and then they go in and fund it by just purchasing credits. We usually purchase 100 credits at a time. I think it’s $79 or something like that at Stock Fresh. It’s not bad. It’s decent.

Every couple of months or so, my curators, my VAs who are doing all of the content marketing for my clients will contact me and say, “Hey, we need this account refilled,” and I’ll just contact the client and say, “Hey, I need you to add another $100, refill the account with credits.” That’s it. That’s how it works, and that’s just to be safe.

That’s because I’ve been hit with extortion letters from Getty Images and their various subsidiaries and I’ve had to pay fines, copyright fines, settlement fees, basically for not having each client having their own licenses. In other words, even if I had my own account for my marketing agency with stock photos, if I published those stock photos on clients’ websites, the client needs to have a license for that photo. Even though I did it on their behalf, I was the license holder, not the client.

I’ve had to pay settlement fees for copyright infringement issues for client sites that they received the extortion letter, but I paid it on their behalf because it was my fault for not having them setup properly. That’s why I talk about that, again, in the Content Kingpin training that I was just talking about, I go into great detail about all of that because it’s very, very important. I would follow Hernan’s advice about social media and really try to have proper licensing for photos that you’re using.

Hernan: Yeah. Yeah, I would do that, too, and for example, there’s some websites that they’re explicitly royalty-free photos like Flickr, for example. You can search for royalty-free photos, then I think Unsplash.com, Unsplash.com. There’s another called Pixabay.com. Those are all royalty-free photos, but you’re limited to what you can find over there.

Sometimes for ads it will work, but if I’m looking for a specific way or specific photo that will convey a specific message that I want to send, then it wouldn’t work, so I’ll need to go out and actually purchase the picture. It’s specifically important with social media. Twitter has become super, super visual. If you go through the Twitter app on mobile, it’s super visual, so photos play a big role.

Would SEO Content Be Okay Or Should You Use The Research Quality Content For An Affiliate Money Site?

Bradley: Okay, Dominick’s up. What’s up, Dominick? He says, “I need some good content for an affiliate money site. I’ve tried Natasha Nixon, but it’s a little pricey. Would SEO content be okay or should I use the research quality content?”

No, if it’s for a money site, I would recommend that you do authority content because the SEO content is exactly what I just mentioned about a content farm. That’s what it is. It’s spun shit. It’s garbage. I can tell you that. That’s to be used for link building and stuff like that. It’s not money site content. I could tell you that even the authority content that you purchase sometimes isn’t going to be very good.

For the most part, I’ve had good experiences with Natasha Nixon for authority content, but the last article I got was complete garbage. It was for Mario’s Cab Service for the GMB Pro case study, and it was complete garbage. I ordered a 1500 word authority content article, paid like $120 for it, and it was complete garbage. I had to go through and manually edit. If I had time, I would’ve requested a rewrite, but I didn’t because I wanted to get it up, so I just edited about 500 or 600 words of it myself and then used that as the actual GMB website article.

Again, guys, remember, your best bet, Dominick, if you need really good authority type content or money site content on a regular basis would be to hire your own writer from Upwork or something. That is a much better way than going to the content producers. Honestly, you’re better off developing a one on one relationship with an individual writer.

Here’s the thing. Well, most of my writers are now curators, but I still can rely on them for article writing at times, but most of the stuff we do is like I said, curating for blog posts and such. The idea is once you’ve developed a relationship with a particular writer, you get to know their voice, so to speak and how they write, and you can help to mold or shape how you want them to write for particular clients, for example. That’s the benefit of doing it.

One of the other benefits of having a relationship with an individual writer is that a lot of times, you get better treatment. You don’t have to wait in queue for a week to get a piece of content back, that kind of stuff. You can have direct message. I use Upwork a lot. There’s desktop notifications and all that kind of stuff, so I recommend doing that.

If you’re going to buy it from a content farm, Natasha Nixon being one of them, then authority content is your better bet. It is a bit more expensive, but again, for money sites, I don’t recommend putting up any kind of SEO articles because they’re literally trash. It’s junk. You yourself will spend more time editing them and making them readable than it’s worth. If that’s the case, why not just write it yourself? Anybody want to comment on that?

Hernan: Yeah. Real quick, I totally agree with what you’re saying, Bradley, in terms of having someone that you can always refer to, even further if you’re offering this on a regular basis. I think that there’s some types of professionals, if you would, or some types of work that you always need stuff done, for example, graphic design, that you would be better off just hiring somebody to do graphic design.

For example, on our end, we hire a graphic designer. He would take over the entire graphic design side of things. He would do thumbnails for YouTube. He would do this and he would do that. He already knows how we work and what types of things we want and if we need a logo, we ask him for it, and if we need banners, sometimes he would do it.

I think that’s part of the team that you want to start putting together. That’s part of the team because you’re providing service and if you’re providing content creation services for your clients, that’s something that you really want to have in mind. For example, if you’re doing, I don’t know, video services, right, you’re doing YouTube services, maybe you need a video editor or maybe you need the tools to actually provide the client with a good service. That will position yourself as a much more valuable asset because you have the tools.

It’s not like you’re getting out there and grabbing the content, the articles, the logos from what everyone else is doing. You become a much more valuable asset because you’re developing your own team. I think that having that long-term relationship and having that long-term view when it comes to the collaborators that work with you, people that help you, helps a lot, helps you save time, money, and helps you position yourself better.

Bradley: Yeah, and the last thing about that I want to mention is I said earlier about you get to know a writer’s voice, and that’s good because especially if you’re providing content for your clients, then you already know what the quality is going to be. When you buy content from places like content farms or a Natasha Nixon, even when you’re buying the authority content which costs more money, you don’t know which writer’s going to get it, so you don’t know what the quality’s going to be like.

The tone of the writing can be different from article to article, can be vastly different. If you’re providing content for webpages, not posts, but pages for client sites, you want consistency in tone because you don’t want one page to have a tone that’s vastly different than another page, because it would be off putting to a visitor. Again, you get to know how the writer writes. You get to come to expect a certain level of quality, a certain tone, a certain voice to speak. That kind of stuff makes you more confident in being able to sell content marketing, right? Good question there, Dom. A great question, actually.

Vincent, doesn’t look much of a question. Let’s see if there’s a comment somewhere. No. Okay, so, well, congratulations. I don’t know what this means.

Adam: Oh, you’ll see it in a minute. He posted after that.

Does Adding A PR Link Helps In Generating Review Snippets Of A GMB Review Page?

Bradley: Okay, cool, cool. Let’s see. “Hey guys. Do you know if adding a PR link to our GMB review page will cause our GMB listing to show a review snippet as shown below?”

No. Adding a PR link to your review page, no. This is a maps thing. You have to have I think five, at least it used to be, you had to have a minimum of five ratings for the stars to show. I think that’s still the case. This is a maps listing that you show here in the picture, so that’s not something that we can manipulate by adding code because we can’t add code to the maps profile.

You can on a website. You can have structured data for review schema, but we can’t do that in the maps profile. The maps profile will show review stars once you have a total of five reviews. Whatever the star ratings are is irrelevant. Your ratings stars will show up once you have a total of five reviews. Does that make sense? That’s it. It’s not something that you can force or trigger by linking to it or adding code because you can’t edit the code of the GMB or maps profile like you could on a website, right? You just need to get five reviews.

Who Do You Recommend For Google Phone Verified Accounts?

Okay, Jim’s up. He says, “Hey, SM team. I’m glad you were able to hang out during the holiday week.” Yeah, us, too. We’ve only missed one in 191 episodes and it was a scheduled miss. “I know you’ve spoken about Google phone verified accounts in the past a lot, but I was wondering who you’d recommend of late. Also, is it worth paying $3 per account for aged accounts instead of 35 cent per newer account? Have you had better ratio on sites sticking with the older accounts?”

I buy aged accounts for very particular projects. Let’s put it this way. I’ve bought some aged accounts. I haven’t tested, I haven’t setup an actual test to test a brand new account versus an aged account anytime in the last three or four years, so I don’t know if having an aged account really makes a difference or not. I can’t tell definitively.

People seem to think it does make a difference. There’s probably some evidence out there to support that. I would just assume that that may be the case. For very particular accounts or projects, campaigns, whatever, I will sometimes buy the aged accounts and I’ll pay as much as $50 per account depending on how old it is. I’ve bought some 12 year old created in 2006 Google accounts and I’ve paid as much as $50 per account for those, and then I still had one of them terminated rather quickly, which pissed me off.

I can’t tell you, Jim, whether it’s really worth it or not. Maybe some other people have some data to prove one way or the other. I don’t. Usually, guys, we try to test everything to give you a definitive answer and this is something I have not tested. Adam, or excuse me, Hernan and or Marco, have either of you have any data to back up one way or the other?

Hernan: No, not on my end, honestly.

Marco: No, I don’t think it makes a difference.

Bradley: Okay. Yeah, I didn’t think so. Honestly, I know people say it does. Jim, I would say proceed at your own risk, whichever way you want, but this is the guy that I’m recommending right now for my aged accounts. [inaudible 00:35:52] is his name. At least that’s what I think it is, BulkPVA.com. I still use him. He’s really responsive on Skype if you connect with him on Skype, and if you go to contact, I think his Skype username is right there. Yeah, it is, BulkPVA.com. You can email him, all that. Just tell him I sent you. He knows because I’ve referred a lot of people to him.

He usually takes very good care of us, as well as anytime accounts get terminated and stuff, if they’re new, obviously if you have accounts terminated two weeks after he delivers them to you, that’s your fault, but if they’re within three days, within 72 hours or something like that, see, look, it takes 24 to 72 hours to deliver each order. Let’s see. After delivery of accounts, if the account is banned within 48 hours, replacements will be given to you.

What I do is whenever we order a new batch, and a lot of these, I buy the double phone verified YouTube accounts, and we do that because we do a lot of video spam for clients and all kinds of stuff, and I’ve got a VA that runs a video spam tool, Ab’s Video Carpet Blitz tool. We have to have dozens, if not 100 plus YouTube accounts at all times. Obviously, because we’re doing a shit ton of spam, a lot of accounts get terminated from overuse, and so I buy accounts from this guy all the time.

What I do is my VA will go in and immediately open up Browseo and just start adding profiles and logging in to bind it to his IP, but they each have their own browsing session because they’re all separated or segregated via Browseo, which you can do that with Ghost Browser, I think is another one. It doesn’t have to be Browseo, guys. It doesn’t matter. All I’m saying is the best way to get these accounts to stick is to bind them to your IP, but make sure they have their own unique browsing session in history.

Start allowing cookies to accrue and search history and allow Google and the websites that that profile visits start to build a customer profile, like an avatar or whatever, for that particular profile. In other words, you want it to look real, and so one of the things that I’ve found is these bulk accounts, when you buy them, if you do a hard reset on your browser to clear all cache and cookies and then log into four, five, six accounts from the same IP all from a 100% virgin browsing session each time you do it, that’s going to look spammy and those accounts tend to get terminated.

If you log into each of them, even from the same IP, as long as they have their own unique browsing sessions that maintain, they stay, in other words they don’t get wiped clean and then use that same IP to log into another profile, with Browseo or Ghost Browser or any number of those apps that do that that will keep browsing sessions per profile, that’s a much better way to do it. That tends not to trigger the red flags that do from using 100% clean browsing sessions each time. Hopefully that makes sense. This is the guy I still recommend. Just tell him I sent you only because he tends to take care of the people that we send to him. You get put the top of his priority list, all right? That was another good question.

Would You Recommend Making The Least Number Of Location Pages For Each Facebook Accounts?

Oh, cool, we’re almost out of time, almost out of questions. Marco says from YouTube, [inaudible 00:39:23], “For multiple location websites, I know normally you guys recommend having one ring of social media that is going to syndicate posts, but in Facebook, you can have multiple location pages linked to one account. Would you recommend making at least the Facebook accounts for every location at least?”

Yeah, you can. Honestly, I would, because multiple location businesses should each have their own Facebook page. Each location should have its own Facebook page, so yeah, absolutely. What I was talking about was a branded Tumblr, a branded Blogger, a branded WordPress, and all the other web twos and stuff that we syndicate and we use as part of the syndication networks. You really only need one branded network that you can publish content to from the root domain, from the blog that’s typically going to be on the root domain. Essentially you can silo the root domain to have categories for each one of the locations.

Let’s say you got six locations. I would set up a category for each location, and then what I would do is publish content, just publish posts from the blog on the root site, make sure it’s the correct category selected. When you’re targeting, let’s say location number one, you’re going to optimize the content and have the call to action link, the link that you’re going to be linking to that sub-domain site or location page, whatever, however you’ve got it configured, but that’s going to be selected and placed into that location category, which helps to optimize it. You can do that for each location from the root blog. You don’t need to have a separation syndication network for each location, but Facebook pages, you can have a separate location page and I would encourage that because that’s a powerful citation.

That’s the thing, guys. When it comes to any of the [inaudible 00:41:20]. I’m sorry. I’ll come back to that question, Vincent. I got sidetracked. The other thing about this is if you have a particular location that is not responding as well to the blog post, the syndication from the root domain, then you can always go in and setup a location specific syndication network where you would just use the same branding, but you would add a local modifier.

In other words, if it’s Joe’s Plumbing and there’s six locations and one of them happens to be, I don’t know, Fairfax, Virginia, then if he has a Joe’s Plumbing syndication network that he’s using to blog for all of the locations, but Fairfax, Virginia isn’t really responding as well to the blogs from the root domain, then you could put a Joe’s Plumbing Fairfax syndication network up and then syndicate content directly from that particular category on the root domain to just that network, or you could even transfer and put a separate blog on that location specific site, if that makes sense.

Guys, remember, categories in WordPress do have their own feeds. You can get a category feed, so you could essentially use the root domain for let’s say if you had six locations, you could literally have six location, so brand plus location modifier networks, and have six individual category RSS feeds each triggering their own geo-specific network. Does that make sense?

Again, you can get really complex with this stuff. I like to keep one branded syndication network to try to accomplish what I desire for all of the locations because that’s less work and it’s easier. I like easy. I like efficiency, but you can make it complicated or add additional geo networks specific to a location when needed, but lastly, like I mentioned, as far as the actual Facebook page, I would have a location page for each location, absolutely, because it’s a very powerful citation.

You could also create location pages on LinkedIn, Crunchbase, if you’re using Crunchbase, which you should because Crunchbase is a very powerful citation as part of the semantic database. What I would recommend with Crunchbase is setup an organization and then you setup sub-locations for each location, which you can link to individually. That becomes very, very powerful. That’s a good question, though.

Vincent said, “The line below reviews that has the blue icon, it’s a review snippet.” Yeah, but that’s something that Google pulls in automatically. That’s not something that you can force. This is a Google Maps listing, Vincent. You can’t manipulate this. Google decides what they’re going to list and show right here, not you. That’s not something that we have the option to edit right now or to change.

