SEO, Stolen From Social

MICHAEL:
Hi guys, Michael here. Do you want a second opinion on your SEO? Head to theseoshow.co and hit the link in the header. We'll take a look under the hood at your SEO, your competitors and your market and tell you how you can improve. All right, let's get into the show.

INTRO: It's time for the SEO show where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now here's your hosts, Michael and Arthur.

MICHAEL: Hello and welcome to the SEO show for another week. I am Michael Costin and I'm joined by Arthur Fabik. Hello. The somewhat capable Arthur Fabik.

ARTHUR: The somewhat capable.

MICHAEL: He's wearing headphones.

ARTHUR: I don't like this intro. We had a better intro than Michael screwed everything up. And now we're doing a second intro and it doesn't feel as organic as the first one.

MICHAEL: This is the first time we've actually been in the studio with the mixer and everything that we use and a little bit rusty. I hadn't set it to record. So there was absolutely gold coming out of us before, wasn't there? I thought so. And then until you just gone into the ether. But look, what's also gold is what we're going to be talking about this week, because it's time for another episode of Stolen. Stolen from Social. This is where we go on social media and thieve the ideas for the content that we talk about on the podcast.

ARTHUR: I just realized there's a very faint Stalin Stalin. Yes. Cause I never wear headphones.

MICHAEL: Exactly. So I've never heard it. It's a fantastic intro. Yeah. Took about 10 minutes anyway, but, um, we haven't done one of these. The last time we did one was episode 97. of the SEO show. So it's been a while, we're up to 113 and we thought it was time we go on and steal content, steal other people's thoughts and then spitball on them ourselves. But before we do that, I wanted to call out a listener review that we received recently. Because I'm going to be honest, we don't get many reviews. People aren't inclined to leave them of their own accord. We don't really ask for them. So the end result is we don't get many. But Orz 58 has gone on there and left a review that says the SEO show is invaluable in giving honest quality and Australian specific advice and news. My favorite SEO podcast and one of the best resources out there.

ARTHUR: How do you feel? How's that make you feel? How much did you pay Orz 58 to write that?

MICHAEL: Not $1. It's totally organic.

ARTHUR: How many reviews do we have? I haven't, I have honestly never even looked at our Apple, I don't use Apple podcasts, but.

MICHAEL: I think Apple, maybe they split it between US and AU and like wherever people leave the reviews, but like 15 or something and- That's more than I thought we had. Like 35 or something. Oh really? Spotify, we have more.

ARTHUR: Wow. But- I thought we had like maybe three.

MICHAEL: The reason I bring this up. Yes. I'm putting the call out out there. If you enjoy the show, if you've been listening for a while, if you've binged a few episodes and got some value from it, Maybe you could head to Apple podcasts or Spotify and leave us a review because it's a little bit of a thrill to get there and I'm sure it helps the episode get found out there. So yeah, if you're feeling charitable, head on over and leave us a review. We'd really appreciate it.

ARTHUR: And if you do, Michael, we'll read it out on the show. I will.

MICHAEL: Maybe you can read the next one. Okay. So we're doing stolen from social, but. I'm going to start off mixing in a little bit of Q and A week, because another thing I wanted to call out is, um, on our podcast host, people can leave us text messages straight from the podcast player. So from Spotify or Apple podcasts, you can click a link in the show notes and send us a text. And Andy has done that. So I thought as part of our Stolen from Social, we'd answer Andy's question as well. So he says he's just started listening from episode one, loving it. Subscribe. That's great. Thank you, Andy. He says he's looking at some local smaller SEO guys around where he lives, and he just has a quick question about good quality backlinks around how many should I be expecting my SEO expert to be able to generate me per month? Um, he says if people claim they can do 300 per month, then clearly they're going to get 300 garbage links. Yes. But if he's paying someone to get me quality, what should he be expecting for around 1200 bucks a month? Thanks, Andy.

ARTHUR: 300 a month. That is insane.

MICHAEL: He says we've spoken about that in the past. I don't remember it, but what do you reckon? 1200 bucks a month. How many quality links realistically could he expect through either an agency or a freelancer for that investment?

ARTHUR: Well, that depends on whether that $1,200 is just for link building or for his own SEO retainer. I would say if it's just link building, good quality links, two to three. Yeah. Yeah. I'd say good quality links, two to three, depending on the DR, depending on the site, how much traffic it gets. Otherwise, yeah, if he's getting you 300 links, it's probably all spam. Yeah.

MICHAEL: He's not saying that. Right. We in the past trashed people who go and get 300 links. Right. They say they'll do 300 a month for like no investment.

