Things...SEO And Otherwise

Bunch of random things to cover today, will try to make it brief.

We've all got an authoritarian monolith to defeat.

I'm loath to keep talking about Disavowing as it's been beaten so hard that dead horse is now paté but I have one thought and a couple questions to address.

The item I forgot from yesterday is that when I updated the Disavow file on one site from only using LinkResearchTools to using my home rolled method that requires more thinking and logic, all the pages that had previously performed worse since the initial Disavow responded incredibly fast, rocketing back up way beyond previous performance.

Tons of new #1 rankings.

Hard ass valuable terms too.

Which got me thinking...what better way to see exactly how Google treats different links than to Disavow them...monitor, and remove them.

You'd need to do it on a page by page basis and ideally only turn one link at a time back on but there's some serious fooking gold in these hills for someone with the penalized sites and motivation to truly learn how Google responds.

Do with that what you will.

And the questions du'jour:

You mentioned low authority AND low traffic no keyword, should be disavowed

But citations, directory links and most classic 'foundational links' could all fall under the low authority and low traffic threshold

Are they treated differently because anchor text is branded?

I didn't say SHOULD. I said that was my criteria. You still have to look at the links and apply logic.

A low authority low traffic no keyword citation or directory link is a different animal than a low authority low traffic no keyword mass spam page or blog comment or <insert favorite spam here, shownews anyone?>

The reality is that you can use link tools and math and regex to speed up the process but if you actually want to get great results doing a Disavow, you're going to have to put in the work and look at links on pages and apply some logic to them.

I've yet to spend less than 4 hours on one. That site had a fairly small back link profile. 8-20 hours is a more typical range.

All you guys saying you're exporting the SEMrush toxic link report and Disavowing that, good luck bros.

I bet I'll see you on X saying 'I disavowed and recovered a little but nothing worth doing'.

Never underestimate the depths of the laziness SEOs will succumb to to avoid winning big.

One more:

I think this is an ambiguous question, but would like your input regarding whether or not to disavow domains like publicwww or biglistofwebsites.com that have high DR and sometimes even high traffic but are clearly directories, scrapers, etc and not relevant to my domain.

Till now I used to keep them for the pure authority and because they usually link to homepages with brand or url anchor texts. Nowadays I'm having my doubts haha.

Would love your feedback.

You don't want my real feedback on this question but I'll play nice.

If Google likes it, I like it.

If Google ranks it for lots of keywords and more importantly big valuable keywords, then I like the link.

Google tells us what it likes in one place, the SERPs. Everything else is hypothetical estimations.

Including our definition of relevancy, authority, etc.

Let the SERPs be your guide. Encroaching on paté territory again.

Final Disavow (hopefully) housekeeping topic: Quit asking to access that old Loom video you're finding in the archives.

It's old, it's outdated and it'll cause you more problems than answers.

I'd delete it but I want to be able to refer back to it in a year or so to see how far the window has shifted.

But yeah, I'd love to not get 20 notifications a day requesting access, thanks.

Another question:

Are you offering your amplified digital PR service? any info would be great

Been too busy to implement, sending everyone to Tom over @ https://twitter.com/WolfofBaldSt. He's killing it for them. At some point I hope to set up something more official with him but he's busy, I'm busy...it'll happen if it happens

If you do end up buying Digital PR from him and you want to amplify them with our link boosts but you can't because I took the buy button off, reach out and I'll get you a direct link to buy.

It's a hackneyed compromise with more work on your end but it'll get you to the same place in the SERPs.

Best I can do under current circumstances.

Moving on...and this is becoming not so brief...fark.

Back in mid-March, I'm in this chat with some friends (no, you don't want to be in there, it's no SEO-centric and the memes would hurt your feelings) and we were discussing how to identify the next great parasites and I said something akin to 'I want them to look like a stock chart before it goes parabolic" and posted them an ahrefs traffic graph for Medium.

So yesterday we were discussing the Google updates (I guess we do talk a lot of SEO in there but trust me, you don't want in) and what sites were getting nuked and what weren't and I remembered my Medium prediction so went digging.

And might have discovered something useful.

Medium
Substack
Patreon
OF (very niche lol)
I'm sure there's more.

Pay to play creator platforms are doing very very well in Google right now.

Have been for awhile.

Dig in, I suspect opportunities abound.

Is LinkedIn Pulse pay to play too? If so, add it to the list.

Probably just the tip of the iceberg but this is a trend I'm noticing.

And noticing trends is part of SEO.

Be a noticer.

I had more but I can't be arsed to remember it right now so there's 936 words that maybe make your life better and if not, bang that unsubscribe button, it probably doesn't get better from here.

Cheers,

Grind

P.S. I hope to send out an official announcement about donation based consulting later this week, time allowing. You know where to buy links if you need some but I'm also good with you keeping your money in your wallet too.