Ultimate SEO | Backlinks, Ranking, Keywords, Audits And PBNs

Backlink BuildingWe can spend all day optimizing our pages for keywords that we researched for days and never rank content on Google Search.  Its just the cold hard fact that in SEO onpage optimization is the easiest thing and it used to work in the 1990s ... heck back then you could keyword stuff and just repeat the same phrase enough in the background and you'd get some traction.  Yes, SEO is dead ... if thats the SEO you are using.Backlinks moved in and added some credence to the claims that our content should rank for this or that keyword.  It made sense, each site that links to you with the anchor text including your keyword was that site basically vouching for your content.  If thats all you think backlinks are then ... Yes, SEO is dead ... simply having a ton of links to your site isn't a sure fire way to demonstrate that your content is rank worthy anymore.Backlinks created a storm of opportunity in SEO for gaming the system and stacking the deck.  I love telling people about the Google Bomb Miserable Failure and how it defined George Bush in 2004.  Or the story of the downfall of JCPenny who mysteriously ranked number one for all manner of their products until Google took manual action and basically they have never recovered.  Those bring me to these games we developed in an effort to fool Google into making us number one in SERPs.Link Building SchemesEverything I'm going to ...
Read More

Two things are important for you to take away from this post about backlinks and they are listed right below.  We've then included Google content explaining these two changes in backlinks.  If the text is italic and navy blue, its quoted from Google.

1. User Generated Content or Sponsored Backlinks Added Are two additional rel="" tag options introduced by Google.  UGC Sponsored can be used together or separately in an attempt to show a difference between the two backlinks.  Nofollow remains a link option but if the link isn't a paid advertisement or User Generated Content yet you want to ensure if is not seen as an endorsement you may still use No Follow as an attribute.
2. Every Link Counts Now. Rel+"NoFollow" used to mean don't follow this link and give the target any credit for this backlink.  Thats changing, all links will now be rewarded potentially...some links have been described as "hints" with "signals" still in the rankings.  It's not clear if they are one in the same or separate.

Evolving “nofollow” – new ways to identify the nature of links Tuesday, September 10, 2019 Nearly 15 years ago, the nofollow attribute was introduced as a means to help fight comment spam. It also quickly became one of Google’s recommended methods for flagging advertising-related or sponsored links. The web has evolved since nofollow was introduced in 2005 and it’s time for nofollow to evolve as well. Today, we’re announcing two new link attributes that provide webmasters with additional ways to identify to ...
Read More

Romantic Depot operates six, soon to be seven adult stores offering sex toys and lingerie, in the New York City area.  Their flagship stores are in Manhattan and the Bronx.  They’ve been around for sometime and over the years their website aged along with other businesses seeking to help drive local foot traffic.They've been around for some time and over the years their website aged along with other businesses sites. The goal of their site was to help drive local foot traffic, but a growing mobile population made their desktop site seem antiquated.With the move to mobile devices in full demonstration the old RomanticDepot.com site was not responsive. It was an HTML static site that required manual editing and didn't display well on a mobile phone.This lead the owner of the chain to build a new site that was mobile friendly and it lead to my involvement overseeing the process of migrating to this new mobile site without hurting the site's strong local SEO presence.Keywords: Branded And UnbrandedRomantic Depot does have an impressive keyword positioning presence in the New York City area. Even nationally they are on page 2 of results for "sex shop".The goal was to ensure a smooth transition to the mobile site while maintaining the SEO that had been built over the years.The site's keywords did present opportunities for overall improvement. While the store name, a branded keyword, was well associated with the site, the product names were not.So someone searching for the store name found it easily but searching for unbranded keywords ...
Read More

