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:

[05:04] Do you recommend Facebook Ads for marketing/SEO services? What about Google Ads? (I see you’ve been doing both.)

Yeah, we recommend both. You can run ads pretty much anywhere. You can run YouTube Ads. You can run Twitter Ads. You can run LinkedIn Ads. We prefer Facebook Ads because they give you an edge when it comes to creative versatility. Even if you’re not that sophisticated with creating ads, you can get on something like Canva.com and come up with different ideas. With Google, you’re typically limited to text unless you’re doing Display Ads. If I could talk to my younger self about SEO, I’d tell him to spend a little more time on ads as they can yield returns a lot quicker, and even though it sounds expensive at first if you’re good at playing around with these creative ideas, you can definitely make a buck out of them. But just like anything in business, if you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re going to lose money.

[08:07] I bought a domain/blog and am building out content on it. I can see that there are a lot of spam anchors and BL going to the website, but some of them are actually from high-DA websites. I can also see that the DA dropped a ton in Dec/Jan, as did traffic. Traffic recovered, but not the DA rating (Semrush’s rating hasn’t recovered, and I know that DA is just a measuring tool). Should I ignore all of this spam stuff for now?

The same principle applies whenever we talk about spam and disavowing. Traffic and rankings are the most important thing, but spam backlinks aren’t the only thing that affects them. If you’re really sure that it’s the spam backlinks that caused it, you can start disavowing. But if you’re not sure about what you’re doing, you could be disavowing stuff that is actually helping you. Since your traffic is recovering, what’s the point of disavowing at this point? Move forward and dilute your anchor profile by building quality links.

[10:52] On this website I bought, the homepage seems to be cannibalizing some of the other pages’ search queries. As you can see, there is a list of names on the homepage that is also similar to a list on another of my main pages that do well. There are also links to all of the articles that are posted on the site (in order of newest posts). Should I remove this list of items and just have links to posts I create? Will that pass link juice to these posts and stop the cannibalization of search queries going there instead of the actual page they should go to?

You want each page on your website to be concise. If your homepage is a hub page, and there is information on that page that is also on an inner page that you’re trying to rank, it will cause crawlers some confusion. At least deoptimize the homepage for those terms and optimize the other pages where you want to rank for those terms.

[14:58] I bought a second site to redirect to the main blog I bought. However, it was originally .html. I redirected that to a non-html structure and built out basic content and let it sit for 2-3 months, and then redirected it to the main blog via an acquisition page. However, I think I saw Nick saying that .html URLs don’t pass on the link juice. Is that correct? I have seen a 30-40% uptick in impressions over the past ¾ days (redirected maybe 1-2 weeks ago), but this could just be the content kicking in. If it’s true about not passing link juice, is it okay to remove this redirect and add a new one straight away (should I buy a new domain to redirect)?

Google crawlers are intuitive enough to understand when there is a relay, but as far as creating a concise redirect to a page from an html-based page, I don’t know of a way to do it. That’s not to say that Google doesn’t understand that this page is supposed to redirect to this page or have an idea of how that’s supposed to work. If you’re getting positive results, I would just stick to what you’re doing, and then with this new redirect that’s not HTML-based, you can just do permalink-to-permalink or, if you’re on WordPress, a 404-to-relevant page. I wouldn’t remove the 301 at this point. Leave it and move forward.

[18:06] I acquired a site with no distinct silo structure—just a flat structure overall. Have you seen an internal linking overhaul to build a stronger, more well-defined silo, fixing traffic stagnation? They basically just used Link Whisper and sprayed links everywhere.

SirLinksalot.co is a virtual silo where the URL structure doesn’t matter. If you don’t have any kind of inner linking structure at all—if your blog articles don’t link out to too many relevant things, you can see a massive gain just by doing some solid inner linking. Link Whisper is definitely a great start, but you can always do it better.

[24:40] Can we use AI content if it’s useful, in spite of Originality.ai? The content is fully informative, as per my expertise.

We completely ignore AI checkers. The consensus of the entire SEO community as of today is that these checkers don’t matter. Google basically gave up on trying to determine whether or not content is AI. All that matters to them now is the value of the content to searchers and adds something new to the conversation, regardless of how the content was generated.

