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gloriainalbis · 4 years

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Strangers

Part 3 - Grand Illusion (S1E1+S1E2)

Nathan Young x Reader Words: 4k Warnings: Swearing, mentions of sex and nudity, drugs Songs: Too Much On My Mind - The Kinks I Won’t Hurt You - The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band

“Where are you going, I don't mind I've killed my world and I've killed my time”

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Masterlist | Ao3

You’re just about done changing, closing your locker and stepping away to zip up the front of your jumpsuit and fix your hair. It’s just you, Nathan, Curtis, and Simon remaining when Nathan whistles and motions for everyone to huddle up. “So…” he begins seriously, an emotion one does not typically expect from Nathan. “If anyone asks what happened yesterday, we say nothin’, right? It’s just a completely normal day.” You nod in agreement as he looks at each of you in turn. Having left the locker room, you are now all standing together to await whatever new probation worker was sent to replace Tony after his mysterious disappearance. You try to look as normal as possible, leaning casually against a pillar and definitely not making any sideways glances at your fellow young offenders. It‘s hard to resist the urge.

A woman walks up to stand before you all, she looks to be about in her early thirties and is dressed simply but well. Her hair is dark, long, and some of it is pulled away from her face. She’s pretty, but by all accounts, a remarkably normal person. You assume she’s the new probation worker, and you’re right. “Gary and my colleague Tony have both been reported missing. Their families are very worried about them. Have you seen anything unusual? Anything at all?” Nathan raises his eyebrows and holds up a finger to catch her attention. “You saw something?” she asks. You desperately want to stop this. Nathan has just told you, moments ago, that you should act like nothing happened yesterday, and yet here he is. He probably isn’t going to tell her the truth, you can’t imagine him ratting everyone out like that, but you can’t imagine him saying anything that would make the situation better, either. “A few days ago…” Kelly shakes her head slightly, trying to get him to stop, and you try to catch his eye to send him a harrowing gaze, but he just barrels on. “I go into the toilets, Tony and Gary were in there. They’re butt naked.” You breathe a sigh of relief that luckily sounded remarkably close to exasperation, which is probably because it was. “Tony has Gary by his hair, like this, an’ he’s just doin’ him, doggy style!” He starts to thrust and grunt, and you put a hand to your cheek, half over your mouth to suppress your involuntary grin. What he’s doing was disgusting, but oddly entertaining. It’s like watching a trainwreck. “And Tony is like ‘Aaagh! Who’s your daddy? I’m your daddy, I’m Big Daddy!’” It’s vulgar, honestly. Nathan gets really into it, making crude motions and grunts, chanting, “Oh yeah, oh yeah, ooooh yeah!” before calling out “I’m daddy cool!” Tony would have presumably finished then, because Nathan stops thrusting to put his hands on his hips and return to his normal posture. “So I’m guessing they’ve ran away to continue their illicit homosexual affair. And I ask you, in this world of intolerance and prejudice, who are we, who are we to condemn them?” He’s on point with the social justice, but now is decidedly not the right time, place, or circumstances. The probation worker says nothing and just walks away. You reach out and shove Nathan. “What the everloving fuck was that?” He gasps indignantly. “I was just trying to act normal!” “If that’s your idea of normal, then there’s somethin’ seriously wrong in your head,” Kelly scolds. “I thought we already knew that,” Curtis agrees, earning a giggle from Alisha. You all congregate on the roof, standing together, overlooking the lake and office buildings on its far side. Ah, the charming sights of Wertham, an army of identical fifteen-story grey blocks. Nathan takes a drag from his cigarette before smiling, “Well, I think we got away from it.” “Do you actually believe that, or are you just really dumb?” Curtis asks sarcastically, and you snicker. “I actually believe that!” Nathan insists. You had just laughed at him, but there’s something in Nathan’s earnest voice that makes you want to believe it, too. “I mean I was there, right? I should have one of these bullshit powers.” “You can have mine,’ Kelly gripes. “You want to hear what people are thinkin’ about you?” “Not so much, no. I want something good, you know? Something from the A-list.” “Maybe you can fly,” Simon offers quietly. Nathan’s face lights up. “He’s not going to be able to fly,” Alisha reasons. “Yeah, there’s always someone who can fly, check it out!” His confidence in this proposition seems inordinately inflated. “We don’t need you trying to jump off buildings like superman to test it,” you add, knowing full well that Nathan could and would. “Ah, I won’t!” He walks over to a nearby chair, far away from the roof’s ledge, and climbs up. “This has no chance of working, right?” You lean in to whisper to Kelly. “None,” she agrees. Nathan leaps into the air, raising his arms up hopefully, but he just falls to the ground like a sack of bricks, except with the addition of a nasty smack. “Ow! No, that’s not it,” he groans, picking himself up with a childish expression of annoyance on his face. “So what happens now? Is this it?” Curtis asks, turning to look at everyone. “Are we gonna be like this forever?” “What if we’re meant to be, like, superheroes?” Now, you really do want to include Simon more, he seems like a genuinely nice, if chronically shy, person, but his suggestions today are horribly lacking. “You lot, superheroes?” Nathan asks, sounding more jealous than anything. Kelly looked worryingly contemplative, and you’re bothered by how well the story seems to fit. “No offense, but in what kind of fucked up world would that be allowed to happen?” “This world is pretty fucked up,” you point out. “I did not sign up for that,” Alisha exclaims. “Superheroes!” Nathan continues with the thinly-veiled jealousy. “I love this guy, you prick!” “What if there’s loads of people like us all over town?” Kelly askes, and she has a point. It had been a pretty large storm, you couldn’t be the only people who had seen or experienced it, right? Are there other people going about their normal, daily lives discovering their powers right now? “No,” Nathan scoffs, cigarette smoke billowing from his nose. “That kind of thing only happens in America. This will fade away. I’m telling you, by this time next week, it’ll be back to the same old boring shit.” Needless to say, this would not prove to be at all true. Your task that day is picking up litter, each of you are given a large plastic bag and trash grabber before being set loose on the city, to collect trash with reckless abandon! In reality, you probably won’t even stray far from the community center. As you follow along the edge of the lake, Nathan continues to complain about his lack of a cool new superhero ability. “And what? Because you’re all special and I’m not? Yeah, well I doubt it. You can think what you like, but I have a ‘superpower’” he uses air quotes and says the word in a comically high-pitched valley-girl voice. “I just need to find out what it is.” “Maybe you’re just super retarded!” Alisha proclaims, and a cursory glance at the rest of the group would tell you she isn’t the only one growing annoyed at him. “Maybe I’ve got a whole Spiderman vibe going on, you know?” he continues unabashed. “Maybe I can climb stuff and do spider shit.” “Yeah, cuz that makes perfect sense,” Curtis cuts in. “Why would you be able to climb stuff?” “I don’t know!” Nathan calls back. “How is it that you can turn back time, apparently? And weird kid can turn invisible?” He pokes Simon in the back of the head with his grabber. “It’s not like this whole situation is backed up by a wank-load of logic.” Later in the morning, you’ve moved all the way from right outside the community center to a tunnel under a nearby bridge. It’s a disturbingly gross place, but its inordinate abundance of trash has led you there, calling to be picked up and sent away to landfill. Curtis peers curiously at something he’s picked up with his grabbers, some sort of melted hunk of plastic. But as he peers, he notices something tucked into a corner not that far away. Something that looks fleshy and pink and remarkably human. “What is that?” he asks, voice dripping with disgust. You scrunch up your nose and move in to get a closer look. “Oh, god…” you groan. It’s a human man, completely naked, lying face down on the pavement. You are suitably disgusted. “Is he breathin’?” Kelly asks. Alisha strides forward without much hesitation and pokes his bare ass with her grabber. “Hey, nude guy!” she calls. “You’re naked!” Your eyes widen and everyone, yourself included lets out cries of protest as he rolls over to reveal himself, full-frontal. It’s not a pretty sight. Simon snapps a photo, you’re not exactly sure why, but documentation seems to be his response to everything so far. “Good lord!” Curtis protests, turning away. “Oh my god!” Alisha laughs, finding it funny more than anything else. Kelly actually turns around completely to avoid seeing any more of it. Nathan’s jaw, however, drops. Realization spreads over both of their faces and Nathan points an accusatory finger at the naked man before crying out, “You?!” The man stands up as fast as he can and bolts, but Nathan is outraged. “Hey!” He tries running after the man, but it’s too late. “Do you want to tell us who that was?” Curtis questions through a chorus of laughter. “He’s my mum’s– He lives with my mum.” He eyes everyone defensively. Alisha chuckles before proclaiming matter-of-factly, “Your stepdad has got a massive cock.” You snicker, even though you don’t want to have to think about it much. It was quite a disturbing image, even more so now that you know he’s close to Nathan’s mum. But… it was true. “Jesus!” Nathan cries in objection. “And he’s not my stepdad, alright?” You hold up your arms in mock surrender, “I assure you, I’m completely ready to forget about that picture, it should be purged from my mind.” Alisha leans closer to you and Kelly, guffawing. “Did you see that thing? That was like monster big!” She locks eyes with Nathan and hisses as if in pain, lowering her voice suggestively. “Your mum will hurt.” “La, la, la! Shut up!” He closes his eyes and literally sticks his fingers in his ears to block out her nasty comments. “Why’s he naked?” Kelly asks, turning to Nathan for the answers he doesn’t have. He gapes, trying to piece it all together, but Alisha speaks up before he can be given the chance. “Well he’s obviously some kind of pervert. Or he’s gay.” You wince at the presumptive, nay, offensive comment, not exactly fond of how it perpetuates harmful stereotypes. Curtis scoffs at her remark, “That follows.” “Well, he was cruising for rough trade!” she explains indignantly. “They love that shit!” “Oh, a little light homophobia? Go for it!” You have to agree with Curtis’ sarcastic reply here for a multitude of reasons, one of which being because you highly doubt Natha’s stepdad is secretly gay. “Or he could be a rapist,” Kelly muses with far too much nonchalance. “There’s loads of ‘em ‘round here.” “Maybe he’s a werewolf,” Simon posits seriously. Everyone sort of sneers at the idea and Nathan certainly isn’t pleased, exclaiming, “Twat!” “It’s what happens in films,” Simon tries to elaborate, growing visibly more nervous by the second. “You turn into a werewolf, you kill someone, an’ then you wake up somewhere naked… Like a zoo.” “He’s not a werewolf, alright?” Nathan protests hotly, defensiveness creeping into the edges of his voice. With the recent storm and all these odd powers, it’s all too likely that Simon’s right, or at the very least eerily close. “This guy is such a pussy, he needs my mum to open jars for him. I’m sure if he was a werewolf, he’d be able to open a jar of peanut butter for himself!” “What happens if the storm messed him up?” Kelly interjects. “Yeah,” you add, agreeing with her not only because it does make some sense, but also because you really want to bother Nathan, “he’s probably only been a werewolf for two days.” “What do you mean probably?” Nathan proclaims. His growing look of disbelief is incredibly amusing. “Well, Alisha had a point…” You look away and raise your eyebrows to insinuate what you mean. “Oh, fuckin’ hell, y/n! You, of all people?” he gapes, and you try not to laugh at his expression. This is far more fun for you than it should be. “Thank you!” Alisha cries, feeling vindicated by your agreement. It isn’t fun to say, but she wasn’t wrong. “That’s bollocks, the storm didn’t do nothin’ to him,” Nathan insists, but it’s starting to sound more like he’s trying to convince himself than you. “What are the chances?” The question hangs uncomfortably in the air. No one answers, and Nathan ends up just rolling his eyes and scoffing before stalking off and getting back to work, picking up trash. You take a quick shower at the community center before heading home, feeling pretty grimy from searching for and collecting trash all day. Toweling off and gathering your things, you wonder if Nathan’s still around. He walked home with you the past few days and you really did enjoy his company. You decide to take a cursory look around, running into Sally in the process. “Oh, y/n, why’re you still here?” She’d looked to be pretty nice, so you’re surprised by the scrutinizing and cold tone you can hear creeping up behind her words. “I decided to shower before heading home,” you explain, trying to keep your voice as level as possible to allay suspicion. “Have you seen Nathan around?” “Yeah, he was by some vending machines a few minutes ago,” she tells you. “Okay, thanks! Have a good one.” You give her a small wave as you turn down a nearby hall, wondering why her smile doesn’t feel genuine. After about five minutes of searching, you enter a large common area with a raised loft in one corner. It’s there you find Nathan, sitting on the floor with arms resting on the railing and legs dangling over the edge. He’s surprised to see you, suddenly sitting up straighter and adopting the expression of someone caught in a nefarious act. “Oh, Nathan! There you are.” You approach him on the ground below, looking up with a smile. “Y/n!” He looks pleased, but notably apprehensive. “I was just wonderin’ if you wanted to walk home with me?” you ask, growing increasingly suspicious. “Uuuuh, well, I don’t know...” It’s then that you notice the duffel bag and mattress behind him. “Wait, why do you have a mattress? And a bag?” You start to piece together a few pieces of this puzzle. “I’ve only known you for three days, I don’t think we really need to know the intimate details of each other’s personal lives,” he stalls, leaning back to push the bag out of your view. But you aren’t about to give up that easy. “Screw that, what about being bonded by our shared traumatic experience?” You thought you were becoming friends with Nathan and don’t want to give that up so soon. And besides, you feel like you’ve known everyone in your service group for far longer than three days. It’s probably the superpowers and experience of burying your probation worker and fellow young offender together, but you want it to be more than that. Nathan gives in, “Alright, fine, come on up.” He patts the space beside him and you grin, turning to walk up the stairs and join him. Once up there, you have a better view of things. Not only is there a mattress, but also a pillow and blanket, and his half-unzipped bag, which appears to be full of clothes. You sit down next to him, dangling your legs over the edge beside his own. You don’t speak, allowing him to open up when he wants to. A few tense moments pass. “My mum kicked me out after our first day of community service,” he finally admits in a small, defeated voice. “I’m sorry, that sucks,” you murmur in response. While you’ve never actually been kicked out, you always felt that it was just about to happen, and you’ve used up all your chances with your dad and stepmum, once you move out, you know you’ll never be able to live with them again. He nods, “It does. I’ve been sleeping here.” “That’s why you were sneaking out of here yesterday morning,” you realize. “Yeah,” he chuckles, remembering how you caught him climbing out of a window. Then you recall what Nathan said when Tony was taking everyone’s phones. “Is that also why you were expecting a call from your mum?” He nods wordlessly. “Well, did she?” “No,” he shakes his head bitterly. “She’s cut me out.” “That’s bullshit,” you counter. Nathan turns to look at you, perplexed. “She doesn’t know what she’s missing out on.” His face lights up in a worrying surge of confidence. “Yeah! I mean look at me,” he holds his arms up in a strongman pose and grunts while trying to flex. You cannot for the life of you tell if he’s being serious, but he looks absolutely ridiculous, so you burst out laughing. “I don’t know what you’re laughing at,” he continues, unphased. “It’s pathetic!” you wheeze between laughs. He almost snickers, half a chortle making it through his poker-faced veneer. “This’s one’s smasher,” he nods to his left bicep and you snort. “This one’s basher,” he nods to his right bicep. It’s redundant to say that you devolve into a fit of hysterical laughter. “And this one…” he points to his crotch and you shake your head, already wheezing, “is The Destroyer!” That absolutely does it in for you, and Nathan can’t hold it in any longer either, he breaks down laughing with you. After a while, the laughter dies down and you’re simply sitting beside one another in amiable silence. Nathan jumps to his feet and holds out a hand to help you up. “Come on, I’ll walk you home.” “But what about…” you motion to all his stuff, but take his hand anyways and stand up. “I’ll walk back later. Now that you’ve become acquainted with where I live, I’d like to see your humble abode.” He grins and begins to walk down the stairs to the room’s main level. “Alright, but beware, my stepmum’s a bitch,” you warn, following after him. “Well, have you ever found her butt naked in a dark alleyway and come to the sudden and disturbing realization that she has gorgeous tits?” You cringe at the thought, “Can’t say that I have.” Nathan is curiously silent for a few moments. “Does she, though? I’m curious,” he muses with a cheeky grin. “Nathan!” you gasp, punching him in the shoulder. “Ow! Point taken! Why do you keep punching me?” he curses, glaring at you with playful indignance. You smile to yourself, pleased. “Because you deserve it and someone has to.” Together you walk to your house, entirely unsure and uneasy about what will happen next. You grow increasingly anxious as you approach your house. There isn’t really a nice side of Wertham, but your stepmom likes to think you live there anyways. She is wrong, suburban Wertham is just as grungy and seamy as the city itself, it just looks marginally more pleasant. Once you’re at the front door, you stop and turn to Nathan. “Okay, here’s the plan. We go in, we try to get upstairs as quickly as possible. If we see my stepmum, we stay civil and try to get away without offending her. Sound good?” You exhale a deep breath, unsure of whether you should be amping up or calming down. “Yeah, but why do we need a plan?” Nathan asks innocently. “You’ll see,” you explain, opening the door. You aren’t really sure what to expect, to be perfectly honest. Your stepmum barely even wants you there, so you never really push it by bringing home anyone else. In secondary school, the only people you had over were friends you’d made before she married your dad, and thus people she had no real control over your relationship with. But once she was in the picture, you suddenly preferred going over to other people’s houses rather than having them come to yours. Hopefully, things would be different now, with you being an at least semi-autonomous adult. But probably not. You lead Nathan inside the front hall, so far so good, and turn to go up the stairs when things go south. “Ah, ah, ah! Who’s this, y/n?” your stepmum stops you, rushing out from wherever she’d been to literally stand between you and the stairs. “Hullo!” Nathan perks up, smiling broadly and sticking out a hand. “I’m Nathan.” Ah, so when you said ‘civil,’ he’d heard ‘unnervingly polite.’ “He’s from community service,” you explain. She glances down at his hand with mild disgust, and so he drops it. “Well, I would appreciate it if you didn’t bring those people to his home,” she sneers with a fake smile. “I’m those people,” you point out. Talking back hadn’t been in the plan, but the plan was never going to work anyways. She casts a derisive glance between you and Nathan, “Evidently.” Your dad walks in, then, from the kitchen, holding a casserole between oven-mitted hands. “Oh, y/n! Are you gonna have dinner with the family?” his tone is cheerful, but the insinuation behind his words stings you. “No, I’m clearly not a part of this family,” you murmur, hoping someone will contradict you, but your dad just squirms and looks sort of uncomfortable. No one says anything, even Nathan remains gloriously silent. “Wow! Okay, so we’re going. Bye.” You grab Nathan’s hand and he lets you drag him away. Once outside, though, you drop it and stalk down the street, just trying to get away from your house. Tears prick at your eyes as you allow yourself to break down. It hurts. It hurts to not be included, even if you expected it. That woman had taken so much from you, had pushed you to become what you were and live the life you’d lived just because she expected it. There are people around you, of course, saying that you’re more than that, but when she looks at you like you’re nothing, you feel like nothing. Nathan follows after you, “Hey, y/n, where are we goin’?” “Away!” You call after him. He catches up to you soon after that, when you’re about a block away from your house, grabbing your arm to get you to stop. Neither of you say anything, but he sits down on the curb and motions for you to join him. You do. He puts his arm around your shoulder and you lean into him. He smells like cigarettes, bandaids, and sharpies, and you wonder why, but it distracts you, and so you revel in it. This is the closest you’ve ever been, and even though you’ve only known each other for three days now, you seem to fit perfectly there. Nathan leans his head in closer to you, “You know, if it makes you feel any better, she had really wack tits.” You laugh despite yourself, “It does, actually.” You smile and close your eyes, allowing yourself to become lost in the feeling of his arm around you and the smell of his clothes, which remind you of the community center and of him. You sit there for a few moments, in comfortable silence. “What’re you gonna do now?” he asks. “I’ll just sneak in through my window, the lock’s broken,” you murmur in a quiet voice. He nods but doesn’t move. Eventually, you say your goodbyes and sneak back into your respective living spaces, but for now, you remain in his arms. For now, you’re together.