Those reviews that are pulled in, like the snippet from a review, that’s just what Google determines that they’re going to pull in and display to the searcher, the user, the Google user. That’s it. It’s not something that you can edit. You can’t force that. Google just does that, at least as far as I know, you can’t. If I’m wrong, I’m sure somebody will correct me. Okay, well, should we give it another minute and see if any other questions come in or should we just wrap up a little bit early?

Adam: I think we should give them a minute because I know there’s definitely a lag, but I want to talk a little bit more about the live event in October.

Bradley: Okay.

Adam: We narrowed it down. It’s going to be in Washington DC like we said, which honestly, I’m kind of pumped about because when we first thought of that, the first thing I thought about was heat and humidity, but I realized it’s going to be in the middle of October and it’s going to be freaking awesome there. You can speak to that. That’s a great time of year around there, isn’t it?

Bradley: Absolutely. It should be really nice. There’s a ton of stuff to do in Washington DC. Besides our event, we’re going to have a VIP event I believe, which we’re going to have to find something good to do. DC, it’s the nation’s capital, right? There’s a lot of stuff to do that.

Adam: Yeah. You’re within striking distance of a lot of stuff, so if you come join us, if you can take a couple days on either side, maybe go do something. If you’re traveling, there’s a lot of neat stuff in that area to do.

Bradley: Yeah. Yeah, there is. Okay, well, I don’t see any other questions coming in, guys. It’s Fourth of July holiday week. For those of you in the US, happy Fourth of July, and go get a cold beer.

Adam: Those of you in England, I’m not watching the game, but hopefully England’s doing well in the soccer match I guess it is right now. I’m going to check that out, and then yeah, I hope everyone has a great Fourth of July. I’m going to head out and enjoy that tomorrow.

Bradley: I’m still working tomorrow for a few hours in the morning. I’ve got to coach Crossfit for two hours in the morning, and then I’m going to work for a couple hours before I go heavily drink.

Marco: Well, England is still sweating.

Hernan: [inaudible 00:46:14] penalties. Very fun. Thank you guys.

Bradley: All right guys. See you later. Happy Fourth.

Marco: Bye everyone.

Chris: Bye.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 191 published first on https://dilatepage.tumblr.com/

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 191

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The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at https://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

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Adam: Hey everybody. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts, episode 191, the question where I guarantee it, if you’re watching this, you can get your question answered, because right now there are almost no questions because of a little error that somebody made. It’s not important who, but let’s go and say hello to everyone real quick. Hopefully, you’re getting an announcement on YouTube or you’re getting a notification. You might be watching this later, in which case, just ignore all this stuff about people making mistakes. Chris, how you doing, man?

Chris: Good. Happy to have summer finally in Europe.

Adam: Oh, nice. It’s finally warming up there?

Chris: Yep.

Adam: Good deal, good deal. Hernan, how about you? Is it nice and cold down there?

Hernan: Yeah. Over here, it’s freezing, man. I’m freezing my ass and overdressed, whatever, but I’m super excited to be here anyway, so that doesn’t stop us.

Adam: Marco, you’re not freezing your ass off, are you?

Marco: Never. Guys, for some reason, we’re not transmitting this Hangout into the Google Plus page. It’s still 190.

Bradley: That’s my fault. Standby.

Adam: Got you. Well, we won’t ask Bradley how he’s doing, because I don’t want to divide up his attention, but we do have a few announcements. Real quick, I wanted to say we’re going to put the link on the page and you’ll be able to find it in the description if you’re watching this later on YouTube, but our live event is a go, The Semantic Mastery Live.

October, the weekend of October 20th, 21st, we’ve already announced one of the special guest speakers. In addition to seeing all of our lovely faces at some point during the event, also Jeffrey Smith of SEO Boot Camp will be joining us and we’re going to have a couple more that we’re holding back.

We’re teasing it a little bit, but that is a go, so I’ll pop the link on here if you want to go and grab your ticket now. Ticket prices are definitely going to go up as time goes on. We want to help out the people who jump on this early and it is capped at a total of 25. Don’t put it off too long. It will be in the Washington DC area and we’re getting ready to lock down our event venue probably in the next week or two.

Bradley: Page is updated.

Adam: All right. As far as other announcements, you guys, we got a lot. I’m going to pass it off. Marco, is there anything we want to say specifically?

Marco: No. We’re moving forward, guys. The Google My Business auto-poster is ready. It has some awesome features. People have a long way to catch up. I know there’s some stuff being put out. It’s [inaudible 00:02:42]. You can get an RSS feed on anyone who’s in Syndication Academy or knows about us. You know how wicked RSS feeds can be, how they can help amplify your content, how they can help you with backlinks, but the most interesting thing we’re doing is we’re pulling in or we should have the ability in the next few days to pull in the RSS feed from the website so that all you would literally have to do is post from your website and you can amplify that content into post. If not, we do have the auto-poster, where you can go in and setup posts well ahead of time.

We also have YouTube views. That’s currently working. It’s working really well to push up videos, to get it ranked. Now, of course, once you start pushing videos, you should continue pushing videos to it to keep it ranked until it picks up its own steam. It’ll pick up steam and stay where it’s supposed to stay. It’ll stay ranked. The great thing about this is that since it’s real people, they’ll interact with your channel, so they’ll send all kinds of signals.

I keep telling people, the caveat in this is that you have to send them to a quality video. I always ask the question, “What’s a quality video?” Well, a quality video, if you look at your competition as a video that has a bunch of likes, it has a bunch of watch time, it has a bunch of subscribers, that’s a quality video. Look at what your competition is doing for that keyword and you mimic that, but do them one better. Better production, a better speaker, better audio quality, whatever it is that you need to do to grab the attention of your viewers.

There’s so many things coming. Video carpet bomb is coming. We were just talking about it. The done for you Google My Business services, that’s coming. The VA is almost trained. I’m working with her daily on this task. Cora reports are going to be available. What else do we have? Drive Stacks, guys. Drive Stacks, the Semantic Mastery way, with my original VA, the VA that I originally trained will be available through our marketplace. Market, it’s coming. Just stay tuned. Keep coming back and we’ll have news as everything develops, but we hope to have at least some of the products available by the end of the week. That’ll be on you to send the email to let people know, “Hey, it’s ready, so go get it.”

Adam: Awesome. Sorry about that. I was muted real quick. Also, I wanted to let everyone know, if you missed the webinar, we have a webinar replay. I’m not going to post the link here because if you’re on our email list, then you are very special and you’re going to get a link to check out the bundle, but there was a great webinar on Monday going into detail about how you can use some of the most powerful training that we have and really combine that.

We’re going to have some more information coming out about that. We’ll just post the link so you can go and grab that if you’re interested in taking advantage. It’s a special Fourth of July kind of holiday offer, and then we’ll have a little bit, like I said, of followup in the coming days. A lot of people are taking some time off, heading out to the beach, doing whatever. If you got some time you can squeak away from the family or make an excuse, you might want to go check out the replay over the next couple of days.

Bradley: I can tell having changed Hump Day Hangouts from Wednesday to Tuesday for this week, we’ve got a lot less viewers on it right now than we typically do, so it’s just timing. I’m glad that unfortunately, we didn’t have all the questions directed to the right place this time. That’s on our end, but we got a few questions. Do we have any other announcements, guys?

Adam: I’m good. How about you guys?

Hernan: I just wanted to reiterate that go ahead and grab your tickets for the [inaudible 00:06:51] Live 2018 because it’s going to depend on that. It’s going to depend on that. I’m really looking forward to seeing you guys, so yeah, I just wanted to repeat that once again.

Adam: Okay, cool.

Bradley: That’s it. We can get into it, huh?

Adam: Yeah, let’s do it.

Bradley: Let’s do it. All right, well, we don’t have a lot of questions, so we’re hoping that some of you guys that are here have some questions and you post them on the page. Again, that was our fault, but it is what it is, so we’re going to run with what we got. I know Adam posted a couple questions that he yanked from one of the Facebook groups, so we’ll start with those. I’ll grab the screen.

Is It Possible To Spread Authority To Multiple Root Domains From One Authority Domain Via Subdomain Redirects?

All right, so from the Facebook group. “Looking for insights on an idea. I wanted to test this, but asking is more efficient. Is the following possible? I have site.com and site.com has authority.” IDA, DR, okay. “I have a sub-domain on site.com, subdomain1.site.com. Sub-domain carries authority from site, correct?” Carry domain authority, but not necessarily page authority, but you’re right.

“Can I create a redirect from subdomain1.site.com to secondsite.com while site.com stays live and then secondsite.com gets authority from subdomain1.site.com?” Questions like this are hard to read. “Both secondsite.com and site have authority. In other words, is it possible to spread authority to multiple domains from one authority domain via sub-domain redirects?” Yes. “I’m doubting this works, but also read some things that indicate it might work.”

It does work. It does absolutely work. There’s a little bit of a loss. That’s called domain authority manipulation, guys. That’s like 2012 stuff. That’s the stuff that we did that worked really freaking well in like 2012, ‘13 timeframe. There’s still a little bit of benefit to pushing domain authority, guys, but honestly, you can set that up. It will work. There’s a little bit of a loss between redirects when pushing domain authority. It will absolutely increase your domain authority from your sub-domain that you direct to another root domain.

My point is, I’m not sure what your end goal is. Why do you want to push this domain authority to that other domain? Domain authority manipulation as a ranking factor is almost obsolete. I guess there might be some benefit to it, but you have to have really high DA numbers for that to really have an effect. It’s much more about relevancy than it is about domain metrics, which are proprietary metrics, right? Marco, I’ll let you comment on that a little bit, but again, look, if you want to do it, yes, it will help to boost domain authority from the second site.

There is a little bit of a loss, so what I’m saying is if you’ve got a 42 domain authority on your root domain and you try to push that over to a second site via sub-domain or any way you want to do it, it really doesn’t matter, but via a sub-domain redirect, you’ll likely fall somewhere in the 30s, the mid 30s with domain authority. It’s not going to happen overnight. When I used to do a lot of domain authority manipulation, we used to do a lot of it. The maws numbers would refresh, I can’t remember, I think it was every other month, every two months.

Marco: Every 90 days.

Bradley: Every 90 days. Okay. If we would do a redirect, like for example, we called it link laundering, and we’d do double 301 redirects from spam domains. We would go find expired domains that were on the closeout because they went through auction and they were really shitty, spammy domains. A lot of the times, they’re Chinese domains that would have hundreds, sometimes thousands or even tens of thousands of sub-domains. The dropped domain would have tens of thousands, sometimes, anywhere between hundreds to tens of thousands of sub-domains.

This is what we used to do and it worked really well. We would go buy a domain, buy one of those domains, and then we would set up a redirect script, a catch all or wild card redirect via HT access. We’d point the domain to a host, a C panel, and then we would set up an HT access file that would do a wild card sub-domain redirect to whatever we wanted to, and we would push domain authority.

We would do what’s called a double 301 redirect, so we would redirect it through one domain first and then push it over to our final target URL. I’d get domains that had 55, 60 domain authority mostly because of all the accumulated domain authority from all the sub-domains, right? We’d do the redirect and then push it over to a brand new domain and I could get my domain authority to jump from one, which is a brand new registered domain, to mid-40s usually within one maws cycle refresh, but sometimes it would take two. It would take anywhere between 90 days, so three months, to six months, to see that kind of a push. Again, I’ve found over the years that using that is purely like a ranking method, which used to work phenomenally. It really is ineffective at this point.

The only thing I would suggest is like I said, or what I would add to this, is that if you have really high domain authority and you can push some of that to another domain, it will help it to respond better to other off page signals, but that’s about it. Again, it’s not something that I even bother doing anymore. I don’t even look at domain authority and page authority numbers anymore, honestly. If you want to do it, it will work. Marco, what are your comments on this?

Marco: I would say he’s better off concentrating on relevance. If they’re relevant, then you can throw DA and domain authority and page authority out the window and push relevance. You could even throw a Drive Stack. Wherever you’re directing, you could put a Drive Stack as buffer and redirect to the Drive Stack and the Drive Stack will then push the power over to the new site with even more relevance. In the Drive Stack, you could push just tons of relevance in there whether you want keyword relevance, what do you call it, keyword plus URL, brand plus keyword relevance. What you really want is that brand plus keyword relevance.

Bradley: Right.

Marco: What you want to become is you want to become the keyword for whatever that niche is, so when people start thinking about those keywords, they don’t necessarily think about the keywords, but they think about your brand. This is where I tell people, Coca-Cola, Xerox, Band-Aid, Scotch Tape, all of these people have done fabulous branding where they become the brand for those keywords.

I know it’s not simple to do and we don’t have the deep pockets, but a way to start doing that is by relevance. How we do it, how we take advantage of it is by going into a Drive Stack and creating all of that keyword relevance which relates to the brand, and then we push maybe [inaudible 00:14:11] which will flow into the website, or maybe we’ll go direct to the website. We’ll go to the Google My Business thing.

There are so many ways to take advantage of this, but you’re pushing relevance. Think metrics. DA is a third party metric. Trust flow and citation flow, third party metrics. We don’t bother with that. What we look for is relevance and as long as the on page is tight on both websites, they will both benefit.

I could go even further, but then I’d be getting stuff that’s only in RYS Academy Reloaded. I could start talking all kind of things about embeds and the nasty stuff that you can do with embeds, but again, as I always say, we’d be doing the people that pay for the information a disservice by giving it away for free.

Hernan: If I may add real quick, that was one of the main reasons, the spam, when we just throw spam on the domain, we’ll rank. We will get higher domain authority, or we would do the sub-domain manipulation and whatnot, and that was one of the reasons why we stopped paying attention that much to domain authority and page authority, because they were so easy to manipulate.

That’s why we migrated to [inaudible 00:15:28] initially, and then we had to develop, as Marco was saying, relevancy and trust and authority as our own metics, our own way of doing things, because it was so easy. Again, you would have these Chinese domains with, I don’t know, 60 domain authority, and they were all spam. That’s one of the reasons, one of the many reasons that we stopped going through those domains.

Also, because maws will start delaying the updates and whatnot, and at some point it became a lot like waiting the page rank update, the public page rank update from Google that would go out every month or so. It became like that, so we stopped paying attention to that altogether and we started focusing a lot more on rankings and actual results.

Bradley: Again, yeah, it’ll work, and what I would recommend if you were trying to push it a second site anyway, guys, remember, if you push domain authority to a sub-domain, it will benefit the entire domain. Remember, domain authority, it’s a site-wide or domain-wide, including all sub-domains, including all inner pages and posts, all of them will benefit from that, will receive the same domain authority.

Instead of pushing from a redirect to a secondsite.com, you could push to a non-indexed sub-domain on that secondsite.com, all right? You do that so that you can set up a sub-domain. You don’t even need to really put a piece of content up on it, but you could. You could set an HTML file to say no index or whatever, and then just point all of it to that specific sub-domain because it will benefit the root without people really being able to see what you’re doing.

Again, I really just think that’s a waste of time unless you’ve got some massive amount of authority on your first site that you’re trying to push, in case it would help a little bit, but you’d have to be really, really high domain authority numbers for that to make much difference now in my opinion based on how the algorithm works now.

