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:

[07:33] I am changing from one domain to another. I don’t wish to lose any traction or SEO juice. What advice do you have?

What you’ll end up doing is called a 301 redirect: You’ll essentially point your old site to the new site. However, expect a bit of volatility because it may take a while for everything to transfer over and be the same as they were before. Do a complete backup of the current site, which means that the URL structure will remain the exact same across the board to avoid 404 errors, etc. Download a backup of that site, transfer it to the new one, then 301 the old URL to the new URL.

[14:07] (site audit) One of my new websites was ranking well earlier, but now it’s going nowhere. The site is indexed, but not a single keyword is under 100. I just made profile links on the homepage, but that’s it. Earlier, it was growing well sitting on pages 2 and 3, but now it’s nowhere.

If I had to guess, that pesky December update had something to do with it. I’ve noticed that orphan pages have really gotten hit since then. This website, for example, doesn’t have anything on the menu. You have your homepage link, branded, and then you have “About Us” and a “Contact”. But you don’t have anything else—no blog, categories, etc. I’m also not seeing any inner linking on any of these pages. Use H tags not in a spammy way, but just to better organize your articles. I got insane results by basically cleaning up the article. It really helps Google to understand which are the main sections of the article. When it comes to on-page fundamentals, this is one of the major things that you should be doing. So, the website is lacking a lot right now. If you focus on this, even better getting to off-page stuff, your ranking will already go up. When it comes to off-page, you don’t have a single branded anchor—just naked URLs. Aside from pillow links, you need higher-authority links, especially in a very competitive niche like yours.

[33:34] Once you go live with a PBN, when should you start building links to the money page? I assume it’s random but do you have some rule-of-thumb numbers?

There is no real answer to this other than making sure that the PBN is indexed. It doesn’t have to have a whole lot of traction for it to be useful. If you’re going to the homepage with generic or branded anchors, you can start a lot sooner than if they go to inner pages. If it’s indexed within three weeks to a month, you can start building links.

[37:00] I’m hoping for some help in clarifying what type of content I should write. Give the hypothetical niche of “hair salons”, let’s say my keyword research yields:

“best Orlando hair salons”: Monthly Vol => 100-1K
“Orlando hair salons”: Monthly Vol => 1K-10K

Will a “top 10 best Orlando hair salons” article still rank for “Orlando hair salons”?

Google “top 10 best Orlando hair salons”, see which sites are ranking on page 1, then Google “Orlando hair salons,” and see if any of them are on both. That’s the easiest way to do it. Also, if you have a tool like Ahrefs or Semrush, you can put one of the keywords in, pull the ranking page up, and plug it into the tool. Then you can look at the keywords that that page is ranking for and see if your keyword is anywhere in there. If the keyword is on page 5, it’s not a good idea to try to rank for page 1 if even the top ranker can’t even do it.

[42:21] Talk about EAT in 2022.

Google has apparently started looking at Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness. A lot of people have said that EAT is total BS because it’s so easy to create a fake persona as your author. As far as expertise goes, you should cover each topic fully in your content, and you should write a lot about the topic. Authority is about having a lot of relevant quality backlinks. Trustworthiness has to do with the About page.

[46:17] I’m building around 150 to 250 PBNs for five money sites. Should I link them to the money site’s homepage or inner pages?

We like to send PBNs to money sites’ homepages. It’s not necessary, but it’s a safer, less-risky way to push a bunch of authority to a domain. Also, that’s a lot of PBNs. They can’t all be pointing to these five money sites. You’ll create an obvious footprint, meaning Google will catch on to what you’re doing and hit you with a penalty. It’s a lot of money wasted. Even if these were massive authority sites with very diverse link profiles, this is not at all something we would consider doing. Start with five PBNs, and make sure you have a good mix of links already going to the websites: pillow links, guest posts, niche edits, etc.

[55:00] I have a DA of 4, a PA of 39, and 1007 backlinks according to Moz. The backlinks are mostly junk. Should I get rid of them?

It’s hard to tell someone to get rid of backlinks. It depends on how your website is performing. If your website is doing well (i.e. ranking), I wouldn’t touch anything. I would move forward by building good, quality backlinks instead of worrying about the old ones. Overall, Google has gotten pretty good at ignoring junk links, unless they are junk links that look extremely manipulative or overly breaking the rules. If your website is doing poorly, start by diversifying the backlink profile and see what kind of traction you get by doing that. Do that over the course of several months. As a last resort, you can do a disavow for those spammy backlinks.

[1:05:38] What do you suggest using as Tier 2 links, and do you plan on offering that as a service at some point?

The most common are very low authority links like guest posts and niche edits, or cheaper PBN links. We actually offer both of those. The only ones I use for tiered linking these days are our low-authority niche edits, which we call “Barrage.” You can also use our PBN links.

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