#misfits #misfits tv #nathan #nathan misfits #nathan young #nathan young misfits #nathan young x reader #nathan young imagine

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lovedinapastlife · 5 years

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3x13 “Requiem for a Welterweight” - Riverdale Reaction

I love waking up to the smell of bacon. Oh, no. Wait. That’s betrayal, bribery, and manipulation. My mistake.

How did Jughead not wake up to the smell of BACON? That sizzle is fierce. I have so many questions about the Jones kitchen. Who put up the hot chili lights? Why is a cutting board out for toast and eggs?

Breakfast allegory. Jughead’s family is pretending to be wholesome and Betty’s fully aware of how fucked hers is. Poor girl is just resigned to her cereal

When did Veronica move back into the Pembrook?

What is that on Hiram’s pin? An octopus? ‘Cuz he wants his arms in everything? I love it. I see Cthulu in this show’s future. Archie will be shipwrecked. I’m calling it now.

Archie…no more skipping class. He keeps resigning himself as an ex-con, but wasn’t he exonerated? Sometimes when he says things I just…I don’t believe that even he believes it, no matter how sweet his smile is.

I love Betty’s smile at Jughead when he says “I’ll make this right” because she’s so proud of her bae. Eight high school girls were in the Serpents, and now they wanna go to the Pret-ty Poi-sons? They do know where Choni’s loyalties are, right? Which is...in her own bed and whim.

Veronica: “I want my family out of drugs” Gladys: “So we both want the same thing!” Man, I WISH that line meant Gladys wanted her own family out of drugs XD Woman, your husband is an addict. Your tween drinks caffeine. Think of the CHILDREN! As far as I know Jughead’s addicted to leadership, justice, Betty, and maybe burgers, so he’s like...o-kay. Also I love how Hiram literally just lets her drink and be a mafiosa and she’s like, “Can’t you gangsters sort this amongst yourselves? Do you see a pearl necklace or Serpent jacket? No. Not interested.” Not a great spy. Or person, lately. Let V be a teen!

Toni is SUCH a FUCKING USELESS TOXIC BIIIIIITCH. And yeah, she BETTER walk away. I don’t see a crown on that skull and...lipstick print leather jacket.

Toni has never ruled, never taken on a role or responsibility even close to Queen because she sucks at decision-making, calming people down, fighting, most recon, and she also doesn’t even try to learn how to shoot arrows. She couldn’t get through one public protest without mousing out! She tries to manipulate Cheryl into causing chaos, and yells at her when it doesn’t go the way she wants (she wants to hurt Betty/Jug instead of Fangs/Pea). It reminds me of when she tried to manipulate Jughead into taking over the Serpents so she could puppet him. Easily the worst character in the show for me, and that’s including the bullshit parents. Anything admirable beyond her hair and makeup is beyond me.

“MINE or YOURS” Isn’t it supposed to be “OURS?” God, I hate this storyline. How often do I get to say Cheryl deserves better?!

Also, the Pretty Poisons, which supposedly has a bunch of defected Serpents in it, beating the shit out of Fangs and Sweet Pea bc Toni feels threatened that they’re a “vanity project” (which...they are, little mini-Cheryls and Tonis in progress), is BULLSHIT. The guys aren’t going to fight them back, they even say they don’t mean them harm! They used to be close friends or at least co-gang members sworn not to hurt each other! Toni has no respect for the Serpents and neither does Cheryl or their girl gang, who honestly kind of are terrible so far. And AGAIN, Cheryl doesn’t even do the hitting, nor does Toni! This is not “empowering women.” It’s toxic. Like POISON. Maybe that’s what they intend, to show that they’re awful, but I doubt it.

I didn’t realize how many dream catchers are now in the Cooper house until this crazy cult waiver scene

“I’m gonna lose.” “With that attitude you are.” Just keep shaking your head at him, Josie. So they’re walking around together at school, but we haven’t seen anybody’s reaction to their dating. Humph.

“My mom is joining a cult, and nobody else seems to be worried about it except for me.” Betty, my heart breaks for you. I feel so bad. Kevin, you are the woooooooorst pretend bestie. “Don’t be so eager to see the worst in people.” Um, remember that person she didn’t trust and you brushed her off? NICK ST. CLAIRE. Oh. Chic? Yeah. Also terrible. All Kevin cares about is his dick and I hope the writers realize how selfish all the outed gay characters are portrayed lately. A lot of the characters in general, honestly. I want to see more good friendships and behavior.

Hahaha Gladys is eating a sucker and reading “Sophisticate” while wearing leather suspenders in her trailer living room where her kid sleeps on the couch. That is a MOOD.

When Jug said, “Are you Curt/Kurt?” I thought he meant it as an adjective. I just looked around like, “how are drugged out psychos who take the time to carve up and hang baby doll pieces going to be a valiant addition to your gang?”

