Building quality backlinks and promoting your content
I know, I know, backlinks are well-trodden ground, we’ve covered them before and we’ll likely cover them again.
Because still after all this time, debate rages about whether backlinks really do make a difference to you ability to rank.
Google encourages us to earn, not buy links.
SEOs tell us to focus on quality not quantity.
We dutifully keep our backlink profiles clean, disavowing on a regular basis.
But is any of this working?
And if the black hat tactics don’t work (PBNs, comment spam and the rest) why do so many SEO types still do them?
Today we’re getting back to basics on backlinks and it’s a refresher that’s definitely worth your ear time.
Tune in to learn
- Do backlinks matter to Google?
- If backlinks from social media have any impact or authority
- Where to start setting up your first 3 backlinks
- How to recognise good backlinks
- How to recognise the red flags
- How content promotion ties in with link-building
- Ranking locally – what effect local backlinks will have
- Alan’s favourite tools to track backlinks
- Dodgy backlinks – are disavows worth it?
- Alan’s top backlink tip
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And big thanks to Ray Pasteur from Australia for their lovely review:
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“SEO without the acronym
This podcast is brilliant. Whether you are a beginner in the digital marketing world or know a thing or two about penguin, panda or helpful content updates – this one is for you. I admire Kate’s honesty and no BS approach to teaching the foundations and techniques of search engine optimisation. By applying these principles and tips, you’ll benefit in the long run. Both in smarts and likely revenue too.”
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Useful Resources
About Alan Silvestri
Fun fact: Alan is a Back to the Future fanatic and Delorean owner.
Transcript
Kate Toon:
I know, I know. Backlinks are well-trodden ground. We’ve covered them before and likely we’ll cover them again, because still after all this time, debate rages about whether backlinks really do make a difference to your ability to rank. Google encourages us to earn, not buy links. SEOs tell us to focus on quality, not quantity. We dutifully keep our backlinks profile clean, disavowing on a regular basis, but is any of this working? And if the black hat tactics don’t work, the PBMs, the comment spams and the rest, why does so many SEO types still do them? Today, we’re getting back to basics on backlinks and it’s a refresher that’s definitely worth your ear time.
Hello, my name is Kate Toon and I’m the head chef at The Recipe for SEO Success, an online teaching hub for all things related to search engine optimization and digital marketing. And today, I’m talking with Alan Silvestri. Hello, Alan.
Alan Silvestri:
Ciao, Kate.
Kate Toon:
Ciao. We’re just talking about the fact that Alan is an ex-Italian living now in Winchester. I was like, “Why move to the UK?” But then when he said Winchester, I understood. Let me introduce Alan to you. Alan is the founder and CEO at Growth Gorilla. Growth Gorilla helps B2B SaaS companies that are already publishing quality content get the word out to acquire quality backlinks and increase traffic and signups. Fun fact, Alan is a Back to the Future fanatic and DeLorean owner. Oh my God. Why didn’t you tell me this earlier? You actually own a real DeLorean in Winchester?
Alan Silvestri:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That’s true. Yes. And I also got a bunch of props and little things here.
Kate Toon:
Oh my goodness. One of my all-time favourite films and I recent-
Alan Silvestri:
Good taste.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. When my son was about 10, I thought, “I’m going to introduce him to Back to the Future,” because it’s such a classic. It’s actually quite-
Alan Silvestri:
Yeah, you must.
Kate Toon:
It’s quite sweary, though, the first one. If you watch it, it’s pretty sweary.
Alan Silvestri:
Yeah, there’s a lot of things if you watch it nowadays that wouldn’t necessarily be nice nowadays because yeah, it’s a movie of its time.
Kate Toon:
It is, it is. And rewatchable again and again. I love that. Fantastic. I love that you own a DeLorean. Do you just bomb around Winchester in your DeLorean looking cool?
Alan Silvestri:
Yeah, yeah. It’s basically my daily driver. We go to Aldi grocery shopping and all that.
Kate Toon:
No, you do not.
Alan Silvestri:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
Oh my God. I am immediately going to go and follow.
Alan Silvestri:
I have photos. I have proofs.
Kate Toon:
I’m going to follow you on social media. I already follow you on social media. I hope you share photos of this on social media.