ARTHUR: Yeah. So if it's, if it's all link building, I'd say it's two to three. Um, but if it's the, if the whole retainer is $1,200 and only a small part of that would be link building. Yeah. So really maybe even one, like,

MICHAEL: Depends where you are. Like at the start, you might not be getting any while they focus on site, technical, whatever the problems they might find, and then rolls over to link building. I would say two to four, I'm being a bit more charitable than you.

ARTHUR: Yeah, well you can get cheap links, but he's saying high quality, so you could potentially get 10.

MICHAEL: He says quality, not high quality, so that'll be a mix of higher, lower, DR, if we're using DR as a metric to assess quality, but we've done episodes that tell you all the stuff you should be looking at to assess quality outside of DR. I think it's always

ARTHUR: quality over quantity. So I would rather one really strong link over three average links. Um, so that, that's more important to me. Yeah. So I know people will obsess over quantity, but have a like really look at the link and see how good it is. And yeah, yeah. Rambled there a little bit, but I think I got the point across.

MICHAEL: All right, well let's move on with what this show is all about, which is stealing stuff off social and talking about it. We have one, two, three, four, five, Six, I think today. I'm going to start with the first one, Nathan Gotch, bit of a big name in the SEO world. He shared a little post that says why SEO isn't dead. And it's a screenshot that shows 96.55% of pages get zero traffic from Google. And then another 2% only get 1 to 10 visits. So the point he's making with that is with websites, there's a lot of opportunity to go in and improve things so that pages are actually generating traffic. There's a lot of pages in the index of Google that aren't even worthy of getting traffic. Lots of websites might have bloat, too many pages because their domain's not strong enough. And you know, it's just a waste of your crawl budget with Google. So the point he's making is SEO isn't dead because there's a lot of work out there to be done to fix that sort of stuff and to get more visibility for these sites that just have tons of pages out there that do nothing. Something that comes to mind might be a carpet cleaner that does posts on what is the best carpet cleaning near me, epping or something like that on their blog posts, churning that stuff out because an SEO agency told them to and it's doing absolutely nothing for them. What do you reckon about that one? Love it.

ARTHUR: Love it. You love it. You look like you love it. I saw this one. I didn't quite get it, but it makes sense now.

MICHAEL: How did you not get that? I'm a bit concerned. You're hosting an SEO podcast and you don't get that.

ARTHUR: Well, I get it now. I just kind of glanced over it.

MICHAEL: Oh, you didn't prepare is what I'm hearing.

ARTHUR: Yes. I didn't prepare.

MICHAEL: Well, let's move on. This one's touching on EMDs. The person is a person on Reddit called Conclusion, OK, something or other, 68 something. 6868. They ask, how much advantage do you have when the keyword exactly matches your domain name? I often see websites that don't have really good content ranked somewhere in the top three. What I noticed is that these websites' names matches the keyword that I've entered. Yeah. We're talking your classic exact match domain there, EMD, right?

ARTHUR: Yeah.

MICHAEL: They're asking how much value does that have? Massive. You say massive, I say massive. The people in this thread on Reddit are all going, nah, doesn't really have that big an impact. What are they saying? Let me read out some of the responses then. Let me read them too. So one person goes, the only person that goes, it's a huge advantage, even though many SEO experts want to believe it's not the case, that person has been downvoted. Then another person goes, it's not about believing, it's a simple fact that the once pretty strong ranking advantage of EMDs has become neglectable. Yeah. But like, if you go search for SEO Sydney, for example, the second domain is an exact match. The third domain is an exact match.

ARTHUR: Respectfully stabbed blogger or whatever your name is on Reddit. You are wrong.

MICHAEL: There's three exact match domain names on the first page for the keyword SEO Sydney. And meanwhile, there's SEO agencies actively going after.

ARTHUR: There's a reason why people will spend big money on exact match domains. Yeah. Because they're easier to rank. That's it. That's just facts.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So the domain ranking factor is a thing. And then it's also the fact that all of your links are naturally going to be exactly branded links of that content. Like it is an advantage.

ARTHUR: Let's not waste any more time.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So you could go, this is where you can go into local niches and fire up a exact match domain name, do some basic local SEO and have a chance at ranking. So we disagree with you, great minds of Reddit. EMDs are.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Well, you were concerned about me. I'm concerned about the SEO subreddit on Reddit. If they're all saying that it's neglect, negligible, negligible. Yeah. Neglectable. Neglectable.

