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:

[05:46] Should I safely use the keyword on the article slug if the domain is EMD or PDM? Are there risks for an over-optimization penalty, or is it a myth? Examples:
microwave.com/microwave-baked-potato
microwave.com/samsung-microwave
microwave.com/best-microwave
microwave.com/how-to-cook-bacon-in-the-microwave

These examples should be fine. It would be less effective if you just repeated the domain in the slug, ex. bestmicrowave.com/best-microwave. We prefer to go shorter with the permalinks and make them about the broad topics of whatever niche that website is about.

[13:11] Should a guest post have the keyword in the title? If so, wouldn’t that guest post compete with the page it is linking to? I bought 40 guest posts in the past months, and I noticed that the keyword difficulty increased from zero to five. Am I increasing the KD by ordering dozens of guest posts from high-DR websites?

No. If those guest posts are linking to you, I wouldn’t worry about them. They’re propping you up. You’re not propping them up.

[15:29] I am between a rock and a hard place. I can’t afford to buy your service until I start making some money. How do I get backlinks to get started? I have tried whatever I can find online through Google, but they have barely helped: 315 domains but a page rank of 2.3, according to Ahrefs.

You have to spend money to make money in this industry, particularly nowadays. It sounds like you’re creating exclusively pillow links with that result, which won’t raise your page. There are many types of backlinks that you can get for free, but the stuff that you’re really after is links from relevant articles on real websites. You can use HARO (Help A Reporter Out) by answering their questions correctly, then get a link to your homepage in return. Doing your own guest posts or niche edit outreach occasionally works, but site masters generally charge money. You’d have to have something extremely valuable to post on their website to get a link for free.

[25:50] Do links from non-English language websites help at all?

Absolutely. Foreign links get a bad rap because the usual idea is low-quality foreign spam. But, if you take the time to translate their backlink profile, you might find out that they are extremely valuable links. That said, you want to concentrate on links from websites in your website’s language.

[31:44] (site audit) I have been working on the on-page SEO, restructuring content, and building internal links.

It looks like things have been going well. In the past six months or so, traffic has gone from a low of 11-12,000 to a high of 18,300. Things are declining right now, with 2000 traffic lost in the past day. DR 29 with about 1000 referring domains is a signal that there might be some low-quality link-building being done. It could also be Web 2.0 spam. Go with more authority, niched-down links. Another thing that is a little off is that there are a lot of walls of text with no images breaking these articles up. If you want more conversions, this is something you need to pay more attention to. A lot of the anchors are not natural and are being repeated. This backlink profile looks like a recipe for disaster in the long term unless you start to move toward more natural links.

[45:03] Do you think that 400 backlinks monthly for a blog that is getting over 260k clicks monthly on Google Search is way too much?

It’s a lot of clicks, but it depends on the type and quality of the backlinks that you have. Are you talking about PBNs? Forum comments? Guest posts? Niche edits? You want to think about sustaining your link-building. If you’re buying 400 links per month, that’s a lot of money. You want to be careful about doing too much too fast and then dropping to zero when your budget runs out. It would be hard to hurt yourself with profile backlinks, but I also wouldn’t build a ton of them each month because there’s no point. You can just do the top 100-200 on the internet, and you’re done. Too many cheap guest posts are a bad idea because they invite spam. Think about the narrative that you’re giving crawlers: Backlinks are a form of press. It’s back-end press for your business. It’s not natural for 400 links to hit your website all of a sudden. It is more likely to happen gradually. Overall, you need to conceptualize a narrative that is going to play into what you’re doing. Instead of focusing on the sheer quantity of links in a short space of time, spread your budget out over time and focus on diversification and higher-quality backlinks.

[54:35] (site audit) We bought the site in September 2021 with just 44 BEST xxx product review pages on it (Amazon affiliate site). We started adding info content during the past year, with good results in Search Console at first. However, after getting hit by the product review update, we removed the 44 BEST product review pages. Our impressions went to zero, and we are still struggling to get our pages indexed, even with the use of the Google Indexing API.

Instead of removing the product review pages, you could have just improved them. Bring them in line with Google’s product review update instead. When it comes to your articles, focus on quality over quantity (i.e., walls of text).

[1:07:02] How can I start learning SEO? Where do I start (ex: on-page SEO, off-page SEO, etc.)?

Check out this article to get access to all of our resources:

https://sirlinksalot.co/learn-seo-for-free/

Start from square one: Get familiar with WordPress. Ignore everything else. Then, learn about website structure, then niche research (nothing too competitive), then keyword research, then content that Google is looking for, then optimizing articles for on-page SEO. Dive into link-building later on once you have this foundation in place. Don’t look for shortcuts and focus on doing things simply.

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