Alan Silvestri:
Definitely. Definitely. Yeah.
Kate Toon:
Okay, good. All right, awesome. Well look, I’d prefer to talk about DeLoreans, but unfortunately we have to talk about backlinks, so let’s get stuck into the episode. We’ve recently done some good episodes about creating good content with back reputable links. We had James Welsh on the podcast recently go through the Google helpful content update and we had Shah Mens very many moons ago talk about how to remove good links gone bad. But today, we’re going to go kind of back to basics. We may get a bit tactical and technical, so bear with us on how to build back things the right way, because I still think there’s a lot of misunderstanding.
So I’m just going to start off explaining what a backlink is. A backlink is link from one website to another. Most SEOs believe that backlinks pass and link juice or authority, I’m doing air fingers, I don’t know why we’re on a podcast, that some kind of love flows through the link from that site A to site B. It’s kind of like, the analogy I use is the SEO is like the most popular girl at school. You have to make everyone else like you and then maybe they’ll give you some attention. So perfect example would be all the thousands of students who’ve done my course, they write me a beautiful testimonial and in return, I give them a backlink to their site and we share the love. But the question is do they share the love? Alan, Google is often telling us that backlinks don’t really matter. What do you think about this?
Alan Silvestri:
I wouldn’t say that they say that backlinks don’t matter. Actually, they’ve been kind of mentioning multiple times the backlink are an important ranking factor. The main thing that they always say is that quality is more important than quantity. So that’s what most people should focus on. But also, the other thing is that especially in the last three, four years maybe, content has become more important than it was before. And so for this reason, backlinks have become less important. Things have moved more into the realm of topical authority, as well. So yeah, basically the way they optimise your content, the key words that you select to optimise the content, the topics that you talk about in your content. And so yeah, for that reason, links have become slightly less important. So basically what Google is trying to do all the time is to make the algorithm more effective and try to avoid people like me to essentially manipulate the algorithm. So yeah, basically what they do is try to include things that are more difficult for people to manipulate basically.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. I mean, I think that’s debatable. I think Google has put out some different information about backlinks. You say that they say they’re of an important ranking factor. I don’t know if I’ve actually ever heard them actually articulate that in a… I don’t know if I’ve ever heard John… in fact, I just had John Mueller on the podcast and I asked him point blank and he’s like-
Alan Silvestri:
Yeah, maybe not him directly.
Kate Toon:
Yes, exactly.
Alan Silvestri:
I’ve seen other people that work at Google, but yeah.
Kate Toon:
And that’s the problem, right? Me and you sitting here have taken a different impression. I’m like, “Google’s a bit kind of like, ‘Yeah, they’re good, but don’t get carried away,'” and you’re like, “No, no, they’re a direct ranking factor.” Thanks, Google. Different mouthpieces saying different things. But I totally get what you’re saying. I think Google, we all know that they’re influenced, we want go on for quality, not quantity. And really it’s about the content. They’re really heavily pushing quality content, and we might talk a little bit about that as well as we go through.
Now, one of the things is, oh obviously we’re talking about backlinks from websites to websites. There’s also a lot of debate about whether backlinks from social media have any impacts. So generally the belief. you might disagree with me. is that they don’t pass authority, but they do obviously bring traffic and it’s what that traffic does on your site that could then have an influence on your ranking. SEOs love to say causation and correlation. So if you have a lot of followers on social media, you may also rank well. It’s not because of the links that are coming, it’s because those people that come into your site and doing things.
Alan Silvestri:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
Do you think that social media links influence ranking?
Alan Silvestri:
I totally agree with you here. Yeah, social media links are all-
Alan Silvestri:
Yeah, basically rel no follow, right? So they technically don’t pass link juice. So yeah, the thing is they can pass traffic, so the more followers you have on the social media, the more people can go to your website. The other thing is I would say that might mean something is the fact that social media links typically are a signal of the fact that real people are behind the website. So maybe they could be seen as trust signals.
Kate Toon:
Yes, I like that. That’s great because often you do find these old sites that don’t have a Facebook account or don’t have anything and you’re like, “Is this a real site?” Now, you mentioned a little term there, rel no follow. Let’s talk about that a little bit. Links by their very nature are follow, so you don’t have to add a tag to say follow this link, but you can add a tag that says rel no follow. And that kind of says to Google, “Look, please, you can click through on this link, but don’t pass any authority.” When do we most commonly see rel no follow used? You talked about social media as one instance. Yeah.
