#it won’t let me paste the link anywhere which is annoying but if you google alex albon mens health you’ll find the full article

[raceweek]

so alex and his trainer patrick gave an interview to men’s health about his recovery from respiratory failure and. im emotionally compromised

[angerissuesandrews]

Hello! Welcome to the Reddie Fic Rec!

 Please make sure you read all tags on fics before reading! 

 Have fun and enjoy :)))

Created by Evan (@iwannadie4000 on tiktok)

And special thanks to Charlie (@hippityhoppe on tiktok) for helping!

 *CLICK HERE FOR THE GOOGLE DOC REC LINK!*

  1. ON POINTE

by tossertozier (rednoseredhair); Explicit (18+)

https://archiveofourown.org/works/12519724

“Eddie was a freshman at Boston University of the arts, majoring in dance with a concentration in ballet. He went to sleep early, woke up earlier & took nothing for granted. He fucking hated his dorm neighbors, loud, obnoxious idiots who got drunk all the time. They didn't even know where the library on campus was. He didn't have any idea how the three of them, especially the one with curly hair, even GOT into that school.

  2.  BRIGHT AS YELLOW

by speakslow; Mature (18+)

https://archiveofourown.org/works/12786678 

Highschool AU, Richie’s loud Eddie’s annoyed what do you expect

3. WONDER VIOLET

by belby; Mature (18+)

https://archiveofourown.org/works/13179045

Eddie’s friends with Richie’s sister ,,, you know what happens

4. GO WEST

by ssstrychnine; Teen and Up Audiences

https://archiveofourown.org/works/12327069

“1996: Richie and Eddie finish school, drive to San Francisco, change their lives ft. hair braiding, a fake las vegas wedding, waterfalls, bumper cars, and approx. 3300 miles.”

5. I LEFT MY UMBRELLA AT HOME

by hippityhoppy; Mature (18+)

https://archiveofourown.org/works/22775233

“By 1996, the Losers are well into college. As they often do, life and time have distanced them in more ways than one. Richie, in an attempt to cling to the normalcy of the past in what feels like a steep slope into a downward spiral, ends up on an unfamiliar doorstep of an all too familiar friend. As if Eddie didn't have to deal with enough on his own plate. The both of them, they quickly come to find out, are unprepared for the storms to come.”

6. LOVESONG (A SERIES)*

by WaxAgent; Mature-Explicit (18+)

https://archiveofourown.org/series/852234

“They're all connected, sure, but nothing comes close to the iron bonds between Richie Tozier and Eddie Kaspbrak; they have their ups and their downs, but they always have each other. A look at their lives from leaving Derry to being dragged back by a promise than both of them had long forgotten.”

*(OKAY EVAN HERE!!! I LOVE THIS FIC/SERIES SO MUCH BUT IN PART 2 IT HAS A STRANGER THINGS CROSSOVER WITH MIKE AND EL BUT I SAY SKIP THAT AND GO ON YOU DON'T MISS MUCH AND WE ALL KNOW IM SO ANTI-CROSSOVER OKAY BYE)

7. WHENEVER I’M ALONE WITH YOU

by stellarbisexual; Explicit (18+)

https://archiveofourown.org/works/12182691

“Losers in college. Richie's in an alternative rock band, and Eddie has flung himself into the queer scene.”

8. SAY THAT YOU’LL STAY

by speakslow; Explicit (18+)

https://archiveofourown.org/works/12474044

“Richie works at a shitty amusement park for the summer and meets some new friends. Set in 1997”

9. STAY FOR THE STORM

by inoubliable; Explicit (18+)

https://archiveofourown.org/works/15442848

“Richie and Eddie had become friends almost on sight. Since they met, most of Eddie's time in Los Angeles has involved Richie in some way.

It's a little different, now that they're both famous.

It's a little different, now that they're sleeping together.

Well, to be fair, they've been sleeping together for a long time, but. No one knows, not even their friends. Eddie has been very careful about that. It's just not the sort of publicity he needs.

So when Beverly calls him that sunny Thursday morning, the last thing he expects her to say is, ‘You're fucking Richie?’”

10. COFFEE AND CARNIVAL BEARS

by StarshipDancer; Teen and Up Audiences

https://archiveofourown.org/works/12325209

“‘Eddie Kaspbrak knew how many germs were in a person’s mouth, and he would only swap spit with his fucking soulmate.’

Finding your soulmate should be pretty straightforward, but not for Eddie. Not when there were two possible candidates, and he had no idea which one it fucking was.”

11. LET’S HEAR IT FOR THE BOY(S)

by Kandakickas; Teen and Up Audiences

https://archiveofourown.org/works/12372279

“In which Richie and Eddie go to different colleges, and all of their friends are curious about their unnamed significant others - right up until those significant others come to visit and everyone is both shocked and confused.”

12. MEET ME HALFWAY

by ShowMeAHero; Explicit (18+)

https://archiveofourown.org/works/20667038

“‘Richie,’ Mike says sharply. “Who are you with? Why are you in Derry?”

‘Tell him,’ Eddie whispers again.

‘Is that Eddie?’ Mike asks.

‘Tell him, Richie,’ Eddie says again, louder.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Mike says, and Richie snaps, throwing his phone hard at the kitchen wall opposite them. The back smashes and the battery falls into a bowl soaking in the sink. There’s a beat of silence where Eddie and Richie stare at the battery floating in the soapy water.

‘Good work, Kobe,’ Eddie says.”

13. DREAMBOAT

by weepies; Not Rated

https://archiveofourown.org/works/14073438

“‘What are you? A third grader? What the fuck is this?’ Eddie asks. He looks at Richie, confused.

‘A list of fun stuff to do, duh. Can’t you read? I thought you were studying creative writing.’ Eddie glares at Richie, who raises his hands in surrender as he chuckles. ‘Okay, okay. Hear me out. Your professor tells you to write what you know, and you said you don’t know anything. Well, sugar, here’s your opportunity to learn something about yourself.’

Dumbfounded, Eddie cannot tear his eyes away from Richie, his mouth agape. ‘You’re insane,’ Eddie says.

‘And proud,’ Richie replies.

...

In which Eddie Kaspbrak is a writer with no ideas, and Richie Tozier is a coffee shop employee bursting with creativity.”

14. TO THE GUY AT THE BUS STOP:

by Ragno; Explicit (18+)

https://archiveofourown.org/works/12809109

“The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, especially if the other side of the fence is Ireland and the grass is Eddie living his own life for the first time ever away from his mom. An International Students Exchange Program is what he needs to finally stand up for himself and doing what he really wants. Who cares if he won't know anybody there? Who cares if he'll be alone in a foreign country? Who cares if he won't have his car and will need to take the bus to go anywhere?? Okay, maybe Eddie does care about that last one…But, hey, at least the real grass is really greener there. Right?”

15. CLOSER THAN MOST

by tozierbraks; Mature (18+)

https://archiveofourown.org/works/14934062/chapters/34598660

“Richie was panting slightly when he reached out an arm and grasped the man’s shoulder a little too hard. He spun rapidly, stumbling backwards away from Richie, his deep brown eyes wide in shock.

‘Eds.’ Richie breathed, his stomach twisting.

Eddie’s wide eyes narrowed in confusion while his brows knitted downwards. He pulled his shoulder out of Richie’s grip

‘Sorry, do I know you?’

college au + forgetting!eddie fic”

16. SIGNED, SOMEONE

by roughentumble; Teen and Up Audiences

https://archiveofourown.org/works/21096380/chapters/50195051

“A secret admirer/love letter AU. Richie starts leaving anonymous love letters in Eddie's locker.”

17. CLUE(LESS) 

by endversed; Teen and Up Audiences

https://archiveofourown.org/works/12468440

“Every person on this sorry planet wakes up on their seventeenth birthday with a soulmate mark somewhere on their body – but it’s not always easy to figure out. It’s not their name, or their first words to you, or even some kind of matching shape. It’s not anything clearly indicative; nothing concrete (at first).

No, all this mark gives you is a clue.”

18. FOR BLUE SKIES

by sunsetozier; Teen and Up Audiences

https://archiveofourown.org/works/13978821

“Just as he’s beginning to shake himself out of his daze, his phone buzzes in his hand, a notification popping up at the top of his screen that makes his entire body freeze, reading and rereading it to make sure his eyes aren’t playing a trick on him. When the words don’t change, his jaw drops, an anxious excitement tingling just beneath his skin.

@trashmouthmusic followed you back!

[In which Richie posts anonymous covers on Twitter and Eddie is instantly infatuated with his voice.]”

19. OUR HOUSE, IN THE MIDDLE OF OUR HOUSE

by orphan_account; Teen and Up Audiences

https://archiveofourown.org/works/12458046

“Whatever song your soulmate has stuck in their head is resultantly stuck in yours. Eddie, long suffering through mattress commercial jingles and old rock hits, imagines he would kill his soulmate if he had the chance. Or, he would, if he didn't think revenge was a better answer.”

20. MAYBE, MAYBE

by lisscor; Not Rated

https://archiveofourown.org/works/12841593

“The light was on again. The one in room 307. Richie wondered, not for the first time, who was up there.

Maybe one day, he would find out.

*

In which two insomniacs who have never met find comfort in the last place they would think to look - each other.”

21. MOST BELOVED

by idaemilia; Mature (18+)

https://archiveofourown.org/works/12160854/chapters/27598224

“‘But he had eyes like rain

and hair like waves

and a soul as vast and deep as the ocean

and I guess I didn't mind drowning in him’

-xvaniex on tumblr

Eddie keeps pining for Richie who is too blind to see it. But maybe he already knows.

*previously named Philtatos*”

22. TO WHAT WE MIGHT DO 

by MacksDramaticShenanigans; Teen and Up Audiences

https://archiveofourown.org/works/21709897

“He looks scared. More scared than Eddie’s ever seen him before. He looks nervous, too, and Eddie didn’t think it was even possible for Richie Tozier to get nervous.

But there he is. Looking like he's going to shit his pants or throw up all over himself. Eddie would be more worried about that if he still thought Richie was drunk.”

23. CROOKED HEARTS

by killerqueer; General Audiences

https://archiveofourown.org/works/13093371

The Monday before Christmas break, Eddie comes to school to find a yellow rose and a letter from a secret admirer taped to his locker. He's convinced it's a prank until the same thing happens the next day and then continues the rest of the week. He's determined to find out who is doing this, even though he's convinced himself that there's no way it could possibly be the one person he really wants it to be.

24. THE THIRD DATE RULE

by tinyarmedtrex; Mature (18+)

https://archiveofourown.org/works/13059960

“Bev drags Eddie along for her tattoo session, telling him that her artist is sex on a stick. She's right, Eddie likes him immediately- if only he wouldn't talk so much.

AU where Richie is a tattoo artist and Eddie pretty much just wants to work in HR and be left alone.”

25. PARENT TEACHER ASSOCIATION (PTA)

by reddiebitch; Mature (18+)

https://archiveofourown.org/works/13773060

“In which Eddie is Richie's kid's first grade teacher.”

26. FAKING IT 

by domino1234; Mature (18+)

https://archiveofourown.org/works/18023273

“The obnoxiously pretty boy with the filthy mouth across the hall manages to convince Eddie to spend spring break pretending to be his boyfriend at his family’s lake house. Can Eddie put his unrequited crush aside to play up the charade for a week or will his feelings inevitably get in the way?”

27. Nightmares

by MargotCelvin; Teen and Up Audiences

https://archiveofourown.org/works/15515028

“Richie Tozier is trying to start over in New York. He left California behind and wants to leave his old life there as well. The only thing holding him to his old life are the nightmares that have plagued him for so long. But is there something in New York that can cure him of this disease?”

28. FREAKING OUT THE NEIGHBORHOOD

by bearkwans; Explicit (18+)

https://archiveofourown.org/works/19342543

“Richie thinks that this is what being a father is like. He sure fucking feels like a father, dropping all of his plans to take care of his pet, making very specific google searches and running around his apartment like a madman, grabbing toys and a blanket and a few mice in a tupperware bowl. He knows logistically that everything he’s grabbing is useless and what he really needs is a chill pill and maybe some whiskey to soothe his shaking hands, but Richie can’t help the way his paternal side wakes up and takes control of his mind.

“[or: richie's pet snake is sick and he goes to see vet eddie ;) ;)]”

29. SUGAR, HONEY, HONEY 

by thefutureisbright; Mature (18+)

https://archiveofourown.org/works/17376344

“Eddie works in a bakery. His life was finally simple. He loved his job, he loved his friends, he loved his shitty little apartment with its shitty little balcony. He loved the plants he kept on his balcony. He loved that he could see the New York skyline when it was an especially clear day. He loved that he lived nowhere near his mother. Eddie loved his quiet, simple life.

Until he met Richie fucking Tozier, and his life was never simple again.”

30. THE BLIND BOX

by tinyarmedtrex; Mature (18+)

https://archiveofourown.org/works/13728915

“Eddie works at Gamestop and a dark haired stranger comes in and starts flirting with him. Eddie doesn't think much of it until they keep meeting.

Another College AU! Because why the hell not”

[theurbansquared]

Guide To Avoiding A Loser Brokerage

by James Hill | theurbansquared

Brokers can be bastards and some even get better at it while other brokers are legitimate life-changing business Sherpas

A broker is supposed to guide you through a career in real estate much like a coach or pimp - offering protection and how to understand a complicated system better and direct it to revenue  without getting your neck broke while playing the game. I created and ran the most well-reviewed, largest full-service brokerage in the fastest-growing city in America.  This gave me access to nearly ever broker and their broker's pay structure and innovations. I also got the agent's version of my same broker buddies brokerages when they eventually joined my brokerage; hovering anywhere from 20–60 agents. Trending insider chatter has blame going to real estate brokers of decades past (and current) and how they’ve managed their agents - - letting unsupervised  agents with no experience run wild on the streets practicing on the public wearing out Realtor love and making a need for all the Mountain Dew-made Zillow-y options that currently exist.

Brokers are out of touch more than ever with today’s current media load, having to understand and use social media platforms for their advertising (since the private Town & Country affair that real estate once was is forever over and the landscape is a bit more like a half Juggalo, half programmer flea market).

Let’s dive into some situations and tenets that most agents don’t consider when choosing a brokerage.

Sales Volume

This is a bit of negotiating psychology and due diligence. Simply ask how much sales they (the brokerage) did last year and how much they’re currently at. If they don’t know these numbers they’re goons. If they don’t give it, you guessed it - they’re hiding something; their lack of revenue. I’ve hired and fired hundreds of agents and in interviews so few ask this question but it’s one of the most important questions you can ask as an agent and you need the information. An agent that doesn’t ask this has already given a tell that they’re not a top producer since they’re not interested in the production capacity of the team they may join. No bueno. Creep the brokerage as well obvi -- reviews, FB & IG engagement and current running ads, and make sure the company Christmas Party isn’t catered by Chic-fil-a at a Burnet Road dive bar.

Office

40% of your learning and 350% of your work will be done at the office. Those numbers will make sense 90% of the time after a few years in real estate. The rest should be on the streets - your car, properties, driving 75 mph talking and sending out docs, gorging on breath mints. Office, home, tiny homes, motorhomes have all blended into one larger conversation where work/live ethos are all in re-definition.

But, when you do need a more savvy moment in any market when people talk about borrowing or selling something that’s over $100K they don’t want to hear some bullshit too loud pedantic conversation seated right next to them at Starbucks or the local kooky coffee shop. In real estate Murphy’s Law is always in effect. The super important listing sign off that has to go well and they want to hear you pitch again before deciding? There will be someone (at this super ‘caj’ coffee house meeting) there projectile vomiting, or throwing cats, or something else tiresome or bad that takes more calls.

Speech and body language are massive parts of sales so when the entire set is thrown because a barista is running through a whole Sublime album. You want the most inviting cool office you can ever pull off at any given moment in real estate . Was that ever a question? There's a balance  -- you can't afford that year one or three, but it’s called real estate for a reason. Sexy, exciting buildings is what the brochure said when I joined. Also, it’s about style not size.

If you haven’t lost business to coffee house back pressure you really haven’t failed at agency properly.

Social IQ

Social reach is the only conversation now. Many brokerages won’t make it as the lead generating aspects of the industry aren't powered by a private MLS anyone and the publicly-hated ‘Realtor’ designation have both brokers and agents guessing about tomorrow. Calendars, best practices and free shitty tips & templates are the du jour of the day for anyone trying to get an agent's eyes. You can Google and get all the ‘basic’ social media dance steps, but with everyone at the same happy hunting spot, you’re being covered up, which leaves all your new artistic efforts fruitless and also squandering winning time.

Traffic, leads and engagement are all separate areas that have to be fulfilled properly and even this is in flux with historic corporations and current start ups all on the same advertising playing field. Social reach and engagement is about going to the consumer direct and becoming their friend with soft bribes -- free food, gifts, prizes (trips, events tickets) or industry work tools. The great news is, real estate has always been mostly consumer direct - start up a convoy at the grocery store (bar, church, meetup) and you’re in the car that weekend looking for houses with a new client. While you, your brokerage and the world are figuring out their exact social media mix, you need to make sure a brokerage isn’t lost on social media since many won’t be able to stay in business in the next few short years. Your brokerage needs to have a plan and and at best some presence on social media. Plus, they should be running low-cost performative marketing ad campaigns to get a feel for what and if set user groups are responding to ads. Anyone can post on IG but people engage on IG when they become inspired. A brokerage should have some sort of inspiration and relationship tied in with the local allure of their city --  or heading that direction.

Mentoring

Much like a neurotic buyer chasing an interest rate for their home mortgage (and then never buying a house) agents too focused on commission may miss the essential career need for mentoring -- for their clients and career. I had a 5 deal minimum for my new agents before they were ever unsupervised and received more commission. I've had new agents with celeb clients in hand and celeb agents with no clients in hand. No one wants to do business with someone with absolutely has no, experience but they do it because they like you as a friend or fam. Your mentor is the person riding shotgun with you at the beginning of your career. On many levels you want to be this person since they embody the position and role. You're literally and figuratively are borrowing experience from them and they deserve to be paid for it. You always have to strengthen your brand outside of your brokerage but if you don’t have any experience your brand doesn’t have ‘strength’ you simply have a logo and a drag & drop website where you're possibly talking about yourself and love of unicorns or football shit but the big boat deals you dream about in bed aren’t gotten this way. Remember, no unicorn could ever throw a football good without a lot of practice and a good mentor.

Support

Support in a brokerage is really communication and solutions for small problems, and systems for managing bigger ones with people. Most of the annoying things in real estate happen outside of the deal - contracts, calls, emails, docs, signatures, more docs. You typically want a super admin, broker, or agent manager that you can call and they pick up the phone. It’s pretty simple. With a mentor, admin, or broker you’re going to have a n 8:30 PM question or deal that’s going down. You’ll need printer help. Real estate always happens now (this was one of the main mantras in my office). Printing, prequal, weekend support and constant post dinner shenanigans.

Training

Meet Frank Miller, David Mamet, the Sex Pistols, Tony Robbins, Wayne Dyer, Hendrix, Tom Hopkins, The World’s Greatest Detective and Conan The Barbarian. We had a lot of different inspirations for the style and ethos of our urban brokerage. The World’s Greatest Detective is Batman. It was a moniker that became popular in the seventies. We used this example about how important due diligence and proper Fact Finding techniques are for serving and closing deals for clients. (It’s almost essential to be inquisitive in real estate esp about property/development to have success). Training is largely your sales meeting(s). Although I don’t come from a car background I’ve mentored many car guys transferring to real estate (they typically are out of the industry within 2 years and are there only for boom markets). Car guys have meetings every morning 6 days a week and they’re not at 9 or 10 am. They’re already working.

free module: The Burger King Phenomena: Why Agents Do Less Working For Themselves Than If They Were Working At Burger King

Many brokerages have no training/meeting schedule (monthly doesn’t count -- that’s a meet and greet company pump and catch up meeting). If a brokerage doesn’t have training on a schedule then there is no training. You’ll possibly be thrown a 3-ring binder, or given some PDF’s, or links to old bizarre training videos or a soup sandwich of all three and sometimes even a bill for the training. An agent’s training/meetings and their attendance to them are the difference between an agent making it or not when you’re 24 months or less in the role as an agent especially in the fast turbulent waters of the current 2021 market where brokerage and agent purpose and pay are under attack. From my experience, new agents that hide die.

Media

Having a background as a creative director I’m aware with great detail of agency and brokerage media needs, the cost and time they extract, and the corresponding revenue they’re projected to bring back. Brokerages are looking for their purpose now as simply having a brokerage doesn’t bring in leads like it used to. This is fitting, since the digital dumbass brokers that that didn’t understand the importance of ‘the web’ rickshawed our MLS data and sold the agent/broker centric real estate system for their benefit while current agents are left with an empty greasy enough to-go box to curl up with. Brokerages were never media houses or ad agencies but now that consumer level graphic programs and website builders are ubiquitous and any agent after being licensed for 10 days can drag & drop a website up in 4 hours and make it look like a brokerage that’s been around for years. I know I’m going wide on the subject here but stay with me because this is the crux of where the industry and consumer are renegotiating roles.

A brokerage’s value proposition has changed drastically with the telecommute revolution that was only sped and strengthened by Covid. Also, generational knowledge base gaps in technology are more apparent than ever with technology as younger agents can often be more media savvy than their broker. The market is flooded with self appointed companies or gurus that are taking on the role of the classic ad agency (Mad Men) or media production house. Also beware of real estate coaches with little or no real estate experience offering to guide you in social media. Okay media can’t be used in apex situations (such as the luxury listings you’re after) and doesn’t draw apex listings. Beware of tapioca room temperature tips and general lists from companies that can appear informative but are really boilerplate low grade data to get your attention to ultimately upsell you on a paid service.

As an agent or a brokerage, consumer level graphic and website building programs can be a death ticket to your business as your competitors have the same tools and are cranking out the same type of style of messaging you are now. Now agents, principals, admins and in art class creating flyers. This has been done since the nineties as the valleys of dead agent careers is full of 2-day Microsoft Word (or any of their shitty office offerings) seshes to produce nasty flyers and presentations. These programs are fun and making bad flyers absolutely work related - the kind of work you don’t want’ related to your business because it’s adult crayon coloring. Activity does not equal production. Staying busy doing the wrong things doesn’t make money in real estate. Rather than spending agent winning time staying in the wrong lanes for way too long, get with a team or brokerage that are providing the most exceptional visual media you can find in your market. It used to be cool 2 years ago, now it’s the only thing that matters. Visual content.

free module: Better Agent Media, Less Agent Money (media tips and hacks).

Access

This is access to your broker. Brokers with families are typically less available. Your best bet as an agent is looking for a grinder broker who sleeps on the couch at their office. This person doesn’t have kids to build into so they’ll build into your career and you’ll get the most out of these brokers. Beware of cheesedick, apathetic, rich boy, bored brokers not around and more concerned with projects like a shitty vanity wine brand that their wife’s forced them to launch since she’s not living her best life anymore as an agent.

Style

What kind of style is your brokerage? Is there an opportunity to bring more style sophistication to the market -- standout in a smaller market? Or, are you in an ultra stylish market currently and butt hurt because you already have a little story about how you’re going to keep it real and be a Dockers wearing slob for eternity? The thing about style in agency is you always need to look like you can list a million dollar house. Oh, is it really that simple? Yes it is. You complicated it. Clients always care about their housing a little bit more than they care about your real estate career. They don’t have time to figure out why you’re wearing shoe styles from 7 years ago. Don’t make it hard for people to do business with you. If you’re ugly, even better. It can be a massive advantage. Everyone on the planet loves when someone who doesn’t fall into our general current ‘attractive’ spectrum doesn’t give af, looks great and puts themselves together in a stylish way that the viewer can understand (can I get away with Teen Wolf?). A great side benefit from this step in the right direction is it’s a great way to make someone who is conventionally attractive insecure.

You want to be in the same style as the people in your area but the secret is you need to lead that style pack if you can -- you always lead and dress apex. Years ago this was anecdotal but after over 100K hours in real estate a good suite (tailored) saved my ass and literally got me business. I listed the largest house in east Austin because of a suit (and got a front page story on the newspaper real estate section for free because the owner saw me walking into the next door neighbor’s house).

Offices, dress, logo, email signature are all elements of you and your brokerage’s style. Style in and of itself isn’t enough to be a top producer in real estate. I’ve had stylish and even celebrity agents that didn't do zilch, but style often is a fingerprint to something more.

Picking the right elements for your agent style is an art because you have to offer something from yourself that’s unique enough as well as something familiar (a bridge to your uniqueness). I have a background as a musician and also as a merchant sailor. Fortunately those are easy convo starters. You could be a philatelist and have some challenges, but regardless it absolutely will take a year or three to develop your own angle and style towards the market as you learn it and the agent role more.

Things that look attractive and familiar puts client’s psychologies at ease. So, if skinny jeans are in you better get in them (that’s like five years old now). You’re on stage. You don’t wear what the worker people behind the camera wear. If you want to wear boring shit get on the other side of the camera. If you want less leads saddle up to a forgettable brokerage. People have hard days. They want you to put an effort into your real estate agency role. Currently it’s a fried role so you’re dealing with that too. People love to be smiled at and sold and especially from someone who smells good. It doesn't ever get old. Don’t make them beg for your charm. Be a nice charming person with a shirt that fits good, it’s a powerful combo.

Get My Damn Paper

If you’ve never seen a werewolf in daylight mess with an agent’s commission after the deal’s done and funded. Admin? Who is the damn person who does the admin? (accounts payable is the icey pro word if you like). That person that you contact to get your commission check cut? If that person is a weirdo, or there’s an unfriendly or sketchy quality to the office or admin staff, do not go forward (don’t confuse this with new people or industry jitters). Grab some free coffee, leave the smarm and jet to the next brokerage blind date.

Software

CRM is an annoying conversation. Here’s the things with CRM’s - for all the work CRMs curtail, because of their complexity and existence and the work(time) they take to interact with you need to consider how much work you’re putting into operating the CRM software verses how much time it’s saving. Many times brokerages have expensive yearly subscriptions with per agent fees for their CRM which can make the brokerage have a zealot meth thing for the ‘team’ software and promise you can’t have a career without taking a bump too. To understand CRM better before it was a name, Client Relationship Management is what analog Proximity became. Let me explain -  being close to people in Church, bar, school, same building -- all give proximity. This becomes familiarity, then ease, then trust. People do business with people they trust & like. Once people disconnected physically and started using other means more contact attempts have to be made to work for or ‘prove’ worth.

Follow Up is a large component of most CRM’s and there are gobs of money for agents who follow up meticulously. Simply ask the broker what CRM they use and research it. Something to remember - unless you’re extremely busy with your career you don’t need a CRM. You can manage & database your clients & leads ‘by hand’ and strap it to the cloud with G-Suite/Google Sheets.

Brokerage Name

A small but important aside, if a brokerage have named themselves after a precious metal or a gem, or if it says elite in the name then it’s not elite. If it has the words prestige or worldwide or international it may not be any of those either. I know a handful of exceptions to this rule but this is a great dirty primer to use when choosing a brokerage that’s going to propel your career and have shrimp options at the Christmas Party.

[postdoc-help-desk]

Expert Note-Taking

Last post was about how to manage any references you gather during your research, so this time I’m going to focus on another important related factor: keeping track of important information obtained from references. Even though you can do this in multiple ways and preferences will determine what you go for, there is one factor you’ll definitely want to consider before choosing an option.

It all comes down to the question of how long your project will last and how many references you’ll need to collect in order to complete it. For me, these fall into three categories that boil down to the terms small, medium, and large.

◆ Consider small projects as those that are fairly short or not requiring many references. If the project only lasts a few weeks or you need under 10 references, you can probably get away with printing articles before highlighting relevant information and scribbling notes in the margins. If you prefer to keep things digital, these options are also available in most PDF reader applications.

◆ For medium-sized projects with up to 20 references or ones that last up to a semester’s worth of time, you may want to consider transferring that information to a notebook or onto note cards that you can flip through or putting it all into a single word processing document. At the very least, this will reduce each reference to its relevant information instead of having to skip past extraneous information. Since you should have a PDF copy of all your references saved for easy access, you will always have the option to return to the full piece for details you may have missed previously.

◆ And then there’s the large projects. For any projects that require more than 20 references, you will likely want to be able to search and sort information more easily, and this is where software options can be immensely beneficial. Similarly, any projects that last longer than one semester’s worth of time is likely best suited for digital notes so you don’t misplace work and have to do a close rereading of any references. As graduate students, this is where your main research project will definitely end up, though other projects may as well.

Of course, your cutoff point might be different than mine, so don’t feel like you have to stick to these values. If you have a better memory or fewer things to juggle, you may get away with stretching to longer time periods or larger quantities of references. If you’re liable to forget things easily or have a lot of responsibilities, make sure you account for this! You know your own limits better than I do, but do try to err on the cautious side. And by no means should you push yourself to keep everything in your head, because you will definitely forget information or mix up sources and details if you do!

So let me spend the rest of this post talking about what some of the best options are out there for digital academic note-taking. Just like you did in choosing a reference manager, spend a little time testing out your choice to make sure it’s a good fit for you and your style. If you thought the idea of transferring your references from one manager to another halfway through a project was daunting, consider how much worse it would be without the automatic export and import options they offer and you’ll have a sense for what transferring your notes to another platform halfway through a project would be like.

Digital note-taking options have two distinct advantages over paper and print options, which are intertwined. They are the copy and paste function and the search function. ◇ Whether you’re copying a specific quotation into your notes or grabbing a screenshot of a figure or table, this is invaluable next to having to hand-write or draw out anything. Even if you were to underline, highlight, or physically cut out the relevant part of a paper, each of these options are more time-consuming in the long run. Cutting up a physical copy to paste pieces into a notebook is completely absurd and does you no benefit when it comes time to use that information, and neither does underlining or highlighting because you’ll still have to go back to the whole reference. Finding highlighted or underlined phrases after the fact is hugely annoying, if for no other reason than having to flip through countless pages to find the right sentence. But any images you put into your digital notebook will be accessible to copy and paste out of it later on, just as any quotations will be. Searching for information will also take significantly less time and effort, because you won’t have to flip through physical notes to manually identify relevant phrases. Instead, all text in your digital notebook can be searched using the search function in the program if it has one, or CTRL+F if it doesn’t.

Now, I’m a little biased in note-taking options and I’m sure that will come across, so do keep that in mind. For me, there are really only three viable digital options at this time that are well-designed for academic note-taking.

A word processing document: ◇ It’s important to start by recognizing the tried-and-true, long-standing option of a massive document. This can of course be a browser-based document like a Google Doc that you can access anywhere with Internet or it could be application-based like a Microsoft Word document that is saved locally to a hard drive. But no matter how you design and format it, a giant document is the most basic of the digital choices and therefore has the fewest benefits. This means that as long as you include something to identify where any information comes from, it can work but it has distinct limits. However, the more references and information you add to the file, the harder it will become to pick out specifics or draw connections between several references. Consider for a moment the limitation of your monitor screen size. While it may sound silly, remember that if you copy several figures or take a lot of notes on one reference, the space taken up could easily take up more than what you are able to reasonably read on the screen. If you then want to find a key phrase or concept that appears in multiple references, there’s no way to find both that key information and the reference it comes from at the same time, even with a search function. Taking notes for small or medium projects may be feasible with a word processing document, but should definitely not be used with large projects.

Evernote or Microsoft OneNote: ◇ So what if you don’t want to use a word-processing document, or you have a large project to do? Both Evernote and OneNote are great options for you to keep all your notes together. They’re fairly similar, so in large part your decision will come down to personal preference. Evernote is distinctly business-like in its design with a relatively drab color scheme. In contrast, OneNote is a bit more colorful and creative in its design. This may not matter to you, but then again, it may be depressing or distracting for you if you choose the wrong application. The most significant difference between them, however, is the cost. Evernote has several levels to it, including the individual use options of basic and premium. Basic Evernote is free, but comes with the limitation of only being accessible on a computer rather than having the mobile access option that comes with a premium account. It also restricts your account in terms of the number of devices that can be linked to it, which may be problematic if you’re likely to work on multiple computers.For $8 a month, however, you’ll have Premium Evernote and be able to get rid of both of these issues while bumping up your abilities in some other areas, too. It’s also worth noting that a school email address can grant you a full year with a Premium account for free. OneNote, on the other hand, is completely free. No pay levels and no differences between account abilities, just full access. So, what can you do with these softwares? Since both of them are designed specifically to be note-taking software, there are some distinct benefits that mostly appear through organizational features. - While the terminology is different between them, both Evernote and OneNote let you organize your notes very well. Remember back in middle school when you had a different binder for each class, dividers within each binder for different sections of material, and many different pages within those dividers that contained your notes? That’s pretty much what you’ll have again through these applications, but with the added benefit of being digital. Each project can be the binder, while subsections within it will become folders, like the dividers, and all of your notes for each reference will go onto a different page. You can even create subfolders if needed. - Another key organizational feature here is one that I pointed out as a weakness with a word processing document, which is keeping more information on one screen. To continue the metaphor, unlike your middle school binders, you can see the name of each page in a folder without having to flip through them so you can identify and find information more easily. You’ll still have to click through the pages to see the notes, but if you use a search function to find a key word or phrase, you’ll much more easily identify which references have that information in them.

No matter what route you choose, regardless of the project size or duration, keeping track of which source any information comes from is easily the most important thing. By doing this, you will save significant amounts of time in not having to look back through multitudes of documents to find a specific statement or figure in one of them again.

[tysonrunningfox]

Toothless: Return to the Black Pony of Second Chances

Part 3 | AO3 (I’m too lazy to link all former chapters because tumblr doesn’t want to show me part 2 and I don’t know why but Archive has them all and it’s easier so there)  

I’m going to try and finish this because I love my dumb horse girl Hiccup au a lot and need structure to try.  

Town isn’t so much an actual town as it is an actual general store with a big, ancient sign that says General Store a gas pump out front, a Denny’s in a Best Western parking lot, a post office combined with a vaguely ominous sounding “Best Trader’s Bank”, and a nameless bar with a Coors Light sign half lit in the front window.  Not only is it not big enough for Astrid and me, it’s not big enough to earn a dot on the atlas map.  If I had service, I’d check if it’s even worth a dot on Google Maps but my service is roaming with the buffalo, wherever they do that, I’m assuming it’s nearby.  I’m sure that if Google could see me, Google would think I was going to show up in the news for surviving being lost in the Wyoming wilderness.

Or dying, you know, which seems more probable with the way Astrid is glowering at the list my dad gave her.

She’s very angry.  I remember that from when we were seven. Or my scalp remembers because there’s a very primal throbbing on the back of my head like by second grade, she had the unique ability to target people where they’d died in a past life.

I don’t necessarily remember her looking like a very muddy and really hot but vicious attack lap dog of my father’s, but after half an hour in the truck while she unflinchingly blared country and refused to look at me, I think I’ve got her figured out.  It’s not like there are very many personality types in Wyoming, and I think I can put her surprisingly dedicated irritation with me in the same corner as my dad’s deep and eternal disappointment.  

“You can wait in the truck.” Astrid’s offer is more like an order and I unbuckle my seatbelt the instant she parks the truck.  

“I’ve been in this truck all day, I need to stretch my legs,” I say it to make her uncomfortable, but she either doesn’t hear or doesn’t remember, because she doesn’t react except to glare at me that I interrupted her counting the money my dad gave her. “What?  They don’t take Apple Pay?”  

“I really don’t need your help,” she double checks the list and tucks it into the grimy pocket of her shirt. The wrists are unbuttoned and it looks like she purposefully dragged them through filthy water, like some bastardization of hick tie-dye.  

“Fine, then I won’t help.” I get out of the truck and stretch my arms over my head, simultaneously overheated in the direct sun and chilled by the wind that cuts through my hoodie like Astrid’s glare.  “Nice park job by the way.”  I point out one of the behemoth’s tires on the crookedly painted line and she huffs at me before deciding against it, her nose pointedly in the air as she stalks off into the shop.  

The silent treatment, my old nemesis.  

One time my mom managed it for a day and a half and I thought I was going to pull my hair out, but that’s my mom.  She knows me. Astrid can’t seem to be not furious for even a second so I doubt she’ll keep it up for long.  

A second gust of wind slams the door shut after me, ruffling a bulletin board full of flyers.  Most of them are advertising things for sale, like a manual Craigslist, and a couple are alerting the few but lucky patrons to fire danger in the area.  The biggest is a poster tacked down at all four corners, advertising the Berk County Rodeo as the oldest continuously running rodeo in Wyoming and promising prize money in a variety of events that I would guess all involve wrestling farm animals.  And that just makes me remember that my dad’s plan is for grueling, back breaking farm labor to miraculously return me to the obedient son that I never even was.  

I thought last summer was bad because Mom refused to turn on the AC.  This is going to be worse, so much worse.  

“Hiccup Haddock, is that you?” A familiar voice greets me and I look up from the bulletin board to see Gobber behind the counter, holding Astrid’s list with his metal hook hand.  

“Gobber?”  I laugh, forgetting at least some of how miserable I am to be here.  My dad looked the same but Gobber looks older, his moustache gray in the middle and blond where it hangs to his chin.  

“Is that a question, laddie?” He laughs, waving me over, and Astrid steps out of the way with an expression like she just bit into a lemon on a dare.  “Stoick said he was picking you up today but I didn’t figure he’d let you out of his sight so soon.”  

“Let?  More like ordered me away before that vein in his forehead finally exploded.”  I shake Gobber’s hand and he pulls me halfway across the counter to thump me on the back with his hook.  “And now you’re bludgeoning me, ouch,” I’m grinning when I get my feet back on the floor, “I see it was a long con to get rid of me.”  

“Don’t think we’d let you off that easy,” he crosses his arms, “expelled, eh?”  

“There it is,” I sigh, and Gobber’s heavy look gives no room for me to try and talk my way out of this judgement.  “In my defense--”

“This should be interesting,” Astrid mumbles under her breath, rolling her eyes and reading a candy wrapper like it’s deeply interesting.  

Maybe it is, to her.  I don’t think they let her off the farm much, maybe she doesn’t know that some food comes pre-killed and pre-packaged for everyone who doesn’t horse wrestle to get their morning pep.  

“Whatever the reason, I’m glad to see you.” He starts stacking items from Astrid’s list on the counter, “a summer of work will do you some good, you look like the wind is going to clean carry you away.”  

“Thanks,” I scoff, swallowing against that all too familiar feeling of fitting in only because I stand out.

It’s different with Gobber though because the reason I’m a token something is different, he’s cutting right to the core of Berk’s problems with me with one swipe of his hook.  And given the lack of diversity in Wyoming personality, candy selection, and everything else, I can just apply his salt to the wound I didn’t think my dad could open back up.  But he’s stubborn and look at this, I’ve been here an hour and gotten through one rousing fight and suddenly, I kind of care what he thinks of me.  

Gobber heads into the back room, humming happily, and given that this is the closest I’m going to get to civilization for a while, it’s probably my best chance to get an SOS out.  Dear Heather, enemy doctrine has reminded me that societally, I’m supposed to want my dad to love me, please send reinforcements.

“Is there cell service anywhere around here?”  I ask Astrid and she looks up pointedly slowly from her absolutely gripping candy wrapper research.  

“We have an amplifier at the ranch but Mr. Haddock keeps it off, usually.”  

“Oh, that’s useful for the underage hostage labor situation he has going on.”  

Her nostrils flare like she’s about to charge me or something and I make sure I’m not wearing my red shirt.

“Ruffnut claims she can check Facebook from the corner by the ice machine,” she points past the two aisles of food and small selection of clothes that look like they were personally plucked by Gobber out of the LL Bean sad grandpa collection.  

“I’ll try that then.”  I take out my phone and slip a pack of gum into my pocket when she isn’t looking, already re-committed to ignoring me. “Don’t worry, not calling the union--”

“You really shouldn’t talk about your dad that way,” she snaps, dropping the candy on the floor and clenching a fist on the counter.  “The rest of us want to be here.  I want to be here.”  

I don’t quite know why, but that makes me think of that horse I noticed on the way over here.  I don’t know why it stood out to me but I think it had something to do with the way it was standing, sulky but still defiant, like it knew it had lost didn’t see any reason to acknowledge it.  Astrid said it didn’t belong and maybe it should take that as a compliment.  

“You do seem deeply happy and fulfilled.”  I head back towards the ice machine, holding my phone over my head and looking for a trace of signal.  It flickers but holds and I open up my messages.  The screen stays blank, unable to load the rest of Heather and my conversation and I’m glad I grabbed the gum, because the secret in my pocket keeps my face blank even as another tether to who I knew I was yesterday wears thinner in the onslaught.  

Hiccup (11:13am): Day 1 in enemy territory, lack of muscle definition has been noticed and noted.  I fear this will make me unattractive to the cows and my cover will be blown Hiccup (11:13am): how’s my mom holding up?

“That’s the last of it and I’ve got the feed on order, someone should be delivering tomorrow,” Gobber hefts a box onto the counter and Astrid pays from her stack of bills.  

“Thanks for doing that research for me, by the way, I hate going cheaper--”

“Don’t worry about that now,” Gobber says almost gently, “Stoick will turn it around, he always does. This time’s no different, you’ll see.”

“Turn what around?”  I check my phone to make sure I stay in signal range even as I try to insert myself back into their cryptic conversation.

“None of your business.” Astrid picks up the box like she’s worried she’ll hit me if she doesn��t have something to occupy her hands.  

“Well, it sounds like it has something to do with the Haddock Ranch, which technically--”

“Are you done irritating whoever you’re texting?”  She gestures at the door with her chin, wordlessly ordering me to open it for her. “Because unlike you, I actually have some work to do.”  

I move slowly and Gobber groans at me, annoyed but nice enough about it that I almost feel bad about the gum in my pocket.  Or maybe I do feel bad, I always feel a little bit bad, but it’s not an exercise in morality as much as impulsivity and reminding myself that no one is watching. A little invisibility is practically armor when Astrid’s glaring at me like that.  

“I thought everyone’s whole point was to put me to work?”  I finally get to the door and lean on it a second too long before pushing it open. The wind fights me and I let it.  

“I don’t know how useful you’ll be,” Astrid gets sick of waiting and shoulders past me, kicking the door fully open with a muddy boot and calling back at Gobber.  “See you later!”  

“Yeah Gobber, I’ll see you,” I wave at him and his unimpressed face reminds me of my mom’s.  

“If you’d like to do that before your own funeral, maybe go a little easy on Astrid.”  

“Right, because she’s going so easy on me.”  I watch her load the box into the backseat of the truck and climb impatiently into the driver’s side, tapping on her watch at me.  

“She’s had a rough few months,” he sighs, “and so has your father.  Maybe lead with a little less…”

“You just gestured to all of me,” I flinch when Astrid honks, and taps her watch again.  “Alright!  I’m coming! Bye Gobber, enjoy my wake, chances of open casket aren’t looking good.”  

“Oh Hiccup,” he sighs as the wind slams the door shut again and I get into the truck.  I’m barely seated let alone buckled in when Astrid pulls out, slamming it into gear and punching the gas.  

“You know, unbuckled passengers become projectiles in accidents.”  

“I’m not going to hit anything.” She sighs and rubs her forehead, leaving a smear of dirt across it, like it somehow sprouts endlessly from her hands. “At least not right now.”  

“That leaves me confident.”

She doesn’t respond to that aside from turning on the radio and going back to her stare straight ahead and glare routine while attempting to humanely lobotomize me with some song about cut offs in a truck in a field in a beer can in the military.  

Halfway up the long driveway to the ranch, I find myself looking for the horse I noticed earlier.  The rest of the herd is still in the field they were last time, but that lone black horse is missing.  Maybe it found somewhere it would rather be and I kind of hope it’s a good omen towards my chances of finding a reliable cell signal.  

But, as with school security system updates, hope doesn’t usually go my way.  

“Shit!”  Astrid yelps, slamming on the brakes as a staggering black blur runs in front of us right at the corner of the fence.  The truck squeals, tires sending a wave of gravel at the twins, who are running after the horse.  Ruffnut flips her off and my dad barks something I can’t quite make out but it gets her running again.  

“I thought you weren’t going to hit anything.”  I goad Astrid, using the physical force of her glare to convince my hands to let go of the seat.  

“Loose horse, don’t just sit there,” she yanks the keys out and runs after everyone, grabbing a rope from a hook on the fence.  

“I don’t really know what I’m supposed to do, but...ok.”  

The horse runs behind the house and I take a few steps towards the other side, more avoiding the action than actively seeking out the horse.  I am curious though, I did recognize it.  It’s limping even as it leads everyone on a scattered chase and I catch a flash of red on its back leg when it dodges around my dad, kicking out at him and stumbling to catch himself.  

Astrid’s probably going to lecture it about disrespect.  

I didn’t grab the gum to chew it, but the dust the chase is kicking up is making my mouth feel dry so I pull out a piece, edging a little closer to the commotion.  

The horse catches my eye and pauses, neck arched, eyes wide enough to see the whites of them even from thirty feet away.  It kicks at Astrid when she tries to grab it with the rope before fixing its attention on me again and staggering to the side.  I can see its hurt leg more clearly now and it makes my own knee twinge sympathetically.  

“Hiccup,” my dad gestures from where he’s standing, arms spread wide to block entrance to the barn.  “Get out of its way.”  

“I thought we were trying to catch it,” I take a step towards it, possessed by the same pull I feel towards knick knacks and unguarded teacher’s keys.  

It blinks at me and nods violent and fast, letting out a shrill sound that’s more scream than anything before running straight at me.  

“Hiccup!”  My dad yells again.  

Maybe my life isn’t flashing before my eyes because I never really had one.  

Or maybe it’s because for some reason I can’t explain, the horse stops three feet ahead of me, nodding again and pawing the ground with one front foot.  Its knee shakes.  My knee shakes.  I hold out my hand and it breathes a gust of warm, damp breath over my palm, nostrils flaring to show vague pink insides.  

“I’m not going to hurt you,” I mutter, clearing my throat when my voice feels lost in it.  “Something already did that.”  

“Hiccup,” Astrid tosses me the rope she’s holding and it hits me in the side.  The horse startles, rearing back on its hind legs and lashing out at her before stumbling, barely catching itself on that quaking back knee.  

“Don’t scare it!”  I step between them, arms held out like I’m the one protecting the raging thousand pound animal.  Maybe I am.  I don’t know.

“Put the rope around its neck,” she orders, which I think is just a base state for her, but I’m not sure what else to do so I listen, picking up the coil with surprisingly steady fingers and examining it.  

“I don’t know how to do this,” I tell the horse, because country music made me go clinically insane this quickly, “this is a lasso, I think, I don’t know.  There’s a loop.”  I glance back at Astrid and she’s scowling at me, giving so much helpful advice.  “I think that’s the part I catch you with. I’m just going to...put it over your head even though you keep trying to kill everyone else here.”  

The horse nods again, chewing with its big, hand crushing teeth, and blowing more air over my hands.  

I have to go onto my toes to get the rope all the way over its ears and I stumble slightly on the gravel. It’s a reflex to reach out and catch myself and I don’t realize what I’ve done until I see my pale hand on its gleaming black shoulder.  

My life doesn’t flash before my eyes.  

The horse stands stock still except for that trembling back leg shaking in time with my heartbeat.  

“Hiccup,” my dad calls again, “let Astrid take him--”

“I’ve got him,” I regrip the rope, taking a step backwards, sure that the horse will follow.  It does, one mincing step on unsure legs.  “There we go, that’s good.”  My left heel drags slightly in the gravel as I take another step back and the horse follows.  

“Take him into the barn,” my dad sounds confused more than anything and he steps out of the way as the horse and I make slow backwards progress.  One of the stalls inside the barn is open but the horse pauses at its entrance, pawing with its front foot again.  

“Come on, bud, you’re close. So close.  I see that knee shaking, I bet you’re tired from making all these people chase you around.”  I reach out and set my hand on its nose and it nods again, grunting deep in its chest between hoarse, distinctly scared breaths, “I’m tired from watching you make these people chase you around.”  

It takes a trembling step over the threshold and the other three feet follow more easily.  

“Take the rope off,” Astrid is watching from the big sliding barn door, eyes sharp and irritated. Curious.  

I think it’s the first time all day I’ve agreed with her.  I’m also curious as to what the fuck just happened.  

“I’m just going to get this off of you,” I loosen the rope and pull it back over his head, “and I’m going to step out of here and close this door.”  

It tries to follow when I step backwards but doesn’t argue when I close the door and slide the brass latch into place.  

“What the hell?”  My dad shakes his head, looking at me like I’m as alien as I feel here.  

I laugh, “watch your language, Dad, impressionable ears are everywhere.”  

“Inside.  Now.”  He points towards the ranch house and I’m too rattled to try and argue with that level of authoritative tone so I listen, knees wobbling as I walk past everyone. I’m not sure how to describe how they’re staring at me, but it’s new.  As new as the urge to turn around and go back into that barn, like something is unfinished.   

[nierly-amazing]

Memory Thorn full translation

Because Yoko Taro hasn’t destroyed our hearts enough already.

Google doc version: [Link]

Original Reddit thread: [Link]

Readmore on the tumb (for mobile users): [Link]

Memory Cage (read first if you haven’t yet) and Orbital Bunker Observation Diary translations: [Link]

1

In a flash, a close-quarter weapon cut through the sandstorm. It is the type 4O sword - a state-of-the-art blade bestowed to only the elites fighting at the frontlines. The blade surges with lightning, knocking away a round object in an arc.