Do You Pay For Articles Or Use A Plugin To Pull In Content?

All right, Adam, the next one that he posted was, “Do you guys pay for articles or use a plugin to pull in content? Looking for an alternative for test site than buying articles.” Yeah, content curation. We have a training course specifically all about that. It’s what I’ve been using. I had to figure out a way to develop content for my clients that was cost-effective and efficient without having to be subject matter experts, so I developed a process years ago that I’ve been using ever since 2012.

We’ve got it as a product right now called Content Kingpin, but that’s the same exact content production process that I used for my own agency and countless amount of our members and students have also implemented that into their business for their primary content methods. We just get across the board good results from even our members that have implemented it, as well, or adopted that process, because it works.

It’s basically hands-free content marketing. You could teach a VA to do it, and they don’t have to be subject matter experts. All they have to do is be able to identify and locate content, authority content or just good, relevant content about whatever topic they’re going to be blogging about and then organizing that content in a logical manner and injecting a small amount of their own commentary. That content is more efficient and way better than any sort of shitty content, farmed content that you could buy from the dime a dozen content farms that are out there, that is just spun, rehashed garbage.

Guys, that’s all the content farms do. They don’t write original content. Even if they do, they’re not subject matter experts. If they are, you’re going to pay a premium for it, but even then, a lot of times, guys, all they do is do mashups where they’ll go, scrape five or 10 articles or whatever about whatever topic it is that you requested the article for, and then they’ll put bits and pieces of each article, put them through a spinner, and sometimes they’ll manually edit the spin text or the output file to where it’s a little bit more readable, but a lot of those content farms, you’ll get a lot of errors and stuff that you can clearly see that a spinner was used and they didn’t take the time to manually edit it.

My point is you’re not really buying original content from content farms, anyway. You’re buying garbage. You’re much better off using curated content where you can reference and cite other people’s authority content that is highly relevant from subject matter experts and you’re giving them credit via the attribution link. You’re citing the source, which is required and ethical. It’s the ethical thing to do.

Now, you’ve got good content from subject matter experts that you’re quoting on your own site, giving them credit, and injecting your own commentary. Again, a VA can do that. That’s why we call it Content Kingpin Hands-Free Content Marketing, because it truly is. You can generate a stream or revenue just from selling content marketing services and managing it. It just requires a very, very small amount of management.

Again, that training, Content Kingpin, teaches exactly how to hire the VAs, what to look for, what type of output production you should expect, what to pay them, how to manage it, all of that, guys. All of that is covered in great detail in that course. I highly recommend anybody that needs content for their clients or their own assets, their own digital assets, check that out because it’s the exact same method we use, all right?

Do We Have To Worry About Stock Photo Copyright Issues When Posting To Social Media Like Twitter?

Jeff, what’s up, Jeff? He says, “Do we have to worry about stock photo copyright issues when posting to social media, like Twitter, the same way we do with our website?” I don’t know, Jeff. I wish I did. I wish I had definitive answer. Maybe somebody else on here knows. Anybody?

Hernan: I had some issues when it comes to posting on Facebook, so yeah, short answer is yeah, because I had to take down an ad that was performing super well just because I was lazy and I didn’t check the stock photos stuff. The actual owner of the photo contacted me and said, “Hey dude, you need to take off the ad,” and I lost the entire social proof and everything on the Facebook side of things.

Yeah, short answer is yes because you can get in trouble. It doesn’t really matter if you’re using it on Twitter, Google. Google, maybe you would have a bigger exposure because you’re being indexed, but on Twitter, people can still see it, right? I think it’s just a matter of photos are still an asset, so it’s like you saying a piece of a song or a piece of a movie, something like that, all of that is copyrighted. You need to have that in mind, no matter where you’re using it.

When you’re doing it on your website, you’re a bit more exposed because anyone can get access to that, while on Twitter it’s not the case, but just to avoid issues, I would say don’t do it. Plus, there are so many deals and having stock photos has become really, really cheap. If you go to [inaudible 00:22:51] for example, you can get deals, like, I don’t know, for 100 photos for 10 bucks or something like that. It’s not even worth the trouble of getting through it.

Bradley: Yeah. Yeah, and usually for my clients, what I have them do is I use StockFresh.com. That’s our primary stock photo site, and so I just have my clients go setup an account or I set it up for them in their name and then I send them the login details and then they go in and fund it by just purchasing credits. We usually purchase 100 credits at a time. I think it’s $79 or something like that at Stock Fresh. It’s not bad. It’s decent.

Every couple of months or so, my curators, my VAs who are doing all of the content marketing for my clients will contact me and say, “Hey, we need this account refilled,” and I’ll just contact the client and say, “Hey, I need you to add another $100, refill the account with credits.” That’s it. That’s how it works, and that’s just to be safe.

That’s because I’ve been hit with extortion letters from Getty Images and their various subsidiaries and I’ve had to pay fines, copyright fines, settlement fees, basically for not having each client having their own licenses. In other words, even if I had my own account for my marketing agency with stock photos, if I published those stock photos on clients’ websites, the client needs to have a license for that photo. Even though I did it on their behalf, I was the license holder, not the client.

I’ve had to pay settlement fees for copyright infringement issues for client sites that they received the extortion letter, but I paid it on their behalf because it was my fault for not having them setup properly. That’s why I talk about that, again, in the Content Kingpin training that I was just talking about, I go into great detail about all of that because it’s very, very important. I would follow Hernan’s advice about social media and really try to have proper licensing for photos that you’re using.

Hernan: Yeah. Yeah, I would do that, too, and for example, there’s some websites that they’re explicitly royalty-free photos like Flickr, for example. You can search for royalty-free photos, then I think Unsplash.com, Unsplash.com. There’s another called Pixabay.com. Those are all royalty-free photos, but you’re limited to what you can find over there.

Sometimes for ads it will work, but if I’m looking for a specific way or specific photo that will convey a specific message that I want to send, then it wouldn’t work, so I’ll need to go out and actually purchase the picture. It’s specifically important with social media. Twitter has become super, super visual. If you go through the Twitter app on mobile, it’s super visual, so photos play a big role.

Would SEO Content Be Okay Or Should You Use The Research Quality Content For An Affiliate Money Site?

Bradley: Okay, Dominick’s up. What’s up, Dominick? He says, “I need some good content for an affiliate money site. I’ve tried Natasha Nixon, but it’s a little pricey. Would SEO content be okay or should I use the research quality content?”

No, if it’s for a money site, I would recommend that you do authority content because the SEO content is exactly what I just mentioned about a content farm. That’s what it is. It’s spun shit. It’s garbage. I can tell you that. That’s to be used for link building and stuff like that. It’s not money site content. I could tell you that even the authority content that you purchase sometimes isn’t going to be very good.

For the most part, I’ve had good experiences with Natasha Nixon for authority content, but the last article I got was complete garbage. It was for Mario’s Cab Service for the GMB Pro case study, and it was complete garbage. I ordered a 1500 word authority content article, paid like $120 for it, and it was complete garbage. I had to go through and manually edit. If I had time, I would’ve requested a rewrite, but I didn’t because I wanted to get it up, so I just edited about 500 or 600 words of it myself and then used that as the actual GMB website article.

Again, guys, remember, your best bet, Dominick, if you need really good authority type content or money site content on a regular basis would be to hire your own writer from Upwork or something. That is a much better way than going to the content producers. Honestly, you’re better off developing a one on one relationship with an individual writer.

Here’s the thing. Well, most of my writers are now curators, but I still can rely on them for article writing at times, but most of the stuff we do is like I said, curating for blog posts and such. The idea is once you’ve developed a relationship with a particular writer, you get to know their voice, so to speak and how they write, and you can help to mold or shape how you want them to write for particular clients, for example. That’s the benefit of doing it.

One of the other benefits of having a relationship with an individual writer is that a lot of times, you get better treatment. You don’t have to wait in queue for a week to get a piece of content back, that kind of stuff. You can have direct message. I use Upwork a lot. There’s desktop notifications and all that kind of stuff, so I recommend doing that.

If you’re going to buy it from a content farm, Natasha Nixon being one of them, then authority content is your better bet. It is a bit more expensive, but again, for money sites, I don’t recommend putting up any kind of SEO articles because they’re literally trash. It’s junk. You yourself will spend more time editing them and making them readable than it’s worth. If that’s the case, why not just write it yourself? Anybody want to comment on that?

Hernan: Yeah. Real quick, I totally agree with what you’re saying, Bradley, in terms of having someone that you can always refer to, even further if you’re offering this on a regular basis. I think that there’s some types of professionals, if you would, or some types of work that you always need stuff done, for example, graphic design, that you would be better off just hiring somebody to do graphic design.

For example, on our end, we hire a graphic designer. He would take over the entire graphic design side of things. He would do thumbnails for YouTube. He would do this and he would do that. He already knows how we work and what types of things we want and if we need a logo, we ask him for it, and if we need banners, sometimes he would do it.

I think that’s part of the team that you want to start putting together. That’s part of the team because you’re providing service and if you’re providing content creation services for your clients, that’s something that you really want to have in mind. For example, if you’re doing, I don’t know, video services, right, you’re doing YouTube services, maybe you need a video editor or maybe you need the tools to actually provide the client with a good service. That will position yourself as a much more valuable asset because you have the tools.

It’s not like you’re getting out there and grabbing the content, the articles, the logos from what everyone else is doing. You become a much more valuable asset because you’re developing your own team. I think that having that long-term relationship and having that long-term view when it comes to the collaborators that work with you, people that help you, helps a lot, helps you save time, money, and helps you position yourself better.

Bradley: Yeah, and the last thing about that I want to mention is I said earlier about you get to know a writer’s voice, and that’s good because especially if you’re providing content for your clients, then you already know what the quality is going to be. When you buy content from places like content farms or a Natasha Nixon, even when you’re buying the authority content which costs more money, you don’t know which writer’s going to get it, so you don’t know what the quality’s going to be like.

The tone of the writing can be different from article to article, can be vastly different. If you’re providing content for webpages, not posts, but pages for client sites, you want consistency in tone because you don’t want one page to have a tone that’s vastly different than another page, because it would be off putting to a visitor. Again, you get to know how the writer writes. You get to come to expect a certain level of quality, a certain tone, a certain voice to speak. That kind of stuff makes you more confident in being able to sell content marketing, right? Good question there, Dom. A great question, actually.

Vincent, doesn’t look much of a question. Let’s see if there’s a comment somewhere. No. Okay, so, well, congratulations. I don’t know what this means.

Adam: Oh, you’ll see it in a minute. He posted after that.

Does Adding A PR Link Helps In Generating Review Snippets Of A GMB Review Page?

Bradley: Okay, cool, cool. Let’s see. “Hey guys. Do you know if adding a PR link to our GMB review page will cause our GMB listing to show a review snippet as shown below?”

No. Adding a PR link to your review page, no. This is a maps thing. You have to have I think five, at least it used to be, you had to have a minimum of five ratings for the stars to show. I think that’s still the case. This is a maps listing that you show here in the picture, so that’s not something that we can manipulate by adding code because we can’t add code to the maps profile.

You can on a website. You can have structured data for review schema, but we can’t do that in the maps profile. The maps profile will show review stars once you have a total of five reviews. Whatever the star ratings are is irrelevant. Your ratings stars will show up once you have a total of five reviews. Does that make sense? That’s it. It’s not something that you can force or trigger by linking to it or adding code because you can’t edit the code of the GMB or maps profile like you could on a website, right? You just need to get five reviews.

Who Do You Recommend For Google Phone Verified Accounts?

Okay, Jim’s up. He says, “Hey, SM team. I’m glad you were able to hang out during the holiday week.” Yeah, us, too. We’ve only missed one in 191 episodes and it was a scheduled miss. “I know you’ve spoken about Google phone verified accounts in the past a lot, but I was wondering who you’d recommend of late. Also, is it worth paying $3 per account for aged accounts instead of 35 cent per newer account? Have you had better ratio on sites sticking with the older accounts?”

I buy aged accounts for very particular projects. Let’s put it this way. I’ve bought some aged accounts. I haven’t tested, I haven’t setup an actual test to test a brand new account versus an aged account anytime in the last three or four years, so I don’t know if having an aged account really makes a difference or not. I can’t tell definitively.

People seem to think it does make a difference. There’s probably some evidence out there to support that. I would just assume that that may be the case. For very particular accounts or projects, campaigns, whatever, I will sometimes buy the aged accounts and I’ll pay as much as $50 per account depending on how old it is. I’ve bought some 12 year old created in 2006 Google accounts and I’ve paid as much as $50 per account for those, and then I still had one of them terminated rather quickly, which pissed me off.

I can’t tell you, Jim, whether it’s really worth it or not. Maybe some other people have some data to prove one way or the other. I don’t. Usually, guys, we try to test everything to give you a definitive answer and this is something I have not tested. Adam, or excuse me, Hernan and or Marco, have either of you have any data to back up one way or the other?

Hernan: No, not on my end, honestly.

Marco: No, I don’t think it makes a difference.

Bradley: Okay. Yeah, I didn’t think so. Honestly, I know people say it does. Jim, I would say proceed at your own risk, whichever way you want, but this is the guy that I’m recommending right now for my aged accounts. [inaudible 00:35:52] is his name. At least that’s what I think it is, BulkPVA.com. I still use him. He’s really responsive on Skype if you connect with him on Skype, and if you go to contact, I think his Skype username is right there. Yeah, it is, BulkPVA.com. You can email him, all that. Just tell him I sent you. He knows because I’ve referred a lot of people to him.

He usually takes very good care of us, as well as anytime accounts get terminated and stuff, if they’re new, obviously if you have accounts terminated two weeks after he delivers them to you, that’s your fault, but if they’re within three days, within 72 hours or something like that, see, look, it takes 24 to 72 hours to deliver each order. Let’s see. After delivery of accounts, if the account is banned within 48 hours, replacements will be given to you.

What I do is whenever we order a new batch, and a lot of these, I buy the double phone verified YouTube accounts, and we do that because we do a lot of video spam for clients and all kinds of stuff, and I’ve got a VA that runs a video spam tool, Ab’s Video Carpet Blitz tool. We have to have dozens, if not 100 plus YouTube accounts at all times. Obviously, because we’re doing a shit ton of spam, a lot of accounts get terminated from overuse, and so I buy accounts from this guy all the time.

What I do is my VA will go in and immediately open up Browseo and just start adding profiles and logging in to bind it to his IP, but they each have their own browsing session because they’re all separated or segregated via Browseo, which you can do that with Ghost Browser, I think is another one. It doesn’t have to be Browseo, guys. It doesn’t matter. All I’m saying is the best way to get these accounts to stick is to bind them to your IP, but make sure they have their own unique browsing session in history.

Start allowing cookies to accrue and search history and allow Google and the websites that that profile visits start to build a customer profile, like an avatar or whatever, for that particular profile. In other words, you want it to look real, and so one of the things that I’ve found is these bulk accounts, when you buy them, if you do a hard reset on your browser to clear all cache and cookies and then log into four, five, six accounts from the same IP all from a 100% virgin browsing session each time you do it, that’s going to look spammy and those accounts tend to get terminated.