Alan Silvestri:
Yeah, yeah. So no follow is mostly social media, but also directories, forums or typically people, they use affiliate links. They also do that to kind of avoid spam and being penalised by Google as well. There’s all sorts of different rel for the different types of link that’s sponsored. Now they also introduce a couple more. So yeah, we’re getting technical here, but the main thing is basically they say to Google not to pass authority. And this is also one of the reasons why I would say that Google indirectly say links are important, right?
Kate Toon:
Exactly. Yeah, yeah.
Alan Silvestri:
Because-
Kate Toon:
Why have the tags?
Alan Silvestri:
Because otherwise they wouldn’t have that.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. Why have the tags? And if you’ve ever used any of the major SEO tools, you can actually see your links as follow and no follow. And the idea is you want to try and get as many follow links as possible. Ads as well, sponsored. You’re not supposed to pass authority through those. That’s against Google’s guidelines. As a small business owner or a regular person with a website, I tend to say don’t worry too much about rel no follow. If it’s an ad, absolutely, but other than that, I don’t think you need to laboriously go through your site making everything no follow. I just wouldn’t worry about it. Some people do though, right? Some people say if you have lots of links going out of your site, you’re going to lose, you’re going to leak SEO juice. Do you believe in that or what –
Alan Silvestri:
Not really. I mean, yeah, I don’t believe in the fact that you would lose SEO juice. Maybe yes, if you have a 500-world article and you’re linking out to 10,000 links.
Kate Toon:
700 places. Yeah, yeah.
Alan Silvestri:
Yeah, in that case maybe yes, but yeah, as long as you write content naturally for real people, you shouldn’t have any problems.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, I think that’s it. Don’t be tight with your link juice. Now, we’re going to come into some tactics, but one question which I should ask you before we do that is all the different tools have different measures of this authority of this SEO love. The classic was domain authority, which I think Moz coined many years ago. And basically, domain authority is the overall sort of score of the website. All things being considered, Alan’s site is better than mine, it’s been around longer, it’s better content. His domain authority is going to be 60 and mine, I just built it yesterday. It’s a little site about Guinea pigs and it’s only got a domain authority of three. And generally, the idea is is that you’re better off trying to get links from high domain authority sites than low domain authority sites, although obviously getting links from high domain authority sites is harder. Anything else to say about domain authority? Because again, lots of people say domain authority is a myth, it’s not true. What do you think about that?
Alan Silvestri:
Yeah, so I would say that I don’t think that Google uses domain authority as a metric to classify website. That said, it’s being seen as a correlation with the fact that sites that rank higher typically also have a higher domain authority. But I guess that’s also kind of a snowball effect. So once you rank higher, you start getting more links from other pages and so it’s all kind of natural. Yeah.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, it’s a tricky one, isn’t it? And I think to a degree, I mean, I think a lot of SEO is common sense. Clearly you’re going to get more love, attention, humans, whatever from linking a link from the New Yorker magazine than you are from your mom’s Guinea pig blog. But when you’re starting out, your mom’s Guinea pig blog might be all you can get. So I think it’s all about being realistic about that.
Alan Silvestri:
Yeah. And the other thing to mention is also, maybe you get a link now from a low domain authority site that is low domain authority now, but maybe in five years that’s going to be high authority.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, who knows?
Alan Silvestri:
And so the link should technically be more powerful, right?
Kate Toon:
Yeah. My Guinea pig blog is going to go off, I tell you. So everyone should be wanting a link from that. And then the other thing, I guess the other thing that comes up a lot with backlink is toxicity score. So things like SEM rush have scores and it can be a bit misleading because often they give low authority sites that are just started out, they say, “This site is toxic,” and there’s actually nothing wrong with it, it’s just a bit crap. So what STO do you put in toxicity scores? Do you believe them? Do you check them out?
