#ah a nice and refreshing new meta

[mx-bright-sky]

Stain Is A Little Bitch And Here’s Why; The Newer Version!

Yeah I made a post like this forever ago debunking all of Stain’s motives and stuff but it’s been. Forever. And so I’m remaking it! Cause I still believe this. 

As you probably know, if you’ve been following my blog for a while, I trust neither the hero society nor UA and Nedzu himself. So, one might THINK that because of this I would agree with Stain.

That is not the case. 

Stain was wrong and I’m gonna prove why.

So the easiest place to start out is looking at Stain’s motives by themselves. The reasons that Stain thinks modern heroes are corrupt are as follows:

Too concerned about the paycheck

Don’t actually follow heroic ideals (Iida attacking him for revenge)/All Might is the ideal hero in his view and that’s it

Only care about the glory and the fighting

I’ll go down the line to state what I think about each of the reasonings themselves.

Although, before I start, I would like to emphasize; I do not trust the Hero Society as it is at all. I definitely do believe that it is corrupt and has many flaws. It’s just that, at the same time, Stain was still wrong

Now then, the first one is the deal with money. On the surface, this does seem like a good reason; heroes fighting for the money and only the money is a problem. However looking deeper into it this argument quickly falls apart. Consider for a moment what would happen with the heroes is they WEREN’T paid. In this case, the heroes would have to get a second “job” on the side to be able to, you know, live. By getting paid for their heroism, heroes are able to work on being heroes 24/7, instead of having to worry about divided attention. 

In addition to that, heroes are paid based on how they perform as heroes, by saving people and defeating villains. The heroes who do the most work get the most pay. That being said, it’s also pretty easy to see that some heroes still don’t get paid very much at all. Mt. Lady, for example; even though she’s new, she has a problem with money. If heroes just got payed way too much, then why is she still struggling? And Uwabami- maybe she likes being a model, but she had to take up a side job away from heroing because it didn’t give her enough money. (another possibility for that is unequal pay fro heroes but I’ll get into that another time).

And yet even more to that, being a hero is the most popularized profession. I do think that itself is a flaw, yes, but it’s true. So, if heroing is a popularized profession and pretty much everyone wants to go into it... then the country must be overflowing with heroes. That being said, there’s no way that being a hero always pays well no matter what. I’d even go so far as to say that any hero not in the top 50 or even the top 10 make any large or ludicrous amount of money. Yet, when Stain attacks a hero, he goes after Ingenium (who, while probably in the top 50, is not in the top 10) and Native (who we know nothing about besides that he was there; I highly doubt he was all that bad). 

But that’s just the first tic on the list, there’s more. 

The second thing that Stain upholds is All Might’s idealistic form of heroism. Any other kind of hero is wrong. As we know that’s just... flat out wrong. We all know it was foolish of Iida to try and attack Stain. Do we say that this makes him any less of a hero? No. Uraraka’s original motivation is getting money.... for her family, which is poor. Maybe not the most pure of motivations, but at the end of the day she just wants what’s best for her family and can we really say that that’s wrong? And she has proven time and time again, that even if she is there to make money for her family, she still has heroic qualities and wants to help and save people. At the end of the day, by choosing this path, the majority of heroes are intentionally putting themselves in danger to do something that, at the end of the day, helps innocent people. Whether it’s for family pride, personal pride, or a true heroic spirit, these heroes are fighting villains that want to hurt or even kill them. If their ideals aren’t all that perfect, is it really wrong?

Now then... the last one. The last one is tricky.

Stain’s last argument is that heroes are starting to only care about glory and fighting. And while I like to believe that MOST heroes aren’t like that... the evidence is all there to suggest that some heroes are that way. This is the one thing that I will minorly agree with Stain on, because, for this one part of his beliefs, he was right. This focus on glory and fighting is what lets someone like Endeavor be a hero. Endeavor is the purest example of everything Stain hates; he only cares about the money, the glory, the fame. He only wants to be number one. He doesn’t care a single shred about saving people. 

But at the same time, in this belief, Stain is a hypocrite. He hates heroes for being put up on pedestals, while putting All Might on a pedestal himself. 

That being said, though one shred of his reasoning is actually right, his actions themselves prove him to be wrong. 

First there’s the obvious that killing people is flat out wrong. Even if he disagrees with these heroes, killing them is not the answer. They might not be perfect, but those people have families. Families that will be distraught that they’re gone. In the cases of real corrupted heroes, then maybe the deserve to go to jail, or to be injured to the point where they can no longer work- but death? Death is permanent. And it’s not always the right way to deal justice. 

Beyond that, there is the effects that these deaths have. Because these heroes are gone, killed, that means that any villain they would have defeated if they hadn’t died now does not get defeated, at least not as quickly as they might have. Even if the heroes are being replaced, if a bunch of heroes in an area die, then villains can easily attack harder on that area knowing that it’s less protected now. This gets innocent people hurt. 

Then there’s the replacing of the heroes. By killing heroes, Stain is creating a demand for more heroes. With a demand for more and more heroes, how many corrupt ones are going to slip through the cracks? How many people not suited to Stain’s ideology are going to become heroes now because of Stain’s actions? What Stain has done is counterproductive to itself. 

What about WHY Stain is doing this? We know his reasonings. But as for WHY Stain is going this far? It’s simply because no one would listen to him. He wasn’t hurt by some corrupt hero. There wasn’t a loved one that a hero didn’t manage to save. There was no past betrayal from a hero. Stain simply came up with this ideology and these thoughts, and when no one listened to him, he acted on them. How entitled do you have to be to do that? Stain is an entitled man child who whined that society wasn’t fair and got violent when people wouldn’t listen to him.

Finally, we have the “who” is getting killed. Stain says he only goes after corrupt heroes, but from what we see? That’s a lie. The people that Stain attacks are Ingenium, Native, Iida, Izuku, and Todoroki. We know Stain wasn’t planning on killing Izuku because he had one throw away line where he mentioned All Might and that made Stain assume he was a good hero. Other than that? 

Ingenium. From everything we know about him from Iida’s flashbacks, he’s a good guy. He wanted to be a hero because he thinks that the kind of person who helps kids on the street is cool. He’s Iida’s model as an older brother. Generally all around Ingenium is a good, charismatic hero. But Stain attacks him. For what? Because he gets money? Because it’s a family business? It’s not about Ingenium’s actual motives or reasons for being a hero at all- Stain makes assumptions and decides Ingenium is worth killing. 

Native. We know very very little about Native. But here’s what we can gather; He’s definitely not in the top ten, and I doubt he’s in the top fifty, so fame and glory certainly wasn’t it. Money can also be knocked off the list because it’s very likely that less popular heroes hardly make anything. So that leaves... what exactly? Native isn’t cruel, at least he isn’t shown to be. He helps carry Izuku when the fight is over because Izuku has an injured leg. Stain gives us no reason for why he’s killing Native. He just. IS.

Iida. He made one(1) emotionally fueled mistake. He’s just a kid. He’s in no way done with growing and learning. But because his love for his brother turned into a need to avenge his brother’s attack, Stain quickly decides that Iida deserves to die. To DIE. He doesn’t entertain the thought that Iida could ever grow and change. He decides that, on the spot, because of this one occasion, that Iida only ever will care about revenge and that he is destined to be a horrible hero. 

Todoroki. Stain never outright says what his plan with Todoroki was. We don’t know for sure if Stain would have spared him or killed him, but I believe that Stain would have killed him. For the same reasoning that he attacked Ingenium- family name. Other than that I can’t press further on this because we don’t really know if he would have killed Todoroki or not for sure. 

In conclusion? Stain? Is a little bitch. The one shred of it that he got right he never even acts on. He certainly doesn’t deserve all the publicity and praise. He was WRONG. Case closed.

[gofancyninjaworld]

OPM Manga Chapter 150 Review: Master and Disciple

Needless to say, this is going to be long.   Needful to say this is going to be almost entirely meta. 

There’s a new archive site being considered for OPM manga chapters.  No need to sign up with Google to read, no ads, and so far I’ve found it clean and fast loading.  So, please go read chapter 150 here if you need the story/want to refresh your mind on the fine points:  https://catmanga.org/series/opm/150  @vibhavm​  would also like to know what you make of the site -- message him directly. :)

Right, with that out of the way, let’s GO!

Excellent call back to Bang using the same words

The Rod of Discipline

I have been dying for backstory for Bang and Garou forever, and here we are!  Normally, I do get annoyed when backstory is interspersed with a current fight, but in this instance, it adds a much-needed context to everything that is happening.