The now headless machine lifeform ceased its movements. A few seconds later, its cylindrical body toppled over on the sand and exploded. The explosion engulfed the bodies of two previously defeated machines and turned all into a shower of scrap metal.

Only the telltale sound of desert winds remain after the fiery explosion faded away.

As the sandstorm settles, a humanoid silhouette appears. You could tell that the silhouette belonged to an adult female by the gentle slope of its shoulders, its slim and tight waistline, as well as the well-shaped legs extending from its skirt.

However, the silhouette is neither an ‘adult’ nor a ‘female’ in the strictest sense. She is neither a human, nor does she have a sex in a biological sense. She is a type YoRHa android number 2 B type, or 2B for short. A model optimized for battle.

It’s been a long time since humans have left the earth. Humans had no choice but to flee for the moon in face of an alien invasion. Currently, the earth is nothing but a battlefield for the alien’s machine lifeforms and the androids tasked to destroy them.

2B sheathed her sword and directed her attention behind her.

“Is this all of them?”

In response to her question, an object floating about three meters above the ground began its descent. It is a support unit called the pod. Composed of a rectangular head and four arms of varied sized, pods spend most of their time in the air, but can be deployed underwater if need be. They’re equipped with various functions in order to support YoRHa type androids, including long-range attacks against enemy units, analysis of the situation at hand, communication, as well as first aid.

“Affirmative: No enemy signals detected within a 5 kilometer radius of the access point.”

I see, 2B replied, and started to make her way to the metallic box slightly taller than her. Access points camouflage themselves as a relic of human civilization, but it is an important facility both as a method of communication with the headquarters as well as a source of information regarding surrounding lands.

It’s unclear whether they’re aware of that fact or not, but machine lifeforms tend to gather around access points. Be it in a corner of some ruins, or the middle of the desert. Their behavior resembles insects gathering around a fallen fruit.

Therefore, YoRHa units have to destroy nearby machine lifeforms whenever they want to check their mail or retrieve geographical information about their surroundings. This happened so often that it became procedural for them.

After going through the motions of destroying machines, 2B was finally able to accomplish her original goal. She selected the newest message from her inbox and opened it. Her eyes skimmed over the sender and the words ‘top secret’ in the title, and was just about to read its contents.

“2B!”

YoRHa unit number 9 type S, or 9S for short, appeared out of nowhere. Unlike 2B, who has the form of an adult female, 9S was created after the imagine of a young boy.

“Is it a message from the commander?” Not really, 2B answered curtly, and tried her hardest to cover up how shaken she felt.

“More importantly, why are you here?”

“Huh? What do you mean, 2B?”

“It’s not time for the mission yet.”

Since the pod notified her of a new incoming message, 2B decided to make her way to the access point earlier than planned. Even though she lost some time dispatching the machine lifeforms, she still expected to be able to finish reading the message before 9S arrived.

“Well...the operator told me that 2B is in the middle of combat. So I thought…I should help out.”

“That’s unnecessary.”

2B shook her head slightly, trying to rid herself of something that was neither irritation nor anxiety.

“I guess that’s true.”

9S gave an exaggerated shrug. 2B finally understood what she was trying to rid herself of. It was something borne from her piled up memories of past conversations and past actions.

“Well, now that we’ve met up with each other, we might as well head towards the destination.”

It was deja vu.

2.

“Urgh, sand in my shoes again?”

He just couldn’t bring himself to like the desert, and it’s all because of the sand. It’s annoying when the wind blows and makes things hard to see, and his shoes are just full of sand as he walks. It’s pretty fun to slide on the sand slopes, but walking on anywhere but the slopes is a pain in the ass. 9S scowled, and glanced at 2B. However, 2B walked on without any change in her expression.

“2B, don’t you mind?” “Mind what?”

“The fact that your shoes are filled with sand, 2B.”

“While it does feel strange, it doesn’t interfere with walking.”

“Don’t you hate it when the sand sloshes around in your shoes? Sure, it’s not a hindrance, but it’s a matter of feeling!”

“Emotions are prohibited.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

You’re one to speak, 2B, 9S thinks to himself even as he responds.

2B isn’t as good at holding back her emotions as she thinks. At least, that’s how it appeared to 9S. It’s just a guess, but 9S thinks that her spiel about emotions being prohibited is more directed to herself than to 9S. She’s scolding herself by saying it out loud. It’s definitely a very 2B-ish thing to do.

9S thinks that she doesn’t have to try so hard. She doesn’t exactly have to walk the talk. Just how many YoRHa units actually follow the clause of not having emotions, anyways?

...but even if he says that out loud, 2B won’t change the way she is. 2B isn’t skilled enough to untangle her true feelings from how she acts on the surface.

9S glanced over at 2B again. He saw something behind those tightly shut lips. 2B was never very good at hiding things, after all.

“Nines?”

2B gave him a strange look. She’s probably wondering why he’s staring at her.

“Oh, it’s nothing...just...there’s so much sand...it’s so hot...I’d really love to take a bath right now.”

No. That’s not what he wanted to say.

“We have no need for baths.”

“That’s what I thought…”

What are you hiding? You’ve been acting strange lately. Anything on your mind? Or…?

9S knew that he won’t get an answer even if he asked those questions. They’ve been working on missions together for months, after all. Instead, 9S simply raised his voice.

“Oh! Is that the target for this investigation?”

He saw the hulking form of what appeared to be a huge building beyond the sandstorm. They’re very close to the desert’s end.

“Affirmative: The large building to the front is the target of our current investigation.”

The pod beside him answered. It is pod 153, 9S’s personal support pod. 2B’s support pod, 042 simply floated behind her in silence.

“They call this building a temple. I think the official name is the “Stone Temple”? Something of great importance was transported here - I guess like a god’s statue or something? And they’ve used this as a temple ever since.”

Silence. 2B stood frozen with her mouth open.

“2B? What’s wrong?”

Her lips moved as if to form words. ...but 2B changed her mind at the last second before speaking again.

“No. It’s nothing.”

Of course it’s not nothing. She clearly struggled to come up with an answer. But 2B had no intention to tell 9S why. Even though she addresses him as “Nines” now, he still feels an insurmountable distance between them.

“Let’s go, 2B!”

9S made himself sound more cheerful than he’d liked. He took off right away, making it seem like he was excited about the prospect of an investigation.

No matter how he asked, 2B probably won’t give him an answer. He knew that from the very beginning.

It was unbearable.

3.

The Stone Temple was built in a deep valley. Because it was surrounded by steep cliffs, it took quite a bit of time and effort to reach the temple.

“Of all places they could’ve built a temple in...why here? I don’t get it.”

Reaching the temple was no easy task, as they had to descend to the very bottom of the gorge, cover a significant amount of ground, and then climb up the cliffs just to get to the entrance. 9S is completely within his rights to complain.

“Conjecture: The remains were surrounded by a “lake” or a manmade “canal” in the past, and access was made possible by ships or bridges.”

9S thought pod 153’s answer made sense. He knew that buildings which contained important people or objects were often surrounded by water. Perhaps that would explain the temple’s cylindrical shape as well - it was trying to get as much space as possible from its limited land mass.

“But that doesn’t explain...this.”

9S looked up at the huge tree in front of him. Clearly, it had withered a while ago, and its blackened trunk leaned powerlessly against the spiral staircase.

“What’s the point of planting such a huge tree inside a building?”

The cylindrical building had an open ceiling, and the spiral staircase that extended all the way from the first floor crumbled away right before the topmost floor. Perhaps the staircase had once connected all the floors, but it’s hard to tell from its current sorry state.

“2B, what do you think?”

No reply. She didn’t even realize that 9S was talking to her until 9S turned to face her. Startled out of whatever daze she was in, she blurted out a response.

“What?” “It’s a spiral staircase.”

9S deliberately chose to not repeat himself.

“What...what about it…?”

As expected, she wasn’t listening at all. If she even caught a bit of what 9S said before, she would’ve probably replied with something like “But that’s not what you said”. The only reason she didn’t do so was because she wasn’t listening.

“Let’s see how far up we can make it.”

Deciding to not point out their failed communication, 9S made his way towards the spiral staircase. 2B followed in silence. Something is wrong. It’s not like 2B at all.

2B is tasked with a mission, so why is she acting like this? Or is her mission the reason behind her current behavior? 2B has been acting strange lately, and 9S decided to stay silent on the matter ever since he figured out why. He pretended that he was none the wiser, and interacted with 2B the same way as before. Contrary to 2B who can’t seem to keep a secret, 9S found it pretty easy to keep up the masquerade. Otherwise, he wouldn’t try to access the main server illegally. Not even once, but multiple times.

Well, enough about himself. He’s going to be disposed of soon enough, anyways. He knew that. And he knew that 2B will be the one to do the job.

He knew that ever since he received orders for the current mission. The investigation is just a farce, and there’s no doubt that 2B had been given a separate mission.

The commander’s orders...must be to eliminate 9S. Me. Right, 2B?

But even then, 2B’s actions just seem...off. She’s so distracted, and 9S doesn’t feel a shred of tension from her. He didn’t think 2B could undertake a top secret mission with such a lackluster attitude. S types can’t match B types in close-quarter combat, but they can and will counterattack, and they can let their pods provide long range support as well.

So...maybe there’s another reason for 2B unnatural behavior. A reason unrelated to 9S’s illegal accesses.

2B, who was walking in front of him, suddenly lost her balance.

“Watch out!”

9S reached out hurriedly and caught 2B with his arms.

“What’s wrong? I’ve never seen 2B trip on a staircase.”

It’s true, the quality of the spiral staircase left much to be desired, years of wear and tear leaving holes and bumps. But there’s no way that 2B, with all her athletic ability, would let herself be caught off guard.

“Are you alright?” “Ah….yes.”

She replied absentmindedly.

“I guess we’re lucky there aren’t any enemies around here. That could’ve been fatal if machine lifeforms attacked.”

“It could’ve...been fatal…?”

9S doubted his eyes. 2B was smiling. Her lips were curled unnaturally in a very strange smile. There’s clearly something wrong.

“What’s happening? Are you feeling unwell?”

“No...I’m..I’m fine…”

2B wobbled as she tried to stand. Seems like she couldn’t control her strength very well.

“Do you hear what you’re saying!? You’re clearly not fine!”

Why didn’t he catch the signs of her worsening condition? But no, all her checks were green before the mission.. 9S was responsible for 2B’s maintenance, so he would’ve requested to cancel the mission if he found anything wrong.

“Let’s retreat for now.”

However, 2B ignored 9S’s words and began making her way up the stairs again.

“2B!”

9S raise his voice and grabbed 2B’s arm.

“Warning: Enemy signals detected above.”

“Warning: Multiple signals at 2 o’clock.”

The two pods simultaneously warned them of danger. The chances of running into machine lifeforms were supposed to be close to zero according to the headquarter’s prebrief.

Yet here they are, six aerial units approaching them from above. Their shapes resemble what 9S liked to call ‘small fry’, but they seem to possess the ability to emit jamming signals. That’s how they were able to avoid detection until they came within range…

“Dammit.”

They were certainly opportunists, choosing to attack when 2B wasn’t at her best. Retreating is made difficult by the fact that there is an open ceiling above the spiral staircase - 9S and 2B would always be in the machine’s range of fire.

“Nines! Get back!”

A sharp cry. 2B ran up the stairs as if a switch flipped inside her. Unlike the past few moments, her movements were smooth. She’s back to the usual 2B.

“I’ll provide support!”

Then the only thing left for him is to provide support as usual.

“Pod! Analyze enemy units’ flight patterns!”

Careful to not get in the way of 2B’s personal pod 042, 9S issued a command to 153. Machine lifeforms generally move in patterns specific to their overall shape. If those patterns can be predicted, then 9S could inflict the most amount of damage while sustaining the least amount of injuries.

153 used its long range attacks to strike down a machine that was trying to approach 2B from the back. The machines weren’t that fast.

Just when 9S thought they had a chance, the two pods again issued their warnings in unison.

“Warning: Enemy signals detected in overhead corridor.”

“Conjecture: Multiple non-aerial units. Enemy form and numbers remain unknown.”

The aerial units are interfering with the pods’ ability to obtain enemy data. That’s something that needs to be taken care of first.

“2B! Go on ahead! I’ll take care of the aerial units!”

Type B units are better at dealing with with non-aerial types due to their strength in close-quarters combat.

“Understood. I leave this to you.”

2B jumped over the handrail, took ahold of 042’s arm and glided towards the corridor. There was no hesitation in her movements.

“Pod! I’ll be hacking to take control of the enemy!”

“Understood: Providing support.”

9S rushed up the stairs and closed the distance between him and the enemy. Luckily, the enemy was slow to react and 9S managed to launch his invasion in no time.

Once he’s in, machine lifeforms are often left defenceless. They’ve picked up a great variety of physical attacks, but they haven’t quite learned how to deal with hacking internally.

Having found the control unit, 9S overwrote the system settings. As long as he gained control of one unit, the rest was easy.

9S used his controlled unit to attack the remaining five aerial units. None of the aerial units responded in kind when attacked. Maybe the machine lifeforms don’t have a concept of friendly fire - because even when 9S approached them with his controlled unit, they did not evade and were shot down immediately.

Having destroyed all five units, 9S activated self-destruction on his controlled unit and returned to the physical world. He ran up the spiral staircase, aiming for the corridor that 2B was fighting in. He thought he could provide some support, but it was clear that it was no longer needed.

“I guess you’re all done here.”

2B was surrounded with various pieces of scrap metal - what remained of the non-aerial units. They couldn’t let their guard down completely because there might be enemy units in the floors above, but they’ve certainly cleared out their immediate surroundings.

“Are you hurt?” “I’m fine.”

Before he could even relax from hearing that, 2B abruptly dropped her sword. 9S ran towards her. He had a bad feeling.

“2B!”

“Don’t worry. My hand...just slipped…”

Strange noises accompanied her voice. Her hands, shaking uncontrollably, scratched at her own neck.

“Logic virus!?”

2B fell down on her knees. 9S tore off 2B’s goggles - 2B’s eyes were shining a bright crimson. No doubt. She was infected by an enemy unit.

“I’ll remove the virus through hacking!” “Wait….don’t…”

2B shook her head in pain.

“What are you saying? We have to remove the virus now!”

He can’t afford to waste any second. Once the infection reaches her personality data, there’d be nothing that he could do. 9S laid down 2B on her back, and forcibly hacked into her despite her still shaking head.

4.

What used to be a pure white hacking region was stained black at various parts. A classic effect of the logic virus.

A logic virus takes over an android’s memory area and logic circuits, effectively taking control of their personality and body. If left to its own devices, the infected android will destroy its surroundings and even attack its comrades.

“I have to hurry…”

Luckily, 9S has seen this type of virus before. He had already succeeded in combating this virus in the past.

“But the infection is progressing too fast. Plus…”

An orange light whizzed past 9S’s personality data. It was an attack from the virus.

“Such a pain.”

But since the virus didn’t appear to be irregular, its attack patterns remained the same as before. 9S had no problem tackling the virus while avoiding its attacks.

It didn’t take long before he removed all traces of the virus. All he needed to do was to make sure that no viruses were hibernating inside 2B’s ethical circuits. As simple as performing a quick scan. “Huh? This is weird.”

As he was scanning over her ethical circuits, he discovered cracks in 2B’s personality data. In general, hacking regions appear as ‘pure white walls without a single crack’, but what he saw in front of him resembled the cracked walls of an abandoned building. He just didn’t see it before when the virus’s black color covered up the cracks.

“Is this an aftereffect of the virus?”

He had to find out more. He began a deep search, and was immediately met with the sound of rushing wind. Words filled his entire field of vision.

“You are ordered to terminate 9S.”

It was a fragment of 2B’s memories. These words were probably part of a mail’s contents. The sound of the wind is probably reflective of the location itself - the desert. 9S remembered the sight of 2B receiving mail in front of the access point. That wasn’t too long ago.

9S paused his scanning activity and accessed the memory at hand. He felt a pang of guilt, but since his own name was mentioned, he should probably be privy to its contents.

“...has attempted illegal access to the main server multiple times. We found traces of him having accessed the most confidential layer in the past few days.”

The words are wavering. The sounds of the wind are no more. It seems like 2B was shaken to the core during this memory.

“Therefore, you are ordered to terminate 9S.”

2B refused to have her virus removed because she didn’t want him to see this memory.

“You shouldn’t even let that bother you. I knew that you were an assassin sent by the commander.”

The only thing he didn’t know was the when. But he knew it from the moment he met up with her at the desert’s access point. He felt something from 2B as she read her mail with her back turned towards him. The final nail in the coffin was how she didn’t even realize 9S was approaching until he called out to her…

“Destruction of the head.”

The sound startled 9S. Fragments from a different time were intermingled with the memories of 2B reading the mail. It was a low, emotionless voice. But since it sounded so much like 2B’s voice, 9S couldn’t help but follow that voice.

“This is 2B. I have accomplished my mission.”

It’s the same voice. If the previous words were from 2B as well, whose head did she destroy?

9S approached the scattered memory fragments.

“What...is this?”

Upon first glance, these fragments appear to be scattered, but they were actually bent and connected in unnatural ways. What’s more, every single fragment had thorns protruding from them. 9S had never seen memory data like this.

They were full of thorns, they were disfigured, they were intermingled...they were 2B’s memories.

Maybe he shouldn’t see them. Maybe ignorance is bliss. Logically, he knew that, but couldn’t stop himself anyways. He was slightly resentful of his natural curiosity as an S type.

He touched one of the fragments and was immediately wracked with pain. But the pain helped him make up his mind - he needed to see this.

“But there’s no way an S type can win against a B type.”

This voice belonged to no other than himself. Since this is 2B’s memory, he must’ve said those words to her at some point. But he couldn’t recall anything like that. His memories were erased at some point.

By whom? For what?

Seeking for answers, 9S accessed another piece of memory.

“Goodbye, 2B.”

His own voice again. Hearing such a frail voice, 2B tried her hardest to keep her emotions in check. 9S didn’t get any visual information, probably because 2B had shut her eyes tightly at this point.

“Goodbye, 2B.”

“Goodbye, 2B.”

“Goodbye, 2B.”

These same words repeated themselves. When 2B read the message from the commander at the desert access points, these were the words that she heard in her mind.

But when and where did he say that?

Another piece of memory began its playback at that point. It took place during the mission at the so-called Sand Temple. It was the first time 2B executed 9S. She trapped 9S in her hacking space, cut off his escape routes via a wall created by a self-closing algorithm and erased his data.

Those were 9S’s parting words, right before he was about to be annihilated in 2B’s hacking space…

“2B has killed me before.”

That makes sense, he thought to himself. It certainly explained the sense of wrongness felt all along.

He attempted to access the next fragment. Again, he felt pain, but there’s no way he could stop now.

That particular execution happened in outer space. 2B destroyed 9S during their descent to earth. Another execution happened at the Sand Temple. Having learned from her previous mistake, 2B immediately killed 9S with a flash of her sword once they stepped into the temple. A few of the executions also happened right here, in the Stone Temple.

Sometimes she executed him after undertaking missions together. Sometimes she attacked and executed him while they were “total strangers”.

No matter how many times he’s executed or how many times his memory got wiped, 9S will always reach the same conclusion - that the commander is hiding something. And to sate his curiosity, he will always attempt to access the main server.

2B tried to stop him. Multiple times. When she got the chance to work with 9S, she tried her hardest persuade him to not suspect the commander. When she had to execute him without a chance to interact with him, she erased his memories and tried to nip his suspicions in the bud.

But all of her efforts were fruitless. No matter what she did, she couldn’t change the end result. It didn’t matter if she treated 9S with affection or indifference. It didn’t matter whether she called him “Nines” or not. At the very end, 2B will always receive orders to kill 9S.

“So that’s how it was…”

He’s been wondering about this ever since he first met 2B. 2B sometimes seemed like she was talking to someone else while they were alone. Back then, he concluded that 2B must’ve worked with other S types in the past.

His conclusion wasn’t completely right, nor was it completely wrong. 2B didn’t work with another S type - she worked with 9S. But not the “current 9S”.

“That could’ve been fatal if machine lifeforms attacked.”

He now knew the reason behind 2B’s peculiar actions after he said those words. Because a previous 9S said the exact same words in the exact same location in the past. He was killed by 2B right after that. His words triggered 2B’s memories of that time and caused her suffering.

And not just this once. Every memory she had of 9S brought great pain to her. So much that her own personality data is in tatters.

“I won’t apologize, because this is my mission. I won’t feel any guilt. Not now. Not ever.”

9S looked over 2B’s personality data again. It was pure white, but looked like it could crumble to dust at any moment…

5.

Her consciousness surfaced from the darkness. She blinked, and saw 9S’s face close to her. He had a downcast expression. Or did she imagine it? 2B blinked and looked at him again.

“Nines…?”

That’s right, they were attacked by machine lifeforms. She fought them but became infected with the logic virus. Her last memory was of her trying desperately to stop 9S.

“I have removed the virus.”

She didn’t manage to stop him. 9S forcibly hacked her and dove into her memory regions.

“So...you’ve seen it all, huh?”

9S nodded silently.

“I see…”

She wasn’t surprised. She knew that this day was coming. S types are very insightful. 9S has already seen through her secret mission multiple times.

“2B wasn’t your actual name, huh.”

But this scenario had never happened before.

“2E.”

This was the first time 9S called her by her real name. E type number 2. Tasked with pursuing and executing deserters or rebels, as well as finishing off fellow androids that could no longer function on the battlefield. She is a YoRHa type android specializing in such dirty jobs.

2B drew her sword. 9S’s shoulders were shaking. He knew that 2B had killed him countless times before.

“I don’t intend to kill you anymore.”

She pointed the tip of the blade towards herself and gave the handle to 9S.

“So kill me.”

Her mission ended in failure. She failed as an E type. She’s now a defective product that can’t even justify her own operating costs.

“At the very least, I want to die by your hands…”

She had no illusions about this being any form of atonement. But if she could even give back a sliver of what she’d taken from 9S...there’s nothing much left for her to give. This is the only thing that she had to offer.

She saw 9S tighten his grip on the sword handle. She smiled and awaited her last moments.

The sword flashed. However, the blade was not aimed at 2B.

“Nines!?”

2B widened her eyes in shock, her head covered in a shower of blood. 9S, having sliced his own throat, slowly fell over. She cradled his body in her arms, her own screams of ‘Why?!’ sounding distant to even herself. “Because...I had fun.”

She doubted her ears. He had fun? That’s impossible. There’s no way that’s true.

“I really enjoyed the time we had together. I think...that goes for all my previous selves as well.”

“Nines…”

I’m sorry, she wanted to say, but 9S interrupted her unspoken apology.

“Don’t apologize. Instead…”

Even with his rough breathing, 9S was smiling.

“Next time...don’t hesitate...to kill me. Because we….will meet again.”

As long as he wipes his memory regions and re-installs his personality data, he will get to meet 2B again. Even if he won’t be his current self anymore.

“I want….to see you...again…”

Even if their next meeting is nothing but a preface to another execution.

“I understand.”

Her vision blurred, and she couldn’t discern 9S’s last expression.

The body in her arms became heavier. The hand touching her cheek fell limply to his side. His black box signal was weakening by the moment. It would be cruel to let this drag out any longer.

She laid down 9S’s body and thrust her sword through his chest. His black box signal disappeared completely.

“I promise you.”

That I won’t hesitate to kill you. The next time, or the time after that. Not because of her mission, but because that’s what 9S wanted. To grant his wish of meeting again...she’ll kill him.

2B silently withdrew her sword from 9S’s chest.

[incaseyouart]

Omg i’m so sorry to everyone that I haven’t answered in the past few days! I’ve been really busy shipping out zines etc @_@ I figured rather than spamming everyone on my dash I’ll do a batch-answer. 

1. For digital I use the watercolour and pen brushes in Fire Alpaca. For traditional the Koi waterbrush (medium tip).

2. Thank you that’s so nice of you to say!! <3

3. I know I’ve gained a good audience by posting frequently and interacting with other members of the community, and just in general trying to stay positive! Also remember to tag everything you post to make it searchable!

4. Aw thanks~ The asks aren’t annoying!! I appreciate every single one (well.. mostly. some are clearly jokes lol). Just use reference - I usually Google-image search! I also have some drawings/tips on hands here. 

5. On your lineart layer select the box “Protect alpha” - this means that any colour you lay down will ONLY affect the pixels on your lineart. You can do this for any layer. It’s basically the same function as a clipping mask.

6. You’d have to go into your pen settings I imagine! For me it’s the Wacom Desktop Centre.

7. Fire Alpaca has a lot of help files on their website, but like everything in art, mastering something just takes a lot of practice! Things that took me a bit to figure out was the “Protect Alpha” option (which lets you lock pixels and colour JUST on them and nothing else), and how to use the “snap to gridlines” in perspective - so, setting up the vanishing points. I’m still getting used to that one. Just play around with each tool for a bit and look up what it does, and how best to use it! 

8. I would highly encourage you to try developing your OWN style - one that you can uniquely say is yours. You can of course take inspiration from other artists (and here I encourage the plural). If it looks TOO similar, as you’re suggesting, then you might be accused of tracing, and the original owner of that style (and any of their followers) might be annoyed. Style comes organically with practice, and you should also embrace multiple styles - that’s what makes an artist versatile, and versatility in a competitive market is very crucial for success. Good luck!

9. I have a few tutorials here - but none for that specifically. This is a cool image I found on Google. When in doubt, box it out!! Basically every figure in existence can be planned out with boxes (or circles/ellipses). 

10. Use reference. 

11. Hmm, I don’t think so... I don’t usually link the pose reference image(s) I use. I will, however, link the reference if it’s from another artist. I mean, it’s always a good idea to link back to reference - that’s a good practice that I should do more. 

12. You can drag around the different windows by holding your mouse down on the top of the window, and then you can snap that window into/beside/underneath other windows! 

13. You can for sure look at my art for reference, but keep in mind, my anatomy skills are not as good as the real thing, so I would highly encourage you to use actual references of the real human body/whatever it is you’re drawing. Thanks for asking!! 

14. Please browse through my digital art and drawing tablet tags! 

15. Lol I would love to get snowed on all day :P Thanks for going through my tutorials ^_^ I hope they inspired you to want to start arting! 

16. Yaaay I use an Intuos small on a Mac too! You should use Fire Alpaca it’s the best (and free). For tips, please browse through my digital art and drawing tablet tags! I don’t have the buttons set on my tablet right now actually haha - except for the top button on the pen is set as eyedropper. 

17, 18, 19. You need to inform your parents that you have a friend who relies on your help via electronic devices! Also yes please do take a breather from life for a bit - sounds like you’re a bit overwhelmed! If you want to DM me you can and we can talk more :) 

20. You can draw however you want! There is never any pressure to draw realistically, other than from yourself! Being able to render realistically is a useful skill - and my professors would argue that before you can accurately caricature anything you must know how it works realistically - but for sure you can branch out into cartoon-like style! I always encourage artists to adopt several styles (see answer #8 and these posts)

21. Sounds like you’re drawing at too small a resolution and/or canvas size! Try a canvas of at least 2000X2000 pixels set at 200DPI. Also I find the line quality much better in Fire Alpaca than in SAI (that’s mainly why I switched over). Good luck! 

22. I DON’T have all the tools a human can have - that, in my eyes, is having a Wacom Cintiq, or a Cintiq companion. I literally just use watercolour paints+paper+koi brush, or my Mac+Fire Alpaca+Intuous. I also have markers and pencil crayons, which I used to use exclusively from 2004-2013 (I miss them actually) but yeah now I only use a few things. It’s not the tools that make the artist great, it’s knowing HOW to create art! Like wizards/witches and their wands - some tools do enhance your skill (obviously), but you must know the craft FIRST. 

23. I own Canson brand sketch books! Mixed Media (90lb paper) and Watercolour (140lb cold press)

24. I used my smart phone camera, scanned it in and touched it up with Photoshop. The biggest edit I did was making the background around the drawings white. Here’s a tutorial about how to do it (with a different image)

25. Wahoo thanks for the follow and the compliment <3 GO CANADA!

26. YAAAAAAY OUR BABY HAS ARRIVED! I have shipped all the Canada ones out, and I shipped another 45 today to the US and other countries, and the rest should be out by the end of the week!! I’m so happy you got it, thanks so much for the support!! 

27.  Age difference doesn’t really matter THAT much, in the grand scheme - well, maybe it does for the teen years. If she has a partner currently, and she seems happy, then I would try to just stay her friend for now! You could maybe gradually drop hints that you like her, and gage her reaction? 

28. Could it be acid reflux, or heart burn, or an accute respiratory condition maybe? I’m not really well-versed in medical things, and I don’t know anything about your level of fitness or health, so it’s difficult to answer... >.<

29. The print was drawn out by a friend who got them printed onto sweaters at a local print shop! We tried to find and buy it online but we couldn’t find it anywhere >.< 

30. Prepare for it like any other interview - dress like you want to succeed (but also be comfortable). Know your portfolio really well, so that when they ask questions you won’t have to flip through it or hesitate. Be knowledgable about the job/thing you’re applying to as well, so you’re go to go for trivia about the interviewer. Smile and make an appropriate amount of eye contact (demonstrate active listening). Here is a good LinkedIn article about interviews.

31. Aw thanks~ yes yes most of my life is quite happy and I can’t complain ^_^ Have a good one!

32. Thank you!!!! I hope 2017 is super productive for me as well!! Graci and ciao~

WHEW! Feel free to DM me if you want to know more~ 

[kensingtonseo]

Local Security Company SEO Audit

SEO Audit Example Of A Local Security Business

00:01 Hello, this is an SEO site audit for the Three Lion Security Limited, so we met at the networking meeting in Thrapston, and he asked me to have a quick look over his site. So I’ve gone through and done what I would call a simple SEO audit for you, which will highlight a number of the issues you have with the website and I’m listing things that you need to do, a checklist of things that you need to get done to help you improve your ranking. So hopefully you find it useful.

00:58 So I’m just going to take you through your website and show you some of the issues. I’ve got a notepad here where I’ve just taken some notes of some of the issues with the site. I expect this will take about 15 to 20 minutes, so start off with. It’s a, it’s a nice little site. It’s functional, it’s on WordPress, which is good. There are a few kinds of legal things that need to happen. You need to have an EU cookie consent pop up. You’ve probably seen those annoying popups on other websites where you need to have one on here so that you can, you can do that via a WordPress plugin. There are plenty of those. Um, and also you need to have, I can’t find them anywhere, some privacy pages and your terms and conditions pages, especially as a limited company.

01:59 You should really have those on the website as well and you can just pop them in the footer bar here, the footer menu here to keep them out of the way that they really ought to be there. One comment on the homepage is there isn’t really a lot of information and to improve your rankings it will be a good idea to add some more content. One of the biggest issues I see with websites these days is they try and look better than they are useful to Google. So, you know, it looks nice. You got a big header image here and you’ve got the three content boxes here, but the only real content is this a little bit here and it’s not really enough for Google to be able to understand what your site is all about. So let’s just have a quick look at the Moz toolbar.

02:54 This is something that just gives us some information about the page and you’ll see as we go through this that there are some reoccurring themes. A page title, this should be around about 75 characters and yours is 133. And for most of the pages, the page title is too long. So we need to look at reducing the page titles, the Meta description as well, which is here. This is the snippet that shows when somebody does a search and Google, this is too long as well. There should be shorter than this, otherwise, it gets truncated and it doesn’t make sense for the searcher. So we need to look at shortening those on the page. One of the things that most of your pages have is these Meta keywords, now this has been dropped by Google.

03:52 I would remove those keyword tags has probably been done by the Yoast plugin, but you can disable that. So I would get rid of those. We’ve got an H1 tag here. There’s no H1 tag. It will be good and helpful to have an H1 tag, although we’ve got an H2 tag. It was possibly something to do with the theme or it might just be the way in which the text has been formatted, but you would certainly want to have an H1 tag not having an H1 and just having an H2 wouldn’t make any sense to Googlebot. So that needs to be looked at and there’s no bold words or Italics. Ideally, you want to bold your main keyword and italicize some of your main keywords throughout the content, preferably in the first paragraph.

SEO Audit Checklist – Image Optimisation

04:46 This is the ALT tag, a little explanation that you can add to any images that you’ve got on the page so that a web browser can read them and understand what the image is about. And also screen readers use this for the visually impaired. If you’ve got people with accessibility problems, shortsightedness, those kinds of things, then the screen readers will be able to tell them what the images are and all throughout your site, your ALT tags really could do with being better optimised. This is pretty much the standard that we’ve got on every single page. That’s mainly due to the logos and that in the footer. So it will be better to look at improving the ALT tag and again, through WordPress, that’s reasonably straightforward because each image has the facility to add an ALT tag text to it using the media library.

SEO Audit Checklist – Schema Markup

05:51 There isn’t any Schema markup on any of the site. Schema Markup is something that is a code that you put into the site which will tell Google exactly what your page is about in an easy to understand machine language. You should, as a local business, have at least local business markup you can use. You can use a plugin to help you with this and it should ideally be in JSON LD, but it could also be in microdata format, but really it tells Google what your business is, where it is, and also helps to link together your social profiles so it can start to build up an idea of who your business is on the web and start linking those properties together so that when you tweet something or you share something on Facebook, Google can understand that it actually is about your website entity.

SEO Audit Checklist – Secure Website With SSL (https)

06:50 One last issue on the home page, something that is a ranking factor these days, which again now isn’t that difficult to do, is to switch to an https website, a secure website. You’ll need to make sure that you do any redirects from the old site to the new site, but that would also help to give your site a little ranking boost. So, just looking at, these other pages, we’ve got things like security guarding and again, it’s a fairly similar thing. We’ve not got anywhere near enough content on these pages. There should be at least 300 words as a very minimum. And if you’re looking to outrank competitors, then you need to make sure that you’ve got more and better quality content for your pages to make sure that you rank for these. Again, looking at the on-page stuff, we’ve got a page title too long meta-description this a little bit too long.

SEO Audit Checklist – On-Page Elements

08:02 We’ve got meta keywords that need to be removed. We’ve got H1 tag, but really we could do with better optimising that so that it’s more keyword rich. And we’ve got an H2 tag with the content “why use us?” That’s a bit of a waste of a keyword in the H2 tag. Again, no bolding or Italics to identify or highlight the keywords that this page is about. So in an ideal world, you have, for each of these pages, this is your security services page. Your title will reflect that your meta-description will reflect the keywords, the keywords that are bolded in the text reflects that the H1 tags reflect that the H2 tags, the images, the images, ALT tag text on the images reflect that as well. So the whole page is themed around these, the main keyword.

09:03 So I won’t go through the rest of them because they’re all pretty much the same. I’m just moving over to here. Accreditation’s again, it’s just a similar theme. There’s just not much content and Google really doesn’t like what’s known as thin content pages, ones that don’t have much content. So you need to look at putting more information on your pages or combining the pages so that it’s. I said that they’re kind of better laid out. On the meet the team. I thought it was a bit odd because I was expecting to see staff images and that kind of thing and I got an About Us page essentially, so we might want to look at kind of rewording that or doing something so that it seems to make more sense and it looks as if there’s been some copying and pasting as gone on because there’s a lot throughout the whole site.

10:02 There are these areas here where you’ve got odd characters and these are ‘dot formatted’, character’s usually where something’s been copied and paste from word and it’s gone in and WordPress hasn’t quite understood the character and coding that’s gone through, so this all needs to be attended to. It should be fairly straightforward just to go through the text and make the changes so that we get rid of these odd characters. I noticed there was a lot of it on the job vacancies page as well. I’m down here. We’ve got kind of odd characters around here and here, here and various others here and I think on one of the pages right at the bottom where it was it. One of the pages contact us, one of the pages that have got a big banner at the bottom, which is kind of got your motto and that was messed up as well. So let me just see if I can quickly find that for you whilst we’re flicking through.

11:17 The other thing that we can do to the site is what’s called siloing, this is about building buckets of related content. The other thing is to do with silo in and that is where we create content stacks if you like, and where we start linking from our content to relevant content within our site. So we haven’t got any of that at all. So we’re not helping google to understand what the site is about. The other issues looking through my little list here is that we’re looking at targeting these local areas, which is absolutely fine, but there’s nothing on the site other than the keywords that have been put in which needs to be got rid of. That really indicates that you are a local site targeting these areas.

SEO Audit Checklist – Location pages

12:11 So really to do this properly and efficiently it will be a good idea to have a locations page tab here with the various locations and the services that you provide in those locations. And then build out content within each of those that let’s say for Wellingborough. So let’s say you want to provide these four services within Wellingborough where you recreate these pages within the Wellingborough location tab and you then put the content in there and you make the content relevant to, to Wellingborough. If you want to rank locally, you really need to look at doing more about optimising your site for local search intent because at the moment you’re not really taken advantage of that. Although the keywords seem to suggest that that’s what you want. So overall, there are quite a few things from an on-page point of view that need to be looked at.

SEO Audit Checklist – Google My Business Optimisation

13:17 Your Google my business page. That’s an important element because it kinda tells Google that about your business. And really that kind of ties everything together. And the one of the ways, the main ways that Google will tie that together is by using what’s known as the NAPW, which is your name, address, phone number and website, and these details need to be the same across all of your web properties and directory listings. So on your Twitter, on your Facebook, on your Google, My Business page, on your Yelp or Yell.com listings, or any of the free listings that you can get. These all need to be exactly the same and they need to be the same as what is on your Google My Business page, which at the moment is showing this address which is slightly different to what you’ve got is different to what you’ve got on your website and different to what you’ve got.

14:11 Because as we see down here, we’ve got your Registered Address. So it might be better if you put the registered address in your, say your terms and conditions page. And then you had your address down here, which would then match up with what was on the contact page. And the contact page addresses, again, slightly different to this. So that would need to be changed up so that it actually matched the address because it needs to be exact. Say they haven’t got that in the Google My Business listing and the postcode is, is formatted slightly as well. So there’s a little thing, it might not seem much, but in Google’s eyes, they’re as different as chalk and cheese. So you need to make sure that the address is laid out correctly and is the same and consistently the same. Otherwise, you won’t benefit from those mentions, what are known as citations from across the web.

Local Security Company SEO Audit – Call Us For You Own Audit

15:12 So I think we’ve got a good deal of things that we can target to improve your website on-page, you’ve got a lot of keywords here and you have got the opportunity to make some really good content written about this. So a content marketing campaign, creating interesting posts about all of these topics and then getting people to link back to those articles locally will really help you to start to boost the authority of this website and really help to improve your rankings, which will, of course, get you more calls, enquiries and generate more business. So I hope you found that useful I’ve got a separate report which I shall include with the email to you and I’ll send this all over with a link to this video so that you can watch it and if you need to, you can obviously watch it a couple times. So feel free to get in touch if you want some advice on how to get all of this done on the implementation.

The post Local Security Company SEO Audit appeared first on Kensington SEO.

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: Required Reading

The US Department of Interior announced on Twitter that this was their most popular image of the week. It’s a sunset in Zion National Park in Utah and it was taken by Shay Blechynden. (via @interior)

Want to know why the Peggy Guggenheim Collection ended up in Venice? Well, this concise history is very helpful:

Venice promised Peggy a more civilised welcome and, after much house-hunting, she found a vacant palazzo on the eastern stretch of the Grand Canal. It was a curiously proportioned building, very wide but only one storey high. The Venier family, who had commissioned it in the mid-18th century, had imagined it rising to a monumental five storeys, but ran out of money (and male heirs). Locals derisively nicknamed it the Unfinished Palazzo, but for Peggy, who was living alone with her dogs and her art, it was the perfect size.

She remained there for the remaining 30 years of her life and, during the summer, opened it up to the public. It was an eccentrically informal arrangement, with Peggy’s collection mixed into the muddle of her domestic life. Guests staying at the palazzo would find eager art tourists wandering into their bedrooms and (given the lack of toilet facilities) catch them peeing discreetly in the garden. But over time, the Venier palazzo became one of Venice’s major attractions, and a spur to the city’s development as an international showcase for contemporary art.

Jessica Lynne speaks with the curators behind the Brooklyn Museum’s landmark We Wanted A Revolution: Black Radical Women 1965–85 exhibition:

Jessica Lynne: This exhibition has been a few years in the making. Could you talk about the impetus of the project and why it was vital for the show to exist within the museum’s series A Year of Yes: Reimagining Feminism at the Brooklyn Museum?

Catherine Morris: Several years ago, we started thinking about how the projects we were focusing on pushed against historical orthodoxies, and about second wave feminism, which is the foundation of the Sackler Center. What are the stories that aren’t told? It came down to an exercise of revising revisionism. Revisionist history is one of the most important contributions feminist theorizing has made to the history of art, but it was time to turn that method on itself. We Wanted a Revolution captures that spirit.

Rujeko Hockley: Exactly. A lot of We Wanted a Revolution came out of my work in graduate school and the work I had done about women of color and black feminism outside of the art world. There is an institutional history here vis-à-vis the museum’s community gallery, a space that existed from 1968 to ’86 which was a problematic space in some ways. And a lot of the work in the show is part of the Brooklyn Museum’s collection, including a Black Arts Movement collection of work acquired by the museum in 2012. We are building on institutional history and bringing out stories that we ourselves didn’t necessarily know that well.

Andrew Russeth writes about the awful Damien Hirst show that opened in Venice. I don’t think this is anywhere close to the worst exhibition of contemporary art in the past decade, but it’s fun to read:

Damien Hirst’s doubleheader in Venice is undoubtedly one of the worst exhibitions of contemporary art staged in the past decade. It is devoid of ideas, aesthetically bland, and ultimately snooze-inducing—which, one has to concede, is a kind of achievement for a show with work that has taken ten years and untold millions of dollars to create.

This should have been a triumph. Hirst loves a grand occasion, and the prospect of taking over collector François Pinault’s palatial spaces in the Most Serene Republic, the Palazzo Grassi and the Punta della Dogana, would seem like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to let it rip. I was looking forward to an extravagant bit of Hirst nihilism, betting that the artist could at least deliver something so truly bad that it would be delightfully good. Instead, Hirst choked. It is bad show, and a depressing one.

What’s Santa Fe like for art dealers? Art Market Monitor talks to dealers Mike Tansey and Barry Ellsworth about a scene that has always been one of the main art markets in the US (the city has 200 galleries, for instance):

John Oliver on the importance of Net Neutrality is so good. Please watch:

Related: gofccyourself.com

Why are there still so many Confederate monuments?

It will come as little surprise that the greatest number of these sites are in the states of the Confederacy, and to a lesser extent in border states. Nor is this a case of the Deep South being somehow behind the times, as opposed to their more forward-thinking neighbors. In fact, the upper South is dotted with rebel symbols. The greatest collection is in Virginia, with 223. That makes some sense, since Richmond served as the Confederate capital for most of the war; the commonwealth hosted more battles than any other; and the Confederacy’s two most famous generals, Lee and Jackson, were both Virginians. Texas, with 178, comes next, followed by Georgia, North Carolina, and Mississippi. But a surprising number of sites are not in the South. A handful of symbols bear Confederate dedications in Northern States, including New York, which furnished more soldiers to the Union war effort and saw more of them die than any other state, and California, where schools in San Diego and Long Beach are named for Robert E. Lee. (Illinois, the land of Lincoln, has none.)

The Dakota Access Pipeline has already leaked (and it’s not even fully functional). Where did we hear this before? Oh, yeah:

“They keep telling everybody that it is state of the art, that leaks won’t happen, that nothing can go wrong,” said Jan Hasselman, a lawyer for the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, which has been fighting the project for years. “It’s always been false. They haven’t even turned the thing on and it’s shown to be false.”

Is social media making us miserable? Well, kinda:

On social media, the top descriptors to complete the phrase “My husband is …” are “the best,” “my best friend,” “amazing,” “the greatest” and “so cute.” On Google, one of the top five ways to complete that phrase is also “amazing.” So that checks out. The other four: “a jerk,” “annoying,” “gay” and “mean.”

While spending five years staring at a computer screen learning about some of human beings’ strangest and darkest thoughts may not strike most people as a good time, I have found the honest data surprisingly comforting. I have consistently felt less alone in my insecurities, anxieties, struggles and desires.

Once you’ve looked at enough aggregate search data, it’s hard to take the curated selves we see on social media too seriously. Or, as I like to sum up what Google data has taught me: We’re all a mess.

Ok, now some tweets from the week, including this one, which has become the MOST retweeted and faved tweet in history (and it’s about chicken nuggets):

HELP ME PLEASE. A MAN NEEDS HIS NUGGS http://pic.twitter.com/4SrfHmEMo3

— Carter Wilkerson (@carterjwm) April 6, 2017

Well, this is insightful (and scary):

Either the history books will teach the brief troubled presidency of Donald Trump as an object lesson or there will be no history books.

— Gary Shteyngart (@Shteyngart) May 11, 2017

Something about this image is satisfying … I wonder what it is:

@realDonaldTrump http://pic.twitter.com/u4U3kZTehD

— Mike Denison (@mikd33) May 12, 2017

And one more:

This. http://pic.twitter.com/PUzzqVZiMC

— Steve Silberman (@stevesilberman) May 10, 2017

Required Reading is published every Sunday morning ET, and is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.

The post Required Reading appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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[lawrenceseitz22]

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 129

Click on the video above to watch Episode 129 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://ift.tt/1NZu6N2.

  Announcement

Bradley: Okay. We’re live.

Adam: All right. Hey, everybody. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts, episode 129. This is the 26th of April 2017, and we’ve got part of the group, here. I think two, fifths of us are out traveling or flying, today. Myself, Bradley, and Marco ares here. Instead of doing the Brady Bunch up and down, I’ll just look over this way, and Bradley how are you doing, man?

Bradley: Good, man. I’m happy to be here. It’s a beautiful spring day. Got lots of good questions, already, and just looking forward to doing it.

Adam: That’s nice. Marco, how’s the weather, for you?

Marco: It’s sunny in the mornings and it rains every afternoon, now for three, four hours and then it goes away until the next day, it’s typical, but still warm.

Adam: Nice.

Marco: As I said, it’s either warm and raining, or warm and sunny.

Adam: Nice. I couldn’t help, I was looking at my background, if Wayne is watching, there’s Nike headphone inception going on, here, there’s the exact same pair behind me. Anyways. On to more important announcements, not about my headphones. I wanted to let everybody know, hopefully by the end of this Hump Day Hangout we’ll have a link for you guys, we’re busy getting it setup, because we just confirmed with Pavel, and I just missed out on the topic, real quick, because I was busy doing the background stuff. Bradley, do you want to tell them what the webinar this Monday is going to be about?

Bradley: Site Whizz. Apparently, he’s got another application that he built specifically for PBN stuff, but I can tell you I’m super freaking impressed with Rank Whizz and Pavel from the webinar that we had this week, on Monday. I mean, the guy really knows his stuff, and you can tell, and because of that the tool is super powerful, and from some of our Mastermind members that were commenting on a thread in the Mastermind about it, they were saying that it is indeed a very powerful tool. There is a bit of a learning curve, though. My point is after going through the training webinar with Pavel on Monday, and seeing what Rank Whizz does, and seeing how so many other tools that are kind of like duct taped together, you know, everybody has different tools to do different things, so many of that can be consolidated under one dashboard.

It makes sense to take the time to learn it, now honestly, I’ll be 100% transparent, I don’t run tools like that. I’ve hired people years ago to start doing that for me, because it’s not something I had any desire to do. We’re probably going to be and in fact, I’ve already talked to our link building manager, Deady, about hiring, or signing somebody to us to run Rank Whizz, specifically, because of some of the incredible stuff it can do. So, anyways, that said, if you haven’t seen that webinar go watch it and then the Site Whizz webinar, I can only imagine is equally as impressive, because of how much development, and care, and thought that Pavel put into the Rank Whizz. I’m really super excited to see what it does, because I’m clueless as to what Site Whizz does, so this is going to be 100% new to me, as well, but I’m really anxious to see it, so I encourage you guys to sign up or register for the webinar on Monday and attend.

Marco: What really drew my attention was that he actually talked about what I call the three elements, or the three components that a link must have to be considered good. Right? Which is relevancy, activity, and trust and authority, not necessarily in that order, but I mean he’s one of the few people that I know, Mike Pierce is another, and you guys know that to me he is by far the best technical SEO, anywhere, but for someone else to talk about it, and to know, and to understand the concepts, to me, that says it all, because he actually understands where Google is and the W3C are trying to take the semantic web, where everything is headed. So, if he understands what the future is then he’s already planning ahead, which is where everybody should be going. You never want to be reactive. Right? To search engines and upgrades. You always want to be proactive-

Bradley: Correct.

Marco: You always want to be in there, and you want to be ahead of the curve.

Bradley: Yeah. What’s next, Adam?

Adam: I believe, you guys have a webinar, you guys, I believe we, hopefully we’ll be there live, you guys are doing some structured data awesomeness. Correct me if I’m wrong. I believe that is May 8th. Right? The following Monday.

Bradley: Yes. At three o'clock, I think.

Marco: May 8th, at three o'clock. Yeah. It’s not ready, yet, nor is the signup ready, I mean, I’m still working through a whole bunch of information that I had to go through. Every time I think I have it, I keep discovering something new, so I it’s new for me, so trying to explain it in layman’s terms, so that everyone can understand. I know we have a lot of high level people, but I like to talk one level down for the person that’s just starting out, for the person that’s trying to grasp the concepts. I have to really understand what it is that they’re saying, so that I can try to explain it. All right. If you cannot explain it, you don’t know shit. That’s where I go. That’s where I am. I know that Bradley is co-presenter, so he’s going to be giving us his insights, and how he sees structured data working. He does so much local, so he knows about all that and how it works. We’re hoping to give a really good one, two presentation on structured data.