Alan Silvestri:
No, no. No, we don’t use any of that. We mainly focus on using metrics to remove the initial maybe junk from a list. And we’re very careful with what metrics we use, but then we manually check all the pages and the website to do a visual check and to actually get a feel for what the site is and what kind of business, all that stuff.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. I’m wildly going off track from our plan, Alan, but you’re making me think of other questions, which is good, which is good. So I think all the tools put these kind of metrics in to try and make your life a bit easier. “Oh, great. I’ll just pivot this table to have all the high domain authority and remove all the toxic links, blah, blah, blah.” But I’m the same as you. I think you have to look at each link individually.
But another broad sweep you could argue is to look at the location of the website. So if you are in Australia and your audience is primarily Australian, you tend to want more links from Australian websites. So if you’re seeing a lot of Russian, Chinese links popping up, they’re probably not necessarily the best. How does country play into your strategy? Is that something that you look at?
Alan Silvestri:
Yeah, definitely. We have clients that are UK-based and so they ideally would like more links from UK-based sites. That’s also so they can maybe get referral traffic. That’s a very simple reason, because a product from a company that’s UK-based might not make sense for people in the US, for example. But yeah, so the main thing we try to do is focus on domains that are country-specific, maybe sometimes.
The other thing is try to get websites that are ranking for the specific country that we are looking in. So for example, we type a keyword, we might get the top 20 results for the keyword in that specific country because we know that those are more relevant and country-specific, as well.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. I mean, I think I started building backlinks way back when, when these tools weren’t at the level of sophistication they are now. And you just mentioned one of the best ways, the easiest ways… we’re going to come onto some tactics now. When I started out as a copywriter, I typed copywriter into Google and there were a million copywriters and I was like, “Oh, God dammit. I’m screwed, I’m never going to be able to rank.” But I just used that basic strategy of Googling who was at the top, also looking at my competitors, seeing where they had backlinks from. And for the first year pretty much, I just tried to build back links from those sites to mine. If my competitor had been featured in an article on Site X, I tried to be featured and that’s all I did. I didn’t worry too much about domain authority or anything like that. That was my basic strategy. I wonder if that still works today.
So I’m going to give you a scenario, Alan. It was a lot easier SEO awhile, 10, 12 years ago. It’s a bit harder now. So let’s say I’m a small business, I’ve got some great content on my blog, my site is speedy, I’ve optimised it well, but I haven’t really put in any effort into building backlinks. Now this I would say is 95% of people who come on my course. We get to module five, which is backlinks, and I’m like, “Let’s do a backlink audit,” and they’re like, “I’ve only got one backlink.” And I’m like, “Well, have you done anything?” They’re like, “No, but I just thought you got them naturally.” It’s like, “Yeah, kind of.” So where would you start? How would you get, for example, maybe your first three backlinks?
Alan Silvestri:
So the first place where I will start is even before the backlinks. So something that’s very important is people should know the pages that they want to build links to, because some pages can maybe bring in more revenue than other pages. So the first thing is knowing which pages you want to promote effectively. The second thing that you can do is possibly look at those pages that are already ranking maybe between position 4 and position 15, so the bottom of page one and the top of page two, because you know that those are what we call the quick win pages. So these pages are already ranking quite well for maybe some keywords, so chances are maybe with just one, maybe two extra backlinks, they could shoot all the way to position five. So something like that.
So once you know the best pages to promote and you found some that already are ranking quite well, the three main tactics that I would probably focus on is number one, is to look out for listicles, right? So all of those articles that are talking about top… For example, if we’re talking about SaaS, which is my main niche, so look for all these articles that I mentioned, like top tools for sales. So all of that. The second thing is guest posting, so reaching out to people to publish your content on their website. And the third thing is probably something like HARO. So looking, subscribing to the services where journalists are essentially looking for quotes for expert so you can give them your two cents and get a backlink in return.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, I love that. HARO is Help a Reporter Out over here in Australia. We have a site whose name has completely escaped me, but there’s lots of sites where you can go and volunteer. It doesn’t even have to be a whole guest plug, does it? Sometimes you can just provide a little quote or a snippet and get your backlink. I love that. Now again, something I want to pick off on what you said, you mentioned, which is super important, looking at pages which are going to deliver a great user experience that maybe sell your product the best. And that’s really important, because I see most people just building backlinks to their homepage rather than spreading the links out across their site. And obviously your homepage isn’t always the best result, because it’s kind of like the magazine cover and then they’ve got to do work to get to the relevant spot. So I love that. Do you start off building links to the homepage or do you go straight into building links to key pages or how do you approach that?