We find out mostly through Bomb, who is watching the showdown between erstwhile master and disciple closely.  As the elder of the pair,  Bomb has seen it as his role to correct the dissolute life his talented younger brother once led.   The cruel, selfish, hard-drinking, hard-fighting and sluttish life that Bang had once led would be difficult for anyone to countenance and with Bang hurting people on a whim,  Bomb decided that he had to step in.

“You haven’t even overcome yourself.” That is for me the pivotal line here.

Overcoming oneself seems to be the theme here.  It’s definitely been the big thing for Bang, first feeling ashamed that he had tried to kill his own brother while the latter had shown restraint even as he beat him down.  

Bang disciplined himself, set aside his offensive style to develop an incredible defensive style, opened a school and even became a hero more recently.   We see a series of snapshots as Bomb watches Bang’s development approvingly.  He’s been more ambivalent of Bang’s decision to become a hero,  but you can’t fault Bomb for still keeping an eye and supportive hand on his brother, come what may.

It's good to see that while his brother succeeded in admonishing him for his selfish and anti social life, Bang still has to learn to truly give of himself to others. Turning over a new leaf is a nice idiom, but truly changing oneself is a long-term project.  I’ve written before about Bang’s failings as a master. Bang acknowledging his failings as a master in text is so important. It's not just Garou: losing nearly all his students is an outcome of his neglecting them. 

Even in his ninth decade of life, there’s something wholesome and humbling about seeing Bang realise that he still has things to learn and room to grow.   He wants to get through to Garou the way Bomb got through to him.   That’s why he’s thrown away chance after chance to land a killing blow, getting hit and hit again as he faces off against Garou and hopes to reach him.

We leave off as something seems to be happening to Garou.  He’s still and his mask is cracking.  Bang is watching expectantly and...

...ah, but we’re going to have to wait and see what happens as we go to see what else is going on.

To the Bitter End

Over on the other side of the battlefield, something else is going crack and another disciple is questioning his convictions. Under the relentless assault of billions of monsters, Genos’s legs have finally given way and he goes crashing to the ground.   But he doesn’t think of his predicament first: Tatsumaki is also down for the count and she’s in a worse state than he is in.   He rockets over, slams the Black Sperms holding Tatsumaki into paste and starts to drag Tatsumaki away.

Unfortunately, her dress is a heck of a lot stretchier than it looks, making dragging her hard work.  Black Sperm isn’t helping, taunting him with the number of ‘him’ left over ( about 4.5 billion).  It’s hopeless.  There isn’t a way to turn this situation around.

As though to echo Genos’s gloomy thoughts, Tatsumaki briefly regains consciousness to ask him to run away already.

Tatsumaki, going back to Demon Cyborg rather than Genos is on one level emotional separation, but it’s more than that. By calling him by his hero name, she's also absolving him of any guilt in abandoning her.  Heroes hate to leave someone behind and are big on berating themselves that there should have been something they could have done.  By telling him there's nothing he could have done, she's telling him it's okay to leave.

And in answer, he laid on top of her to shield her from the monster as long as possible.

Not that Black Sperm is making it easy.  Genos has propped himself up as much as possible so as to provide a buffer between himself and Tatsumaki and the monster is pile-driving his head and what’s left of his arms into the ground, but it’s worse than that. The last page is filled with blood splatter and that blood is Genos’s. It’s not easy to make a full-bodied cyborg bleed (but we saw such an event early on, when Genos ripped Armored Gorilla’s limbs off and thrashed the poor creature so soundly blood poured out of its nose), but you can... and with so little body, Genos doesn’t have much blood to spare. This isn’t just broken parts to be fixed overnight.  He really is getting beaten to death here.

Looking at this, I’m thinking just how true to his name, Genocide, he is.  You see, the kanji with which his name is written means ‘great slaughter’ but it also means ‘to fight fiercely until the end’.  Even in the terrible state he is in, he still has the power to slaughter every last monster on site by self-detonating and erasing all life in a five kilometer radius.  But he’s turned away from that to continue to fight for the life of one lousy human being with whom he’s never gotten along, even at the price of a slow and painful death.  Even if it turns out to be for nothing. 

If that’s not strength, I don’t know what that is.   A lot of the words may be carried over from the webcomic, but they hit completely differently. It’s sad to see Genos thinking himself weak because he can’t do what Saitama does and stretch out a lazy arm to eliminate even the toughest enemies, but he’s shown us so graphically how much more to strength there is than inexhaustible physical prowess.

Meta: The More Similar, The More Important the Differences

It’s easy to see the physical similarities between Garou and Bang and easy to note how both of them are drowning in talent   But I can’t help but be struck by how different their rationales are in coming off the rails.  There is no way Garou would not have been appalled by Young Bang.  Garou is motivated by his struggling to think of how to make a positive, noticeable impact on the world, not just his own personal gratification. 

Garou does not drink, smoke, take drugs, chase after women (or men).  He may be getting in a lot of fights, but they’re not purely for fun.  He’s a good person wrestling with his place in the world.  On the other hand, Bang has been a bad person who is wrestling with his desire to become a better person in this world. 

I’m thinking... just as we know that Bang’s joining the Hero Association wasn’t mainly intended as a message to Bomb (who saw it as his little brother saying ‘I’ve really changed), I’m sure Bang is seeing Garou as being just like him in the reason he’s acting out, which isn’t right either.

I’m not having a good feeling about this as I look at the brothers’ hopeful faces.

Coda: ONE is evil, part 66

I've been saying that this arc, ONE has been going out of his way to break heroes in a way they find most painful to them, and he’s really brought the savage. Melting off Darkshine’s skin.  Killing Atomic’s friends and mentors in front of him in the nastiest way possible. I’m sure that Atomic Samurai is going to be triggered every time he even hears someone slurping up a thick milkshake.   A guy like Genos, who likes a six-foot separation distance between himself and 99.9999999% of the world, ONE loves inflicting prolonged, sadistic, dignity-attacking manglings on him. 

This time, ONE has outdone himself, by presenting Genos with situations where putting himself in compromising positions is the only heroic course of action.  Way up too close to Drive Knight, who compounded the indignity by discarding him shamelessly as soon as he got what he wanted from him.  I can see ONE now, steepling his fingers.  'Oh, you want to protect Tatsumaki at all costs, eh?  Admirable, admirable, now climb on top of her. Yeah, you heard right. Chop-chop, those little monsters aren't going to wait around forever.  She won’t mind -- she’s passed out.  Oh, you mind? Look on the bright side, once they beat you to death, you're not going to have to remember this. Then again, given how tough you are, that may take a while...'

If Bang is hoping that the cracking of Garou’s mask is going to reveal a newly-penitent student, ready to give him another chance, he may be in for an unpleasant surprise.

[theultimateultimateweapon]

Kirby: Meta Knight and the Knight of Hades (Chapter 8)

The third night had arrived in Hades. The gray flowers all deflated at once. Meta Knight only has one night before the flowers open again. If the red butterfly doesn’t appear tonight, Meta Knight may never be able to return.

As expected, Meta Knight was concerned. For the past three days, he hasn’t taken a rest and has walked without eating. However, he wasn’t tired or hungry at all. He was scared. He wouldn’t feel tired or hungry again if he stayed in the underworld.

Meta Knight began to ask Papi questions while they walked to shake his fears. “Papi. Do you have any favorite foods?”

“Eh? Food?” Papi replied.

“When you were alive. What did you like to eat?”

“Um… yellow!” Papi said in a slightly joyful voice, perhaps because his memories were coming back to him.

“...Yellow?”

“Yeah! It’s refreshing and delicious. Pink is good, but it’s a little too sweet. The purple color has a nice taste. What color do you like, Meta Knight?”

“...I asked about your food preferences, not colors.”

“That is my favorite food. I like yellow flower nectar the most.”

“Oh, I see.” 

Papi is a butterfly, so when it comes to food, flowers fit his appetite.

Meta Knight replied, “I have never tasted flowers.”

“What? Really!? Why!?”

“Because I’m not a butterfly.”

“Oh… sorry. I’ve never tasted anything better than nectar. So what kind of food does Meta Knight like?”

“I…”

He recalled various meals and desserts he ate with Captain Vul and his men. He was also often swayed by the gluttonous Kirby and King Dedede.

Would he ever be able to eat with them again?

Or…

Meta Knight shook off his sinister thoughts and looked at the trees growing along the road.

There were gray fruits.

They didn’t look delicious, but he wasn’t hungry anyways. He reached out to the fruit anyways. They could remind him of eating. It might give him the sense of the original world again.