This show is too damn dark. Literally dark. I like the allegory of the light with Jughead but...this scene was just to remind us the Gargoyle Gang is creepy. I remember. Don’t worry.

I feel bad for the extras working out in the background during the Archie/Keller training scene. How many sit ups and push ups were done that day? I’m more worried about them than Archie at this point. Also Keller as a gym teacher would be tight. I want him to call people by their last names and exercise authority and stay trim for his lady love

Jughead looks so sad that they’ve lost their minds to the corruption of the town, and everyone tells him to forget about it. Just like everyone tells Betty to forget about her cult mom, but neither of them are letting the world tell them to stop investigating or caring and I love them for it.

Are the core four even friends? We saw Bughead for two seconds and Archie didn’t invite anyone to his bloodbath. Okay, and do they just want to put fake blood on Archie all the time? Aesthetic him up with blood because of his red hair?

Polly is definitely hoping to kill her mother. She’s like, “Ai’ight, I’ll take that bitch’s blood on my hands. But not on my outfit.” I loved the first-person warped perspective of being dunked under the water. Betty saves the day and doesn’t catch a break. This poor child.

I dunno. I’m not into Archie and Josie. I don’t see the appeal on either end beyond young, pretty, and horny. I think they both have their independent strengths. Josie’s outfits were great this episode. I’m ready to move on, but I prefer watching them to typical Lodge out-manipulation scenes that go nowhere.

“I was reborn” I WISH! I wish you were reborn as a parent who isn’t a total psycho bag of bricks meant to emotionally abuse your daughters. Casa Cooper is cursed. Except for that beautiful fucking bedroom. Let’s go back there, shall we?

Ah, much better.

#riverdale reaction #riverdale #riverdale 3x13 #requiem of a welterweight #3.13 #riverdale season 3 #season 3 #anti-choni #anti-pretty poisons

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comicteaparty · 5 years

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February 11th-February 17th, 2019 CTP Archive

The archive for the Comic Tea Party week long chat that occurred from February 11th, 2019 to February 17th, 2019. The chat focused on Sombulus by Christina Major.

Featured Comment:

Chat:

RebelVampire

COMIC TEA PARTY- WEEK LONG BOOK CLUB START!

Hello and welcome everyone to Comic Tea Party’s Week Long Book Club~! This week we’ll be focusing on Sombulus by Christina Major~! (http://www.sombulus.com/)

You are free to read and comment about the comic all week at your own pace, so stop on by whenever it suits your schedule! Remember, though, that while we allow constructive criticism, our focus is to have fun and appreciate the comic. Below you will find four questions to get you started on the discussion. However, a new question will be posted and pinned everyday (between 12:01AM and 6AM PST), so keep checking back for more! You have until February 17th to tell us all your wonderful thoughts! With that established, let’s get going on the reading and the chatting!

QUESTION 1. What has been your favorite scene in the comic so far? What specifically did you like about it?

QUESTION 2. At the moment, who is your favorite character? What about that character earns them this favor?

QUESTION 3. What do you think caused Rana, Astyr, and Sydney to wind up bound all together since Astyr didn’t do it on purpose? Do you believe the trio will be able to become unbounded? How might this affect their relationships?

QUESTION 4. Who exactly are Hannah and Vuudo working for? Why are the two so intent in spying on Astyr? Further, what about Kazar? What spying activity is Kazar doing and why was Yanell’s presence of interest to her? How will these spying activities affect the main trio?

Delphina

It's my comic! I'm so excited!

khkddn

I have not started reading yet but I wanted to say the website looks really nice. The archive is so neat looking!!

Delphina

Thanks! I know the archive is long, so having a nice-looking archive page that would be helpful for seeing where you left off was important to me. XD

varethane

I think Sydney is my favourite, but that is liable to change at any minute cuz I like Astyr and Rana and Tenge a lot too lol

kayotics

1. I think I like lot of the more recent scenes the best. I really like the emotional depth that's happening between the main characters, specifically Astyr and Sydney. The scenes where Sydney was actively working with Astyr are some of my favorite, just because it shows a lot of character growth. 2. I like Tenge a lot (I'm a sucker for nerds), but I think I like Astyr and Sydney the best! Mostly I like their dynamic and the emotional development that has started between them. Overall, the cast is really fun because they all have something unique about them. 3. I don't really have much speculation on how they became bound together, but I do think that they're going to eventually become unbound from each other, but I think that at least Rana will choose to stay with Astyr after becoming unbound. 4. Again, I haven't speculated too much on who they work for, but my guess on why they're intent on following around Astyr is he's caused some sort of significant disruption in magic before (it seems that he does that frequently enough), or he's important in some sort of larger plot that he's not aware of.

keii4ii

Can I just say I love the main trio a lot + Tenge? Also, I'm entertaining a vague AU idea about half-ascended Astyr with one blue eye.

kayotics

Oooh I like that AU

Delphina

He looks like that guy from My Hero Academia XDDD

kayotics

huh, you're right

RebelVampire

QUESTION 5. Do you believe that Tenge will destroy his own Morphid father? If not, what do you think he’ll do alternatively? Whether he does it or not, how do you think further contact with his father will affect him? What about his relationship with Astyr?

RebelVampire

1) its hard to pick so im picking two. the first one is the scene where sydney is confronted with the fact not all demshull can do magic. i felt at that point in the comic thered been a lot of build up for sydney being confronted with her own racism, and i felt that moment was a great pay off. especially cause sydney's facial expressions in the moment are just fantastic and like she got hit with a ton of bricks. for the second fave scene though, the one where astyr and sydney first meet rana and rana discovers that basically her life is a lie. there was something fantastic in the pacing and atmosphere that really drove home the fact that this was a life changing moment for rana. 2) Astyr. I like how Astyr is sort of this gray character where he's not terrible yet he causes lots of property damage that makes you think Sydney is kind of right about him. And I really just like this complicated dynamic cause it makes you feel unsure about whether to trust him or not. I also love though that deep down hes willing to risk a lot of people he cares about. 3) i actually think it was rana who bound them all, not astyr. theres one moment where rana is looking off into the distance getting internally emotional and then suddenly the alarm about essence going off triggers. and rana is shown to basically be kind of weird where thats concerned, so i think she inadvertantly bound them so she could leave with them. Regardless, I consider it inevitable that they'll become unbounded. While Rana and Astyr will probably be fine, Sydney I think is gonna be most affected. Cause at that point she's either going have to destroy the friendship or admit that Astyr isn't so bad. I assume she'll choose the latter after all the build up, but itll certainly strengthen the relationships since the relationships will have to become by choice and not force.

4) i actually think hannah and vuudo are working for whoever organized the experiments all the half-bred children were part of. cause hannah seems like the type whod do that. so obviously if that's the case, that's why theyre watching astyr. hes their favorite experiment kid and maybe someday hell do something useful. as for kazar, idk. at the moment it just feels like kazar is just doing generic spying, possibly charged with making sure there's no peace to be made (hence why yanell is of interest to her). As for the effect of hte main trio, I think theyre just gonna become public enemy number one for both groups for various reasons, cause theyre clearly super powered weirdos who know too much and should be stopped. 5) I don't think Tenge will go through with it. He'll certainly try, but I think Astyr's pleas are gonna haunt him and he'll hesitate wondering if there is some merit to his father. However, I kind of think Tenge will banish him and still not talk to him. Overall, I think Tenge is gonna start questioning his place in life more. Wonder why he continues when he has to hide out avoiding everyone. As for his relationship with Astyr, eh, it'll probably continue to just be strained cause Astyr has bigger fish to fry right now I think.

Stefan G

@Delphina I have to take additional time to read more comics ... but the first impression is [beautiful cartoons/drawing] ... and the website looks really nice [like how you added a store, archive and how to support your art - good job ... I might steal that ] ... did you code that website yourself or do you hire somebody to do that?

Delphina

Thanks so much! My coder buddy Kemayo built me a very simple webcomic CMS, and the store functionality is powered by Gumroad, but all the HTML/CSS was done by me!

lomcia (princess_lom)

1. DETAILS! It's the best detailed page, colors are nice for eye

2. I don't have yet fav character.... but for now Brendolyn looks ok

And I read it and I need to say, that seeing how your style changed make me impress. I got a question actually, everyone got move to do comic because of some event, movie, game etc. a] Who/what inspired you to do that comic? (I'm asking everyone that question, I just want and need to know!) b] What you feel now, when you look on your comic, how characters develop and how your style improved?

Delphina

Thanks so much! I really had a lot of fun with the colors in this whole scene, so I'm happy you like them! For me: a) Sombulus was a NaNoMango project (like a NaNoWriMo community except for comics) that I started when I was putting off what I thought was going to be my bigger, better story. The main trio of characters and the idea of world-hopping to lots of weird magical places just wouldn't leave me alone. The shape of it has changed a lot, but I'm really happy with where it's gone and it's exciting to be dropping some of the big big spoilers I've had in my head for years! b) I'm going through a lot of Act 3 right now preparing things for print, so I've been staring at pages I did 5 years ago a lot recently. Part of how I designed Sombulus was because I knew it would take a long time, I wanted to incorporate the idea of each world being in a different style. When I didn't have a lot of practice, it was much easier to get the story going in black/white until I got faster at art, but it's also nice to have a built in reason to try different software and brushes. Of course, there's a lot of loose and sloppy anatomy in the past, but I'm the kind of person who really values seeing that as a sign of growth so I'm trying not to update that much and just focus on making parts of the story clearer and more supportive of where it eventually went.

(I know this chat is specifically focused on the comic of the week, so if you want answers from people who aren't me, you might want to ask in #general maybe!)

lomcia (princess_lom)

Yeah, I asked, not everyone is answering, so I'm using week and thirsday bookclub to ask

rae

Nanomango is super good at giving people a kick in the ass for projects. You've done really good with getting it off the ground

Delphina

Thanks, Rae, it's been... whew... a while! Nanomango is a good little group project, though now that I've been at this comic for 9 years, I really think trying to do 30 pages in 30 days (even as sketches) was never going to work for me, and it's never fun to feel like you've failed to meet a goal. But one thing that I think was really good for me was participating year after year gave me sort of a drafting process? Letting what I had done stew and simmer for a few months let me see everything with fresh eyes when I came back, so I could come back the next time and focus on the parts I wanted and cut the parts that didn't seem like good directions anymore.

rae

i feel like it was easier to do 30 comics with the community we had

and yeah, editing is def a thing I wish I could do more for webcomics. >_>

RebelVampire

QUESTION 6. Who or what do you think Rana is? Why was Rana locked away in the Library? What does all this potentially have to do with Rana’s strange abilities that seem to have some ill affects on magic? How will Rana’s abilities affect the group further?

keii4ii

I don't have theories because I'm the type of the reader who just wants to see the answers as they come, but I wanna say I am super curious about this #6.

kayotics

I read the same way, but yeah I’ve been curious about Rana too. Considering some of the recent pages have shown that Sydney has a very strange origin story, it might be safe to assume that Rana is the same. I like that Rana seems to often get the group out of trouble too. Rana has a lot of mystery around her that makes me intrigued to see what the full extent of her abilities are, since I think there’s a lot more to her

Delphina

Rana is so problematic because I love coming up with ideas for her, but it also means I gotta find a million references for gadgets and machines to draw scenes where she does cool things.

kayotics

Rana, the problematic fav

Kezhound - What it Takes

Considering we just found out that Sydney is the daughter of a spear and a magic spring, I'm guessing whatever Rana is, it's a kind of spontaneous creation too. Maybe she's the result of a computer dropped into a magic volcano

it's always possible she IS a machine from another world, one so advanced no one can figure her out

but...have we ever seen her bleed? Or injured?

https://tenor.com/view/arnold-schwarzenegger-blood-leaf-flannel-shirt-gif-3519051

Delphina

I am so here for the Compucano ship

varethane

omg

RebelVampire

QUESTION 7. What do you think happened in the past that ruined Yanell’s peace talk progress? Do you believe that the Kanites and Demshul will continue their fear-mongering ways, or will Yanell advance peace again? What is your reasoning?

RebelVampire

@Kezhound - What it Takes I love this Rana is a machine theory. That is so far from something I would guess, yet would love to see be true to a degree. It fits with all the symptoms.