Bradley: Yeah. I agree. It’s going to be awesome.

Adam: Yeah. Everybody, we’ll get that out to you. As soon as we do, obviously, it takes a little time to set up the webinars and do all that, so once we get that, we’ll send out an email and let everybody know about it. Other than that, though, I think that’s good on announcements. You guys got anything, else?

Bradley: No. I was about to post on the event page for Ken Roberts. Hey, Ken, we did, we answered your question. Actually, Marco and I got together on Monday to consult about your question, and so it’s been answered in the Facebook group. The Syndication Academy Facebook group, I’m about to drop the link to that particular post, apparently Semantic Mastery’s doesn’t have you in a circle, Ken, because I cannot tag you, but anyways I’ll drop the link, or go back to The Syndication Academy, Ken, in the group and you should see the answers to your questions from last week, because we did end up, Marco and I scheduled time on Monday just so that we could talk about your question. Anyways.

Adam: One more thing, real quick, I was going to say, we just got the webinar setup, so I’m going to post the link in if you want to check out this awesome webinar, this Monday, with Sit whizz info, get signed up, and we’ll email out about that, but I wanted to make sure everybody has a chance today to hop on that.

Bradley: All right. Ken, I just posted, he’s here watching, I just posted the link to that Facebook post. If you’re not in Syndication Academy guys, you won’t be able to see it, but Ken will, because he’s there. All right. I’m going to grab the screen and we’re going to get into it. You guys cool with that?

Adam: Yeah. Let’s do this.

Bradley: Yeah. Let’s do it. Can you guys see me okay?

Adam: Yes. We can.

Marco: Yeah.

Bradley: All right. Very good. Let’s scroll down to the bottom. Got lots of good questions, already, so this is awesome. All right. Aussie is up first, “Hey, all. I got a website that have a tier one,” oh, couple things we didn’t mention, number one, if you guys are new to Hump Day Hangouts, there’s a couple things that we probably need to just make a note of this, Adam, every day, or every single week.

Adam: Yeah. I just did, and I didn’t want to stop you, I’m actually getting something to paste in there.

Bradley: Okay. Cool. I was going to say, if you guys aren’t aware of where to get Syndication Academy you can go to syndication.academy, again, that’s syndication.academy. That’s where a lot of the questions that we get on Hump Day Hangouts come from that training and that methodology, so that’s a lot of the times what we’re talking about, if you’re unfamiliar with that. Also, a lot of questions that we get, regularly, guys can be answered in our knowledge base, just so you know, and that is at support.semanticmastery.com, again, support.semanticmastery.com is our support portal, I guess, and there is a knowledge base and FAQ’s for various products that we have right there on that support site. I just wanted to kind of point you guys to that, in case you were unaware of those resources. All right. Anyways. Aussie says-

Marco: Before you move on, can I just mention something, so that we have it down.

Bradley: Sure.

Marco: When we get new people, we get the same question a lot of times over and over, and over, and I understand that we have new people coming in that will ask the same questions. Please, if you are new don’t think that we’re treating you like you are new, like you’re dumb, like you don’t know what you’re talking about, this forum, or what we do on Hump Day Hangouts is just for that, we don’t want you to feel bad. Please, ask your questions, if we say to go to whatever source, it’s because the answer is there. It’s been explained, and that’s the best way to start, if after that, after you’ve gone and looked at the resources, you still have a question, you’re welcome to come back and ask us a more in depth question or to clarify, but please just keep asking the questions and we’ll do the best we can to answer them.

Bradley: Yeah. Occasionally, if I get a question that’s been asked 1300 times, I do get a tad bit annoyed, but don’t misinterpret that as me being annoyed with the person asking the question, I’m annoyed with the question, not the person asking the question and I’m working on that, guys. I recognized that, that can come across as shitty, and so I’m working on that, and I apologize for that, but I just want you to know that certainly guys that’s what this is for. Hump Day Hangouts is for people to come and ask questions, new, or experienced alike, it makes no difference. Please, feel free to ask questions, here. Okay?

Decreasing Rankings Of A T1 Branded Ring Powered By PBNs

All right. Now, we’ll get to Aussie’s question, he says, “I got a website that I have a tier one branded ring, I powered up the ring with my PBN’s. The tier one ring became too powerful.” Okay. “My website got slapped by Google and all the pages that had links from the ring lost their rankings, is that possible? PS, the other pages that don’t get links from the ring didn’t lose their rankings and webmaster tool 400 links from WordPress, one of the links from blog spot, Trello, network shows in search results, some of them even page one, the Trello especially,” yeah, by the way, just a side note, I’ve noticed that, too, recently that the Trello pages or your profiles are ranking like crazy, I’m not sure why that is. “If I want personal support who would I contact with? I’m a member of Syndication Academy and Battle Plan, and RYS starter.” Okay. I’ve never seen this, what you’re describing here.

Now, hold on a minute, let me rephrase this, if it’s just a tier one branded ring, I’ve never seen any issues, whatsoever. I’ve not experienced this. Now, with multiple syndication networks connected to a website, for blog syndication, and this is precisely why I talk about, throughout the training, and throughout so many Hump Day Hangouts, about not connecting multiple syndication rings to a blog, for blog syndication, because I have had, I’ve gotten slapped from that before and it’s because of unnatural link profile, I’ve been slapped various ways. I’ve had algorithmic slaps, and I’ve had manual penalties, as well. Both, from connecting too many syndication networks to a blog, but that is precisely why we talk about primarily just using a tier one branded ring. If you’re going to use tier two, and I know Aussie, you’re not saying that you use tier two, but I’m just explaining this for the benefit of other people, as well, in part for why I don’t use multiple or tiered rings for blog syndication.

If you’re going to be using tiered rings, though, however, or syndication networks you want to add additional related content feeds, or sources, triggers, into the second tier networks to try to mask or hide footprint as much as possible. Remember, you’re not trying to hide a footprint on your branded ring, you’re trying to claim it. You’re trying to announce to the world that this is you on all these different locations, or this is your brand, or whatever. I’ve never experienced that, what you’re talking about here from a branded ring, but that’s also because, and Aussie, I don’t know what kind of content you’re publishing from your blog, so what I’m saying is if you’re publishing content from your main blog that’s syndicating to your ring, and you’re doing automated content, or positing maybe too frequently, or I don’t know what could cause that, but I know that there could be content issues that are causing that problem, as well, and it’s not necessarily from the syndication network. There’s some variables that I’m unaware of, here, from this one line, or two little sentences here isn’t enough detail for me to be able to make an educated guess as to what the problem is, other than it may be a content issue with what you’re posting from the blog, if that makes sense. Marco, or Adam, I guess, have you guys ever had any experience with this?

Marco: I’m looking at this and he says he has RYS starter, now, what he could be experiencing is the Google dance, we covered this before, and I just dropped the link at the top, so that he can go and take a look at it, I don’t know how long it’s been since he did this. Sometimes they disappear. It doesn’t mean that you got Google slapped. It just means that they’re dancing, and they’ll eventually come back, you wait 21 days until the Google dance has cleared, and then you go take a look at your ranking. You cannot SERP watch or you’ll drive yourself nuts-

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Watching it go up and down. It goes up and down, up and down. Then, eventually after that period it’s like a probationary period. Right? Where if you go and do anything, they extend it to, I think it’s either 60 or 80 days and if you do anything within that period then you can get permanently sand boxed, so I would say just relax, let it sit, let it stew, and see if it starts coming back. In the meantime, he can be looking at other things, whether he’s doing multiple posting, whether he has a multi tiered ring, which is not necessary for most keywords, but I see that, and if he did that, and if he powered it up, meaning if he built links to tier one and RYS it will dance, but it will come back and it will come back better than ever, if you leave it alone for the period of time that the Google dance requires, it’s riding the patent.

Bradley: Yeah. See, Aussie, I’ve got, I mean, I literally have websites and some clients, some are my own that I’ve had syndication networks around since 2012, and literally have thousands of links from WordPress and thousands of links from blog spot, or blogger, and Tumblr, and that kind of thing in search console, and never once have they ever been slapped. I cannot see it having anything to with the syndication network, unless there was a problem with the content, again, that you’re publishing. If it scrapped content, spun content, stuff like that, that could cause problems, and there’s no question.

Also, it could be if you’re using tiered networks, like I said, and you’re not masking or hiding your footprint, properly. That could also cause issues, but again, if you want to contact somebody, you could reach out to us in support, and if you’re in the Mastermind, we can provide, of course, support within the Mastermind, but if not it might, you might have to schedule with someone on one consulting time, but you can always send in a support ticket and propose what it is you need help with and we can figure out what the best course of action for you would be. Okay?

Proxies When Creating Branded IFTTT Networks For Clients

All right. David’s up, he says, “Same question as last week, tech glitch pause, if I’m creating branded IFTTT networks for clients, do I need proxies?” Okay, David. No. Yes and no. No, if you are limiting how many accounts you create. Let’s put it this way, when you go to start creating an account, or a network, you’re going to create a profile in a new Google account, and then you’re going to use that Google account to create the profile or the accounts on all the other network sites, network properties, Tumblr, WordPress, Gravatar, all that stuff. Right? That’s basically one account set, so as long as you’re only doing one or no more than two account sets in any 24 hour period, then you should be okay.

However, if you’re building for clients, I recommend having a minimum of five or just a handful, I mean, typically I always just start off with five proxies, dedicated proxies. The reason why is, because if you’re building them, which by the way, David, you shouldn’t be building them, honestly, you really shouldn’t be, but if you plan on doing it anyways, because you can outsource this kind of work, man, for a hell of a lot less than what your time is worth, I can tell you that. But, if you are planning on doing it, anyways, then I recommend just getting five dedicated proxies it will cost you like 10 bucks a month, man. Then, that way you have basically cycled through the proxies. In other words, if on Monday you start to create one account set with proxy number one, then on Tuesday create your next account set proxy number two, and by the time you get to Saturday, you cycle back up to proxy number one. Does that make sense?

Just, in other words, that way you’re spreading out new account sets per IP, so that you’re not, if you use just your own IP, and you’re creating a new account set, every day, at some point, I don’t know what the threshold is, but at some point, you’re probably going to have your IP flagged, by if not Google, by some of the other web two properties. I recommend that you always use, you know, you can use a VPN. I particularly don’t like to use VPN’s, because those are shared IP’s, even though a lot of them have big pools of IP’s now, I still don’t like to use them, because they’re shared. I prefer dedicated proxies, because then I know they’re clean. Okay. Again, I highly recommend that you’re going to do it, and also, David, if you’re going to be building networks and using proxies then to make your life a hell a lot easier I recommend that you pick up Browseo. Right now, Browseo, now has a monthly option it’s like 37 bucks a month.

The amount of headache that it will save you to be able to use Browseo and have multiple browsing sessions open using different proxies for different profiles and all that kind of stuff, the speed with which you’re able to accomplish your tasks by having that ability, or that function available is unbelievable. Right? It’s amazing. I’ve got Browseo open right now. I mean, I got it open all the time, now, because it’s just so freaking amazing. So, I highly recommend that you use that, as well, it’s going to make you a lot more efficient. As I mentioned, before, I certainly recommend, David, that you only build a few networks to get the hang of it and then outsource it. You can buy them from us, or you can hire your own virtual assistant, and put them through the training, and have them build so that you have an in house builder, that’s going to be your best option, you’ll make the most money that way, if you create your own in house builder, or excuse me, train your own in house builder. All right.

Boosting IFTTT Networks With Google Stacks

Next question. “After an IFTTT stack is in place, how much does a Google property stack, including interlinking docs, excuse me, interlocking Google Doc’s, et cetera, boost to network and what tier should they point at, and how soon can, should it be plugged in?” As far doing an RYS or a drive stack, I don’t see any reason to wait. Marco, can comment on that, but I don’t see where there’s any reason to wait, and you can link to all of the above. You can link to your money site, your Google My Business page, your tier one properties, because all it’s doing is reinforcing and validating the entity. Marco, do you have a comment on any [crosstalk 00:20:50].

Marco: No. I totally agree. No. We usually order IFTTT and RYS as soon as we get-

Bradley: The network back.

Marco: The verification from Google.

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: As soon as the verification, then we have that NAP, the way that it’s set in Google, that’s how it’s going everywhere else that we have it. I mean, I trained Justin, and I continuously go back and forth with him, he’s our RYS VA, he knows exactly what to do, how to hook everything up, so that you guys don’t have to do it. If you want to go through it, then the place for the training is RYS Academy. Otherwise, you’re left guessing on how everything is done.

Bradley: Yeah. All right. Hopefully, that helps, David. Yeah. The same order that whenever, I agree with Marco, if it’s going to be for a local business, it has an NAP, you’re going to want to wait until you have a verified address, and you probably already do, but if not, if it’s a new listing, a new business, then yeah, wait until you get the Google My Business page verified, so that then you have the NAP exactly as it’s listed in Google. I totally agree with that. Typically, what I’ll do with a new property is order the network, build the site, while the network is being built.

My curator, somebody from, one of my curators, will end up creating content for me like having at least a minimum of three curated posts ready to go, so that when the site is built, and the network has been connected, then I go in and publish those three posts. I’ll drip them out, over a course of a week, or so, and then from there I’ll order the, excuse me, the drive stack, and then I’ll order a press release, and then I’ll order the first batch of citations. That’s pretty much the exact same process that I go through for every single new site that I launch, or even a site that’s an existing site and I’m taking a new client or something like that, that’s the same process I have to go through, is still sitting up the network first, and having content produced while the network is being set up and all that kind of stuff. It’s the exact same timeline that I always use. Just because it works. There’s no reason, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

ReIndexing Videos To Google Sitemap

Ryan’s up. “I’ve added a section to my website that is a video library, the section lists all the videos from my YouTube channel. Each video has its own page, or we are hosting a YouTube video with transcript and description of what the video is about. My question, I created a separate video site map listing all the individual videos, once I submitted the site map, all 55 of the videos were indexed, but over time they are starting to get de-indexed in increments of five or 10 at a time, now, only nine videos are indexed. What could cause this? What can I do to troubleshoot why my videos are getting de-indexed? Everything in search console shows that my video site map has no errors, so I’m not sure what is causing this de-indexing.” It’s a good question, Ryan. I’m not 100% sure, either.

Adam: Description about what the video is about, is it actually the video description?

Bradley: It’s a transcript and a description. Probably like a summary, maybe, is what the description is.

Adam: Okay.

Marco: I mean, is the description being taken word for word from the video description?

Bradley: You mean, from the video description in YouTube?

Marco: Correct.

Bradley: Yeah. That can cause problems, Ryan. Good point, Marco. I don’t know that, that’s the case, Ryan, but if you are, here’s the thing, though, if you’re adding the transcription to the post, then that should make it unique enough, I mean, again, this is just speculative, but my experience with having video pages de-indexed, and I’m not talking about the videos themselves, I’m assuming the YouTube videos are still indexed, but the video pages on your site are being de-indexed, or falling out of the index, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ve been de-indexed. Right? De-indexed connotes like a penalty, but falling out of the index doesn’t necessarily, like that’s just a Google dance. Right? My point, Ryan, what I’m trying to get at is whenever I was doing a lot of video syndication networks, what I used to call broadcasting networks, which is I’d have self hosted WordPress sites with IFTTT syndication networks around those sites, and then when I would publish a video to a YouTube channel I’d have YouTube connected as a trigger to self hosted WordPress sites. I used to use a plugin to do that, but then I just switched it over to using IFTTT, and YouTube to WordPress. You can do that for self hosted sites, by the way.

Anyways, whenever I would have the applet set up at the time, they were called recipes, but the applets within the description, we always just talk about pasting the embed code, and a link to the video, and you can either do a naked URL, or an anchored text URL to the actual YouTube video itself, and then a link back to the channel and if that’s why our applets are set up the way that they are, because when I had those video broadcasting networks and I was auto syndicating videos to them any time I uploaded a video to a channel, any of those WordPress sites, those self hosted WordPress sites that imported the description, so remember that’s a token, a token inside of IFTTT that you can add, or what they call an ingredient.

You can add the description ingredient. Every single one of the sites that I had auto syndicated videos to that imported the description got de-indexed. Every single one of them. All the sites that I had didn’t import the video description from YouTube, didn’t get de-indexed. That very well could be it, is if you are importing, although, like I said, at least without testing this I would think that if you had the transcription in the blog post, but not in the video description on YouTube, that, that would make that blog post unique enough that it wouldn’t be de-indexed, but maybe it is causing an issue. That’s the only thing I can think of at this time. I mean, what other ideas could there be, Marco, anything else?

Marco: I would use video schema.

Bradley: You could do that.

Marco: I would use it totally, just to solidify it at the entity level. Right? At the coding level. I’d post the URL to Sistrix, which is really, really good about giving you some great video markup for rich snippets, and that might help. Everything tried first, get rid of the description, see what happens, and then mark them up.

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Use the schema generator that I posted and see what happens. Come back and let us know.

Bradley: Yeah. That could help. Wrapping those videos and video object markup could probably help, too, so let us know, Ryan, how that goes. Then, also, again, I’m curious to find out if that’s what you’re doing is importing the video descriptions, too, because if so, what I would recommend is omitting the video descriptions if it’s the same as what they are on YouTube, and then just using the transcription and that’s it.

Live Rank Sniper Vs Tube Rocket (Rocket Video Ranker Pro)

All right. Kurt’s up, he says, “A couple of questions. LRS has done a great job poking some keywords to Google page one, what I use Tube Rocket from Bill Cousins, instead of LRS to upload the videos into the poked sites, if not, what would I use to Tube Rocket for if LRS, works? I understand that Tube Rocker,” and he’s talking about Tube Authority Rocket, guys, otherwise known as Rocket Video Ranker Pro. We did a webinar with Bill Cousins a week or two ago, it’s a really, really cool tool. We got a lot of really, I did a full on case study bonus, too, which was pretty detailed. It’s probably two and a half hours worth of video in that case study alone.

He says, “I understand that Tube Rocket can make the videos unique, but if possible, how would I get them into the spots created by LRS, since it requires live stream, not just a video upload?” Okay. First of all, Kurt, yes, you can use Live Rank Sniper to stream a video into the scheduled live event, because those are essentially just place holders. Right? The schedule of live events are just place holders, however, the problem, and it’s not a problem, but the drawback of using Live Rank Sniper to stream to those scheduled live events is that it’s a slow process, because you have to open up Live Rank Sniper, it’s only a couple of clicks of a mouse, guys, it’s not like it’s difficult, it’s very simple to do, but it’s a slow process, because you have to allow the software to start the stream.

You click the upload or whatever, you click the tab, and then you go navigate to the file on your hard drive, click it, and then you tell it to start streaming, and it basically, you just wait for it to go through the process of firing up the live stream, starts to stream it, and then it closes it down, and all that. So, it’s a manual process, and my point was if you’ve poked a 100 keywords and you got 40 of them that are ranking on page one and/or page two, and you want to go upload, that’s a long time. A lot of time that you’re going to have to sit there and click the mouse a few times to get it to stream, it’s just going to take you a ton of time, Kurt. You can absolutely do that, there’s no problem. It’s just personally, it’s not efficient, for me, so I wouldn’t recommend doing that. You know, there is, Peter Drew, excuse me, I was drawing a blank, Peter Drew has Hangout Millionaire, which would integrate very, very well with Live Rank Sniper, because they’re from the same developer. They have the same interface and that kind of stuff.

I’m fairly certain that Hangout Millionaire can actually stream into those scheduled live events. That will automate the process, so that you don’t have to manually start every single stream. If you want to use the pre-scheduled events that are already ranking, then I would recommend that you upgrade to Hangout Millionaire, and use that. Okay? That’s the reason why I say that is because you’ve already got the place holders in place, and I’m fairly sure that Hangout Millionaire is able to stream to those scheduled live events, but you might have to check with Peter Drew and support first prior to signing up for that. Where Rocket Video Ranker, Tube Authority Rocket, they’re one and the same, really, shines is that it basically uploads videos and it uses that very unique process where it sets everything to private, and then you go in and turn them all public at the same time, and it just seems to work.

Again, I don’t know why it works, but it works. So, as long as it’s working, it’s something that can be exploited, and I’ve used it a lot, as well. Okay. But, no, you cannot use Rocket Video Ranker to stream to scheduled live events, it doesn’t work that way. Rocket Video Ranker is strictly an upload application, I mean it makes it so much faster and efficient to upload a bunch of videos all at one time to the same channel. But, there’s a limit to that, by the way, too. I ran into a couple of issues throughout the case study where I made a mistake with a batch of 30 uploads and I had to go in and delete them all, and then I went back and uploaded, again, to the same channel, and it denied me, it said, you’ve uploaded too many videos, and you must wait 24 hours before uploading anymore, or something like that, so just keep that in mind. Again, it’s a different animal. They can accomplish similar things, but remember Live Rank Sniper was specifically a keyword poking tool, I mean that’s what it was advertised as. Right? It’s a keyword poking tool. Yes, you can steam to pre-scheduled events, but it’s not really designed to do that, efficiently, in other words. Okay?

All right. Next, he says, “Also, I made a spintax with keywords and geotargeting for the LRS pokes, some of them landed on page one and two, and in the videos page, this was done without the long lat settings in Live Rank Sniper, if I needed to do long lat in LRS, would this require one poke per keyword?” Yes. Well, it would be one poke per location, Kurt. I did this same thing Kurt, in other words, when I was running my, I was basically targeting one keyword in multiple locations, so I didn’t use the geo coordinate setting, either. I left that blank, but if you want to target multiple keywords in one location, then you could use the geo, you know, the geo settings, excuse me, because then it’s all the same location, but I did the same thing, which you’re asking about, here, no, I just omitted that. Okay. “Or, could I just use the long lat for Chicago and geo target all the smaller communities and metros in Chicago with the keywords spintex with the same result and effectiveness?”

I don’t know, Kurt, I haven’t test that, personally, I would not want to use Chicago coordinates for suburbs around Chicago, because those suburbs each have their own coordinates. Right? Every point, anywhere at all geographically has its on coordinate. Right? So, even if you move a 100 yards to the right or the left, or north, south, east, west, it doesn’t matter my point is it still got a unique coordinate, so if you’re assigning a Chicago coordinate, excuse me, to all of the other locations that you’re targeting, then you’d be giving mixed messages to Google. I haven’t tested that, so I don’t know whether it would work or not, but to be honest with you it seems logical to me that it would cause problems. So, I would recommend just omitting the geocoordinates from those campaigns, unless you’re targeting one location.

Using Same Persona Rings To Multiple Products

All right. Alexander is up, “Should I use the same persona rings to multiple products? For example, the same 10% of the rings for two or more unrelated projects.” I don’t recommend that. I mean, you can to a point, Alexander, I would still try to keep them somewhat related. Here’s the thing guys, like for second tier networks, which are basically persona based networks, especially for like YouTube syndication’s, stuff like that, things can be a bit more general, but remember theming is really, really important. I’ll let Marco comment on this, but guys theming and relevancy is critical, now, and it’s only becoming more and more critical, so I’d recommend not spamming up some second tier networks, or persona based networks with a whole bunch of unrelated stuff. Try to keep it somewhat ballpark, somewhat in the same ballpark, because you’re going to get more power, and more authority built from any of those links, embeds, whatever, from those networks if they’re themed correctly. Marco, you got a comment for that?

Marco: No. I agree. We go back to what I mentioned in the beginning, which is the three components of a link. Right?

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Relevancy, activity on the link, trust and authority. If those three things are present then you have a great link, if you omit one of those then the link becomes not so great, what overcomes that is where the link is coming from, like if you can get that awesome boost from one of these super powerful websites where you get that link that just pops you to number one, then that’ll override the relevancy activity, but it has to be powerful, it cannot just be any old link, or it could have decent metrics and you would have to boost it, so that you power up the metrics to override the relevancy factor, but you still need all the other three components. I mean, I could talk about this all day, but we’re still going to come back to relevancy, activity, trust and authority, that’s what you need on a link. If you don’t have that, and most, again, most PBN’s are just there to provide a link, if you are doing just that then you’re better off going and renting. You know how you can go and rent from what used to be a PR7, or a PR8 you better off doing that, you can still do that and get a lot of bang for your money.

Multiple Google Sites For Different Personas

Bradley: Yeah. All right. Bacon is up, he says, “I have a question about Google sites, if you were to create multiple sites, do you need to do each under a different persona, since it is a Google property?” No. It’s not necessary. You can do it all, I mean, you can create multiple Google sites under one profile. It’s fine. Just keep in mind, that if you’re doing some nasty stuff with them, with any one of them, or a combination of them, you stand a chance of getting that account slapped and potentially terminated, and if you have multiple Google sites in that one account, and that account gets slapped, or terminated, then it could end up, you end up losing all of them. Again, I always talk about mitigating risk, guys, specifically because I just don’t want to have one where Google can come in and terminate one account, and I lose multiple digital assets, or multiple businesses, so to speak. Right?

That’s why I always try to separate things by different Google profiles, because then I can always connect, and add as a manager, and you can do that in Google sites, too, you can add a manager. So, you can add, you can create, let’s say you’re going to create 10 Google sites, have 10 different profiles, each owning its own Google site, and then you can connect your main profile, you, or Bacon, as a manager to all of them, so that you can manage all of them underneath one account. But, if anyone of those accounts were to get terminated, it will only affect the one Google site that was owned by that profile account. If that makes sense.

Different Content When Syndicating My Maps

So, it’s a matter of just trying to mitigate risk, it’s up to you. What’s your risk tolerance? Mine is very, very low. Okay. All right. Ken, says, “I know when syndicating a YouTube video we want to only push out the video and link back to the video without any other content on the page, would this hold true for syndicating my map, too? Is it better, worse, or does it matter to have content on the page with my map when syndicating it?” I don’t have enough experience with that end, but maybe Marco can shed some light on that.

Marco: Let me read through that, again. There’s a lot of stuff that I just cannot give away in this forum. I cannot give that away. Yeah. Content matters, whether it’s on the page, or somewhere else, makes a big difference. Relevance, right? You can push relevancy, because it will bleed through to the source, whatever you have on the page, the bot will come in read it, it will drop into the iframe, so to speak, it will drop into the hole, go down to see where the source is, and all of that, that the bot is holding, wherever it’s holding the information, follows through, so it helps. It helps more if it’s somewhere else. That’s as far as I’m going to take it.

Bradley: Yeah. I mean, I haven’t done a lot of map embedding stuff, so I don’t have a lot of experience with testing, Ken, on that, but I would agree that I would probably be, because the problem with YouTube with importing the description, is what I discussed earlier. Right? Is that every single time, or every property that I have while I was importing the descriptions would get de-indexed. That’s why I stopped doing it, but for maps that’s different. Again, I would want to try to put some content on the page, and then test it, but I don’t know, because I haven’t done it. I’d just follow Marco’s advice.

Resolving Suspended Google My Business Page

All right. Don Johnson, says, “I just tried to verify a UPS mailbox for Google My Business, and as soon as I submitted the postcard request, I got Google has suspended your page due to quality issues,” I can imagine, “I decided to delete the listing and try to come up with a plan. I knew you guys have started using PO Boxes with street delivery, which is what I told the client to do, but he didn’t listen. Just wondering if you have any advice how to save this address. I have been trying to convince this client for a couple years that we need an address in a larger neighboring city, and telling him, that, hey that didn’t work, we need another address is not something that I want to do. Does it mean that the UPS location is flagged as a mailbox location, or might there be a work around? Thanks.” It very well could be, Don. UPS mailboxes, in fact, there was one, I mentioned before on a couple of different times that, yes, I use PO boxes, now, and I have been for at least three years, now, and I keep all of them.

In other words, when I rent a mailbox, I don’t just rent it, or excuse me, a PO box, I don’t just rent it long enough to get the postcard, and then let it expire. I keep renewing them. I’ve got dozens of PO boxes and I pay for them every single year, and the reason I do that is because in the event that I ever have to reverify the business, I’ll have access to that location, that address. The reason I know how to do that is because that’s only happened twice to me in my entire career. Okay. But, one of the times that it happened it was a UPS mailbox for one of my tree service lead gen sites, and the UPS mailbox was like $36.00 a month, it was freaking ridiculous, and so I let that mailbox go, because I thought I’ll never need it again, and it’s too damn expensive. Sure enough, I got a reverification, I was required to reverify via mail, snail mail, and I didn’t have access to that location, so I lost that maps listing, because I didn’t have access to it.

So, that was a painful lesson for me, because that was a profitable, it generated quite a bit of revenue, that particular site, so anyways, my point is that ever since that time, first of all I stopped using UPS mailboxes, the UPS stores and stuff, I stopped using those and I went to PO boxes, and I keep them renewed. Now, with that said, you know, if you’ve been trying to tell a client something for two years, now, look, I understand, because you are kind of black hatting the maps listing. I’ve had clients that have been resistive to that, as well, so you know, I don’t know what else you can do other than tell them why it would benefit them to do that, and try to get them to do it the correct way, otherwise I don’t know what else you could do to tell them that. Short of you going out and getting the mailbox yourself, which I don’t recommend doing, but if it’s a client that’s paying you a good amount of money, look, I pay anywhere between $64.00 and $128.00 per year, per PO box.

It just depends on the population density of the area that I’m renting the box in. Right? The more populated it is, the more expensive it’s going to be, but I don’t have a single mailbox out of dozens of them that cost me more than, I think, 128, actually, that may not be true, it might be as much as 164, or 168 a year, or something like that. It’s still relatively inexpensive, so again I don’t recommend going out and buying a mailbox for a client unless there’s enough revenue in it for you, to make it worth your while. Here’s the thing, you might end up, there’s always the opportunity that you could use, you know, create other digital assets in that same area, and use that, you could try using that same mailbox, but I wouldn’t do that.

I would have a separate mailbox specifically for this client, and again, if it’s not something that you want to approach the client about, I wouldn’t mind approaching the client, just say, look, you got a UPS mailbox, those don’t work and here’s the reason why, recommend using a USPS box, it’s cheaper, and they’re still working, right now, and it’s going to benefit your business, and I recommend that you do it. That’s what I would say, otherwise you could do it on your own. Again, I don’t recommend doing that, Don, but if you’re making enough revenue from that client, it’s a nominal small price to pay to be able to get them results. Okay.

Differences Between FCS, RankerX, SEO Autopilot and Rankwyz

Kay says, “Please review the difference between FCS, RankerX, SEO Autopilot, and Rank Whizz. As a newbie, and budgeting for a growing business, I want to spend wisely. Also, please talk about any must have SEO tools. I realize this part may vary. Thanks, again, for everything you all do.” I cannot speak about the difference between all those tools, because I’ve never run any of them. So, honestly, Kay, I wish I could help you, but we would have to ask one of our more experienced link building, like tool users. For example, our link building manager, Deadia, which I’m sure he’d be happy to come on to a webinar and talk about that a little bit. He did it inside the Mastermind, I don’t know if we could get him on Hump Day Hangout, maybe. We’d have to ask him. But, he’s the one that runs all those tools.

I cannot answer you Kay, honestly, because I just don’t know. I don’t use any of those tools. I can tell you that I’m super, super, super impressed with Rank Whizz, and Pavel from the webinar that we did on Monday. I think if you were going to invest, and again, this is only based upon, not from using any of the tools, myself, but just based upon what I know and from what I saw on Monday with Rank Whizz is it seems like it can do everything that I could ever want a link building tool to do, in a very unique way. In fact, the content mill function of Rank Whizz is amazing, because they don’t scrape content based upon keywords, they do it based upon topics, which is the very first time I’ve ever heard of a link building tool do that, which speaks directly to RankBrain and Hummingbird. Right?

The semantic web algorithms, or the semantic web filters, or whatever, layers to the algorithm. My point is, that after going through that webinar, if you haven’t seen it yet, Kay, go through it, that we did with Pavel. I think it was two hours long, but it’s super, super powerful and if you’re going to invest time and money, well, money is the small part, an investment is the time. Right? The biggest investment is the time to learn how to use these tools. I would pick one that does everything and learn that one tool. So, that you don’t have to patch a bunch of stuff together and Rank Whizz apparently has all that. Guys, again, this is only based upon the webinar, because Pavel knows his stuff, he is a serious SEO. After hearing him talk for two hours, he really knows what he’s talking about, so I think it’s a very, very powerful tool and I would put my trust into that, but that’s just my assumption. Okay. I don’t have any proof behind that, because I don’t use any of those tools, myself. All right.

Marco: [crosstalk 00:47:26].

Bradley: Go ahead.

Marco: If I may, and if she’s a newbie, and she’s going to go into this expense, the expense has to be justified, well, the investment, let’s call it, because it’s actually an investment on the business.

Bradley: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Marco: So, you should have an SEO business if you’re going to be running this type of tool, because this tool is for tier two and out, and if you get good enough into T-1 never at the money site. Unless, you’re really surgical with the tool, you get so good with the tool that you can actually go at tier one, you know exactly what you’re doing. Before you get to all that you should have a really good foundation with everything else. I don’t know if she’s doing Syndication Academy, if she wants to do it for clients, if she wants to do things affiliate, what it is that she wants to do, she says she’s a newbie, which is really broad, what is she a newbie in? What is she trying to take on? What is she trying to do? Because if you go right for the link building tools, you have to have assets that you build links to.

Bradley: Yeah. Okay. Next is Stephen, and we’re running out of time here, very quickly, I can see we’re not going to be able to get to Roy’s question, again, either, we tried this last week and I know we spent some time on it, but apparently we didn’t have the whole scenario, and I know I passed over Steve. Roy, I’m assuming, I don’t think you’re in the Mastermind, Roy, but this might be one of those questions we’re going to have to answer in the Facebook group or something, because we’re running out of time. If you don’t mind, Roy, can you repost this in one of the Facebook groups, Syndication Academy, or the SEO tutorials group, either one, and then tag me on it, Roy, and I’ll spend some time going through and try to give you even if I’ve got to just record a quick screen cast video, or something and drop it in the comments section of that post, I’ll try to get to this, because apparently two weeks in a row you’ve posted this, and we must not have answered it last week, because we didn’t have the full information, and I’d hate to leave you hanging for another week, so if you don’t mind, post that one on Facebook groups. Okay? Like, we did for Ken, this week, we can make sure that we get you a proper answer. All right?

Diversifying When Building Google Properties/Stacks

All right. Steve, says, “Do you have any thoughts on diversity when building Google property stacks beyond all the eggs in one basket argument? For instance, would links from 10 Google Doc’s be as strong as one G Doc plus one sheet, plus one form, plus one G site?” I honestly don’t know. I like the diversity of different link types, so I just use them all. That seems like a question that would be more suited for RYS Academy. Can you comment on that Marco, or what do you think?

Marco: Yeah. Not all Google files are created equal.

Bradley: Right.

Marco: They each have different, like one will rank over the other, remember Doctor Gary did a test I think it was in the Mastermind, or in RYS Academy. It was one or the other, or both, probably, where he showed, which one ranks better than the other one, but we still like to do all of them, because we like to interlink. Having just one Google property linking to another, and those two linking to another, and everything linking back, creating the spider web silo, that powers up everything, and it shoots the relevancy out to the destination, which is what we like to do. So, the way we do it is we just keep, you know, we don’t do one or one file type, we do them all.

Bradley: Right.

Marco: We do as many as we can and we link them all together, and then send the power wherever we want.

Bradley: Which is more diversity. Right? I mean, it seems to me, I haven’t tested it, but I mean, I just, we always do every doc type that’s available to us, or every file type. Okay. Let’s see. We’ve got about four minutes. I’ll give another four minutes. Roy, like I said, please, because this is a big long question and with the second part, as well, so just post that in the Facebook group, man, and tag me on it, I’m giving you permission to tag me, so that we can make sure we answer that. I might answer Columbia’s real quick and then we’re going to wrap it up, guys. By the way, we have Syndication Academy update webinar at 5:00 p.m., so in about 10 minutes, guys. You should have been notified via the Facebook group, because I created an event, so if you’re in Syndication Academy, just go to the Facebook group, click on the events tab and you should find the event and it’s going to start here in about eight minutes.

Best Structure For A Lead Gen Site

Columbia says, “Could you describe the best structure for a lead gen site and what would be careful to avoid? Do you do this under your name, or a persona? Thanks.” No. I always do everything under personas, Columbia, as I mentioned earlier in this webinar, and as I often do in many, many webinars, I try to mitigate my risk. So, I always set up a new persona for every lead gen site that set up. Then, I add myself as a manager, so I can add, for example, like I set up, for every lead gen site that I set up, guys, I set up a brand new Google account. I create a new persona, and then I create the website, and I add the Google My Business listing underneath that persona, the Google plus pages, I do all, Google Analytics, search console, tag manager, everything.

The only thing that I don’t create a new account for every time is AdWords, but everything else I do. Then, what I do is I just add myself, or one of my agency profiles, like, I have an AdWords manager account that’s underneath, it’s basically an agency Google profile that I created specifically to run an AdWords manager account, so since I do most everything in AdWords for lead gen, now, I do some Maps SEO, but pretty much I do a ton of AdWords stuff now for lead gen, I just assign that agency profile as a manager to all my lead gen property sites, and search consoles, and analytics, and all of those, so that I can access everything from my agency profile. But, everything is owned by separate individual Google accounts.

The reason I do that, is because once again, I don’t want, if at any time something happens and they decide that Google doesn’t like my agency account anymore, and they shut it down, terminate it, I don’t want to lose all those accounts. Right? It would suck to have my agency account shut down, but at least I would still have all my lead gen assets because they’re all owned, you know, owned in air quotes, by other persona accounts. Okay. It’s all about mitigating risk, guys. It’s just about reducing risk to where if something bad were to happen you don’t lose it all.

I don’t know about you guys, but I’m not willing to take my chances and put everything underneath one account, and then end up losing it. Then, what do you do? You’re left, you’re stuck with nothing. You got to start all over again. At least if you do what I’m talking about, you know, you might lose an account or two, but you’re not going to lose everything. Right?All right, guys. Yeah. I know. Adam started yelling at me, again. All right, guys. We’re going to see everybody in Syndication Academy webinar in just a minute, hopefully. If you’re not there, come join us.

Adam: Sounds good. See you guys later.

Marco: Bye, everyone.

Bradley: Thanks, everybody. We’ll see you all on the next one. Any questions that didn’t get answered, guys, just submit them next week, or post in some of the groups, we’ll try to get to them. I cannot promise we’ll get to all of them. I know I will get to Roy’s, because I told him I would. We’ll see you all next week. Thanks for being here. Thanks, guys.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 129 posted first on your-t1-blog-url from Blogger http://ift.tt/2p1DE2i via IFTTT

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 129

Click on the video above to watch Episode 129 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://ift.tt/1NZu6N2.

 Announcement

Bradley: Okay. We’re live.

Adam: All right. Hey, everybody. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts, episode 129. This is the 26th of April 2017, and we’ve got part of the group, here. I think two, fifths of us are out traveling or flying, today. Myself, Bradley, and Marco ares here. Instead of doing the Brady Bunch up and down, I’ll just look over this way, and Bradley how are you doing, man?

Bradley: Good, man. I’m happy to be here. It’s a beautiful spring day. Got lots of good questions, already, and just looking forward to doing it.

Adam: That’s nice. Marco, how’s the weather, for you?

Marco: It’s sunny in the mornings and it rains every afternoon, now for three, four hours and then it goes away until the next day, it’s typical, but still warm.

Adam: Nice.

Marco: As I said, it’s either warm and raining, or warm and sunny.

Adam: Nice. I couldn’t help, I was looking at my background, if Wayne is watching, there’s Nike headphone inception going on, here, there’s the exact same pair behind me. Anyways. On to more important announcements, not about my headphones. I wanted to let everybody know, hopefully by the end of this Hump Day Hangout we’ll have a link for you guys, we’re busy getting it setup, because we just confirmed with Pavel, and I just missed out on the topic, real quick, because I was busy doing the background stuff. Bradley, do you want to tell them what the webinar this Monday is going to be about?

Bradley: Site Whizz. Apparently, he’s got another application that he built specifically for PBN stuff, but I can tell you I’m super freaking impressed with Rank Whizz and Pavel from the webinar that we had this week, on Monday. I mean, the guy really knows his stuff, and you can tell, and because of that the tool is super powerful, and from some of our Mastermind members that were commenting on a thread in the Mastermind about it, they were saying that it is indeed a very powerful tool. There is a bit of a learning curve, though. My point is after going through the training webinar with Pavel on Monday, and seeing what Rank Whizz does, and seeing how so many other tools that are kind of like duct taped together, you know, everybody has different tools to do different things, so many of that can be consolidated under one dashboard.

It makes sense to take the time to learn it, now honestly, I’ll be 100% transparent, I don’t run tools like that. I’ve hired people years ago to start doing that for me, because it’s not something I had any desire to do. We’re probably going to be and in fact, I’ve already talked to our link building manager, Deady, about hiring, or signing somebody to us to run Rank Whizz, specifically, because of some of the incredible stuff it can do. So, anyways, that said, if you haven’t seen that webinar go watch it and then the Site Whizz webinar, I can only imagine is equally as impressive, because of how much development, and care, and thought that Pavel put into the Rank Whizz. I’m really super excited to see what it does, because I’m clueless as to what Site Whizz does, so this is going to be 100% new to me, as well, but I’m really anxious to see it, so I encourage you guys to sign up or register for the webinar on Monday and attend.

Marco: What really drew my attention was that he actually talked about what I call the three elements, or the three components that a link must have to be considered good. Right? Which is relevancy, activity, and trust and authority, not necessarily in that order, but I mean he’s one of the few people that I know, Mike Pierce is another, and you guys know that to me he is by far the best technical SEO, anywhere, but for someone else to talk about it, and to know, and to understand the concepts, to me, that says it all, because he actually understands where Google is and the W3C are trying to take the semantic web, where everything is headed. So, if he understands what the future is then he’s already planning ahead, which is where everybody should be going. You never want to be reactive. Right? To search engines and upgrades. You always want to be proactive-

Bradley: Correct.

Marco: You always want to be in there, and you want to be ahead of the curve.

Bradley: Yeah. What’s next, Adam?

Adam: I believe, you guys have a webinar, you guys, I believe we, hopefully we’ll be there live, you guys are doing some structured data awesomeness. Correct me if I’m wrong. I believe that is May 8th. Right? The following Monday.

Bradley: Yes. At three o'clock, I think.

Marco: May 8th, at three o'clock. Yeah. It’s not ready, yet, nor is the signup ready, I mean, I’m still working through a whole bunch of information that I had to go through. Every time I think I have it, I keep discovering something new, so I it’s new for me, so trying to explain it in layman’s terms, so that everyone can understand. I know we have a lot of high level people, but I like to talk one level down for the person that’s just starting out, for the person that’s trying to grasp the concepts. I have to really understand what it is that they’re saying, so that I can try to explain it. All right. If you cannot explain it, you don’t know shit. That’s where I go. That’s where I am. I know that Bradley is co-presenter, so he’s going to be giving us his insights, and how he sees structured data working. He does so much local, so he knows about all that and how it works. We’re hoping to give a really good one, two presentation on structured data.

Bradley: Yeah. I agree. It’s going to be awesome.

Adam: Yeah. Everybody, we’ll get that out to you. As soon as we do, obviously, it takes a little time to set up the webinars and do all that, so once we get that, we’ll send out an email and let everybody know about it. Other than that, though, I think that’s good on announcements. You guys got anything, else?

Bradley: No. I was about to post on the event page for Ken Roberts. Hey, Ken, we did, we answered your question. Actually, Marco and I got together on Monday to consult about your question, and so it’s been answered in the Facebook group. The Syndication Academy Facebook group, I’m about to drop the link to that particular post, apparently Semantic Mastery’s doesn’t have you in a circle, Ken, because I cannot tag you, but anyways I’ll drop the link, or go back to The Syndication Academy, Ken, in the group and you should see the answers to your questions from last week, because we did end up, Marco and I scheduled time on Monday just so that we could talk about your question. Anyways.

Adam: One more thing, real quick, I was going to say, we just got the webinar setup, so I’m going to post the link in if you want to check out this awesome webinar, this Monday, with Sit whizz info, get signed up, and we’ll email out about that, but I wanted to make sure everybody has a chance today to hop on that.

Bradley: All right. Ken, I just posted, he’s here watching, I just posted the link to that Facebook post. If you’re not in Syndication Academy guys, you won’t be able to see it, but Ken will, because he’s there. All right. I’m going to grab the screen and we’re going to get into it. You guys cool with that?

Adam: Yeah. Let’s do this.

Bradley: Yeah. Let’s do it. Can you guys see me okay?

Adam: Yes. We can.

Marco: Yeah.

Bradley: All right. Very good. Let’s scroll down to the bottom. Got lots of good questions, already, so this is awesome. All right. Aussie is up first, “Hey, all. I got a website that have a tier one,” oh, couple things we didn’t mention, number one, if you guys are new to Hump Day Hangouts, there’s a couple things that we probably need to just make a note of this, Adam, every day, or every single week.

Adam: Yeah. I just did, and I didn’t want to stop you, I’m actually getting something to paste in there.

Bradley: Okay. Cool. I was going to say, if you guys aren’t aware of where to get Syndication Academy you can go to syndication.academy, again, that’s syndication.academy. That’s where a lot of the questions that we get on Hump Day Hangouts come from that training and that methodology, so that’s a lot of the times what we’re talking about, if you’re unfamiliar with that. Also, a lot of questions that we get, regularly, guys can be answered in our knowledge base, just so you know, and that is at support.semanticmastery.com, again, support.semanticmastery.com is our support portal, I guess, and there is a knowledge base and FAQ’s for various products that we have right there on that support site. I just wanted to kind of point you guys to that, in case you were unaware of those resources. All right. Anyways. Aussie says-

Marco: Before you move on, can I just mention something, so that we have it down.

Bradley: Sure.

Marco: When we get new people, we get the same question a lot of times over and over, and over, and I understand that we have new people coming in that will ask the same questions. Please, if you are new don’t think that we’re treating you like you are new, like you’re dumb, like you don’t know what you’re talking about, this forum, or what we do on Hump Day Hangouts is just for that, we don’t want you to feel bad. Please, ask your questions, if we say to go to whatever source, it’s because the answer is there. It’s been explained, and that’s the best way to start, if after that, after you’ve gone and looked at the resources, you still have a question, you’re welcome to come back and ask us a more in depth question or to clarify, but please just keep asking the questions and we’ll do the best we can to answer them.

Bradley: Yeah. Occasionally, if I get a question that’s been asked 1300 times, I do get a tad bit annoyed, but don’t misinterpret that as me being annoyed with the person asking the question, I’m annoyed with the question, not the person asking the question and I’m working on that, guys. I recognized that, that can come across as shitty, and so I’m working on that, and I apologize for that, but I just want you to know that certainly guys that’s what this is for. Hump Day Hangouts is for people to come and ask questions, new, or experienced alike, it makes no difference. Please, feel free to ask questions, here. Okay?

Decreasing Rankings Of A T1 Branded Ring Powered By PBNs

All right. Now, we’ll get to Aussie’s question, he says, “I got a website that I have a tier one branded ring, I powered up the ring with my PBN’s. The tier one ring became too powerful.” Okay. “My website got slapped by Google and all the pages that had links from the ring lost their rankings, is that possible? PS, the other pages that don’t get links from the ring didn’t lose their rankings and webmaster tool 400 links from WordPress, one of the links from blog spot, Trello, network shows in search results, some of them even page one, the Trello especially,” yeah, by the way, just a side note, I’ve noticed that, too, recently that the Trello pages or your profiles are ranking like crazy, I’m not sure why that is. “If I want personal support who would I contact with? I’m a member of Syndication Academy and Battle Plan, and RYS starter.” Okay. I’ve never seen this, what you’re describing here.

Now, hold on a minute, let me rephrase this, if it’s just a tier one branded ring, I’ve never seen any issues, whatsoever. I’ve not experienced this. Now, with multiple syndication networks connected to a website, for blog syndication, and this is precisely why I talk about, throughout the training, and throughout so many Hump Day Hangouts, about not connecting multiple syndication rings to a blog, for blog syndication, because I have had, I’ve gotten slapped from that before and it’s because of unnatural link profile, I’ve been slapped various ways. I’ve had algorithmic slaps, and I’ve had manual penalties, as well. Both, from connecting too many syndication networks to a blog, but that is precisely why we talk about primarily just using a tier one branded ring. If you’re going to use tier two, and I know Aussie, you’re not saying that you use tier two, but I’m just explaining this for the benefit of other people, as well, in part for why I don’t use multiple or tiered rings for blog syndication.

If you’re going to be using tiered rings, though, however, or syndication networks you want to add additional related content feeds, or sources, triggers, into the second tier networks to try to mask or hide footprint as much as possible. Remember, you’re not trying to hide a footprint on your branded ring, you’re trying to claim it. You’re trying to announce to the world that this is you on all these different locations, or this is your brand, or whatever. I’ve never experienced that, what you’re talking about here from a branded ring, but that’s also because, and Aussie, I don’t know what kind of content you’re publishing from your blog, so what I’m saying is if you’re publishing content from your main blog that’s syndicating to your ring, and you’re doing automated content, or positing maybe too frequently, or I don’t know what could cause that, but I know that there could be content issues that are causing that problem, as well, and it’s not necessarily from the syndication network. There’s some variables that I’m unaware of, here, from this one line, or two little sentences here isn’t enough detail for me to be able to make an educated guess as to what the problem is, other than it may be a content issue with what you’re posting from the blog, if that makes sense. Marco, or Adam, I guess, have you guys ever had any experience with this?