He thought about it and tried to eat the fruit.

“Ah, ah, ah…?” Papi made anxious sounds.

Meta Knight looked at him. “What?”

“Uh… yeah… nothing...no… uh! Ehe!” Papi laughed brightly.

“You’re quite odd.” Meta Knight tried to eat the fruit again.

Then, Papi made a desperate cry. “...No! Don’t eat it, Meta Knight!” Papi slammed into his hand and knocked out the fruit.

Meta Knight was stunned. “What are you doing, Papi?”

“No… it’s…” Papi looked unprecedentedly sick. “Don’t eat it.”

“...Eh?” Meta Knight saw the fruit at his feet. “Don’t eat it…? Is it poisonous?”

“Sort of. Well, not really, but…” Papi folded his wings and explained. “If you eat something from Hades, you will never be able to return to the original world.”

Meta Knight was surprised. “What!?”

“It’s a rule. If you take a bite here, you will become a permanent resident. You won’t be able to return to the original world anymore.”

“That…” Meta Knight had a heavy heart. “Papi, you…”

“...Yup.” He fluttered again and stopped on a tree branch. “I didn’t know the rule. I came to the underworld and just tasted the flowers.”

“Why…”

“I wasn’t hungry, but I was wondering if I could eat something and get better! At that time, my body was still in the original world, still alive despite being seriously injured, just like you. So, if I had the chance, I might have been able to come back, but because I tasted the flowers of Hades… I had to stay here forever.”

“Is that so…”

Papi apologized. “I’m sorry, Meta Knight.”

“What are you sorry for?”

“I thought for a moment that you should eat the fruit, then you’ll be with me forever… I’m sorry…” HIs voice disappeared.

Butterflies don’t shed tears, but to Meta Knight, Papi seemed to be crying.

Meta Knight called out kindly, “But you stopped me. Thanks to you, I was saved.”

“But I…”

“You are my savior, my butterfly hero. Thank you, Papi.”

“...Butterfly hero! I like the sound of that! Ehe!” Papi laughed shyly and spread his wings.

The night of the country of Hades quietly continues.

Meta Knight kept walking. The end of his time was approaching. The gray buds are bulging like they are about to open.

Meta Knight spoke, “Papi. Apparently, I have no hope.”

“...Meta Knight?”

“Soon, the morning of the fourth day will come. I’m out of time…”

Suddenly, Papi shouted. “Wait, Meta Knight! It’s nearby!”

“...What?”

“It’s the red butterfly! It’s nearby!”

“What did you say?” Meta Knight looked around, but there was no red butterfly.

Papi said. “I can feel it. It’s a butterfly thing. This is it!” He flew through the trees.

Meta Knight hurriedly followed Papi. Beyond the trees was a small fountain.

“Here!” Papi shouted.

The red butterfly was flying over the fountain. While Meta Knight was watching, Papi flew towards the red butterfly.

“He, he, hey! Red butterfly! Nice to meet you!” His voice was shaking.

Terrified, Papi put on a brave face for Meta Knight. “Listen to me! Um… um…!”

“Thank you Papi. I’ll talk from here.” When Meta Knight called out, Papi was relieved and fluttered back, hiding behind him.

Meta Knight called out carefully. “...Red butterfly. Can you hear me?”

It didn’t react at all and flew over the spring, fluttering.

“I want to go back to the original world. I want to know how to do it.”

The butterfly did not turn its face. As Meta Knight stepped towards the fountain, it fluttered away.

Papi screamed. “W-wait…!” 

Suddenly, they heard a voice from somewhere. It was a low voice, like a moan, like a growl. 

Papi said mysteriously. “Hmm? Can you hear me? What is this…”

Meta Knight looked around.

No reply. The voice grew louder and louder.

Papi was restless and panicked. “Somehow… I’m scared… I’m scared, this voice!”

It was no wonder Papi was frightened. The voice heard from somewhere was tinged with a dark feeling. Defeat, regret, hopelessness…

“This, no way…!” Meta Knight was stunned.

He didn’t know whose voice it was. However, he remembered hearing such a voice before. This was the voice of a person with tremendous power who had been sealed away. 

Somewhere, someone with overwhelming power was about to disappear. They were screaming for fate.

“The agonizing death scream…!” Meta Knight shouted at that moment.

Suddenly, the appearance of the red butterfly changed. Its wings began to shine in response to the cry. At that same time, the space around it was distorted. The butterfly gave off a fiery light and fluttered loudly. The space was twisted and a gaping hole appeared. Beyond the hole was darkness.

Meta Knight shouted. “The road has opened! Beyond that… the original world!”

It was a miracle. A hole in the sky of Hades was torn, opening the way to the original world.

The red butterfly disappeared as if it was sucked into the hole.

“Wait…!” Meta Knight enthusiastically jumped off the ground and chased the butterfly. 

However, he did not reach even slightly and fell into the fountain. 

Splashes rise. The hole made by the butterfly is closing.

Not enough time…!

At that moment, Papi jumped out.

He flew straight in and fluttered with all his might at the edge of the hole in space.

“Hurry, hurry, Meta Knight!” Papi shouted, desperately trying to widen the hole as it was closing.

“Papi!”

“Hurry~! I’ll be crushed~!”

Meta Knight spread his cloak into wings and jumped out. 

He poked his head into the hole as it was closing.

Papi was relieved and moved away from the hole.

“Papi!” Meta Knight turned around and shouted.

Papi fluttered over the fountain.

“Good~! You’re just in time, Meta Knight!”

“Papi! Papi…”

“Goodbye, I’ll be fine. Don’t forget about me!”

Meta Knight was sucked into a passage to another dimension with a strong force.

The hole was getting smaller and smaller. 

The last thing Meta Knight saw was a blue light, as small as a star.

Kirby and King Dedede were taken aback.

The moment Galacta Knight fell, a red butterfly appeared out of nowhere. Butterflies fluttered all over the fallen knight. This wasn’t a good sign in the heat of a fierce battle.

“What, that butterfly… where did it come from?”

“How strange. Is there a flower blooming somewhere?”

As they were wondering, the red butterfly stopped softly on the tip of the lance.

Kirby said in a hurry, “He’s dangerous. Why would it go to him if he’s not a flower…”

The butterfly fluttered its wings and scattered bright light.

Hmmm.

Galacta Knight’s body began to glow white.

“...What?” King Dedede’s eyes widened.

Galacta Knight disappeared as the light broke.

“Wa!?” Kirby and King Dedede screamed and fell at the same time.

“What was that!? Hey, where…!?”

A butterfly was left in the place where the knight stood. It stopped flapping and floating in the air. Its red wings were brighter and brighter, shining like flames.

Both Kirby and King Dedede finally noticed. This was not a normal butterfly.

“Watch out, Kirby. This guy…!” The king picked up his hammer back up.

The butterfly turned into a fireball, sparkling light. The fireball swelled greatly.

“Waaaah!” Kirby and King Dedede stepped back, afraid they were about to catch the sparks. However, the scattered lights were not hot at all. 

The fireball burst in front of the stunned two allies. What appeared was a knight with a fearsome, masked face!

“Ga- Galacta Knight!? Has he been resurrected!?” King Dedede shouted.

Kirby said, “No, that’s not Galacta Knight! The weapon and colors are different!”

It’s as Kirby says. Unlike the pure white Galacta Knight, the knight who appeared here held a new sword and wore a crimson mask. What he had on his back were not wings like Galacta Knight’s, but bright red, butterfly-like wings.

“The red butterfly…! Then, did that red butterfly and Galacta Knight come together to look like that!?”

“I don’t know… but!”

They didn’t have time to think. The knight with the red butterfly wings swung the sword in his hand and attacked them.

“Waaa!” Kirby quickly held his sword and took the attack. It was a tremendous shock, he was about to drop his sword. “He’s… strong! Maybe stronger than Galacta Knight!”

“What…!?” King Dedede squeezed his face and swung his hammer up. His hammer hit the knight! The moment he thought he made the attack, the knight changed and countless red butterflies danced.

The king was blinded by a flock of butterflies and screamed.  “WAAAA!? Butterflies…!?”

The red knight appeared and rushed on the king.

“King Dedede-!” Kirby tried to help, but he wasn’t in time.

The red knight swung his sword down at King Dedede.

“GWAHH!” The king was blown away and struck on the stone floor.

The red knight turned to Kirby. Kirby glanced at his enemy. He didn’t know who he was, he didn’t even know where he came from.

However, the overwhelming strength that surpassed Galacta Knight’s could be felt.