RebelVampire

6) I think Rana is some mega essence container or something. Like connected to the origin of it all or something like that. It adds up to me why Morphids are so super affected by her presence and why she'd be locked up in the library. You don't just leave your essence power house unattended. You lock them away where they can be "safe." As for future affects, I mean I figure at some point someone somewhere is gonna be like "Hey wait a second weird magic stuff? Isn't that the person we locked in the library?" And then more manhunts ensue. 7) I'm taking a stab in the dark and saying I think it's direct sabotage. Like Yanell's disappearance and entrapement wasn't just happen stance. There is a shadow puppet somewhere making sure that no peace will ever be had. I do think they'll get to peace though. Mostly because I'm an optimist and assume peace will prevail. And also because their entire conflict seems to be based more around fear mongering than actual things they should be that mad about.

Cheshire777

I think that Hannah and Vuudo are working for whoever is messing up Yannell's peace treatys; they're pretty much the only wild cards at this point besides the morphids.

RebelVampire

(the archive for Offshore Comic is now up! https://comicteaparty.com/post/182818407550/february-4th-february-10th-2019-ctp-archive @Stefan G )

so basically its all a giant conspiracy because ppl be hating on peace? O_O @Cheshire777

Stefan G

@RebelVampire Thanks for everything, RebelVampire ... 1) really enjoyed everyone’s comments and suggestions for Offshore. Thanks y’all 2) I also rewrote/fixed the js-code on my website [www.offshorecomic.com] ... now the strips flow smoother and I added a counter in order to better follow your progression. Check it out

Cheshire777

@RebelVampire I'm guessing that the "Big Bad Boss" has some ulterior motive/motives besides just indefinitely extending the war, whether the war is a side effect or that they will profit directly from it (I've just been reading back through the old Akatsuki storyline of Naruto) I have no guess.

RebelVampire

QUESTION 8. Given what’s shown of Astyr’s past, what do you think the experimenters were attempting to do? Why were they targeting half-breed children like Astyr, Cioara, and Tenge? What was their ultimate goal having Astyr explore the Weave?

RebelVampire

8) I feel like theres some power source theyre searching for in the Weave. Maybe a person, maybe just a thing, but they need someone super good at exploring the Weave to find it. I cant fathom why though, albeit i doubt it's anything good. As for why half-breeds, I think it's because they have a different sort of connection with essence and the Weave. Like we've already seen how Rana's strange relationship with essence affects Cioara, and i dont think that's entirely on Rana. I think it's just who Cioara's own strange relationship with it too since plenty of others interact with Rana fine. Either way, I think the experimenters are just trying to figure out if their atypical nature has practical uses for stuff like that.

Cheshire777

8. I think that they were probably recruiting/kidnapping anyone with odd powers, and those three just happened to be half breeds. I think that they briefly refered to other compounds? As for what they are looking for, at this point it could be a whole lot of different things, but a magic/essence/mana/etc store is quite likely.

RebelVampire

QUESTION 9. Do you believe that Astyr and Sydney will be able to successfully restore Sydney’s physical form? How might the ordeal change their relationship? How might it also change Sydney’s views on Demshul in general?

Cheshire777

They probably will, it has been established that Sydney is dissolving: a) Sydney is one of the main characters. b) we're right in the middle of finding out her backstory. She is finding reality at odds with her brainwashing (mosty through experiencing Astyr's memorys) and will have to come to terms with that.

snuffysam

1) act 3. acts 1 & 2 I was like "essence? jumping between worlds? currency? what the heck is going on?". act 3 was like "ohhhh i get what this comic is. it's a bread comic." and i love it.(edited)

2) the combo of vuudo and hannah. something about the way our heroes just keep falling for their lies, the pairing of hannah's planning and vuudo's acting... i just love them.

snuffysam

3) my interpretation is that binding is just something that happens when a demshul tries to bring someone world-hopping. since astyr is inexperienced, he goofed up and brought sydney along for the ride.

snuffysam

4) hannah's doing a truman show starring astyr. no further explanation needed. for kazar, I'm guessing she's just working for the government as a spy in general.

looking at #5, i'm wondering... is tenge & ciora's father a morphid, or the morphid? morphids seem to endlessly divide, and neither tenge nor the morphids seem to have a "hive mind". is it possible that there's just one morphid, and it happens to be in a lot of places at once?

Cheshire777

@snuffysam From what I've observed so far, the Morphid (and Tenge's) multiplication works vaguely like Naruto's shadow clones- when they split all of them have the same base memorys, they have separate experiences and basically act like different people (that are clones of each other ), and when they "regroup" the single has all the experiences of the doubles.(edited)

snuffysam

which would explain why astyr could say something along the lines of "oh, you're one of the ones that recognizes me"

RebelVampire

QUESTION 10. What are you most looking forward to in the comic? Also, do you have any final thoughts to share overall?

RebelVampire

i assume theyre a single being, but tbf i dont discount the possibility theres multiple morphid originals. in the sense that there were multiple "original" people who split into morphids. just cause it still fits with astyr saying one of the ones that recognize me. cause i highly doubt if theres multiple originals they know whose morphid is whos. again tho, just not discounting the possibility. i do get more of the sense that they were once a single entity.

9) yes because narratively i cant forsee the comic semi-killing off a main character quite yet. and sydney has unresolved matters as well, like her meeting with her old mentor and such. idk if the experience will change her view on demshul, but i think shell come to terms that astyr has some inner demons, is a weirdo, but also has a good heart. and that he isnt out to see sydney's demise. 10) im looking forward to more of everything. i wanna see all the inner turmoils, and i especially want to find more hints as to what the deal with rana is. cause astyr and sydney dont seem to care much rana is a weirdo outside of when she doesnt eat, so i will care enough for the both of them.

Delphina

I just want to thank you all for reading Sombulus! I know it's got... several pages, so I really appreciate folks who make it through everything, and such amazing thoughtful questions and responses!

keii4ii

My brain is a mush right now and I can't articulate my feels thoughtfully, but I really want to say Sombulus updates really help brighten my day, every time. I always look forward new pages and am glad it updates twice a week

Delphina

(Also this discussion made me draw Tenge as Naruto. Poor guy, I torture him so.)

snuffysam

before the chat ends, I just wanted to say that I really love sombulus, and I can't wait to see where it goes next!

RebelVampire

COMIC TEA PARTY- WEEK LONG BOOK CLUB END!

Thank you everyone so much for reading and chatting about Sombulus this week! Please also give a special thank you to Christina Major for volunteering the comic and creating it! If you liked Sombulus, make sure to continue to support it via some of the links below!

Read and Comment: http://www.sombulus.com/

Christina Major’s Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Delphina

Christina Major’s Store: http://www.sombulus.com/store

Christina Major’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/Delphina2k

#ctparchive #comics #webcomics #indie comics #comic chat #comic discussion #book club #bookclub #webcomic book club #webcomic bookclub #comic tea party #ctp #sombulus #christina major

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just-jordie-things · 7 years

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Scallisaac: Allison Argent’s Side of the Story

Scott McCall. My first love, the boy with the puppy dog eyes and the crooked jaw line. The boy who’s hand fit perfectly in mind, our fingers linking in between each other’s so perfectly. We’d met at a young age, and fell in love so quickly. It was scary, but in a way, the entire time I felt safe. Seeing that we both went through these feelings together for the first time. Through the obstacles of a new town, supernaturals, my parents, Scott being a werewolf, Jackson, lacrosse, the list went on and on- we never really fell out of love. In fact, it might have just grown.

Even when things were tough, and our relationship had to be more secretive than I would’ve liked. Matt began..um..stalking me... yeah that happened. Jackson becoming a stupid lizard (which I found comically ironic), Lydia low key losing her mind, my grandfather beating the shit out of my friends. Not to forget that he manipulated me, and turned me against my friends and loved ones. It means something when your father, who hates your werewolf boyfriend, befriends your werewolf boyfriend.

Breaking up with Scott was single handedly the hardest thing I ever did. I knew it wouldn’t last, I’d done it in hopes of getting back together with him. Taking some time off in France, just carefree and having no worries about the town I left behind for the summer was a good choice for me, and gave me time to really think about where I wanted to go with my future. And I definitely saw being with Scott in my future.

That first day back at school junior year hit me like a brick to the head. As soon as I’d slumped next to Lydia’s locker, tightly holding onto my books, I’d wished I’d taken up on my father’s idea of staying home. Maybe I’d needed more time. See, the longer I listened to hearing Lydia’s plans for her high school career, and then further, even listing off colleges she’d started applications too, the bigger the knot in my stomach became. All I’d done was think about Scott. When I was supposed to just be thinking about my future. Like my genius strawberry blonde headed friend had done. Though soon enough, as we realized out days of fighting the supernatural weren’t as over as we’d thought, new problems began to occur.

Not that falling for the curly blonde haired boy by the name Isaac Lahey was really a problem. Not until you factored in the fact that he was becoming closer friends with Scott by the days at least. Lydia told me to go for it, well actually she’d said a piece of meat is a piece of meat Allison. Which in the human language, meant that it shouldn’t matter. But it did. Scott wasn’t just a boyfriend, he wasn’t a fling, he was a lover. We’d lost our virginity to each other, that’s not really ‘no big deal’ (as Lydia had also said). But it’s not like Isaac and I were having sex (Lydia: eye sex Allison. Penetrates just as good as- me: i get it!) there was really just low key flirting here and there. It was mindless and easy.

But the day that I got locked in that stupid closet with him, was a make or break moment. It ended up being both. Starting as make, having a feeling of forgiveness and friendliness in the air. This was pre door lock. Post door lock was when the real shit happened. I hadn’t missed the short look of fury on Scott’s face when he’d gotten us out. He’d replaced it just as quickly as I noticed it, to one of concern.

Concern for both Isaac and I. Both.

Yes, I was well aware of the way the boys looked at each other. Oblivious to my own feelings, yes I try to be. But oblivious to the world around me? Hell no! Especially when my whole world was this makeshift pack that we’d seemed to find ourselves in. And the second Isaac began taking seats next to Scott at the lunch table, and vice versa, my interest was peaked. Of course I wanted what was best for Scott, even if that wasn’t me. I mean, he’d said himself that he knew we’d be together, that didn’t mean right away. These things take time. More time than I’d originally been thinking...perhaps. Isaac moving in with with Scott definitely had caught my ear the second Isaac had complained about the McCall guest bed. I’d asked right away what that was all about, and the pale boy gave me a somewhat guilty. He stuttered an apology, but I’d shook my head, simply saying that he could stay at my father and I’s apartment as well.

Though staying at the McCall house with the both of them was an idea in the back of my mind that didn’t seem to go away. Cooking in the kitchen with them, the three of us cuddling up on the couch to watch a movie, passing the bowl of popcorn around. And for some unknown reason, the idea of laying in Scott’s bed, pressed into Scott’s back with Isaac’s arms wrapped around me, had been plaguing my thoughts. When I’d gone to Lydia about this, (after much consideration, her past advice ended in winks that made me shudder and regret my life’s decisions) she actually hesitated before giving me an answer. Her lips pursed, eyes thoughtful as she stopped typing on her laptop to look at me. Immediately indicating that I was in deep shit. A problem that the Lydia Martin couldn’t solve in a snap?

Man was I screwed.

Maybe if I hadn’t started to have sexy dreams about Isaac. Maybe then I wouldn’t be thinking about what the three of us could have. And somewhere along the lines, on a late night working on this Nogitsune problem we’d had, I had hastily decided to just pull my shirt over my head. Maybe there were events leading up to my action, but it happened without regrets. Even seeing him in school the next day, things went on as normal. Even though in that moment the previous night, I easily would’ve jumped on him. Pretty sure I could say the same for Isaac too. I mean, he was the first one to take off his shirt.

But after that, the development stayed at it’s normal pace. Simple flirting with Isaac, building up my best friendship with Scott. Nothing ever went any further, though there were nights when I would think, Allison, it’s time. But I was actually quite content with how things were. Especially with the stressful and hectic conflicts that Beacon Hills was facing. Thousand year old Japanese spirits were sort of taking up all of my attention, so a boyfriend(s) wasn’t really my top priority. It was a close second. But again, I was pretty happy. I was in an honest to Deaton good place. I had great friendships around me, which only grew. Though Stiles’ smartass comments, and Lydia’s... whatever you called her relationship with Aiden, it was manageable. I’d even made the high honor roll twice throughout the year, while still getting target practice on the heads of Onis by night (Lydia called me her everyday superhero). Kira, our new pixie looking kitsune friend, was a lovely addition to our pack. She worried me at first, seeing how she knew so much about our... situation. But she turned out to be a super badass, yet sweet girl. I kind of wish I could’ve gotten to know her better without the jealousy biased view I had towards Scott.