MICHAEL: Which I don't think was the right word, but that's what they use. Anyway. I got to tell you the SEO subreddit. See, in the back, I don't even read Reddit much anymore, but back in the day, big SEO, our big SEO always used to be good, our SEO was just filled with absolute noobs. Now there's a lot of pessimism in there, like don't bother with SEO, don't get into it as a career, don't do this, don't do that. That's a conspiracy. Maybe, there's a big anti-SEO conspiracy going on. And that's why they're giving clearly incorrect answers like that, that EMDs don't work. Let's go, let's fire off another topic from Reddit. Profanity of swear words. And I'm not even going to read this name out, it's too long. But they've asked, do you think profanity or swear words harm your SEO for non-adult website content? Can it mark a legitimate website with a penalty? I know they have a website with about 80 articles. None have profanity. They want to write one article. Yeah. It has a common question around a term that is involved in sex. Wow. That is- What will Google think? I don't know. That's what I want to know.

ARTHUR: You will be penalized. You will never appear on the SERPs again. Gone. If you ever, ever use any profanity on any one of your pages, that's it. Game over. Yes. No, I don't think so. Definitely not. No. Um, there's plenty of articles out there that will have swear words in there that rank and we'll look at Reddit itself. Well, yeah.

MICHAEL: Reddit like any, yeah. Reddit has the most traffic it's ever had. Like it's just drowning in traffic and it's also drowning in profanity. Yeah.

ARTHUR: Um, yeah, definitely not. Yeah. Feel free to use as many swear words on your pages as you want.

MICHAEL: Yeah. There's, um, I know Google has safe, safe search, but like even that one swear word on a website, your whole website needs to be like on like sort of unsafe theme for it to trigger that sort of a thing. Like it's not like Google's allocating resources to hunting out swear words in people's sites and penalizing them. Hmm. Or maybe they are.

ARTHUR: Well, I never thought of the safe search in terms of like having the swear words in the copy. Yeah. I just thought it was like the actual, like you said, the actual theme of the site or images, if there's like nudity or something. Yeah.

MICHAEL: But having like one article out of 81 articles that has one swear word in it, you're fine. You're going to be fine.

ARTHUR: There'd be like news.com articles and like publications that would have swear words in there. So it's fine.

MICHAEL: Yeah. This is, um, topical at the moment, like you don't follow formula one, but in the formula one, I do kind of, well, I know, I don't know. The governing body demanded that the drivers stop swearing on the radio comms, like when they're talking to the pit because it's broadcast. And like, so one of the drivers did it, Max Verstappen swore, and then they gave him community service. He has to go do community service because of it. And so now he's refusing to answer questions in like the press conferences and there's a battle going on.

ARTHUR: well over profanity when like he's a sportsman in the heat of battle out there and they're broadcasting it and wanting him to sort of change it's a bit it's always fun when you're watching like nrl and you hear like the players swearing at each other yeah and it gets picked up on the uh ref mic yes that's fun yeah um yeah i i don't mind swearing

MICHAEL: Well, as Max Verstappen says, everyone in the world swears. And like, even if kids are hearing it, they're going to grow up and swear and he's going to keep swearing and he doesn't care. And so in this case, the FIA, who don't want him swearing.

ARTHUR: Do you know what it reminds me of? Sorry to interrupt. Yeah. Do you remember the Rage Against the Machine when they were on, um, I think was it Countdown on BBC or something? Yeah. Playing Killing in the Name of. Yeah. And they said that they can't swear. Yes. So like, I won't do what you to tell me. So for the first part of like that drop, they didn't say it. And then once it dropped, they just like swore the whole time.

MICHAEL: How good was that? That whole thing where they became the number one album, the number one song instead of whoever won British Idol or UK Idol or whatever it's called. You know the story behind it? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's great. Anyway. Moving on, Rage Against the Machine and SEO somehow combined. How to reduce website spam score. This is by Saravanan05. My website has a spam score of 8 on the MozDA checker. I've been trying to reduce it, and used Google's disavow tool to disavow over 2,500 toxic domains, as indicated in SEMrush. So he started off with MozDAChecker spam score, now he's moved on to SEMrush toxic domains. He did it two months ago, but there has been no change in the spam score. What can I do? Please help!

ARTHUR: Please help! don't disavow your links. I think a lot of the time you don't need to. If there's rubbish in there, Google will just ignore it. Didn't they say like many years ago that do not use the disavow tool unless there is absolutely something that is- Unless you have a actually actively have a manual penalty or something. Yeah. And then also if there's something that's very obviously bad that you want to get rid of it, but that just brings more attention to your domain, in my opinion, because you're basically telling Google, hey, look at me. So I, yeah, I'm not a big advocate of disavowing spammy links because I know that Google will just ignore them.