PBNs in 2019 can be just as effective as they once were if properly maintained and staged.  Mimicing an organic site goes a long way in the stability of your PBN. Additional Private Blog Network Resources: SEO PBN - Collection of all our SEO Articles on PBNs PBN Videos For Finding Expired Domains Backlinks and Auto Posting Maintaining A PBN It started off simple enough every week I'd search through expiring domains and pick up a couple cheap .org domains and spent about $7 bucks on two. I'd build my sites out individually and define a purpose to them and make them fully functional sites and move on.  But no one does that who is running just one site.  You return to the site and you improve it, add content, run updates and make sure it hasn't been hacked. This continued for 2 or 3 months in 2018 and before I knew it I had a hundred domains.  But I didn't really...because the oldest sites were usually hacked or outdated plugins would shut off removing functionality.  SSL certs may have expired in any regard there are a lot of things out there ready to shut your site down. Basically the older the site the longer it had been left to its own devices, the more likely it was down. Just monitoring whats up and down is a chore.  Sure you can check 1 or 2 sites, but I figured out if I spent 15 per site I'd need 25 hours ...
Read More

Adobe Will No Longer Support Flash After 2020, 10 Years After Steve Jobs Argued Why It Should End In 2010. Google Announced in September 2019 that it was phasing out support for Flash from its Chrome browser following Adobe;s announcement that they would end support in 2020.  Apple users wont likely hear much about the end of Flash, in 2010,  Steve Jobs wrote a scathing review of Flash and in it explained why Apple products wouldn't support it. Google's Flash Announcement: For 20 years, Flash has helped shape the way that you play games, watch videos and run applications on the web. But over the last few years, Flash has become less common. Three years ago, 80 percent of desktop Chrome users visited a site with Flash each day. Today usage is only 17 percent and continues to decline. This trend reveals that sites are migrating to open web technologies, which are faster and more power-efficient than Flash. They’re also more secure, so you can be safer while shopping, banking, or reading sensitive documents. They also work on both mobile and desktop, so you can visit your favorite site anywhere. These open web technologies became the default experience for Chrome late last year when sites started needing to ask your permission to run Flash. Chrome will continue phasing out Flash over the next few years, first by asking for your permission to run Flash in more situations, and eventually disabling it by default. We will remove Flash completely from Chrome toward the end of ...
Read More

Example Audit Considerations This post includes a client audit recently completed with the client's name largely removed.  Some reports are linked too from within the report and since those reports are still of use to the client they remain largely intact. This has prevented redaction of these external reports. Graphics may include the client's site address.  This audit is only posted and made available to provide an illustration of what might be expected from an Ultimate SEO Custom Audit. Its not uncommon to generate an audit of a site using a computer's AI or a set of rules ... "if this is that then write that."  Automated audits are useful but only in showing very generalized often cookie cutter responses.  These responses would include statements such as "build more backlinks" but in these custom reports an SEO reviews the entirety of multiple automated reports and then provides insight and an action plan for addressing the most pressing issues affecting a site's goals. Ultimate SEO Custom Site Audits are a unique in-depth tool that is essential to many organization’s competitive edge.  In this post I’m including a recent audit completed for a client to provide an example of the audits we offer in the SEO store. Read more about our custom audits after the example document. Our custom audits include virtually everything.

• Site Audit - listing errors and warnings that include missing pages, misspellings, missing metadata and more.
• Backlink Audit - A review of the referring domains, their strength, anchor ...
  Read More

One might think cybersecurity is not an SEO topic, but it is a very important SEO topic.  SEO as I keep noting here is more than keywords today. Technical SEO is about speed optimization, files such as robots.txt and sitemap.xml and security of your site IS an SEO matter. If you neglect your security Google can take action including deindexing your site if malware is found.  You'd be notified likely in Google Search Console of manual action and be removed from searches until you've cleaned up the site. Consider images like these in Search Engine Console or read about a real life deindexing from an SEO's perspective. Wordfence Alternative - WP-Cerber Wordfence is a highly popular WordPress security plugin that offers multiple layers of protection and is known to protect the most WordPress sites of any other security plugin. Is it fool profit?  Has anyone ever beaten it?  Yes, and often. Because of that last sentence I never use Wordfence because being number one makes you the target most hackers train to overcome. Think of the Microsoft vs Apple security myth ... Apple is thought to be more secure, and its not  that it is more secure it is more that more computers run Microsoft so most threats focus on it. WP Cerber Security Settings Sometimes its good to be number two.  WP Cerber is a security plugin that I viewto be the best Wordfence alternative. There are a lot of features and settings in any security plugin but these ...
Read More