But again, I was pretty happy. I had my boys, Scott, Isaac, Stiles, (Derek here and there, but I still don’t believe he ever forgave me for that one thing..). And my girls, my bestie Lydia, who I would go into war for if someone merely looked at her wrong. And now Kira. I had to admire the way she’d swing around that katana, an image of of pure grace, and quite frankly beauty. I’m especially happy with where my dad and I were at. One point in our lives, we’d been nothing but secretive liars, his paternal relationship with me seemingly toxic, and there was a time where I thought I’d never fix that. But there we were, utterly proud of each other, through everything our family had endured. We were at our strongest. We all were.

In the end, I was happy with the way that the events of my time with my friends, my family, had played out.

collab with my best gals @taegdcl1018, who wrote Scott’s part of the fic and @skylars-little-world, who wrote Isaac’s part of the fic.

DONT FORGET TO FOLLOW THEM CUZ THEY R GRRREAT!

tried something different, but it was a smack to the face of inspriration so I sat and did it all for ye. xoxo ~ jordie

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dantelaw21 · 4 years

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Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 302

Click on the video above to watch Episode 302 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.

The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

Announcement

All right, we are live Welcome everybody to Hump Day Hangouts. Today is Episode 302. It is the 26th of August 2020. This is the episode where I click on some risky links to keep you all safe. So looks like someone posted a link called dirty Tinder glory, social calm, I highly suggest you don’t click on that. But I went ahead and fell on the sword for everybody. And we’re going to get that deleted. So we don’t get the hold up everyone thinks later. Yeah. Anyways, moving right along. We got a couple of announcements we want to get to and a couple of upcoming events. But I just want to go through real quick and say hi to guys and see what’s going on. So let’s see. I’ll start on my left Bradley, how are you doing? I’m good. I’m good. I was running late because I was recording the solid training videos that I’ve been talking about for weeks and, and I almost almost ran out of time before Hump Day Hangouts. That’s why we’re a minute or so behind. So but I’m here. Got a good start on it. I’ll probably have that finished tomorrow.

So you guys can go to semanticmastery.com/process and you know, you’ll see the training as it gets updated over the next 24 hours or so I should have that new silo training updated so go check it out.

Nice Cool. All right, Chris. How are you doing? Man? Good here enjoying the end of summer not too hot anymore. But like yeah, during the last couple of days until it gets cold again here. And yeah, can’t complain otherwise. Cool. Marco. Looks nice and sunny here.

It’s raining. Yeah. Yeah, right. It’s, that’s a window with a like a filmy curtain so you can see outside, but it’s so bright.

It’s so bright, that you can’t see outside. I can’t help him.

What can I say? It’s the price I pay for the life I live.

Well, we agree

You taking that for us?

Awesome. Last but not least turn on the radio, man. Goodman, it’s good to have you back. Yeah, it’s good to be back I’m not gonna lie It’s kind of nice being out and about Gone Camping.

Anyways, nice to get away but happy to be back here and see everyone’s faces I see some familiar people in the chat as well.

Happy to have you back we didn’t die. Yeah, I was like yeah, smack masteries still here all right great. You bring us something from the roots. I did but with the pandemic, I’m just gonna have to keep it off so you know I’m a really sorry brick.

Adams gonna have to take another one and go ahead and eat the mushrooms. I know it’s rough. We’ve got all the mushrooms in the woods have got what was it? Glory social.

Mushroom.

Cake it better getting a little more serious here. I did want to talk to everyone real quick. You no doubt have heard by now about POFU Live. But it is coming up. So we’re getting under the 30-day count. I know that a lot of people talk to, we’re going to have a lot more people joining, we have 40 seats left as of right now. But it is nice because I know this year one of the ups of being virtuals. You don’t have to plan travel, you know, you don’t have to book a hotel room, all that. But I would say don’t put this off too long. Because we are limiting it on purpose. You know, if we had 1000 people, there are some things we wouldn’t be able to do that we’re gonna be a part of the event. We’re gonna have some group discussion, we’re gonna have some case studies back and forth. So if you’re considering POFU Live, check it out, go to pofulive.com, grab your ticket. Now. You can see the deadlines down here we have about eight or nine days left on the VIP tickets, there’s a very good reason for that. If you’re in the US, and we’ll get a beer sampling and food shipped to you. And we have to have all of that data in there’s additional links and stuff you’re going to get on top of that, but you can come over here and read it. I want to also go down

Um, and talk to you about our guest speaker so far not to get too into the details, but you can come over to POFU Live and check it out. But we’ve got Jordan Fowler Alright, mastermind member but also the owner of moon and our marketing Jordans been I don’t know, Marco, you know more than I do. But I know Jordan gets up some pretty cool stuff and he’s got an incredibly successful agency. So just having him talk about that, to me is impressive, but I think he’s gonna go into some stuff here about the content creation process and driving revenue. Well, it isn’t only that he has a successful agency. It’s the fact that he’s able to rank for the most competitive keywords in the metropolitan area with what like I’d say 15 million people only. Now he focuses on the part I’m not gonna say of all that he’s doing all the 20 million people, but he’s targeting a really large area with lots of people, lots of competition, and like he’s getting to the point where he doesn’t even have to reach out to

People, right where he doesn’t have to go out, knocking on doors. You know how sucky that is man. He’s getting people coming to him when you get that famous, or when you get that name and not fame, but name when you get that good when you can produce results over and over and over when you systematize. Like we say, create that system that just works. And this is what happens. You don’t go out looking for people they come to you. And best of all, it’s POFU, you name your price. It’s not a tenant on what they want to pay. Because if they couldn’t pay, they wouldn’t be talking to you in the first place. They’d be looking for that cheap stuff. When they come to you and they already know that you have a name that you’re the big fish in the big pond. They know the money that’s gonna take.

Definitely Awesome. All right, and I’m not gonna I do want to get into the question. So I’ll keep this short. We’ll talk about these guys a little bit more. But Jeffrey Smith will be joining us for the third POFU Live here in 2020. He was with us for 2018 2019 he’s coming back if you don’t know who he goes check out SEO boot camp and then come out from under the rocky been hiding under semanticmastery.com/seobootcamp. Yes, I say that is because it’s half price if you buy it through our link No shit, so just want to clarify that sorry. No, no, that’s good. You just saved her on some money cuz I was just speeding through it. But we’ve got a quick video with him coming out. I believe Bradley. Hernan. You sat down and talked to him briefly. So we’re going to be sharing some of that information, what he’s excited about POFU Live. And last but certainly not least, Brian Caddo. He’s going to be talking to us. He’s also an agency owner, and he’s going to be giving a great presentation at POFU Live about getting better clients and the most important part of that good client that sticks with you. Because I think there’s a lot of us out there. We’ve been in that situation where we could get clients. But then we found out that you know what, sometimes it’s harder to get those good clients and then have them stick around. So I think that to me is just as important. I don’t want to turn I want to find good points.

I want them to stick with me. So I’m really excited to hear what Brian has to say about this.

So with that said, head over POFU Live, grab your tickets. Do you have any questions about this about the tickets, anything like that just emails support at Semantic Mastery and we’ll get you straightened out. Before we dive into anything else, we need to cover you guys. Very briefly, I just want to mention what Marco was saying about the difference between inbound prospecting and outbound prospecting is he was talking about Jordan and Jordan got people coming to him this inbound prospecting, right? That’s people coming to him from referrals, or it could be from, you know, content marketing can be from any number of things where people have been exposed to who he is, and then they seek him out. And that’s a very, very, it’s a much better position to be in when you’re trying to take on new clients or, you know, lead buyers or whatever it is that you’re trying to do for your business. It’s certainly a better it’s a much different dynamic when somebody seeks you out first because it puts you in a power position of power position to fuck you as we call it right or position.

of authority because they already know that they’re they want you to I want they want to work with you, right? Or they want you to give them at least a proposal pitch them a proposal. So that’s a whole different dynamic than interruption marketing. When you’re doing outbound prospecting, don’t discredit either one of them. Now, the reason I started telling you this because I’ve been playing around what I’m going to be teaching about at POFU Live this year is prospecting. I’ve been working on some prospecting stuff or some lead gen assets of mine, and I’m using a new, a new service called dub DBB, calm DBB calm, it’s a video email platform, but it works really, really well. And just at the beginning, on just on Monday, I sent out an email to 15 Tree Service contractors one video that I recorded and uploaded it to the dub platform. And I sent out one email to 15 Tree Service contractors and I got two new lead buyers this week from it for that’s pretty damn good. That’s really really good results.

I’m also working on some automation and things like that to really just start filling up the pipeline with Tree Service contractors on autopilot. And that’s what I’m going to be teaching about at POFU Live this year. So what the reason I wanted to mention that was that inbound prospecting is where we ultimately all want to be. I think that takes time, you got to build a reputation a name for yourself, and then people will start to seek you out. That’s also part of the reason I always recommend niching down into a particular industry because you start to make a name for yourself in that industry, you can charge higher prices, it becomes easier to scale all of that. But don’t discount outbound prospecting because if done right, it can be very, very effective. So I just wanted to point that out.

Cool, let’s do it.

Okay, everybody, good. We can get into questions. Yep. All right. Let’s do let’s go.

Oh, yeah, by the way, so go to semanticmastery.com/process guys. This is the process street doc that I’ve been talking about for a few weeks, but I have not done this either training, I will flesh this out with more text as well as you know what I’ve got in the slides and things like that as I finished the training as I said, I hope to have it done by tomorrow afternoon. But I just wanted to point out the website, silo architecture training. A couple of the videos have been added, this will be fleshed out a little bit more, but this is going to be completely updated from the silo training that I recorded, I don’t know in 2014 or 15. So this is all updated. All right, should be done by tomorrow. That said, let’s get into questions.

How Do Add Attribution Links To A Shopify Blog Without Yoast Or WP?

Looks like the first one is from BM SEO. He says Hey guys, unreal content, I had a question about RSS post attribution links for the Shopify blog. How do I go about adding these without Yoast or WordPress thanks.

You can hard code that in humped excuse me in IFTTT, you can hardcoded into the applets in IFTTT, so if that’s what you’re using as your syndication trigger is IFTTT to kind of manage that for you, then you can write in the applet you can set that up. And in fact, I did training on this for Hump Day Hangouts. Just a, I don’t know, probably about six or eight weeks ago now.

But yeah, I did specific training and even posted the, you know, example, code for the applet and the hump day Hangout. So just go to our YouTube channel and search for attribution. You know, whatever, go to semantic or YouTube comm slash semantic mastery, use the channel search feature and then just search for IFTTT attribution, applets or something like that attribution links and it should come up, you should be able to go see what I posted and the text document for the code that I posted should also be available in the video description for that as well. Okay. Does anybody want to comment on that?

Is Semantic Mastery Related To Ranking Factory Revolutions?

Nope. Next is please excuse me for mentioning a competitor. But there are these guys Ranking Factory Revolutions. Do you have any relation to them as they teach similar tactics of stacking? I do not. Marco, do you want to comment on that?

Oh, I’m okay with Patrick. I know Patrick Patrick total, I’ve done webinars with Patrick Tuttle. He owns the factories, or he’s part-owner, I’m not sure.

It’ll be the first one to tell you that they’re based on my tactics on my original iframe and concepts. So I appreciate him for that. He does mention that he mentions that often guys. It’s just different ways of trying to accomplish the same thing, which is ranking. I’m not saying I can’t really say anything about it, because I don’t know. I know people that use it and have success with it. And I know people that use our stuff and have success with it eventually comes down to a choice of what it is that you want to do and how you want to accomplish it. That’s all it is. I mean, we have an entire system built around this. So it’s not just the drive stacks and D sites. It’s not just a stacking. It’s not just the iframes, right?

We set up the SEO shield for a very specific purpose because we’re accomplishing many different things when we set out for that purpose, which is what we’re calling now, entity-based wireless SEO, meaning we don’t worry anymore about Google, haven’t worried about a Google update. I mean, I see guys freaking out all the time. Google’s constantly updated updating three over 3000 or 4000, just last year. I don’t know how many so far this year, but it’ll be in the thousands. So imagine, every time they have enough that you freak out you die, or have multiple peptic ulcers, right for perforated ulcers. Now, with that in mind, but Robin, I sat down and came up with this shield concept, right? I’ve been talking about the SEO shoot for years.