Kirby held his sword and saved his strength. The red knight also seemed to see Kirby’s power. He didn’t try to slash right away, but was watching. Kirby unleashed his last-minute power.

Twister slash!

The red knight flew lightly and fled, holding his sword and saving energy. Meanwhile, the sword grows huge. Much larger than Kirby’s body.

Kirby drew back. “Eeee!? That’s huge-!”

The monstrous sword was swung down. Kirby desperately tried to avoid it, but the sword was too big. It was impossible to escape the attack range.

“Waaaaa!” After the strong blow, Kirby was knocked over.

With the hit, his copy ability was lost. Blade Knight had come out and Kirby returned to no ability.

Blade Knight was sitting on the floor, trying to get up. He shook his head, looked around him, and noticed Kirby lying down.

“...Kirby? What? What’s wrong, Kirby? What about Galacta Knight…?”

Behind Blade Knight, the red knight was preparing for a blow. Kirby raised his face and squeezed his voice.

“Ah… no… get out of there… Blade Knight!”

“Eh?” Blade Knight looked back, feeling an ominous presence.

But the sword of the red knight had returned to normal size, probably because it used up its energy in the previous attack.  However, the power of the sword was still increasing.

Blade Knight screamed. “W-w-waaaahh! W-what the heck is that!?”

Blade Knight hugged Kirby. Kirby looked at the red knight, but he couldn’t do anything anymore.

The moment when the red knight tried to slash at them, the space above Kirby’s head broke and someone rolled out.

Blade Knight was so scared he closed his eyes tightly, not even noticing.

Kirby opened his eyes and screamed.

“Me...Me...Meta Knight-!?”

(Chapter 7 - Table of Contents - Chapter 9)

[moonamite]

Chapter 4

Meta knight turned to walk away from the dispersing crowd, trying to comfort Kirby. I’ve only just come here and i’ve already failed to protect Kirby. He winced. Maybe Kirby really would be better off here, with his real parents. He needed to sit down to comprehend the gruesome scene he’d just witnessed. He’d seen executions before, but none like that. The suspect wasn’t even given a chance to make an argument. And nobody tried to stand up for him, even when he was crying and begging. Suddenly, a voice pulled him from his thoughts. “Hey, you!” Oh no. A red Stellos with large, soft-looking, narrow Bird wings landed in front of the pair. “Who are you? I’ve never seen you around here before. Are you from a neighboring town? Or maybe... The city? A traveler? It’s refreshing to see a new face, it was starting to get dull around here! Heh!” Ok, Meta Knight. This is the moment you’ve been preparing for. Remember your lines. “I- uh, i’m... ah-” Dammit, Meta Knight. “Doesn’t matter!” Well, looks like he didn’t have to use the fake story this time. “I’m Scarlet! What’s your name? Wait! Don’t tell me...  Smallwings!” “What? No! It’s... it’s Valiant.” He said, making sure to use his fake name. “Huh. Are you sure? Because you seem like a Smallwings.” She said. “I’m pretty sure I know my own name.” Meta Knight answered. “And who’s this little guy? Is he your son? Nephew mayhaps? Aw, he looks so sad! I’m guessing nobody told you guys that the princess was doing her bi-yearly visit today. So sorry you guys had to see that! I swear, this town is actually very nice!” Meta Knight almost choked at the word son. “N-no, this is Kirby, i’m...” He paused. “Taking him with me on a mission of utmost importance.” She looked at him, suddenly seeming more excited then she was before. “Ooooo.” she said. “A mission? How exciting! Nothing ever happens around here! Can I help? He’s so cute! I wanna help him, too!” Meta Knight thought about this. How do I know I can trust her? What if she’s a spy? What if she finds out who I am, and turns me in? Who will protect Kirby then? He looked back up at her. She was still waiting for a response, smiling politely and eagerly. She doesn’t look very spy-like. She certainly doesn’t act like one, and if she was, she’s very unprofessional. She seems like she genuinely wants to help. Besides, he had a feeling if he said no, she would still try to help. “...Alright, fine. You can come. But you need to act serious- because this is serious.” He said slowly. Scarlet jumped up, surprising the Knight. “Oh, wow! I never thought i’d do anything important in my life!” She laughed. “Well, except my art, which is super important- well, to me, at least. My parents always said ‘Stop wasting your time and get a real job, Like a noble scientist. Or a Soldier.’ and bla bla bla...” Kirby giggled at the funny voice she used to imitate her parents. She smiled softly at them. “We need to get to the capital.” He said, looking her in the eyes. “How do we get to the capital from here?” He asked. Scarlet looked down. “Well... The Capital is quite a long flight from here. And you just got here, right? So maybe we should take it slow, relax, and rest, y’know?” Before Meta Knight could respond, she spoke again, “Oh, you HAVE to see the art gallery! It’s Awesome! C’mon, sad-face, lets make this day fun!” She suddenly grabbed his hand and started dragged them. Well, I guess this will help take my mind off everything wrong for a while...

[tinytanpopo]

Now that Gegege no Kitaro 2018 is over, and I remember it's one of your favorite Gegege no Kitaro iteration, what's your overall and concluding thoughts about it? What are your favorite episodes of all 97 (or each season) episodes? The positive and negative? Characterization of Sawashiro Kitaro and the other Kitaro family (including Mana)? I would love to know your opinion of the sixth remake!

This is going to be a long answer. And full of spoilers, for those of you looking at this who haven’t watched the 2018 version of Kitaro. Here goes!

What are your favorite episodes of all 97?

I watched all 97 episodes 3 times over the course of its run. I started out watching on my own, then eventually my friend wanted to watch with me. But the crappy Crunchyroll subs got in the way of his enjoyment, so I polished them for him, and then we started watching together.

So for each episode, I’ve…

1.) Watched for my own enjoyment when the raw came out

2.) Fixed the subs

3.) Watched and enjoyed again with my best friend.

Before my friend and I started watching together, I also did a rewatch of the series up to the middle of the Backbeard arc, so, 3.3 times? And it only made me like each episode more, and notice more tiny fun details about it. Sawashiro actually smiles a lot, u guys

Anyways, here are my stand-out favorites. Titles may be self-translated or shortened, as I’m looking at the Japanese wikipedia entry for the episodes, and my opinions are mostly disorganized gushing:

1: The Day the Youkai Awoke. Kitaro, Eyeball Dad, and Mana are all very cutely introduced, as well as their dynamics with each other. Great action, ends with the apparent death of the hero. (I was new to Kitaro.) Got me to watch the next week, that’s for sure! Also, world full of weird freaky monsters, already suited to my tastes.

3: Tantanbo’s Youkai Castle. The episode that earned Sawashiro Kitaro his “Gorilla” nickname from the fandom. Also Mana asked to be friends and made Kitaro bashful and the whole latter half is so sweet. FRIENDSHIP

6: Sunekosuri. This is the first Kitaro episode that made me cry, like I really wasn’t expecting that kind of emotional impact. Another thing that kept me watching was that, even though Kitaro has its formulas (as does everything), I still didn’t know what to expect.

7: Ghost Train. Ah, my first experience with the Ghost Train story. Y'know this is the only one where the human passenger pair are both already dead? I’ve seen many other renditions of this story, but this one’s the darkest.

11-12: The 808 Tanuki arc. The whole Kitaro Family shows off their skills in a big cool battle, and Mana overcomes an intense struggle to save the day (with some credit to Murder Momen Rollo Cloth). As my friend often says, Mana is too good for this world.

13: Wanyuudo. Got some insight to Kitaro and Ratman’s odd, long-lasting friendship. When I first watched this, I didn’t really understand why they were still friends. But over the next 2 years, I would.

The meta reason? Ratman was Shigeru Mizuki’s favorite out of all his characters.

14: Makura-gaeshi. The second episode that made me cry. (not hard for a show to do that, but still) Also shot my already-present respect for Eyeball Dad through the roof.

I’m pretty sure this is the episode that changed GeGeGe no Kitaro from “one of the shows I watch once a week” to “I must find and learn about the rest of this franchise.” I’d looked up characters and little facts here and there on wikis, and occasionally browsed the Kitaro tag on Pixiv before this point, but this was the tipping point.

The door to the unseen world was open, and I jumped through.

18: Kawauso’s Lie. haha, Mana’s a city girl who’s scared of bugs

22: Gyuuki. Body horror, despair, and a really good Catgirl episode.

27-37: The Backbeard arc, or 6th Kitaro’s version of the “Great Youkai War” story. For a refreshing twist, the designated “Witch” isn’t evil in this retelling. In fact, Agnes quickly became one of my most favorite and relatable characters.