Alan Silvestri:
So for newer websites, we typically starts off with the homepage campaign, and that’s mainly because it can help with the domain rating that we’re talking about before, but also because it can bring in referral traffic. And so that’s always nice for people that are starting out to start getting some ROI from the link building as well. Then typically we move on to individual pages because our main goal is rank these pages for their target keywords, essentially.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, that’s it. And your homepage is not targeted to, maybe just targeted your brand name or a very broad niche sector or whatever. So I love that. That’s a really important thing to mention. And I guess we’re kind of assuming that you’ve already built backlinks from social media knowing that they don’t have parcel authority and that maybe you’ve listed yourself in a few directories, like her Yellow Pages, True Local. Again, any link that’s easy to get that all your competitors can get isn’t going to move the needle that much because everyone can get on True Local, so it’s not going to make a big difference. So you are really trying to break new ground and get links that your competitors don’t have rather than just following them slavishly. Follow them slavishly to begin with and then get new ones.
So we’ve got our first three backlinks, and listicles, guest posts and HARO, I think most people may have heard of those. Now we’re going to get a bit trickier. Where are our next five coming from, Alan?
Alan Silvestri:
So I would say the first thing is pick one of the three strategies that we mentioned before, the one that you’ve been doing best and that works best for you, and just try to scale it up as much as you can so you can maybe automate some part of the process, the most boring, the more time-consuming, and you can use tools. So all the ways that you can do to scale that specific strategy. The other, once you have more budget maybe, because you got the first backlinks, you’re starting getting some traffic, so we have some budget, then at that point I would probably move to strategies where you can create some extra content. So linkable assets, maybe. So this could be anything like data-driven content pieces, research, statistics, like trends kind of articles or some of the things like free tools that you can offer to the audience that they can use or link out to in resource pages. And then the last one is probably the classic broken link building. So finding broken links and then replacing them with your own content to essentially steal all of those backlinks, basically.
Kate Toon:
I love that. Can we dig into those a little bit more? So we talked about listicles and guest posts and scaling that. so obviously doing more guest posts and more listicles. There’s also the idea of digital PR, So you do something newsworthy and therefore you get featured in digital publications, but also the digital versions of them. This is kind of what you do a lot, right? Content promotion, content creation.
Alan Silvestri:
Mm-hmm.
Kate Toon:
So you create… I found surveys to be a really useful tactic. So I did a big survey for my copywriting school about the state of copywriting, blah, blah, blah, in whatever year. And then that becomes not only a PR story, but something that my peers and other copywriters are going to link to. And those are, then you’ve got that relevancy of the link. So creating amazing content, which is amazing, is a hard one. But you mentioned a few formats there. So tools is one, surveys, guides that they-
Alan Silvestri:
Yeah, free tools.
Kate Toon:
Yeah.
Alan Silvestri:
Data-driven research kind of pieces.
Kate Toon:
Yeah.
Alan Silvestri:
The other thing is any kind of content that could be a good fit for our resource page, so providing any kind of summarised information on a specific topic to be the ultimate guide, for example. Anything that people can just reference as a main guide or resource for the topic typically works.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. I mean, we’re all focusing on EAT now and wanting to be able to back up our content with some measurable stats or quotes from people of authority. So if you can be the quote of authority or if you can provide the stat, then you’re going to get linked to a lot. I love that. You mentioned the broken links and also link outreach, which is kind of an awkward thing. Most small businesses loathe SEOs for those emails that tell us that our sites are broken, but then the next level is, “Oh, hey. We noticed you have an article on eggs. Will you please link to our ultimate guide to eggs?” Most of which I think, and if that was your content, Alan, I do apologise, but most of those emails I just-
Alan Silvestri:
You got me.
Kate Toon:
… immediately delete. Do you find like outreach in that way works, just the cold email? I mean, it must work to some degree or people wouldn’t do it, right?
Alan Silvestri:
Yeah, yeah. That’s basically all we do, like 99% of what we do.
Kate Toon:
It’s you. It’s you doing it. You’re the egg guy.