MICHAEL: And I would start with why, what is the end result of you bringing down your spam score? So it's at eight. If you got it down to four.

ARTHUR: What happens? Maybe hoping that they'll rank higher.

MICHAEL: I don't know. Probably, maybe, but like, is it like, you got to look at what's the outcomes you're looking for here? Like is maybe, I guess, maybe their sites tanked out of the SERPs.

ARTHUR: Well, it's probably if they've got some sort of like overall SEO score, you're just trying to tick all the boxes to get the highest score possible thinking that that's, it's just an arbitrary score.

MICHAEL: The tools made up out of thin air doesn't relate. Like it's not Google score. Yeah. I guess that's why they asked the question. They've mentioned two different tools there. So, well, I guess, yeah, that's the thing. People. Sorry. Yeah. Take what these tools say with a grain of salt. Yeah. Like remember Yoast and the green traffic lights and how obsessed people were about getting all greens.

ARTHUR: Yeah I mean there's also we've had clients in the past that would be subscribed to like Moz and they would get like the for example the same report like you have 11 toxic links like urgent, urgent. They'll panic forward the message and you're like all right this is fine don't stress about it this is just you know an automated report from a tool that is just saying that this is spammy but it's not going to hurt your backlink profile. Yeah. But it just creates a sense of urgency and alarm. Yeah. And they can start to like maybe doubt you as well when you're saying it's fine. So I don't like those, um, risk tools or whatever you want to call it.

MICHAEL: Yes. Yeah. They, they, they try to simplify what required, what, what, something that needs experience to assess links and the quality of them. They try to simplify it into this automated tool and it's never going to work. No. So don't worry about reducing your website spam score. Worry about improving your visibility in traffic. And if you have great rankings in traffic, but your spam score's high, who cares?

ARTHUR: I guess that's why we're here to debunk this sort of stuff.

MICHAEL: You're doing the Lord's work over there.

ARTHUR: I just slumped over on my chair with the microphone, stealing content from Twitter and Reddit and regurgitating it. That's it.

MICHAEL: That's God's work. Somebody's got to do it, and it's us. All right, last bit of content we're going to steal. This one had you fired up before, before we started recording. So I'm going to read it out. This is by the SEO guy. He says, if you are paying more than thousand dollars a month for SEO and you aren't getting any backlinks from your agency's work, I have absolutely no idea what you're paying for.

ARTHUR: Yeah, I was fired up.

MICHAEL: Why were you fired up? What about it fires you up?

ARTHUR: Well, because there's a lot more to SEO than link building. And although I agree that a lot of the work is front loaded and like, you know, keyword research and all that takes time, like writing content, like strategizing, planning what you're going to do, like looking at competitors, that all takes time as well. Like writing report commentary takes time. Chatting to a client takes time. That you're paying for someone's time. So just because they're not link building, and to be fair, for a thousand dollars a month, you probably shouldn't be expecting any link building anyway. It's unfair to say, what are you doing? So there's definitely gonna be people out there that would be scamming you and, you know, there'll be agencies or like freelancers that will just, you know, do an automated report. But a good SEO person will be doing stuff like looking at competitors, strategizing what content to write, putting together content calendars, using, you know, AI to write content, auditing the site, doing technical audits, like all that stuff is time consuming. And you're paying for someone who has expertise that you don't have to do it. So that's what you're paying for.

MICHAEL: I am worked up, you're right. Yeah, and hey, you're making points, preach. But I would say it depends on how big the site is too. Like if you're just a local business and you've already done a lot of the initial work and you're rolling over onto link building or like sort of ongoing work, maybe this guy has a point. But if you're like a large site that still has a ton of location pages and service pages to build and you haven't done a lot of the technical cleanup and implementation that an audit has recommended, then, as you said, that's time. And the links are something that will come in the future. So it's not a one-size-fits-all blanket rule that if you're paying $1,000 a month, which is, $1,000 a month realistically is not very much to invest in SEO, no matter what you do. But there's no blanket rule that says if you are paying that and you aren't getting any links, you have no idea what you're being paid for. But the important thing is that If you are paying that and you're not getting links, at least you're getting reports that explain what's being done, why there's a plan, they're in touch with you, you know what's going on. Sure. And the stuff they're doing all makes sense in line with all the stuff that we talk about on this show all the time. Yep. So we disagree. The SEO guy, Arthur, the SEO Lord over there disagrees. Doing God's work. So that is one holy episode of the SEO show all done and dusted for another week. We'll be back next week with another episode, but until then happy SEOing.

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