Marco: I’m looking at this and he says he has RYS starter, now, what he could be experiencing is the Google dance, we covered this before, and I just dropped the link at the top, so that he can go and take a look at it, I don’t know how long it’s been since he did this. Sometimes they disappear. It doesn’t mean that you got Google slapped. It just means that they’re dancing, and they’ll eventually come back, you wait 21 days until the Google dance has cleared, and then you go take a look at your ranking. You cannot SERP watch or you’ll drive yourself nuts-

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Watching it go up and down. It goes up and down, up and down. Then, eventually after that period it’s like a probationary period. Right? Where if you go and do anything, they extend it to, I think it’s either 60 or 80 days and if you do anything within that period then you can get permanently sand boxed, so I would say just relax, let it sit, let it stew, and see if it starts coming back. In the meantime, he can be looking at other things, whether he’s doing multiple posting, whether he has a multi tiered ring, which is not necessary for most keywords, but I see that, and if he did that, and if he powered it up, meaning if he built links to tier one and RYS it will dance, but it will come back and it will come back better than ever, if you leave it alone for the period of time that the Google dance requires, it’s riding the patent.

Bradley: Yeah. See, Aussie, I’ve got, I mean, I literally have websites and some clients, some are my own that I’ve had syndication networks around since 2012, and literally have thousands of links from WordPress and thousands of links from blog spot, or blogger, and Tumblr, and that kind of thing in search console, and never once have they ever been slapped. I cannot see it having anything to with the syndication network, unless there was a problem with the content, again, that you’re publishing. If it scrapped content, spun content, stuff like that, that could cause problems, and there’s no question.

Also, it could be if you’re using tiered networks, like I said, and you’re not masking or hiding your footprint, properly. That could also cause issues, but again, if you want to contact somebody, you could reach out to us in support, and if you’re in the Mastermind, we can provide, of course, support within the Mastermind, but if not it might, you might have to schedule with someone on one consulting time, but you can always send in a support ticket and propose what it is you need help with and we can figure out what the best course of action for you would be. Okay?

Proxies When Creating Branded IFTTT Networks For Clients

All right. David’s up, he says, “Same question as last week, tech glitch pause, if I’m creating branded IFTTT networks for clients, do I need proxies?” Okay, David. No. Yes and no. No, if you are limiting how many accounts you create. Let’s put it this way, when you go to start creating an account, or a network, you’re going to create a profile in a new Google account, and then you’re going to use that Google account to create the profile or the accounts on all the other network sites, network properties, Tumblr, WordPress, Gravatar, all that stuff. Right? That’s basically one account set, so as long as you’re only doing one or no more than two account sets in any 24 hour period, then you should be okay.

However, if you’re building for clients, I recommend having a minimum of five or just a handful, I mean, typically I always just start off with five proxies, dedicated proxies. The reason why is, because if you’re building them, which by the way, David, you shouldn’t be building them, honestly, you really shouldn’t be, but if you plan on doing it anyways, because you can outsource this kind of work, man, for a hell of a lot less than what your time is worth, I can tell you that. But, if you are planning on doing it, anyways, then I recommend just getting five dedicated proxies it will cost you like 10 bucks a month, man. Then, that way you have basically cycled through the proxies. In other words, if on Monday you start to create one account set with proxy number one, then on Tuesday create your next account set proxy number two, and by the time you get to Saturday, you cycle back up to proxy number one. Does that make sense?

Just, in other words, that way you’re spreading out new account sets per IP, so that you’re not, if you use just your own IP, and you’re creating a new account set, every day, at some point, I don’t know what the threshold is, but at some point, you’re probably going to have your IP flagged, by if not Google, by some of the other web two properties. I recommend that you always use, you know, you can use a VPN. I particularly don’t like to use VPN’s, because those are shared IP’s, even though a lot of them have big pools of IP’s now, I still don’t like to use them, because they’re shared. I prefer dedicated proxies, because then I know they’re clean. Okay. Again, I highly recommend that you’re going to do it, and also, David, if you’re going to be building networks and using proxies then to make your life a hell a lot easier I recommend that you pick up Browseo. Right now, Browseo, now has a monthly option it’s like 37 bucks a month.

The amount of headache that it will save you to be able to use Browseo and have multiple browsing sessions open using different proxies for different profiles and all that kind of stuff, the speed with which you’re able to accomplish your tasks by having that ability, or that function available is unbelievable. Right? It’s amazing. I’ve got Browseo open right now. I mean, I got it open all the time, now, because it’s just so freaking amazing. So, I highly recommend that you use that, as well, it’s going to make you a lot more efficient. As I mentioned, before, I certainly recommend, David, that you only build a few networks to get the hang of it and then outsource it. You can buy them from us, or you can hire your own virtual assistant, and put them through the training, and have them build so that you have an in house builder, that’s going to be your best option, you’ll make the most money that way, if you create your own in house builder, or excuse me, train your own in house builder. All right.

Boosting IFTTT Networks With Google Stacks

Next question. “After an IFTTT stack is in place, how much does a Google property stack, including interlinking docs, excuse me, interlocking Google Doc’s, et cetera, boost to network and what tier should they point at, and how soon can, should it be plugged in?” As far doing an RYS or a drive stack, I don’t see any reason to wait. Marco, can comment on that, but I don’t see where there’s any reason to wait, and you can link to all of the above. You can link to your money site, your Google My Business page, your tier one properties, because all it’s doing is reinforcing and validating the entity. Marco, do you have a comment on any [crosstalk 00:20:50].

Marco: No. I totally agree. No. We usually order IFTTT and RYS as soon as we get-

Bradley: The network back.

Marco: The verification from Google.

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: As soon as the verification, then we have that NAP, the way that it’s set in Google, that’s how it’s going everywhere else that we have it. I mean, I trained Justin, and I continuously go back and forth with him, he’s our RYS VA, he knows exactly what to do, how to hook everything up, so that you guys don’t have to do it. If you want to go through it, then the place for the training is RYS Academy. Otherwise, you’re left guessing on how everything is done.

Bradley: Yeah. All right. Hopefully, that helps, David. Yeah. The same order that whenever, I agree with Marco, if it’s going to be for a local business, it has an NAP, you’re going to want to wait until you have a verified address, and you probably already do, but if not, if it’s a new listing, a new business, then yeah, wait until you get the Google My Business page verified, so that then you have the NAP exactly as it’s listed in Google. I totally agree with that. Typically, what I’ll do with a new property is order the network, build the site, while the network is being built.

My curator, somebody from, one of my curators, will end up creating content for me like having at least a minimum of three curated posts ready to go, so that when the site is built, and the network has been connected, then I go in and publish those three posts. I’ll drip them out, over a course of a week, or so, and then from there I’ll order the, excuse me, the drive stack, and then I’ll order a press release, and then I’ll order the first batch of citations. That’s pretty much the exact same process that I go through for every single new site that I launch, or even a site that’s an existing site and I’m taking a new client or something like that, that’s the same process I have to go through, is still sitting up the network first, and having content produced while the network is being set up and all that kind of stuff. It’s the exact same timeline that I always use. Just because it works. There’s no reason, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

ReIndexing Videos To Google Sitemap

Ryan’s up. “I’ve added a section to my website that is a video library, the section lists all the videos from my YouTube channel. Each video has its own page, or we are hosting a YouTube video with transcript and description of what the video is about. My question, I created a separate video site map listing all the individual videos, once I submitted the site map, all 55 of the videos were indexed, but over time they are starting to get de-indexed in increments of five or 10 at a time, now, only nine videos are indexed. What could cause this? What can I do to troubleshoot why my videos are getting de-indexed? Everything in search console shows that my video site map has no errors, so I’m not sure what is causing this de-indexing.” It’s a good question, Ryan. I’m not 100% sure, either.

Adam: Description about what the video is about, is it actually the video description?

Bradley: It’s a transcript and a description. Probably like a summary, maybe, is what the description is.

Adam: Okay.

Marco: I mean, is the description being taken word for word from the video description?

Bradley: You mean, from the video description in YouTube?

Marco: Correct.

Bradley: Yeah. That can cause problems, Ryan. Good point, Marco. I don’t know that, that’s the case, Ryan, but if you are, here’s the thing, though, if you’re adding the transcription to the post, then that should make it unique enough, I mean, again, this is just speculative, but my experience with having video pages de-indexed, and I’m not talking about the videos themselves, I’m assuming the YouTube videos are still indexed, but the video pages on your site are being de-indexed, or falling out of the index, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ve been de-indexed. Right? De-indexed connotes like a penalty, but falling out of the index doesn’t necessarily, like that’s just a Google dance. Right? My point, Ryan, what I’m trying to get at is whenever I was doing a lot of video syndication networks, what I used to call broadcasting networks, which is I’d have self hosted WordPress sites with IFTTT syndication networks around those sites, and then when I would publish a video to a YouTube channel I’d have YouTube connected as a trigger to self hosted WordPress sites. I used to use a plugin to do that, but then I just switched it over to using IFTTT, and YouTube to WordPress. You can do that for self hosted sites, by the way.

Anyways, whenever I would have the applet set up at the time, they were called recipes, but the applets within the description, we always just talk about pasting the embed code, and a link to the video, and you can either do a naked URL, or an anchored text URL to the actual YouTube video itself, and then a link back to the channel and if that’s why our applets are set up the way that they are, because when I had those video broadcasting networks and I was auto syndicating videos to them any time I uploaded a video to a channel, any of those WordPress sites, those self hosted WordPress sites that imported the description, so remember that’s a token, a token inside of IFTTT that you can add, or what they call an ingredient.

You can add the description ingredient. Every single one of the sites that I had auto syndicated videos to that imported the description got de-indexed. Every single one of them. All the sites that I had didn’t import the video description from YouTube, didn’t get de-indexed. That very well could be it, is if you are importing, although, like I said, at least without testing this I would think that if you had the transcription in the blog post, but not in the video description on YouTube, that, that would make that blog post unique enough that it wouldn’t be de-indexed, but maybe it is causing an issue. That’s the only thing I can think of at this time. I mean, what other ideas could there be, Marco, anything else?

Marco: I would use video schema.

Bradley: You could do that.

Marco: I would use it totally, just to solidify it at the entity level. Right? At the coding level. I’d post the URL to Sistrix, which is really, really good about giving you some great video markup for rich snippets, and that might help. Everything tried first, get rid of the description, see what happens, and then mark them up.

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Use the schema generator that I posted and see what happens. Come back and let us know.

Bradley: Yeah. That could help. Wrapping those videos and video object markup could probably help, too, so let us know, Ryan, how that goes. Then, also, again, I’m curious to find out if that’s what you’re doing is importing the video descriptions, too, because if so, what I would recommend is omitting the video descriptions if it’s the same as what they are on YouTube, and then just using the transcription and that’s it.

Live Rank Sniper Vs Tube Rocket (Rocket Video Ranker Pro)

All right. Kurt’s up, he says, “A couple of questions. LRS has done a great job poking some keywords to Google page one, what I use Tube Rocket from Bill Cousins, instead of LRS to upload the videos into the poked sites, if not, what would I use to Tube Rocket for if LRS, works? I understand that Tube Rocker,” and he’s talking about Tube Authority Rocket, guys, otherwise known as Rocket Video Ranker Pro. We did a webinar with Bill Cousins a week or two ago, it’s a really, really cool tool. We got a lot of really, I did a full on case study bonus, too, which was pretty detailed. It’s probably two and a half hours worth of video in that case study alone.

He says, “I understand that Tube Rocket can make the videos unique, but if possible, how would I get them into the spots created by LRS, since it requires live stream, not just a video upload?” Okay. First of all, Kurt, yes, you can use Live Rank Sniper to stream a video into the scheduled live event, because those are essentially just place holders. Right? The schedule of live events are just place holders, however, the problem, and it’s not a problem, but the drawback of using Live Rank Sniper to stream to those scheduled live events is that it’s a slow process, because you have to open up Live Rank Sniper, it’s only a couple of clicks of a mouse, guys, it’s not like it’s difficult, it’s very simple to do, but it’s a slow process, because you have to allow the software to start the stream.

You click the upload or whatever, you click the tab, and then you go navigate to the file on your hard drive, click it, and then you tell it to start streaming, and it basically, you just wait for it to go through the process of firing up the live stream, starts to stream it, and then it closes it down, and all that. So, it’s a manual process, and my point was if you’ve poked a 100 keywords and you got 40 of them that are ranking on page one and/or page two, and you want to go upload, that’s a long time. A lot of time that you’re going to have to sit there and click the mouse a few times to get it to stream, it’s just going to take you a ton of time, Kurt. You can absolutely do that, there’s no problem. It’s just personally, it’s not efficient, for me, so I wouldn’t recommend doing that. You know, there is, Peter Drew, excuse me, I was drawing a blank, Peter Drew has Hangout Millionaire, which would integrate very, very well with Live Rank Sniper, because they’re from the same developer. They have the same interface and that kind of stuff.

I’m fairly certain that Hangout Millionaire can actually stream into those scheduled live events. That will automate the process, so that you don’t have to manually start every single stream. If you want to use the pre-scheduled events that are already ranking, then I would recommend that you upgrade to Hangout Millionaire, and use that. Okay? That’s the reason why I say that is because you’ve already got the place holders in place, and I’m fairly sure that Hangout Millionaire is able to stream to those scheduled live events, but you might have to check with Peter Drew and support first prior to signing up for that. Where Rocket Video Ranker, Tube Authority Rocket, they’re one and the same, really, shines is that it basically uploads videos and it uses that very unique process where it sets everything to private, and then you go in and turn them all public at the same time, and it just seems to work.

Again, I don’t know why it works, but it works. So, as long as it’s working, it’s something that can be exploited, and I’ve used it a lot, as well. Okay. But, no, you cannot use Rocket Video Ranker to stream to scheduled live events, it doesn’t work that way. Rocket Video Ranker is strictly an upload application, I mean it makes it so much faster and efficient to upload a bunch of videos all at one time to the same channel. But, there’s a limit to that, by the way, too. I ran into a couple of issues throughout the case study where I made a mistake with a batch of 30 uploads and I had to go in and delete them all, and then I went back and uploaded, again, to the same channel, and it denied me, it said, you’ve uploaded too many videos, and you must wait 24 hours before uploading anymore, or something like that, so just keep that in mind. Again, it’s a different animal. They can accomplish similar things, but remember Live Rank Sniper was specifically a keyword poking tool, I mean that’s what it was advertised as. Right? It’s a keyword poking tool. Yes, you can steam to pre-scheduled events, but it’s not really designed to do that, efficiently, in other words. Okay?

All right. Next, he says, “Also, I made a spintax with keywords and geotargeting for the LRS pokes, some of them landed on page one and two, and in the videos page, this was done without the long lat settings in Live Rank Sniper, if I needed to do long lat in LRS, would this require one poke per keyword?” Yes. Well, it would be one poke per location, Kurt. I did this same thing Kurt, in other words, when I was running my, I was basically targeting one keyword in multiple locations, so I didn’t use the geo coordinate setting, either. I left that blank, but if you want to target multiple keywords in one location, then you could use the geo, you know, the geo settings, excuse me, because then it’s all the same location, but I did the same thing, which you’re asking about, here, no, I just omitted that. Okay. “Or, could I just use the long lat for Chicago and geo target all the smaller communities and metros in Chicago with the keywords spintex with the same result and effectiveness?”

I don’t know, Kurt, I haven’t test that, personally, I would not want to use Chicago coordinates for suburbs around Chicago, because those suburbs each have their own coordinates. Right? Every point, anywhere at all geographically has its on coordinate. Right? So, even if you move a 100 yards to the right or the left, or north, south, east, west, it doesn’t matter my point is it still got a unique coordinate, so if you’re assigning a Chicago coordinate, excuse me, to all of the other locations that you’re targeting, then you’d be giving mixed messages to Google. I haven’t tested that, so I don’t know whether it would work or not, but to be honest with you it seems logical to me that it would cause problems. So, I would recommend just omitting the geocoordinates from those campaigns, unless you’re targeting one location.

Using Same Persona Rings To Multiple Products

All right. Alexander is up, “Should I use the same persona rings to multiple products? For example, the same 10% of the rings for two or more unrelated projects.” I don’t recommend that. I mean, you can to a point, Alexander, I would still try to keep them somewhat related. Here’s the thing guys, like for second tier networks, which are basically persona based networks, especially for like YouTube syndication’s, stuff like that, things can be a bit more general, but remember theming is really, really important. I’ll let Marco comment on this, but guys theming and relevancy is critical, now, and it’s only becoming more and more critical, so I’d recommend not spamming up some second tier networks, or persona based networks with a whole bunch of unrelated stuff. Try to keep it somewhat ballpark, somewhat in the same ballpark, because you’re going to get more power, and more authority built from any of those links, embeds, whatever, from those networks if they’re themed correctly. Marco, you got a comment for that?

Marco: No. I agree. We go back to what I mentioned in the beginning, which is the three components of a link. Right?

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Relevancy, activity on the link, trust and authority. If those three things are present then you have a great link, if you omit one of those then the link becomes not so great, what overcomes that is where the link is coming from, like if you can get that awesome boost from one of these super powerful websites where you get that link that just pops you to number one, then that’ll override the relevancy activity, but it has to be powerful, it cannot just be any old link, or it could have decent metrics and you would have to boost it, so that you power up the metrics to override the relevancy factor, but you still need all the other three components. I mean, I could talk about this all day, but we’re still going to come back to relevancy, activity, trust and authority, that’s what you need on a link. If you don’t have that, and most, again, most PBN’s are just there to provide a link, if you are doing just that then you’re better off going and renting. You know how you can go and rent from what used to be a PR7, or a PR8 you better off doing that, you can still do that and get a lot of bang for your money.

Multiple Google Sites For Different Personas

Bradley: Yeah. All right. Bacon is up, he says, “I have a question about Google sites, if you were to create multiple sites, do you need to do each under a different persona, since it is a Google property?” No. It’s not necessary. You can do it all, I mean, you can create multiple Google sites under one profile. It’s fine. Just keep in mind, that if you’re doing some nasty stuff with them, with any one of them, or a combination of them, you stand a chance of getting that account slapped and potentially terminated, and if you have multiple Google sites in that one account, and that account gets slapped, or terminated, then it could end up, you end up losing all of them. Again, I always talk about mitigating risk, guys, specifically because I just don’t want to have one where Google can come in and terminate one account, and I lose multiple digital assets, or multiple businesses, so to speak. Right?

That’s why I always try to separate things by different Google profiles, because then I can always connect, and add as a manager, and you can do that in Google sites, too, you can add a manager. So, you can add, you can create, let’s say you’re going to create 10 Google sites, have 10 different profiles, each owning its own Google site, and then you can connect your main profile, you, or Bacon, as a manager to all of them, so that you can manage all of them underneath one account. But, if anyone of those accounts were to get terminated, it will only affect the one Google site that was owned by that profile account. If that makes sense.

Different Content When Syndicating My Maps

So, it’s a matter of just trying to mitigate risk, it’s up to you. What’s your risk tolerance? Mine is very, very low. Okay. All right. Ken, says, “I know when syndicating a YouTube video we want to only push out the video and link back to the video without any other content on the page, would this hold true for syndicating my map, too? Is it better, worse, or does it matter to have content on the page with my map when syndicating it?” I don’t have enough experience with that end, but maybe Marco can shed some light on that.

Marco: Let me read through that, again. There’s a lot of stuff that I just cannot give away in this forum. I cannot give that away. Yeah. Content matters, whether it’s on the page, or somewhere else, makes a big difference. Relevance, right? You can push relevancy, because it will bleed through to the source, whatever you have on the page, the bot will come in read it, it will drop into the iframe, so to speak, it will drop into the hole, go down to see where the source is, and all of that, that the bot is holding, wherever it’s holding the information, follows through, so it helps. It helps more if it’s somewhere else. That’s as far as I’m going to take it.

Bradley: Yeah. I mean, I haven’t done a lot of map embedding stuff, so I don’t have a lot of experience with testing, Ken, on that, but I would agree that I would probably be, because the problem with YouTube with importing the description, is what I discussed earlier. Right? Is that every single time, or every property that I have while I was importing the descriptions would get de-indexed. That’s why I stopped doing it, but for maps that’s different. Again, I would want to try to put some content on the page, and then test it, but I don’t know, because I haven’t done it. I��d just follow Marco’s advice.

Resolving Suspended Google My Business Page

All right. Don Johnson, says, “I just tried to verify a UPS mailbox for Google My Business, and as soon as I submitted the postcard request, I got Google has suspended your page due to quality issues,” I can imagine, “I decided to delete the listing and try to come up with a plan. I knew you guys have started using PO Boxes with street delivery, which is what I told the client to do, but he didn’t listen. Just wondering if you have any advice how to save this address. I have been trying to convince this client for a couple years that we need an address in a larger neighboring city, and telling him, that, hey that didn’t work, we need another address is not something that I want to do. Does it mean that the UPS location is flagged as a mailbox location, or might there be a work around? Thanks.” It very well could be, Don. UPS mailboxes, in fact, there was one, I mentioned before on a couple of different times that, yes, I use PO boxes, now, and I have been for at least three years, now, and I keep all of them.

In other words, when I rent a mailbox, I don’t just rent it, or excuse me, a PO box, I don’t just rent it long enough to get the postcard, and then let it expire. I keep renewing them. I’ve got dozens of PO boxes and I pay for them every single year, and the reason I do that is because in the event that I ever have to reverify the business, I’ll have access to that location, that address. The reason I know how to do that is because that’s only happened twice to me in my entire career. Okay. But, one of the times that it happened it was a UPS mailbox for one of my tree service lead gen sites, and the UPS mailbox was like $36.00 a month, it was freaking ridiculous, and so I let that mailbox go, because I thought I’ll never need it again, and it’s too damn expensive. Sure enough, I got a reverification, I was required to reverify via mail, snail mail, and I didn’t have access to that location, so I lost that maps listing, because I didn’t have access to it.

So, that was a painful lesson for me, because that was a profitable, it generated quite a bit of revenue, that particular site, so anyways, my point is that ever since that time, first of all I stopped using UPS mailboxes, the UPS stores and stuff, I stopped using those and I went to PO boxes, and I keep them renewed. Now, with that said, you know, if you’ve been trying to tell a client something for two years, now, look, I understand, because you are kind of black hatting the maps listing. I’ve had clients that have been resistive to that, as well, so you know, I don’t know what else you can do other than tell them why it would benefit them to do that, and try to get them to do it the correct way, otherwise I don’t know what else you could do to tell them that. Short of you going out and getting the mailbox yourself, which I don’t recommend doing, but if it’s a client that’s paying you a good amount of money, look, I pay anywhere between $64.00 and $128.00 per year, per PO box.

It just depends on the population density of the area that I’m renting the box in. Right? The more populated it is, the more expensive it’s going to be, but I don’t have a single mailbox out of dozens of them that cost me more than, I think, 128, actually, that may not be true, it might be as much as 164, or 168 a year, or something like that. It’s still relatively inexpensive, so again I don’t recommend going out and buying a mailbox for a client unless there’s enough revenue in it for you, to make it worth your while. Here’s the thing, you might end up, there’s always the opportunity that you could use, you know, create other digital assets in that same area, and use that, you could try using that same mailbox, but I wouldn’t do that.

I would have a separate mailbox specifically for this client, and again, if it’s not something that you want to approach the client about, I wouldn’t mind approaching the client, just say, look, you got a UPS mailbox, those don’t work and here’s the reason why, recommend using a USPS box, it’s cheaper, and they’re still working, right now, and it’s going to benefit your business, and I recommend that you do it. That’s what I would say, otherwise you could do it on your own. Again, I don’t recommend doing that, Don, but if you’re making enough revenue from that client, it’s a nominal small price to pay to be able to get them results. Okay.

Differences Between FCS, RankerX, SEO Autopilot and Rankwyz

Kay says, “Please review the difference between FCS, RankerX, SEO Autopilot, and Rank Whizz. As a newbie, and budgeting for a growing business, I want to spend wisely. Also, please talk about any must have SEO tools. I realize this part may vary. Thanks, again, for everything you all do.” I cannot speak about the difference between all those tools, because I’ve never run any of them. So, honestly, Kay, I wish I could help you, but we would have to ask one of our more experienced link building, like tool users. For example, our link building manager, Deadia, which I’m sure he’d be happy to come on to a webinar and talk about that a little bit. He did it inside the Mastermind, I don’t know if we could get him on Hump Day Hangout, maybe. We’d have to ask him. But, he’s the one that runs all those tools.

I cannot answer you Kay, honestly, because I just don’t know. I don’t use any of those tools. I can tell you that I’m super, super, super impressed with Rank Whizz, and Pavel from the webinar that we did on Monday. I think if you were going to invest, and again, this is only based upon, not from using any of the tools, myself, but just based upon what I know and from what I saw on Monday with Rank Whizz is it seems like it can do everything that I could ever want a link building tool to do, in a very unique way. In fact, the content mill function of Rank Whizz is amazing, because they don’t scrape content based upon keywords, they do it based upon topics, which is the very first time I’ve ever heard of a link building tool do that, which speaks directly to RankBrain and Hummingbird. Right?

The semantic web algorithms, or the semantic web filters, or whatever, layers to the algorithm. My point is, that after going through that webinar, if you haven’t seen it yet, Kay, go through it, that we did with Pavel. I think it was two hours long, but it’s super, super powerful and if you’re going to invest time and money, well, money is the small part, an investment is the time. Right? The biggest investment is the time to learn how to use these tools. I would pick one that does everything and learn that one tool. So, that you don’t have to patch a bunch of stuff together and Rank Whizz apparently has all that. Guys, again, this is only based upon the webinar, because Pavel knows his stuff, he is a serious SEO. After hearing him talk for two hours, he really knows what he’s talking about, so I think it’s a very, very powerful tool and I would put my trust into that, but that’s just my assumption. Okay. I don’t have any proof behind that, because I don’t use any of those tools, myself. All right.

Marco: [crosstalk 00:47:26].

Bradley: Go ahead.

Marco: If I may, and if she’s a newbie, and she’s going to go into this expense, the expense has to be justified, well, the investment, let’s call it, because it’s actually an investment on the business.

Bradley: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Marco: So, you should have an SEO business if you’re going to be running this type of tool, because this tool is for tier two and out, and if you get good enough into T-1 never at the money site. Unless, you’re really surgical with the tool, you get so good with the tool that you can actually go at tier one, you know exactly what you’re doing. Before you get to all that you should have a really good foundation with everything else. I don’t know if she’s doing Syndication Academy, if she wants to do it for clients, if she wants to do things affiliate, what it is that she wants to do, she says she’s a newbie, which is really broad, what is she a newbie in? What is she trying to take on? What is she trying to do? Because if you go right for the link building tools, you have to have assets that you build links to.

Bradley: Yeah. Okay. Next is Stephen, and we’re running out of time here, very quickly, I can see we’re not going to be able to get to Roy’s question, again, either, we tried this last week and I know we spent some time on it, but apparently we didn’t have the whole scenario, and I know I passed over Steve. Roy, I’m assuming, I don’t think you’re in the Mastermind, Roy, but this might be one of those questions we’re going to have to answer in the Facebook group or something, because we’re running out of time. If you don’t mind, Roy, can you repost this in one of the Facebook groups, Syndication Academy, or the SEO tutorials group, either one, and then tag me on it, Roy, and I’ll spend some time going through and try to give you even if I’ve got to just record a quick screen cast video, or something and drop it in the comments section of that post, I’ll try to get to this, because apparently two weeks in a row you’ve posted this, and we must not have answered it last week, because we didn’t have the full information, and I’d hate to leave you hanging for another week, so if you don’t mind, post that one on Facebook groups. Okay? Like, we did for Ken, this week, we can make sure that we get you a proper answer. All right?

Diversifying When Building Google Properties/Stacks

All right. Steve, says, “Do you have any thoughts on diversity when building Google property stacks beyond all the eggs in one basket argument? For instance, would links from 10 Google Doc’s be as strong as one G Doc plus one sheet, plus one form, plus one G site?” I honestly don’t know. I like the diversity of different link types, so I just use them all. That seems like a question that would be more suited for RYS Academy. Can you comment on that Marco, or what do you think?

Marco: Yeah. Not all Google files are created equal.

Bradley: Right.

Marco: They each have different, like one will rank over the other, remember Doctor Gary did a test I think it was in the Mastermind, or in RYS Academy. It was one or the other, or both, probably, where he showed, which one ranks better than the other one, but we still like to do all of them, because we like to interlink. Having just one Google property linking to another, and those two linking to another, and everything linking back, creating the spider web silo, that powers up everything, and it shoots the relevancy out to the destination, which is what we like to do. So, the way we do it is we just keep, you know, we don’t do one or one file type, we do them all.

Bradley: Right.

Marco: We do as many as we can and we link them all together, and then send the power wherever we want.

Bradley: Which is more diversity. Right? I mean, it seems to me, I haven’t tested it, but I mean, I just, we always do every doc type that’s available to us, or every file type. Okay. Let’s see. We’ve got about four minutes. I’ll give another four minutes. Roy, like I said, please, because this is a big long question and with the second part, as well, so just post that in the Facebook group, man, and tag me on it, I’m giving you permission to tag me, so that we can make sure we answer that. I might answer Columbia’s real quick and then we’re going to wrap it up, guys. By the way, we have Syndication Academy update webinar at 5:00 p.m., so in about 10 minutes, guys. You should have been notified via the Facebook group, because I created an event, so if you’re in Syndication Academy, just go to the Facebook group, click on the events tab and you should find the event and it’s going to start here in about eight minutes.

Best Structure For A Lead Gen Site

Columbia says, “Could you describe the best structure for a lead gen site and what would be careful to avoid? Do you do this under your name, or a persona? Thanks.” No. I always do everything under personas, Columbia, as I mentioned earlier in this webinar, and as I often do in many, many webinars, I try to mitigate my risk. So, I always set up a new persona for every lead gen site that set up. Then, I add myself as a manager, so I can add, for example, like I set up, for every lead gen site that I set up, guys, I set up a brand new Google account. I create a new persona, and then I create the website, and I add the Google My Business listing underneath that persona, the Google plus pages, I do all, Google Analytics, search console, tag manager, everything.

The only thing that I don’t create a new account for every time is AdWords, but everything else I do. Then, what I do is I just add myself, or one of my agency profiles, like, I have an AdWords manager account that’s underneath, it’s basically an agency Google profile that I created specifically to run an AdWords manager account, so since I do most everything in AdWords for lead gen, now, I do some Maps SEO, but pretty much I do a ton of AdWords stuff now for lead gen, I just assign that agency profile as a manager to all my lead gen property sites, and search consoles, and analytics, and all of those, so that I can access everything from my agency profile. But, everything is owned by separate individual Google accounts.

The reason I do that, is because once again, I don’t want, if at any time something happens and they decide that Google doesn’t like my agency account anymore, and they shut it down, terminate it, I don’t want to lose all those accounts. Right? It would suck to have my agency account shut down, but at least I would still have all my lead gen assets because they’re all owned, you know, owned in air quotes, by other persona accounts. Okay. It’s all about mitigating risk, guys. It’s just about reducing risk to where if something bad were to happen you don’t lose it all.

I don’t know about you guys, but I’m not willing to take my chances and put everything underneath one account, and then end up losing it. Then, what do you do? You’re left, you’re stuck with nothing. You got to start all over again. At least if you do what I’m talking about, you know, you might lose an account or two, but you’re not going to lose everything. Right?All right, guys. Yeah. I know. Adam started yelling at me, again. All right, guys. We’re going to see everybody in Syndication Academy webinar in just a minute, hopefully. If you’re not there, come join us.

Adam: Sounds good. See you guys later.

Marco: Bye, everyone.

Bradley: Thanks, everybody. We’ll see you all on the next one. Any questions that didn’t get answered, guys, just submit them next week, or post in some of the groups, we’ll try to get to them. I cannot promise we’ll get to all of them. I know I will get to Roy’s, because I told him I would. We’ll see you all next week. Thanks for being here. Thanks, guys.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 129 posted first on http://ift.tt/2lnZU8p

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 129

Click on the video above to watch Episode 129 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

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  Announcement

Bradley: Okay. We’re live.

Adam: All right. Hey, everybody. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts, episode 129. This is the 26th of April 2017, and we’ve got part of the group, here. I think two, fifths of us are out traveling or flying, today. Myself, Bradley, and Marco ares here. Instead of doing the Brady Bunch up and down, I’ll just look over this way, and Bradley how are you doing, man?

Bradley: Good, man. I’m happy to be here. It’s a beautiful spring day. Got lots of good questions, already, and just looking forward to doing it.

Adam: That’s nice. Marco, how’s the weather, for you?

Marco: It’s sunny in the mornings and it rains every afternoon, now for three, four hours and then it goes away until the next day, it’s typical, but still warm.

Adam: Nice.

Marco: As I said, it’s either warm and raining, or warm and sunny.

Adam: Nice. I couldn’t help, I was looking at my background, if Wayne is watching, there’s Nike headphone inception going on, here, there’s the exact same pair behind me. Anyways. On to more important announcements, not about my headphones. I wanted to let everybody know, hopefully by the end of this Hump Day Hangout we’ll have a link for you guys, we’re busy getting it setup, because we just confirmed with Pavel, and I just missed out on the topic, real quick, because I was busy doing the background stuff. Bradley, do you want to tell them what the webinar this Monday is going to be about?

Bradley: Site Whizz. Apparently, he’s got another application that he built specifically for PBN stuff, but I can tell you I’m super freaking impressed with Rank Whizz and Pavel from the webinar that we had this week, on Monday. I mean, the guy really knows his stuff, and you can tell, and because of that the tool is super powerful, and from some of our Mastermind members that were commenting on a thread in the Mastermind about it, they were saying that it is indeed a very powerful tool. There is a bit of a learning curve, though. My point is after going through the training webinar with Pavel on Monday, and seeing what Rank Whizz does, and seeing how so many other tools that are kind of like duct taped together, you know, everybody has different tools to do different things, so many of that can be consolidated under one dashboard.

It makes sense to take the time to learn it, now honestly, I’ll be 100% transparent, I don’t run tools like that. I’ve hired people years ago to start doing that for me, because it’s not something I had any desire to do. We’re probably going to be and in fact, I’ve already talked to our link building manager, Deady, about hiring, or signing somebody to us to run Rank Whizz, specifically, because of some of the incredible stuff it can do. So, anyways, that said, if you haven’t seen that webinar go watch it and then the Site Whizz webinar, I can only imagine is equally as impressive, because of how much development, and care, and thought that Pavel put into the Rank Whizz. I’m really super excited to see what it does, because I’m clueless as to what Site Whizz does, so this is going to be 100% new to me, as well, but I’m really anxious to see it, so I encourage you guys to sign up or register for the webinar on Monday and attend.

Marco: What really drew my attention was that he actually talked about what I call the three elements, or the three components that a link must have to be considered good. Right? Which is relevancy, activity, and trust and authority, not necessarily in that order, but I mean he’s one of the few people that I know, Mike Pierce is another, and you guys know that to me he is by far the best technical SEO, anywhere, but for someone else to talk about it, and to know, and to understand the concepts, to me, that says it all, because he actually understands where Google is and the W3C are trying to take the semantic web, where everything is headed. So, if he understands what the future is then he’s already planning ahead, which is where everybody should be going. You never want to be reactive. Right? To search engines and upgrades. You always want to be proactive-

Bradley: Correct.

Marco: You always want to be in there, and you want to be ahead of the curve.

Bradley: Yeah. What’s next, Adam?

Adam: I believe, you guys have a webinar, you guys, I believe we, hopefully we’ll be there live, you guys are doing some structured data awesomeness. Correct me if I’m wrong. I believe that is May 8th. Right? The following Monday.

Bradley: Yes. At three o'clock, I think.

Marco: May 8th, at three o'clock. Yeah. It’s not ready, yet, nor is the signup ready, I mean, I’m still working through a whole bunch of information that I had to go through. Every time I think I have it, I keep discovering something new, so I it’s new for me, so trying to explain it in layman’s terms, so that everyone can understand. I know we have a lot of high level people, but I like to talk one level down for the person that’s just starting out, for the person that’s trying to grasp the concepts. I have to really understand what it is that they’re saying, so that I can try to explain it. All right. If you cannot explain it, you don’t know shit. That’s where I go. That’s where I am. I know that Bradley is co-presenter, so he’s going to be giving us his insights, and how he sees structured data working. He does so much local, so he knows about all that and how it works. We’re hoping to give a really good one, two presentation on structured data.

Bradley: Yeah. I agree. It’s going to be awesome.

Adam: Yeah. Everybody, we’ll get that out to you. As soon as we do, obviously, it takes a little time to set up the webinars and do all that, so once we get that, we’ll send out an email and let everybody know about it. Other than that, though, I think that’s good on announcements. You guys got anything, else?

Bradley: No. I was about to post on the event page for Ken Roberts. Hey, Ken, we did, we answered your question. Actually, Marco and I got together on Monday to consult about your question, and so it’s been answered in the Facebook group. The Syndication Academy Facebook group, I’m about to drop the link to that particular post, apparently Semantic Mastery’s doesn’t have you in a circle, Ken, because I cannot tag you, but anyways I’ll drop the link, or go back to The Syndication Academy, Ken, in the group and you should see the answers to your questions from last week, because we did end up, Marco and I scheduled time on Monday just so that we could talk about your question. Anyways.

Adam: One more thing, real quick, I was going to say, we just got the webinar setup, so I’m going to post the link in if you want to check out this awesome webinar, this Monday, with Sit whizz info, get signed up, and we’ll email out about that, but I wanted to make sure everybody has a chance today to hop on that.

Bradley: All right. Ken, I just posted, he’s here watching, I just posted the link to that Facebook post. If you’re not in Syndication Academy guys, you won’t be able to see it, but Ken will, because he’s there. All right. I’m going to grab the screen and we’re going to get into it. You guys cool with that?

Adam: Yeah. Let’s do this.

Bradley: Yeah. Let’s do it. Can you guys see me okay?

Adam: Yes. We can.

Marco: Yeah.

Bradley: All right. Very good. Let’s scroll down to the bottom. Got lots of good questions, already, so this is awesome. All right. Aussie is up first, “Hey, all. I got a website that have a tier one,” oh, couple things we didn’t mention, number one, if you guys are new to Hump Day Hangouts, there’s a couple things that we probably need to just make a note of this, Adam, every day, or every single week.

Adam: Yeah. I just did, and I didn’t want to stop you, I’m actually getting something to paste in there.

Bradley: Okay. Cool. I was going to say, if you guys aren’t aware of where to get Syndication Academy you can go to syndication.academy, again, that’s syndication.academy. That’s where a lot of the questions that we get on Hump Day Hangouts come from that training and that methodology, so that’s a lot of the times what we’re talking about, if you���re unfamiliar with that. Also, a lot of questions that we get, regularly, guys can be answered in our knowledge base, just so you know, and that is at support.semanticmastery.com, again, support.semanticmastery.com is our support portal, I guess, and there is a knowledge base and FAQ’s for various products that we have right there on that support site. I just wanted to kind of point you guys to that, in case you were unaware of those resources. All right. Anyways. Aussie says-

Marco: Before you move on, can I just mention something, so that we have it down.

Bradley: Sure.

Marco: When we get new people, we get the same question a lot of times over and over, and over, and I understand that we have new people coming in that will ask the same questions. Please, if you are new don’t think that we’re treating you like you are new, like you’re dumb, like you don’t know what you’re talking about, this forum, or what we do on Hump Day Hangouts is just for that, we don’t want you to feel bad. Please, ask your questions, if we say to go to whatever source, it’s because the answer is there. It’s been explained, and that’s the best way to start, if after that, after you’ve gone and looked at the resources, you still have a question, you’re welcome to come back and ask us a more in depth question or to clarify, but please just keep asking the questions and we’ll do the best we can to answer them.

Bradley: Yeah. Occasionally, if I get a question that’s been asked 1300 times, I do get a tad bit annoyed, but don’t misinterpret that as me being annoyed with the person asking the question, I’m annoyed with the question, not the person asking the question and I’m working on that, guys. I recognized that, that can come across as shitty, and so I’m working on that, and I apologize for that, but I just want you to know that certainly guys that’s what this is for. Hump Day Hangouts is for people to come and ask questions, new, or experienced alike, it makes no difference. Please, feel free to ask questions, here. Okay?

Decreasing Rankings Of A T1 Branded Ring Powered By PBNs

All right. Now, we’ll get to Aussie’s question, he says, “I got a website that I have a tier one branded ring, I powered up the ring with my PBN’s. The tier one ring became too powerful.” Okay. “My website got slapped by Google and all the pages that had links from the ring lost their rankings, is that possible? PS, the other pages that don’t get links from the ring didn’t lose their rankings and webmaster tool 400 links from WordPress, one of the links from blog spot, Trello, network shows in search results, some of them even page one, the Trello especially,” yeah, by the way, just a side note, I’ve noticed that, too, recently that the Trello pages or your profiles are ranking like crazy, I’m not sure why that is. “If I want personal support who would I contact with? I’m a member of Syndication Academy and Battle Plan, and RYS starter.” Okay. I’ve never seen this, what you’re describing here.

Now, hold on a minute, let me rephrase this, if it’s just a tier one branded ring, I’ve never seen any issues, whatsoever. I’ve not experienced this. Now, with multiple syndication networks connected to a website, for blog syndication, and this is precisely why I talk about, throughout the training, and throughout so many Hump Day Hangouts, about not connecting multiple syndication rings to a blog, for blog syndication, because I have had, I’ve gotten slapped from that before and it’s because of unnatural link profile, I’ve been slapped various ways. I’ve had algorithmic slaps, and I’ve had manual penalties, as well. Both, from connecting too many syndication networks to a blog, but that is precisely why we talk about primarily just using a tier one branded ring. If you’re going to use tier two, and I know Aussie, you’re not saying that you use tier two, but I’m just explaining this for the benefit of other people, as well, in part for why I don’t use multiple or tiered rings for blog syndication.

If you’re going to be using tiered rings, though, however, or syndication networks you want to add additional related content feeds, or sources, triggers, into the second tier networks to try to mask or hide footprint as much as possible. Remember, you’re not trying to hide a footprint on your branded ring, you’re trying to claim it. You’re trying to announce to the world that this is you on all these different locations, or this is your brand, or whatever. I’ve never experienced that, what you’re talking about here from a branded ring, but that’s also because, and Aussie, I don’t know what kind of content you’re publishing from your blog, so what I’m saying is if you’re publishing content from your main blog that’s syndicating to your ring, and you’re doing automated content, or positing maybe too frequently, or I don’t know what could cause that, but I know that there could be content issues that are causing that problem, as well, and it’s not necessarily from the syndication network. There’s some variables that I’m unaware of, here, from this one line, or two little sentences here isn’t enough detail for me to be able to make an educated guess as to what the problem is, other than it may be a content issue with what you’re posting from the blog, if that makes sense. Marco, or Adam, I guess, have you guys ever had any experience with this?

Marco: I’m looking at this and he says he has RYS starter, now, what he could be experiencing is the Google dance, we covered this before, and I just dropped the link at the top, so that he can go and take a look at it, I don’t know how long it’s been since he did this. Sometimes they disappear. It doesn’t mean that you got Google slapped. It just means that they’re dancing, and they’ll eventually come back, you wait 21 days until the Google dance has cleared, and then you go take a look at your ranking. You cannot SERP watch or you’ll drive yourself nuts-

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Watching it go up and down. It goes up and down, up and down. Then, eventually after that period it’s like a probationary period. Right? Where if you go and do anything, they extend it to, I think it’s either 60 or 80 days and if you do anything within that period then you can get permanently sand boxed, so I would say just relax, let it sit, let it stew, and see if it starts coming back. In the meantime, he can be looking at other things, whether he’s doing multiple posting, whether he has a multi tiered ring, which is not necessary for most keywords, but I see that, and if he did that, and if he powered it up, meaning if he built links to tier one and RYS it will dance, but it will come back and it will come back better than ever, if you leave it alone for the period of time that the Google dance requires, it’s riding the patent.

Bradley: Yeah. See, Aussie, I’ve got, I mean, I literally have websites and some clients, some are my own that I’ve had syndication networks around since 2012, and literally have thousands of links from WordPress and thousands of links from blog spot, or blogger, and Tumblr, and that kind of thing in search console, and never once have they ever been slapped. I cannot see it having anything to with the syndication network, unless there was a problem with the content, again, that you’re publishing. If it scrapped content, spun content, stuff like that, that could cause problems, and there’s no question.

Also, it could be if you’re using tiered networks, like I said, and you’re not masking or hiding your footprint, properly. That could also cause issues, but again, if you want to contact somebody, you could reach out to us in support, and if you’re in the Mastermind, we can provide, of course, support within the Mastermind, but if not it might, you might have to schedule with someone on one consulting time, but you can always send in a support ticket and propose what it is you need help with and we can figure out what the best course of action for you would be. Okay?

Proxies When Creating Branded IFTTT Networks For Clients

All right. David’s up, he says, “Same question as last week, tech glitch pause, if I’m creating branded IFTTT networks for clients, do I need proxies?” Okay, David. No. Yes and no. No, if you are limiting how many accounts you create. Let’s put it this way, when you go to start creating an account, or a network, you’re going to create a profile in a new Google account, and then you’re going to use that Google account to create the profile or the accounts on all the other network sites, network properties, Tumblr, WordPress, Gravatar, all that stuff. Right? That’s basically one account set, so as long as you’re only doing one or no more than two account sets in any 24 hour period, then you should be okay.

However, if you’re building for clients, I recommend having a minimum of five or just a handful, I mean, typically I always just start off with five proxies, dedicated proxies. The reason why is, because if you’re building them, which by the way, David, you shouldn’t be building them, honestly, you really shouldn’t be, but if you plan on doing it anyways, because you can outsource this kind of work, man, for a hell of a lot less than what your time is worth, I can tell you that. But, if you are planning on doing it, anyways, then I recommend just getting five dedicated proxies it will cost you like 10 bucks a month, man. Then, that way you have basically cycled through the proxies. In other words, if on Monday you start to create one account set with proxy number one, then on Tuesday create your next account set proxy number two, and by the time you get to Saturday, you cycle back up to proxy number one. Does that make sense?

Just, in other words, that way you’re spreading out new account sets per IP, so that you’re not, if you use just your own IP, and you’re creating a new account set, every day, at some point, I don’t know what the threshold is, but at some point, you’re probably going to have your IP flagged, by if not Google, by some of the other web two properties. I recommend that you always use, you know, you can use a VPN. I particularly don’t like to use VPN’s, because those are shared IP’s, even though a lot of them have big pools of IP’s now, I still don’t like to use them, because they’re shared. I prefer dedicated proxies, because then I know they’re clean. Okay. Again, I highly recommend that you’re going to do it, and also, David, if you’re going to be building networks and using proxies then to make your life a hell a lot easier I recommend that you pick up Browseo. Right now, Browseo, now has a monthly option it’s like 37 bucks a month.

The amount of headache that it will save you to be able to use Browseo and have multiple browsing sessions open using different proxies for different profiles and all that kind of stuff, the speed with which you’re able to accomplish your tasks by having that ability, or that function available is unbelievable. Right? It’s amazing. I’ve got Browseo open right now. I mean, I got it open all the time, now, because it’s just so freaking amazing. So, I highly recommend that you use that, as well, it’s going to make you a lot more efficient. As I mentioned, before, I certainly recommend, David, that you only build a few networks to get the hang of it and then outsource it. You can buy them from us, or you can hire your own virtual assistant, and put them through the training, and have them build so that you have an in house builder, that’s going to be your best option, you’ll make the most money that way, if you create your own in house builder, or excuse me, train your own in house builder. All right.

Boosting IFTTT Networks With Google Stacks

Next question. “After an IFTTT stack is in place, how much does a Google property stack, including interlinking docs, excuse me, interlocking Google Doc’s, et cetera, boost to network and what tier should they point at, and how soon can, should it be plugged in?” As far doing an RYS or a drive stack, I don’t see any reason to wait. Marco, can comment on that, but I don’t see where there’s any reason to wait, and you can link to all of the above. You can link to your money site, your Google My Business page, your tier one properties, because all it’s doing is reinforcing and validating the entity. Marco, do you have a comment on any [crosstalk 00:20:50].

Marco: No. I totally agree. No. We usually order IFTTT and RYS as soon as we get-

Bradley: The network back.

Marco: The verification from Google.

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: As soon as the verification, then we have that NAP, the way that it’s set in Google, that’s how it’s going everywhere else that we have it. I mean, I trained Justin, and I continuously go back and forth with him, he’s our RYS VA, he knows exactly what to do, how to hook everything up, so that you guys don’t have to do it. If you want to go through it, then the place for the training is RYS Academy. Otherwise, you’re left guessing on how everything is done.