If you log into each of them, even from the same IP, as long as they have their own unique browsing sessions that maintain, they stay, in other words they don’t get wiped clean and then use that same IP to log into another profile, with Browseo or Ghost Browser or any number of those apps that do that that will keep browsing sessions per profile, that’s a much better way to do it. That tends not to trigger the red flags that do from using 100% clean browsing sessions each time. Hopefully that makes sense. This is the guy I still recommend. Just tell him I sent you only because he tends to take care of the people that we send to him. You get put the top of his priority list, all right? That was another good question.

Would You Recommend Making The Least Number Of Location Pages For Each Facebook Accounts?

Oh, cool, we’re almost out of time, almost out of questions. Marco says from YouTube, [inaudible 00:39:23], “For multiple location websites, I know normally you guys recommend having one ring of social media that is going to syndicate posts, but in Facebook, you can have multiple location pages linked to one account. Would you recommend making at least the Facebook accounts for every location at least?”

Yeah, you can. Honestly, I would, because multiple location businesses should each have their own Facebook page. Each location should have its own Facebook page, so yeah, absolutely. What I was talking about was a branded Tumblr, a branded Blogger, a branded WordPress, and all the other web twos and stuff that we syndicate and we use as part of the syndication networks. You really only need one branded network that you can publish content to from the root domain, from the blog that’s typically going to be on the root domain. Essentially you can silo the root domain to have categories for each one of the locations.

Let’s say you got six locations. I would set up a category for each location, and then what I would do is publish content, just publish posts from the blog on the root site, make sure it’s the correct category selected. When you’re targeting, let’s say location number one, you’re going to optimize the content and have the call to action link, the link that you’re going to be linking to that sub-domain site or location page, whatever, however you’ve got it configured, but that’s going to be selected and placed into that location category, which helps to optimize it. You can do that for each location from the root blog. You don’t need to have a separation syndication network for each location, but Facebook pages, you can have a separate location page and I would encourage that because that’s a powerful citation.

That’s the thing, guys. When it comes to any of the [inaudible 00:41:20]. I’m sorry. I’ll come back to that question, Vincent. I got sidetracked. The other thing about this is if you have a particular location that is not responding as well to the blog post, the syndication from the root domain, then you can always go in and setup a location specific syndication network where you would just use the same branding, but you would add a local modifier.

In other words, if it’s Joe’s Plumbing and there’s six locations and one of them happens to be, I don’t know, Fairfax, Virginia, then if he has a Joe’s Plumbing syndication network that he’s using to blog for all of the locations, but Fairfax, Virginia isn’t really responding as well to the blogs from the root domain, then you could put a Joe’s Plumbing Fairfax syndication network up and then syndicate content directly from that particular category on the root domain to just that network, or you could even transfer and put a separate blog on that location specific site, if that makes sense.

Guys, remember, categories in WordPress do have their own feeds. You can get a category feed, so you could essentially use the root domain for let’s say if you had six locations, you could literally have six location, so brand plus location modifier networks, and have six individual category RSS feeds each triggering their own geo-specific network. Does that make sense?

Again, you can get really complex with this stuff. I like to keep one branded syndication network to try to accomplish what I desire for all of the locations because that’s less work and it’s easier. I like easy. I like efficiency, but you can make it complicated or add additional geo networks specific to a location when needed, but lastly, like I mentioned, as far as the actual Facebook page, I would have a location page for each location, absolutely, because it’s a very powerful citation.

You could also create location pages on LinkedIn, Crunchbase, if you’re using Crunchbase, which you should because Crunchbase is a very powerful citation as part of the semantic database. What I would recommend with Crunchbase is setup an organization and then you setup sub-locations for each location, which you can link to individually. That becomes very, very powerful. That’s a good question, though.

Vincent said, “The line below reviews that has the blue icon, it’s a review snippet.” Yeah, but that’s something that Google pulls in automatically. That’s not something that you can force. This is a Google Maps listing, Vincent. You can’t manipulate this. Google decides what they’re going to list and show right here, not you. That’s not something that we have the option to edit right now or to change.

Those reviews that are pulled in, like the snippet from a review, that’s just what Google determines that they’re going to pull in and display to the searcher, the user, the Google user. That’s it. It’s not something that you can edit. You can’t force that. Google just does that, at least as far as I know, you can’t. If I’m wrong, I’m sure somebody will correct me. Okay, well, should we give it another minute and see if any other questions come in or should we just wrap up a little bit early?

Adam: I think we should give them a minute because I know there’s definitely a lag, but I want to talk a little bit more about the live event in October.

Bradley: Okay.

Adam: We narrowed it down. It’s going to be in Washington DC like we said, which honestly, I’m kind of pumped about because when we first thought of that, the first thing I thought about was heat and humidity, but I realized it’s going to be in the middle of October and it’s going to be freaking awesome there. You can speak to that. That’s a great time of year around there, isn’t it?

Bradley: Absolutely. It should be really nice. There’s a ton of stuff to do in Washington DC. Besides our event, we’re going to have a VIP event I believe, which we’re going to have to find something good to do. DC, it’s the nation’s capital, right? There’s a lot of stuff to do that.

Adam: Yeah. You’re within striking distance of a lot of stuff, so if you come join us, if you can take a couple days on either side, maybe go do something. If you’re traveling, there’s a lot of neat stuff in that area to do.

Bradley: Yeah. Yeah, there is. Okay, well, I don’t see any other questions coming in, guys. It’s Fourth of July holiday week. For those of you in the US, happy Fourth of July, and go get a cold beer.

Adam: Those of you in England, I’m not watching the game, but hopefully England’s doing well in the soccer match I guess it is right now. I’m going to check that out, and then yeah, I hope everyone has a great Fourth of July. I’m going to head out and enjoy that tomorrow.

Bradley: I’m still working tomorrow for a few hours in the morning. I’ve got to coach Crossfit for two hours in the morning, and then I’m going to work for a couple hours before I go heavily drink.

Marco: Well, England is still sweating.

Hernan: [inaudible 00:46:14] penalties. Very fun. Thank you guys.

Bradley: All right guys. See you later. Happy Fourth.

Marco: Bye everyone.

Chris: Bye.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 191 published first on your-t1-blog-url https://ift.tt/2BP3z4t July 09, 2018 at 09:07PM Semantic Mastery https://ift.tt/2rWKl8L

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 191

Click on the video above to watch Episode 191 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 https://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

  Announcement

Adam: Hey everybody. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts, episode 191, the question where I guarantee it, if you’re watching this, you can get your question answered, because right now there are almost no questions because of a little error that somebody made. It’s not important who, but let’s go and say hello to everyone real quick. Hopefully, you’re getting an announcement on YouTube or you’re getting a notification. You might be watching this later, in which case, just ignore all this stuff about people making mistakes. Chris, how you doing, man?

Chris: Good. Happy to have summer finally in Europe.

Adam: Oh, nice. It’s finally warming up there?

Chris: Yep.

Adam: Good deal, good deal. Hernan, how about you? Is it nice and cold down there?

Hernan: Yeah. Over here, it’s freezing, man. I’m freezing my ass and overdressed, whatever, but I’m super excited to be here anyway, so that doesn’t stop us.

Adam: Marco, you’re not freezing your ass off, are you?

Marco: Never. Guys, for some reason, we’re not transmitting this Hangout into the Google Plus page. It’s still 190.

Bradley: That’s my fault. Standby.

Adam: Got you. Well, we won’t ask Bradley how he’s doing, because I don’t want to divide up his attention, but we do have a few announcements. Real quick, I wanted to say we’re going to put the link on the page and you’ll be able to find it in the description if you’re watching this later on YouTube, but our live event is a go, The Semantic Mastery Live.

October, the weekend of October 20th, 21st, we’ve already announced one of the special guest speakers. In addition to seeing all of our lovely faces at some point during the event, also Jeffrey Smith of SEO Boot Camp will be joining us and we’re going to have a couple more that we’re holding back.

We’re teasing it a little bit, but that is a go, so I’ll pop the link on here if you want to go and grab your ticket now. Ticket prices are definitely going to go up as time goes on. We want to help out the people who jump on this early and it is capped at a total of 25. Don’t put it off too long. It will be in the Washington DC area and we’re getting ready to lock down our event venue probably in the next week or two.

Bradley: Page is updated.

Adam: All right. As far as other announcements, you guys, we got a lot. I’m going to pass it off. Marco, is there anything we want to say specifically?

Marco: No. We’re moving forward, guys. The Google My Business auto-poster is ready. It has some awesome features. People have a long way to catch up. I know there’s some stuff being put out. It’s [inaudible 00:02:42]. You can get an RSS feed on anyone who’s in Syndication Academy or knows about us. You know how wicked RSS feeds can be, how they can help amplify your content, how they can help you with backlinks, but the most interesting thing we’re doing is we’re pulling in or we should have the ability in the next few days to pull in the RSS feed from the website so that all you would literally have to do is post from your website and you can amplify that content into post. If not, we do have the auto-poster, where you can go in and setup posts well ahead of time.

We also have YouTube views. That’s currently working. It’s working really well to push up videos, to get it ranked. Now, of course, once you start pushing videos, you should continue pushing videos to it to keep it ranked until it picks up its own steam. It’ll pick up steam and stay where it’s supposed to stay. It’ll stay ranked. The great thing about this is that since it’s real people, they’ll interact with your channel, so they’ll send all kinds of signals.

I keep telling people, the caveat in this is that you have to send them to a quality video. I always ask the question, “What’s a quality video?” Well, a quality video, if you look at your competition as a video that has a bunch of likes, it has a bunch of watch time, it has a bunch of subscribers, that’s a quality video. Look at what your competition is doing for that keyword and you mimic that, but do them one better. Better production, a better speaker, better audio quality, whatever it is that you need to do to grab the attention of your viewers.

There’s so many things coming. Video carpet bomb is coming. We were just talking about it. The done for you Google My Business services, that’s coming. The VA is almost trained. I’m working with her daily on this task. Cora reports are going to be available. What else do we have? Drive Stacks, guys. Drive Stacks, the Semantic Mastery way, with my original VA, the VA that I originally trained will be available through our marketplace. Market, it’s coming. Just stay tuned. Keep coming back and we’ll have news as everything develops, but we hope to have at least some of the products available by the end of the week. That’ll be on you to send the email to let people know, “Hey, it’s ready, so go get it.”

Adam: Awesome. Sorry about that. I was muted real quick. Also, I wanted to let everyone know, if you missed the webinar, we have a webinar replay. I’m not going to post the link here because if you’re on our email list, then you are very special and you’re going to get a link to check out the bundle, but there was a great webinar on Monday going into detail about how you can use some of the most powerful training that we have and really combine that.

We’re going to have some more information coming out about that. We’ll just post the link so you can go and grab that if you’re interested in taking advantage. It’s a special Fourth of July kind of holiday offer, and then we’ll have a little bit, like I said, of followup in the coming days. A lot of people are taking some time off, heading out to the beach, doing whatever. If you got some time you can squeak away from the family or make an excuse, you might want to go check out the replay over the next couple of days.

Bradley: I can tell having changed Hump Day Hangouts from Wednesday to Tuesday for this week, we’ve got a lot less viewers on it right now than we typically do, so it’s just timing. I’m glad that unfortunately, we didn’t have all the questions directed to the right place this time. That’s on our end, but we got a few questions. Do we have any other announcements, guys?

Adam: I’m good. How about you guys?

Hernan: I just wanted to reiterate that go ahead and grab your tickets for the [inaudible 00:06:51] Live 2018 because it’s going to depend on that. It’s going to depend on that. I’m really looking forward to seeing you guys, so yeah, I just wanted to repeat that once again.

Adam: Okay, cool.

Bradley: That’s it. We can get into it, huh?

Adam: Yeah, let’s do it.

Bradley: Let’s do it. All right, well, we don’t have a lot of questions, so we’re hoping that some of you guys that are here have some questions and you post them on the page. Again, that was our fault, but it is what it is, so we’re going to run with what we got. I know Adam posted a couple questions that he yanked from one of the Facebook groups, so we’ll start with those. I’ll grab the screen.

Is It Possible To Spread Authority To Multiple Root Domains From One Authority Domain Via Subdomain Redirects?

All right, so from the Facebook group. “Looking for insights on an idea. I wanted to test this, but asking is more efficient. Is the following possible? I have site.com and site.com has authority.” IDA, DR, okay. “I have a sub-domain on site.com, subdomain1.site.com. Sub-domain carries authority from site, correct?” Carry domain authority, but not necessarily page authority, but you’re right.

“Can I create a redirect from subdomain1.site.com to secondsite.com while site.com stays live and then secondsite.com gets authority from subdomain1.site.com?” Questions like this are hard to read. “Both secondsite.com and site have authority. In other words, is it possible to spread authority to multiple domains from one authority domain via sub-domain redirects?” Yes. “I’m doubting this works, but also read some things that indicate it might work.”

It does work. It does absolutely work. There’s a little bit of a loss. That’s called domain authority manipulation, guys. That’s like 2012 stuff. That’s the stuff that we did that worked really freaking well in like 2012, ‘13 timeframe. There’s still a little bit of benefit to pushing domain authority, guys, but honestly, you can set that up. It will work. There’s a little bit of a loss between redirects when pushing domain authority. It will absolutely increase your domain authority from your sub-domain that you direct to another root domain.

My point is, I’m not sure what your end goal is. Why do you want to push this domain authority to that other domain? Domain authority manipulation as a ranking factor is almost obsolete. I guess there might be some benefit to it, but you have to have really high DA numbers for that to really have an effect. It’s much more about relevancy than it is about domain metrics, which are proprietary metrics, right? Marco, I’ll let you comment on that a little bit, but again, look, if you want to do it, yes, it will help to boost domain authority from the second site.

There is a little bit of a loss, so what I’m saying is if you’ve got a 42 domain authority on your root domain and you try to push that over to a second site via sub-domain or any way you want to do it, it really doesn’t matter, but via a sub-domain redirect, you’ll likely fall somewhere in the 30s, the mid 30s with domain authority. It’s not going to happen overnight. When I used to do a lot of domain authority manipulation, we used to do a lot of it. The maws numbers would refresh, I can’t remember, I think it was every other month, every two months.

Marco: Every 90 days.

Bradley: Every 90 days. Okay. If we would do a redirect, like for example, we called it link laundering, and we’d do double 301 redirects from spam domains. We would go find expired domains that were on the closeout because they went through auction and they were really shitty, spammy domains. A lot of the times, they’re Chinese domains that would have hundreds, sometimes thousands or even tens of thousands of sub-domains. The dropped domain would have tens of thousands, sometimes, anywhere between hundreds to tens of thousands of sub-domains.

This is what we used to do and it worked really well. We would go buy a domain, buy one of those domains, and then we would set up a redirect script, a catch all or wild card redirect via HT access. We’d point the domain to a host, a C panel, and then we would set up an HT access file that would do a wild card sub-domain redirect to whatever we wanted to, and we would push domain authority.