Alan Silvestri:
Yeah, yeah. So yeah, we do create content, specifically linkable assets. The main thing with that is the clients really need to have an extra budget for the extra content, and most of the data-driven content can be visual, so it’s quite expensive to create, as well. So yeah, I would say for newer companies that are just starting out, link outreach is the most cost-effective method, but you have to be really unique, try to stand out and avoid all of the usual templates that everybody and their mom have been using for the last 10 years. So there’s a lot of basically nuanced there.
Kate Toon:
Yeah.
Alan Silvestri:
It’s very nuanced.
Kate Toon:
I mean, I think if you’re going to do… cold emailing is something that’s debatable across all industries. It’s not unique to SEO. There’s a lot of people who do cold emails about copywriting and accountants do it to try and win new clients. And I think one of the ways to do that is make it less cold, so warm the candidate up before you contact them, maybe hook up, connect with them on social media, comment on some posts so that when you do send that email, it’s not like, “Who the hell are you?” It’s like, “Ah, it’s you. Hi. I’ve seen you. That’s cool. All right. You’re the egg person. I love your egg posts. Fantastic.” So I think there’s kind of that, I was going to use the term fluffing, but that’s inappropriate. There’s that warming up before you do the lead so it’s less cold.
I’ve got a couple of other tactics, Alan, that work really well for me, which I might share. Number one is being a guest on podcasts. So I’ve probably been on over 200 podcasts and I don’t do it as a backlinking strategy, but generally you will get a bio and that content hangs around for a long time on the site. So it’s a good quality link. And also, you’re getting the added bonus of being shared with their audience. So again, pitching for podcasts I think really works. And then my final one, which is a feel good one, I like to call it good karma SEO. So I have campaigns of giving love to people. So I think about if you’re a small business, think about any supplier you’ve ever worked with, could you give them a testimonial? They’re probably going to use that on their site. You can then follow up and say, “Hey, thanks for using my testimonial. Would you give me a backlink?” And in the spirit of reciprocity, you’ve just done something nice for them, they’re probably going to say yes.
Alan Silvestri:
Yeah, it’s very good.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. And then the other one I like a lot is donating. So I like to donate to charities, which I do anyway, but if you donate to your local dog’s home, they’re probably going to have a sponsors page where they credit people who give regular donations and you could be featured there. So it’s a kind of way of giving back without any expectation, but sometimes you get something back as well. So good karma SEO. You heard that here first, Alan. You can nick that one for your egg guy.
Alan Silvestri:
I look forward to the ultimate guide that everybody can copy and start doing this.
Kate Toon:
Yes, exactly, exactly. I did have a little course, a course on that, but now it’s combined in my big course. So I want to talk about two other things before we wrap up. I want to talk about relevancy. So you talk about content promotion, and there’s an idea that if you are, let’s say an accountant, there’s a benefit if you have other accountants linking to you. How important is industry and niche-related relevancy to you in your link-building strategies?
Alan Silvestri:
Yeah, we’ll say it’s definitely very important and we typically divide relevancy into two parts. So there’s domain relevancy, but also page relevancy. So you want links from websites that are talking about similar or related topics, but also from individual pages that are talking about similar or related topics to your page.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. I think that’s super important. And therefore, your point about creating great guides and surveys and stats is more likely to get you peer-to-peer links rather than just random people, because it’s your peers who are interested. And I think that’s something that a lot of businesses get wrong. They totally think about their content strategy from a who’s my customer point of view, but sometimes you have to do pieces of content that aren’t for your customer, they’re for your peers. And so you become a thought leader within your industry. That then drives your authority and gets you in front of more customers. I love that.
And then let’s talk about locales. We talked about country-based domains. If you are Bob’s Bookshop in Winchester and really you’d love some online orders from around the country, but generally you’re trying to drive foot traffic to your store, would you generally focus on local SEO there, getting local links?
Alan Silvestri:
So yeah, if you’re a local store, yes, I would probably focus, well, first off on optimising your website for local keywords. That’s the main thing. So if we’re talking about local backlinks, those are still very important, but for the organic search results. So when you look for local keywords, it’s divided into two sections. Basically you have the map pack basically at the top, and from what I’ve heard, because local is not really my specialty, but the map pack is basically looking for positions, right?