She definitely had a rocky start with the Japanese youkai, and watching her develop friendships with Mana and Kitaro was great to see, and even better on the rewatch. My friend likes Agnes a lot, too. Just assume I cried at the Mana/Agnes friendship stuff, I’m sure it happened on the rewatch, too.

Also Kitaro finally invites Mana into GeGeGe Forest! She fucking earned it!!

38: Kasha. I had already seen Reverse Mochi Murder 3 different times by this point, but it’s best whenever freaky ghost-eyeballs are involved.

Also Mana punched Kasha in the face. Well, Kitaro’s face.

39: bang. I lost it.

40: This is the darkest version of Sara-kozo! And I like it. His song was best put to use in the 4th Kitaro series, and even had a callback in one of my most favorite episodes of that series. The song, of course, is terribly catchy.

42: The Great Youkai Trial. Having seen the other versions of this story, I’m glad the writers made the 6th series version stand on its own, weaving it into the overarching Nanashi plot.

43: Odoro-Odoro. This isn’t the first Odoro-Odoro retelling where Kitaro’s efforts are thankless and reviled, but it is the one that shows it the most intensely.

47-49: Nanashi arc conclusion. Each Kitaro anime has its harsh and intense moments (even the relatively gentle 5th series), but 6th is the one that goes hard most consistently. Not just into darkness, but

50-51: complete and utter sweetness KITTENGIRL dgjklfhjlkHFDGKMBHKjl

54: Dorotabo. Sometimes, there is no “right” choice that can make everyone happy. Being a mediator can be hard, frustrating, and sometimes impossible. But despite all the stress, frustration, and repeating the same tragic scenarios, Kitaro keeps on trying.

Also, Kitaro totally carried that frog up to the roof of his house for company at the end of the episode.

56: Vampire Elite. The most sympathetic retelling of Johnny’s story. And a great Kitaro/Ratman friendship episode.

57: La Seine. He doesn’t have a top hat this time. A great retelling of Hand, and a Kitaro/Mana friendship episode. Two vampire episodes in a row, and it didn’t feel repetitive at all.

58: Kamaboko. 6th Kitaro’s crossdressing episode, with Sawashiro Kitaro at his most vindictive. Fun for all sorts of reasons. :3c

59: Ushiro-gami. Also known as the youkai cactus episode, somewhat of a series staple. This one had great horror vibes, and Mana overcoming her fear and risking her life to help Kitaro save the day. Never gets old! Mana’s the best.

62: Kitaro and Ratman fighting like children. Kitaro’s shocked face when Ratman steals his pork. Kitaro’s admiration for Ratman’s persistence to keep on living, and appreciation for yanking him back to reality during the end of Nanashi.

The Kitaro/Ratman friendship dynamic is eternal.

64: Suiko, the Water Tiger. If you find an old jar in a dirty hole somewhere? Don’t open it, don’t drink it, don’t let anyone force you to drink it. And if the jar starts talking, shove some dirt in it.

That town full of assholes totally deserved what they got, though.

66: The Grim Reaper and the Hidden Village. Well, in this context, “hidden village” is more like “Shangri-La,” which is what I changed it to in the fixed subs. The only other version of this I’ve seen is the one from the 2nd Kitaro anime. It’s a well-known trauma episode in the fandom.

In the 2nd anime, Kitaro got the trauma. In the 6th one, Mana did, and Kitaro already knew it was coming.

68: Hell Exile. Yet another one where I wasn’t sure if it’d end cynical or hopeful. One of the fresher takes on the Hell Exile story, too.

69: Ibukimaru. Nicely advances the Four Treasonous Generals arc, and has some interaction between Rei and Mana. Oh yeah, this arc introduced Rei Isurugi, an intense chuuni with Megaman demon powers. It’s neat to watch how Rei and Sawashiro Kitaro bounce off each other as individual characters.

70: Mysterious Footprints. Calls back to another one of 2nd Kitaro’s infamous trauma episodes, incidentally one of my favorites. This was great, but the 2nd anime had more intense face-melting.

72: Iyami. Mana Is Gay. That is all.

73: Yamata-no-Orochi. A great take on Kitaro’s Orochi story, now with more monkey’s paw shenanigans!

74-75: Conclusion of the Four Generals arc. Mana convinces Kitaro not to resign himself to shouldering the heaviest burden alone, as he so often does. Agnes and Adel make an appearance(yay!), and they team up with Mana and Catgirl to help save the day. Rei finally chills out, and gets a new mentor.

77: Neko-sennin. Nurarihyon startles the holy hell out of Kitaro, and further establishes how he’s going to operate this time around, connecting to his previous actions in episode 76.

Also, cats. Kitty Kitaro. Cats are my second-favorite animal, so I appreciate the many Kitaro stories involving cats.

78: Mouryou. This one gets retold in several of the other Kitaro series, with decent variation. This one has its own 6th Kitaro touch, with that fucked-up photographer, and an ending I was positive would be dark.

80: Onmoraki. I’d also consider this story a Kitaro staple, though Onmoraki was way tougher this time. Must have had something to do with Nobuyuki Hiyama. :B This is always the episode where Kitaro puts on his old painter costume, and proves he can’t think up fake names worth a damn. Gets me every time.

81: Hideri-gami the mangaka. I love comics, I translate comics, GeGeGe no Kitaro originated as a comic. This episode’s just a love letter to the medium. And seeing Kitaro genuinely enjoying Hiderin’s Totally Original Comic Do Not Steal was adorable.

83: Houkou. Some kind of disaster usually happens in this story. In the 4th anime version, Kitaro was burned to ashes. This one hit harder. Nobody won. No one was happy. We’re reminded of Dorotabo, and how Kitaro never “gets over” tragic situations like these, no matter how often they repeat. I think it’d be worse if he was desensitized, and gave up trying to make anything better.

84: Mr. Chin. The Japanese dialogue is full of puns involving the word chin and yeah I lost it. Sunday morning changes with the times, and they still get this guy in.

I died at “three rainbows” ghjghjk

89: Te-no-me’s Curse. Te-no-me is a youkai who either shows up in the youkai trial story, or has an episode for himself. Also, we finally get to see that Kitaro can just pop his hands on and off. Well, maybe not as casually as in the comics…

90: Sazae-oni. Normally you’re not “supposed” to do “it was all a dream” endings, but this is the first time they’ve done that with Sazae-oni, and the dream reveal means we just saw inside Sawashiro Kitaro’s mind. The fancy sushi restaurant exterior, the plain sweets shop, the body pillow how does he know about those?! Does he know why they look like that?!!

Kitaro seemed disappointed that he didn’t get to sing on stage. And Rei was in his dream-audience! An adorable episode.

93: The Phantom Train. Catgirl got Homuhomu’d. But KitaNeko is finally canon. This whole episode left the fandom reeling, as usual for 6th Kitaro. Best retelling of the Phantom Train story yet.

94: Hot Springs Trip. Mana carried Kitaro over 90 episodes ago, and Kitaro doing the same for Mana repays that favor, in a way.

Kitaro also admits he has Terminal Kitaro Face.

95-97: The end. I did not think they would poof Kitaro. That’s the deadest I’ve ever seen him, in any version. And the most broken, worse than a giant hate-baby crushing his dad. Kitaro giving Ratman his chashu pork made my heart explode, Mana’s sacrifice made the heart-pieces explode, and Mana reuniting with Kitaro 10 years later made my heart whole again.

Nurarihyon offing himself made sense, especially with this being his most dignified characterization in any version. Glad they let Shu-no-bon live, even if he was an actual hardass this time. Shu-no-bon’s usually a teddy bear in comparison to dual-wielding gatling guns

I’m sure the prime minister didn’t keep her position for much longer.

Episode 97’s subs left out most of Mana’s text to Catgirl at the end, so here it is:

“Cat-Sis! Here’s the pic Nebutori took for us on our recent trip! Also, I found a sweets shop near my workplace. Let’s ask Kitaro to go there with us!”

A very sweet ending, indeed.

The positive and negative?

I wish we’d gotten to see more of Agnes and Rei outside of their own arcs, and the conclusions of other arcs, though they clearly had their own lives to live and paths to take.

We didn’t get Akamata or Shisa or a bunch of other youkai I was hoping to see in the episodes. We didn’t get stories for Jami or Kamanari, both of who showed up as bit characters at the very end. But I can accept this, too, as writers and staff working within limits, and telling the story they wanted to tell as best as they could.