Link building is one of the harder  aspects of SEO and because of this one of the least done. Unfortunately it is many times more powerful than anything you do to your page and content.  No level of optimization of content will trump the power of well placed relevant backlinks.Its so hard few ever do it, and those same people probably say that "SEO is dead."  It is if all you're doing is keyword optimization.  75% of what decides the results for a search have nothing to do with what is on the page. Expired Domain Backlinks Every day thousands of domains expire.  The owner just didnt renew it, maybe they forgot it.  Whatever the reason the domain is now available to anyone for registering again.  But what happens to all those pages on the internet that linked to that expired domain?  Nothing usually....each site would have to go through and update their own conten.As a site owner you can probably understand that means the bcklinks of an expired domain usually remain active.  This link building strategy involves you purchsing that domain, then redirecting the existing backlinks to your relevant content.  This video series walks you through three steps.  First, finding the expired domain. Second, reviewing the domain anchor text.  Third, setting those redirects to your site.For more info on assessing a site's value continue reading after the videos below under the SEO Site Audit header. Video 1 - Finding and sorting through expired domains All links below, open in ...
Read More

Duplicate content is a threat to your SEO rankings but not in the way you think.  It is distracting you from stuff that actually matters.  Google has no penalty and notes much of the web is duplicate content, the question is whether your use of the content ads value. Google noted over ten years ago that its not an issue. Let's put this to bed once and for all, folks: There's no such thing as a "duplicate content penalty." At least, not in the way most people mean when they say that. Google Webmaster Central Blog 2008 Duplicate content doesn't cause your site to be penalized. If duplicate pages are detected, one version will be returned in the search results to ensure variety for searchers. Google Webmaster Central Blog 2007 "Lots of duplicate content exists on websites, and often it's not a pressing problem." In the video provided by Google on "How to hire an SEO" they gain note duplicate content isn't a big deal. SearchEngineLand.com has an article that addresses the myth of duplicate content penalties from 2016. Duplicate Content Penalty Duplicate Content is killing your SEO because you're not doing something of value. Rather than worry about duplicate content why not write new content to your blog?  How about posting to relevant forums and share your expertise to attract attention to your site?  Maybe you should be monitoring your social media presence and posting about your services to Facebook?  Rather than duplicate content do some easy link building.  The ...
Read More

Keywords In Headers - How Your H1 H2 Tags Are SEO Keywords Too often people mistake the real value of the H1 and H2 headers when designing a website.  Not only do they come with big or bolder text but used correctly they provide the natural place to put your page's keywords and thats where Google is expecting to see what the page is about. To use them right I always go back to my college days and think in terms of a paper and the structure that APA style provides.  Now I'm not saying the type face or the requirement to center the first level of the headers is required on a page. Rather the logic behind what should be in the header. I think its also worth noting that I'm a bit more strict than you probably have to be with headers but being clear is never bad for SEO. How to Use Headers As Keywords Consider in this article we're discussing the H1 Tag and how many there should be as well as the order of them in your content.  It makes sense for the title to include the keywords were are after. And then it may make sense still to make the h1 header tag the title.  Now with that said how many titles do we want in the same content?  Id suggest one so I as a rule will only use the h1 header once.  To help divide up the content we can use additional ...
Read More