Kate Toon:
Yeah.
Alan Silvestri:
So stores that are near you.
Kate Toon:
Yeah.
Alan Silvestri:
While the organic results, which are the ones below that, those are the ones where local backlinks are still very important. So I will say, yeah, optimised for local backlinks, but then at the end of the day, if people are near you, they’re going to find you in the map pack.
Kate Toon:
That’s it. The map pack is largely driven by Google business and your physical location. There’s not much you can do about that. Where Google dropped the pin in Sydney, it feels to me like they moved the pin because the businesses that used to come up in the top for certain rankings have shifted. They used to have the pin right down by the harbour, and now they’ve moved it more in the – pand there’s nothing you can do about that. And I would say I don’t have any stats on it, but I would say a huge amount of the clicks go to the local pack. So if you’re in the organic listings, you could kind of really, after the ads in the pack, whatever, you’re in position eight or nine. So it’s pretty challenging, I think.
Okay. Let’s talk about tools. I reckon you’re a man who loves a good tool. Which backlink tools do you prefer to use?
Alan Silvestri:
Yeah, so we mainly use Ahrefs for everything in terms of metrics. We use Pitchbox for handling and managing the outreach. So everything from the prospecting process and all the way to basically a CRM for our link opportunities. So those are the two main ones. We use a couple of other tools for finding emails like Hunter.io. Then we’ve built our own Chrome extension as well for being able to find emails contextually. So wherever you are on the web, you’ll see a name of a person, you’ll put in the website and you can find their email. So yeah, those are the main three that we use.
Kate Toon:
Fantastic. So Pitchbox, Ahrefs and Hunter.io. And I’ll ask you for the links to those and we’ll put them in the show notes, if that’s okay.
Alan Silvestri:
Yeah, yeah.
Kate Toon:
As well as your Chrome toolbar. Okay, one kind of sort of final point before we do give the big, juicy tip, which we love to finish the podcast on, negative SEO is a thing. There were algorithm updates put out there to kind of specifically deal with bad links. And you can still go on Fiver and find people who will negative SEO your competitors, which essentially means they drive lots of dodgy, low-quality links to your sites, usually wrapped around a particular keyword that you’re trying to rank for. And the idea is is that is going to damage your link reputation and possibly get you either blacklisted or D-ranked or whatever. And the solution to that is often to create a list of those dodgy backlinks and submit them to disavow tools. But again, big debate here, you submit to the disavow tool, you get nothing from Google doesn’t say, “Okay, we’re going to go to work and remove all of those from your link profile.” Nothing happens. They still show up in your link profile. Where do you stand on dodgy backlinks and keeping a clean backlink profile?
Alan Silvestri:
So yeah, I would say probably 80% of normal websites shouldn’t have to worry about it. The main reason is also with the latest link spam update, it seems that Google is getting better and better to automatically discard spam links. So essentially they’re doing that work for you. So the only situations in which I would probably do that disavow is in case you are a super huge website and you’re really getting either a manual kind of warning from Google or you see hundreds of thousand of spammy domains with super exact match anchor text or maybe anchor text that are not relevant to your niche or business or spammy anchor text like porn, gambling, all of that sort of stuff. Those are the only situations where I probably worry about disavowing.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. And for those who are new, you need to sign up to Google Search Console and that’s where you’ll get your penalty alerts. But I think that’s true. I think if you are a big site or you are super controversial and you’re in the habit of pissing people off, that can be another reason. But I kind of think it’s a good idea… when we go to module five of the course and people do look at their link profile, it’s like they’ve never looked at it before. They’re not aware of who’s linking to them and they’re not aware… They’ve maybe forgotten who they’re linking to. And I think it’s a good thing as a business owner to be aware of who’s linking to your site and be across that. Because also there’s a lot of opportunity there.
Maybe you’ve been linked to from a particular site, and that’s something you, “Wow, I’ve been featured in,” I’m often finding I’m being quoted and stuff, and I’m like, “Oh, cool. You never told me. Brilliant, I’m going to show off about that.” So being across your link profile and looking at it on a regular basis, A, for the very rare occurrence that something’s gone wrong, but B, to look for opportunities as well, or even to go back to them and say, “Love the link. So grateful. Do you mind pointing it at this page rather than that page?” And some people might be up for doing that.