I’m glad they focused more on new stuff than old, though. Maybe they didn’t want to risk a repeat of 5th Kitaro’s non-ending, but they were ready to end the 6th anime with the Nanashi arc. Even with a 2nd year, though, the writers didn’t lose their focused storytelling, and ended the series in a way that left my heart full.

Characterization of Sawashiro Kitaro and the other Kitaro family (including Mana)?

Sawashiro Kitaro continues to be that weird youkai kid, that boy who lives in the woods. He’s chill and has a bunch of comic book youkai powers, a unique sort of superhero, while also not being a cop, thank goodness. Every Kitaro is a bit of a pessimist (except 3rd anime’s Toda Kitaro, I guess), but Sawashiro is especially so. This made his gradual development  even more fun to watch. The fact that he never could give up on that dream, not completely, made me appreciate that development even more.

Sawashiro cried the least out of all the Kitaros—twice, and it was only onscreen once. He kept everything in so much, it’s no wonder he imploded and went to Ultra Hell when the prime minister pot-shot him.

And, Sawashiro Kitaro is so pure and cares so much it hurts.

Eyeball Dad. Since Isamu Tanonaka passed away in 2010, the legendary Masako Nozawa (the original voice of Kitaro) took on voicing the role. Like Kitaro, Eye Dad’s characterization changes a bit with each anime, though not as much. Nozawa’s performance made Eye Dad feel more laid-back this time, I think, and more patient. In older series, he had more “Showa dad” tendencies. And we got to see him outside of eyeball or mummy form! 6th series spoiled us!

Ratman. He’s usually the same between every adaptation, save for the voice. Sometimes he’s nicer, sometimes he’s more of a bastard. But he’s always Kitaro’s friend. He may nasty, greedy, and cynical, but he’s usually right about how the world works, and his priorities are hard to disagree with entirely. He knows how to survive, even when treated like dirt for centuries. Ratman’s got a particular brand of wisdom, if you look past the ringworm.

Catgirl. In other versions, she looks like she’s in elementary or middle school, and 6th anime is the most mature she’s ever looked. This is also Catgirl at her most tsundere, but with zero “mean girl” tendencies. All it takes is Mana shooting pure admiration at Catgirl for them to become friends, and that’s cute. I always like Catgirl, and the 6th anime is no exception.

The Kitaro Family. Sandy’s mostly unchanged, except now she doesn’t own the Youkai Apartments, and can use modern technology to make a shitload of money. Old Crybaby is 100% the same, down to his old person banter with Sandy.

Rollo Cloth’s minor interest in finding a girlfriend got turned up to 11. He’d get a lecture from every previous Rollo.

Wally Wall has less vocabulary, no wife and kids, and they thankfully didn’t show his mouth this time. Still a good dude.

Mana Inuyama. The 3rd anime had Yumeko, but even if she wasn’t damseled as often as you’d expect from a typical 80s cartoon, it still happened a lot. In the 6th anime, Mana clearly has more agency from the get-go, and refuses to leave herself out of Kitaro’s business. She’s serious about being his friend, and never stops being serious about it, even when things worse than she could ever imagine happened.

All she has are good memories with Kitaro.

Like my friend said, she’s too good for this world.

What’s your overall and concluding thoughts about the 6th Kitaro anime?

What an emotional roller coaster. The writers pulled no punches with this, and very much managed to make “their own Kitaro” while still firmly being “Kitaro.” With the dark and cynical twists it sometimes took, I often didn’t know if there’s be a happy ending to an episode, or a bitter one. It’s a Sunday morning cartoon at its core, but very good at making the audience forget that.

6th Kitaro was my introduction to Kitaro as a whole, and I was hopelessly obsessed by episode 14. Well, because of episode 14, probably. I downloaded all the other Kitaro anime series, got into the comics (official ones by Mizuki, official ones not by Mizuki, and a shit-ton of doujin), and now my brain is just “kitarokitarokitaro” all the time.

I don’t think it’s going to stop anytime soon.

[otakween]

07 Ghost (Drama CD) - Hausen Family 

So now that I’ve finished the anime, manga, and doujinshi, all I have left are some drama CDs and the radio series. I’m not going to listen to all of them because some of them were only released as DVD extras. No way am I gonna buy 10+ chunky DVD box sets just to listen to some bonus CDs.

Anyway, this one is apparently based on chapters 27-33 pf the manga. That’s so long ago for me so it might be nice to have a refresher. It’s kind of weird that they keep repackaging the same story over and over, but I guess we do that too with film novelizations and such.

I found a partial translation here. 

Track 1 

-I really wish Razette played a bigger role in the story. She’s just kinda there to round out Castor’s character and doesn’t have an arc of her own :/

-lol @ the dog voice actor. The barking was about as convincing as me pretending to be a dog when I was in 1st grade

-This was a nice, short little prelude to the story + a recap of 07 Ghost’s general premise. I really can’t imagine anyone would buy this CD without any prior 07 Ghost knowledge, but I guess you never know

Track 2

-Ah, now I see the appeal of this CD, you get to hear voices we never got a chance to hear in the anime. The highlight for me is getting to hear Capella’s voice. He sounds VERY girly. I kinda hate it when they give kid characters these overly cutesy moe moe voices, it makes me feel manipulated.

-I know that “Goshujin-sama” just means “Master,” but it’s become so sexualized in otaku culture that it just feels kinda creepy coming from Capella

-Burupya’s snoring was very cute

-This track’s purpose was to establish Capella as part of the squad and setup Teito’s main goal. I really like the “beginnings of a long journey” vibes in these early chapters. 

Track 3

-I feel like gags like Frau’s adult books would only be funny to like...a middle schooler. Like they just use the same gag over and over. (Kinda like in Fullmetal Alchemist when they’re like “hurr hurr Edward is short!”) 

-Castor saying “I’ve misjudged you...” about Frau having a “son” lol 

-They never really explain why Teito has to do this part (entering the God house) alone? Like maybe it’s part of the pilgrimage legend or something, but they never bother to say that. 

-After a lot of screaming, Teito gets welcomed into the Hausen house for the night. Capella and Frau...go somewhere else?? I think they go to a sketchy inn or something. 

Track 4 

-Teito introducing Burupya as his “best friend” to complete strangers is v wholesome.

-This track was basically just “blah blah blah, exposition” plus a cute bath scene where Teito calls Burupya fat lol 

Track 5

-From here on out, there’s no translation. It’s still pretty easy to follow though. This track is basically the meat of the story where Hyuga meets Razette and sacrifices himself to save her

-Castor really went from being creepily obsessed with his Mom to being creepily obsessed with Razette. I guess that’s...an improvement?

Track 6

-Kind of an “action” track with more XingLu backstory and Teito battling his Kor mother. The mom driven mad thing reminds me of Todoroki’s mom (anime moms have it rough, huh?) 

Track 7

-And...that’s a wrap. Not much to say cuz it’s identical to the manga. Teito gets his cursed ticket thingy and Castor’s Mom passes on into the afterlife. I guess I can see why they would want to make this specific story into a drama CD. It’s definitely the most memorable God house. I barely even remember the other ones and I just read the manga! Would I spend money on this? Probably not. Shout out to all those people who share this stuff for free. You guys are the real MVPs!

Cast track

-The cast talk bonus track is always the best part of these things. Not only do you get fun, behind-the-scenes insights but you get to hear the VAs natural speaking voices.

-All the cast talk about how nostalgic it is to reprise these characters cuz the anime ended in 2009 and the drama CD came out in 2012. I wonder what the longest time a seiyuu has played a specific role? Probably Pokemon or Doraemon or something...

-Lol everyone is just joking around and trolling and then Capella’s VA comes on basically in character and it suddenly gets awkward and quiet. I guess she was new and there wasn’t that sense of camaraderie? 

-Castor’s VA accidentally calls Razette “Rozette” and everyone clowns on him haha. Kinda meta cuz I never know whether to call her “Razette” or “Lazette.” 

-Razette’s VA comes on and just goes “Whelp. I had NO lines” hahaha. She compares it to playing a baby or a dog and yeah...that must feel weird.

-Burupya’s VA mentions that previously her script said “Burupya” but this time it said “Mikage.” That’s an interesting tidbit. I guess at different parts of the story they want to emphasize that Burupya = Mikage and other times he can just kinda be a cute background mascot character 

[karihighman]

I love this job more than I imagined I could. The day I stop giving it my all is the day I walk away.”

–John Nolan (Nathan Fillion), 2×14 “Casualties”

The quote above really encapsulates the draw of ABC’s police dramedy (that’s drama-comedy) The Rookie. The Nathan Fillion led series was ordered back in spring 2018, and aired its first season from 2018-2019. It’s currently in its second season, with a new episode airing this Sunday, April 26. In light of that – and because I’ve since managed to get 2 of my friends hooked on it – I decided I’d write up a few reasons as to why you should definitely check out this show…if you haven’t already!