Bradley: Yeah. All right. Hopefully, that helps, David. Yeah. The same order that whenever, I agree with Marco, if it’s going to be for a local business, it has an NAP, you’re going to want to wait until you have a verified address, and you probably already do, but if not, if it’s a new listing, a new business, then yeah, wait until you get the Google My Business page verified, so that then you have the NAP exactly as it’s listed in Google. I totally agree with that. Typically, what I’ll do with a new property is order the network, build the site, while the network is being built.

My curator, somebody from, one of my curators, will end up creating content for me like having at least a minimum of three curated posts ready to go, so that when the site is built, and the network has been connected, then I go in and publish those three posts. I’ll drip them out, over a course of a week, or so, and then from there I’ll order the, excuse me, the drive stack, and then I’ll order a press release, and then I’ll order the first batch of citations. That’s pretty much the exact same process that I go through for every single new site that I launch, or even a site that’s an existing site and I’m taking a new client or something like that, that’s the same process I have to go through, is still sitting up the network first, and having content produced while the network is being set up and all that kind of stuff. It’s the exact same timeline that I always use. Just because it works. There’s no reason, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

ReIndexing Videos To Google Sitemap

Ryan’s up. “I’ve added a section to my website that is a video library, the section lists all the videos from my YouTube channel. Each video has its own page, or we are hosting a YouTube video with transcript and description of what the video is about. My question, I created a separate video site map listing all the individual videos, once I submitted the site map, all 55 of the videos were indexed, but over time they are starting to get de-indexed in increments of five or 10 at a time, now, only nine videos are indexed. What could cause this? What can I do to troubleshoot why my videos are getting de-indexed? Everything in search console shows that my video site map has no errors, so I’m not sure what is causing this de-indexing.” It’s a good question, Ryan. I’m not 100% sure, either.

Adam: Description about what the video is about, is it actually the video description?

Bradley: It’s a transcript and a description. Probably like a summary, maybe, is what the description is.

Adam: Okay.

Marco: I mean, is the description being taken word for word from the video description?

Bradley: You mean, from the video description in YouTube?

Marco: Correct.

Bradley: Yeah. That can cause problems, Ryan. Good point, Marco. I don’t know that, that’s the case, Ryan, but if you are, here’s the thing, though, if you’re adding the transcription to the post, then that should make it unique enough, I mean, again, this is just speculative, but my experience with having video pages de-indexed, and I’m not talking about the videos themselves, I’m assuming the YouTube videos are still indexed, but the video pages on your site are being de-indexed, or falling out of the index, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ve been de-indexed. Right? De-indexed connotes like a penalty, but falling out of the index doesn’t necessarily, like that’s just a Google dance. Right? My point, Ryan, what I’m trying to get at is whenever I was doing a lot of video syndication networks, what I used to call broadcasting networks, which is I’d have self hosted WordPress sites with IFTTT syndication networks around those sites, and then when I would publish a video to a YouTube channel I’d have YouTube connected as a trigger to self hosted WordPress sites. I used to use a plugin to do that, but then I just switched it over to using IFTTT, and YouTube to WordPress. You can do that for self hosted sites, by the way.

Anyways, whenever I would have the applet set up at the time, they were called recipes, but the applets within the description, we always just talk about pasting the embed code, and a link to the video, and you can either do a naked URL, or an anchored text URL to the actual YouTube video itself, and then a link back to the channel and if that’s why our applets are set up the way that they are, because when I had those video broadcasting networks and I was auto syndicating videos to them any time I uploaded a video to a channel, any of those WordPress sites, those self hosted WordPress sites that imported the description, so remember that’s a token, a token inside of IFTTT that you can add, or what they call an ingredient.

You can add the description ingredient. Every single one of the sites that I had auto syndicated videos to that imported the description got de-indexed. Every single one of them. All the sites that I had didn’t import the video description from YouTube, didn’t get de-indexed. That very well could be it, is if you are importing, although, like I said, at least without testing this I would think that if you had the transcription in the blog post, but not in the video description on YouTube, that, that would make that blog post unique enough that it wouldn’t be de-indexed, but maybe it is causing an issue. That’s the only thing I can think of at this time. I mean, what other ideas could there be, Marco, anything else?

Marco: I would use video schema.

Bradley: You could do that.

Marco: I would use it totally, just to solidify it at the entity level. Right? At the coding level. I’d post the URL to Sistrix, which is really, really good about giving you some great video markup for rich snippets, and that might help. Everything tried first, get rid of the description, see what happens, and then mark them up.

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Use the schema generator that I posted and see what happens. Come back and let us know.

Bradley: Yeah. That could help. Wrapping those videos and video object markup could probably help, too, so let us know, Ryan, how that goes. Then, also, again, I’m curious to find out if that’s what you’re doing is importing the video descriptions, too, because if so, what I would recommend is omitting the video descriptions if it’s the same as what they are on YouTube, and then just using the transcription and that’s it.

Live Rank Sniper Vs Tube Rocket (Rocket Video Ranker Pro)

All right. Kurt’s up, he says, “A couple of questions. LRS has done a great job poking some keywords to Google page one, what I use Tube Rocket from Bill Cousins, instead of LRS to upload the videos into the poked sites, if not, what would I use to Tube Rocket for if LRS, works? I understand that Tube Rocker,” and he’s talking about Tube Authority Rocket, guys, otherwise known as Rocket Video Ranker Pro. We did a webinar with Bill Cousins a week or two ago, it’s a really, really cool tool. We got a lot of really, I did a full on case study bonus, too, which was pretty detailed. It’s probably two and a half hours worth of video in that case study alone.

He says, “I understand that Tube Rocket can make the videos unique, but if possible, how would I get them into the spots created by LRS, since it requires live stream, not just a video upload?” Okay. First of all, Kurt, yes, you can use Live Rank Sniper to stream a video into the scheduled live event, because those are essentially just place holders. Right? The schedule of live events are just place holders, however, the problem, and it’s not a problem, but the drawback of using Live Rank Sniper to stream to those scheduled live events is that it’s a slow process, because you have to open up Live Rank Sniper, it’s only a couple of clicks of a mouse, guys, it’s not like it’s difficult, it’s very simple to do, but it’s a slow process, because you have to allow the software to start the stream.

You click the upload or whatever, you click the tab, and then you go navigate to the file on your hard drive, click it, and then you tell it to start streaming, and it basically, you just wait for it to go through the process of firing up the live stream, starts to stream it, and then it closes it down, and all that. So, it’s a manual process, and my point was if you’ve poked a 100 keywords and you got 40 of them that are ranking on page one and/or page two, and you want to go upload, that’s a long time. A lot of time that you’re going to have to sit there and click the mouse a few times to get it to stream, it’s just going to take you a ton of time, Kurt. You can absolutely do that, there’s no problem. It’s just personally, it’s not efficient, for me, so I wouldn’t recommend doing that. You know, there is, Peter Drew, excuse me, I was drawing a blank, Peter Drew has Hangout Millionaire, which would integrate very, very well with Live Rank Sniper, because they’re from the same developer. They have the same interface and that kind of stuff.

I’m fairly certain that Hangout Millionaire can actually stream into those scheduled live events. That will automate the process, so that you don’t have to manually start every single stream. If you want to use the pre-scheduled events that are already ranking, then I would recommend that you upgrade to Hangout Millionaire, and use that. Okay? That’s the reason why I say that is because you’ve already got the place holders in place, and I’m fairly sure that Hangout Millionaire is able to stream to those scheduled live events, but you might have to check with Peter Drew and support first prior to signing up for that. Where Rocket Video Ranker, Tube Authority Rocket, they’re one and the same, really, shines is that it basically uploads videos and it uses that very unique process where it sets everything to private, and then you go in and turn them all public at the same time, and it just seems to work.

Again, I don’t know why it works, but it works. So, as long as it’s working, it’s something that can be exploited, and I’ve used it a lot, as well. Okay. But, no, you cannot use Rocket Video Ranker to stream to scheduled live events, it doesn’t work that way. Rocket Video Ranker is strictly an upload application, I mean it makes it so much faster and efficient to upload a bunch of videos all at one time to the same channel. But, there’s a limit to that, by the way, too. I ran into a couple of issues throughout the case study where I made a mistake with a batch of 30 uploads and I had to go in and delete them all, and then I went back and uploaded, again, to the same channel, and it denied me, it said, you’ve uploaded too many videos, and you must wait 24 hours before uploading anymore, or something like that, so just keep that in mind. Again, it’s a different animal. They can accomplish similar things, but remember Live Rank Sniper was specifically a keyword poking tool, I mean that’s what it was advertised as. Right? It’s a keyword poking tool. Yes, you can steam to pre-scheduled events, but it’s not really designed to do that, efficiently, in other words. Okay?

All right. Next, he says, “Also, I made a spintax with keywords and geotargeting for the LRS pokes, some of them landed on page one and two, and in the videos page, this was done without the long lat settings in Live Rank Sniper, if I needed to do long lat in LRS, would this require one poke per keyword?” Yes. Well, it would be one poke per location, Kurt. I did this same thing Kurt, in other words, when I was running my, I was basically targeting one keyword in multiple locations, so I didn’t use the geo coordinate setting, either. I left that blank, but if you want to target multiple keywords in one location, then you could use the geo, you know, the geo settings, excuse me, because then it’s all the same location, but I did the same thing, which you’re asking about, here, no, I just omitted that. Okay. “Or, could I just use the long lat for Chicago and geo target all the smaller communities and metros in Chicago with the keywords spintex with the same result and effectiveness?”

I don’t know, Kurt, I haven’t test that, personally, I would not want to use Chicago coordinates for suburbs around Chicago, because those suburbs each have their own coordinates. Right? Every point, anywhere at all geographically has its on coordinate. Right? So, even if you move a 100 yards to the right or the left, or north, south, east, west, it doesn’t matter my point is it still got a unique coordinate, so if you’re assigning a Chicago coordinate, excuse me, to all of the other locations that you’re targeting, then you’d be giving mixed messages to Google. I haven’t tested that, so I don’t know whether it would work or not, but to be honest with you it seems logical to me that it would cause problems. So, I would recommend just omitting the geocoordinates from those campaigns, unless you’re targeting one location.

Using Same Persona Rings To Multiple Products

All right. Alexander is up, “Should I use the same persona rings to multiple products? For example, the same 10% of the rings for two or more unrelated projects.” I don’t recommend that. I mean, you can to a point, Alexander, I would still try to keep them somewhat related. Here’s the thing guys, like for second tier networks, which are basically persona based networks, especially for like YouTube syndication’s, stuff like that, things can be a bit more general, but remember theming is really, really important. I’ll let Marco comment on this, but guys theming and relevancy is critical, now, and it’s only becoming more and more critical, so I’d recommend not spamming up some second tier networks, or persona based networks with a whole bunch of unrelated stuff. Try to keep it somewhat ballpark, somewhat in the same ballpark, because you’re going to get more power, and more authority built from any of those links, embeds, whatever, from those networks if they’re themed correctly. Marco, you got a comment for that?

Marco: No. I agree. We go back to what I mentioned in the beginning, which is the three components of a link. Right?

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Relevancy, activity on the link, trust and authority. If those three things are present then you have a great link, if you omit one of those then the link becomes not so great, what overcomes that is where the link is coming from, like if you can get that awesome boost from one of these super powerful websites where you get that link that just pops you to number one, then that’ll override the relevancy activity, but it has to be powerful, it cannot just be any old link, or it could have decent metrics and you would have to boost it, so that you power up the metrics to override the relevancy factor, but you still need all the other three components. I mean, I could talk about this all day, but we’re still going to come back to relevancy, activity, trust and authority, that’s what you need on a link. If you don’t have that, and most, again, most PBN’s are just there to provide a link, if you are doing just that then you’re better off going and renting. You know how you can go and rent from what used to be a PR7, or a PR8 you better off doing that, you can still do that and get a lot of bang for your money.

Multiple Google Sites For Different Personas

Bradley: Yeah. All right. Bacon is up, he says, “I have a question about Google sites, if you were to create multiple sites, do you need to do each under a different persona, since it is a Google property?” No. It’s not necessary. You can do it all, I mean, you can create multiple Google sites under one profile. It’s fine. Just keep in mind, that if you’re doing some nasty stuff with them, with any one of them, or a combination of them, you stand a chance of getting that account slapped and potentially terminated, and if you have multiple Google sites in that one account, and that account gets slapped, or terminated, then it could end up, you end up losing all of them. Again, I always talk about mitigating risk, guys, specifically because I just don’t want to have one where Google can come in and terminate one account, and I lose multiple digital assets, or multiple businesses, so to speak. Right?

That’s why I always try to separate things by different Google profiles, because then I can always connect, and add as a manager, and you can do that in Google sites, too, you can add a manager. So, you can add, you can create, let’s say you’re going to create 10 Google sites, have 10 different profiles, each owning its own Google site, and then you can connect your main profile, you, or Bacon, as a manager to all of them, so that you can manage all of them underneath one account. But, if anyone of those accounts were to get terminated, it will only affect the one Google site that was owned by that profile account. If that makes sense.

Different Content When Syndicating My Maps

So, it’s a matter of just trying to mitigate risk, it’s up to you. What’s your risk tolerance? Mine is very, very low. Okay. All right. Ken, says, “I know when syndicating a YouTube video we want to only push out the video and link back to the video without any other content on the page, would this hold true for syndicating my map, too? Is it better, worse, or does it matter to have content on the page with my map when syndicating it?” I don’t have enough experience with that end, but maybe Marco can shed some light on that.

Marco: Let me read through that, again. There’s a lot of stuff that I just cannot give away in this forum. I cannot give that away. Yeah. Content matters, whether it’s on the page, or somewhere else, makes a big difference. Relevance, right? You can push relevancy, because it will bleed through to the source, whatever you have on the page, the bot will come in read it, it will drop into the iframe, so to speak, it will drop into the hole, go down to see where the source is, and all of that, that the bot is holding, wherever it’s holding the information, follows through, so it helps. It helps more if it’s somewhere else. That’s as far as I’m going to take it.

Bradley: Yeah. I mean, I haven’t done a lot of map embedding stuff, so I don’t have a lot of experience with testing, Ken, on that, but I would agree that I would probably be, because the problem with YouTube with importing the description, is what I discussed earlier. Right? Is that every single time, or every property that I have while I was importing the descriptions would get de-indexed. That’s why I stopped doing it, but for maps that’s different. Again, I would want to try to put some content on the page, and then test it, but I don’t know, because I haven’t done it. I’d just follow Marco’s advice.

Resolving Suspended Google My Business Page

All right. Don Johnson, says, “I just tried to verify a UPS mailbox for Google My Business, and as soon as I submitted the postcard request, I got Google has suspended your page due to quality issues,” I can imagine, “I decided to delete the listing and try to come up with a plan. I knew you guys have started using PO Boxes with street delivery, which is what I told the client to do, but he didn’t listen. Just wondering if you have any advice how to save this address. I have been trying to convince this client for a couple years that we need an address in a larger neighboring city, and telling him, that, hey that didn’t work, we need another address is not something that I want to do. Does it mean that the UPS location is flagged as a mailbox location, or might there be a work around? Thanks.” It very well could be, Don. UPS mailboxes, in fact, there was one, I mentioned before on a couple of different times that, yes, I use PO boxes, now, and I have been for at least three years, now, and I keep all of them.

In other words, when I rent a mailbox, I don’t just rent it, or excuse me, a PO box, I don’t just rent it long enough to get the postcard, and then let it expire. I keep renewing them. I’ve got dozens of PO boxes and I pay for them every single year, and the reason I do that is because in the event that I ever have to reverify the business, I’ll have access to that location, that address. The reason I know how to do that is because that’s only happened twice to me in my entire career. Okay. But, one of the times that it happened it was a UPS mailbox for one of my tree service lead gen sites, and the UPS mailbox was like $36.00 a month, it was freaking ridiculous, and so I let that mailbox go, because I thought I’ll never need it again, and it’s too damn expensive. Sure enough, I got a reverification, I was required to reverify via mail, snail mail, and I didn’t have access to that location, so I lost that maps listing, because I didn’t have access to it.

So, that was a painful lesson for me, because that was a profitable, it generated quite a bit of revenue, that particular site, so anyways, my point is that ever since that time, first of all I stopped using UPS mailboxes, the UPS stores and stuff, I stopped using those and I went to PO boxes, and I keep them renewed. Now, with that said, you know, if you’ve been trying to tell a client something for two years, now, look, I understand, because you are kind of black hatting the maps listing. I’ve had clients that have been resistive to that, as well, so you know, I don’t know what else you can do other than tell them why it would benefit them to do that, and try to get them to do it the correct way, otherwise I don’t know what else you could do to tell them that. Short of you going out and getting the mailbox yourself, which I don’t recommend doing, but if it’s a client that’s paying you a good amount of money, look, I pay anywhere between $64.00 and $128.00 per year, per PO box.

It just depends on the population density of the area that I’m renting the box in. Right? The more populated it is, the more expensive it’s going to be, but I don’t have a single mailbox out of dozens of them that cost me more than, I think, 128, actually, that may not be true, it might be as much as 164, or 168 a year, or something like that. It’s still relatively inexpensive, so again I don’t recommend going out and buying a mailbox for a client unless there’s enough revenue in it for you, to make it worth your while. Here’s the thing, you might end up, there’s always the opportunity that you could use, you know, create other digital assets in that same area, and use that, you could try using that same mailbox, but I wouldn’t do that.

I would have a separate mailbox specifically for this client, and again, if it’s not something that you want to approach the client about, I wouldn’t mind approaching the client, just say, look, you got a UPS mailbox, those don’t work and here’s the reason why, recommend using a USPS box, it’s cheaper, and they’re still working, right now, and it’s going to benefit your business, and I recommend that you do it. That’s what I would say, otherwise you could do it on your own. Again, I don’t recommend doing that, Don, but if you’re making enough revenue from that client, it’s a nominal small price to pay to be able to get them results. Okay.

Differences Between FCS, RankerX, SEO Autopilot and Rankwyz

Kay says, “Please review the difference between FCS, RankerX, SEO Autopilot, and Rank Whizz. As a newbie, and budgeting for a growing business, I want to spend wisely. Also, please talk about any must have SEO tools. I realize this part may vary. Thanks, again, for everything you all do.” I cannot speak about the difference between all those tools, because I’ve never run any of them. So, honestly, Kay, I wish I could help you, but we would have to ask one of our more experienced link building, like tool users. For example, our link building manager, Deadia, which I’m sure he’d be happy to come on to a webinar and talk about that a little bit. He did it inside the Mastermind, I don’t know if we could get him on Hump Day Hangout, maybe. We’d have to ask him. But, he’s the one that runs all those tools.

I cannot answer you Kay, honestly, because I just don’t know. I don’t use any of those tools. I can tell you that I’m super, super, super impressed with Rank Whizz, and Pavel from the webinar that we did on Monday. I think if you were going to invest, and again, this is only based upon, not from using any of the tools, myself, but just based upon what I know and from what I saw on Monday with Rank Whizz is it seems like it can do everything that I could ever want a link building tool to do, in a very unique way. In fact, the content mill function of Rank Whizz is amazing, because they don’t scrape content based upon keywords, they do it based upon topics, which is the very first time I’ve ever heard of a link building tool do that, which speaks directly to RankBrain and Hummingbird. Right?

The semantic web algorithms, or the semantic web filters, or whatever, layers to the algorithm. My point is, that after going through that webinar, if you haven’t seen it yet, Kay, go through it, that we did with Pavel. I think it was two hours long, but it’s super, super powerful and if you’re going to invest time and money, well, money is the small part, an investment is the time. Right? The biggest investment is the time to learn how to use these tools. I would pick one that does everything and learn that one tool. So, that you don’t have to patch a bunch of stuff together and Rank Whizz apparently has all that. Guys, again, this is only based upon the webinar, because Pavel knows his stuff, he is a serious SEO. After hearing him talk for two hours, he really knows what he’s talking about, so I think it’s a very, very powerful tool and I would put my trust into that, but that’s just my assumption. Okay. I don’t have any proof behind that, because I don’t use any of those tools, myself. All right.

Marco: [crosstalk 00:47:26].

Bradley: Go ahead.

Marco: If I may, and if she’s a newbie, and she’s going to go into this expense, the expense has to be justified, well, the investment, let’s call it, because it’s actually an investment on the business.

Bradley: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Marco: So, you should have an SEO business if you’re going to be running this type of tool, because this tool is for tier two and out, and if you get good enough into T-1 never at the money site. Unless, you’re really surgical with the tool, you get so good with the tool that you can actually go at tier one, you know exactly what you’re doing. Before you get to all that you should have a really good foundation with everything else. I don’t know if she’s doing Syndication Academy, if she wants to do it for clients, if she wants to do things affiliate, what it is that she wants to do, she says she’s a newbie, which is really broad, what is she a newbie in? What is she trying to take on? What is she trying to do? Because if you go right for the link building tools, you have to have assets that you build links to.

Bradley: Yeah. Okay. Next is Stephen, and we’re running out of time here, very quickly, I can see we’re not going to be able to get to Roy’s question, again, either, we tried this last week and I know we spent some time on it, but apparently we didn’t have the whole scenario, and I know I passed over Steve. Roy, I’m assuming, I don’t think you’re in the Mastermind, Roy, but this might be one of those questions we’re going to have to answer in the Facebook group or something, because we’re running out of time. If you don’t mind, Roy, can you repost this in one of the Facebook groups, Syndication Academy, or the SEO tutorials group, either one, and then tag me on it, Roy, and I’ll spend some time going through and try to give you even if I’ve got to just record a quick screen cast video, or something and drop it in the comments section of that post, I’ll try to get to this, because apparently two weeks in a row you’ve posted this, and we must not have answered it last week, because we didn’t have the full information, and I’d hate to leave you hanging for another week, so if you don’t mind, post that one on Facebook groups. Okay? Like, we did for Ken, this week, we can make sure that we get you a proper answer. All right?

Diversifying When Building Google Properties/Stacks

All right. Steve, says, “Do you have any thoughts on diversity when building Google property stacks beyond all the eggs in one basket argument? For instance, would links from 10 Google Doc’s be as strong as one G Doc plus one sheet, plus one form, plus one G site?” I honestly don’t know. I like the diversity of different link types, so I just use them all. That seems like a question that would be more suited for RYS Academy. Can you comment on that Marco, or what do you think?

Marco: Yeah. Not all Google files are created equal.

Bradley: Right.

Marco: They each have different, like one will rank over the other, remember Doctor Gary did a test I think it was in the Mastermind, or in RYS Academy. It was one or the other, or both, probably, where he showed, which one ranks better than the other one, but we still like to do all of them, because we like to interlink. Having just one Google property linking to another, and those two linking to another, and everything linking back, creating the spider web silo, that powers up everything, and it shoots the relevancy out to the destination, which is what we like to do. So, the way we do it is we just keep, you know, we don’t do one or one file type, we do them all.

Bradley: Right.

Marco: We do as many as we can and we link them all together, and then send the power wherever we want.

Bradley: Which is more diversity. Right? I mean, it seems to me, I haven’t tested it, but I mean, I just, we always do every doc type that’s available to us, or every file type. Okay. Let’s see. We’ve got about four minutes. I’ll give another four minutes. Roy, like I said, please, because this is a big long question and with the second part, as well, so just post that in the Facebook group, man, and tag me on it, I’m giving you permission to tag me, so that we can make sure we answer that. I might answer Columbia’s real quick and then we’re going to wrap it up, guys. By the way, we have Syndication Academy update webinar at 5:00 p.m., so in about 10 minutes, guys. You should have been notified via the Facebook group, because I created an event, so if you’re in Syndication Academy, just go to the Facebook group, click on the events tab and you should find the event and it’s going to start here in about eight minutes.

Best Structure For A Lead Gen Site

Columbia says, “Could you describe the best structure for a lead gen site and what would be careful to avoid? Do you do this under your name, or a persona? Thanks.” No. I always do everything under personas, Columbia, as I mentioned earlier in this webinar, and as I often do in many, many webinars, I try to mitigate my risk. So, I always set up a new persona for every lead gen site that set up. Then, I add myself as a manager, so I can add, for example, like I set up, for every lead gen site that I set up, guys, I set up a brand new Google account. I create a new persona, and then I create the website, and I add the Google My Business listing underneath that persona, the Google plus pages, I do all, Google Analytics, search console, tag manager, everything.

The only thing that I don’t create a new account for every time is AdWords, but everything else I do. Then, what I do is I just add myself, or one of my agency profiles, like, I have an AdWords manager account that’s underneath, it’s basically an agency Google profile that I created specifically to run an AdWords manager account, so since I do most everything in AdWords for lead gen, now, I do some Maps SEO, but pretty much I do a ton of AdWords stuff now for lead gen, I just assign that agency profile as a manager to all my lead gen property sites, and search consoles, and analytics, and all of those, so that I can access everything from my agency profile. But, everything is owned by separate individual Google accounts.

The reason I do that, is because once again, I don’t want, if at any time something happens and they decide that Google doesn’t like my agency account anymore, and they shut it down, terminate it, I don’t want to lose all those accounts. Right? It would suck to have my agency account shut down, but at least I would still have all my lead gen assets because they’re all owned, you know, owned in air quotes, by other persona accounts. Okay. It’s all about mitigating risk, guys. It’s just about reducing risk to where if something bad were to happen you don’t lose it all.

I don’t know about you guys, but I’m not willing to take my chances and put everything underneath one account, and then end up losing it. Then, what do you do? You’re left, you’re stuck with nothing. You got to start all over again. At least if you do what I’m talking about, you know, you might lose an account or two, but you’re not going to lose everything. Right?All right, guys. Yeah. I know. Adam started yelling at me, again. All right, guys. We’re going to see everybody in Syndication Academy webinar in just a minute, hopefully. If you’re not there, come join us.

Adam: Sounds good. See you guys later.

Marco: Bye, everyone.

Bradley: Thanks, everybody. We’ll see you all on the next one. Any questions that didn’t get answered, guys, just submit them next week, or post in some of the groups, we’ll try to get to them. I cannot promise we’ll get to all of them. I know I will get to Roy’s, because I told him I would. We’ll see you all next week. Thanks for being here. Thanks, guys.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 129 published first on your-t1-blog-url

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 129

Click on the video above to watch Episode 129 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://ift.tt/1NZu6N2.

  Announcement

Bradley: Okay. We’re live.

Adam: All right. Hey, everybody. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts, episode 129. This is the 26th of April 2017, and we’ve got part of the group, here. I think two, fifths of us are out traveling or flying, today. Myself, Bradley, and Marco ares here. Instead of doing the Brady Bunch up and down, I’ll just look over this way, and Bradley how are you doing, man?

Bradley: Good, man. I’m happy to be here. It’s a beautiful spring day. Got lots of good questions, already, and just looking forward to doing it.

Adam: That’s nice. Marco, how’s the weather, for you?

Marco: It’s sunny in the mornings and it rains every afternoon, now for three, four hours and then it goes away until the next day, it’s typical, but still warm.

Adam: Nice.

Marco: As I said, it’s either warm and raining, or warm and sunny.

Adam: Nice. I couldn’t help, I was looking at my background, if Wayne is watching, there’s Nike headphone inception going on, here, there’s the exact same pair behind me. Anyways. On to more important announcements, not about my headphones. I wanted to let everybody know, hopefully by the end of this Hump Day Hangout we’ll have a link for you guys, we’re busy getting it setup, because we just confirmed with Pavel, and I just missed out on the topic, real quick, because I was busy doing the background stuff. Bradley, do you want to tell them what the webinar this Monday is going to be about?

Bradley: Site Whizz. Apparently, he’s got another application that he built specifically for PBN stuff, but I can tell you I’m super freaking impressed with Rank Whizz and Pavel from the webinar that we had this week, on Monday. I mean, the guy really knows his stuff, and you can tell, and because of that the tool is super powerful, and from some of our Mastermind members that were commenting on a thread in the Mastermind about it, they were saying that it is indeed a very powerful tool. There is a bit of a learning curve, though. My point is after going through the training webinar with Pavel on Monday, and seeing what Rank Whizz does, and seeing how so many other tools that are kind of like duct taped together, you know, everybody has different tools to do different things, so many of that can be consolidated under one dashboard.

It makes sense to take the time to learn it, now honestly, I’ll be 100% transparent, I don’t run tools like that. I’ve hired people years ago to start doing that for me, because it’s not something I had any desire to do. We’re probably going to be and in fact, I’ve already talked to our link building manager, Deady, about hiring, or signing somebody to us to run Rank Whizz, specifically, because of some of the incredible stuff it can do. So, anyways, that said, if you haven’t seen that webinar go watch it and then the Site Whizz webinar, I can only imagine is equally as impressive, because of how much development, and care, and thought that Pavel put into the Rank Whizz. I’m really super excited to see what it does, because I’m clueless as to what Site Whizz does, so this is going to be 100% new to me, as well, but I’m really anxious to see it, so I encourage you guys to sign up or register for the webinar on Monday and attend.

Marco: What really drew my attention was that he actually talked about what I call the three elements, or the three components that a link must have to be considered good. Right? Which is relevancy, activity, and trust and authority, not necessarily in that order, but I mean he’s one of the few people that I know, Mike Pierce is another, and you guys know that to me he is by far the best technical SEO, anywhere, but for someone else to talk about it, and to know, and to understand the concepts, to me, that says it all, because he actually understands where Google is and the W3C are trying to take the semantic web, where everything is headed. So, if he understands what the future is then he’s already planning ahead, which is where everybody should be going. You never want to be reactive. Right? To search engines and upgrades. You always want to be proactive-

Bradley: Correct.

Marco: You always want to be in there, and you want to be ahead of the curve.

Bradley: Yeah. What’s next, Adam?

Adam: I believe, you guys have a webinar, you guys, I believe we, hopefully we’ll be there live, you guys are doing some structured data awesomeness. Correct me if I’m wrong. I believe that is May 8th. Right? The following Monday.

Bradley: Yes. At three o'clock, I think.

Marco: May 8th, at three o'clock. Yeah. It’s not ready, yet, nor is the signup ready, I mean, I’m still working through a whole bunch of information that I had to go through. Every time I think I have it, I keep discovering something new, so I it’s new for me, so trying to explain it in layman’s terms, so that everyone can understand. I know we have a lot of high level people, but I like to talk one level down for the person that’s just starting out, for the person that’s trying to grasp the concepts. I have to really understand what it is that they’re saying, so that I can try to explain it. All right. If you cannot explain it, you don’t know shit. That’s where I go. That’s where I am. I know that Bradley is co-presenter, so he’s going to be giving us his insights, and how he sees structured data working. He does so much local, so he knows about all that and how it works. We’re hoping to give a really good one, two presentation on structured data.

Bradley: Yeah. I agree. It’s going to be awesome.

Adam: Yeah. Everybody, we’ll get that out to you. As soon as we do, obviously, it takes a little time to set up the webinars and do all that, so once we get that, we’ll send out an email and let everybody know about it. Other than that, though, I think that’s good on announcements. You guys got anything, else?

Bradley: No. I was about to post on the event page for Ken Roberts. Hey, Ken, we did, we answered your question. Actually, Marco and I got together on Monday to consult about your question, and so it’s been answered in the Facebook group. The Syndication Academy Facebook group, I’m about to drop the link to that particular post, apparently Semantic Mastery’s doesn’t have you in a circle, Ken, because I cannot tag you, but anyways I’ll drop the link, or go back to The Syndication Academy, Ken, in the group and you should see the answers to your questions from last week, because we did end up, Marco and I scheduled time on Monday just so that we could talk about your question. Anyways.

Adam: One more thing, real quick, I was going to say, we just got the webinar setup, so I’m going to post the link in if you want to check out this awesome webinar, this Monday, with Sit whizz info, get signed up, and we’ll email out about that, but I wanted to make sure everybody has a chance today to hop on that.

Bradley: All right. Ken, I just posted, he’s here watching, I just posted the link to that Facebook post. If you’re not in Syndication Academy guys, you won’t be able to see it, but Ken will, because he’s there. All right. I’m going to grab the screen and we’re going to get into it. You guys cool with that?

Adam: Yeah. Let’s do this.

Bradley: Yeah. Let’s do it. Can you guys see me okay?

Adam: Yes. We can.

Marco: Yeah.

Bradley: All right. Very good. Let’s scroll down to the bottom. Got lots of good questions, already, so this is awesome. All right. Aussie is up first, “Hey, all. I got a website that have a tier one,” oh, couple things we didn’t mention, number one, if you guys are new to Hump Day Hangouts, there’s a couple things that we probably need to just make a note of this, Adam, every day, or every single week.

Adam: Yeah. I just did, and I didn’t want to stop you, I’m actually getting something to paste in there.

Bradley: Okay. Cool. I was going to say, if you guys aren’t aware of where to get Syndication Academy you can go to syndication.academy, again, that’s syndication.academy. That’s where a lot of the questions that we get on Hump Day Hangouts come from that training and that methodology, so that’s a lot of the times what we’re talking about, if you’re unfamiliar with that. Also, a lot of questions that we get, regularly, guys can be answered in our knowledge base, just so you know, and that is at support.semanticmastery.com, again, support.semanticmastery.com is our support portal, I guess, and there is a knowledge base and FAQ’s for various products that we have right there on that support site. I just wanted to kind of point you guys to that, in case you were unaware of those resources. All right. Anyways. Aussie says-

Marco: Before you move on, can I just mention something, so that we have it down.

Bradley: Sure.

Marco: When we get new people, we get the same question a lot of times over and over, and over, and I understand that we have new people coming in that will ask the same questions. Please, if you are new don’t think that we’re treating you like you are new, like you’re dumb, like you don’t know what you’re talking about, this forum, or what we do on Hump Day Hangouts is just for that, we don’t want you to feel bad. Please, ask your questions, if we say to go to whatever source, it’s because the answer is there. It’s been explained, and that’s the best way to start, if after that, after you’ve gone and looked at the resources, you still have a question, you’re welcome to come back and ask us a more in depth question or to clarify, but please just keep asking the questions and we’ll do the best we can to answer them.

Bradley: Yeah. Occasionally, if I get a question that’s been asked 1300 times, I do get a tad bit annoyed, but don’t misinterpret that as me being annoyed with the person asking the question, I’m annoyed with the question, not the person asking the question and I’m working on that, guys. I recognized that, that can come across as shitty, and so I’m working on that, and I apologize for that, but I just want you to know that certainly guys that’s what this is for. Hump Day Hangouts is for people to come and ask questions, new, or experienced alike, it makes no difference. Please, feel free to ask questions, here. Okay?

Decreasing Rankings Of A T1 Branded Ring Powered By PBNs

All right. Now, we’ll get to Aussie’s question, he says, “I got a website that I have a tier one branded ring, I powered up the ring with my PBN’s. The tier one ring became too powerful.” Okay. “My website got slapped by Google and all the pages that had links from the ring lost their rankings, is that possible? PS, the other pages that don’t get links from the ring didn’t lose their rankings and webmaster tool 400 links from WordPress, one of the links from blog spot, Trello, network shows in search results, some of them even page one, the Trello especially,” yeah, by the way, just a side note, I’ve noticed that, too, recently that the Trello pages or your profiles are ranking like crazy, I’m not sure why that is. “If I want personal support who would I contact with? I’m a member of Syndication Academy and Battle Plan, and RYS starter.” Okay. I’ve never seen this, what you’re describing here.

Now, hold on a minute, let me rephrase this, if it’s just a tier one branded ring, I’ve never seen any issues, whatsoever. I’ve not experienced this. Now, with multiple syndication networks connected to a website, for blog syndication, and this is precisely why I talk about, throughout the training, and throughout so many Hump Day Hangouts, about not connecting multiple syndication rings to a blog, for blog syndication, because I have had, I’ve gotten slapped from that before and it’s because of unnatural link profile, I’ve been slapped various ways. I’ve had algorithmic slaps, and I’ve had manual penalties, as well. Both, from connecting too many syndication networks to a blog, but that is precisely why we talk about primarily just using a tier one branded ring. If you’re going to use tier two, and I know Aussie, you’re not saying that you use tier two, but I’m just explaining this for the benefit of other people, as well, in part for why I don’t use multiple or tiered rings for blog syndication.

If you’re going to be using tiered rings, though, however, or syndication networks you want to add additional related content feeds, or sources, triggers, into the second tier networks to try to mask or hide footprint as much as possible. Remember, you’re not trying to hide a footprint on your branded ring, you’re trying to claim it. You’re trying to announce to the world that this is you on all these different locations, or this is your brand, or whatever. I’ve never experienced that, what you’re talking about here from a branded ring, but that’s also because, and Aussie, I don’t know what kind of content you’re publishing from your blog, so what I’m saying is if you’re publishing content from your main blog that’s syndicating to your ring, and you’re doing automated content, or positing maybe too frequently, or I don’t know what could cause that, but I know that there could be content issues that are causing that problem, as well, and it’s not necessarily from the syndication network. There’s some variables that I’m unaware of, here, from this one line, or two little sentences here isn’t enough detail for me to be able to make an educated guess as to what the problem is, other than it may be a content issue with what you’re posting from the blog, if that makes sense. Marco, or Adam, I guess, have you guys ever had any experience with this?

Marco: I’m looking at this and he says he has RYS starter, now, what he could be experiencing is the Google dance, we covered this before, and I just dropped the link at the top, so that he can go and take a look at it, I don’t know how long it’s been since he did this. Sometimes they disappear. It doesn’t mean that you got Google slapped. It just means that they’re dancing, and they’ll eventually come back, you wait 21 days until the Google dance has cleared, and then you go take a look at your ranking. You cannot SERP watch or you’ll drive yourself nuts-

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Watching it go up and down. It goes up and down, up and down. Then, eventually after that period it’s like a probationary period. Right? Where if you go and do anything, they extend it to, I think it’s either 60 or 80 days and if you do anything within that period then you can get permanently sand boxed, so I would say just relax, let it sit, let it stew, and see if it starts coming back. In the meantime, he can be looking at other things, whether he’s doing multiple posting, whether he has a multi tiered ring, which is not necessary for most keywords, but I see that, and if he did that, and if he powered it up, meaning if he built links to tier one and RYS it will dance, but it will come back and it will come back better than ever, if you leave it alone for the period of time that the Google dance requires, it’s riding the patent.

Bradley: Yeah. See, Aussie, I’ve got, I mean, I literally have websites and some clients, some are my own that I’ve had syndication networks around since 2012, and literally have thousands of links from WordPress and thousands of links from blog spot, or blogger, and Tumblr, and that kind of thing in search console, and never once have they ever been slapped. I cannot see it having anything to with the syndication network, unless there was a problem with the content, again, that you’re publishing. If it scrapped content, spun content, stuff like that, that could cause problems, and there’s no question.

Also, it could be if you’re using tiered networks, like I said, and you’re not masking or hiding your footprint, properly. That could also cause issues, but again, if you want to contact somebody, you could reach out to us in support, and if you’re in the Mastermind, we can provide, of course, support within the Mastermind, but if not it might, you might have to schedule with someone on one consulting time, but you can always send in a support ticket and propose what it is you need help with and we can figure out what the best course of action for you would be. Okay?

Proxies When Creating Branded IFTTT Networks For Clients

All right. David’s up, he says, “Same question as last week, tech glitch pause, if I’m creating branded IFTTT networks for clients, do I need proxies?” Okay, David. No. Yes and no. No, if you are limiting how many accounts you create. Let’s put it this way, when you go to start creating an account, or a network, you’re going to create a profile in a new Google account, and then you’re going to use that Google account to create the profile or the accounts on all the other network sites, network properties, Tumblr, WordPress, Gravatar, all that stuff. Right? That’s basically one account set, so as long as you’re only doing one or no more than two account sets in any 24 hour period, then you should be okay.

However, if you’re building for clients, I recommend having a minimum of five or just a handful, I mean, typically I always just start off with five proxies, dedicated proxies. The reason why is, because if you’re building them, which by the way, David, you shouldn’t be building them, honestly, you really shouldn’t be, but if you plan on doing it anyways, because you can outsource this kind of work, man, for a hell of a lot less than what your time is worth, I can tell you that. But, if you are planning on doing it, anyways, then I recommend just getting five dedicated proxies it will cost you like 10 bucks a month, man. Then, that way you have basically cycled through the proxies. In other words, if on Monday you start to create one account set with proxy number one, then on Tuesday create your next account set proxy number two, and by the time you get to Saturday, you cycle back up to proxy number one. Does that make sense?

Just, in other words, that way you’re spreading out new account sets per IP, so that you’re not, if you use just your own IP, and you’re creating a new account set, every day, at some point, I don’t know what the threshold is, but at some point, you’re probably going to have your IP flagged, by if not Google, by some of the other web two properties. I recommend that you always use, you know, you can use a VPN. I particularly don’t like to use VPN’s, because those are shared IP’s, even though a lot of them have big pools of IP’s now, I still don’t like to use them, because they’re shared. I prefer dedicated proxies, because then I know they’re clean. Okay. Again, I highly recommend that you’re going to do it, and also, David, if you’re going to be building networks and using proxies then to make your life a hell a lot easier I recommend that you pick up Browseo. Right now, Browseo, now has a monthly option it’s like 37 bucks a month.

The amount of headache that it will save you to be able to use Browseo and have multiple browsing sessions open using different proxies for different profiles and all that kind of stuff, the speed with which you’re able to accomplish your tasks by having that ability, or that function available is unbelievable. Right? It’s amazing. I’ve got Browseo open right now. I mean, I got it open all the time, now, because it’s just so freaking amazing. So, I highly recommend that you use that, as well, it’s going to make you a lot more efficient. As I mentioned, before, I certainly recommend, David, that you only build a few networks to get the hang of it and then outsource it. You can buy them from us, or you can hire your own virtual assistant, and put them through the training, and have them build so that you have an in house builder, that’s going to be your best option, you’ll make the most money that way, if you create your own in house builder, or excuse me, train your own in house builder. All right.

Boosting IFTTT Networks With Google Stacks

Next question. “After an IFTTT stack is in place, how much does a Google property stack, including interlinking docs, excuse me, interlocking Google Doc’s, et cetera, boost to network and what tier should they point at, and how soon can, should it be plugged in?” As far doing an RYS or a drive stack, I don’t see any reason to wait. Marco, can comment on that, but I don’t see where there’s any reason to wait, and you can link to all of the above. You can link to your money site, your Google My Business page, your tier one properties, because all it’s doing is reinforcing and validating the entity. Marco, do you have a comment on any [crosstalk 00:20:50].

Marco: No. I totally agree. No. We usually order IFTTT and RYS as soon as we get-

Bradley: The network back.

Marco: The verification from Google.

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: As soon as the verification, then we have that NAP, the way that it’s set in Google, that’s how it’s going everywhere else that we have it. I mean, I trained Justin, and I continuously go back and forth with him, he’s our RYS VA, he knows exactly what to do, how to hook everything up, so that you guys don’t have to do it. If you want to go through it, then the place for the training is RYS Academy. Otherwise, you’re left guessing on how everything is done.

Bradley: Yeah. All right. Hopefully, that helps, David. Yeah. The same order that whenever, I agree with Marco, if it’s going to be for a local business, it has an NAP, you’re going to want to wait until you have a verified address, and you probably already do, but if not, if it’s a new listing, a new business, then yeah, wait until you get the Google My Business page verified, so that then you have the NAP exactly as it’s listed in Google. I totally agree with that. Typically, what I’ll do with a new property is order the network, build the site, while the network is being built.

My curator, somebody from, one of my curators, will end up creating content for me like having at least a minimum of three curated posts ready to go, so that when the site is built, and the network has been connected, then I go in and publish those three posts. I’ll drip them out, over a course of a week, or so, and then from there I’ll order the, excuse me, the drive stack, and then I’ll order a press release, and then I’ll order the first batch of citations. That’s pretty much the exact same process that I go through for every single new site that I launch, or even a site that’s an existing site and I’m taking a new client or something like that, that’s the same process I have to go through, is still sitting up the network first, and having content produced while the network is being set up and all that kind of stuff. It’s the exact same timeline that I always use. Just because it works. There’s no reason, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

ReIndexing Videos To Google Sitemap

Ryan’s up. “I’ve added a section to my website that is a video library, the section lists all the videos from my YouTube channel. Each video has its own page, or we are hosting a YouTube video with transcript and description of what the video is about. My question, I created a separate video site map listing all the individual videos, once I submitted the site map, all 55 of the videos were indexed, but over time they are starting to get de-indexed in increments of five or 10 at a time, now, only nine videos are indexed. What could cause this? What can I do to troubleshoot why my videos are getting de-indexed? Everything in search console shows that my video site map has no errors, so I’m not sure what is causing this de-indexing.” It’s a good question, Ryan. I’m not 100% sure, either.

Adam: Description about what the video is about, is it actually the video description?

Bradley: It’s a transcript and a description. Probably like a summary, maybe, is what the description is.

Adam: Okay.

Marco: I mean, is the description being taken word for word from the video description?

Bradley: You mean, from the video description in YouTube?

Marco: Correct.

Bradley: Yeah. That can cause problems, Ryan. Good point, Marco. I don’t know that, that’s the case, Ryan, but if you are, here’s the thing, though, if you’re adding the transcription to the post, then that should make it unique enough, I mean, again, this is just speculative, but my experience with having video pages de-indexed, and I’m not talking about the videos themselves, I’m assuming the YouTube videos are still indexed, but the video pages on your site are being de-indexed, or falling out of the index, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ve been de-indexed. Right? De-indexed connotes like a penalty, but falling out of the index doesn’t necessarily, like that’s just a Google dance. Right? My point, Ryan, what I’m trying to get at is whenever I was doing a lot of video syndication networks, what I used to call broadcasting networks, which is I’d have self hosted WordPress sites with IFTTT syndication networks around those sites, and then when I would publish a video to a YouTube channel I’d have YouTube connected as a trigger to self hosted WordPress sites. I used to use a plugin to do that, but then I just switched it over to using IFTTT, and YouTube to WordPress. You can do that for self hosted sites, by the way.

Anyways, whenever I would have the applet set up at the time, they were called recipes, but the applets within the description, we always just talk about pasting the embed code, and a link to the video, and you can either do a naked URL, or an anchored text URL to the actual YouTube video itself, and then a link back to the channel and if that’s why our applets are set up the way that they are, because when I had those video broadcasting networks and I was auto syndicating videos to them any time I uploaded a video to a channel, any of those WordPress sites, those self hosted WordPress sites that imported the description, so remember that’s a token, a token inside of IFTTT that you can add, or what they call an ingredient.

You can add the description ingredient. Every single one of the sites that I had auto syndicated videos to that imported the description got de-indexed. Every single one of them. All the sites that I had didn’t import the video description from YouTube, didn’t get de-indexed. That very well could be it, is if you are importing, although, like I said, at least without testing this I would think that if you had the transcription in the blog post, but not in the video description on YouTube, that, that would make that blog post unique enough that it wouldn’t be de-indexed, but maybe it is causing an issue. That’s the only thing I can think of at this time. I mean, what other ideas could there be, Marco, anything else?

Marco: I would use video schema.

Bradley: You could do that.

Marco: I would use it totally, just to solidify it at the entity level. Right? At the coding level. I’d post the URL to Sistrix, which is really, really good about giving you some great video markup for rich snippets, and that might help. Everything tried first, get rid of the description, see what happens, and then mark them up.

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Use the schema generator that I posted and see what happens. Come back and let us know.

Bradley: Yeah. That could help. Wrapping those videos and video object markup could probably help, too, so let us know, Ryan, how that goes. Then, also, again, I’m curious to find out if that’s what you’re doing is importing the video descriptions, too, because if so, what I would recommend is omitting the video descriptions if it’s the same as what they are on YouTube, and then just using the transcription and that’s it.

Live Rank Sniper Vs Tube Rocket (Rocket Video Ranker Pro)

All right. Kurt’s up, he says, “A couple of questions. LRS has done a great job poking some keywords to Google page one, what I use Tube Rocket from Bill Cousins, instead of LRS to upload the videos into the poked sites, if not, what would I use to Tube Rocket for if LRS, works? I understand that Tube Rocker,” and he’s talking about Tube Authority Rocket, guys, otherwise known as Rocket Video Ranker Pro. We did a webinar with Bill Cousins a week or two ago, it’s a really, really cool tool. We got a lot of really, I did a full on case study bonus, too, which was pretty detailed. It’s probably two and a half hours worth of video in that case study alone.

He says, “I understand that Tube Rocket can make the videos unique, but if possible, how would I get them into the spots created by LRS, since it requires live stream, not just a video upload?” Okay. First of all, Kurt, yes, you can use Live Rank Sniper to stream a video into the scheduled live event, because those are essentially just place holders. Right? The schedule of live events are just place holders, however, the problem, and it’s not a problem, but the drawback of using Live Rank Sniper to stream to those scheduled live events is that it’s a slow process, because you have to open up Live Rank Sniper, it’s only a couple of clicks of a mouse, guys, it’s not like it’s difficult, it’s very simple to do, but it’s a slow process, because you have to allow the software to start the stream.

You click the upload or whatever, you click the tab, and then you go navigate to the file on your hard drive, click it, and then you tell it to start streaming, and it basically, you just wait for it to go through the process of firing up the live stream, starts to stream it, and then it closes it down, and all that. So, it’s a manual process, and my point was if you’ve poked a 100 keywords and you got 40 of them that are ranking on page one and/or page two, and you want to go upload, that’s a long time. A lot of time that you’re going to have to sit there and click the mouse a few times to get it to stream, it’s just going to take you a ton of time, Kurt. You can absolutely do that, there’s no problem. It’s just personally, it’s not efficient, for me, so I wouldn’t recommend doing that. You know, there is, Peter Drew, excuse me, I was drawing a blank, Peter Drew has Hangout Millionaire, which would integrate very, very well with Live Rank Sniper, because they’re from the same developer. They have the same interface and that kind of stuff.