But we finally came up with a concept where we taught people just relax.

This is what we’re doing. This is how to do it. This is how you’re going to accomplish it and not worry about Google. Why? Because we’re doing exactly what Google wants. Here.

Very good. I gotta find it. I’m gonna I’ll find it and come back. I’m looking for that attribution stuff that the previous question was about guys. I’ll try to find it and post it back in here at the end of today should only take me a minute. We should actually probably highlight that somewhere too. I’ll make a bookmark or something because we get that question often so I’ll come back to it.

Should You Wait Until You Have A Verified GMB Before Publishing The Gsite?

Okay, uh, let’s see. The next question was Ilana says, Hey, guys, would you wait until you have a verified GMB before publishing the G site? Just wondering whether or not having all the links in place for the initial crawl would affect anything, in turn, all the iframes on the G site as well would be missing the GMB. I mean, it’s up to you I don’t typically wait if I’ve got. I usually wait only because I don’t usually have ordered the stuff until after the GMP has already been verified. But if I was getting an early jump on the G site and all of that, I would go ahead and publish the damn thing and then just go back and add in as needed. And you can always go back to search console and ask to have it re-crawled. For example, if you go to URL inspection in Search Console, or Yeah, Search Console URL inspection and just add the URL back in and have it crawl again, it’ll say whether it’s indexed or not. But if it says it says page changed, question mark request indexing. So if your page has changed, you can ask Google to recrawl it again, by just doing that. So that’s what I would do is I would first publish the G site, go ahead and add it to search console. And then from there, whenever you go, you know, go back and complete it. Once your GMB is available, and you have updated the G site, then I would go back and just request indexing again, essentially have them recrawl it again, that’s what I would do. Anybody else? Yeah. What what are we doing? Because when you talk about something like this, you’re talking about so many things, if you’re talking about our system, our way, if you’re trying to create the entire entity, then you need that GMB.

First, so you can do everything else, especially if that g site is going to be your money site. So you can’t publish. Like you can’t get very you would have to get the G site first publish it and add it to your GMB listing. Or as soon as you can, you would have to edit that out. Now, it’s also part of the ad ID where we add the entity right? Well, we add the iframe to the D site. So you do need the D site but you need the GMB so you can iframe it all in there doesn’t make sense to have to go back and like do double work or have to go back and edit and have to have to go back and do all these things where you can just do them all as it becomes available. So go get that GMP that’s your main entity when you do a local that’s like without that. You’re not getting him to the map.

That’d be it. You’re just not you need that map you need that you need to verify GMB to get that local listing, to be able to appear in maps to be able to get those local calls.

Which is where all the action takes place. So get that first. Now if it’s nonlocal, you don’t really need a GMB.

So, Atlanta, what is it? So let me ask you directly, what are you trying to do? Are you working locally? You can’t do it without the GMB. If it’s nonlocal, then you have a lot of options open.

That’s what I would say with that.

Are You Linking From Your Google Properties To Gsite Categories Or The Homepage?

Are you good? The next questions are from Ilana as well. She says two more. One for the G site or excuse me, for the G site mirroring, are you linking from your G properties to those categories on the G site with the keywords you’re trying to push or just linking to the homepage? Yeah, again, it’s mirroring, right. So that’s what we talked about. I don’t know how deep we can get into it here. But whatever your mirrored your pages from. So for example, if I’m going to use this as an example, although I don’t know that you’re going to have a self-hosted website if you had a self-hosted website and you’re mirroring that structure onto a G site, then each, you’d have a one to the one-page relationship. So in other words, for every page on your main site, you’d have a corresponding page on the G site, what I do is I frame the main site page into the G site. And then I’ll also link back to that page using the primary keyword typically so that I have an anchor text link going back to that page as well. That’s just that’s one of the ways that I do it because you can actually push keyword relevancy through that link that way. But that’s the way that I do it. So for example, if I’m creating silo structure on the G site, so I would create child pages because there’s not really posts on the G site, then the child pages are going to be linked to from the parent page by default unless you turn that option off in G sites. So that creates that link. And then for each one of the child pages, I’m going to iframe in the corresponding page from the money site, and I’m going to also link back to that page with an anchor text link. And then I’m going to link to the previous posts within that silo or page within that silo using a related keyword phrase, so just basically another one from another keyword from that same silo. Does that make sense? So that’s the way that I do it so that it’s always linking back to its target page, whatever it’s mirrored on is going to always be linking back to its target page. And then I always duplicate whatever internal linking structure I have from my primary asset into my mirrored assets as well. And that goes for the same for the RYS drive stack stuff as well. Same thing. So that’s how I do it. Marco, do you do it differently?

I mean, no, yeah. All right. So when we start out with the keyword research, the keyword research gig, we deliver three categories, right siloed with suggested words that people use, guys and it’s just a suggestion. It doesn’t mean that that’s the way it has to be, you know your niche better than we do. We give you suggestions. You go with it, or you don’t but three categories are enough to start with on something new. If you already have existing categories, then that’s fine. So I’m going to the top-level category.

I’m going to clone that one to one, right whatever that category is, is going on the G site extension with its own DRS tag. And then that’s going to get hammered. And link over to that category page on the money site. Now category meaning the WordPress taxonomy.

Correct.

It’s your market level keyword. So if it’s HTML, or whatever else it is, it’s the market level keyword, the top keyword in that niche that you’re trying to push up where all the money is. That’s what you will link to, that’s what you will push your link building through so that you so that it ranks for not only that top market level category where the money is but all the additional keywords under that category. Alright.

That’s one. So you extend those, it would make no sense to do all that work and link everything to the homepage. Yeah.

Yeah, agree. Absolutely. None. So think about that.

Yeah, where do you want to push the relevancy? That’s the point the whole kind of theme, mirroring to keep all of the activity, external link building, and everything that we’re going to be doing to our tier one, entity assets, all of that very tight keyword theming. So those keyword sets want to keep it very, very tight, very specific. And we want to inject that into the appropriate area of the SEO shield, right, and then have the SEO shield direct it to the appropriate area on our money site, whether that’s a G site is our money site, or if we have a self-hosted site, it doesn’t matter. The whole point is you want to think about, you know, go from the outside in like, you know, tiered link building like the top of the funnel down to the bottom of the funnel, right which would be very pinpoint accuracy where you want all of that relevancy that you just built through the tiered link, building your entity assets and everything else, where do you want to push that relevancy to? And that’s really, really important. So just keep, think of it that way. Think of it as a funnel. Visually, you’ve got all this stuff on the outside and it keeps narrowing down to its ultimate target point, which is where you want to play

All of it too. And you want to with with with very specifically pushing it to certain areas on your site. And again, it’s all about relevancy and how you stack content and everything else. And that’s essentially what you’re saying. Correct, Marco? Yeah.

Very good. All right.

What Is The SEO Benefit Of Using Link Shorteners?

So the second part of that is what is the SEO benefit of using link shorteners? It just gives you additional URLs. So you can also siphon some authority off of the domain shortener or the URL shorteners themselves, which is part of the reason why the mgyb.co shortener is working really well. Because, you know, over the years, it’s been hammered with a shit ton of backlinks and everything else. So it’s got some link juice built to it. And so we do the link shortening because it just gives what first of all turns really ugly URLs into something a lot shorter. But also, you actually do siphon some authority from the domain itself that way and it gives you additional link building targets to what else can you add to that?

No.

I mean that is a lot of benefits that aren’t really talked about because people just don’t know that I’m not willing to share in an open way that I have shared anywhere. I mean, not even with you guys on how these shortened links can work to benefit everything that you’re doing, but that’s coming in the heavy hitter Club by the way. So I will be sharing that at some point. Why they work how they work, why to avoid Abby, any way you can anything that’s not a 301 anything other than a 301 should be avoided like the plague, right?

It’s just pushing power you can Dre that trust, authority, so many things that come with that link shortener as long as it’s a 301 anything other than the 301 and you lose the benefit and makes no sense to use it.

There you go.

What WP Plugins Do You Recommend For A Local Directory Site?

Let’s say Mateus is up if I said that pronounce that properly says hey guys thinking about a local directory. I was wondering if you knew any good WordPress plugins for this. Preferably one with a solid structure built would be nice and ability to add in cities to expand in future also, would an ROI stack be suitable for a site like this using just the category keywords and linking to the homepage? Thank you. You know, I don’t know there, I don’t have any suggestions for the category or excuse me, plugins for building a local directory. I know there’s some, some pretty decent themes out there now that are built specifically for that. So they probably have functionality built into the WordPress themes that will handle what it is that you need to do. There, there may be plugins as well, I just don’t do directory style sites, I found them to not be very lucrative, more work than they’re worth, to be honest with you. But I’m not you know, I’m not trying to discourage you if that’s what you want to do. But I just don’t have anything to suggest because it’s not something I’ve done I last time I started to build a directory site was probably seven or eight years ago, no shit. And I just found them not to be very, very profitable. They’re harder to rank, in my opinion, because it’s hard to build topical relevancy on a directory site. Does that make sense? I know that because one of my clients has actually got

He’s building a directory and and and I’ve been working with him and it’s he’s wondering why he’s not getting he’s not spending any money on it. It’s all on-page stuff that I’ve been consulting with him for. It’s just on-page stuff. And they keep asking me why they’re not getting any results. I keep telling him You got to spend money on off-page two, especially for the directory because think about directory style sites guys, that the content is very thin, usually right? So it’s very difficult to build topical relevancy, without doing external like off-page SEO stuff, right? You can push power into a directory site where it doesn’t need a ton of on-page, four topical relevancy if you’re building the relevancy externally. But if you’re just trying to rank with topical relevancy on-page, it’s very difficult to do with a directory unless it’s a very niche, specific type directory, in which case then it can accrue topical relevancy, very easy, but if it’s a general business directory with multiple types of business, then it’s hard for Google to identify what the site is about specific

Because it’s got so many broad topics. And so again, I’m, I don’t recommend building local directory sites unless it’s niche-specific. Or unless you’re going to be doing a lot of external SEO, if it’s a general business directory, then it requires, in my opinion, a lot of external or off-page SEO, in order to really start to get results from it. Because there’s very little that you can do on-page to build relevancy. At least that’s, that’s been my experience, which is why I just don’t like to mess with directory sites. So I don’t have any recommendations for you. Does anybody here not for plugins, you know that we use MPC math page creator for mass page websites, that’s the way I think that would be an easier way to build the directory and then what you would do is on the drive stack and G site, each category that you have on your directory would get a cat a corresponding category on the dry second t site right in extension. So that’s how you drive the power into it. This is Bradley then it’s about everything. So how can you tell the But what exactly your website is about when you can’t really focus on what the website is about because it’s about everything when your website is about everything like the entity is really hard to focus on because it’s about all of these categories.

And so you’re gonna have to plan that out, you’re gonna have to do the schema correctly, so that you relate all of these categories to the parent, the parent, to all of the carriers, the children, and how you’re going to create all of that relevance throughout your brand. The best way would be brand, pushing the categories dry second D site extensions, but it’s a map monumental job. What do you hope to accomplish with your directory? what’s the point of this because if it’s ranking rent, then it might be better to do something local, where it’s highly relevant.

Get those local services ranked, and then you can rent it out, you can offer it to people, right? It’s a lot different. I always tell people, look, we have to focus, we have to find a focal point, we have to find some way to make this thing, because it’s a thing, and the entity is just a thing on the internet that we’re trying to get Google to see. And we’re trying to show Google that our thing is the best on the web. So how do we do this? If we’re scattered all over, then to start with, it’s going to be so difficult to accomplish, what it is that you’re trying to do, which is rank, every category, and then everything under each category, which is a monumental job. I mean, you’re talking about just hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars to get something that Yelp didn’t grow out overnight. Yelps have been around for years. Any other directory that you can talk about? It’s been around for years. To start out. You can bootstrap it, you can. Yeah, I’m gonna put in some sweat equity and a couple 100 bucks, and here I go, not gonna happen.