We would do what’s called a double 301 redirect, so we would redirect it through one domain first and then push it over to our final target URL. I’d get domains that had 55, 60 domain authority mostly because of all the accumulated domain authority from all the sub-domains, right? We’d do the redirect and then push it over to a brand new domain and I could get my domain authority to jump from one, which is a brand new registered domain, to mid-40s usually within one maws cycle refresh, but sometimes it would take two. It would take anywhere between 90 days, so three months, to six months, to see that kind of a push. Again, I’ve found over the years that using that is purely like a ranking method, which used to work phenomenally. It really is ineffective at this point.

The only thing I would suggest is like I said, or what I would add to this, is that if you have really high domain authority and you can push some of that to another domain, it will help it to respond better to other off page signals, but that’s about it. Again, it’s not something that I even bother doing anymore. I don’t even look at domain authority and page authority numbers anymore, honestly. If you want to do it, it will work. Marco, what are your comments on this?

Marco: I would say he’s better off concentrating on relevance. If they’re relevant, then you can throw DA and domain authority and page authority out the window and push relevance. You could even throw a Drive Stack. Wherever you’re directing, you could put a Drive Stack as buffer and redirect to the Drive Stack and the Drive Stack will then push the power over to the new site with even more relevance. In the Drive Stack, you could push just tons of relevance in there whether you want keyword relevance, what do you call it, keyword plus URL, brand plus keyword relevance. What you really want is that brand plus keyword relevance.

Bradley: Right.

Marco: What you want to become is you want to become the keyword for whatever that niche is, so when people start thinking about those keywords, they don’t necessarily think about the keywords, but they think about your brand. This is where I tell people, Coca-Cola, Xerox, Band-Aid, Scotch Tape, all of these people have done fabulous branding where they become the brand for those keywords.

I know it’s not simple to do and we don’t have the deep pockets, but a way to start doing that is by relevance. How we do it, how we take advantage of it is by going into a Drive Stack and creating all of that keyword relevance which relates to the brand, and then we push maybe [inaudible 00:14:11] which will flow into the website, or maybe we’ll go direct to the website. We’ll go to the Google My Business thing.

There are so many ways to take advantage of this, but you’re pushing relevance. Think metrics. DA is a third party metric. Trust flow and citation flow, third party metrics. We don’t bother with that. What we look for is relevance and as long as the on page is tight on both websites, they will both benefit.

I could go even further, but then I’d be getting stuff that’s only in RYS Academy Reloaded. I could start talking all kind of things about embeds and the nasty stuff that you can do with embeds, but again, as I always say, we’d be doing the people that pay for the information a disservice by giving it away for free.

Hernan: If I may add real quick, that was one of the main reasons, the spam, when we just throw spam on the domain, we’ll rank. We will get higher domain authority, or we would do the sub-domain manipulation and whatnot, and that was one of the reasons why we stopped paying attention that much to domain authority and page authority, because they were so easy to manipulate.

That’s why we migrated to [inaudible 00:15:28] initially, and then we had to develop, as Marco was saying, relevancy and trust and authority as our own metics, our own way of doing things, because it was so easy. Again, you would have these Chinese domains with, I don’t know, 60 domain authority, and they were all spam. That’s one of the reasons, one of the many reasons that we stopped going through those domains.

Also, because maws will start delaying the updates and whatnot, and at some point it became a lot like waiting the page rank update, the public page rank update from Google that would go out every month or so. It became like that, so we stopped paying attention to that altogether and we started focusing a lot more on rankings and actual results.

Bradley: Again, yeah, it’ll work, and what I would recommend if you were trying to push it a second site anyway, guys, remember, if you push domain authority to a sub-domain, it will benefit the entire domain. Remember, domain authority, it’s a site-wide or domain-wide, including all sub-domains, including all inner pages and posts, all of them will benefit from that, will receive the same domain authority.

Instead of pushing from a redirect to a secondsite.com, you could push to a non-indexed sub-domain on that secondsite.com, all right? You do that so that you can set up a sub-domain. You don’t even need to really put a piece of content up on it, but you could. You could set an HTML file to say no index or whatever, and then just point all of it to that specific sub-domain because it will benefit the root without people really being able to see what you’re doing.

Again, I really just think that’s a waste of time unless you’ve got some massive amount of authority on your first site that you’re trying to push, in case it would help a little bit, but you’d have to be really, really high domain authority numbers for that to make much difference now in my opinion based on how the algorithm works now.

Do You Pay For Articles Or Use A Plugin To Pull In Content?

All right, Adam, the next one that he posted was, “Do you guys pay for articles or use a plugin to pull in content? Looking for an alternative for test site than buying articles.” Yeah, content curation. We have a training course specifically all about that. It’s what I’ve been using. I had to figure out a way to develop content for my clients that was cost-effective and efficient without having to be subject matter experts, so I developed a process years ago that I’ve been using ever since 2012.

We’ve got it as a product right now called Content Kingpin, but that’s the same exact content production process that I used for my own agency and countless amount of our members and students have also implemented that into their business for their primary content methods. We just get across the board good results from even our members that have implemented it, as well, or adopted that process, because it works.

It’s basically hands-free content marketing. You could teach a VA to do it, and they don’t have to be subject matter experts. All they have to do is be able to identify and locate content, authority content or just good, relevant content about whatever topic they’re going to be blogging about and then organizing that content in a logical manner and injecting a small amount of their own commentary. That content is more efficient and way better than any sort of shitty content, farmed content that you could buy from the dime a dozen content farms that are out there, that is just spun, rehashed garbage.

Guys, that’s all the content farms do. They don’t write original content. Even if they do, they’re not subject matter experts. If they are, you’re going to pay a premium for it, but even then, a lot of times, guys, all they do is do mashups where they’ll go, scrape five or 10 articles or whatever about whatever topic it is that you requested the article for, and then they’ll put bits and pieces of each article, put them through a spinner, and sometimes they’ll manually edit the spin text or the output file to where it’s a little bit more readable, but a lot of those content farms, you’ll get a lot of errors and stuff that you can clearly see that a spinner was used and they didn’t take the time to manually edit it.

My point is you’re not really buying original content from content farms, anyway. You’re buying garbage. You’re much better off using curated content where you can reference and cite other people’s authority content that is highly relevant from subject matter experts and you’re giving them credit via the attribution link. You’re citing the source, which is required and ethical. It’s the ethical thing to do.

Now, you’ve got good content from subject matter experts that you’re quoting on your own site, giving them credit, and injecting your own commentary. Again, a VA can do that. That’s why we call it Content Kingpin Hands-Free Content Marketing, because it truly is. You can generate a stream or revenue just from selling content marketing services and managing it. It just requires a very, very small amount of management.

Again, that training, Content Kingpin, teaches exactly how to hire the VAs, what to look for, what type of output production you should expect, what to pay them, how to manage it, all of that, guys. All of that is covered in great detail in that course. I highly recommend anybody that needs content for their clients or their own assets, their own digital assets, check that out because it’s the exact same method we use, all right?

Do We Have To Worry About Stock Photo Copyright Issues When Posting To Social Media Like Twitter?

Jeff, what’s up, Jeff? He says, “Do we have to worry about stock photo copyright issues when posting to social media, like Twitter, the same way we do with our website?” I don’t know, Jeff. I wish I did. I wish I had definitive answer. Maybe somebody else on here knows. Anybody?

Hernan: I had some issues when it comes to posting on Facebook, so yeah, short answer is yeah, because I had to take down an ad that was performing super well just because I was lazy and I didn’t check the stock photos stuff. The actual owner of the photo contacted me and said, “Hey dude, you need to take off the ad,” and I lost the entire social proof and everything on the Facebook side of things.

Yeah, short answer is yes because you can get in trouble. It doesn’t really matter if you’re using it on Twitter, Google. Google, maybe you would have a bigger exposure because you’re being indexed, but on Twitter, people can still see it, right? I think it’s just a matter of photos are still an asset, so it’s like you saying a piece of a song or a piece of a movie, something like that, all of that is copyrighted. You need to have that in mind, no matter where you’re using it.

When you’re doing it on your website, you’re a bit more exposed because anyone can get access to that, while on Twitter it’s not the case, but just to avoid issues, I would say don’t do it. Plus, there are so many deals and having stock photos has become really, really cheap. If you go to [inaudible 00:22:51] for example, you can get deals, like, I don’t know, for 100 photos for 10 bucks or something like that. It’s not even worth the trouble of getting through it.

Bradley: Yeah. Yeah, and usually for my clients, what I have them do is I use StockFresh.com. That’s our primary stock photo site, and so I just have my clients go setup an account or I set it up for them in their name and then I send them the login details and then they go in and fund it by just purchasing credits. We usually purchase 100 credits at a time. I think it’s $79 or something like that at Stock Fresh. It’s not bad. It’s decent.

Every couple of months or so, my curators, my VAs who are doing all of the content marketing for my clients will contact me and say, “Hey, we need this account refilled,” and I’ll just contact the client and say, “Hey, I need you to add another $100, refill the account with credits.” That’s it. That’s how it works, and that’s just to be safe.

That’s because I’ve been hit with extortion letters from Getty Images and their various subsidiaries and I’ve had to pay fines, copyright fines, settlement fees, basically for not having each client having their own licenses. In other words, even if I had my own account for my marketing agency with stock photos, if I published those stock photos on clients’ websites, the client needs to have a license for that photo. Even though I did it on their behalf, I was the license holder, not the client.

I’ve had to pay settlement fees for copyright infringement issues for client sites that they received the extortion letter, but I paid it on their behalf because it was my fault for not having them setup properly. That’s why I talk about that, again, in the Content Kingpin training that I was just talking about, I go into great detail about all of that because it’s very, very important. I would follow Hernan’s advice about social media and really try to have proper licensing for photos that you’re using.

Hernan: Yeah. Yeah, I would do that, too, and for example, there’s some websites that they’re explicitly royalty-free photos like Flickr, for example. You can search for royalty-free photos, then I think Unsplash.com, Unsplash.com. There’s another called Pixabay.com. Those are all royalty-free photos, but you’re limited to what you can find over there.

Sometimes for ads it will work, but if I’m looking for a specific way or specific photo that will convey a specific message that I want to send, then it wouldn’t work, so I’ll need to go out and actually purchase the picture. It’s specifically important with social media. Twitter has become super, super visual. If you go through the Twitter app on mobile, it’s super visual, so photos play a big role.

Would SEO Content Be Okay Or Should You Use The Research Quality Content For An Affiliate Money Site?

Bradley: Okay, Dominick’s up. What’s up, Dominick? He says, “I need some good content for an affiliate money site. I’ve tried Natasha Nixon, but it’s a little pricey. Would SEO content be okay or should I use the research quality content?”

No, if it’s for a money site, I would recommend that you do authority content because the SEO content is exactly what I just mentioned about a content farm. That’s what it is. It’s spun shit. It’s garbage. I can tell you that. That’s to be used for link building and stuff like that. It’s not money site content. I could tell you that even the authority content that you purchase sometimes isn’t going to be very good.

For the most part, I’ve had good experiences with Natasha Nixon for authority content, but the last article I got was complete garbage. It was for Mario’s Cab Service for the GMB Pro case study, and it was complete garbage. I ordered a 1500 word authority content article, paid like $120 for it, and it was complete garbage. I had to go through and manually edit. If I had time, I would’ve requested a rewrite, but I didn’t because I wanted to get it up, so I just edited about 500 or 600 words of it myself and then used that as the actual GMB website article.

Again, guys, remember, your best bet, Dominick, if you need really good authority type content or money site content on a regular basis would be to hire your own writer from Upwork or something. That is a much better way than going to the content producers. Honestly, you’re better off developing a one on one relationship with an individual writer.

Here’s the thing. Well, most of my writers are now curators, but I still can rely on them for article writing at times, but most of the stuff we do is like I said, curating for blog posts and such. The idea is once you’ve developed a relationship with a particular writer, you get to know their voice, so to speak and how they write, and you can help to mold or shape how you want them to write for particular clients, for example. That’s the benefit of doing it.

One of the other benefits of having a relationship with an individual writer is that a lot of times, you get better treatment. You don’t have to wait in queue for a week to get a piece of content back, that kind of stuff. You can have direct message. I use Upwork a lot. There’s desktop notifications and all that kind of stuff, so I recommend doing that.

If you’re going to buy it from a content farm, Natasha Nixon being one of them, then authority content is your better bet. It is a bit more expensive, but again, for money sites, I don’t recommend putting up any kind of SEO articles because they’re literally trash. It’s junk. You yourself will spend more time editing them and making them readable than it’s worth. If that’s the case, why not just write it yourself? Anybody want to comment on that?

Hernan: Yeah. Real quick, I totally agree with what you’re saying, Bradley, in terms of having someone that you can always refer to, even further if you’re offering this on a regular basis. I think that there’s some types of professionals, if you would, or some types of work that you always need stuff done, for example, graphic design, that you would be better off just hiring somebody to do graphic design.

For example, on our end, we hire a graphic designer. He would take over the entire graphic design side of things. He would do thumbnails for YouTube. He would do this and he would do that. He already knows how we work and what types of things we want and if we need a logo, we ask him for it, and if we need banners, sometimes he would do it.

I think that’s part of the team that you want to start putting together. That’s part of the team because you’re providing service and if you’re providing content creation services for your clients, that’s something that you really want to have in mind. For example, if you’re doing, I don’t know, video services, right, you’re doing YouTube services, maybe you need a video editor or maybe you need the tools to actually provide the client with a good service. That will position yourself as a much more valuable asset because you have the tools.

It’s not like you’re getting out there and grabbing the content, the articles, the logos from what everyone else is doing. You become a much more valuable asset because you’re developing your own team. I think that having that long-term relationship and having that long-term view when it comes to the collaborators that work with you, people that help you, helps a lot, helps you save time, money, and helps you position yourself better.

Bradley: Yeah, and the last thing about that I want to mention is I said earlier about you get to know a writer’s voice, and that’s good because especially if you’re providing content for your clients, then you already know what the quality is going to be. When you buy content from places like content farms or a Natasha Nixon, even when you’re buying the authority content which costs more money, you don’t know which writer’s going to get it, so you don’t know what the quality’s going to be like.

The tone of the writing can be different from article to article, can be vastly different. If you’re providing content for webpages, not posts, but pages for client sites, you want consistency in tone because you don’t want one page to have a tone that’s vastly different than another page, because it would be off putting to a visitor. Again, you get to know how the writer writes. You get to come to expect a certain level of quality, a certain tone, a certain voice to speak. That kind of stuff makes you more confident in being able to sell content marketing, right? Good question there, Dom. A great question, actually.

Vincent, doesn’t look much of a question. Let’s see if there’s a comment somewhere. No. Okay, so, well, congratulations. I don’t know what this means.

Adam: Oh, you’ll see it in a minute. He posted after that.