Reason #1: The cast

(ABC/Andrew Eccles)

Yes, Nathan Fillion of ABC’s Castle headlines the series, but there’s a whole slew of cast members that carry the show just the same. Not to mention, you’ve probably seen them on other TV shows or films prior to their appearance on The Rookie.

CURRENT CAST (as of season 2–onward):

Nathan Fillion portrays John Nolan, the 45-year-old “rookie” who decided to pack up and move to LA to join the LAPD after a robbery at his local bank in Pennsylvania made him question his life decisions. You’ve probably seen him on: Castle, Firefly, Two Guys & a Girl, and/or Con Man.

Alyssa Diaz portrays Angela Lopez, one of three TOs (training officers) at the Mid-Wilshire Police Department in Los Angeles, California. You’ve probably seen her in: As the World Turns, Army Wives, The Nine Lives of Chloe King, and/or Ray Donovan.

Richard T. Jones portrays Sergeant Wade Grey, who is the immediate boss of the TOs, and is also responsible for their rookies, as well as the remainder of the police under his command at the station. You’ve probably seen him in: Judging Amy, Why Did I Get Married?/Why Did I Get Married Too?, and/or Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

Titus Makin Jr. portrays Jackson West, the second in the trio of rookies. His father is the head of LAPD’s Internal Affairs, so he’s struggled some with having to prove himself outside of his father’s shadow. You’ve probably seen him in: Glee, Starcrossed, Pretty Little Liars, and/or The Path.

Melissa O’Neil portrays Lucy Chen, the 28-year-old hotshot who completes the trio of rookies in the LAPD. She decided to become a cop on a whim, but she loves it so much now, even though it’s the opposite of what her psychologist parents want her to do career-wise. You’ve probably seen her in/on: Canadian Idol, Dark Matter, and/or as a part of the Broadway musical Les Miserables.

Eric Winter portrays Tim Bradford, the second training officer under Sgt. Grey. He’s first seen as the no-nonsense type, but has since softened some during season 2. You’ve probably seen him in: The Mentalist, Witches of East End, The Ugly Truth, and/or Days of Our Lives.

Mekia Cox portrays Nyla Harper, a former undercover detective turned training officer. She’s quite a badass, and does whatever she can to excel at work, as it’ll earn points in her favor, because she’s fighting for custody of her daughter with her ex-husband. You’ve probably seen her in: 90210, Chicago Med, Secrets & Lies, and/or Once Upon a Time.

CURRENT RECURRING CAST (as of season 2–onward):

Image Credits: (ABC/Christopher Willard); (ABC/Richard Cartwright); and (ABC/Eric McCandless)

Ali Larter as Dr. Grace Sawyer, a former flame of John’s from his college days. She now works at Shaw Memorial Hospital, and while she and John reconnect as just friends first, they eventually ramp it up to dating.

Harold Perrineau as Detective Nick Armstrong, a new night detective that assists the LAPD with their case load after their regular shifts. He becomes involved more so when notorious serial killer Rosalind Dyer is brought to Grey’s station per a deal with the DA.

Shawn Ashmore as Wesley Evers, a lawyer that is currently dating Angela Lopez. The two have been living together since the start of season 2, and are now engaged as of episode 16.

Jasmine Matthews as Rachel Hall, a social worker who is one of Lucy’s best friends, and currently the girlfriend of Tim Bradford.

Daniel Lissing as Sterling Freeman, Jackson’s boyfriend who’s (ironically? meta-ly?) the star of a cop show, Hot Suspect.

Sarah Shahi as Jessica Russo, who is an FBI agent that was brought in to work a biological terror attack. She and John have a brief relationship, but break it off by episode 6 of season 2.

FORMER CAST (season 1): 

Mercedes Mason portrayed Captain Zoe Andersen, who was the tough but fair captain of the LAPD. She believed Nolan’s life experience would be good for the department. She was killed in episode 16 by a gang member who made an attempt on Nolan’s life.

Afton Williamson portrayed Talia Bishop, Nolan’s former training officer. She came off as brash at first, but she did help John a lot during his first six months on the job. She left the LAPD for a job with ATF; Afton exited the series after season 1 ended.

FORMER RECURRING CAST (season 1): 

Mircea Monroe as Isabel Bradford, Tim’s ex-wife. She was an undercover officer, but got hooked onto drugs which made her lose her job, and consequently, her husband. Tim tried to help her numerous times, but they’d been estranged for a year. She did finally get clean; but they decided it’d be best to separate, as Tim did not want to remind her of her old life.

Michael Beach as Commander Percy West, Jackson’s father who runs Internal Affairs for the LAPD. He and his son had their tough moments, but the two seemed to have reconciled in the season 1 finale after Jackson’s heroic efforts to stop a viral criminal.

*random fun fact: Mekia’s not the only one with a One Chicago tie-in. Alyssa Diaz actually worked with Chicago PD actor Jesse Lee Soffer on As the World Turns, and Michael Beach actually just finished a recurring role on Chicago PD as Darius Walker. Joelle Carter, who portrayed Shawn Christian’s character’s wife in the “Hawke” episode, has been on not one, but 3 One Chicago shows. Two of which portraying Laura Nagel (Chicago PD for 1 episode, and the spinoff Chicago Justice); she guested on Chicago Med this year.

Just wanted to toss that tidbit in there since quite a few fans of The Rookie have also been fans of the One Chicago franchise – at least that I’ve interacted with on social media! 

Reason #2: The balance of dramatic cases with humorous banter between the officers

(ABC/Ron Batzdorff)

(ABC/Ron Batzdorff)

While The Rookie is no means a straight comedy, it’s also not technically a classic police procedural either. That’s a good thing, as the balance of the lighter comedic moments interspersed with the dramatic or sometimes gruesome cases is what makes the show so damn entertaining. Oh, and did I mention there are bloopers? Because there are bloopers, and they are hilarious. Click here & here to see those!!

Reason #3: The pairs (TOs & Rookies)

(ABC/Ron Batzdorff)

Ah yes, another reason why The Rookie works so well. The pairings of the training officers with their respective rookie is spot-on. In season 1 you had the new, upbeat, John Nolan paired with spunky Talia Bishop; and the two bounced off each other quite nicely. John’s new TO, Nyla Harper, is just as sassy, if not sassier than Talia, but in a way, she’s a little more grounded, as she has a young daughter to consider. That’s something they have in common, as John has a 20 year old son, Henry.

(ABC/Christopher Willard)

Another pair is Angela Lopez and Jackson West. Sure, you would think: oh, here are two ambitious, young, intelligent people, so they should feed off each other, right? Wrong…at least not at first. And that’s what was so refreshing about it. Was that you had the push-and-pull between them that made you wonder if West could really stick it out with Lopez. He eventually did get over his “stage fright” when gunfire was occurring, but it took time; and it was realistic to see Angela be tough, yet understanding with him when it came to things like that. Not to mention, Jackson’s helped her out on the relationship front a few times, as he’s listened to her issues with dating, and Wesley. He even was the one who put the idea of a proposal in her head when they were at a stakeout! The two are really jiving, and it’s fun to see!

(ABC/Christopher Willard)

Last but not least is the duo of Bradford and Chen. They couldn’t be more opposite from each other at first glance: you’ve got tough-as-nails Tim, who’s got to train positive, spirited Lucy. Sounds like a little bit of a clash, right? It seemed like it at first, as Tim was very tough on Lucy; but he’s since let down his guard a little, which has been cool to see. He’s balanced out Lucy’s energy, and the two have since been so in-sync, it’s a little crazy at times (but in the best way possible)!

Reason #4: The “ships” (couples) of the show

(ABC/Christopher Willard)

Image Credit: Twitter/TheRookie

Image Credit: IG @TheRookieABC.

(ABC/Christopher Willard)

Image Credit: IG @TheRookieABC

Ah yes, the part that a lot of fans (myself included!) love about our favorite TV shows: the couples that pair off in it! It’s also worth mentioning that fans usually get excited about “should be” couples aka: people that they think should be together/dating/a couple/etc.

As far as The Rookie goes, there are actually quite a few well-established couples on the show, especially in season 2! If you need or want a quick season 1 refresher: Tim was technically still married to his now ex-wife, Isabel; Jackson had a brief relationship with Gino; Angela and Wesley had begun dating; and yes, John & Lucy had a brief thing early on!