I’m fairly certain that Hangout Millionaire can actually stream into those scheduled live events. That will automate the process, so that you don’t have to manually start every single stream. If you want to use the pre-scheduled events that are already ranking, then I would recommend that you upgrade to Hangout Millionaire, and use that. Okay? That’s the reason why I say that is because you’ve already got the place holders in place, and I’m fairly sure that Hangout Millionaire is able to stream to those scheduled live events, but you might have to check with Peter Drew and support first prior to signing up for that. Where Rocket Video Ranker, Tube Authority Rocket, they’re one and the same, really, shines is that it basically uploads videos and it uses that very unique process where it sets everything to private, and then you go in and turn them all public at the same time, and it just seems to work.

Again, I don’t know why it works, but it works. So, as long as it’s working, it’s something that can be exploited, and I���ve used it a lot, as well. Okay. But, no, you cannot use Rocket Video Ranker to stream to scheduled live events, it doesn’t work that way. Rocket Video Ranker is strictly an upload application, I mean it makes it so much faster and efficient to upload a bunch of videos all at one time to the same channel. But, there’s a limit to that, by the way, too. I ran into a couple of issues throughout the case study where I made a mistake with a batch of 30 uploads and I had to go in and delete them all, and then I went back and uploaded, again, to the same channel, and it denied me, it said, you’ve uploaded too many videos, and you must wait 24 hours before uploading anymore, or something like that, so just keep that in mind. Again, it’s a different animal. They can accomplish similar things, but remember Live Rank Sniper was specifically a keyword poking tool, I mean that’s what it was advertised as. Right? It’s a keyword poking tool. Yes, you can steam to pre-scheduled events, but it’s not really designed to do that, efficiently, in other words. Okay?

All right. Next, he says, “Also, I made a spintax with keywords and geotargeting for the LRS pokes, some of them landed on page one and two, and in the videos page, this was done without the long lat settings in Live Rank Sniper, if I needed to do long lat in LRS, would this require one poke per keyword?” Yes. Well, it would be one poke per location, Kurt. I did this same thing Kurt, in other words, when I was running my, I was basically targeting one keyword in multiple locations, so I didn’t use the geo coordinate setting, either. I left that blank, but if you want to target multiple keywords in one location, then you could use the geo, you know, the geo settings, excuse me, because then it’s all the same location, but I did the same thing, which you’re asking about, here, no, I just omitted that. Okay. “Or, could I just use the long lat for Chicago and geo target all the smaller communities and metros in Chicago with the keywords spintex with the same result and effectiveness?”

I don’t know, Kurt, I haven’t test that, personally, I would not want to use Chicago coordinates for suburbs around Chicago, because those suburbs each have their own coordinates. Right? Every point, anywhere at all geographically has its on coordinate. Right? So, even if you move a 100 yards to the right or the left, or north, south, east, west, it doesn’t matter my point is it still got a unique coordinate, so if you’re assigning a Chicago coordinate, excuse me, to all of the other locations that you’re targeting, then you’d be giving mixed messages to Google. I haven’t tested that, so I don’t know whether it would work or not, but to be honest with you it seems logical to me that it would cause problems. So, I would recommend just omitting the geocoordinates from those campaigns, unless you’re targeting one location.

Using Same Persona Rings To Multiple Products

All right. Alexander is up, “Should I use the same persona rings to multiple products? For example, the same 10% of the rings for two or more unrelated projects.” I don’t recommend that. I mean, you can to a point, Alexander, I would still try to keep them somewhat related. Here’s the thing guys, like for second tier networks, which are basically persona based networks, especially for like YouTube syndication’s, stuff like that, things can be a bit more general, but remember theming is really, really important. I’ll let Marco comment on this, but guys theming and relevancy is critical, now, and it’s only becoming more and more critical, so I’d recommend not spamming up some second tier networks, or persona based networks with a whole bunch of unrelated stuff. Try to keep it somewhat ballpark, somewhat in the same ballpark, because you’re going to get more power, and more authority built from any of those links, embeds, whatever, from those networks if they’re themed correctly. Marco, you got a comment for that?

Marco: No. I agree. We go back to what I mentioned in the beginning, which is the three components of a link. Right?

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Relevancy, activity on the link, trust and authority. If those three things are present then you have a great link, if you omit one of those then the link becomes not so great, what overcomes that is where the link is coming from, like if you can get that awesome boost from one of these super powerful websites where you get that link that just pops you to number one, then that’ll override the relevancy activity, but it has to be powerful, it cannot just be any old link, or it could have decent metrics and you would have to boost it, so that you power up the metrics to override the relevancy factor, but you still need all the other three components. I mean, I could talk about this all day, but we’re still going to come back to relevancy, activity, trust and authority, that’s what you need on a link. If you don’t have that, and most, again, most PBN’s are just there to provide a link, if you are doing just that then you’re better off going and renting. You know how you can go and rent from what used to be a PR7, or a PR8 you better off doing that, you can still do that and get a lot of bang for your money.

Multiple Google Sites For Different Personas

Bradley: Yeah. All right. Bacon is up, he says, “I have a question about Google sites, if you were to create multiple sites, do you need to do each under a different persona, since it is a Google property?” No. It’s not necessary. You can do it all, I mean, you can create multiple Google sites under one profile. It’s fine. Just keep in mind, that if you’re doing some nasty stuff with them, with any one of them, or a combination of them, you stand a chance of getting that account slapped and potentially terminated, and if you have multiple Google sites in that one account, and that account gets slapped, or terminated, then it could end up, you end up losing all of them. Again, I always talk about mitigating risk, guys, specifically because I just don’t want to have one where Google can come in and terminate one account, and I lose multiple digital assets, or multiple businesses, so to speak. Right?

That’s why I always try to separate things by different Google profiles, because then I can always connect, and add as a manager, and you can do that in Google sites, too, you can add a manager. So, you can add, you can create, let’s say you’re going to create 10 Google sites, have 10 different profiles, each owning its own Google site, and then you can connect your main profile, you, or Bacon, as a manager to all of them, so that you can manage all of them underneath one account. But, if anyone of those accounts were to get terminated, it will only affect the one Google site that was owned by that profile account. If that makes sense.

Different Content When Syndicating My Maps

So, it’s a matter of just trying to mitigate risk, it’s up to you. What’s your risk tolerance? Mine is very, very low. Okay. All right. Ken, says, “I know when syndicating a YouTube video we want to only push out the video and link back to the video without any other content on the page, would this hold true for syndicating my map, too? Is it better, worse, or does it matter to have content on the page with my map when syndicating it?” I don’t have enough experience with that end, but maybe Marco can shed some light on that.

Marco: Let me read through that, again. There’s a lot of stuff that I just cannot give away in this forum. I cannot give that away. Yeah. Content matters, whether it’s on the page, or somewhere else, makes a big difference. Relevance, right? You can push relevancy, because it will bleed through to the source, whatever you have on the page, the bot will come in read it, it will drop into the iframe, so to speak, it will drop into the hole, go down to see where the source is, and all of that, that the bot is holding, wherever it’s holding the information, follows through, so it helps. It helps more if it’s somewhere else. That’s as far as I’m going to take it.

Bradley: Yeah. I mean, I haven’t done a lot of map embedding stuff, so I don’t have a lot of experience with testing, Ken, on that, but I would agree that I would probably be, because the problem with YouTube with importing the description, is what I discussed earlier. Right? Is that every single time, or every property that I have while I was importing the descriptions would get de-indexed. That’s why I stopped doing it, but for maps that’s different. Again, I would want to try to put some content on the page, and then test it, but I don’t know, because I haven’t done it. I’d just follow Marco’s advice.

Resolving Suspended Google My Business Page

All right. Don Johnson, says, “I just tried to verify a UPS mailbox for Google My Business, and as soon as I submitted the postcard request, I got Google has suspended your page due to quality issues,” I can imagine, “I decided to delete the listing and try to come up with a plan. I knew you guys have started using PO Boxes with street delivery, which is what I told the client to do, but he didn’t listen. Just wondering if you have any advice how to save this address. I have been trying to convince this client for a couple years that we need an address in a larger neighboring city, and telling him, that, hey that didn’t work, we need another address is not something that I want to do. Does it mean that the UPS location is flagged as a mailbox location, or might there be a work around? Thanks.” It very well could be, Don. UPS mailboxes, in fact, there was one, I mentioned before on a couple of different times that, yes, I use PO boxes, now, and I have been for at least three years, now, and I keep all of them.

In other words, when I rent a mailbox, I don’t just rent it, or excuse me, a PO box, I don’t just rent it long enough to get the postcard, and then let it expire. I keep renewing them. I’ve got dozens of PO boxes and I pay for them every single year, and the reason I do that is because in the event that I ever have to reverify the business, I’ll have access to that location, that address. The reason I know how to do that is because that’s only happened twice to me in my entire career. Okay. But, one of the times that it happened it was a UPS mailbox for one of my tree service lead gen sites, and the UPS mailbox was like $36.00 a month, it was freaking ridiculous, and so I let that mailbox go, because I thought I’ll never need it again, and it’s too damn expensive. Sure enough, I got a reverification, I was required to reverify via mail, snail mail, and I didn’t have access to that location, so I lost that maps listing, because I didn’t have access to it.

So, that was a painful lesson for me, because that was a profitable, it generated quite a bit of revenue, that particular site, so anyways, my point is that ever since that time, first of all I stopped using UPS mailboxes, the UPS stores and stuff, I stopped using those and I went to PO boxes, and I keep them renewed. Now, with that said, you know, if you’ve been trying to tell a client something for two years, now, look, I understand, because you are kind of black hatting the maps listing. I’ve had clients that have been resistive to that, as well, so you know, I don’t know what else you can do other than tell them why it would benefit them to do that, and try to get them to do it the correct way, otherwise I don’t know what else you could do to tell them that. Short of you going out and getting the mailbox yourself, which I don’t recommend doing, but if it’s a client that’s paying you a good amount of money, look, I pay anywhere between $64.00 and $128.00 per year, per PO box.

It just depends on the population density of the area that I’m renting the box in. Right? The more populated it is, the more expensive it’s going to be, but I don’t have a single mailbox out of dozens of them that cost me more than, I think, 128, actually, that may not be true, it might be as much as 164, or 168 a year, or something like that. It’s still relatively inexpensive, so again I don’t recommend going out and buying a mailbox for a client unless there’s enough revenue in it for you, to make it worth your while. Here’s the thing, you might end up, there’s always the opportunity that you could use, you know, create other digital assets in that same area, and use that, you could try using that same mailbox, but I wouldn’t do that.

I would have a separate mailbox specifically for this client, and again, if it’s not something that you want to approach the client about, I wouldn’t mind approaching the client, just say, look, you got a UPS mailbox, those don’t work and here’s the reason why, recommend using a USPS box, it’s cheaper, and they’re still working, right now, and it’s going to benefit your business, and I recommend that you do it. That’s what I would say, otherwise you could do it on your own. Again, I don’t recommend doing that, Don, but if you’re making enough revenue from that client, it’s a nominal small price to pay to be able to get them results. Okay.

Differences Between FCS, RankerX, SEO Autopilot and Rankwyz

Kay says, “Please review the difference between FCS, RankerX, SEO Autopilot, and Rank Whizz. As a newbie, and budgeting for a growing business, I want to spend wisely. Also, please talk about any must have SEO tools. I realize this part may vary. Thanks, again, for everything you all do.” I cannot speak about the difference between all those tools, because I’ve never run any of them. So, honestly, Kay, I wish I could help you, but we would have to ask one of our more experienced link building, like tool users. For example, our link building manager, Deadia, which I’m sure he’d be happy to come on to a webinar and talk about that a little bit. He did it inside the Mastermind, I don’t know if we could get him on Hump Day Hangout, maybe. We’d have to ask him. But, he’s the one that runs all those tools.

I cannot answer you Kay, honestly, because I just don’t know. I don’t use any of those tools. I can tell you that I’m super, super, super impressed with Rank Whizz, and Pavel from the webinar that we did on Monday. I think if you were going to invest, and again, this is only based upon, not from using any of the tools, myself, but just based upon what I know and from what I saw on Monday with Rank Whizz is it seems like it can do everything that I could ever want a link building tool to do, in a very unique way. In fact, the content mill function of Rank Whizz is amazing, because they don’t scrape content based upon keywords, they do it based upon topics, which is the very first time I’ve ever heard of a link building tool do that, which speaks directly to RankBrain and Hummingbird. Right?

The semantic web algorithms, or the semantic web filters, or whatever, layers to the algorithm. My point is, that after going through that webinar, if you haven’t seen it yet, Kay, go through it, that we did with Pavel. I think it was two hours long, but it’s super, super powerful and if you’re going to invest time and money, well, money is the small part, an investment is the time. Right? The biggest investment is the time to learn how to use these tools. I would pick one that does everything and learn that one tool. So, that you don’t have to patch a bunch of stuff together and Rank Whizz apparently has all that. Guys, again, this is only based upon the webinar, because Pavel knows his stuff, he is a serious SEO. After hearing him talk for two hours, he really knows what he’s talking about, so I think it’s a very, very powerful tool and I would put my trust into that, but that’s just my assumption. Okay. I don’t have any proof behind that, because I don’t use any of those tools, myself. All right.

Marco: [crosstalk 00:47:26].

Bradley: Go ahead.

Marco: If I may, and if she’s a newbie, and she’s going to go into this expense, the expense has to be justified, well, the investment, let’s call it, because it’s actually an investment on the business.

Bradley: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Marco: So, you should have an SEO business if you’re going to be running this type of tool, because this tool is for tier two and out, and if you get good enough into T-1 never at the money site. Unless, you’re really surgical with the tool, you get so good with the tool that you can actually go at tier one, you know exactly what you’re doing. Before you get to all that you should have a really good foundation with everything else. I don’t know if she’s doing Syndication Academy, if she wants to do it for clients, if she wants to do things affiliate, what it is that she wants to do, she says she’s a newbie, which is really broad, what is she a newbie in? What is she trying to take on? What is she trying to do? Because if you go right for the link building tools, you have to have assets that you build links to.

Bradley: Yeah. Okay. Next is Stephen, and we’re running out of time here, very quickly, I can see we’re not going to be able to get to Roy’s question, again, either, we tried this last week and I know we spent some time on it, but apparently we didn’t have the whole scenario, and I know I passed over Steve. Roy, I’m assuming, I don’t think you’re in the Mastermind, Roy, but this might be one of those questions we’re going to have to answer in the Facebook group or something, because we’re running out of time. If you don’t mind, Roy, can you repost this in one of the Facebook groups, Syndication Academy, or the SEO tutorials group, either one, and then tag me on it, Roy, and I’ll spend some time going through and try to give you even if I’ve got to just record a quick screen cast video, or something and drop it in the comments section of that post, I’ll try to get to this, because apparently two weeks in a row you’ve posted this, and we must not have answered it last week, because we didn’t have the full information, and I’d hate to leave you hanging for another week, so if you don’t mind, post that one on Facebook groups. Okay? Like, we did for Ken, this week, we can make sure that we get you a proper answer. All right?

Diversifying When Building Google Properties/Stacks

All right. Steve, says, “Do you have any thoughts on diversity when building Google property stacks beyond all the eggs in one basket argument? For instance, would links from 10 Google Doc’s be as strong as one G Doc plus one sheet, plus one form, plus one G site?” I honestly don’t know. I like the diversity of different link types, so I just use them all. That seems like a question that would be more suited for RYS Academy. Can you comment on that Marco, or what do you think?

Marco: Yeah. Not all Google files are created equal.

Bradley: Right.

Marco: They each have different, like one will rank over the other, remember Doctor Gary did a test I think it was in the Mastermind, or in RYS Academy. It was one or the other, or both, probably, where he showed, which one ranks better than the other one, but we still like to do all of them, because we like to interlink. Having just one Google property linking to another, and those two linking to another, and everything linking back, creating the spider web silo, that powers up everything, and it shoots the relevancy out to the destination, which is what we like to do. So, the way we do it is we just keep, you know, we don’t do one or one file type, we do them all.

Bradley: Right.

Marco: We do as many as we can and we link them all together, and then send the power wherever we want.

Bradley: Which is more diversity. Right? I mean, it seems to me, I haven’t tested it, but I mean, I just, we always do every doc type that’s available to us, or every file type. Okay. Let’s see. We’ve got about four minutes. I’ll give another four minutes. Roy, like I said, please, because this is a big long question and with the second part, as well, so just post that in the Facebook group, man, and tag me on it, I’m giving you permission to tag me, so that we can make sure we answer that. I might answer Columbia’s real quick and then we’re going to wrap it up, guys. By the way, we have Syndication Academy update webinar at 5:00 p.m., so in about 10 minutes, guys. You should have been notified via the Facebook group, because I created an event, so if you’re in Syndication Academy, just go to the Facebook group, click on the events tab and you should find the event and it’s going to start here in about eight minutes.

Best Structure For A Lead Gen Site

Columbia says, “Could you describe the best structure for a lead gen site and what would be careful to avoid? Do you do this under your name, or a persona? Thanks.” No. I always do everything under personas, Columbia, as I mentioned earlier in this webinar, and as I often do in many, many webinars, I try to mitigate my risk. So, I always set up a new persona for every lead gen site that set up. Then, I add myself as a manager, so I can add, for example, like I set up, for every lead gen site that I set up, guys, I set up a brand new Google account. I create a new persona, and then I create the website, and I add the Google My Business listing underneath that persona, the Google plus pages, I do all, Google Analytics, search console, tag manager, everything.

The only thing that I don’t create a new account for every time is AdWords, but everything else I do. Then, what I do is I just add myself, or one of my agency profiles, like, I have an AdWords manager account that’s underneath, it’s basically an agency Google profile that I created specifically to run an AdWords manager account, so since I do most everything in AdWords for lead gen, now, I do some Maps SEO, but pretty much I do a ton of AdWords stuff now for lead gen, I just assign that agency profile as a manager to all my lead gen property sites, and search consoles, and analytics, and all of those, so that I can access everything from my agency profile. But, everything is owned by separate individual Google accounts.

The reason I do that, is because once again, I don’t want, if at any time something happens and they decide that Google doesn’t like my agency account anymore, and they shut it down, terminate it, I don’t want to lose all those accounts. Right? It would suck to have my agency account shut down, but at least I would still have all my lead gen assets because they’re all owned, you know, owned in air quotes, by other persona accounts. Okay. It’s all about mitigating risk, guys. It’s just about reducing risk to where if something bad were to happen you don’t lose it all.

I don’t know about you guys, but I’m not willing to take my chances and put everything underneath one account, and then end up losing it. Then, what do you do? You’re left, you’re stuck with nothing. You got to start all over again. At least if you do what I’m talking about, you know, you might lose an account or two, but you’re not going to lose everything. Right?All right, guys. Yeah. I know. Adam started yelling at me, again. All right, guys. We’re going to see everybody in Syndication Academy webinar in just a minute, hopefully. If you’re not there, come join us.

Adam: Sounds good. See you guys later.

Marco: Bye, everyone.

Bradley: Thanks, everybody. We’ll see you all on the next one. Any questions that didn’t get answered, guys, just submit them next week, or post in some of the groups, we’ll try to get to them. I cannot promise we’ll get to all of them. I know I will get to Roy’s, because I told him I would. We’ll see you all next week. Thanks for being here. Thanks, guys.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 129 published first on your-t1-blog-url

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 129

Click on the video above to watch Episode 129 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

Bradley: Okay. We’re live.

Adam: All right. Hey, everybody. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts, episode 129. This is the 26th of April 2017, and we’ve got part of the group, here. I think two, fifths of us are out traveling or flying, today. Myself, Bradley, and Marco ares here. Instead of doing the Brady Bunch up and down, I’ll just look over this way, and Bradley how are you doing, man?

Bradley: Good, man. I’m happy to be here. It’s a beautiful spring day. Got lots of good questions, already, and just looking forward to doing it.

Adam: That’s nice. Marco, how’s the weather, for you?

Marco: It’s sunny in the mornings and it rains every afternoon, now for three, four hours and then it goes away until the next day, it’s typical, but still warm.

Adam: Nice.

Marco: As I said, it’s either warm and raining, or warm and sunny.

Adam: Nice. I couldn’t help, I was looking at my background, if Wayne is watching, there’s Nike headphone inception going on, here, there’s the exact same pair behind me. Anyways. On to more important announcements, not about my headphones. I wanted to let everybody know, hopefully by the end of this Hump Day Hangout we’ll have a link for you guys, we’re busy getting it setup, because we just confirmed with Pavel, and I just missed out on the topic, real quick, because I was busy doing the background stuff. Bradley, do you want to tell them what the webinar this Monday is going to be about?

Bradley: Site Whizz. Apparently, he’s got another application that he built specifically for PBN stuff, but I can tell you I’m super freaking impressed with Rank Whizz and Pavel from the webinar that we had this week, on Monday. I mean, the guy really knows his stuff, and you can tell, and because of that the tool is super powerful, and from some of our Mastermind members that were commenting on a thread in the Mastermind about it, they were saying that it is indeed a very powerful tool. There is a bit of a learning curve, though. My point is after going through the training webinar with Pavel on Monday, and seeing what Rank Whizz does, and seeing how so many other tools that are kind of like duct taped together, you know, everybody has different tools to do different things, so many of that can be consolidated under one dashboard.

It makes sense to take the time to learn it, now honestly, I’ll be 100% transparent, I don’t run tools like that. I’ve hired people years ago to start doing that for me, because it’s not something I had any desire to do. We’re probably going to be and in fact, I’ve already talked to our link building manager, Deady, about hiring, or signing somebody to us to run Rank Whizz, specifically, because of some of the incredible stuff it can do. So, anyways, that said, if you haven’t seen that webinar go watch it and then the Site Whizz webinar, I can only imagine is equally as impressive, because of how much development, and care, and thought that Pavel put into the Rank Whizz. I’m really super excited to see what it does, because I’m clueless as to what Site Whizz does, so this is going to be 100% new to me, as well, but I’m really anxious to see it, so I encourage you guys to sign up or register for the webinar on Monday and attend.

Marco: What really drew my attention was that he actually talked about what I call the three elements, or the three components that a link must have to be considered good. Right? Which is relevancy, activity, and trust and authority, not necessarily in that order, but I mean he’s one of the few people that I know, Mike Pierce is another, and you guys know that to me he is by far the best technical SEO, anywhere, but for someone else to talk about it, and to know, and to understand the concepts, to me, that says it all, because he actually understands where Google is and the W3C are trying to take the semantic web, where everything is headed. So, if he understands what the future is then he’s already planning ahead, which is where everybody should be going. You never want to be reactive. Right? To search engines and upgrades. You always want to be proactive-

Bradley: Correct.

Marco: You always want to be in there, and you want to be ahead of the curve.

Bradley: Yeah. What’s next, Adam?

Adam: I believe, you guys have a webinar, you guys, I believe we, hopefully we’ll be there live, you guys are doing some structured data awesomeness. Correct me if I’m wrong. I believe that is May 8th. Right? The following Monday.

Bradley: Yes. At three o'clock, I think.

Marco: May 8th, at three o'clock. Yeah. It’s not ready, yet, nor is the signup ready, I mean, I’m still working through a whole bunch of information that I had to go through. Every time I think I have it, I keep discovering something new, so I it’s new for me, so trying to explain it in layman’s terms, so that everyone can understand. I know we have a lot of high level people, but I like to talk one level down for the person that’s just starting out, for the person that’s trying to grasp the concepts. I have to really understand what it is that they’re saying, so that I can try to explain it. All right. If you cannot explain it, you don’t know shit. That’s where I go. That’s where I am. I know that Bradley is co-presenter, so he’s going to be giving us his insights, and how he sees structured data working. He does so much local, so he knows about all that and how it works. We’re hoping to give a really good one, two presentation on structured data.

Bradley: Yeah. I agree. It’s going to be awesome.

Adam: Yeah. Everybody, we’ll get that out to you. As soon as we do, obviously, it takes a little time to set up the webinars and do all that, so once we get that, we’ll send out an email and let everybody know about it. Other than that, though, I think that’s good on announcements. You guys got anything, else?

Bradley: No. I was about to post on the event page for Ken Roberts. Hey, Ken, we did, we answered your question. Actually, Marco and I got together on Monday to consult about your question, and so it’s been answered in the Facebook group. The Syndication Academy Facebook group, I’m about to drop the link to that particular post, apparently Semantic Mastery’s doesn’t have you in a circle, Ken, because I cannot tag you, but anyways I’ll drop the link, or go back to The Syndication Academy, Ken, in the group and you should see the answers to your questions from last week, because we did end up, Marco and I scheduled time on Monday just so that we could talk about your question. Anyways.

Adam: One more thing, real quick, I was going to say, we just got the webinar setup, so I’m going to post the link in if you want to check out this awesome webinar, this Monday, with Sit whizz info, get signed up, and we’ll email out about that, but I wanted to make sure everybody has a chance today to hop on that.

Bradley: All right. Ken, I just posted, he’s here watching, I just posted the link to that Facebook post. If you’re not in Syndication Academy guys, you won’t be able to see it, but Ken will, because he’s there. All right. I’m going to grab the screen and we’re going to get into it. You guys cool with that?

Adam: Yeah. Let’s do this.

Bradley: Yeah. Let’s do it. Can you guys see me okay?

Adam: Yes. We can.

Marco: Yeah.

Bradley: All right. Very good. Let’s scroll down to the bottom. Got lots of good questions, already, so this is awesome. All right. Aussie is up first, “Hey, all. I got a website that have a tier one,” oh, couple things we didn’t mention, number one, if you guys are new to Hump Day Hangouts, there’s a couple things that we probably need to just make a note of this, Adam, every day, or every single week.

Adam: Yeah. I just did, and I didn’t want to stop you, I’m actually getting something to paste in there.

Bradley: Okay. Cool. I was going to say, if you guys aren’t aware of where to get Syndication Academy you can go to syndication.academy, again, that’s syndication.academy. That’s where a lot of the questions that we get on Hump Day Hangouts come from that training and that methodology, so that’s a lot of the times what we’re talking about, if you’re unfamiliar with that. Also, a lot of questions that we get, regularly, guys can be answered in our knowledge base, just so you know, and that is at support.semanticmastery.com, again, support.semanticmastery.com is our support portal, I guess, and there is a knowledge base and FAQ’s for various products that we have right there on that support site. I just wanted to kind of point you guys to that, in case you were unaware of those resources. All right. Anyways. Aussie says-

Marco: Before you move on, can I just mention something, so that we have it down.

Bradley: Sure.

Marco: When we get new people, we get the same question a lot of times over and over, and over, and I understand that we have new people coming in that will ask the same questions. Please, if you are new don’t think that we’re treating you like you are new, like you’re dumb, like you don’t know what you’re talking about, this forum, or what we do on Hump Day Hangouts is just for that, we don’t want you to feel bad. Please, ask your questions, if we say to go to whatever source, it’s because the answer is there. It’s been explained, and that’s the best way to start, if after that, after you’ve gone and looked at the resources, you still have a question, you’re welcome to come back and ask us a more in depth question or to clarify, but please just keep asking the questions and we’ll do the best we can to answer them.

Bradley: Yeah. Occasionally, if I get a question that’s been asked 1300 times, I do get a tad bit annoyed, but don’t misinterpret that as me being annoyed with the person asking the question, I’m annoyed with the question, not the person asking the question and I’m working on that, guys. I recognized that, that can come across as shitty, and so I’m working on that, and I apologize for that, but I just want you to know that certainly guys that’s what this is for. Hump Day Hangouts is for people to come and ask questions, new, or experienced alike, it makes no difference. Please, feel free to ask questions, here. Okay?

Decreasing Rankings Of A T1 Branded Ring Powered By PBNs

All right. Now, we’ll get to Aussie’s question, he says, “I got a website that I have a tier one branded ring, I powered up the ring with my PBN’s. The tier one ring became too powerful.” Okay. “My website got slapped by Google and all the pages that had links from the ring lost their rankings, is that possible? PS, the other pages that don’t get links from the ring didn’t lose their rankings and webmaster tool 400 links from WordPress, one of the links from blog spot, Trello, network shows in search results, some of them even page one, the Trello especially,” yeah, by the way, just a side note, I’ve noticed that, too, recently that the Trello pages or your profiles are ranking like crazy, I’m not sure why that is. “If I want personal support who would I contact with? I’m a member of Syndication Academy and Battle Plan, and RYS starter.” Okay. I’ve never seen this, what you’re describing here.

Now, hold on a minute, let me rephrase this, if it’s just a tier one branded ring, I’ve never seen any issues, whatsoever. I’ve not experienced this. Now, with multiple syndication networks connected to a website, for blog syndication, and this is precisely why I talk about, throughout the training, and throughout so many Hump Day Hangouts, about not connecting multiple syndication rings to a blog, for blog syndication, because I have had, I’ve gotten slapped from that before and it’s because of unnatural link profile, I’ve been slapped various ways. I’ve had algorithmic slaps, and I’ve had manual penalties, as well. Both, from connecting too many syndication networks to a blog, but that is precisely why we talk about primarily just using a tier one branded ring. If you’re going to use tier two, and I know Aussie, you’re not saying that you use tier two, but I’m just explaining this for the benefit of other people, as well, in part for why I don’t use multiple or tiered rings for blog syndication.

If you’re going to be using tiered rings, though, however, or syndication networks you want to add additional related content feeds, or sources, triggers, into the second tier networks to try to mask or hide footprint as much as possible. Remember, you’re not trying to hide a footprint on your branded ring, you’re trying to claim it. You’re trying to announce to the world that this is you on all these different locations, or this is your brand, or whatever. I’ve never experienced that, what you’re talking about here from a branded ring, but that’s also because, and Aussie, I don’t know what kind of content you’re publishing from your blog, so what I’m saying is if you’re publishing content from your main blog that’s syndicating to your ring, and you’re doing automated content, or positing maybe too frequently, or I don’t know what could cause that, but I know that there could be content issues that are causing that problem, as well, and it’s not necessarily from the syndication network. There’s some variables that I’m unaware of, here, from this one line, or two little sentences here isn’t enough detail for me to be able to make an educated guess as to what the problem is, other than it may be a content issue with what you’re posting from the blog, if that makes sense. Marco, or Adam, I guess, have you guys ever had any experience with this?

Marco: I’m looking at this and he says he has RYS starter, now, what he could be experiencing is the Google dance, we covered this before, and I just dropped the link at the top, so that he can go and take a look at it, I don’t know how long it’s been since he did this. Sometimes they disappear. It doesn’t mean that you got Google slapped. It just means that they’re dancing, and they’ll eventually come back, you wait 21 days until the Google dance has cleared, and then you go take a look at your ranking. You cannot SERP watch or you’ll drive yourself nuts-

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Watching it go up and down. It goes up and down, up and down. Then, eventually after that period it’s like a probationary period. Right? Where if you go and do anything, they extend it to, I think it’s either 60 or 80 days and if you do anything within that period then you can get permanently sand boxed, so I would say just relax, let it sit, let it stew, and see if it starts coming back. In the meantime, he can be looking at other things, whether he’s doing multiple posting, whether he has a multi tiered ring, which is not necessary for most keywords, but I see that, and if he did that, and if he powered it up, meaning if he built links to tier one and RYS it will dance, but it will come back and it will come back better than ever, if you leave it alone for the period of time that the Google dance requires, it’s riding the patent.

Bradley: Yeah. See, Aussie, I’ve got, I mean, I literally have websites and some clients, some are my own that I’ve had syndication networks around since 2012, and literally have thousands of links from WordPress and thousands of links from blog spot, or blogger, and Tumblr, and that kind of thing in search console, and never once have they ever been slapped. I cannot see it having anything to with the syndication network, unless there was a problem with the content, again, that you’re publishing. If it scrapped content, spun content, stuff like that, that could cause problems, and there’s no question.

Also, it could be if you’re using tiered networks, like I said, and you’re not masking or hiding your footprint, properly. That could also cause issues, but again, if you want to contact somebody, you could reach out to us in support, and if you’re in the Mastermind, we can provide, of course, support within the Mastermind, but if not it might, you might have to schedule with someone on one consulting time, but you can always send in a support ticket and propose what it is you need help with and we can figure out what the best course of action for you would be. Okay?

Proxies When Creating Branded IFTTT Networks For Clients

All right. David’s up, he says, “Same question as last week, tech glitch pause, if I’m creating branded IFTTT networks for clients, do I need proxies?” Okay, David. No. Yes and no. No, if you are limiting how many accounts you create. Let’s put it this way, when you go to start creating an account, or a network, you’re going to create a profile in a new Google account, and then you’re going to use that Google account to create the profile or the accounts on all the other network sites, network properties, Tumblr, WordPress, Gravatar, all that stuff. Right? That’s basically one account set, so as long as you’re only doing one or no more than two account sets in any 24 hour period, then you should be okay.

However, if you’re building for clients, I recommend having a minimum of five or just a handful, I mean, typically I always just start off with five proxies, dedicated proxies. The reason why is, because if you’re building them, which by the way, David, you shouldn’t be building them, honestly, you really shouldn’t be, but if you plan on doing it anyways, because you can outsource this kind of work, man, for a hell of a lot less than what your time is worth, I can tell you that. But, if you are planning on doing it, anyways, then I recommend just getting five dedicated proxies it will cost you like 10 bucks a month, man. Then, that way you have basically cycled through the proxies. In other words, if on Monday you start to create one account set with proxy number one, then on Tuesday create your next account set proxy number two, and by the time you get to Saturday, you cycle back up to proxy number one. Does that make sense?

Just, in other words, that way you’re spreading out new account sets per IP, so that you’re not, if you use just your own IP, and you’re creating a new account set, every day, at some point, I don’t know what the threshold is, but at some point, you’re probably going to have your IP flagged, by if not Google, by some of the other web two properties. I recommend that you always use, you know, you can use a VPN. I particularly don’t like to use VPN’s, because those are shared IP’s, even though a lot of them have big pools of IP’s now, I still don’t like to use them, because they’re shared. I prefer dedicated proxies, because then I know they’re clean. Okay. Again, I highly recommend that you’re going to do it, and also, David, if you’re going to be building networks and using proxies then to make your life a hell a lot easier I recommend that you pick up Browseo. Right now, Browseo, now has a monthly option it’s like 37 bucks a month.

The amount of headache that it will save you to be able to use Browseo and have multiple browsing sessions open using different proxies for different profiles and all that kind of stuff, the speed with which you’re able to accomplish your tasks by having that ability, or that function available is unbelievable. Right? It’s amazing. I’ve got Browseo open right now. I mean, I got it open all the time, now, because it’s just so freaking amazing. So, I highly recommend that you use that, as well, it’s going to make you a lot more efficient. As I mentioned, before, I certainly recommend, David, that you only build a few networks to get the hang of it and then outsource it. You can buy them from us, or you can hire your own virtual assistant, and put them through the training, and have them build so that you have an in house builder, that’s going to be your best option, you’ll make the most money that way, if you create your own in house builder, or excuse me, train your own in house builder. All right.

Boosting IFTTT Networks With Google Stacks

Next question. “After an IFTTT stack is in place, how much does a Google property stack, including interlinking docs, excuse me, interlocking Google Doc’s, et cetera, boost to network and what tier should they point at, and how soon can, should it be plugged in?” As far doing an RYS or a drive stack, I don’t see any reason to wait. Marco, can comment on that, but I don’t see where there’s any reason to wait, and you can link to all of the above. You can link to your money site, your Google My Business page, your tier one properties, because all it’s doing is reinforcing and validating the entity. Marco, do you have a comment on any [crosstalk 00:20:50].

Marco: No. I totally agree. No. We usually order IFTTT and RYS as soon as we get-

Bradley: The network back.

Marco: The verification from Google.

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: As soon as the verification, then we have that NAP, the way that it’s set in Google, that’s how it’s going everywhere else that we have it. I mean, I trained Justin, and I continuously go back and forth with him, he’s our RYS VA, he knows exactly what to do, how to hook everything up, so that you guys don’t have to do it. If you want to go through it, then the place for the training is RYS Academy. Otherwise, you’re left guessing on how everything is done.

Bradley: Yeah. All right. Hopefully, that helps, David. Yeah. The same order that whenever, I agree with Marco, if it’s going to be for a local business, it has an NAP, you’re going to want to wait until you have a verified address, and you probably already do, but if not, if it’s a new listing, a new business, then yeah, wait until you get the Google My Business page verified, so that then you have the NAP exactly as it’s listed in Google. I totally agree with that. Typically, what I’ll do with a new property is order the network, build the site, while the network is being built.

My curator, somebody from, one of my curators, will end up creating content for me like having at least a minimum of three curated posts ready to go, so that when the site is built, and the network has been connected, then I go in and publish those three posts. I’ll drip them out, over a course of a week, or so, and then from there I’ll order the, excuse me, the drive stack, and then I’ll order a press release, and then I’ll order the first batch of citations. That’s pretty much the exact same process that I go through for every single new site that I launch, or even a site that’s an existing site and I’m taking a new client or something like that, that’s the same process I have to go through, is still sitting up the network first, and having content produced while the network is being set up and all that kind of stuff. It’s the exact same timeline that I always use. Just because it works. There’s no reason, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

ReIndexing Videos To Google Sitemap

Ryan’s up. “I’ve added a section to my website that is a video library, the section lists all the videos from my YouTube channel. Each video has its own page, or we are hosting a YouTube video with transcript and description of what the video is about. My question, I created a separate video site map listing all the individual videos, once I submitted the site map, all 55 of the videos were indexed, but over time they are starting to get de-indexed in increments of five or 10 at a time, now, only nine videos are indexed. What could cause this? What can I do to troubleshoot why my videos are getting de-indexed? Everything in search console shows that my video site map has no errors, so I’m not sure what is causing this de-indexing.” It’s a good question, Ryan. I’m not 100% sure, either.

Adam: Description about what the video is about, is it actually the video description?

Bradley: It’s a transcript and a description. Probably like a summary, maybe, is what the description is.

Adam: Okay.

Marco: I mean, is the description being taken word for word from the video description?

Bradley: You mean, from the video description in YouTube?

Marco: Correct.

Bradley: Yeah. That can cause problems, Ryan. Good point, Marco. I don’t know that, that’s the case, Ryan, but if you are, here’s the thing, though, if you’re adding the transcription to the post, then that should make it unique enough, I mean, again, this is just speculative, but my experience with having video pages de-indexed, and I’m not talking about the videos themselves, I’m assuming the YouTube videos are still indexed, but the video pages on your site are being de-indexed, or falling out of the index, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ve been de-indexed. Right? De-indexed connotes like a penalty, but falling out of the index doesn’t necessarily, like that’s just a Google dance. Right? My point, Ryan, what I’m trying to get at is whenever I was doing a lot of video syndication networks, what I used to call broadcasting networks, which is I’d have self hosted WordPress sites with IFTTT syndication networks around those sites, and then when I would publish a video to a YouTube channel I’d have YouTube connected as a trigger to self hosted WordPress sites. I used to use a plugin to do that, but then I just switched it over to using IFTTT, and YouTube to WordPress. You can do that for self hosted sites, by the way.

Anyways, whenever I would have the applet set up at the time, they were called recipes, but the applets within the description, we always just talk about pasting the embed code, and a link to the video, and you can either do a naked URL, or an anchored text URL to the actual YouTube video itself, and then a link back to the channel and if that’s why our applets are set up the way that they are, because when I had those video broadcasting networks and I was auto syndicating videos to them any time I uploaded a video to a channel, any of those WordPress sites, those self hosted WordPress sites that imported the description, so remember that’s a token, a token inside of IFTTT that you can add, or what they call an ingredient.

You can add the description ingredient. Every single one of the sites that I had auto syndicated videos to that imported the description got de-indexed. Every single one of them. All the sites that I had didn’t import the video description from YouTube, didn’t get de-indexed. That very well could be it, is if you are importing, although, like I said, at least without testing this I would think that if you had the transcription in the blog post, but not in the video description on YouTube, that, that would make that blog post unique enough that it wouldn’t be de-indexed, but maybe it is causing an issue. That’s the only thing I can think of at this time. I mean, what other ideas could there be, Marco, anything else?

Marco: I would use video schema.

Bradley: You could do that.

Marco: I would use it totally, just to solidify it at the entity level. Right? At the coding level. I’d post the URL to Sistrix, which is really, really good about giving you some great video markup for rich snippets, and that might help. Everything tried first, get rid of the description, see what happens, and then mark them up.

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Use the schema generator that I posted and see what happens. Come back and let us know.

Bradley: Yeah. That could help. Wrapping those videos and video object markup could probably help, too, so let us know, Ryan, how that goes. Then, also, again, I’m curious to find out if that’s what you’re doing is importing the video descriptions, too, because if so, what I would recommend is omitting the video descriptions if it’s the same as what they are on YouTube, and then just using the transcription and that’s it.

Live Rank Sniper Vs Tube Rocket (Rocket Video Ranker Pro)

All right. Kurt’s up, he says, “A couple of questions. LRS has done a great job poking some keywords to Google page one, what I use Tube Rocket from Bill Cousins, instead of LRS to upload the videos into the poked sites, if not, what would I use to Tube Rocket for if LRS, works? I understand that Tube Rocker,” and he’s talking about Tube Authority Rocket, guys, otherwise known as Rocket Video Ranker Pro. We did a webinar with Bill Cousins a week or two ago, it’s a really, really cool tool. We got a lot of really, I did a full on case study bonus, too, which was pretty detailed. It’s probably two and a half hours worth of video in that case study alone.

He says, “I understand that Tube Rocket can make the videos unique, but if possible, how would I get them into the spots created by LRS, since it requires live stream, not just a video upload?” Okay. First of all, Kurt, yes, you can use Live Rank Sniper to stream a video into the scheduled live event, because those are essentially just place holders. Right? The schedule of live events are just place holders, however, the problem, and it’s not a problem, but the drawback of using Live Rank Sniper to stream to those scheduled live events is that it’s a slow process, because you have to open up Live Rank Sniper, it’s only a couple of clicks of a mouse, guys, it’s not like it’s difficult, it’s very simple to do, but it’s a slow process, because you have to allow the software to start the stream.

You click the upload or whatever, you click the tab, and then you go navigate to the file on your hard drive, click it, and then you tell it to start streaming, and it basically, you just wait for it to go through the process of firing up the live stream, starts to stream it, and then it closes it down, and all that. So, it’s a manual process, and my point was if you’ve poked a 100 keywords and you got 40 of them that are ranking on page one and/or page two, and you want to go upload, that’s a long time. A lot of time that you’re going to have to sit there and click the mouse a few times to get it to stream, it’s just going to take you a ton of time, Kurt. You can absolutely do that, there’s no problem. It’s just personally, it’s not efficient, for me, so I wouldn’t recommend doing that. You know, there is, Peter Drew, excuse me, I was drawing a blank, Peter Drew has Hangout Millionaire, which would integrate very, very well with Live Rank Sniper, because they’re from the same developer. They have the same interface and that kind of stuff.

I’m fairly certain that Hangout Millionaire can actually stream into those scheduled live events. That will automate the process, so that you don’t have to manually start every single stream. If you want to use the pre-scheduled events that are already ranking, then I would recommend that you upgrade to Hangout Millionaire, and use that. Okay? That’s the reason why I say that is because you’ve already got the place holders in place, and I’m fairly sure that Hangout Millionaire is able to stream to those scheduled live events, but you might have to check with Peter Drew and support first prior to signing up for that. Where Rocket Video Ranker, Tube Authority Rocket, they’re one and the same, really, shines is that it basically uploads videos and it uses that very unique process where it sets everything to private, and then you go in and turn them all public at the same time, and it just seems to work.

Again, I don’t know why it works, but it works. So, as long as it’s working, it’s something that can be exploited, and I’ve used it a lot, as well. Okay. But, no, you cannot use Rocket Video Ranker to stream to scheduled live events, it doesn’t work that way. Rocket Video Ranker is strictly an upload application, I mean it makes it so much faster and efficient to upload a bunch of videos all at one time to the same channel. But, there’s a limit to that, by the way, too. I ran into a couple of issues throughout the case study where I made a mistake with a batch of 30 uploads and I had to go in and delete them all, and then I went back and uploaded, again, to the same channel, and it denied me, it said, you’ve uploaded too many videos, and you must wait 24 hours before uploading anymore, or something like that, so just keep that in mind. Again, it’s a different animal. They can accomplish similar things, but remember Live Rank Sniper was specifically a keyword poking tool, I mean that’s what it was advertised as. Right? It’s a keyword poking tool. Yes, you can steam to pre-scheduled events, but it’s not really designed to do that, efficiently, in other words. Okay?

All right. Next, he says, “Also, I made a spintax with keywords and geotargeting for the LRS pokes, some of them landed on page one and two, and in the videos page, this was done without the long lat settings in Live Rank Sniper, if I needed to do long lat in LRS, would this require one poke per keyword?” Yes. Well, it would be one poke per location, Kurt. I did this same thing Kurt, in other words, when I was running my, I was basically targeting one keyword in multiple locations, so I didn’t use the geo coordinate setting, either. I left that blank, but if you want to target multiple keywords in one location, then you could use the geo, you know, the geo settings, excuse me, because then it’s all the same location, but I did the same thing, which you’re asking about, here, no, I just omitted that. Okay. “Or, could I just use the long lat for Chicago and geo target all the smaller communities and metros in Chicago with the keywords spintex with the same result and effectiveness?”

I don’t know, Kurt, I haven’t test that, personally, I would not want to use Chicago coordinates for suburbs around Chicago, because those suburbs each have their own coordinates. Right? Every point, anywhere at all geographically has its on coordinate. Right? So, even if you move a 100 yards to the right or the left, or north, south, east, west, it doesn’t matter my point is it still got a unique coordinate, so if you’re assigning a Chicago coordinate, excuse me, to all of the other locations that you’re targeting, then you’d be giving mixed messages to Google. I haven’t tested that, so I don’t know whether it would work or not, but to be honest with you it seems logical to me that it would cause problems. So, I would recommend just omitting the geocoordinates from those campaigns, unless you’re targeting one location.

Using Same Persona Rings To Multiple Products

All right. Alexander is up, “Should I use the same persona rings to multiple products? For example, the same 10% of the rings for two or more unrelated projects.” I don’t recommend that. I mean, you can to a point, Alexander, I would still try to keep them somewhat related. Here’s the thing guys, like for second tier networks, which are basically persona based networks, especially for like YouTube syndication’s, stuff like that, things can be a bit more general, but remember theming is really, really important. I’ll let Marco comment on this, but guys theming and relevancy is critical, now, and it’s only becoming more and more critical, so I’d recommend not spamming up some second tier networks, or persona based networks with a whole bunch of unrelated stuff. Try to keep it somewhat ballpark, somewhat in the same ballpark, because you’re going to get more power, and more authority built from any of those links, embeds, whatever, from those networks if they’re themed correctly. Marco, you got a comment for that?

Marco: No. I agree. We go back to what I mentioned in the beginning, which is the three components of a link. Right?

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Relevancy, activity on the link, trust and authority. If those three things are present then you have a great link, if you omit one of those then the link becomes not so great, what overcomes that is where the link is coming from, like if you can get that awesome boost from one of these super powerful websites where you get that link that just pops you to number one, then that’ll override the relevancy activity, but it has to be powerful, it cannot just be any old link, or it could have decent metrics and you would have to boost it, so that you power up the metrics to override the relevancy factor, but you still need all the other three components. I mean, I could talk about this all day, but we’re still going to come back to relevancy, activity, trust and authority, that’s what you need on a link. If you don’t have that, and most, again, most PBN’s are just there to provide a link, if you are doing just that then you’re better off going and renting. You know how you can go and rent from what used to be a PR7, or a PR8 you better off doing that, you can still do that and get a lot of bang for your money.

Multiple Google Sites For Different Personas

Bradley: Yeah. All right. Bacon is up, he says, “I have a question about Google sites, if you were to create multiple sites, do you need to do each under a different persona, since it is a Google property?” No. It’s not necessary. You can do it all, I mean, you can create multiple Google sites under one profile. It’s fine. Just keep in mind, that if you’re doing some nasty stuff with them, with any one of them, or a combination of them, you stand a chance of getting that account slapped and potentially terminated, and if you have multiple Google sites in that one account, and that account gets slapped, or terminated, then it could end up, you end up losing all of them. Again, I always talk about mitigating risk, guys, specifically because I just don’t want to have one where Google can come in and terminate one account, and I lose multiple digital assets, or multiple businesses, so to speak. Right?

That’s why I always try to separate things by different Google profiles, because then I can always connect, and add as a manager, and you can do that in Google sites, too, you can add a manager. So, you can add, you can create, let’s say you’re going to create 10 Google sites, have 10 different profiles, each owning its own Google site, and then you can connect your main profile, you, or Bacon, as a manager to all of them, so that you can manage all of them underneath one account. But, if anyone of those accounts were to get terminated, it will only affect the one Google site that was owned by that profile account. If that makes sense.

Different Content When Syndicating My Maps

So, it’s a matter of just trying to mitigate risk, it’s up to you. What’s your risk tolerance? Mine is very, very low. Okay. All right. Ken, says, “I know when syndicating a YouTube video we want to only push out the video and link back to the video without any other content on the page, would this hold true for syndicating my map, too? Is it better, worse, or does it matter to have content on the page with my map when syndicating it?” I don’t have enough experience with that end, but maybe Marco can shed some light on that.