Alan Silvestri:
Yeah, exactly.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, so I think being aware of that for opportunity. Now, this wasn’t a question I was going to ask you, but I may as well ask you because you’re an orb of knowledge. So we’re talking about backlinks here and obviously them passing authority, but there’s also this idea that not everyone’s going to link to you and that you may just get a citation. You might not get the link, but a citation and citations still have value because they go towards creating your digital footprint, showing your expertise in authority. Do you know often settle for a citation rather than a backlink?
Alan Silvestri:
Yeah, I would say it’s all about relevancy and see whether a citation makes more sense than a link. Because at the end of the day, I think that the way I see backlinks, it’s kind of building bridges across the web to send people to relevant information to know more than what they’re already reading. So if the citation makes more sense, that basically sending people to another page, then that’s probably best.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. I mean, that’s it, isn’t it? I mentioned the mention. It’s nice to have people talking about you as long as it’s positive. So Alan, it’s been amazing. Thank you. I don’t think we got too techy. I think we explained things very well. I love the bridge analogy. I love an analogy. So let’s finish up with a big tip. We’re a new company or a small business, we’ve never really thought about backlinks. What’s one tip that you can give them to guide them through the terrifying world of earning backlinks?
Alan Silvestri:
So the main thing that I would probably say, and this might not be a very SEO kind of related tip, but it’s study copywriting and become extremely good at writing emails, because a lot of people might be good at finding pages to get links from, but not a lot of people are good at asking for those backlinks. So yeah, if you’re good at copywriting, you basically won half the battle.
Kate Toon:
Oh, well I’m all right then. And I think my added tip to that would be don’t always use email. There are so many other ways to contact people. Sliding into someones DMs can often be a lot more effective than email because we’re kind of sometimes in business mode when we’re on email and we’re like, “Oh, delete, delete, delete, delete.”
Alan Silvestri:
Yes.
Kate Toon:
Whereas on social media, if you work a bit harder, you can build a relationship before you ask for something. And I think that can be helpful. Alan, that was amazing. Where can we find out more about you?
Alan Silvestri:
The best place would probably be our website, which is mygrowthgorilla.com, or you can find me and DM me on Twitter. I’m @AlanGGorilla.
Kate Toon:
And you’re on LinkedIn, because Twitter’s a bit-
Alan Silvestri:
Yeah, LinkedIn as well.
Kate Toon:
Twitter’s a bit of a dumpster fire at the moment, so I’ve-
Alan Silvestri:
Yeah. Also LinkedIn. You can find me. You can follow me on LinkedIn.
Kate Toon:
That’s where I found Alan. I found him on LinkedIn and I follow him and he shares a lot of really amazing content. So I recommend going and following him there.
Alan Silvestri:
Thank you.
Kate Toon:
Alan, thank you so much for your time today. It’s been wonderful. I was going to try and say something in Italian, but I can’t think of anything.
Alan Silvestri:
Yeah. Thank you, Kate. It’s been awesome.
Kate Toon:
Fantastic. Okay, there we go. I’ve said [Italian 00:36:53] to Alan and now we are wrapping up. So if you like what you’re hearing on The Recipe for SEO Success Show, it’d be great if you could take a minute to share some positive ratings and reviews on iTunes and Stitcher. We’ve had the spate of people leaving one star reviews for no reason, which is a bit sad. Anyway, Ray Pastor from Australia left a lovely review and he said, “SEO without the acronym. This podcast is brilliant. Whether you’re a beginner in the digital marketing world or know a thing or two about Penguin Panda and helpful content updates, this one is for you. I admire Kate’s honesty,” I sound like I’m going to start crying, “and no BS approach to teaching the foundations and techniques of search engine optimization. By applying these principles and tips, you’ll benefit in the long run, both in smarts and lightly in relevant revenue tool.” Thank you very much, Ray.
So as always, you can head to the show notes for this episode to find out more about Growth Gorilla and Alan, and also all those tools that he mentioned. So go there to see links to Hunter.io and Pitchbox and some of those outreach tools, as well as his link recommendations as well. So thanks for listening. I hope you enjoyed that, and until next time, happy SEO-ing. Bye-bye.
