Welcome to another episode of Live SEO Support!

Live SEO Support is an hour-long Weekly Livestream where our founders, Nicholas Altimore and Chris Tzitzis, take questions from the audience on anything related to SEO.

It’s 100% free, and anyone can join us weekly in our Facebook Group or on Youtube.

But in case you missed us live this week, here’s the full episode:

This Week’s Archived Livestream:

[09:22] I have a new site I started last year in March; however, it was a Google Business domain, so I decided to buy a domain name in Nov/Dec. I hired someone on Fiverr to make the website. I thought it would come with content. It did not. So I had to do all the content myself. I would just like some tips on how I can get it ranked for local maps and organic. I have done 80 citations through BrightLocal, although not many show on Google yet. I made the mistake of hiring someone on Fiverr for a few backlinks. I used your platform for some social signals. I’m currently ranked 4th on Map Pack because of the geographical location of my business. The competition in spot 3 is new as well. He is just closer to town. Is it possible to beat them out with the location? I tried my hand at a few blog posts, but I don’t think the quality is very good.

I wouldn’t worry about not all 80 citations showing up on Google. You might have gotten some bad backlinks from Fiverr. But it’s not the end of the world because you just started the site and Google is pretty good at ignoring crap these days. About your competitor in spot 3, note that Map Pack is making it more and more important to put the actual location of your business and where the searcher is searching from. Proximity is super important for ranking. I would think about getting an address that is in the center of the proximity with the highest traffic volume. Optimize the homepage for the location, split up your service pages, and add to your blog. You have no inner linking anywhere but your contact page. Focus on that because it is huge when it comes to ranking. Start diversifying your anchors by building a bunch of branded anchors and URL anchors (without the “http”). No need to disavow. Just keep going and focus on higher-quality anchors from here on out. Fix that on-page stuff as quickly as possible and tie your socials to it. Just by doing that, I wouldn’t be surprised if, within a metro like this, you start beating out competitors.

[26:36] What do you think about doing SEO for YouTube?

SEO for YouTube is completely different from SEO for Google. In fact, it’s not really SEO at all. For YouTube, it’s all about a clickbait title, a clickbait thumbnail, and once they click on your video, keeping them watching for the entire video. However, if your goal is to rank a video on Google SERPs, then it IS advantageous to make sure that your title and description help you in the same way as would a website. You can also use backlinks to influence those rankings.

[30:40] How do you use Web 2.0 backlinks as a foundational strategy and what do you provide in your service? How many pages do you create per property and what content should we use?

If I were building Web 2.0s, I wouldn’t build more than ten for a website. I would link them to the homepage, which is our foundational strategy. The content should be related to your niche. We do provide Web 2.0s in our Pillow Link Packs and Diversity Link Packs. But these Web 2.0s are a little bit different because we don’t make them brand new. They’re aged Web 2.0s that are basically their own little websites, which means they have more than five articles.

[33:50] What should be the backlink strategy if I don’t have any real competitors (in a local niche) after building citations?

If you don’t have any real competition, you might not have to build a lot of backlinks. But you can get links from local and niche directories, and do blog or forum comments on local blogs or forums. If you do your on-page properly, you should be able to rank automatically, or soon with no competition.

[35:48] If a restaurant also does catering, should I create separate citations for the catering business using other categories or should I not build separate citations?

Don’t build separate citations because it’s the same business. Create a services or catering page and rank that.

[37:14] Any Google My Business suggestions for ranking in the Map Pack (3 listings) vs getting the Google My Business listing to take over the entire sidebar?

That’s specific SERP-to-SERP. Some SERPs are going to show you as a brand on the side with pop-up images, your phone, etc. Some SERPs will show 2-4 sites ranking in the Map Pack at the top. With local, you want those citations, reviews with keywords, replies to reviews with keywords, and schema markup.

[41:17] Does using schema enhancements help on-page much?

Yes, but we’re not schema experts so we can’t give you up-to-date information on it. That being said, we rank things quite well without schema.

[45:24] Do you look at Semrush toxicity scores when buying expired domains?

Never. Google tends to ignore what it sees as spam or manipulative. The only way to see whether the score is valuable to you or not is to inspect metrics in conjunction with it. If you’re only focused on one thing, especially if it’s considered a “spam” score, it’s probably going to screw you up.

[51:30] Can I get link juice from 3031 redirects if the website is in a different language?

Yes. It would be better if it wasn’t, but you never really know. It’s best if you get as close as possible to what the new website is going to be about. That means you want the language to be the same and the niche to be as close as possible.

[54:03] What makes the PBN so powerful? How is that different from a website I brought from an expired or aged domain? Is the power coming from the homepage? How is a homepage PBN different from a homepage website’s backlinks?

A PBN (Private Blog Network) is either a site or a group of sites that you have specifically to manipulate the homepage and send a backlink back to the asset that you’re trying to rank. They choose the homepage because, historically, PBNs were bought with the majority of the power going to the homepage. Nowadays, you need content pumping through PBNs for them to stay relevant in the SERPs. Even then, there are a lot of variables that you have to manipulate to make sure that they DO pass all that juice.

[59:21] (adult site audit)

63,000 indexed pages, 429 referring domains, DR 30. The site went down from 30k traffic to almost 0. Based on Ahrefs, there was a hard spike from July 2022 to October 2022. However, after that spammy link-blasting, it looks like you only have six backlinks that are worth anything. Spend your money on high-end links.

[1:05:14] How do I test if an expired domain was penalized? If it was penalized a long time ago, is it possible to still use it in a PBN and pass link juice?

Without Google Search Console access, there is no way to know what’s actually penalized. But you can always look up the history on Ahrefs and see if it was hit with a penalty. Even if it’s been dormant for years, you can use it. I’m not sure it’s worth all the effort for a PBN. If it was for a money site, it might be worth the effort.

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