Yeah, you know, in my opinion, a better method if you want to go the directory style is to go with a local directory in a particular city but build the primary site out as a local events and news type site like in other words you can and there’s something that we’re gonna we’ve got in the works that we’re going to be bringing to you guys in the coming months. But it’s along these lines where you can build out like a locally local media or local news style site for a particular city. And you can go out and curate content from other local news sources and radio and you know, event calendars and local Facebook pages or Facebook groups, you know, things like that, that you can actually use to populate the content of a locally based site that’s and that will start to generate if you know from having content that you don’t even have to produce because it’s produced. Again, you can use like Damon Nelson RSS masher for that is an example. Those are things that you can do that you can actually get a site that will start to accrue traffic, once it gains a little bit of traction. And then from there, you can start to sell or rent, you know, like business listings on there, or even just rent or sell ad space, right? You can do things like that. And I think that’s a better route to go than to build like a Yelp style directory type business site because it’s very difficult to get traction as Marco and I just mentioned with those types of sites, whereas I think with even though the local news type media style sites, you can populate it with other people’s content. And you can do that on autopilot. And it will start to you know, with some additional off-page SEO stuff like a drive stack, for example, and link building and everything else, you can start to get some traction in local space with that type of a site and start getting traffic and traffic will really help that site to take to gain authority in Google’s eyes. And then from there, you can start to sell posts or business directory listings, essentially as well as advertising space and everything else that’s something that I would recommend overdoing a traditional like Business Directory site. Because I just I’ve seen over the years, we’ve had a lot of people come through Semantic Mastery that has tried business directories, a ton of internet marketers and SEOs have tried business directories. And it’s very rare that anybody turns them into something profitable, it ends up being more of a time and money suck than anything. So I would just recommend against it unless you like Marco said if you got a specific reason and you’ve got a strategy in place that you think will work then, by all means, pursue it. But the reason why a lot of people don’t have directories is that it’s very difficult to get them to perform well. So

good question now. Maybe he’s up with a multitude of questions, but that’s okay. Maybe because we don’t have a lot of questions today for some reason. So we’ll go start with

How Much Of The Budget Should You Allocate For Content Strategy?

number one just for knowing even if SEO clients are not my preferred model, so you charge $1,000 on a client, how much of that should you allocate to content? It just depends. You know, like, are you doing it in house? Are you buying it, you’re outsourcing the content to a third-party provider, you know, all that kind of stuff, I can tell you that depends with my clients, on an average note, usually, I spend more of whatever the overall retainer budget is on a monthly basis, in the beginning, so that I can get the traction very quickly. But then once, you know, my client is my, the project is performing well, then I usually back I usually try to keep it to about 40%, no more than 40% of whatever the overall budget is. And that pays for content that pays for virtual assistants to manage different aspects. So essentially, you know, administrative assistants and that kind of stuff, but I try to keep it around 40%. That’s not always the case. Like I said in the beginning, typically I might spend 60 or 70% of whatever the monthly retainer is to get traction very quickly. But then once it’s performing well then that’s like I said I try to keep it at somewhere, somewhere around 40%. Mark. And that’s just kind of a rule of thumb. It doesn’t always fall into that ratio. about you guys. Yeah, go ahead. Marga no good. Well, I’m gonna say I think he’s got I forget this BB. Yes. Yeah, I think you’re approaching this kind of backward, I would say how much is it going to cost to get the content that I need? And then kind of work off of that? Because if the content can be done for 50 bucks, what, you know, that’s great. That doesn’t mean you can’t charge $1,000. You know, I would just look at that in the budget, instead of saying, Okay, I’m getting $1,000. Now, how much should I spend? Because at that point, what if the answer is 1200? So, yeah, which I mean, it won’t be But yeah, I would just say maybe work that backward in the future. I think you’re right to say how much should I expect to be spending because you may just be asking this question to kind of look into content ideas and how much it may cost but if not, I would say definitely flip this around a little bit.

Next time and say if I need to produce content, or how much is it going to cost? And then based on that, how much should I charge?

Yeah, to me, I’m with Adam. Because he’s focusing on the wrong thing. It’s not just content allocation, how much is it going to take for resource allocation, because there’s a lot of things that that thousand dollar client is going to require, well, hopefully not, hopefully, you’re not doing a whole lot for 1000. Now, I wouldn’t do shit for 1000 hours.

Right? $1,000 that’s not even an hour of my time, I’m not doing shit. Now.

I understand you guys. You have to take these clients at $1,000 you should have a system in place it has to be part of your system. And you have to know what that system costs you monthly per client. So you know when you bring $1,000 client and what it is that you can give that client for that thousand dollars because you don’t know you’re going to end up spending a whole lot of your time.

Listen to me, when I tell you this, it’s going to cost you more than $1,000. That kind of giving you because it’s going to require a whole lot of your time, which you shouldn’t be spending on that anyway. So focus on building a system to the point where you know exactly also, let’s say, the first three months, it’s going to cost you 80% of that revenue coming in. But after that, it’s going to go down to take 3040. And then you get to keep 60. Well see, now you have a system in place, and you know exactly what it’s going to cost. And you can just bring these people in one right after the other at $1,000. Knowing that, three months later, you’re going to keep 60% of the revenue. So you get 10 clients at the end of those three months. You’re making six k a month. If you don’t know it’s going to cost you time and it’s going to cost you money. Remember what I’m telling you?

You’re right, you’re absolutely right. And forgive me I forgot that he mentioned to just content but what I was talking about is it overall what how much of my clients budget Am I using to get the results for and that that covers link building and bed campaigns all of it right so my blogger to produce content, everything that covers it all so and I do have a system for all I’m working with now is Tree Service clients. So you know, I know what my costs are going into a new anytime I get a new client the contacts a new Tree Service contractor the contacts me, I’ll look at their, their project and I’ll determine what the competition levels are, but I know what my costs are. So it’s easy for me to be able to quote on that. And that’s again, why I prefer to stick with just one industry type now because I know what my costs are I know what it’s what the keywords are, I know what you know, I’ve got content people in place that are really good at producing content for that industry. So all of it just makes it much easier for me to be able to determine very quickly what my costs like it’s just easier to manage my business when it’s all one industry like that. So

So I got away from trying to do work for anybody other than just tree care companies. Now.

How Do You Build An SEO Shield With A Domain That Has Multiple Subdomains?

The next question was if you have a domain that has subdomains, each subdomain has a different purpose of a niche, not for lead gen niches like dogs, cats, sports, etc. How should it be built with the SEO shield to the top domain and shield each subdomain? Well, yeah, I mean, if each subdomain is kind of its own standalone topic then that’s what I mean. Again, I don’t like how do you have things branded together? Remember, it’s about the entity too. It’s not just about the topics, it’s about the entity. So it that’s kind of a difficult question to answer because I don’t have all of the details of you know, what the structure of the project is that you’re talking about is, so I don’t know how all the subdomains tie into the main entity, the root domain, how does that occur? Like what, what is the relationship and that would really, that would determine what my answer would be. So if it’s all the same brand, but it’s like different categories of things, then you could have one, you should have one primary stack and one primary entity. And you can have like subsidiaries of all of that for but again, I don’t know what your setup is on that. So it’s kind of difficult to answer. If they’re all kind of unrelated or they’re not part of really an overall brand, then I would do separate, you know, separate shields for each one of them and treat them as if they were independent entities almost. But it’s really difficult to answer without more details. Do you want to take a stab at that, Marco?

No, no, I totally agree if you don’t relate the subdomains in some way to the parent, and you create any kind of confusion as to which one’s the parent.

If you in some way know, are ambiguous that parent-child relationship, then you’re in trouble because Google is going to take those, let’s say just three subdomains and the main domain is going to be four separate entities that Google is going to take a look at. And it’s going to confuse all four and it’s not going to know which one is supposed to rank. AI is getting to the point and especially with schema not available and everything. That’s about available it’s to the point where it Google can really focus down on what the entity is what it’s all about. And what it’s supposed to do with that, the moment that you confuse it, it gets really confused and really fucked up. And it’s going to go all over the place and not know, like, you’ll see things scattered all over the place, the moment that you related or that you create the relationship, the parent-child, make sure that that the button knows subdomain is part of the main domain. But the subdomain is not a separate and apart domain is that living is not just living there and doing nothing. It’s completely relevant to whatever it is that you’re doing, then you can really power that up and it’ll help the root and the root will help the subdomain that’s where we are right now. Okay, so it’s when you’re really focusing on this when you’re thinking about how to brand and how to focus on the subdomains and how to bring them up how to rank them. Then it all works together. It all comes together. It’s not something that works, separate and apart. You have to bring up

mol together and that’s tied up or tight together with the schema.

Yeah, he’s saying there’s no relation to them. So if there’s no relation, then I would treat each one of those subdomains as separate. Basically entities really, if there’s no relation between the parent and the subdomains, right, so the root domain and the subdomains and you just have, you know, different websites built on subdomains and they’re each about different topics, so not related to each other or to an overall bigger brand, then you could potentially just to treat each one as a separate entity, am I right? Yeah, but why not? Then just take them into separate domains? Randy, Randy, one and focus on each one separately, rather than trying to fit them all together. Where the bot Have you seen something about dogs and sports and Legion? And what and what are you doing, especially if you don’t do it now, instead of tying it all together, what you’re going to have to do is do a really good job of separating them each create for each one its own brand, its own to teach if you’re gonna do that might as well just separate the domains. Yeah, I agree.

Does Google Index A Referring URL?

All right. The next question was if a user came from a backlink to our site that was just created, does Google index the backlink? Well, I don’t know if Google index the backlink, but from somebody visiting it, but it is a signal nonetheless. And depending on where that user or visitor came from, right, if they were at from an Android device or from a Chrome browser on a desktop or a laptop, or if the site that they came that the link was on that they clicked through, had analytics on it. You know, all of the Google Chrome knows that clicked came from that link. Right. So the visitor came from that referral, that referring URL, whether Google decides to index that page that had that referring URL on it or not, is up to Google. That just because somebody clicked through that referring URL doesn’t mean that Google’s going to index the page. But Google depending on like I said, it Google, most likely 98 chance, knows that that visitor came from that specific URL from that, from the page that that URL was referring URL was posted on. And that’s still a good signal nonetheless, for both? Well, it can be a good signal, but not only for your own site, but also for the page where that referring URL was on because that shows activity. Right? So activity, relevance, trust, and authority. So that’s activity. So but again, it could be a visitor from a completely unrelated, so like a non-relevant link, and that shows activity, but if it’s on if it’s not relevant, is that beneficial, or does it cancel it out? Do you see what I’m saying? So there, that’s why ART (activity, relevance, trust, and authority). There are three letters in the same acronym because they’re all related to each other. So you want to comment on that?

You are absolutely right. We don’t we have no way of knowing what Google’s going to do. Come on. It’s cool. We don’t know now.

What’s going to happen to that is like, what link? Are you talking about it? Where is that link? Because if it’s a link in some document, some obscure document somewhere, I don’t know how likely it is that that’s going to index or how the user even found that backlink. Now, what you can do if you want it index is run some ads to that and get some click-throughs. And I guarantee you that Google is looking at that even if they decide not to index it. That’s a that’s an absolutely depends what Google does with that backlink. It depends on how relevant it considers that back. And because of that backlink isn’t relevant to everything that you’re doing, then Google is just going to disregard that make right the distance graph algorithms not even going to take it into account.

It could be that the person clicks on it, it’s not related. They bounce. And that’s not a good signal. It’s a negative don’t find what they’re looking for. And so that link, it’s discounted unless it’s coming from a very powerful domain to start with what

The relevance gets transferred in another way, let’s just call it that way. So I don’t have to go deep into that. But you know, the power of the subdomain, the trust and authority can override relevance. And we’ve seen it time and time again. But that’s why we use Google. That’s why we went in there in the first place. Right? It depends on the bank backlinks, it depends on the website that it’s on. Depends on the purpose of the website. And it entirely depends on Google, because even if it’s powerful, and you’re getting all of these positive signals or whatever, Google may decide just for whatever not to index that backlink, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t benefit from it because Google knows it’s there.

What Should You Do If A Youtube Syndication Powered Video Ranks Down From SERPs?