Marco: Let me read through that, again. There’s a lot of stuff that I just cannot give away in this forum. I cannot give that away. Yeah. Content matters, whether it’s on the page, or somewhere else, makes a big difference. Relevance, right? You can push relevancy, because it will bleed through to the source, whatever you have on the page, the bot will come in read it, it will drop into the iframe, so to speak, it will drop into the hole, go down to see where the source is, and all of that, that the bot is holding, wherever it’s holding the information, follows through, so it helps. It helps more if it’s somewhere else. That’s as far as I’m going to take it.

Bradley: Yeah. I mean, I haven’t done a lot of map embedding stuff, so I don’t have a lot of experience with testing, Ken, on that, but I would agree that I would probably be, because the problem with YouTube with importing the description, is what I discussed earlier. Right? Is that every single time, or every property that I have while I was importing the descriptions would get de-indexed. That’s why I stopped doing it, but for maps that’s different. Again, I would want to try to put some content on the page, and then test it, but I don’t know, because I haven’t done it. I’d just follow Marco’s advice.

Resolving Suspended Google My Business Page

All right. Don Johnson, says, “I just tried to verify a UPS mailbox for Google My Business, and as soon as I submitted the postcard request, I got Google has suspended your page due to quality issues,” I can imagine, “I decided to delete the listing and try to come up with a plan. I knew you guys have started using PO Boxes with street delivery, which is what I told the client to do, but he didn’t listen. Just wondering if you have any advice how to save this address. I have been trying to convince this client for a couple years that we need an address in a larger neighboring city, and telling him, that, hey that didn’t work, we need another address is not something that I want to do. Does it mean that the UPS location is flagged as a mailbox location, or might there be a work around? Thanks.” It very well could be, Don. UPS mailboxes, in fact, there was one, I mentioned before on a couple of different times that, yes, I use PO boxes, now, and I have been for at least three years, now, and I keep all of them.

In other words, when I rent a mailbox, I don’t just rent it, or excuse me, a PO box, I don’t just rent it long enough to get the postcard, and then let it expire. I keep renewing them. I’ve got dozens of PO boxes and I pay for them every single year, and the reason I do that is because in the event that I ever have to reverify the business, I’ll have access to that location, that address. The reason I know how to do that is because that’s only happened twice to me in my entire career. Okay. But, one of the times that it happened it was a UPS mailbox for one of my tree service lead gen sites, and the UPS mailbox was like $36.00 a month, it was freaking ridiculous, and so I let that mailbox go, because I thought I’ll never need it again, and it’s too damn expensive. Sure enough, I got a reverification, I was required to reverify via mail, snail mail, and I didn’t have access to that location, so I lost that maps listing, because I didn’t have access to it.

So, that was a painful lesson for me, because that was a profitable, it generated quite a bit of revenue, that particular site, so anyways, my point is that ever since that time, first of all I stopped using UPS mailboxes, the UPS stores and stuff, I stopped using those and I went to PO boxes, and I keep them renewed. Now, with that said, you know, if you’ve been trying to tell a client something for two years, now, look, I understand, because you are kind of black hatting the maps listing. I’ve had clients that have been resistive to that, as well, so you know, I don’t know what else you can do other than tell them why it would benefit them to do that, and try to get them to do it the correct way, otherwise I don’t know what else you could do to tell them that. Short of you going out and getting the mailbox yourself, which I don’t recommend doing, but if it’s a client that’s paying you a good amount of money, look, I pay anywhere between $64.00 and $128.00 per year, per PO box.

It just depends on the population density of the area that I’m renting the box in. Right? The more populated it is, the more expensive it’s going to be, but I don’t have a single mailbox out of dozens of them that cost me more than, I think, 128, actually, that may not be true, it might be as much as 164, or 168 a year, or something like that. It’s still relatively inexpensive, so again I don’t recommend going out and buying a mailbox for a client unless there’s enough revenue in it for you, to make it worth your while. Here’s the thing, you might end up, there’s always the opportunity that you could use, you know, create other digital assets in that same area, and use that, you could try using that same mailbox, but I wouldn’t do that.

I would have a separate mailbox specifically for this client, and again, if it’s not something that you want to approach the client about, I wouldn’t mind approaching the client, just say, look, you got a UPS mailbox, those don’t work and here’s the reason why, recommend using a USPS box, it’s cheaper, and they’re still working, right now, and it’s going to benefit your business, and I recommend that you do it. That’s what I would say, otherwise you could do it on your own. Again, I don’t recommend doing that, Don, but if you’re making enough revenue from that client, it’s a nominal small price to pay to be able to get them results. Okay.

Differences Between FCS, RankerX, SEO Autopilot and Rankwyz

Kay says, “Please review the difference between FCS, RankerX, SEO Autopilot, and Rank Whizz. As a newbie, and budgeting for a growing business, I want to spend wisely. Also, please talk about any must have SEO tools. I realize this part may vary. Thanks, again, for everything you all do.” I cannot speak about the difference between all those tools, because I’ve never run any of them. So, honestly, Kay, I wish I could help you, but we would have to ask one of our more experienced link building, like tool users. For example, our link building manager, Deadia, which I’m sure he’d be happy to come on to a webinar and talk about that a little bit. He did it inside the Mastermind, I don’t know if we could get him on Hump Day Hangout, maybe. We’d have to ask him. But, he’s the one that runs all those tools.

I cannot answer you Kay, honestly, because I just don’t know. I don’t use any of those tools. I can tell you that I’m super, super, super impressed with Rank Whizz, and Pavel from the webinar that we did on Monday. I think if you were going to invest, and again, this is only based upon, not from using any of the tools, myself, but just based upon what I know and from what I saw on Monday with Rank Whizz is it seems like it can do everything that I could ever want a link building tool to do, in a very unique way. In fact, the content mill function of Rank Whizz is amazing, because they don’t scrape content based upon keywords, they do it based upon topics, which is the very first time I’ve ever heard of a link building tool do that, which speaks directly to RankBrain and Hummingbird. Right?

The semantic web algorithms, or the semantic web filters, or whatever, layers to the algorithm. My point is, that after going through that webinar, if you haven’t seen it yet, Kay, go through it, that we did with Pavel. I think it was two hours long, but it’s super, super powerful and if you’re going to invest time and money, well, money is the small part, an investment is the time. Right? The biggest investment is the time to learn how to use these tools. I would pick one that does everything and learn that one tool. So, that you don’t have to patch a bunch of stuff together and Rank Whizz apparently has all that. Guys, again, this is only based upon the webinar, because Pavel knows his stuff, he is a serious SEO. After hearing him talk for two hours, he really knows what he’s talking about, so I think it’s a very, very powerful tool and I would put my trust into that, but that’s just my assumption. Okay. I don’t have any proof behind that, because I don’t use any of those tools, myself. All right.

Marco: [crosstalk 00:47:26].

Bradley: Go ahead.

Marco: If I may, and if she’s a newbie, and she’s going to go into this expense, the expense has to be justified, well, the investment, let’s call it, because it’s actually an investment on the business.

Bradley: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Marco: So, you should have an SEO business if you’re going to be running this type of tool, because this tool is for tier two and out, and if you get good enough into T-1 never at the money site. Unless, you’re really surgical with the tool, you get so good with the tool that you can actually go at tier one, you know exactly what you’re doing. Before you get to all that you should have a really good foundation with everything else. I don’t know if she’s doing Syndication Academy, if she wants to do it for clients, if she wants to do things affiliate, what it is that she wants to do, she says she’s a newbie, which is really broad, what is she a newbie in? What is she trying to take on? What is she trying to do? Because if you go right for the link building tools, you have to have assets that you build links to.

Bradley: Yeah. Okay. Next is Stephen, and we’re running out of time here, very quickly, I can see we’re not going to be able to get to Roy’s question, again, either, we tried this last week and I know we spent some time on it, but apparently we didn’t have the whole scenario, and I know I passed over Steve. Roy, I’m assuming, I don’t think you’re in the Mastermind, Roy, but this might be one of those questions we’re going to have to answer in the Facebook group or something, because we’re running out of time. If you don’t mind, Roy, can you repost this in one of the Facebook groups, Syndication Academy, or the SEO tutorials group, either one, and then tag me on it, Roy, and I’ll spend some time going through and try to give you even if I’ve got to just record a quick screen cast video, or something and drop it in the comments section of that post, I’ll try to get to this, because apparently two weeks in a row you’ve posted this, and we must not have answered it last week, because we didn’t have the full information, and I’d hate to leave you hanging for another week, so if you don’t mind, post that one on Facebook groups. Okay? Like, we did for Ken, this week, we can make sure that we get you a proper answer. All right?

Diversifying When Building Google Properties/Stacks

All right. Steve, says, “Do you have any thoughts on diversity when building Google property stacks beyond all the eggs in one basket argument? For instance, would links from 10 Google Doc’s be as strong as one G Doc plus one sheet, plus one form, plus one G site?” I honestly don’t know. I like the diversity of different link types, so I just use them all. That seems like a question that would be more suited for RYS Academy. Can you comment on that Marco, or what do you think?

Marco: Yeah. Not all Google files are created equal.

Bradley: Right.

Marco: They each have different, like one will rank over the other, remember Doctor Gary did a test I think it was in the Mastermind, or in RYS Academy. It was one or the other, or both, probably, where he showed, which one ranks better than the other one, but we still like to do all of them, because we like to interlink. Having just one Google property linking to another, and those two linking to another, and everything linking back, creating the spider web silo, that powers up everything, and it shoots the relevancy out to the destination, which is what we like to do. So, the way we do it is we just keep, you know, we don’t do one or one file type, we do them all.

Bradley: Right.

Marco: We do as many as we can and we link them all together, and then send the power wherever we want.

Bradley: Which is more diversity. Right? I mean, it seems to me, I haven’t tested it, but I mean, I just, we always do every doc type that’s available to us, or every file type. Okay. Let’s see. We’ve got about four minutes. I’ll give another four minutes. Roy, like I said, please, because this is a big long question and with the second part, as well, so just post that in the Facebook group, man, and tag me on it, I’m giving you permission to tag me, so that we can make sure we answer that. I might answer Columbia’s real quick and then we’re going to wrap it up, guys. By the way, we have Syndication Academy update webinar at 5:00 p.m., so in about 10 minutes, guys. You should have been notified via the Facebook group, because I created an event, so if you’re in Syndication Academy, just go to the Facebook group, click on the events tab and you should find the event and it’s going to start here in about eight minutes.

Best Structure For A Lead Gen Site

Columbia says, “Could you describe the best structure for a lead gen site and what would be careful to avoid? Do you do this under your name, or a persona? Thanks.” No. I always do everything under personas, Columbia, as I mentioned earlier in this webinar, and as I often do in many, many webinars, I try to mitigate my risk. So, I always set up a new persona for every lead gen site that set up. Then, I add myself as a manager, so I can add, for example, like I set up, for every lead gen site that I set up, guys, I set up a brand new Google account. I create a new persona, and then I create the website, and I add the Google My Business listing underneath that persona, the Google plus pages, I do all, Google Analytics, search console, tag manager, everything.

The only thing that I don’t create a new account for every time is AdWords, but everything else I do. Then, what I do is I just add myself, or one of my agency profiles, like, I have an AdWords manager account that’s underneath, it’s basically an agency Google profile that I created specifically to run an AdWords manager account, so since I do most everything in AdWords for lead gen, now, I do some Maps SEO, but pretty much I do a ton of AdWords stuff now for lead gen, I just assign that agency profile as a manager to all my lead gen property sites, and search consoles, and analytics, and all of those, so that I can access everything from my agency profile. But, everything is owned by separate individual Google accounts.

The reason I do that, is because once again, I don’t want, if at any time something happens and they decide that Google doesn’t like my agency account anymore, and they shut it down, terminate it, I don’t want to lose all those accounts. Right? It would suck to have my agency account shut down, but at least I would still have all my lead gen assets because they’re all owned, you know, owned in air quotes, by other persona accounts. Okay. It’s all about mitigating risk, guys. It’s just about reducing risk to where if something bad were to happen you don’t lose it all.

I don’t know about you guys, but I’m not willing to take my chances and put everything underneath one account, and then end up losing it. Then, what do you do? You’re left, you’re stuck with nothing. You got to start all over again. At least if you do what I’m talking about, you know, you might lose an account or two, but you’re not going to lose everything. Right?All right, guys. Yeah. I know. Adam started yelling at me, again. All right, guys. We’re going to see everybody in Syndication Academy webinar in just a minute, hopefully. If you’re not there, come join us.

Adam: Sounds good. See you guys later.

Marco: Bye, everyone.

Bradley: Thanks, everybody. We’ll see you all on the next one. Any questions that didn’t get answered, guys, just submit them next week, or post in some of the groups, we’ll try to get to them. I cannot promise we’ll get to all of them. I know I will get to Roy’s, because I told him I would. We’ll see you all next week. Thanks for being here. Thanks, guys.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 129 this post was syndicated

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 129

Click on the video above to watch Episode 129 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://ift.tt/1NZu6N2.

  Announcement

Bradley: Okay. We’re live.

Adam: All right. Hey, everybody. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts, episode 129. This is the 26th of April 2017, and we’ve got part of the group, here. I think two, fifths of us are out traveling or flying, today. Myself, Bradley, and Marco ares here. Instead of doing the Brady Bunch up and down, I’ll just look over this way, and Bradley how are you doing, man?

Bradley: Good, man. I’m happy to be here. It’s a beautiful spring day. Got lots of good questions, already, and just looking forward to doing it.

Adam: That’s nice. Marco, how’s the weather, for you?

Marco: It’s sunny in the mornings and it rains every afternoon, now for three, four hours and then it goes away until the next day, it’s typical, but still warm.

Adam: Nice.

Marco: As I said, it’s either warm and raining, or warm and sunny.

Adam: Nice. I couldn’t help, I was looking at my background, if Wayne is watching, there’s Nike headphone inception going on, here, there’s the exact same pair behind me. Anyways. On to more important announcements, not about my headphones. I wanted to let everybody know, hopefully by the end of this Hump Day Hangout we’ll have a link for you guys, we’re busy getting it setup, because we just confirmed with Pavel, and I just missed out on the topic, real quick, because I was busy doing the background stuff. Bradley, do you want to tell them what the webinar this Monday is going to be about?

Bradley: Site Whizz. Apparently, he’s got another application that he built specifically for PBN stuff, but I can tell you I’m super freaking impressed with Rank Whizz and Pavel from the webinar that we had this week, on Monday. I mean, the guy really knows his stuff, and you can tell, and because of that the tool is super powerful, and from some of our Mastermind members that were commenting on a thread in the Mastermind about it, they were saying that it is indeed a very powerful tool. There is a bit of a learning curve, though. My point is after going through the training webinar with Pavel on Monday, and seeing what Rank Whizz does, and seeing how so many other tools that are kind of like duct taped together, you know, everybody has different tools to do different things, so many of that can be consolidated under one dashboard.

It makes sense to take the time to learn it, now honestly, I’ll be 100% transparent, I don’t run tools like that. I’ve hired people years ago to start doing that for me, because it’s not something I had any desire to do. We’re probably going to be and in fact, I’ve already talked to our link building manager, Deady, about hiring, or signing somebody to us to run Rank Whizz, specifically, because of some of the incredible stuff it can do. So, anyways, that said, if you haven’t seen that webinar go watch it and then the Site Whizz webinar, I can only imagine is equally as impressive, because of how much development, and care, and thought that Pavel put into the Rank Whizz. I’m really super excited to see what it does, because I’m clueless as to what Site Whizz does, so this is going to be 100% new to me, as well, but I’m really anxious to see it, so I encourage you guys to sign up or register for the webinar on Monday and attend.

Marco: What really drew my attention was that he actually talked about what I call the three elements, or the three components that a link must have to be considered good. Right? Which is relevancy, activity, and trust and authority, not necessarily in that order, but I mean he’s one of the few people that I know, Mike Pierce is another, and you guys know that to me he is by far the best technical SEO, anywhere, but for someone else to talk about it, and to know, and to understand the concepts, to me, that says it all, because he actually understands where Google is and the W3C are trying to take the semantic web, where everything is headed. So, if he understands what the future is then he’s already planning ahead, which is where everybody should be going. You never want to be reactive. Right? To search engines and upgrades. You always want to be proactive-

Bradley: Correct.

Marco: You always want to be in there, and you want to be ahead of the curve.

Bradley: Yeah. What’s next, Adam?

Adam: I believe, you guys have a webinar, you guys, I believe we, hopefully we’ll be there live, you guys are doing some structured data awesomeness. Correct me if I’m wrong. I believe that is May 8th. Right? The following Monday.

Bradley: Yes. At three o'clock, I think.

Marco: May 8th, at three o'clock. Yeah. It’s not ready, yet, nor is the signup ready, I mean, I’m still working through a whole bunch of information that I had to go through. Every time I think I have it, I keep discovering something new, so I it’s new for me, so trying to explain it in layman’s terms, so that everyone can understand. I know we have a lot of high level people, but I like to talk one level down for the person that’s just starting out, for the person that’s trying to grasp the concepts. I have to really understand what it is that they’re saying, so that I can try to explain it. All right. If you cannot explain it, you don’t know shit. That’s where I go. That’s where I am. I know that Bradley is co-presenter, so he’s going to be giving us his insights, and how he sees structured data working. He does so much local, so he knows about all that and how it works. We’re hoping to give a really good one, two presentation on structured data.

Bradley: Yeah. I agree. It’s going to be awesome.

Adam: Yeah. Everybody, we’ll get that out to you. As soon as we do, obviously, it takes a little time to set up the webinars and do all that, so once we get that, we’ll send out an email and let everybody know about it. Other than that, though, I think that’s good on announcements. You guys got anything, else?

Bradley: No. I was about to post on the event page for Ken Roberts. Hey, Ken, we did, we answered your question. Actually, Marco and I got together on Monday to consult about your question, and so it’s been answered in the Facebook group. The Syndication Academy Facebook group, I’m about to drop the link to that particular post, apparently Semantic Mastery’s doesn’t have you in a circle, Ken, because I cannot tag you, but anyways I’ll drop the link, or go back to The Syndication Academy, Ken, in the group and you should see the answers to your questions from last week, because we did end up, Marco and I scheduled time on Monday just so that we could talk about your question. Anyways.

Adam: One more thing, real quick, I was going to say, we just got the webinar setup, so I’m going to post the link in if you want to check out this awesome webinar, this Monday, with Sit whizz info, get signed up, and we’ll email out about that, but I wanted to make sure everybody has a chance today to hop on that.

Bradley: All right. Ken, I just posted, he’s here watching, I just posted the link to that Facebook post. If you’re not in Syndication Academy guys, you won’t be able to see it, but Ken will, because he’s there. All right. I’m going to grab the screen and we’re going to get into it. You guys cool with that?

Adam: Yeah. Let’s do this.

Bradley: Yeah. Let’s do it. Can you guys see me okay?

Adam: Yes. We can.

Marco: Yeah.

Bradley: All right. Very good. Let’s scroll down to the bottom. Got lots of good questions, already, so this is awesome. All right. Aussie is up first, “Hey, all. I got a website that have a tier one,” oh, couple things we didn’t mention, number one, if you guys are new to Hump Day Hangouts, there’s a couple things that we probably need to just make a note of this, Adam, every day, or every single week.

Adam: Yeah. I just did, and I didn’t want to stop you, I’m actually getting something to paste in there.

Bradley: Okay. Cool. I was going to say, if you guys aren’t aware of where to get Syndication Academy you can go to syndication.academy, again, that’s syndication.academy. That’s where a lot of the questions that we get on Hump Day Hangouts come from that training and that methodology, so that’s a lot of the times what we’re talking about, if you’re unfamiliar with that. Also, a lot of questions that we get, regularly, guys can be answered in our knowledge base, just so you know, and that is at support.semanticmastery.com, again, support.semanticmastery.com is our support portal, I guess, and there is a knowledge base and FAQ’s for various products that we have right there on that support site. I just wanted to kind of point you guys to that, in case you were unaware of those resources. All right. Anyways. Aussie says-

Marco: Before you move on, can I just mention something, so that we have it down.

Bradley: Sure.

Marco: When we get new people, we get the same question a lot of times over and over, and over, and I understand that we have new people coming in that will ask the same questions. Please, if you are new don’t think that we’re treating you like you are new, like you’re dumb, like you don’t know what you’re talking about, this forum, or what we do on Hump Day Hangouts is just for that, we don’t want you to feel bad. Please, ask your questions, if we say to go to whatever source, it’s because the answer is there. It’s been explained, and that’s the best way to start, if after that, after you’ve gone and looked at the resources, you still have a question, you’re welcome to come back and ask us a more in depth question or to clarify, but please just keep asking the questions and we’ll do the best we can to answer them.

Bradley: Yeah. Occasionally, if I get a question that’s been asked 1300 times, I do get a tad bit annoyed, but don’t misinterpret that as me being annoyed with the person asking the question, I’m annoyed with the question, not the person asking the question and I’m working on that, guys. I recognized that, that can come across as shitty, and so I’m working on that, and I apologize for that, but I just want you to know that certainly guys that’s what this is for. Hump Day Hangouts is for people to come and ask questions, new, or experienced alike, it makes no difference. Please, feel free to ask questions, here. Okay?

Decreasing Rankings Of A T1 Branded Ring Powered By PBNs

All right. Now, we’ll get to Aussie’s question, he says, “I got a website that I have a tier one branded ring, I powered up the ring with my PBN’s. The tier one ring became too powerful.” Okay. “My website got slapped by Google and all the pages that had links from the ring lost their rankings, is that possible? PS, the other pages that don’t get links from the ring didn’t lose their rankings and webmaster tool 400 links from WordPress, one of the links from blog spot, Trello, network shows in search results, some of them even page one, the Trello especially,” yeah, by the way, just a side note, I’ve noticed that, too, recently that the Trello pages or your profiles are ranking like crazy, I’m not sure why that is. “If I want personal support who would I contact with? I’m a member of Syndication Academy and Battle Plan, and RYS starter.” Okay. I’ve never seen this, what you’re describing here.

Now, hold on a minute, let me rephrase this, if it’s just a tier one branded ring, I’ve never seen any issues, whatsoever. I’ve not experienced this. Now, with multiple syndication networks connected to a website, for blog syndication, and this is precisely why I talk about, throughout the training, and throughout so many Hump Day Hangouts, about not connecting multiple syndication rings to a blog, for blog syndication, because I have had, I’ve gotten slapped from that before and it’s because of unnatural link profile, I’ve been slapped various ways. I’ve had algorithmic slaps, and I’ve had manual penalties, as well. Both, from connecting too many syndication networks to a blog, but that is precisely why we talk about primarily just using a tier one branded ring. If you’re going to use tier two, and I know Aussie, you’re not saying that you use tier two, but I’m just explaining this for the benefit of other people, as well, in part for why I don’t use multiple or tiered rings for blog syndication.

If you’re going to be using tiered rings, though, however, or syndication networks you want to add additional related content feeds, or sources, triggers, into the second tier networks to try to mask or hide footprint as much as possible. Remember, you’re not trying to hide a footprint on your branded ring, you’re trying to claim it. You’re trying to announce to the world that this is you on all these different locations, or this is your brand, or whatever. I’ve never experienced that, what you’re talking about here from a branded ring, but that’s also because, and Aussie, I don’t know what kind of content you’re publishing from your blog, so what I’m saying is if you’re publishing content from your main blog that’s syndicating to your ring, and you’re doing automated content, or positing maybe too frequently, or I don’t know what could cause that, but I know that there could be content issues that are causing that problem, as well, and it’s not necessarily from the syndication network. There’s some variables that I’m unaware of, here, from this one line, or two little sentences here isn’t enough detail for me to be able to make an educated guess as to what the problem is, other than it may be a content issue with what you’re posting from the blog, if that makes sense. Marco, or Adam, I guess, have you guys ever had any experience with this?

Marco: I’m looking at this and he says he has RYS starter, now, what he could be experiencing is the Google dance, we covered this before, and I just dropped the link at the top, so that he can go and take a look at it, I don’t know how long it’s been since he did this. Sometimes they disappear. It doesn’t mean that you got Google slapped. It just means that they’re dancing, and they’ll eventually come back, you wait 21 days until the Google dance has cleared, and then you go take a look at your ranking. You cannot SERP watch or you’ll drive yourself nuts-

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Watching it go up and down. It goes up and down, up and down. Then, eventually after that period it’s like a probationary period. Right? Where if you go and do anything, they extend it to, I think it’s either 60 or 80 days and if you do anything within that period then you can get permanently sand boxed, so I would say just relax, let it sit, let it stew, and see if it starts coming back. In the meantime, he can be looking at other things, whether he’s doing multiple posting, whether he has a multi tiered ring, which is not necessary for most keywords, but I see that, and if he did that, and if he powered it up, meaning if he built links to tier one and RYS it will dance, but it will come back and it will come back better than ever, if you leave it alone for the period of time that the Google dance requires, it’s riding the patent.

Bradley: Yeah. See, Aussie, I’ve got, I mean, I literally have websites and some clients, some are my own that I’ve had syndication networks around since 2012, and literally have thousands of links from WordPress and thousands of links from blog spot, or blogger, and Tumblr, and that kind of thing in search console, and never once have they ever been slapped. I cannot see it having anything to with the syndication network, unless there was a problem with the content, again, that you’re publishing. If it scrapped content, spun content, stuff like that, that could cause problems, and there’s no question.

Also, it could be if you’re using tiered networks, like I said, and you’re not masking or hiding your footprint, properly. That could also cause issues, but again, if you want to contact somebody, you could reach out to us in support, and if you’re in the Mastermind, we can provide, of course, support within the Mastermind, but if not it might, you might have to schedule with someone on one consulting time, but you can always send in a support ticket and propose what it is you need help with and we can figure out what the best course of action for you would be. Okay?

Proxies When Creating Branded IFTTT Networks For Clients

All right. David’s up, he says, “Same question as last week, tech glitch pause, if I’m creating branded IFTTT networks for clients, do I need proxies?” Okay, David. No. Yes and no. No, if you are limiting how many accounts you create. Let’s put it this way, when you go to start creating an account, or a network, you’re going to create a profile in a new Google account, and then you’re going to use that Google account to create the profile or the accounts on all the other network sites, network properties, Tumblr, WordPress, Gravatar, all that stuff. Right? That’s basically one account set, so as long as you’re only doing one or no more than two account sets in any 24 hour period, then you should be okay.

However, if you’re building for clients, I recommend having a minimum of five or just a handful, I mean, typically I always just start off with five proxies, dedicated proxies. The reason why is, because if you’re building them, which by the way, David, you shouldn’t be building them, honestly, you really shouldn’t be, but if you plan on doing it anyways, because you can outsource this kind of work, man, for a hell of a lot less than what your time is worth, I can tell you that. But, if you are planning on doing it, anyways, then I recommend just getting five dedicated proxies it will cost you like 10 bucks a month, man. Then, that way you have basically cycled through the proxies. In other words, if on Monday you start to create one account set with proxy number one, then on Tuesday create your next account set proxy number two, and by the time you get to Saturday, you cycle back up to proxy number one. Does that make sense?

Just, in other words, that way you’re spreading out new account sets per IP, so that you’re not, if you use just your own IP, and you’re creating a new account set, every day, at some point, I don’t know what the threshold is, but at some point, you’re probably going to have your IP flagged, by if not Google, by some of the other web two properties. I recommend that you always use, you know, you can use a VPN. I particularly don’t like to use VPN’s, because those are shared IP’s, even though a lot of them have big pools of IP’s now, I still don’t like to use them, because they’re shared. I prefer dedicated proxies, because then I know they’re clean. Okay. Again, I highly recommend that you’re going to do it, and also, David, if you’re going to be building networks and using proxies then to make your life a hell a lot easier I recommend that you pick up Browseo. Right now, Browseo, now has a monthly option it’s like 37 bucks a month.

The amount of headache that it will save you to be able to use Browseo and have multiple browsing sessions open using different proxies for different profiles and all that kind of stuff, the speed with which you’re able to accomplish your tasks by having that ability, or that function available is unbelievable. Right? It’s amazing. I’ve got Browseo open right now. I mean, I got it open all the time, now, because it’s just so freaking amazing. So, I highly recommend that you use that, as well, it’s going to make you a lot more efficient. As I mentioned, before, I certainly recommend, David, that you only build a few networks to get the hang of it and then outsource it. You can buy them from us, or you can hire your own virtual assistant, and put them through the training, and have them build so that you have an in house builder, that’s going to be your best option, you’ll make the most money that way, if you create your own in house builder, or excuse me, train your own in house builder. All right.

Boosting IFTTT Networks With Google Stacks

Next question. “After an IFTTT stack is in place, how much does a Google property stack, including interlinking docs, excuse me, interlocking Google Doc’s, et cetera, boost to network and what tier should they point at, and how soon can, should it be plugged in?” As far doing an RYS or a drive stack, I don’t see any reason to wait. Marco, can comment on that, but I don’t see where there’s any reason to wait, and you can link to all of the above. You can link to your money site, your Google My Business page, your tier one properties, because all it’s doing is reinforcing and validating the entity. Marco, do you have a comment on any [crosstalk 00:20:50].

Marco: No. I totally agree. No. We usually order IFTTT and RYS as soon as we get-

Bradley: The network back.

Marco: The verification from Google.

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: As soon as the verification, then we have that NAP, the way that it’s set in Google, that’s how it’s going everywhere else that we have it. I mean, I trained Justin, and I continuously go back and forth with him, he’s our RYS VA, he knows exactly what to do, how to hook everything up, so that you guys don’t have to do it. If you want to go through it, then the place for the training is RYS Academy. Otherwise, you’re left guessing on how everything is done.

Bradley: Yeah. All right. Hopefully, that helps, David. Yeah. The same order that whenever, I agree with Marco, if it’s going to be for a local business, it has an NAP, you’re going to want to wait until you have a verified address, and you probably already do, but if not, if it’s a new listing, a new business, then yeah, wait until you get the Google My Business page verified, so that then you have the NAP exactly as it’s listed in Google. I totally agree with that. Typically, what I’ll do with a new property is order the network, build the site, while the network is being built.

My curator, somebody from, one of my curators, will end up creating content for me like having at least a minimum of three curated posts ready to go, so that when the site is built, and the network has been connected, then I go in and publish those three posts. I’ll drip them out, over a course of a week, or so, and then from there I’ll order the, excuse me, the drive stack, and then I’ll order a press release, and then I’ll order the first batch of citations. That’s pretty much the exact same process that I go through for every single new site that I launch, or even a site that’s an existing site and I’m taking a new client or something like that, that’s the same process I have to go through, is still sitting up the network first, and having content produced while the network is being set up and all that kind of stuff. It’s the exact same timeline that I always use. Just because it works. There’s no reason, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

ReIndexing Videos To Google Sitemap

Ryan’s up. “I’ve added a section to my website that is a video library, the section lists all the videos from my YouTube channel. Each video has its own page, or we are hosting a YouTube video with transcript and description of what the video is about. My question, I created a separate video site map listing all the individual videos, once I submitted the site map, all 55 of the videos were indexed, but over time they are starting to get de-indexed in increments of five or 10 at a time, now, only nine videos are indexed. What could cause this? What can I do to troubleshoot why my videos are getting de-indexed? Everything in search console shows that my video site map has no errors, so I’m not sure what is causing this de-indexing.” It’s a good question, Ryan. I’m not 100% sure, either.

Adam: Description about what the video is about, is it actually the video description?

Bradley: It’s a transcript and a description. Probably like a summary, maybe, is what the description is.

Adam: Okay.

Marco: I mean, is the description being taken word for word from the video description?

Bradley: You mean, from the video description in YouTube?

Marco: Correct.

Bradley: Yeah. That can cause problems, Ryan. Good point, Marco. I don’t know that, that’s the case, Ryan, but if you are, here’s the thing, though, if you’re adding the transcription to the post, then that should make it unique enough, I mean, again, this is just speculative, but my experience with having video pages de-indexed, and I’m not talking about the videos themselves, I’m assuming the YouTube videos are still indexed, but the video pages on your site are being de-indexed, or falling out of the index, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ve been de-indexed. Right? De-indexed connotes like a penalty, but falling out of the index doesn’t necessarily, like that’s just a Google dance. Right? My point, Ryan, what I’m trying to get at is whenever I was doing a lot of video syndication networks, what I used to call broadcasting networks, which is I’d have self hosted WordPress sites with IFTTT syndication networks around those sites, and then when I would publish a video to a YouTube channel I’d have YouTube connected as a trigger to self hosted WordPress sites. I used to use a plugin to do that, but then I just switched it over to using IFTTT, and YouTube to WordPress. You can do that for self hosted sites, by the way.

Anyways, whenever I would have the applet set up at the time, they were called recipes, but the applets within the description, we always just talk about pasting the embed code, and a link to the video, and you can either do a naked URL, or an anchored text URL to the actual YouTube video itself, and then a link back to the channel and if that’s why our applets are set up the way that they are, because when I had those video broadcasting networks and I was auto syndicating videos to them any time I uploaded a video to a channel, any of those WordPress sites, those self hosted WordPress sites that imported the description, so remember that’s a token, a token inside of IFTTT that you can add, or what they call an ingredient.

You can add the description ingredient. Every single one of the sites that I had auto syndicated videos to that imported the description got de-indexed. Every single one of them. All the sites that I had didn’t import the video description from YouTube, didn’t get de-indexed. That very well could be it, is if you are importing, although, like I said, at least without testing this I would think that if you had the transcription in the blog post, but not in the video description on YouTube, that, that would make that blog post unique enough that it wouldn’t be de-indexed, but maybe it is causing an issue. That’s the only thing I can think of at this time. I mean, what other ideas could there be, Marco, anything else?

Marco: I would use video schema.

Bradley: You could do that.

Marco: I would use it totally, just to solidify it at the entity level. Right? At the coding level. I’d post the URL to Sistrix, which is really, really good about giving you some great video markup for rich snippets, and that might help. Everything tried first, get rid of the description, see what happens, and then mark them up.

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Use the schema generator that I posted and see what happens. Come back and let us know.

Bradley: Yeah. That could help. Wrapping those videos and video object markup could probably help, too, so let us know, Ryan, how that goes. Then, also, again, I’m curious to find out if that’s what you’re doing is importing the video descriptions, too, because if so, what I would recommend is omitting the video descriptions if it’s the same as what they are on YouTube, and then just using the transcription and that’s it.

Live Rank Sniper Vs Tube Rocket (Rocket Video Ranker Pro)

All right. Kurt’s up, he says, “A couple of questions. LRS has done a great job poking some keywords to Google page one, what I use Tube Rocket from Bill Cousins, instead of LRS to upload the videos into the poked sites, if not, what would I use to Tube Rocket for if LRS, works? I understand that Tube Rocker,” and he’s talking about Tube Authority Rocket, guys, otherwise known as Rocket Video Ranker Pro. We did a webinar with Bill Cousins a week or two ago, it’s a really, really cool tool. We got a lot of really, I did a full on case study bonus, too, which was pretty detailed. It’s probably two and a half hours worth of video in that case study alone.

He says, “I understand that Tube Rocket can make the videos unique, but if possible, how would I get them into the spots created by LRS, since it requires live stream, not just a video upload?” Okay. First of all, Kurt, yes, you can use Live Rank Sniper to stream a video into the scheduled live event, because those are essentially just place holders. Right? The schedule of live events are just place holders, however, the problem, and it’s not a problem, but the drawback of using Live Rank Sniper to stream to those scheduled live events is that it’s a slow process, because you have to open up Live Rank Sniper, it’s only a couple of clicks of a mouse, guys, it’s not like it’s difficult, it’s very simple to do, but it’s a slow process, because you have to allow the software to start the stream.

You click the upload or whatever, you click the tab, and then you go navigate to the file on your hard drive, click it, and then you tell it to start streaming, and it basically, you just wait for it to go through the process of firing up the live stream, starts to stream it, and then it closes it down, and all that. So, it’s a manual process, and my point was if you’ve poked a 100 keywords and you got 40 of them that are ranking on page one and/or page two, and you want to go upload, that’s a long time. A lot of time that you’re going to have to sit there and click the mouse a few times to get it to stream, it’s just going to take you a ton of time, Kurt. You can absolutely do that, there’s no problem. It’s just personally, it’s not efficient, for me, so I wouldn’t recommend doing that. You know, there is, Peter Drew, excuse me, I was drawing a blank, Peter Drew has Hangout Millionaire, which would integrate very, very well with Live Rank Sniper, because they’re from the same developer. They have the same interface and that kind of stuff.

I’m fairly certain that Hangout Millionaire can actually stream into those scheduled live events. That will automate the process, so that you don’t have to manually start every single stream. If you want to use the pre-scheduled events that are already ranking, then I would recommend that you upgrade to Hangout Millionaire, and use that. Okay? That’s the reason why I say that is because you’ve already got the place holders in place, and I’m fairly sure that Hangout Millionaire is able to stream to those scheduled live events, but you might have to check with Peter Drew and support first prior to signing up for that. Where Rocket Video Ranker, Tube Authority Rocket, they’re one and the same, really, shines is that it basically uploads videos and it uses that very unique process where it sets everything to private, and then you go in and turn them all public at the same time, and it just seems to work.

Again, I don’t know why it works, but it works. So, as long as it’s working, it’s something that can be exploited, and I’ve used it a lot, as well. Okay. But, no, you cannot use Rocket Video Ranker to stream to scheduled live events, it doesn’t work that way. Rocket Video Ranker is strictly an upload application, I mean it makes it so much faster and efficient to upload a bunch of videos all at one time to the same channel. But, there’s a limit to that, by the way, too. I ran into a couple of issues throughout the case study where I made a mistake with a batch of 30 uploads and I had to go in and delete them all, and then I went back and uploaded, again, to the same channel, and it denied me, it said, you’ve uploaded too many videos, and you must wait 24 hours before uploading anymore, or something like that, so just keep that in mind. Again, it’s a different animal. They can accomplish similar things, but remember Live Rank Sniper was specifically a keyword poking tool, I mean that’s what it was advertised as. Right? It’s a keyword poking tool. Yes, you can steam to pre-scheduled events, but it’s not really designed to do that, efficiently, in other words. Okay?

All right. Next, he says, “Also, I made a spintax with keywords and geotargeting for the LRS pokes, some of them landed on page one and two, and in the videos page, this was done without the long lat settings in Live Rank Sniper, if I needed to do long lat in LRS, would this require one poke per keyword?” Yes. Well, it would be one poke per location, Kurt. I did this same thing Kurt, in other words, when I was running my, I was basically targeting one keyword in multiple locations, so I didn’t use the geo coordinate setting, either. I left that blank, but if you want to target multiple keywords in one location, then you could use the geo, you know, the geo settings, excuse me, because then it’s all the same location, but I did the same thing, which you’re asking about, here, no, I just omitted that. Okay. “Or, could I just use the long lat for Chicago and geo target all the smaller communities and metros in Chicago with the keywords spintex with the same result and effectiveness?”

I don’t know, Kurt, I haven’t test that, personally, I would not want to use Chicago coordinates for suburbs around Chicago, because those suburbs each have their own coordinates. Right? Every point, anywhere at all geographically has its on coordinate. Right? So, even if you move a 100 yards to the right or the left, or north, south, east, west, it doesn’t matter my point is it still got a unique coordinate, so if you’re assigning a Chicago coordinate, excuse me, to all of the other locations that you’re targeting, then you’d be giving mixed messages to Google. I haven’t tested that, so I don’t know whether it would work or not, but to be honest with you it seems logical to me that it would cause problems. So, I would recommend just omitting the geocoordinates from those campaigns, unless you’re targeting one location.

Using Same Persona Rings To Multiple Products

All right. Alexander is up, “Should I use the same persona rings to multiple products? For example, the same 10% of the rings for two or more unrelated projects.” I don’t recommend that. I mean, you can to a point, Alexander, I would still try to keep them somewhat related. Here’s the thing guys, like for second tier networks, which are basically persona based networks, especially for like YouTube syndication’s, stuff like that, things can be a bit more general, but remember theming is really, really important. I’ll let Marco comment on this, but guys theming and relevancy is critical, now, and it’s only becoming more and more critical, so I’d recommend not spamming up some second tier networks, or persona based networks with a whole bunch of unrelated stuff. Try to keep it somewhat ballpark, somewhat in the same ballpark, because you’re going to get more power, and more authority built from any of those links, embeds, whatever, from those networks if they’re themed correctly. Marco, you got a comment for that?

Marco: No. I agree. We go back to what I mentioned in the beginning, which is the three components of a link. Right?

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Relevancy, activity on the link, trust and authority. If those three things are present then you have a great link, if you omit one of those then the link becomes not so great, what overcomes that is where the link is coming from, like if you can get that awesome boost from one of these super powerful websites where you get that link that just pops you to number one, then that’ll override the relevancy activity, but it has to be powerful, it cannot just be any old link, or it could have decent metrics and you would have to boost it, so that you power up the metrics to override the relevancy factor, but you still need all the other three components. I mean, I could talk about this all day, but we’re still going to come back to relevancy, activity, trust and authority, that’s what you need on a link. If you don’t have that, and most, again, most PBN’s are just there to provide a link, if you are doing just that then you’re better off going and renting. You know how you can go and rent from what used to be a PR7, or a PR8 you better off doing that, you can still do that and get a lot of bang for your money.

Multiple Google Sites For Different Personas

Bradley: Yeah. All right. Bacon is up, he says, “I have a question about Google sites, if you were to create multiple sites, do you need to do each under a different persona, since it is a Google property?” No. It’s not necessary. You can do it all, I mean, you can create multiple Google sites under one profile. It’s fine. Just keep in mind, that if you’re doing some nasty stuff with them, with any one of them, or a combination of them, you stand a chance of getting that account slapped and potentially terminated, and if you have multiple Google sites in that one account, and that account gets slapped, or terminated, then it could end up, you end up losing all of them. Again, I always talk about mitigating risk, guys, specifically because I just don’t want to have one where Google can come in and terminate one account, and I lose multiple digital assets, or multiple businesses, so to speak. Right?

That’s why I always try to separate things by different Google profiles, because then I can always connect, and add as a manager, and you can do that in Google sites, too, you can add a manager. So, you can add, you can create, let’s say you’re going to create 10 Google sites, have 10 different profiles, each owning its own Google site, and then you can connect your main profile, you, or Bacon, as a manager to all of them, so that you can manage all of them underneath one account. But, if anyone of those accounts were to get terminated, it will only affect the one Google site that was owned by that profile account. If that makes sense.

Different Content When Syndicating My Maps

So, it’s a matter of just trying to mitigate risk, it’s up to you. What’s your risk tolerance? Mine is very, very low. Okay. All right. Ken, says, “I know when syndicating a YouTube video we want to only push out the video and link back to the video without any other content on the page, would this hold true for syndicating my map, too? Is it better, worse, or does it matter to have content on the page with my map when syndicating it?” I don’t have enough experience with that end, but maybe Marco can shed some light on that.

Marco: Let me read through that, again. There’s a lot of stuff that I just cannot give away in this forum. I cannot give that away. Yeah. Content matters, whether it’s on the page, or somewhere else, makes a big difference. Relevance, right? You can push relevancy, because it will bleed through to the source, whatever you have on the page, the bot will come in read it, it will drop into the iframe, so to speak, it will drop into the hole, go down to see where the source is, and all of that, that the bot is holding, wherever it’s holding the information, follows through, so it helps. It helps more if it’s somewhere else. That’s as far as I’m going to take it.

Bradley: Yeah. I mean, I haven’t done a lot of map embedding stuff, so I don’t have a lot of experience with testing, Ken, on that, but I would agree that I would probably be, because the problem with YouTube with importing the description, is what I discussed earlier. Right? Is that every single time, or every property that I have while I was importing the descriptions would get de-indexed. That’s why I stopped doing it, but for maps that’s different. Again, I would want to try to put some content on the page, and then test it, but I don’t know, because I haven’t done it. I’d just follow Marco’s advice.

Resolving Suspended Google My Business Page

All right. Don Johnson, says, “I just tried to verify a UPS mailbox for Google My Business, and as soon as I submitted the postcard request, I got Google has suspended your page due to quality issues,” I can imagine, “I decided to delete the listing and try to come up with a plan. I knew you guys have started using PO Boxes with street delivery, which is what I told the client to do, but he didn’t listen. Just wondering if you have any advice how to save this address. I have been trying to convince this client for a couple years that we need an address in a larger neighboring city, and telling him, that, hey that didn’t work, we need another address is not something that I want to do. Does it mean that the UPS location is flagged as a mailbox location, or might there be a work around? Thanks.” It very well could be, Don. UPS mailboxes, in fact, there was one, I mentioned before on a couple of different times that, yes, I use PO boxes, now, and I have been for at least three years, now, and I keep all of them.

In other words, when I rent a mailbox, I don’t just rent it, or excuse me, a PO box, I don’t just rent it long enough to get the postcard, and then let it expire. I keep renewing them. I’ve got dozens of PO boxes and I pay for them every single year, and the reason I do that is because in the event that I ever have to reverify the business, I’ll have access to that location, that address. The reason I know how to do that is because that’s only happened twice to me in my entire career. Okay. But, one of the times that it happened it was a UPS mailbox for one of my tree service lead gen sites, and the UPS mailbox was like $36.00 a month, it was freaking ridiculous, and so I let that mailbox go, because I thought I’ll never need it again, and it’s too damn expensive. Sure enough, I got a reverification, I was required to reverify via mail, snail mail, and I didn’t have access to that location, so I lost that maps listing, because I didn’t have access to it.

So, that was a painful lesson for me, because that was a profitable, it generated quite a bit of revenue, that particular site, so anyways, my point is that ever since that time, first of all I stopped using UPS mailboxes, the UPS stores and stuff, I stopped using those and I went to PO boxes, and I keep them renewed. Now, with that said, you know, if you’ve been trying to tell a client something for two years, now, look, I understand, because you are kind of black hatting the maps listing. I’ve had clients that have been resistive to that, as well, so you know, I don’t know what else you can do other than tell them why it would benefit them to do that, and try to get them to do it the correct way, otherwise I don’t know what else you could do to tell them that. Short of you going out and getting the mailbox yourself, which I don’t recommend doing, but if it’s a client that’s paying you a good amount of money, look, I pay anywhere between $64.00 and $128.00 per year, per PO box.

It just depends on the population density of the area that I’m renting the box in. Right? The more populated it is, the more expensive it’s going to be, but I don’t have a single mailbox out of dozens of them that cost me more than, I think, 128, actually, that may not be true, it might be as much as 164, or 168 a year, or something like that. It’s still relatively inexpensive, so again I don’t recommend going out and buying a mailbox for a client unless there’s enough revenue in it for you, to make it worth your while. Here’s the thing, you might end up, there’s always the opportunity that you could use, you know, create other digital assets in that same area, and use that, you could try using that same mailbox, but I wouldn’t do that.

I would have a separate mailbox specifically for this client, and again, if it’s not something that you want to approach the client about, I wouldn’t mind approaching the client, just say, look, you got a UPS mailbox, those don’t work and here’s the reason why, recommend using a USPS box, it’s cheaper, and they’re still working, right now, and it’s going to benefit your business, and I recommend that you do it. That’s what I would say, otherwise you could do it on your own. Again, I don’t recommend doing that, Don, but if you’re making enough revenue from that client, it’s a nominal small price to pay to be able to get them results. Okay.

Differences Between FCS, RankerX, SEO Autopilot and Rankwyz

Kay says, “Please review the difference between FCS, RankerX, SEO Autopilot, and Rank Whizz. As a newbie, and budgeting for a growing business, I want to spend wisely. Also, please talk about any must have SEO tools. I realize this part may vary. Thanks, again, for everything you all do.” I cannot speak about the difference between all those tools, because I’ve never run any of them. So, honestly, Kay, I wish I could help you, but we would have to ask one of our more experienced link building, like tool users. For example, our link building manager, Deadia, which I’m sure he’d be happy to come on to a webinar and talk about that a little bit. He did it inside the Mastermind, I don’t know if we could get him on Hump Day Hangout, maybe. We’d have to ask him. But, he’s the one that runs all those tools.

I cannot answer you Kay, honestly, because I just don’t know. I don’t use any of those tools. I can tell you that I’m super, super, super impressed with Rank Whizz, and Pavel from the webinar that we did on Monday. I think if you were going to invest, and again, this is only based upon, not from using any of the tools, myself, but just based upon what I know and from what I saw on Monday with Rank Whizz is it seems like it can do everything that I could ever want a link building tool to do, in a very unique way. In fact, the content mill function of Rank Whizz is amazing, because they don’t scrape content based upon keywords, they do it based upon topics, which is the very first time I’ve ever heard of a link building tool do that, which speaks directly to RankBrain and Hummingbird. Right?

The semantic web algorithms, or the semantic web filters, or whatever, layers to the algorithm. My point is, that after going through that webinar, if you haven’t seen it yet, Kay, go through it, that we did with Pavel. I think it was two hours long, but it’s super, super powerful and if you’re going to invest time and money, well, money is the small part, an investment is the time. Right? The biggest investment is the time to learn how to use these tools. I would pick one that does everything and learn that one tool. So, that you don’t have to patch a bunch of stuff together and Rank Whizz apparently has all that. Guys, again, this is only based upon the webinar, because Pavel knows his stuff, he is a serious SEO. After hearing him talk for two hours, he really knows what he’s talking about, so I think it’s a very, very powerful tool and I would put my trust into that, but that’s just my assumption. Okay. I don’t have any proof behind that, because I don’t use any of those tools, myself. All right.

