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:

[09:45] I found a keyword with a high search volume, but I’m too busy to write an article about it. Should I use it to pitch a guest post instead?

I’d keep the keyword. If it’s something that fits into my website, even if it’s not in the exact cluster I’m working on right now, I’m taking it. I won’t make more competition for myself because others will do that for me. If you think that the keyword falls under your niche, you’ll be surprised, especially if it’s in an emerging SERP, that you’ll get traffic for it without having to bridge out and get more topical value for it. At the same time, if it’s a SERP that’s very valuable, and you snipe that with your main domain, it’s not a bad idea to do a guest post or two dedicated to that same SERP so that you control the majority of the SERP for that term.

[17:04] Should I put a shopping cart in my store, like WooCommerce? It seems like Google hates affiliate sites. I am not even getting impressions anymore.

Zero keywords, zero traffic, DR 2.3, 363 referring domains. I’d stick to being an affiliate site because there is so much to learn and deal with when you switch over to being an e-commerce site. This probably has more to do with how your site reads—the on-page. We know affiliate sites that are doing really well, so it’s not being an affiliate site that’s the problem. In fact, a big problem here is that you’re sending e-com signals to Google, but this reads like an affiliate site. Focus on EEAT. Update the look since this looks like a site from the 90s. We recommend the course Affiliate Lab by Matt Diggity.

[33:35] What will happen if I build only PBN links to my website?

You’re most likely going to get a penalty. That means you’re going to lose all your rankings, all your traffic, all your keywords—all the work that you’ve done on your website. Google is not going to let your website rank for anything. Use PBN links sparingly while focusing on link diversity, which means getting lots of different kinds of backlinks and more natural than unnatural backlinks. PBN links are the most unnatural you can get. Google actively looks for them. We sell and use PBN links, but we only use them as a small part of our overall backlink profile—less than 5% of it. It’s the cherry on top rather than the backbone of the backlink profile. Use guest posts and niche edits, HARO, and PR campaigns once your authority really goes up. Use pillow links such as social profiles, foreign links, blog comments, forum comments, social signals, citations, Web 2.0s, etc. They’re low-value and cheap, but they add diversity to your link profile to minimize the chances of getting a penalty.

[39:55] I posted content and added an about page, a contact page, etc. I added natural links. There are 28 WordPress subdomains. I sent these to my money site and got pretty good results, but I overcooked my anchor text keyword density. But I was ranking page 1 for med comp. Do you think this will work, and is there a market for this type of bot? My bot goes out and auto-builds these Web 2.0s for you. It builds About pages, Contact pages, and privacy policies and uses AI-generated content to link to both competitors and yourself.

I wouldn’t mess with link farming/spamming. As with the last question, diversify what you’re doing. If they’re all on different subdomains, but you’re linking to the same asset, you’ll eventually be found out and penalized. In today’s day and age, if you think you found a gimmick of a solution for backlinking, just know that everything has been conceptualized. Everything has been tested and tried. Millions of smart people have come before you, and many have tried your “hack.” Stick to the basics. Ultimately, the biggest hack is looking at what diversification can do for you, how it can insulate you from a backlinking standpoint, and use that to your advantage. If you’re diversifying consistently, that is the hardest thing for an individual to emulate.

[53:42] What about using only PBN links to power up tier 1 or tier 2 links?

Google can read several tiers behind your website. Link diversity is key whether you’re going immediately to your URL or tier 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. All of that is readable to the algorithm. Google’s system for detection is called SpamBrain, and it’s getting better. Diversity is the hardest thing to emulate. Diversify as much as you can to insulate your asset beyond belief. If you want to research how to do that, pull up a piece of viral content and throw that page into Ahrefs. Look at the trajectory that page got as far as off-page values go, and compare that to the main URL. You’re going to start digesting ideas that will help you conceptualize ways to diversify backlink profiles that a) give you massive rankings very quickly and b) help you insulate your website. It’s a myth in the SEO community that you can’t get too aggressive or risk being caught. You can get aggressive, but you have to make it look as natural as possible. You do that through diversification. It’s natural for viral content to get fed a ton of press very quickly, but it’s not natural for it to come from one specific type of backlink.

[1:00:25] I’m interested in your aged domains. I want to get one and turn it into a blog site. Can I earn from this?

Aged domains are a huge shortcut to ranking. With a new website, you’re starting with zero backlinks and zero history with Google. The site has no trust built up yet. With an aged domain, you’re starting the race halfway through. Note that if you want to build a money site on the aged domain, we advise you to find an aged domain that’s pretty darn close to whatever it is that you’re trying to build. Conceptualize what you’re going to do with the domain before you purchase it. When you buy it, immediately attack the main keywords that it had movement from in the form of historical press. Put fresh content on those pages.

[1:06:26] Recommendations for PBN hosting services?

Our top two suggestions are Bulk Buy Hosting and Launch CDN.

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