Does Adding A PR Link Helps In Generating Review Snippets Of A GMB Review Page?

Bradley: Okay, cool, cool. Let’s see. “Hey guys. Do you know if adding a PR link to our GMB review page will cause our GMB listing to show a review snippet as shown below?”

No. Adding a PR link to your review page, no. This is a maps thing. You have to have I think five, at least it used to be, you had to have a minimum of five ratings for the stars to show. I think that’s still the case. This is a maps listing that you show here in the picture, so that’s not something that we can manipulate by adding code because we can’t add code to the maps profile.

You can on a website. You can have structured data for review schema, but we can’t do that in the maps profile. The maps profile will show review stars once you have a total of five reviews. Whatever the star ratings are is irrelevant. Your ratings stars will show up once you have a total of five reviews. Does that make sense? That’s it. It’s not something that you can force or trigger by linking to it or adding code because you can’t edit the code of the GMB or maps profile like you could on a website, right? You just need to get five reviews.

Who Do You Recommend For Google Phone Verified Accounts?

Okay, Jim’s up. He says, “Hey, SM team. I’m glad you were able to hang out during the holiday week.” Yeah, us, too. We’ve only missed one in 191 episodes and it was a scheduled miss. “I know you’ve spoken about Google phone verified accounts in the past a lot, but I was wondering who you’d recommend of late. Also, is it worth paying $3 per account for aged accounts instead of 35 cent per newer account? Have you had better ratio on sites sticking with the older accounts?”

I buy aged accounts for very particular projects. Let’s put it this way. I’ve bought some aged accounts. I haven’t tested, I haven’t setup an actual test to test a brand new account versus an aged account anytime in the last three or four years, so I don’t know if having an aged account really makes a difference or not. I can’t tell definitively.

People seem to think it does make a difference. There’s probably some evidence out there to support that. I would just assume that that may be the case. For very particular accounts or projects, campaigns, whatever, I will sometimes buy the aged accounts and I’ll pay as much as $50 per account depending on how old it is. I’ve bought some 12 year old created in 2006 Google accounts and I’ve paid as much as $50 per account for those, and then I still had one of them terminated rather quickly, which pissed me off.

I can’t tell you, Jim, whether it’s really worth it or not. Maybe some other people have some data to prove one way or the other. I don’t. Usually, guys, we try to test everything to give you a definitive answer and this is something I have not tested. Adam, or excuse me, Hernan and or Marco, have either of you have any data to back up one way or the other?

Hernan: No, not on my end, honestly.

Marco: No, I don’t think it makes a difference.

Bradley: Okay. Yeah, I didn’t think so. Honestly, I know people say it does. Jim, I would say proceed at your own risk, whichever way you want, but this is the guy that I’m recommending right now for my aged accounts. [inaudible 00:35:52] is his name. At least that’s what I think it is, BulkPVA.com. I still use him. He’s really responsive on Skype if you connect with him on Skype, and if you go to contact, I think his Skype username is right there. Yeah, it is, BulkPVA.com. You can email him, all that. Just tell him I sent you. He knows because I’ve referred a lot of people to him.

He usually takes very good care of us, as well as anytime accounts get terminated and stuff, if they’re new, obviously if you have accounts terminated two weeks after he delivers them to you, that’s your fault, but if they’re within three days, within 72 hours or something like that, see, look, it takes 24 to 72 hours to deliver each order. Let’s see. After delivery of accounts, if the account is banned within 48 hours, replacements will be given to you.

What I do is whenever we order a new batch, and a lot of these, I buy the double phone verified YouTube accounts, and we do that because we do a lot of video spam for clients and all kinds of stuff, and I’ve got a VA that runs a video spam tool, Ab’s Video Carpet Blitz tool. We have to have dozens, if not 100 plus YouTube accounts at all times. Obviously, because we’re doing a shit ton of spam, a lot of accounts get terminated from overuse, and so I buy accounts from this guy all the time.

What I do is my VA will go in and immediately open up Browseo and just start adding profiles and logging in to bind it to his IP, but they each have their own browsing session because they’re all separated or segregated via Browseo, which you can do that with Ghost Browser, I think is another one. It doesn’t have to be Browseo, guys. It doesn’t matter. All I’m saying is the best way to get these accounts to stick is to bind them to your IP, but make sure they have their own unique browsing session in history.

Start allowing cookies to accrue and search history and allow Google and the websites that that profile visits start to build a customer profile, like an avatar or whatever, for that particular profile. In other words, you want it to look real, and so one of the things that I’ve found is these bulk accounts, when you buy them, if you do a hard reset on your browser to clear all cache and cookies and then log into four, five, six accounts from the same IP all from a 100% virgin browsing session each time you do it, that’s going to look spammy and those accounts tend to get terminated.

If you log into each of them, even from the same IP, as long as they have their own unique browsing sessions that maintain, they stay, in other words they don’t get wiped clean and then use that same IP to log into another profile, with Browseo or Ghost Browser or any number of those apps that do that that will keep browsing sessions per profile, that’s a much better way to do it. That tends not to trigger the red flags that do from using 100% clean browsing sessions each time. Hopefully that makes sense. This is the guy I still recommend. Just tell him I sent you only because he tends to take care of the people that we send to him. You get put the top of his priority list, all right? That was another good question.

Would You Recommend Making The Least Number Of Location Pages For Each Facebook Accounts?

Oh, cool, we’re almost out of time, almost out of questions. Marco says from YouTube, [inaudible 00:39:23], “For multiple location websites, I know normally you guys recommend having one ring of social media that is going to syndicate posts, but in Facebook, you can have multiple location pages linked to one account. Would you recommend making at least the Facebook accounts for every location at least?”

Yeah, you can. Honestly, I would, because multiple location businesses should each have their own Facebook page. Each location should have its own Facebook page, so yeah, absolutely. What I was talking about was a branded Tumblr, a branded Blogger, a branded WordPress, and all the other web twos and stuff that we syndicate and we use as part of the syndication networks. You really only need one branded network that you can publish content to from the root domain, from the blog that’s typically going to be on the root domain. Essentially you can silo the root domain to have categories for each one of the locations.

Let’s say you got six locations. I would set up a category for each location, and then what I would do is publish content, just publish posts from the blog on the root site, make sure it’s the correct category selected. When you’re targeting, let’s say location number one, you’re going to optimize the content and have the call to action link, the link that you’re going to be linking to that sub-domain site or location page, whatever, however you’ve got it configured, but that’s going to be selected and placed into that location category, which helps to optimize it. You can do that for each location from the root blog. You don’t need to have a separation syndication network for each location, but Facebook pages, you can have a separate location page and I would encourage that because that’s a powerful citation.

That’s the thing, guys. When it comes to any of the [inaudible 00:41:20]. I’m sorry. I’ll come back to that question, Vincent. I got sidetracked. The other thing about this is if you have a particular location that is not responding as well to the blog post, the syndication from the root domain, then you can always go in and setup a location specific syndication network where you would just use the same branding, but you would add a local modifier.

In other words, if it’s Joe’s Plumbing and there’s six locations and one of them happens to be, I don’t know, Fairfax, Virginia, then if he has a Joe’s Plumbing syndication network that he’s using to blog for all of the locations, but Fairfax, Virginia isn’t really responding as well to the blogs from the root domain, then you could put a Joe’s Plumbing Fairfax syndication network up and then syndicate content directly from that particular category on the root domain to just that network, or you could even transfer and put a separate blog on that location specific site, if that makes sense.

Guys, remember, categories in WordPress do have their own feeds. You can get a category feed, so you could essentially use the root domain for let’s say if you had six locations, you could literally have six location, so brand plus location modifier networks, and have six individual category RSS feeds each triggering their own geo-specific network. Does that make sense?

Again, you can get really complex with this stuff. I like to keep one branded syndication network to try to accomplish what I desire for all of the locations because that’s less work and it’s easier. I like easy. I like efficiency, but you can make it complicated or add additional geo networks specific to a location when needed, but lastly, like I mentioned, as far as the actual Facebook page, I would have a location page for each location, absolutely, because it’s a very powerful citation.

You could also create location pages on LinkedIn, Crunchbase, if you’re using Crunchbase, which you should because Crunchbase is a very powerful citation as part of the semantic database. What I would recommend with Crunchbase is setup an organization and then you setup sub-locations for each location, which you can link to individually. That becomes very, very powerful. That’s a good question, though.

Vincent said, “The line below reviews that has the blue icon, it’s a review snippet.” Yeah, but that’s something that Google pulls in automatically. That’s not something that you can force. This is a Google Maps listing, Vincent. You can’t manipulate this. Google decides what they’re going to list and show right here, not you. That’s not something that we have the option to edit right now or to change.

Those reviews that are pulled in, like the snippet from a review, that’s just what Google determines that they’re going to pull in and display to the searcher, the user, the Google user. That’s it. It’s not something that you can edit. You can’t force that. Google just does that, at least as far as I know, you can’t. If I’m wrong, I’m sure somebody will correct me. Okay, well, should we give it another minute and see if any other questions come in or should we just wrap up a little bit early?

Adam: I think we should give them a minute because I know there’s definitely a lag, but I want to talk a little bit more about the live event in October.

Bradley: Okay.

Adam: We narrowed it down. It’s going to be in Washington DC like we said, which honestly, I’m kind of pumped about because when we first thought of that, the first thing I thought about was heat and humidity, but I realized it’s going to be in the middle of October and it’s going to be freaking awesome there. You can speak to that. That’s a great time of year around there, isn’t it?

Bradley: Absolutely. It should be really nice. There’s a ton of stuff to do in Washington DC. Besides our event, we’re going to have a VIP event I believe, which we’re going to have to find something good to do. DC, it’s the nation’s capital, right? There’s a lot of stuff to do that.

Adam: Yeah. You’re within striking distance of a lot of stuff, so if you come join us, if you can take a couple days on either side, maybe go do something. If you’re traveling, there’s a lot of neat stuff in that area to do.

Bradley: Yeah. Yeah, there is. Okay, well, I don’t see any other questions coming in, guys. It’s Fourth of July holiday week. For those of you in the US, happy Fourth of July, and go get a cold beer.

Adam: Those of you in England, I’m not watching the game, but hopefully England’s doing well in the soccer match I guess it is right now. I’m going to check that out, and then yeah, I hope everyone has a great Fourth of July. I’m going to head out and enjoy that tomorrow.

Bradley: I’m still working tomorrow for a few hours in the morning. I’ve got to coach Crossfit for two hours in the morning, and then I’m going to work for a couple hours before I go heavily drink.

Marco: Well, England is still sweating.

Hernan: [inaudible 00:46:14] penalties. Very fun. Thank you guys.

Bradley: All right guys. See you later. Happy Fourth.

Marco: Bye everyone.

Chris: Bye.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 191 published first on your-t1-blog-url

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 191

Click on the video above to watch Episode 191 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 https://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

  Announcement

Adam: Hey everybody. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts, episode 191, the question where I guarantee it, if you’re watching this, you can get your question answered, because right now there are almost no questions because of a little error that somebody made. It’s not important who, but let’s go and say hello to everyone real quick. Hopefully, you’re getting an announcement on YouTube or you’re getting a notification. You might be watching this later, in which case, just ignore all this stuff about people making mistakes. Chris, how you doing, man?

Chris: Good. Happy to have summer finally in Europe.

Adam: Oh, nice. It’s finally warming up there?

Chris: Yep.

Adam: Good deal, good deal. Hernan, how about you? Is it nice and cold down there?

Hernan: Yeah. Over here, it’s freezing, man. I’m freezing my ass and overdressed, whatever, but I’m super excited to be here anyway, so that doesn’t stop us.

Adam: Marco, you’re not freezing your ass off, are you?

Marco: Never. Guys, for some reason, we’re not transmitting this Hangout into the Google Plus page. It’s still 190.

Bradley: That’s my fault. Standby.

Adam: Got you. Well, we won’t ask Bradley how he’s doing, because I don’t want to divide up his attention, but we do have a few announcements. Real quick, I wanted to say we’re going to put the link on the page and you’ll be able to find it in the description if you’re watching this later on YouTube, but our live event is a go, The Semantic Mastery Live.

October, the weekend of October 20th, 21st, we’ve already announced one of the special guest speakers. In addition to seeing all of our lovely faces at some point during the event, also Jeffrey Smith of SEO Boot Camp will be joining us and we’re going to have a couple more that we’re holding back.

We’re teasing it a little bit, but that is a go, so I’ll pop the link on here if you want to go and grab your ticket now. Ticket prices are definitely going to go up as time goes on. We want to help out the people who jump on this early and it is capped at a total of 25. Don’t put it off too long. It will be in the Washington DC area and we’re getting ready to lock down our event venue probably in the next week or two.

Bradley: Page is updated.

Adam: All right. As far as other announcements, you guys, we got a lot. I’m going to pass it off. Marco, is there anything we want to say specifically?

Marco: No. We’re moving forward, guys. The Google My Business auto-poster is ready. It has some awesome features. People have a long way to catch up. I know there’s some stuff being put out. It’s [inaudible 00:02:42]. You can get an RSS feed on anyone who’s in Syndication Academy or knows about us. You know how wicked RSS feeds can be, how they can help amplify your content, how they can help you with backlinks, but the most interesting thing we’re doing is we’re pulling in or we should have the ability in the next few days to pull in the RSS feed from the website so that all you would literally have to do is post from your website and you can amplify that content into post. If not, we do have the auto-poster, where you can go in and setup posts well ahead of time.

We also have YouTube views. That’s currently working. It’s working really well to push up videos, to get it ranked. Now, of course, once you start pushing videos, you should continue pushing videos to it to keep it ranked until it picks up its own steam. It’ll pick up steam and stay where it’s supposed to stay. It’ll stay ranked. The great thing about this is that since it’s real people, they’ll interact with your channel, so they’ll send all kinds of signals.

I keep telling people, the caveat in this is that you have to send them to a quality video. I always ask the question, “What’s a quality video?” Well, a quality video, if you look at your competition as a video that has a bunch of likes, it has a bunch of watch time, it has a bunch of subscribers, that’s a quality video. Look at what your competition is doing for that keyword and you mimic that, but do them one better. Better production, a better speaker, better audio quality, whatever it is that you need to do to grab the attention of your viewers.

There’s so many things coming. Video carpet bomb is coming. We were just talking about it. The done for you Google My Business services, that’s coming. The VA is almost trained. I’m working with her daily on this task. Cora reports are going to be available. What else do we have? Drive Stacks, guys. Drive Stacks, the Semantic Mastery way, with my original VA, the VA that I originally trained will be available through our marketplace. Market, it’s coming. Just stay tuned. Keep coming back and we’ll have news as everything develops, but we hope to have at least some of the products available by the end of the week. That’ll be on you to send the email to let people know, “Hey, it’s ready, so go get it.”

Adam: Awesome. Sorry about that. I was muted real quick. Also, I wanted to let everyone know, if you missed the webinar, we have a webinar replay. I’m not going to post the link here because if you’re on our email list, then you are very special and you’re going to get a link to check out the bundle, but there was a great webinar on Monday going into detail about how you can use some of the most powerful training that we have and really combine that.