[29:40] With the spam links mentioned above, I am getting some hits on those pages leading to 404s (you can see this via RankMath). I saw Kyle Roof mention previously to limit 404s as much as possible. Should I redirect these spam URLs to my homepage?

We use a WordPress plugin called “404 Auto Redirect to Similar Post”. This is just a way to make sure you’re not “wasting” link juice. But if you’ve gone into Ahrefs or something comparable and you see these URLs that are 404ing and have a significant amount of backlinks going to them, then find something that you think is comparable.

[36:14] What does it mean when you pop on and off the main keyword SERPs—6 times on and off in 2-3 months? Usually, it’s only on for a day. It’s high-traffic, high-comp.

From an EEAT standpoint, Authority and Trust have a big influence on this: Make sure you have Author pages, etc., and that you have a comparable number of backlinks going to these inner pages, with comparable amounts of anchor text ratios to that of your competitors. In doing that, I’ve noticed more stability. Focus on whether your content is really “helpful content.”

[44:12] I have been doing keyword research for a keyword and got very different traffic volumes for Canada compared to the U.S. (this wasn’t a trendy topic). Do you think I should just take into account the traffic volume from Canada even though it is ten times lower?

All the keyword tools and traffic volumes—and even Google’s estimates—are pretty bad. Don’t rely on these numbers. We see keyword traffic volume data as relative to all other keyword data: One keyword has a very big number while another has a small number. You’ll never get the exact traffic, but you’ll have a ballpark figure.

[47:59] Is there a way to find out via SEO tools what my page is categorized as? There was some different content on the original site (cultural / names of stuff / pet-related stuff), so I’m not sure exactly what niche Google sees this in (I think it’s cultural, but not 100%).

Majestic SEO is a good tool.

[50:47] If posts go to pages 2-3 within a few days/weeks of posting but move up and down slightly, can they still get to the top of page 1 a month later? Or is this likely their final resting place without additional links/content?

Generally, something’s not just going to fly to page 1 without a reason. If you’re landing on page 2 or three, it usually means that, while you probably did a good job writing the content, you don’t have enough authority. Or, for certain SERPs, Google prefers to see aged articles. Check what your competition on page 1 is doing and start emulating them.

[55:14] Are Yahoo backlinks good? I saw something like this: https://www.prlog.org/pub/prnewswire/, but isn’t it spammy since it mentions “complimentary report with the links to where your release has appeared on approx. 100 sites”? Or would it be a good idea for a “viral” campaign? Or would it be better to outreach to niche websites that have their articles redistributed by Yahoo and ask them for the price?

Press release links are good, but we consider them pillow links. These can give you a little bit of energy, not in the sense that you’re going to shoot up to page 1, but that you’re diversifying your backlink profile. It makes sense for a new business to want to get their name out there. Cheap press releases done naturally are viable and worthwhile, and Yahoo plays into that, but they’re not going to make you number one for the majority of the SERPs that you’re after. I don’t know that you can reach out to Yahoo itself, but it’s not worthwhile. Do a cheap press release once every six months, max. If you’re doing a solid backlinking campaign, once a year is much safer.

[1:06:16] Do you think there is any value in bit.ly links? I saw many big brands doing it on their social media. I’m not sure if it’s something that’s worth the time, though.

Bit.ly is just a shortener. They’re also good for tracking links. There is no SEO value to them.

[1:08:48] What do you think about the big news websites where the guest posts have a dedicated URL slug category where all guest posts are posted? I saw a big brand having success by doing it regularly, but this was in a non-English country, and, as you said, you can be more spammy, considering Google is fine-tuned for English.

If I’m getting a guest post, I wouldn’t want them to be in that kind of category. I don’t want anything indicating that the link I got was paid for. I want it to look like an actual endorsement from that website for my brand/article/website/etc.

[1:11:21] Have you gotten access to the ChatGPT plugins yet? If so, any thoughts? Are there any new SEO opportunities?

We don’t have access to the plugins yet. There are a lot of new SEO opportunities, but also a lot of opportunities to waste your time. That’s the way things are when a big shift like this happens in the world. Don’t worry about it too much. There are two primary skills in SEO: content creation and off-page factors like backlinking. Get good at those two things, then utilize AI to help you do your job better and faster.

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