Marco: [crosstalk 00:47:26].

Bradley: Go ahead.

Marco: If I may, and if she’s a newbie, and she’s going to go into this expense, the expense has to be justified, well, the investment, let’s call it, because it’s actually an investment on the business.

Bradley: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Marco: So, you should have an SEO business if you’re going to be running this type of tool, because this tool is for tier two and out, and if you get good enough into T-1 never at the money site. Unless, you’re really surgical with the tool, you get so good with the tool that you can actually go at tier one, you know exactly what you’re doing. Before you get to all that you should have a really good foundation with everything else. I don’t know if she’s doing Syndication Academy, if she wants to do it for clients, if she wants to do things affiliate, what it is that she wants to do, she says she’s a newbie, which is really broad, what is she a newbie in? What is she trying to take on? What is she trying to do? Because if you go right for the link building tools, you have to have assets that you build links to.

Bradley: Yeah. Okay. Next is Stephen, and we’re running out of time here, very quickly, I can see we’re not going to be able to get to Roy’s question, again, either, we tried this last week and I know we spent some time on it, but apparently we didn’t have the whole scenario, and I know I passed over Steve. Roy, I’m assuming, I don’t think you’re in the Mastermind, Roy, but this might be one of those questions we’re going to have to answer in the Facebook group or something, because we’re running out of time. If you don’t mind, Roy, can you repost this in one of the Facebook groups, Syndication Academy, or the SEO tutorials group, either one, and then tag me on it, Roy, and I’ll spend some time going through and try to give you even if I’ve got to just record a quick screen cast video, or something and drop it in the comments section of that post, I’ll try to get to this, because apparently two weeks in a row you’ve posted this, and we must not have answered it last week, because we didn’t have the full information, and I’d hate to leave you hanging for another week, so if you don’t mind, post that one on Facebook groups. Okay? Like, we did for Ken, this week, we can make sure that we get you a proper answer. All right?

Diversifying When Building Google Properties/Stacks

All right. Steve, says, “Do you have any thoughts on diversity when building Google property stacks beyond all the eggs in one basket argument? For instance, would links from 10 Google Doc’s be as strong as one G Doc plus one sheet, plus one form, plus one G site?” I honestly don’t know. I like the diversity of different link types, so I just use them all. That seems like a question that would be more suited for RYS Academy. Can you comment on that Marco, or what do you think?

Marco: Yeah. Not all Google files are created equal.

Bradley: Right.

Marco: They each have different, like one will rank over the other, remember Doctor Gary did a test I think it was in the Mastermind, or in RYS Academy. It was one or the other, or both, probably, where he showed, which one ranks better than the other one, but we still like to do all of them, because we like to interlink. Having just one Google property linking to another, and those two linking to another, and everything linking back, creating the spider web silo, that powers up everything, and it shoots the relevancy out to the destination, which is what we like to do. So, the way we do it is we just keep, you know, we don’t do one or one file type, we do them all.

Bradley: Right.

Marco: We do as many as we can and we link them all together, and then send the power wherever we want.

Bradley: Which is more diversity. Right? I mean, it seems to me, I haven’t tested it, but I mean, I just, we always do every doc type that’s available to us, or every file type. Okay. Let’s see. We’ve got about four minutes. I’ll give another four minutes. Roy, like I said, please, because this is a big long question and with the second part, as well, so just post that in the Facebook group, man, and tag me on it, I’m giving you permission to tag me, so that we can make sure we answer that. I might answer Columbia’s real quick and then we’re going to wrap it up, guys. By the way, we have Syndication Academy update webinar at 5:00 p.m., so in about 10 minutes, guys. You should have been notified via the Facebook group, because I created an event, so if you’re in Syndication Academy, just go to the Facebook group, click on the events tab and you should find the event and it’s going to start here in about eight minutes.

Best Structure For A Lead Gen Site

Columbia says, “Could you describe the best structure for a lead gen site and what would be careful to avoid? Do you do this under your name, or a persona? Thanks.” No. I always do everything under personas, Columbia, as I mentioned earlier in this webinar, and as I often do in many, many webinars, I try to mitigate my risk. So, I always set up a new persona for every lead gen site that set up. Then, I add myself as a manager, so I can add, for example, like I set up, for every lead gen site that I set up, guys, I set up a brand new Google account. I create a new persona, and then I create the website, and I add the Google My Business listing underneath that persona, the Google plus pages, I do all, Google Analytics, search console, tag manager, everything.

The only thing that I don’t create a new account for every time is AdWords, but everything else I do. Then, what I do is I just add myself, or one of my agency profiles, like, I have an AdWords manager account that’s underneath, it’s basically an agency Google profile that I created specifically to run an AdWords manager account, so since I do most everything in AdWords for lead gen, now, I do some Maps SEO, but pretty much I do a ton of AdWords stuff now for lead gen, I just assign that agency profile as a manager to all my lead gen property sites, and search consoles, and analytics, and all of those, so that I can access everything from my agency profile. But, everything is owned by separate individual Google accounts.

The reason I do that, is because once again, I don’t want, if at any time something happens and they decide that Google doesn’t like my agency account anymore, and they shut it down, terminate it, I don’t want to lose all those accounts. Right? It would suck to have my agency account shut down, but at least I would still have all my lead gen assets because they’re all owned, you know, owned in air quotes, by other persona accounts. Okay. It’s all about mitigating risk, guys. It’s just about reducing risk to where if something bad were to happen you don’t lose it all.

I don’t know about you guys, but I’m not willing to take my chances and put everything underneath one account, and then end up losing it. Then, what do you do? You’re left, you’re stuck with nothing. You got to start all over again. At least if you do what I’m talking about, you know, you might lose an account or two, but you’re not going to lose everything. Right?All right, guys. Yeah. I know. Adam started yelling at me, again. All right, guys. We’re going to see everybody in Syndication Academy webinar in just a minute, hopefully. If you’re not there, come join us.

Adam: Sounds good. See you guys later.

Marco: Bye, everyone.

Bradley: Thanks, everybody. We’ll see you all on the next one. Any questions that didn’t get answered, guys, just submit them next week, or post in some of the groups, we’ll try to get to them. I cannot promise we’ll get to all of them. I know I will get to Roy’s, because I told him I would. We’ll see you all next week. Thanks for being here. Thanks, guys.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 129 published first on your-t1-blog-url

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 129

Click on the video above to watch Episode 129 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://ift.tt/1NZu6N2.

  Announcement

Bradley: Okay. We’re live.

Adam: All right. Hey, everybody. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts, episode 129. This is the 26th of April 2017, and we’ve got part of the group, here. I think two, fifths of us are out traveling or flying, today. Myself, Bradley, and Marco ares here. Instead of doing the Brady Bunch up and down, I’ll just look over this way, and Bradley how are you doing, man?

Bradley: Good, man. I’m happy to be here. It’s a beautiful spring day. Got lots of good questions, already, and just looking forward to doing it.

Adam: That’s nice. Marco, how’s the weather, for you?

Marco: It’s sunny in the mornings and it rains every afternoon, now for three, four hours and then it goes away until the next day, it’s typical, but still warm.

Adam: Nice.

Marco: As I said, it’s either warm and raining, or warm and sunny.

Adam: Nice. I couldn’t help, I was looking at my background, if Wayne is watching, there’s Nike headphone inception going on, here, there’s the exact same pair behind me. Anyways. On to more important announcements, not about my headphones. I wanted to let everybody know, hopefully by the end of this Hump Day Hangout we’ll have a link for you guys, we’re busy getting it setup, because we just confirmed with Pavel, and I just missed out on the topic, real quick, because I was busy doing the background stuff. Bradley, do you want to tell them what the webinar this Monday is going to be about?

Bradley: Site Whizz. Apparently, he’s got another application that he built specifically for PBN stuff, but I can tell you I’m super freaking impressed with Rank Whizz and Pavel from the webinar that we had this week, on Monday. I mean, the guy really knows his stuff, and you can tell, and because of that the tool is super powerful, and from some of our Mastermind members that were commenting on a thread in the Mastermind about it, they were saying that it is indeed a very powerful tool. There is a bit of a learning curve, though. My point is after going through the training webinar with Pavel on Monday, and seeing what Rank Whizz does, and seeing how so many other tools that are kind of like duct taped together, you know, everybody has different tools to do different things, so many of that can be consolidated under one dashboard.

It makes sense to take the time to learn it, now honestly, I’ll be 100% transparent, I don’t run tools like that. I’ve hired people years ago to start doing that for me, because it’s not something I had any desire to do. We’re probably going to be and in fact, I’ve already talked to our link building manager, Deady, about hiring, or signing somebody to us to run Rank Whizz, specifically, because of some of the incredible stuff it can do. So, anyways, that said, if you haven’t seen that webinar go watch it and then the Site Whizz webinar, I can only imagine is equally as impressive, because of how much development, and care, and thought that Pavel put into the Rank Whizz. I’m really super excited to see what it does, because I’m clueless as to what Site Whizz does, so this is going to be 100% new to me, as well, but I’m really anxious to see it, so I encourage you guys to sign up or register for the webinar on Monday and attend.

Marco: What really drew my attention was that he actually talked about what I call the three elements, or the three components that a link must have to be considered good. Right? Which is relevancy, activity, and trust and authority, not necessarily in that order, but I mean he’s one of the few people that I know, Mike Pierce is another, and you guys know that to me he is by far the best technical SEO, anywhere, but for someone else to talk about it, and to know, and to understand the concepts, to me, that says it all, because he actually understands where Google is and the W3C are trying to take the semantic web, where everything is headed. So, if he understands what the future is then he’s already planning ahead, which is where everybody should be going. You never want to be reactive. Right? To search engines and upgrades. You always want to be proactive-

Bradley: Correct.

Marco: You always want to be in there, and you want to be ahead of the curve.

Bradley: Yeah. What’s next, Adam?

Adam: I believe, you guys have a webinar, you guys, I believe we, hopefully we’ll be there live, you guys are doing some structured data awesomeness. Correct me if I’m wrong. I believe that is May 8th. Right? The following Monday.

Bradley: Yes. At three o'clock, I think.

Marco: May 8th, at three o'clock. Yeah. It’s not ready, yet, nor is the signup ready, I mean, I’m still working through a whole bunch of information that I had to go through. Every time I think I have it, I keep discovering something new, so I it’s new for me, so trying to explain it in layman’s terms, so that everyone can understand. I know we have a lot of high level people, but I like to talk one level down for the person that’s just starting out, for the person that’s trying to grasp the concepts. I have to really understand what it is that they’re saying, so that I can try to explain it. All right. If you cannot explain it, you don’t know shit. That’s where I go. That’s where I am. I know that Bradley is co-presenter, so he’s going to be giving us his insights, and how he sees structured data working. He does so much local, so he knows about all that and how it works. We’re hoping to give a really good one, two presentation on structured data.

Bradley: Yeah. I agree. It’s going to be awesome.

Adam: Yeah. Everybody, we’ll get that out to you. As soon as we do, obviously, it takes a little time to set up the webinars and do all that, so once we get that, we’ll send out an email and let everybody know about it. Other than that, though, I think that’s good on announcements. You guys got anything, else?

Bradley: No. I was about to post on the event page for Ken Roberts. Hey, Ken, we did, we answered your question. Actually, Marco and I got together on Monday to consult about your question, and so it’s been answered in the Facebook group. The Syndication Academy Facebook group, I’m about to drop the link to that particular post, apparently Semantic Mastery’s doesn’t have you in a circle, Ken, because I cannot tag you, but anyways I’ll drop the link, or go back to The Syndication Academy, Ken, in the group and you should see the answers to your questions from last week, because we did end up, Marco and I scheduled time on Monday just so that we could talk about your question. Anyways.

Adam: One more thing, real quick, I was going to say, we just got the webinar setup, so I’m going to post the link in if you want to check out this awesome webinar, this Monday, with Sit whizz info, get signed up, and we’ll email out about that, but I wanted to make sure everybody has a chance today to hop on that.

Bradley: All right. Ken, I just posted, he’s here watching, I just posted the link to that Facebook post. If you’re not in Syndication Academy guys, you won’t be able to see it, but Ken will, because he’s there. All right. I’m going to grab the screen and we’re going to get into it. You guys cool with that?

Adam: Yeah. Let’s do this.

Bradley: Yeah. Let’s do it. Can you guys see me okay?

Adam: Yes. We can.

Marco: Yeah.

Bradley: All right. Very good. Let’s scroll down to the bottom. Got lots of good questions, already, so this is awesome. All right. Aussie is up first, “Hey, all. I got a website that have a tier one,” oh, couple things we didn’t mention, number one, if you guys are new to Hump Day Hangouts, there’s a couple things that we probably need to just make a note of this, Adam, every day, or every single week.

Adam: Yeah. I just did, and I didn’t want to stop you, I’m actually getting something to paste in there.

Bradley: Okay. Cool. I was going to say, if you guys aren’t aware of where to get Syndication Academy you can go to syndication.academy, again, that’s syndication.academy. That’s where a lot of the questions that we get on Hump Day Hangouts come from that training and that methodology, so that’s a lot of the times what we’re talking about, if you’re unfamiliar with that. Also, a lot of questions that we get, regularly, guys can be answered in our knowledge base, just so you know, and that is at support.semanticmastery.com, again, support.semanticmastery.com is our support portal, I guess, and there is a knowledge base and FAQ’s for various products that we have right there on that support site. I just wanted to kind of point you guys to that, in case you were unaware of those resources. All right. Anyways. Aussie says-

Marco: Before you move on, can I just mention something, so that we have it down.

Bradley: Sure.

Marco: When we get new people, we get the same question a lot of times over and over, and over, and I understand that we have new people coming in that will ask the same questions. Please, if you are new don’t think that we’re treating you like you are new, like you’re dumb, like you don’t know what you’re talking about, this forum, or what we do on Hump Day Hangouts is just for that, we don’t want you to feel bad. Please, ask your questions, if we say to go to whatever source, it’s because the answer is there. It’s been explained, and that’s the best way to start, if after that, after you’ve gone and looked at the resources, you still have a question, you’re welcome to come back and ask us a more in depth question or to clarify, but please just keep asking the questions and we’ll do the best we can to answer them.

Bradley: Yeah. Occasionally, if I get a question that’s been asked 1300 times, I do get a tad bit annoyed, but don’t misinterpret that as me being annoyed with the person asking the question, I’m annoyed with the question, not the person asking the question and I’m working on that, guys. I recognized that, that can come across as shitty, and so I’m working on that, and I apologize for that, but I just want you to know that certainly guys that’s what this is for. Hump Day Hangouts is for people to come and ask questions, new, or experienced alike, it makes no difference. Please, feel free to ask questions, here. Okay?

Decreasing Rankings Of A T1 Branded Ring Powered By PBNs

All right. Now, we’ll get to Aussie’s question, he says, “I got a website that I have a tier one branded ring, I powered up the ring with my PBN’s. The tier one ring became too powerful.” Okay. “My website got slapped by Google and all the pages that had links from the ring lost their rankings, is that possible? PS, the other pages that don’t get links from the ring didn’t lose their rankings and webmaster tool 400 links from WordPress, one of the links from blog spot, Trello, network shows in search results, some of them even page one, the Trello especially,” yeah, by the way, just a side note, I’ve noticed that, too, recently that the Trello pages or your profiles are ranking like crazy, I’m not sure why that is. “If I want personal support who would I contact with? I’m a member of Syndication Academy and Battle Plan, and RYS starter.” Okay. I’ve never seen this, what you’re describing here.

Now, hold on a minute, let me rephrase this, if it’s just a tier one branded ring, I’ve never seen any issues, whatsoever. I’ve not experienced this. Now, with multiple syndication networks connected to a website, for blog syndication, and this is precisely why I talk about, throughout the training, and throughout so many Hump Day Hangouts, about not connecting multiple syndication rings to a blog, for blog syndication, because I have had, I’ve gotten slapped from that before and it’s because of unnatural link profile, I’ve been slapped various ways. I’ve had algorithmic slaps, and I’ve had manual penalties, as well. Both, from connecting too many syndication networks to a blog, but that is precisely why we talk about primarily just using a tier one branded ring. If you’re going to use tier two, and I know Aussie, you’re not saying that you use tier two, but I’m just explaining this for the benefit of other people, as well, in part for why I don’t use multiple or tiered rings for blog syndication.

If you’re going to be using tiered rings, though, however, or syndication networks you want to add additional related content feeds, or sources, triggers, into the second tier networks to try to mask or hide footprint as much as possible. Remember, you’re not trying to hide a footprint on your branded ring, you’re trying to claim it. You’re trying to announce to the world that this is you on all these different locations, or this is your brand, or whatever. I’ve never experienced that, what you’re talking about here from a branded ring, but that’s also because, and Aussie, I don’t know what kind of content you’re publishing from your blog, so what I’m saying is if you’re publishing content from your main blog that’s syndicating to your ring, and you’re doing automated content, or positing maybe too frequently, or I don’t know what could cause that, but I know that there could be content issues that are causing that problem, as well, and it’s not necessarily from the syndication network. There’s some variables that I’m unaware of, here, from this one line, or two little sentences here isn’t enough detail for me to be able to make an educated guess as to what the problem is, other than it may be a content issue with what you’re posting from the blog, if that makes sense. Marco, or Adam, I guess, have you guys ever had any experience with this?

Marco: I’m looking at this and he says he has RYS starter, now, what he could be experiencing is the Google dance, we covered this before, and I just dropped the link at the top, so that he can go and take a look at it, I don’t know how long it’s been since he did this. Sometimes they disappear. It doesn’t mean that you got Google slapped. It just means that they’re dancing, and they’ll eventually come back, you wait 21 days until the Google dance has cleared, and then you go take a look at your ranking. You cannot SERP watch or you’ll drive yourself nuts-

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Watching it go up and down. It goes up and down, up and down. Then, eventually after that period it’s like a probationary period. Right? Where if you go and do anything, they extend it to, I think it’s either 60 or 80 days and if you do anything within that period then you can get permanently sand boxed, so I would say just relax, let it sit, let it stew, and see if it starts coming back. In the meantime, he can be looking at other things, whether he’s doing multiple posting, whether he has a multi tiered ring, which is not necessary for most keywords, but I see that, and if he did that, and if he powered it up, meaning if he built links to tier one and RYS it will dance, but it will come back and it will come back better than ever, if you leave it alone for the period of time that the Google dance requires, it’s riding the patent.

Bradley: Yeah. See, Aussie, I’ve got, I mean, I literally have websites and some clients, some are my own that I’ve had syndication networks around since 2012, and literally have thousands of links from WordPress and thousands of links from blog spot, or blogger, and Tumblr, and that kind of thing in search console, and never once have they ever been slapped. I cannot see it having anything to with the syndication network, unless there was a problem with the content, again, that you’re publishing. If it scrapped content, spun content, stuff like that, that could cause problems, and there’s no question.

Also, it could be if you’re using tiered networks, like I said, and you’re not masking or hiding your footprint, properly. That could also cause issues, but again, if you want to contact somebody, you could reach out to us in support, and if you’re in the Mastermind, we can provide, of course, support within the Mastermind, but if not it might, you might have to schedule with someone on one consulting time, but you can always send in a support ticket and propose what it is you need help with and we can figure out what the best course of action for you would be. Okay?

Proxies When Creating Branded IFTTT Networks For Clients

All right. David’s up, he says, “Same question as last week, tech glitch pause, if I’m creating branded IFTTT networks for clients, do I need proxies?” Okay, David. No. Yes and no. No, if you are limiting how many accounts you create. Let’s put it this way, when you go to start creating an account, or a network, you’re going to create a profile in a new Google account, and then you’re going to use that Google account to create the profile or the accounts on all the other network sites, network properties, Tumblr, WordPress, Gravatar, all that stuff. Right? That’s basically one account set, so as long as you’re only doing one or no more than two account sets in any 24 hour period, then you should be okay.

However, if you’re building for clients, I recommend having a minimum of five or just a handful, I mean, typically I always just start off with five proxies, dedicated proxies. The reason why is, because if you’re building them, which by the way, David, you shouldn’t be building them, honestly, you really shouldn’t be, but if you plan on doing it anyways, because you can outsource this kind of work, man, for a hell of a lot less than what your time is worth, I can tell you that. But, if you are planning on doing it, anyways, then I recommend just getting five dedicated proxies it will cost you like 10 bucks a month, man. Then, that way you have basically cycled through the proxies. In other words, if on Monday you start to create one account set with proxy number one, then on Tuesday create your next account set proxy number two, and by the time you get to Saturday, you cycle back up to proxy number one. Does that make sense?

Just, in other words, that way you’re spreading out new account sets per IP, so that you’re not, if you use just your own IP, and you’re creating a new account set, every day, at some point, I don’t know what the threshold is, but at some point, you’re probably going to have your IP flagged, by if not Google, by some of the other web two properties. I recommend that you always use, you know, you can use a VPN. I particularly don’t like to use VPN’s, because those are shared IP’s, even though a lot of them have big pools of IP’s now, I still don’t like to use them, because they’re shared. I prefer dedicated proxies, because then I know they’re clean. Okay. Again, I highly recommend that you’re going to do it, and also, David, if you’re going to be building networks and using proxies then to make your life a hell a lot easier I recommend that you pick up Browseo. Right now, Browseo, now has a monthly option it’s like 37 bucks a month.

The amount of headache that it will save you to be able to use Browseo and have multiple browsing sessions open using different proxies for different profiles and all that kind of stuff, the speed with which you’re able to accomplish your tasks by having that ability, or that function available is unbelievable. Right? It’s amazing. I’ve got Browseo open right now. I mean, I got it open all the time, now, because it’s just so freaking amazing. So, I highly recommend that you use that, as well, it’s going to make you a lot more efficient. As I mentioned, before, I certainly recommend, David, that you only build a few networks to get the hang of it and then outsource it. You can buy them from us, or you can hire your own virtual assistant, and put them through the training, and have them build so that you have an in house builder, that’s going to be your best option, you’ll make the most money that way, if you create your own in house builder, or excuse me, train your own in house builder. All right.

Boosting IFTTT Networks With Google Stacks

Next question. “After an IFTTT stack is in place, how much does a Google property stack, including interlinking docs, excuse me, interlocking Google Doc’s, et cetera, boost to network and what tier should they point at, and how soon can, should it be plugged in?” As far doing an RYS or a drive stack, I don’t see any reason to wait. Marco, can comment on that, but I don’t see where there’s any reason to wait, and you can link to all of the above. You can link to your money site, your Google My Business page, your tier one properties, because all it’s doing is reinforcing and validating the entity. Marco, do you have a comment on any [crosstalk 00:20:50].

Marco: No. I totally agree. No. We usually order IFTTT and RYS as soon as we get-

Bradley: The network back.

Marco: The verification from Google.

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: As soon as the verification, then we have that NAP, the way that it’s set in Google, that’s how it’s going everywhere else that we have it. I mean, I trained Justin, and I continuously go back and forth with him, he’s our RYS VA, he knows exactly what to do, how to hook everything up, so that you guys don’t have to do it. If you want to go through it, then the place for the training is RYS Academy. Otherwise, you’re left guessing on how everything is done.

Bradley: Yeah. All right. Hopefully, that helps, David. Yeah. The same order that whenever, I agree with Marco, if it’s going to be for a local business, it has an NAP, you’re going to want to wait until you have a verified address, and you probably already do, but if not, if it’s a new listing, a new business, then yeah, wait until you get the Google My Business page verified, so that then you have the NAP exactly as it’s listed in Google. I totally agree with that. Typically, what I’ll do with a new property is order the network, build the site, while the network is being built.

My curator, somebody from, one of my curators, will end up creating content for me like having at least a minimum of three curated posts ready to go, so that when the site is built, and the network has been connected, then I go in and publish those three posts. I’ll drip them out, over a course of a week, or so, and then from there I’ll order the, excuse me, the drive stack, and then I’ll order a press release, and then I’ll order the first batch of citations. That’s pretty much the exact same process that I go through for every single new site that I launch, or even a site that’s an existing site and I’m taking a new client or something like that, that’s the same process I have to go through, is still sitting up the network first, and having content produced while the network is being set up and all that kind of stuff. It’s the exact same timeline that I always use. Just because it works. There’s no reason, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

ReIndexing Videos To Google Sitemap

Ryan’s up. “I’ve added a section to my website that is a video library, the section lists all the videos from my YouTube channel. Each video has its own page, or we are hosting a YouTube video with transcript and description of what the video is about. My question, I created a separate video site map listing all the individual videos, once I submitted the site map, all 55 of the videos were indexed, but over time they are starting to get de-indexed in increments of five or 10 at a time, now, only nine videos are indexed. What could cause this? What can I do to troubleshoot why my videos are getting de-indexed? Everything in search console shows that my video site map has no errors, so I’m not sure what is causing this de-indexing.” It’s a good question, Ryan. I’m not 100% sure, either.

Adam: Description about what the video is about, is it actually the video description?

Bradley: It’s a transcript and a description. Probably like a summary, maybe, is what the description is.

Adam: Okay.

Marco: I mean, is the description being taken word for word from the video description?

Bradley: You mean, from the video description in YouTube?

Marco: Correct.

Bradley: Yeah. That can cause problems, Ryan. Good point, Marco. I don’t know that, that’s the case, Ryan, but if you are, here’s the thing, though, if you’re adding the transcription to the post, then that should make it unique enough, I mean, again, this is just speculative, but my experience with having video pages de-indexed, and I’m not talking about the videos themselves, I’m assuming the YouTube videos are still indexed, but the video pages on your site are being de-indexed, or falling out of the index, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ve been de-indexed. Right? De-indexed connotes like a penalty, but falling out of the index doesn’t necessarily, like that’s just a Google dance. Right? My point, Ryan, what I’m trying to get at is whenever I was doing a lot of video syndication networks, what I used to call broadcasting networks, which is I’d have self hosted WordPress sites with IFTTT syndication networks around those sites, and then when I would publish a video to a YouTube channel I’d have YouTube connected as a trigger to self hosted WordPress sites. I used to use a plugin to do that, but then I just switched it over to using IFTTT, and YouTube to WordPress. You can do that for self hosted sites, by the way.

Anyways, whenever I would have the applet set up at the time, they were called recipes, but the applets within the description, we always just talk about pasting the embed code, and a link to the video, and you can either do a naked URL, or an anchored text URL to the actual YouTube video itself, and then a link back to the channel and if that’s why our applets are set up the way that they are, because when I had those video broadcasting networks and I was auto syndicating videos to them any time I uploaded a video to a channel, any of those WordPress sites, those self hosted WordPress sites that imported the description, so remember that’s a token, a token inside of IFTTT that you can add, or what they call an ingredient.

You can add the description ingredient. Every single one of the sites that I had auto syndicated videos to that imported the description got de-indexed. Every single one of them. All the sites that I had didn’t import the video description from YouTube, didn’t get de-indexed. That very well could be it, is if you are importing, although, like I said, at least without testing this I would think that if you had the transcription in the blog post, but not in the video description on YouTube, that, that would make that blog post unique enough that it wouldn’t be de-indexed, but maybe it is causing an issue. That’s the only thing I can think of at this time. I mean, what other ideas could there be, Marco, anything else?

Marco: I would use video schema.

Bradley: You could do that.

Marco: I would use it totally, just to solidify it at the entity level. Right? At the coding level. I’d post the URL to Sistrix, which is really, really good about giving you some great video markup for rich snippets, and that might help. Everything tried first, get rid of the description, see what happens, and then mark them up.

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Use the schema generator that I posted and see what happens. Come back and let us know.

Bradley: Yeah. That could help. Wrapping those videos and video object markup could probably help, too, so let us know, Ryan, how that goes. Then, also, again, I’m curious to find out if that’s what you’re doing is importing the video descriptions, too, because if so, what I would recommend is omitting the video descriptions if it’s the same as what they are on YouTube, and then just using the transcription and that’s it.

Live Rank Sniper Vs Tube Rocket (Rocket Video Ranker Pro)

All right. Kurt’s up, he says, “A couple of questions. LRS has done a great job poking some keywords to Google page one, what I use Tube Rocket from Bill Cousins, instead of LRS to upload the videos into the poked sites, if not, what would I use to Tube Rocket for if LRS, works? I understand that Tube Rocker,” and he’s talking about Tube Authority Rocket, guys, otherwise known as Rocket Video Ranker Pro. We did a webinar with Bill Cousins a week or two ago, it’s a really, really cool tool. We got a lot of really, I did a full on case study bonus, too, which was pretty detailed. It’s probably two and a half hours worth of video in that case study alone.

He says, “I understand that Tube Rocket can make the videos unique, but if possible, how would I get them into the spots created by LRS, since it requires live stream, not just a video upload?” Okay. First of all, Kurt, yes, you can use Live Rank Sniper to stream a video into the scheduled live event, because those are essentially just place holders. Right? The schedule of live events are just place holders, however, the problem, and it’s not a problem, but the drawback of using Live Rank Sniper to stream to those scheduled live events is that it’s a slow process, because you have to open up Live Rank Sniper, it’s only a couple of clicks of a mouse, guys, it’s not like it’s difficult, it’s very simple to do, but it’s a slow process, because you have to allow the software to start the stream.

You click the upload or whatever, you click the tab, and then you go navigate to the file on your hard drive, click it, and then you tell it to start streaming, and it basically, you just wait for it to go through the process of firing up the live stream, starts to stream it, and then it closes it down, and all that. So, it’s a manual process, and my point was if you’ve poked a 100 keywords and you got 40 of them that are ranking on page one and/or page two, and you want to go upload, that’s a long time. A lot of time that you’re going to have to sit there and click the mouse a few times to get it to stream, it’s just going to take you a ton of time, Kurt. You can absolutely do that, there’s no problem. It’s just personally, it’s not efficient, for me, so I wouldn’t recommend doing that. You know, there is, Peter Drew, excuse me, I was drawing a blank, Peter Drew has Hangout Millionaire, which would integrate very, very well with Live Rank Sniper, because they’re from the same developer. They have the same interface and that kind of stuff.

I’m fairly certain that Hangout Millionaire can actually stream into those scheduled live events. That will automate the process, so that you don’t have to manually start every single stream. If you want to use the pre-scheduled events that are already ranking, then I would recommend that you upgrade to Hangout Millionaire, and use that. Okay? That’s the reason why I say that is because you’ve already got the place holders in place, and I’m fairly sure that Hangout Millionaire is able to stream to those scheduled live events, but you might have to check with Peter Drew and support first prior to signing up for that. Where Rocket Video Ranker, Tube Authority Rocket, they’re one and the same, really, shines is that it basically uploads videos and it uses that very unique process where it sets everything to private, and then you go in and turn them all public at the same time, and it just seems to work.

Again, I don’t know why it works, but it works. So, as long as it’s working, it’s something that can be exploited, and I’ve used it a lot, as well. Okay. But, no, you cannot use Rocket Video Ranker to stream to scheduled live events, it doesn’t work that way. Rocket Video Ranker is strictly an upload application, I mean it makes it so much faster and efficient to upload a bunch of videos all at one time to the same channel. But, there’s a limit to that, by the way, too. I ran into a couple of issues throughout the case study where I made a mistake with a batch of 30 uploads and I had to go in and delete them all, and then I went back and uploaded, again, to the same channel, and it denied me, it said, you’ve uploaded too many videos, and you must wait 24 hours before uploading anymore, or something like that, so just keep that in mind. Again, it’s a different animal. They can accomplish similar things, but remember Live Rank Sniper was specifically a keyword poking tool, I mean that’s what it was advertised as. Right? It’s a keyword poking tool. Yes, you can steam to pre-scheduled events, but it’s not really designed to do that, efficiently, in other words. Okay?

All right. Next, he says, “Also, I made a spintax with keywords and geotargeting for the LRS pokes, some of them landed on page one and two, and in the videos page, this was done without the long lat settings in Live Rank Sniper, if I needed to do long lat in LRS, would this require one poke per keyword?” Yes. Well, it would be one poke per location, Kurt. I did this same thing Kurt, in other words, when I was running my, I was basically targeting one keyword in multiple locations, so I didn’t use the geo coordinate setting, either. I left that blank, but if you want to target multiple keywords in one location, then you could use the geo, you know, the geo settings, excuse me, because then it’s all the same location, but I did the same thing, which you’re asking about, here, no, I just omitted that. Okay. “Or, could I just use the long lat for Chicago and geo target all the smaller communities and metros in Chicago with the keywords spintex with the same result and effectiveness?”

I don’t know, Kurt, I haven’t test that, personally, I would not want to use Chicago coordinates for suburbs around Chicago, because those suburbs each have their own coordinates. Right? Every point, anywhere at all geographically has its on coordinate. Right? So, even if you move a 100 yards to the right or the left, or north, south, east, west, it doesn’t matter my point is it still got a unique coordinate, so if you’re assigning a Chicago coordinate, excuse me, to all of the other locations that you’re targeting, then you’d be giving mixed messages to Google. I haven’t tested that, so I don’t know whether it would work or not, but to be honest with you it seems logical to me that it would cause problems. So, I would recommend just omitting the geocoordinates from those campaigns, unless you’re targeting one location.

Using Same Persona Rings To Multiple Products

All right. Alexander is up, “Should I use the same persona rings to multiple products? For example, the same 10% of the rings for two or more unrelated projects.” I don’t recommend that. I mean, you can to a point, Alexander, I would still try to keep them somewhat related. Here’s the thing guys, like for second tier networks, which are basically persona based networks, especially for like YouTube syndication’s, stuff like that, things can be a bit more general, but remember theming is really, really important. I’ll let Marco comment on this, but guys theming and relevancy is critical, now, and it’s only becoming more and more critical, so I’d recommend not spamming up some second tier networks, or persona based networks with a whole bunch of unrelated stuff. Try to keep it somewhat ballpark, somewhat in the same ballpark, because you’re going to get more power, and more authority built from any of those links, embeds, whatever, from those networks if they’re themed correctly. Marco, you got a comment for that?

Marco: No. I agree. We go back to what I mentioned in the beginning, which is the three components of a link. Right?

Bradley: Yeah.

Marco: Relevancy, activity on the link, trust and authority. If those three things are present then you have a great link, if you omit one of those then the link becomes not so great, what overcomes that is where the link is coming from, like if you can get that awesome boost from one of these super powerful websites where you get that link that just pops you to number one, then that’ll override the relevancy activity, but it has to be powerful, it cannot just be any old link, or it could have decent metrics and you would have to boost it, so that you power up the metrics to override the relevancy factor, but you still need all the other three components. I mean, I could talk about this all day, but we’re still going to come back to relevancy, activity, trust and authority, that’s what you need on a link. If you don’t have that, and most, again, most PBN’s are just there to provide a link, if you are doing just that then you’re better off going and renting. You know how you can go and rent from what used to be a PR7, or a PR8 you better off doing that, you can still do that and get a lot of bang for your money.

Multiple Google Sites For Different Personas

Bradley: Yeah. All right. Bacon is up, he says, “I have a question about Google sites, if you were to create multiple sites, do you need to do each under a different persona, since it is a Google property?” No. It’s not necessary. You can do it all, I mean, you can create multiple Google sites under one profile. It’s fine. Just keep in mind, that if you’re doing some nasty stuff with them, with any one of them, or a combination of them, you stand a chance of getting that account slapped and potentially terminated, and if you have multiple Google sites in that one account, and that account gets slapped, or terminated, then it could end up, you end up losing all of them. Again, I always talk about mitigating risk, guys, specifically because I just don’t want to have one where Google can come in and terminate one account, and I lose multiple digital assets, or multiple businesses, so to speak. Right?

That’s why I always try to separate things by different Google profiles, because then I can always connect, and add as a manager, and you can do that in Google sites, too, you can add a manager. So, you can add, you can create, let’s say you’re going to create 10 Google sites, have 10 different profiles, each owning its own Google site, and then you can connect your main profile, you, or Bacon, as a manager to all of them, so that you can manage all of them underneath one account. But, if anyone of those accounts were to get terminated, it will only affect the one Google site that was owned by that profile account. If that makes sense.

Different Content When Syndicating My Maps

So, it’s a matter of just trying to mitigate risk, it’s up to you. What’s your risk tolerance? Mine is very, very low. Okay. All right. Ken, says, “I know when syndicating a YouTube video we want to only push out the video and link back to the video without any other content on the page, would this hold true for syndicating my map, too? Is it better, worse, or does it matter to have content on the page with my map when syndicating it?” I don’t have enough experience with that end, but maybe Marco can shed some light on that.

Marco: Let me read through that, again. There’s a lot of stuff that I just cannot give away in this forum. I cannot give that away. Yeah. Content matters, whether it’s on the page, or somewhere else, makes a big difference. Relevance, right? You can push relevancy, because it will bleed through to the source, whatever you have on the page, the bot will come in read it, it will drop into the iframe, so to speak, it will drop into the hole, go down to see where the source is, and all of that, that the bot is holding, wherever it’s holding the information, follows through, so it helps. It helps more if it’s somewhere else. That’s as far as I’m going to take it.

Bradley: Yeah. I mean, I haven’t done a lot of map embedding stuff, so I don’t have a lot of experience with testing, Ken, on that, but I would agree that I would probably be, because the problem with YouTube with importing the description, is what I discussed earlier. Right? Is that every single time, or every property that I have while I was importing the descriptions would get de-indexed. That’s why I stopped doing it, but for maps that’s different. Again, I would want to try to put some content on the page, and then test it, but I don’t know, because I haven’t done it. I’d just follow Marco’s advice.

Resolving Suspended Google My Business Page

All right. Don Johnson, says, “I just tried to verify a UPS mailbox for Google My Business, and as soon as I submitted the postcard request, I got Google has suspended your page due to quality issues,” I can imagine, “I decided to delete the listing and try to come up with a plan. I knew you guys have started using PO Boxes with street delivery, which is what I told the client to do, but he didn’t listen. Just wondering if you have any advice how to save this address. I have been trying to convince this client for a couple years that we need an address in a larger neighboring city, and telling him, that, hey that didn’t work, we need another address is not something that I want to do. Does it mean that the UPS location is flagged as a mailbox location, or might there be a work around? Thanks.” It very well could be, Don. UPS mailboxes, in fact, there was one, I mentioned before on a couple of different times that, yes, I use PO boxes, now, and I have been for at least three years, now, and I keep all of them.

In other words, when I rent a mailbox, I don’t just rent it, or excuse me, a PO box, I don’t just rent it long enough to get the postcard, and then let it expire. I keep renewing them. I’ve got dozens of PO boxes and I pay for them every single year, and the reason I do that is because in the event that I ever have to reverify the business, I’ll have access to that location, that address. The reason I know how to do that is because that’s only happened twice to me in my entire career. Okay. But, one of the times that it happened it was a UPS mailbox for one of my tree service lead gen sites, and the UPS mailbox was like $36.00 a month, it was freaking ridiculous, and so I let that mailbox go, because I thought I’ll never need it again, and it’s too damn expensive. Sure enough, I got a reverification, I was required to reverify via mail, snail mail, and I didn’t have access to that location, so I lost that maps listing, because I didn’t have access to it.

So, that was a painful lesson for me, because that was a profitable, it generated quite a bit of revenue, that particular site, so anyways, my point is that ever since that time, first of all I stopped using UPS mailboxes, the UPS stores and stuff, I stopped using those and I went to PO boxes, and I keep them renewed. Now, with that said, you know, if you’ve been trying to tell a client something for two years, now, look, I understand, because you are kind of black hatting the maps listing. I’ve had clients that have been resistive to that, as well, so you know, I don’t know what else you can do other than tell them why it would benefit them to do that, and try to get them to do it the correct way, otherwise I don’t know what else you could do to tell them that. Short of you going out and getting the mailbox yourself, which I don’t recommend doing, but if it’s a client that’s paying you a good amount of money, look, I pay anywhere between $64.00 and $128.00 per year, per PO box.

It just depends on the population density of the area that I’m renting the box in. Right? The more populated it is, the more expensive it’s going to be, but I don’t have a single mailbox out of dozens of them that cost me more than, I think, 128, actually, that may not be true, it might be as much as 164, or 168 a year, or something like that. It’s still relatively inexpensive, so again I don’t recommend going out and buying a mailbox for a client unless there’s enough revenue in it for you, to make it worth your while. Here’s the thing, you might end up, there’s always the opportunity that you could use, you know, create other digital assets in that same area, and use that, you could try using that same mailbox, but I wouldn’t do that.

I would have a separate mailbox specifically for this client, and again, if it’s not something that you want to approach the client about, I wouldn’t mind approaching the client, just say, look, you got a UPS mailbox, those don’t work and here’s the reason why, recommend using a USPS box, it’s cheaper, and they’re still working, right now, and it’s going to benefit your business, and I recommend that you do it. That’s what I would say, otherwise you could do it on your own. Again, I don’t recommend doing that, Don, but if you’re making enough revenue from that client, it’s a nominal small price to pay to be able to get them results. Okay.

Differences Between FCS, RankerX, SEO Autopilot and Rankwyz

Kay says, “Please review the difference between FCS, RankerX, SEO Autopilot, and Rank Whizz. As a newbie, and budgeting for a growing business, I want to spend wisely. Also, please talk about any must have SEO tools. I realize this part may vary. Thanks, again, for everything you all do.” I cannot speak about the difference between all those tools, because I’ve never run any of them. So, honestly, Kay, I wish I could help you, but we would have to ask one of our more experienced link building, like tool users. For example, our link building manager, Deadia, which I’m sure he’d be happy to come on to a webinar and talk about that a little bit. He did it inside the Mastermind, I don’t know if we could get him on Hump Day Hangout, maybe. We’d have to ask him. But, he’s the one that runs all those tools.

I cannot answer you Kay, honestly, because I just don’t know. I don’t use any of those tools. I can tell you that I’m super, super, super impressed with Rank Whizz, and Pavel from the webinar that we did on Monday. I think if you were going to invest, and again, this is only based upon, not from using any of the tools, myself, but just based upon what I know and from what I saw on Monday with Rank Whizz is it seems like it can do everything that I could ever want a link building tool to do, in a very unique way. In fact, the content mill function of Rank Whizz is amazing, because they don’t scrape content based upon keywords, they do it based upon topics, which is the very first time I’ve ever heard of a link building tool do that, which speaks directly to RankBrain and Hummingbird. Right?

The semantic web algorithms, or the semantic web filters, or whatever, layers to the algorithm. My point is, that after going through that webinar, if you haven’t seen it yet, Kay, go through it, that we did with Pavel. I think it was two hours long, but it’s super, super powerful and if you’re going to invest time and money, well, money is the small part, an investment is the time. Right? The biggest investment is the time to learn how to use these tools. I would pick one that does everything and learn that one tool. So, that you don’t have to patch a bunch of stuff together and Rank Whizz apparently has all that. Guys, again, this is only based upon the webinar, because Pavel knows his stuff, he is a serious SEO. After hearing him talk for two hours, he really knows what he’s talking about, so I think it’s a very, very powerful tool and I would put my trust into that, but that’s just my assumption. Okay. I don’t have any proof behind that, because I don’t use any of those tools, myself. All right.

Marco: [crosstalk 00:47:26].

Bradley: Go ahead.

Marco: If I may, and if she’s a newbie, and she’s going to go into this expense, the expense has to be justified, well, the investment, let’s call it, because it’s actually an investment on the business.

Bradley: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Marco: So, you should have an SEO business if you’re going to be running this type of tool, because this tool is for tier two and out, and if you get good enough into T-1 never at the money site. Unless, you’re really surgical with the tool, you get so good with the tool that you can actually go at tier one, you know exactly what you’re doing. Before you get to all that you should have a really good foundation with everything else. I don’t know if she’s doing Syndication Academy, if she wants to do it for clients, if she wants to do things affiliate, what it is that she wants to do, she says she’s a newbie, which is really broad, what is she a newbie in? What is she trying to take on? What is she trying to do? Because if you go right for the link building tools, you have to have assets that you build links to.

Bradley: Yeah. Okay. Next is Stephen, and we’re running out of time here, very quickly, I can see we’re not going to be able to get to Roy’s question, again, either, we tried this last week and I know we spent some time on it, but apparently we didn’t have the whole scenario, and I know I passed over Steve. Roy, I’m assuming, I don’t think you’re in the Mastermind, Roy, but this might be one of those questions we’re going to have to answer in the Facebook group or something, because we’re running out of time. If you don’t mind, Roy, can you repost this in one of the Facebook groups, Syndication Academy, or the SEO tutorials group, either one, and then tag me on it, Roy, and I’ll spend some time going through and try to give you even if I’ve got to just record a quick screen cast video, or something and drop it in the comments section of that post, I’ll try to get to this, because apparently two weeks in a row you’ve posted this, and we must not have answered it last week, because we didn’t have the full information, and I’d hate to leave you hanging for another week, so if you don’t mind, post that one on Facebook groups. Okay? Like, we did for Ken, this week, we can make sure that we get you a proper answer. All right?

Diversifying When Building Google Properties/Stacks

All right. Steve, says, “Do you have any thoughts on diversity when building Google property stacks beyond all the eggs in one basket argument? For instance, would links from 10 Google Doc’s be as strong as one G Doc plus one sheet, plus one form, plus one G site?” I honestly don’t know. I like the diversity of different link types, so I just use them all. That seems like a question that would be more suited for RYS Academy. Can you comment on that Marco, or what do you think?

Marco: Yeah. Not all Google files are created equal.

Bradley: Right.

Marco: They each have different, like one will rank over the other, remember Doctor Gary did a test I think it was in the Mastermind, or in RYS Academy. It was one or the other, or both, probably, where he showed, which one ranks better than the other one, but we still like to do all of them, because we like to interlink. Having just one Google property linking to another, and those two linking to another, and everything linking back, creating the spider web silo, that powers up everything, and it shoots the relevancy out to the destination, which is what we like to do. So, the way we do it is we just keep, you know, we don’t do one or one file type, we do them all.

Bradley: Right.

Marco: We do as many as we can and we link them all together, and then send the power wherever we want.

Bradley: Which is more diversity. Right? I mean, it seems to me, I haven’t tested it, but I mean, I just, we always do every doc type that’s available to us, or every file type. Okay. Let’s see. We’ve got about four minutes. I’ll give another four minutes. Roy, like I said, please, because this is a big long question and with the second part, as well, so just post that in the Facebook group, man, and tag me on it, I’m giving you permission to tag me, so that we can make sure we answer that. I might answer Columbia’s real quick and then we’re going to wrap it up, guys. By the way, we have Syndication Academy update webinar at 5:00 p.m., so in about 10 minutes, guys. You should have been notified via the Facebook group, because I created an event, so if you’re in Syndication Academy, just go to the Facebook group, click on the events tab and you should find the event and it’s going to start here in about eight minutes.

Best Structure For A Lead Gen Site

Columbia says, “Could you describe the best structure for a lead gen site and what would be careful to avoid? Do you do this under your name, or a persona? Thanks.” No. I always do everything under personas, Columbia, as I mentioned earlier in this webinar, and as I often do in many, many webinars, I try to mitigate my risk. So, I always set up a new persona for every lead gen site that set up. Then, I add myself as a manager, so I can add, for example, like I set up, for every lead gen site that I set up, guys, I set up a brand new Google account. I create a new persona, and then I create the website, and I add the Google My Business listing underneath that persona, the Google plus pages, I do all, Google Analytics, search console, tag manager, everything.

The only thing that I don’t create a new account for every time is AdWords, but everything else I do. Then, what I do is I just add myself, or one of my agency profiles, like, I have an AdWords manager account that’s underneath, it’s basically an agency Google profile that I created specifically to run an AdWords manager account, so since I do most everything in AdWords for lead gen, now, I do some Maps SEO, but pretty much I do a ton of AdWords stuff now for lead gen, I just assign that agency profile as a manager to all my lead gen property sites, and search consoles, and analytics, and all of those, so that I can access everything from my agency profile. But, everything is owned by separate individual Google accounts.

The reason I do that, is because once again, I don’t want, if at any time something happens and they decide that Google doesn’t like my agency account anymore, and they shut it down, terminate it, I don’t want to lose all those accounts. Right? It would suck to have my agency account shut down, but at least I would still have all my lead gen assets because they’re all owned, you know, owned in air quotes, by other persona accounts. Okay. It’s all about mitigating risk, guys. It’s just about reducing risk to where if something bad were to happen you don’t lose it all.

I don’t know about you guys, but I’m not willing to take my chances and put everything underneath one account, and then end up losing it. Then, what do you do? You’re left, you’re stuck with nothing. You got to start all over again. At least if you do what I’m talking about, you know, you might lose an account or two, but you’re not going to lose everything. Right?All right, guys. Yeah. I know. Adam started yelling at me, again. All right, guys. We’re going to see everybody in Syndication Academy webinar in just a minute, hopefully. If you’re not there, come join us.

Adam: Sounds good. See you guys later.

Marco: Bye, everyone.

Bradley: Thanks, everybody. We’ll see you all on the next one. Any questions that didn’t get answered, guys, just submit them next week, or post in some of the groups, we’ll try to get to them. I cannot promise we’ll get to all of them. I know I will get to Roy’s, because I told him I would. We’ll see you all next week. Thanks for being here. Thanks, guys.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 129 published first on your-t1-blog-url