We’re going to have some more information coming out about that. We’ll just post the link so you can go and grab that if you’re interested in taking advantage. It’s a special Fourth of July kind of holiday offer, and then we’ll have a little bit, like I said, of followup in the coming days. A lot of people are taking some time off, heading out to the beach, doing whatever. If you got some time you can squeak away from the family or make an excuse, you might want to go check out the replay over the next couple of days.

Bradley: I can tell having changed Hump Day Hangouts from Wednesday to Tuesday for this week, we’ve got a lot less viewers on it right now than we typically do, so it’s just timing. I’m glad that unfortunately, we didn’t have all the questions directed to the right place this time. That’s on our end, but we got a few questions. Do we have any other announcements, guys?

Adam: I’m good. How about you guys?

Hernan: I just wanted to reiterate that go ahead and grab your tickets for the [inaudible 00:06:51] Live 2018 because it’s going to depend on that. It’s going to depend on that. I’m really looking forward to seeing you guys, so yeah, I just wanted to repeat that once again.

Adam: Okay, cool.

Bradley: That’s it. We can get into it, huh?

Adam: Yeah, let’s do it.

Bradley: Let’s do it. All right, well, we don’t have a lot of questions, so we’re hoping that some of you guys that are here have some questions and you post them on the page. Again, that was our fault, but it is what it is, so we’re going to run with what we got. I know Adam posted a couple questions that he yanked from one of the Facebook groups, so we’ll start with those. I’ll grab the screen.

Is It Possible To Spread Authority To Multiple Root Domains From One Authority Domain Via Subdomain Redirects?

All right, so from the Facebook group. “Looking for insights on an idea. I wanted to test this, but asking is more efficient. Is the following possible? I have site.com and site.com has authority.” IDA, DR, okay. “I have a sub-domain on site.com, subdomain1.site.com. Sub-domain carries authority from site, correct?” Carry domain authority, but not necessarily page authority, but you’re right.

“Can I create a redirect from subdomain1.site.com to secondsite.com while site.com stays live and then secondsite.com gets authority from subdomain1.site.com?” Questions like this are hard to read. “Both secondsite.com and site have authority. In other words, is it possible to spread authority to multiple domains from one authority domain via sub-domain redirects?” Yes. “I’m doubting this works, but also read some things that indicate it might work.”

It does work. It does absolutely work. There’s a little bit of a loss. That’s called domain authority manipulation, guys. That’s like 2012 stuff. That’s the stuff that we did that worked really freaking well in like 2012, ‘13 timeframe. There’s still a little bit of benefit to pushing domain authority, guys, but honestly, you can set that up. It will work. There’s a little bit of a loss between redirects when pushing domain authority. It will absolutely increase your domain authority from your sub-domain that you direct to another root domain.

My point is, I’m not sure what your end goal is. Why do you want to push this domain authority to that other domain? Domain authority manipulation as a ranking factor is almost obsolete. I guess there might be some benefit to it, but you have to have really high DA numbers for that to really have an effect. It’s much more about relevancy than it is about domain metrics, which are proprietary metrics, right? Marco, I’ll let you comment on that a little bit, but again, look, if you want to do it, yes, it will help to boost domain authority from the second site.

There is a little bit of a loss, so what I’m saying is if you’ve got a 42 domain authority on your root domain and you try to push that over to a second site via sub-domain or any way you want to do it, it really doesn’t matter, but via a sub-domain redirect, you’ll likely fall somewhere in the 30s, the mid 30s with domain authority. It’s not going to happen overnight. When I used to do a lot of domain authority manipulation, we used to do a lot of it. The maws numbers would refresh, I can’t remember, I think it was every other month, every two months.

Marco: Every 90 days.

Bradley: Every 90 days. Okay. If we would do a redirect, like for example, we called it link laundering, and we’d do double 301 redirects from spam domains. We would go find expired domains that were on the closeout because they went through auction and they were really shitty, spammy domains. A lot of the times, they’re Chinese domains that would have hundreds, sometimes thousands or even tens of thousands of sub-domains. The dropped domain would have tens of thousands, sometimes, anywhere between hundreds to tens of thousands of sub-domains.

This is what we used to do and it worked really well. We would go buy a domain, buy one of those domains, and then we would set up a redirect script, a catch all or wild card redirect via HT access. We’d point the domain to a host, a C panel, and then we would set up an HT access file that would do a wild card sub-domain redirect to whatever we wanted to, and we would push domain authority.

We would do what’s called a double 301 redirect, so we would redirect it through one domain first and then push it over to our final target URL. I’d get domains that had 55, 60 domain authority mostly because of all the accumulated domain authority from all the sub-domains, right? We’d do the redirect and then push it over to a brand new domain and I could get my domain authority to jump from one, which is a brand new registered domain, to mid-40s usually within one maws cycle refresh, but sometimes it would take two. It would take anywhere between 90 days, so three months, to six months, to see that kind of a push. Again, I’ve found over the years that using that is purely like a ranking method, which used to work phenomenally. It really is ineffective at this point.

The only thing I would suggest is like I said, or what I would add to this, is that if you have really high domain authority and you can push some of that to another domain, it will help it to respond better to other off page signals, but that’s about it. Again, it’s not something that I even bother doing anymore. I don’t even look at domain authority and page authority numbers anymore, honestly. If you want to do it, it will work. Marco, what are your comments on this?

Marco: I would say he’s better off concentrating on relevance. If they’re relevant, then you can throw DA and domain authority and page authority out the window and push relevance. You could even throw a Drive Stack. Wherever you’re directing, you could put a Drive Stack as buffer and redirect to the Drive Stack and the Drive Stack will then push the power over to the new site with even more relevance. In the Drive Stack, you could push just tons of relevance in there whether you want keyword relevance, what do you call it, keyword plus URL, brand plus keyword relevance. What you really want is that brand plus keyword relevance.

Bradley: Right.

Marco: What you want to become is you want to become the keyword for whatever that niche is, so when people start thinking about those keywords, they don’t necessarily think about the keywords, but they think about your brand. This is where I tell people, Coca-Cola, Xerox, Band-Aid, Scotch Tape, all of these people have done fabulous branding where they become the brand for those keywords.

I know it’s not simple to do and we don’t have the deep pockets, but a way to start doing that is by relevance. How we do it, how we take advantage of it is by going into a Drive Stack and creating all of that keyword relevance which relates to the brand, and then we push maybe [inaudible 00:14:11] which will flow into the website, or maybe we’ll go direct to the website. We’ll go to the Google My Business thing.

There are so many ways to take advantage of this, but you’re pushing relevance. Think metrics. DA is a third party metric. Trust flow and citation flow, third party metrics. We don’t bother with that. What we look for is relevance and as long as the on page is tight on both websites, they will both benefit.

I could go even further, but then I’d be getting stuff that’s only in RYS Academy Reloaded. I could start talking all kind of things about embeds and the nasty stuff that you can do with embeds, but again, as I always say, we’d be doing the people that pay for the information a disservice by giving it away for free.

Hernan: If I may add real quick, that was one of the main reasons, the spam, when we just throw spam on the domain, we’ll rank. We will get higher domain authority, or we would do the sub-domain manipulation and whatnot, and that was one of the reasons why we stopped paying attention that much to domain authority and page authority, because they were so easy to manipulate.

That’s why we migrated to [inaudible 00:15:28] initially, and then we had to develop, as Marco was saying, relevancy and trust and authority as our own metics, our own way of doing things, because it was so easy. Again, you would have these Chinese domains with, I don’t know, 60 domain authority, and they were all spam. That’s one of the reasons, one of the many reasons that we stopped going through those domains.

Also, because maws will start delaying the updates and whatnot, and at some point it became a lot like waiting the page rank update, the public page rank update from Google that would go out every month or so. It became like that, so we stopped paying attention to that altogether and we started focusing a lot more on rankings and actual results.

Bradley: Again, yeah, it’ll work, and what I would recommend if you were trying to push it a second site anyway, guys, remember, if you push domain authority to a sub-domain, it will benefit the entire domain. Remember, domain authority, it’s a site-wide or domain-wide, including all sub-domains, including all inner pages and posts, all of them will benefit from that, will receive the same domain authority.

Instead of pushing from a redirect to a secondsite.com, you could push to a non-indexed sub-domain on that secondsite.com, all right? You do that so that you can set up a sub-domain. You don’t even need to really put a piece of content up on it, but you could. You could set an HTML file to say no index or whatever, and then just point all of it to that specific sub-domain because it will benefit the root without people really being able to see what you’re doing.

Again, I really just think that’s a waste of time unless you’ve got some massive amount of authority on your first site that you’re trying to push, in case it would help a little bit, but you’d have to be really, really high domain authority numbers for that to make much difference now in my opinion based on how the algorithm works now.

Do You Pay For Articles Or Use A Plugin To Pull In Content?

All right, Adam, the next one that he posted was, “Do you guys pay for articles or use a plugin to pull in content? Looking for an alternative for test site than buying articles.” Yeah, content curation. We have a training course specifically all about that. It’s what I’ve been using. I had to figure out a way to develop content for my clients that was cost-effective and efficient without having to be subject matter experts, so I developed a process years ago that I’ve been using ever since 2012.

We’ve got it as a product right now called Content Kingpin, but that’s the same exact content production process that I used for my own agency and countless amount of our members and students have also implemented that into their business for their primary content methods. We just get across the board good results from even our members that have implemented it, as well, or adopted that process, because it works.

It’s basically hands-free content marketing. You could teach a VA to do it, and they don’t have to be subject matter experts. All they have to do is be able to identify and locate content, authority content or just good, relevant content about whatever topic they’re going to be blogging about and then organizing that content in a logical manner and injecting a small amount of their own commentary. That content is more efficient and way better than any sort of shitty content, farmed content that you could buy from the dime a dozen content farms that are out there, that is just spun, rehashed garbage.

Guys, that’s all the content farms do. They don’t write original content. Even if they do, they’re not subject matter experts. If they are, you’re going to pay a premium for it, but even then, a lot of times, guys, all they do is do mashups where they’ll go, scrape five or 10 articles or whatever about whatever topic it is that you requested the article for, and then they’ll put bits and pieces of each article, put them through a spinner, and sometimes they’ll manually edit the spin text or the output file to where it’s a little bit more readable, but a lot of those content farms, you’ll get a lot of errors and stuff that you can clearly see that a spinner was used and they didn’t take the time to manually edit it.

My point is you’re not really buying original content from content farms, anyway. You’re buying garbage. You’re much better off using curated content where you can reference and cite other people’s authority content that is highly relevant from subject matter experts and you’re giving them credit via the attribution link. You’re citing the source, which is required and ethical. It’s the ethical thing to do.

Now, you’ve got good content from subject matter experts that you’re quoting on your own site, giving them credit, and injecting your own commentary. Again, a VA can do that. That’s why we call it Content Kingpin Hands-Free Content Marketing, because it truly is. You can generate a stream or revenue just from selling content marketing services and managing it. It just requires a very, very small amount of management.

Again, that training, Content Kingpin, teaches exactly how to hire the VAs, what to look for, what type of output production you should expect, what to pay them, how to manage it, all of that, guys. All of that is covered in great detail in that course. I highly recommend anybody that needs content for their clients or their own assets, their own digital assets, check that out because it’s the exact same method we use, all right?

Do We Have To Worry About Stock Photo Copyright Issues When Posting To Social Media Like Twitter?

Jeff, what’s up, Jeff? He says, “Do we have to worry about stock photo copyright issues when posting to social media, like Twitter, the same way we do with our website?” I don’t know, Jeff. I wish I did. I wish I had definitive answer. Maybe somebody else on here knows. Anybody?

Hernan: I had some issues when it comes to posting on Facebook, so yeah, short answer is yeah, because I had to take down an ad that was performing super well just because I was lazy and I didn’t check the stock photos stuff. The actual owner of the photo contacted me and said, “Hey dude, you need to take off the ad,” and I lost the entire social proof and everything on the Facebook side of things.

Yeah, short answer is yes because you can get in trouble. It doesn’t really matter if you’re using it on Twitter, Google. Google, maybe you would have a bigger exposure because you’re being indexed, but on Twitter, people can still see it, right? I think it’s just a matter of photos are still an asset, so it’s like you saying a piece of a song or a piece of a movie, something like that, all of that is copyrighted. You need to have that in mind, no matter where you’re using it.

When you’re doing it on your website, you’re a bit more exposed because anyone can get access to that, while on Twitter it’s not the case, but just to avoid issues, I would say don’t do it. Plus, there are so many deals and having stock photos has become really, really cheap. If you go to [inaudible 00:22:51] for example, you can get deals, like, I don’t know, for 100 photos for 10 bucks or something like that. It’s not even worth the trouble of getting through it.

Bradley: Yeah. Yeah, and usually for my clients, what I have them do is I use StockFresh.com. That’s our primary stock photo site, and so I just have my clients go setup an account or I set it up for them in their name and then I send them the login details and then they go in and fund it by just purchasing credits. We usually purchase 100 credits at a time. I think it’s $79 or something like that at Stock Fresh. It’s not bad. It’s decent.

Every couple of months or so, my curators, my VAs who are doing all of the content marketing for my clients will contact me and say, “Hey, we need this account refilled,” and I’ll just contact the client and say, “Hey, I need you to add another $100, refill the account with credits.” That’s it. That’s how it works, and that’s just to be safe.

That’s because I’ve been hit with extortion letters from Getty Images and their various subsidiaries and I’ve had to pay fines, copyright fines, settlement fees, basically for not having each client having their own licenses. In other words, even if I had my own account for my marketing agency with stock photos, if I published those stock photos on clients’ websites, the client needs to have a license for that photo. Even though I did it on their behalf, I was the license holder, not the client.

I’ve had to pay settlement fees for copyright infringement issues for client sites that they received the extortion letter, but I paid it on their behalf because it was my fault for not having them setup properly. That’s why I talk about that, again, in the Content Kingpin training that I was just talking about, I go into great detail about all of that because it’s very, very important. I would follow Hernan’s advice about social media and really try to have proper licensing for photos that you’re using.

Hernan: Yeah. Yeah, I would do that, too, and for example, there’s some websites that they’re explicitly royalty-free photos like Flickr, for example. You can search for royalty-free photos, then I think Unsplash.com, Unsplash.com. There’s another called Pixabay.com. Those are all royalty-free photos, but you’re limited to what you can find over there.

Sometimes for ads it will work, but if I’m looking for a specific way or specific photo that will convey a specific message that I want to send, then it wouldn’t work, so I’ll need to go out and actually purchase the picture. It’s specifically important with social media. Twitter has become super, super visual. If you go through the Twitter app on mobile, it’s super visual, so photos play a big role.

Would SEO Content Be Okay Or Should You Use The Research Quality Content For An Affiliate Money Site?

Bradley: Okay, Dominick’s up. What’s up, Dominick? He says, “I need some good content for an affiliate money site. I’ve tried Natasha Nixon, but it’s a little pricey. Would SEO content be okay or should I use the research quality content?”