Sweet The next question, and then we’ll get to somebody else’s baby says say you say we use a YouTube syndication only what to do if a video drops position in the SERPs. While you can just do standard link Building and embeds plus link building. That’s all like just traditional SEO stuff. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve repeated this maybe. But my preferred method, besides just SEO stuff, is to buy targeted traffic to it from Google ads. So because it’s so inexpensive, it’s so inexpensive. In fact, it’s typically cheaper to run a targeted traffic campaign to a video to help it stay ranked or to rank it, to begin with, and then also to stay ranked than it is to spend a lot of money on embeds and link building. I’m not saying don’t do that, because if you don’t want to run Google ads, for whatever reason, then you can still brute force YouTube videos to rank with SEO, there’s no question you can do it. So link building embeds plus link building that kind of stuff. Again, putting a video in a press release tends to work quite well. Also, that’s a great signal for videos to rank. But for me, I like to do a little bit of SEO work and then just constantly run targeted traffic to the video and that seems to just like be the magic bullet for what I’ve done over the last several years. But you know, one other thing is to remember if you have, you can set up like applets inside of IFTTT to where when you like a video so like whatever channel is connected as a service to your IFTTT, so whatever channel it is that you’re using an IFTTT to trigger your syndication, you can go out and create the like applets which are if an if videos light, then so if, like video, then and then just basically duplicate all the applets that you currently have, and have so that the trigger is instead of new video uploaded. It’s when you like a video from that channel. Like in other words, when you’re acting as that channel and then you like a video, whatever video it is that you like, will automatically syndicate so if you’ve got your syndication networks connected to your YouTube channel, then you

You log in as that YouTube channel and you go back to your video and you can make your own video and it will re-syndicate out across the network that can also give it another boost and that that, you know can occur from time to time, especially with older videos that have already been syndicated. And it’s been a while, but as I said, something else you can always do is go out and take your syndication network posts, where that video was already republished, and extract all those URLs and then by link building to those URLs as opposed to directly to the video. Something else you can do is the YouTube silo method, right? So create a playlist, which is a YouTube playlist is nothing other than a container. So you can create silos within your YouTube channel using playlist so you can also remember you can get even boost whatever video is you’re trying to rank by taking that same video creating similar versions of it, your tools out there where you can take the same video and spin it. And essentially, it’s the same damn video but it looks different to YouTube. You can create a playlist with your video that you want to rank at the top with the playlist and then create add all those additional videos in the playlist as supporting keywords just like a silo, silo architecture on a WordPress site or on an on a website, and then interlink all of those back up to that top-level video. And again, I cover all that stuff in YouTube silo Academy, which you should already have access to bV. If you’ve ever purchased anything from us, I think we just give it away now. If not, it’s seven bucks, go buy it. But that’s something else you can do. So there’s a number of things you can do for YouTube. Again, for me, the easiest thing in the world to do is just go once the initial SEO push is done, I just go buy targeted traffic and that tends to do work every time. So the comments on that, guys? The three pillars that we work by that we work on there that we live by our activity, relevance, trust, and authority. You have a video and for whatever reason, it’s dropping. You already have the relevance because you got it on a playlist you’ve done.

The video optimization, you’ve done everything you can with that. The video file you got on a playlist. So that’s fine, you’re on YouTube. So your trusted authority is there. So now what you’re missing in this is your region you originally ranked it, and it started to fall is the activity if you’re not getting the activity to the so it’s user signals, especially on YouTube. If people aren’t sending YouTube, the YouTube algorithm, the proper signals for your video, then it’s likely that your video is going to drop, because people are finding more relevant videos. How are they? How is that relevance determined? Well, if people come to the radio, they stay on the video. They watch it all the way through and then they take some kind of action on the video. How do you accomplish that when nobody’s coming to watch a video of Bradley does that it, get activity in there, run some ads, relevant people, right? You’re going to create an audience for that video.

People who are looking for that whatever that thing is, doesn’t matter. Your audience has to be built around. It can be location-based, right? It can be geographical relevance, or it can be topical relevance, it can be about the topic you’re interested in. I think it can be age and age range, where you’re hyper-focused on that on that range on that, on those demographics, no matter what it is, if you’re not getting eventually traffic to that video, then how are you going to keep it up? And boosted up when there are people who have YouTube videos with traffic? I mean, we have to be really logical about this and say, the one piece I’m missing here. So Marco says that there are three pillars in this. And the three pillars are activity, relevance, trust, and authority. I’m missing the activity because I don’t have anybody watching my video. How do I get people to watch my video? Well, I mean, you could include the embed on in a press release. That’ll get activity to it for sure. Or you can do a combination

Do that dude. Send a press release with the video embed and especially gets paid for its pennies, guys if you’re outside the US, and you’re not running ads to YouTube videos, it’s really silly because it’s pennies on the pennies that you would pay anyway even if you were in the US. So, activity, that’s what you need. Yeah. And baby I just posted this for you this was a video that I’ve done a while back on Hump Day Hangouts and we cut the clip out. But it’s how to take a YouTube silo. So a playlist and make sure that whatever video it is that you want to be on top. And if it’s the top of silo video, it’s always going to be if you just take the regular playlist embed code, and you can embed that so you can go by and embed gig from MGYB and submit the playlist embed code as opposed to just the video embed code, because you can build all that additional relevancy through supporting keywords within the playlist, that makes sense. And if it’s the top-level video that you’re always trying to rank, then that then then all you need is just the regular playlist, embed code. But there’s a lot of strategic things you can do with YouTube silos as well, such as you can publish content on a blog, just for example, that for each one of the supporting keywords, right, each one has it’s own supporting its own blog post, optimized for that supporting keyword within the silo. And you can take the playlist and then you know, again, if you’re optimizing, even if it’s the same video, and you just spin the video and change the title of the video, to each one of the supporting keywords, so each version of the video has its own unique title with a longer tail version of whatever your primary keyword is, and all that kind of stuff. You put all of those in a silo a playlist interlink it properly and then you take that playlist embed, and you embed that in corresponding content on the blog. You could even use like if you don’t have a money site, but you’ve got a syndication network you could use as a blogger for example, or Tumblr or WordPress.

As your actual like a blog to do this, right, and then you can go out and just use some for video youtube videos, typically you can just grab some content or some content, farm content or some content that you put through a spinner, change it up a little bit and then publish a post with the route, you know, that’s optimized for that keyword that has, you know, the supporting keyword itself. And then embed that playlist with that particular video that’s optimized for that same keyword as the top video in the playlist, right, the one that’s showing is the embed even though the whole playlist is present. And again, that’s here’s a little instruction on how to do that, because used to be able to select that when you would grab the embed code which video you wanted to show at the top of the page, or you know, as the embedded video, but that YouTube took that away. But you can still do that when just adding a little piece of code into the embed code. And I’ll show you how to do that right here. So there’s a lot of really cool things that you can do just using traditional SEO tactics to rank a video. But again, a lot of that is a lot of additional work when it’s so much easier for me just to go step up $1 a day YouTube traffic through Google ads and get the results that I want. So we’re almost out of time. Let’s run through the next one a couple real quick. We’re going to go to James and Pavlo. And then we’ll come back to you BB if we have time, or actually we got another one from the client as well.

What Should You Order First If You Want To Use The RYS Drive Stack Strategy?

So James says I want to get a drive stack set up for one of my entities. And I’m a little confused about the whole RYS Google Drive stack thing on what to do first if I ordered the SEO shield package, does that satisfy the whole drive stack setup? Yes, it does the SEO power shield especially. Or do I need the order? The ROI is Google Drive stack package first before I know so if again if you just go look at the SEO shield page on our store mgyb.co, you’ll see that it includes the drive stack like the weather to location shield, starter shield, location shield or power shield, go with the power shield that pretty much covers everything. That’s your best bet. That’s why we bundled it the way that we did. So now don’t buy in our bias.

First, because then you really wouldn’t need the SEO shield, you might need the other components that are missing. But you wouldn’t need the whole shield at that point. So I would recommend just getting the SEO power shield and it would that covers pretty much all your basis. Any comments on that? Yeah, SEO power shield, right? Yep, the syndication network, which is your tier one branded ad that gets added to the to drive psychology side order, the ad ID page, and everything gets delivered as it’s built. So it’s not as if you have to wait until everything is created. Everything is done to get that delivered to you. When the syndication Academy network is done, that will get delivered to you then the drive secondary site ad ID we’ll get. It’ll all get delivered. So now don’t buy it separately. That’s why we bundled it all up. Like Bradley said, just go to the website and take a look. Yeah.

How Would You Deliver Link Building Volumes To Push Power To Different Entities?

So Pavlos up, what’s up Pavlo He says, Hey, guys, I excuse me, thanks for all the value that you give to people. You’re welcome. He says I have an SEO shoot and map embeds ready. Now I’m planning to submit link building orders. It’s better to pick narrow target points and push all power to it or spread link volume to different points such as IFTTT posts, links, g sitemap embeds, etc. Maybe you have a percentage of link usage on something like that. Thanks. Well, yeah, I mean, that’s a good question. I can’t really answer that on a general level, because I don’t know what your project is. And I don’t know what you need where.

But I like to use like built by link building gigs for strategic, like entry points within my SEO shield or my entity period, right. So I typically, you know, if it’s the first, if it’s the start of a new project, then once you get your SEO, SEO back and you have your syndication network, your drive stack, your G site, all of that, then I might just buy, you know, a great big link building package the Nitro Kit, and just include the list of URLs up to 100. Right, and just so that I’m initially seeding the whole entity, the SEO shield, essentially in all of its components, with some external links, right and that’s just to kind of start jumpstart, pushing power into the whole ecosystem, right? But once that’s done once that initial and so so, therefore, like I said I will grab all the syndication network property profile URLs, the drive stack files and folders, the G site, the ID page URL, the press advantage organization page URL, the GMB assets including the GMB map and the GMB website all of those will go into my target URL list for my first initial link building package which will have basically all of them you know keywords for the entire project will be included in my keyword list, because all I’m trying to do is really kind of jumpstart the whole you know, pushing relevancy into the entity period. But then once that is initially done, then I go in and I start strategically buying link building packages with more focused anchor text based upon you know certain things that I’m certain keywords or keyword sets.

I’m trying to push within my project. So I might build all of, you know, by a whole link building package to one page on the G site. But on the G site, it might, it’s a theme, the mirrored page that might have, you know, embeds and or links back with anchor text links back to specific pages on my money site. And that’s, that’s where I’ve talked about on multiple occasions over the last couple of months, really, you can do things like for example, if you’ve got a keyword that is difficult, you’re having difficulty ranking, then you can take the post that has been syndicated out to your syndication network targeting and optimized for that particular keyword. And go extract the post URLs from your syndication network, by a link building gig to build specifically to those posts, URLs and of the corresponding g site page that have those posts embedded in and all of that so now you can see you can take very, very specific keyword sets and start pushing relevancy to very specific points within your project, which is what we were kind of talking about earlier. With like that kind of visual that I tried to explain with a funnel. And you know, you start off with a bunch of links out there, but they all funnel down into one very specific pinpoint that we’re trying to push relevancy to. And that’s typically what I do. You know, occasionally once every 90 days or so I’ll do just a more general link building and or embed campaign to just the entity assets in general. But most of the time, I just do that in the beginning. And then on a monthly basis, I’m finding strategic parts of my project that I’m trying to push, and I’ll set up the link building campaign or bed campaign accordingly.

is a really good question and we’re out of time, guys. You want a really good question. Something Okay, hammer, the first time around, you hammer, everything, you hit everything, everything needs to be boosted up. Then you get the data Three weeks later, and you see what you need to focus your resources. And then you set up a schedule where you go through cycle through your life.

Building so that no single target gets hit time and time and time again. Because it’s going to continuously death. set that up, set that upon a schedule. And you know, that is the best. There’s nobody like dedhia he’ll take care of.

Okay. And then Clint very quickly, I’m, we’re a little bit over, but I can answer this rather quickly.

Should You Add More Content To A Website Before Building An SEO Shield?

Clint says, Hey guys, I have a client who wants their site strengthened to be SEO shield, but the site is light on content, would it be best to increase the content offering first before starting on the brand shield? No. And here’s why. Because it’s going to take a little bit of time for the SEO shield to be built anyway. And then once it’s built, it takes time for it to really start to gain traction. And, you know, link building is going to be done to it, as we always recommend and all that other stuff. So no. I mean, I would just go ahead and order it now because you can be working on adding and fleshing out the content on the money site. As you’re waiting for everything else to be built. As long as you have the primary target URL for the project, to begin with. There’s no reason you can’t order that now and have it

You know, and you can work on beefing the content up as you’re waiting for the SEO show to be built and even once it’s built, you can still add more on-page at you can do more on-page SEO as your link building to your drive stack and such. So my point is, I wouldn’t wait. I’d go ahead and just order it now as long as you have the primary asset that you’re going to push relevancy to completed and published online like it’s live, then there’s no reason you don’t have you can’t order the shield now. Marco, would you agree? Absolutely. Very good. Okay, guys, thanks, everybody for being here. We will see you guys next week.

Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 302 published first on your-t1-blog-url

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