SEO And Migrations: Changing Domain Names With Matt Cutts Migrating your site from one domain name to another can be problematic and the SEO implications can be long lasting.  UltimateSEO.org was not the original domain name for this site. SEOData.cloud was and it seemed great because it used three aspects of what I wanted to focus on all in one address.  Of course it lacked any backlinks or history and wasn't a .com .net, or a .org. I switched after ultimateseo.org expired from another person because it had the backlinks and metrics of a site years ahead of SEOData.cloud. There are a lot of opinions in SEO on how to switch domains during a migration but few carry the experience and weight as Matt Cutts, former head of Google Search Spam Team.  Here's a video of his guidance. Matt Cutts Video On Changig Domain Names Changing Domains And SEO Concerns What should you consider before a domain name shift?

1. Domain Age: It's still a ranking factor.  Not huge but a factor to consider.
2. Redirects: Per the latest from Google 301 redirects will transfer 100% of SEO value but make sure its relevant content to ensure user behavior doesn't hurt your site. i.e. Someone is looking for Australian Kangaroos and you've redirected everything to your homepage about animals.  Make the redirect to a page about kangaroos.
3. Internal Redirects and Assets: Make sure you crawl your site and adjust for links that may include the old domain.
4. SEO TIP If your ...
   Read More

AWS Alternative If you use AWS and are annoyed at your rising costs and cant figure out their pricing schemes you arent alone.  Ultimate SEO has moved most of it's servers to Digital Ocean and they are about 50% of the cost of AWS.  Check them out and see what you can do with a $5 server.  Click the image above and you will receive a $25 credit. Or follow this url https://m.do.co/c/6f93e63b6b43 ...
Read More

This post is largely a repost from New Media Campaigns.  Its spot on and I couldn't say it better.  Some additional recommendations I've made for political candidates and their campaigns are included in: Political SEO and Articles Politically Tagged the main article I have on this is Political SEO: SEO Tips For Political Campaign Websites William Henry Harrison is the imagery I wanted you to consider when thinking about your social media and mistakes that could be made. As President of the United States he wasted no time in his inaugural address to deliver in detail his long plans for the country.  Speaking uncovered in torrential rains history blame's his death on the blunder of talking so long in a downpour.  The end of a politician due to his messaging is the image I give you. Top Mistakes Made In Social Media By Candidates 1. Not promoting it The first tip is super-straightforward, but it is so important yet so often overlooked that it is worth mentioning first.  Once you create a Facebook page it needs to be promoted for voters and supporters to ever find it. Add a link to the page wherever you can online, including the campaign website, Twitter account, and Youtube video descriptions. Additionally, promote the page offline in places like on direct mail, campaign literature, TV ads, and in a candidate’s stump speeches. Targeting Facebook ads to voters and potential supporters can also be tremendously cost-effective, so use some of the money budgeted for online ads (you ...
Read More

In several previous articles we've covered: Domain Auditing, Page Speed And SEO, Backlinks and even some less than white hat techniques such as Private Blog Networks, Guest Posts and more.  All of these are cogs in the greater overall machine which is Search Engine Optimization or SEO.  To you and any other website owner it is Search Engine Position Ranking.    In this article we're going to look more holistically at the sum of the parts and how it fits together.Search Engine Marketing Vs Search Engine OptimizationSEO is not Search Engine Marketing, or SEM. It is closely related but very different.  In the end both mean to drive relevant traffic to a site but in different, often at odds means.  SEM includes Pay Per Click or PPC traffic, but can also include more paid traffic channels.I'd argue that a good SEM landing page is an awful SEO landing page.  SEO pages may have a lot of content on them but they are structured in a specific a deliberate manner with everything falling neatly under the page's topical subject.PPC requires none of that and its page structure is more geared with conversion in mind.  A good SEO is not necessarily a good SEM and vice versa someone with PPC experience is not an SEO.  I only lay it out like that because I've worked for sites where a SEM's decisions hindered the SEO efforts but they served the PPC interests just fine.SERPs or Search Engine Rank Position directly translates into increased traffic ...
Read More