No, if it’s for a money site, I would recommend that you do authority content because the SEO content is exactly what I just mentioned about a content farm. That’s what it is. It’s spun shit. It’s garbage. I can tell you that. That’s to be used for link building and stuff like that. It’s not money site content. I could tell you that even the authority content that you purchase sometimes isn’t going to be very good.

For the most part, I’ve had good experiences with Natasha Nixon for authority content, but the last article I got was complete garbage. It was for Mario’s Cab Service for the GMB Pro case study, and it was complete garbage. I ordered a 1500 word authority content article, paid like $120 for it, and it was complete garbage. I had to go through and manually edit. If I had time, I would’ve requested a rewrite, but I didn’t because I wanted to get it up, so I just edited about 500 or 600 words of it myself and then used that as the actual GMB website article.

Again, guys, remember, your best bet, Dominick, if you need really good authority type content or money site content on a regular basis would be to hire your own writer from Upwork or something. That is a much better way than going to the content producers. Honestly, you’re better off developing a one on one relationship with an individual writer.

Here’s the thing. Well, most of my writers are now curators, but I still can rely on them for article writing at times, but most of the stuff we do is like I said, curating for blog posts and such. The idea is once you’ve developed a relationship with a particular writer, you get to know their voice, so to speak and how they write, and you can help to mold or shape how you want them to write for particular clients, for example. That’s the benefit of doing it.

One of the other benefits of having a relationship with an individual writer is that a lot of times, you get better treatment. You don’t have to wait in queue for a week to get a piece of content back, that kind of stuff. You can have direct message. I use Upwork a lot. There’s desktop notifications and all that kind of stuff, so I recommend doing that.

If you’re going to buy it from a content farm, Natasha Nixon being one of them, then authority content is your better bet. It is a bit more expensive, but again, for money sites, I don’t recommend putting up any kind of SEO articles because they’re literally trash. It’s junk. You yourself will spend more time editing them and making them readable than it’s worth. If that’s the case, why not just write it yourself? Anybody want to comment on that?

Hernan: Yeah. Real quick, I totally agree with what you’re saying, Bradley, in terms of having someone that you can always refer to, even further if you’re offering this on a regular basis. I think that there’s some types of professionals, if you would, or some types of work that you always need stuff done, for example, graphic design, that you would be better off just hiring somebody to do graphic design.

For example, on our end, we hire a graphic designer. He would take over the entire graphic design side of things. He would do thumbnails for YouTube. He would do this and he would do that. He already knows how we work and what types of things we want and if we need a logo, we ask him for it, and if we need banners, sometimes he would do it.

I think that’s part of the team that you want to start putting together. That’s part of the team because you’re providing service and if you’re providing content creation services for your clients, that’s something that you really want to have in mind. For example, if you’re doing, I don’t know, video services, right, you’re doing YouTube services, maybe you need a video editor or maybe you need the tools to actually provide the client with a good service. That will position yourself as a much more valuable asset because you have the tools.

It’s not like you’re getting out there and grabbing the content, the articles, the logos from what everyone else is doing. You become a much more valuable asset because you’re developing your own team. I think that having that long-term relationship and having that long-term view when it comes to the collaborators that work with you, people that help you, helps a lot, helps you save time, money, and helps you position yourself better.

Bradley: Yeah, and the last thing about that I want to mention is I said earlier about you get to know a writer’s voice, and that’s good because especially if you’re providing content for your clients, then you already know what the quality is going to be. When you buy content from places like content farms or a Natasha Nixon, even when you’re buying the authority content which costs more money, you don’t know which writer’s going to get it, so you don’t know what the quality’s going to be like.

The tone of the writing can be different from article to article, can be vastly different. If you’re providing content for webpages, not posts, but pages for client sites, you want consistency in tone because you don’t want one page to have a tone that’s vastly different than another page, because it would be off putting to a visitor. Again, you get to know how the writer writes. You get to come to expect a certain level of quality, a certain tone, a certain voice to speak. That kind of stuff makes you more confident in being able to sell content marketing, right? Good question there, Dom. A great question, actually.

Vincent, doesn’t look much of a question. Let’s see if there’s a comment somewhere. No. Okay, so, well, congratulations. I don’t know what this means.

Adam: Oh, you’ll see it in a minute. He posted after that.

Does Adding A PR Link Helps In Generating Review Snippets Of A GMB Review Page?

Bradley: Okay, cool, cool. Let’s see. “Hey guys. Do you know if adding a PR link to our GMB review page will cause our GMB listing to show a review snippet as shown below?”

No. Adding a PR link to your review page, no. This is a maps thing. You have to have I think five, at least it used to be, you had to have a minimum of five ratings for the stars to show. I think that’s still the case. This is a maps listing that you show here in the picture, so that’s not something that we can manipulate by adding code because we can’t add code to the maps profile.

You can on a website. You can have structured data for review schema, but we can’t do that in the maps profile. The maps profile will show review stars once you have a total of five reviews. Whatever the star ratings are is irrelevant. Your ratings stars will show up once you have a total of five reviews. Does that make sense? That’s it. It’s not something that you can force or trigger by linking to it or adding code because you can’t edit the code of the GMB or maps profile like you could on a website, right? You just need to get five reviews.

Who Do You Recommend For Google Phone Verified Accounts?

Okay, Jim’s up. He says, “Hey, SM team. I’m glad you were able to hang out during the holiday week.” Yeah, us, too. We’ve only missed one in 191 episodes and it was a scheduled miss. “I know you’ve spoken about Google phone verified accounts in the past a lot, but I was wondering who you’d recommend of late. Also, is it worth paying $3 per account for aged accounts instead of 35 cent per newer account? Have you had better ratio on sites sticking with the older accounts?”

I buy aged accounts for very particular projects. Let’s put it this way. I’ve bought some aged accounts. I haven’t tested, I haven’t setup an actual test to test a brand new account versus an aged account anytime in the last three or four years, so I don’t know if having an aged account really makes a difference or not. I can’t tell definitively.

People seem to think it does make a difference. There’s probably some evidence out there to support that. I would just assume that that may be the case. For very particular accounts or projects, campaigns, whatever, I will sometimes buy the aged accounts and I’ll pay as much as $50 per account depending on how old it is. I’ve bought some 12 year old created in 2006 Google accounts and I’ve paid as much as $50 per account for those, and then I still had one of them terminated rather quickly, which pissed me off.

I can’t tell you, Jim, whether it’s really worth it or not. Maybe some other people have some data to prove one way or the other. I don’t. Usually, guys, we try to test everything to give you a definitive answer and this is something I have not tested. Adam, or excuse me, Hernan and or Marco, have either of you have any data to back up one way or the other?

Hernan: No, not on my end, honestly.

Marco: No, I don’t think it makes a difference.

Bradley: Okay. Yeah, I didn’t think so. Honestly, I know people say it does. Jim, I would say proceed at your own risk, whichever way you want, but this is the guy that I’m recommending right now for my aged accounts. [inaudible 00:35:52] is his name. At least that’s what I think it is, BulkPVA.com. I still use him. He’s really responsive on Skype if you connect with him on Skype, and if you go to contact, I think his Skype username is right there. Yeah, it is, BulkPVA.com. You can email him, all that. Just tell him I sent you. He knows because I’ve referred a lot of people to him.

He usually takes very good care of us, as well as anytime accounts get terminated and stuff, if they’re new, obviously if you have accounts terminated two weeks after he delivers them to you, that’s your fault, but if they’re within three days, within 72 hours or something like that, see, look, it takes 24 to 72 hours to deliver each order. Let’s see. After delivery of accounts, if the account is banned within 48 hours, replacements will be given to you.

What I do is whenever we order a new batch, and a lot of these, I buy the double phone verified YouTube accounts, and we do that because we do a lot of video spam for clients and all kinds of stuff, and I’ve got a VA that runs a video spam tool, Ab’s Video Carpet Blitz tool. We have to have dozens, if not 100 plus YouTube accounts at all times. Obviously, because we’re doing a shit ton of spam, a lot of accounts get terminated from overuse, and so I buy accounts from this guy all the time.

What I do is my VA will go in and immediately open up Browseo and just start adding profiles and logging in to bind it to his IP, but they each have their own browsing session because they’re all separated or segregated via Browseo, which you can do that with Ghost Browser, I think is another one. It doesn’t have to be Browseo, guys. It doesn’t matter. All I’m saying is the best way to get these accounts to stick is to bind them to your IP, but make sure they have their own unique browsing session in history.

Start allowing cookies to accrue and search history and allow Google and the websites that that profile visits start to build a customer profile, like an avatar or whatever, for that particular profile. In other words, you want it to look real, and so one of the things that I’ve found is these bulk accounts, when you buy them, if you do a hard reset on your browser to clear all cache and cookies and then log into four, five, six accounts from the same IP all from a 100% virgin browsing session each time you do it, that’s going to look spammy and those accounts tend to get terminated.

If you log into each of them, even from the same IP, as long as they have their own unique browsing sessions that maintain, they stay, in other words they don’t get wiped clean and then use that same IP to log into another profile, with Browseo or Ghost Browser or any number of those apps that do that that will keep browsing sessions per profile, that’s a much better way to do it. That tends not to trigger the red flags that do from using 100% clean browsing sessions each time. Hopefully that makes sense. This is the guy I still recommend. Just tell him I sent you only because he tends to take care of the people that we send to him. You get put the top of his priority list, all right? That was another good question.

Would You Recommend Making The Least Number Of Location Pages For Each Facebook Accounts?

Oh, cool, we’re almost out of time, almost out of questions. Marco says from YouTube, [inaudible 00:39:23], “For multiple location websites, I know normally you guys recommend having one ring of social media that is going to syndicate posts, but in Facebook, you can have multiple location pages linked to one account. Would you recommend making at least the Facebook accounts for every location at least?”

Yeah, you can. Honestly, I would, because multiple location businesses should each have their own Facebook page. Each location should have its own Facebook page, so yeah, absolutely. What I was talking about was a branded Tumblr, a branded Blogger, a branded WordPress, and all the other web twos and stuff that we syndicate and we use as part of the syndication networks. You really only need one branded network that you can publish content to from the root domain, from the blog that’s typically going to be on the root domain. Essentially you can silo the root domain to have categories for each one of the locations.

Let’s say you got six locations. I would set up a category for each location, and then what I would do is publish content, just publish posts from the blog on the root site, make sure it’s the correct category selected. When you’re targeting, let’s say location number one, you’re going to optimize the content and have the call to action link, the link that you’re going to be linking to that sub-domain site or location page, whatever, however you’ve got it configured, but that’s going to be selected and placed into that location category, which helps to optimize it. You can do that for each location from the root blog. You don’t need to have a separation syndication network for each location, but Facebook pages, you can have a separate location page and I would encourage that because that’s a powerful citation.

That’s the thing, guys. When it comes to any of the [inaudible 00:41:20]. I’m sorry. I’ll come back to that question, Vincent. I got sidetracked. The other thing about this is if you have a particular location that is not responding as well to the blog post, the syndication from the root domain, then you can always go in and setup a location specific syndication network where you would just use the same branding, but you would add a local modifier.

In other words, if it’s Joe’s Plumbing and there’s six locations and one of them happens to be, I don’t know, Fairfax, Virginia, then if he has a Joe’s Plumbing syndication network that he’s using to blog for all of the locations, but Fairfax, Virginia isn’t really responding as well to the blogs from the root domain, then you could put a Joe’s Plumbing Fairfax syndication network up and then syndicate content directly from that particular category on the root domain to just that network, or you could even transfer and put a separate blog on that location specific site, if that makes sense.

Guys, remember, categories in WordPress do have their own feeds. You can get a category feed, so you could essentially use the root domain for let’s say if you had six locations, you could literally have six location, so brand plus location modifier networks, and have six individual category RSS feeds each triggering their own geo-specific network. Does that make sense?

Again, you can get really complex with this stuff. I like to keep one branded syndication network to try to accomplish what I desire for all of the locations because that’s less work and it’s easier. I like easy. I like efficiency, but you can make it complicated or add additional geo networks specific to a location when needed, but lastly, like I mentioned, as far as the actual Facebook page, I would have a location page for each location, absolutely, because it’s a very powerful citation.

You could also create location pages on LinkedIn, Crunchbase, if you’re using Crunchbase, which you should because Crunchbase is a very powerful citation as part of the semantic database. What I would recommend with Crunchbase is setup an organization and then you setup sub-locations for each location, which you can link to individually. That becomes very, very powerful. That’s a good question, though.

Vincent said, “The line below reviews that has the blue icon, it’s a review snippet.” Yeah, but that’s something that Google pulls in automatically. That’s not something that you can force. This is a Google Maps listing, Vincent. You can’t manipulate this. Google decides what they’re going to list and show right here, not you. That’s not something that we have the option to edit right now or to change.

Those reviews that are pulled in, like the snippet from a review, that’s just what Google determines that they’re going to pull in and display to the searcher, the user, the Google user. That’s it. It’s not something that you can edit. You can’t force that. Google just does that, at least as far as I know, you can’t. If I’m wrong, I’m sure somebody will correct me. Okay, well, should we give it another minute and see if any other questions come in or should we just wrap up a little bit early?

Adam: I think we should give them a minute because I know there’s definitely a lag, but I want to talk a little bit more about the live event in October.

Bradley: Okay.

Adam: We narrowed it down. It’s going to be in Washington DC like we said, which honestly, I’m kind of pumped about because when we first thought of that, the first thing I thought about was heat and humidity, but I realized it’s going to be in the middle of October and it’s going to be freaking awesome there. You can speak to that. That’s a great time of year around there, isn’t it?

Bradley: Absolutely. It should be really nice. There’s a ton of stuff to do in Washington DC. Besides our event, we’re going to have a VIP event I believe, which we’re going to have to find something good to do. DC, it’s the nation’s capital, right? There’s a lot of stuff to do that.

Adam: Yeah. You’re within striking distance of a lot of stuff, so if you come join us, if you can take a couple days on either side, maybe go do something. If you’re traveling, there’s a lot of neat stuff in that area to do.

Bradley: Yeah. Yeah, there is. Okay, well, I don’t see any other questions coming in, guys. It’s Fourth of July holiday week. For those of you in the US, happy Fourth of July, and go get a cold beer.

Adam: Those of you in England, I’m not watching the game, but hopefully England’s doing well in the soccer match I guess it is right now. I’m going to check that out, and then yeah, I hope everyone has a great Fourth of July. I’m going to head out and enjoy that tomorrow.

Bradley: I’m still working tomorrow for a few hours in the morning. I’ve got to coach Crossfit for two hours in the morning, and then I’m going to work for a couple hours before I go heavily drink.

Marco: Well, England is still sweating.

Hernan: [inaudible 00:46:14] penalties. Very fun. Thank you guys.

Bradley: All right guys. See you later. Happy Fourth.

Marco: Bye everyone.

Chris: Bye.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 191 published first on your-t1-blog-url