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:

[06:50] I have a brand new exact-match domain affiliate website. Should I really create categories for the different products, or should I build pages and articles that are simply linked directly from the homepage?

Hypothetically, categories, especially if we’re talking about WordPress, are going to be used to build out silos with which we can niche down. For example, if you have “dogs.com” with a section for dog toys, then all the pages you create about this subject will fall under the “dog toys” category. It doesn’t matter if you have an EMD or not, or if your homepage is just a random hub page or a big affiliate article. Having categories on your website and practicing proper inner linking and using these category pages as a hub to link out to relevant pages—these are all very standard SEO practices that should always be done.

[13:27] Is automated off-page SEO helpful at all?

In general, we stay away from anything that is automated in SEO, especially off-page if we’re talking about backlinks.

[22:17] Does the Google algorithm factor in how much traffic you get from a dofollow link?

This is called “referral traffic” (ex. if CNN gives you a backlink and people are actually clicking it and visiting your site from CNN). Now, I don’t think it does anything at all when it comes to building your site’s authority. People going to your site is always good, but the algorithm doesn’t seem to take referral traffic into account. If anything, it would have more to do with the quality of the backlink you’re getting. For example, a higher-authority domain that gets more traffic translates to more click-throughs going to your actual money site. That’s a stronger link because it will boost you up in the SERPs.

[27:06] Do Google News-approved sites help to index your pillow links?

Don’t waste your time indexing pillow links. Anything that’s user-generated content (which is what pillow links are) has a lot of trouble getting indexed, especially as the internet grows.

[29:09] Can you review my competitor’s backlinks? He ranks top page on 720 key terms and uses a lot of spam backlinks.

This is the real estate niche, which is very competitive. Your competitor has a bunch of URL anchors, but overall, the anchors definitely don’t look very natural. It almost comes across as looking like negative SEO with just how crappy it is: giant blocks of text (5000 words or so) on foreign domains for a local website. Now, Google has started to ignore what looks like negative SEO which sometimes means that you can strategically do stuff that will either get ignored or help you a little until it gets ignored. As for this website, I would rather ignore what they’re doing wrong and focus on what they’re doing right. This site has a competitive advantage specifically thanks to the on-page factors. If they were to do higher-authority link-building, they could really become a powerhouse in this industry. All that said, there is really no reason for you to analyze your competitors’ backlink profiles. There is nothing there to learn. As far as link-building goes, just stick to the established basics: Build up the authority of your site and get quality, relevant links from quality sites. Build a diverse mix of links, a diverse mix of anchor texts, etc.

[40:07] Have you seen any big shifts since the last Google update (the Helpful Content Update on Dec 5th) was announced? I know it will take around two weeks to roll out, but I’m just curious.

We haven’t noticed anything yet. It’s too early to say for sure.

[42:03] Can you talk about trailing slash and non-trailing slash?

According to stackoverflow.com: “Conventionally, a trailing slash (/) at the end of a URL meant that the URL was a folder or directory. A URL without a trailing slash at the end used to mean that the URL was a file.” As far as anchors go, it doesn’t matter at all what you use.

[47:43] I don’t want to use my own address on affiliate sites. What are the alternatives?

A random address.

[49:28] How can you do SEO on the Shopify platform?

Shopify’s a bit of a mess. You will have dirty permalinks for specific products. Use informational articles to push people toward your products so that the silo is more organized up top.

[52:02] Can you review my website’s SEO in comparison to my competitor’s? How can I compete when he is using spam links and when I don’t have the budget needed for backlinks to compete?

PM us your links at facebook.com/SirLinksalot and we can conduct a site audit on a future live stream!

[53:03] In Search Console, it’s showing “client errors 4xx”. What does this mean?

Sorry, but you’ll have to do your own research on this (i.e. Google it). Our strength is link-building, on-page, and content. Technical SEO is a gray area for us.

[55:48] (site audit) I’m stuck on page 5.

Your DR is pretty low compared to the amount of referring domains that you have. 600 referring domains giving you a DR of 8 typically means a lot of pillow-linking. Just work on your more competitive terms and switch to higher-authority backlinks.

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