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:

[07:24] (health/diet niche site audit) I had a trademark expired domain and was ranking well, but then I found this domain with no trademark, so I redirected that domain to this one. Then in April, something happened, so I stopped working on this website for about a month. It hasn’t been ranking since May. I wonder if it got hit or if it’s having problems with EEAT and content. What should I do to rank this website on the SERPs?

81 indexed pages. 27 RF. The site was never really ranking in the first place, with only 24 traffic. You’re in a super competitive and spammy niche, and you’re up against monster authority sites that are very well-known. The site is pure text and has very surface-level EEAT. Your About page is lacking, and the Contact Us page only has an email. Your social icons go to your author page. Your site is off to a good start, but you have a long way to go with EEAT. Get tips from your top-ranking competitors and emulate them. Unfortunately, we can only recommend going into a smaller niche because the one you’ve chosen is a rough way to get into SEO.

[21:10] What niche should I start with? I’m interested in community-building, freelancing, finance, artificial intelligence, and student life.

You’d be better off asking this question to ChatGPT. Try narrowing down the topics you listed (ex. Investing tips for college graduates, AI for architects, etc.). Niche selection is the hardest part of SEO. Once you actually know how to do SEO, you’re literally just doing what you know works already—which is essentially content and backlinks. The first thing you need to do is niche research: Look for websites similar to what you want to create. Then, go plug them into a tool like Ahrefs and see how much traffic they’re getting, how they’re monetizing their website, how big the website is, how many backlinks they have, etc. As a beginner, you want to choose a niche that is easier to break into. These are smaller websites without as many backlinks: Their DR and authority aren’t as high as those websites in more competitive niches. But they’re still able to make money. You can also use Flippa, which is a site where people sell functional websites that are already making money.

[29:15] What is the difference between successful and unsuccessful websites/businesses?

At the end of the day, a successful website or business is one that’s making money consistently. There are a million ways to do that, and not just with SEO. You can do it through paid advertisements or social media. Just because the website is not ranking, someone could be making a ton of money from a website just by funneling people there through their social media.

[34:14] What are the pros and cons of starting on an aged domain vs. 301’ing to an existing site? I hear that you can lose something in the transfer when you 301.

The main con is that you have to start with a different URL. The main pro is that a lot of the backend is already done for you. You can 301 to an aged domain, which is my preference. I can’t say for sure if you’ll lose something with the 301. There may be a delayed fuse on getting the 301 to activate in the SERPs. It may take six months to notice a difference. You have to rely on knowing that the domain you purchased to do the 301 with has high-quality backlinks and that you can build those historical pages to pass that juice around via quality content. You may also lose a bunch of 404 pages or HTML pages that you can’t actually forward to a new page. But if Google reads the site as an asset that is doing well in the SERPs, then 301’ing is a safe bet.

[41:21] (dating niche site audit) This is a website I built with all-handwritten content from scratch. It got hit in October. What should I do with it?

Check out the October 2022 Content Spam Update. Try disconnecting all of your ads and see what happens. That said, whenever a site goes down to zero traffic, it’s very likely a technical problem. It’s still indexed with 93 pages. Check Search Console to see if there are any penalties. It ranked for relevant keywords before. The website itself is filled with text and stock images. You have no referring domains, so the only thing we can think of is that a hidden PBN was penalized. A lot of your links are spam. Start throwing in a handful of quality links to your homepage to see if you can get some kind of momentum.

[50:20] I got an aged domain a few months ago and posted some articles. They were ranking well, but after a few days, they lost their rankings. What should I do now? Work on it, or 301 to another domain?

Unless you’ve been building mostly with spammy tactics, there is usually a way to remedy this situation. First, check if you got a penalty. Prod at variables and see what happens.

[55:58] (finance niche site audit) I’m working on trying to contact some of the backlinks to change exact match to get them to the domain or branded. I’ve been waiting to see if it was the update, thinking some might return before making any major changes. At this point, we’re at the end of the update, and it hasn’t returned. Working on auditing content that was lost with Surfer, but the content is already optimized. Internal linking is pretty on-point, so not much that I can see is fixable. I just went through Semrush and disavowed a few subdomains that may be toxic, but I don’t think that will help. In case it was a JS or CSS issue, I removed optimizations from WP Rocket to see if that helped. I don’t want to mess with much more unless it’s the backlinks.

First of all, don’t show Google that you have the ability to change your anchor text because you bought backlinks. It’s a better idea to diversify by adding new backlinks instead of trying to change the old ones. We don’t pay much attention to toxic links. You have 222 indexed pages. 505 referring domains. Looking through your anchors, there is a lot in your backlink profile that we don’t like. Even if you change the anchors, you’ll just compound the issues you’re already having. It looks like you did a Fiverr guest post blast. I wouldn’t disavow right now. Focus on adding quality links—branded, naked, natural anchors—until your graph starts climbing back up before moving to your inner pages.

[1:09:09] What strategies would you use to break into gambling affiliates?

Super black hat tactics. If you’re just getting started with SEO, we’d recommend getting into a different niche first to start learning. Otherwise, start with a really strong aged domain and emulate your competitors.

[1:14:31] I’m ranking on page 2 for about five important keywords. I think you call them “money pages.” I jumped on Ahrefs and it looks like it’s mostly a backlink deficiency. What are the true costs of competing?

In Ahrefs, look at how many referring domains your competitors have, not just on a page value but the entire domain. Get their DR, which is an estimation of their authority. See how they compare to yours. The two major costs to compete are content and backlinks. If their sites have more pages than yours, it’s likely that they have more topical authority (i.e., articles) than you.

[1:25:41] Can you explain the differences between SERPs? High traffic vs. low/new SERP vs. old, and anything else that I don’t have a clue about?

Newer SERPs are typically easier to go after. If there’s high traffic and it’s an older SERP, there will be a lot of competition. Even if you have a lot of authority, it can still take a long time to break into older SERPs. Some SERPs also have different features from others. Some show YouTube videos, and some don’t. Some have a knowledge panel, and some don’t. Some have a featured snippet panel, and some don’t. Some have a local map pack, and some don’t.

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