Now, for season 2, you’ve got: Jackson & Sterling; Tim & Rachel; Wesley & Angela; John & Grace (John was previously dating Jessica); aaaaaaand the fan-favorite should-be couple: Tim & Lucy. The final “couple” is actually how I got hooked onto The Rookie – thank you social media for all the #Chenford/#Tucy hashtags!!

Most everyone loves these relationships because they’re fun, endearing, dramatic, and sometimes even a little bit funny. It’s quite a nice counterbalance to all the death and destruction the LAPD encounters on the streets everyday, you know? Plus, who hasn’t found a couple on a show that they like a lot, right? It’s fun to interact with other fans about it too – which is part of the reason why “ships” are really effective.

Jackson and Sterling have that lovely push-and-pull dynamic, where, since Sterling’s a celebrity, and Jackson’s a cop, they had to keep it low-key at first. But now, since they’re technically out of the spotlight, they’re free to do as they please.

Tim and Rachel originally began as a bet, but, it turned into something more afterwards. Even though the two have had their little disagreements here and there, it’s been really interesting to see Tim open himself up to a new relationship after his wife in season 1. The fact that Rachel’s one of Lucy’s best friends is…beside the point. Although, for fans of Chenford/Tucy, it’s kind of comical, or ironic. I’m not quite sure which.

Speaking of Chenford, Tim & Lucy are the ones that fans have been clamoring to get together – even though technically, nothing can happen between the two until Lucy’s no longer a rookie (Tim’s her TO!). I’ll admit, I was originally intrigued by them because of their similarities to another “should-be” cop couple I ship: Upstead from Chicago PD; but, seeing how in-sync the partners are on The Rookie, I understand why everyone wants them to be more than that. I sure do!

Wesley and Angela have been steady since season 1, and his heartbreaking PTSD storyline in season 2 only brought them closer together, and showed just how strong of a relationship they have. Angela’s been super supportive, and Wesley’s always been confident in her abilities. They’re even the couple to beat in terms of major milestones: they’ve moved in together, and they’re engaged! YAY!

John and Grace were a little bit of a wildcard at the start, since they had a little bit of a history there. But, ever since they blossomed into friends, their transition into a relationship was relatively easy. It’s been nice to see John happy, and Grace seems to be really good for him right now.

Reason #5: The vibe behind the scenes

(ABC/Troy Harvey)

Last, but not least is the “vibe” behind the scenes of The Rookie. That includes the off-set antics the cast gets up to! It’s been really fun to scour social media and see their comments on not only The Rookie account, but on fan things too! The cast is also great about liking comments and posts that fans make, which is super-nice!

Not to mention, they’re just genuinely fun people – at least judging from their behind the scenes posts and on-set videos! From car sing-a-longs to random dance parties, there’s never a dull moment on The Rookie set! They’re such good sports. Not only does that camaraderie come through onscreen, but it helps the chemistry to translate nicely as well. Believability is part of what sells TV, and The Rookie has that skill down pat!

Bonus: Favorite Episodes So Far / Ones To Watch

Image Credits: (ABC/Richard Cartwright) and (ABC/Christopher Willard)

Note: this is just my own personal list, but if you have any more to add, feel free to comment! 🙂 PS: Season 2 is available for streaming on ABC.com or Hulu; season 1 is not, but there are a bevy of clips online (YouTube) which can help catch you up! 

The Pilot, of course! 1×01, and then the kind-of-sort-of subsequent follow-up 1×02 “Crash Course”

1×04 “The Switch”

1×07 “The Ride Along” & 1×08 “Time of Death”

1×14 “Plain Clothes Day” and 1×15 “Manhunt”

1×19 “The Checklist” and 1×20 “Free Fall” (the season 1 finale)

2×01 “Impact” (picks up right after season 1 leaves off!)

2×03 “The Bet” and 2×04 “Warriors and Guardians” (which is Mekia’s debut!)

2×06 “Fallout” and 2×08 “Clean Cut”

2×10 “The Dark Side” and 2×11 “Day of Death” *you should definitely watch these back-to-back, as 2×10 serves as the midseason finale; 2×11 is the midseason premiere*

2×12 “Now and Then”; 2×16 “The Overnight”; and 2×17 “Control”

That’s all for me for now! 5 (or 6, if you count the dramatic episodes!) reasons to watch The Rookie! You can catch all-new episodes on ABC, Sunday nights at 10/9 c! Be sure you’re following the show on Twitter and/or Instagram so you can see fun behind the scenes content, not to mention live-tweet during tomorrow’s all-new episode! Hope ya’ll liked this post!

Credit: GIPHY/Google

Why You Should Be Watching #TheRookie (if you're not already!) I love this job more than I imagined I could. The day I stop giving it my all is the day I walk away."

[spaceorphan18]

TDB Rewatch: The New York Arc

I was originally going to do a post for each episode - but you know what? I think I’ve talked about this particular part of the series more than any other part - and even though it’s been seven weeks since I’ve even seen an episode of Glee (!!) - I’m not entirely sure I have anything new to say about these episodes, so here we go with one big post for you. 

New New York

Is this still the best episode of the series?  Yes - I think it is.  The entire episode is completely watchable, the music is great, the Klaine stuff is great, everyone gets something interesting to do, Rachel is interesting again, Mercedes re-joins the cast, and even Artie has some funny lines.  This episode almost feels like a pilot of a spin-off series, and I’m a little sad we didn’t get to see more than this arc, because these characters still seem fresh and interesting - and this episode is clearly all setting up the status quo for living in New York.  

I’ve seen the episode so many times now that this one flew by, and while I’m always here for the amazing Klaine stuff - the nice thing is that watching the episode as a whole, I’m not bored with any of it.  I have no new meta to add to the piles of things I’ve already written and said on the podcast, but I’m glad this episode remains enjoyable even after a million rewatches.   

Btw - I still say they should have asked Adam Lambert to be a regular - he adds so much and I’m sad that this is his last appearance on the show. 

Also - I can tell it’s been a while since I’ve watched the show - Chris and Darren are really pretty.  Just thought I should remind you ;) 

///

Bash

So, while Opening Night might be my least favorite of the bunch, but I think as an episode Bash might be the weakest? And actually - I think it might have been better if the Kurt being bashed story line was a) more prominently in the episode or b) not in it at all.  It feels like it’s almost an after thought to Rachel’s (absurd) story - and there’s such a rich story with Kurt (and Blaine) that feels wholly untapped because it’s more about Rachel Berry and her feelings. :P  I do like the little bits of it that we did get, Kurt and Blaine are superb as they are in all of these episodes.  And I mean - it’s nice that Rachel gets yelled at twice for being a moron - even if the whole thing doesn’t hold together very well.  

Meanwhile, I’m not sure how much I have to say about Sam and Mercedes - I enjoy them as a couple, though I can’t say that I’m riveted by their story line. It is nice, though that Amber Riley gets a chance to shine since she’s been away from the show for so long.  I think the awkwardest thing about this episode, (besides Sam’s impressions) is the fact that that the two story lines don’t mesh well, and it feels like the episode starts off as one thing then pivots and does something else entirely in the second half.  

That said - the music is great, as always, everyone sounds really beautiful on all the Soundheim things.  And while I didn’t need two Mercedes solos - she is lovely as always.  

///

Tested

Who knew Artie having an STD would be such a fun episode.  Honestly, I think this is the best episode the show does about sex.  Yes, even over The First Time (even if I like TFT just a smidge more).  Each of the characters are in a unique situation, and come at sex in a different way - and it’s actually pretty cool the way the show handles it.  They’re not usually great with these kind of topics, but I really have no complaints about how they handled anything in this episode.  I especially like the fact that a) Mercedes gets to choose how she wants to deal with sex and b) they let Mercedes and Rachel be actual girl friends when it comes to a topic - again something the show doesn’t always handle the best.  Yes, for all the sex positive conversations in this episode.  

Also, the ‘I’m slut shaming you’ scene might be one of the funniest things the show ever did.  

The only one weighing this one down, and why it isn’t passing NNY by on my favorites list - is that the music just isn’t good.  I mean, all the songs fit the episode fine, and the performances are great, I just don’t like any of the songs.  

Also - Kurt is super extra in this episode - which really reinforces my headcanon that Kurt not getting regular sexy times is super grumpy. 

Anyway, I give kudos to the show for doing an episode that has some actual layers to it in all of its plot lines.  Usually, Glee’s pretty anivilish about everything, but there’s some actual nuance in this story - good job show.  It’s nice to be not spoon fed everything all the time.  

/// 

Opening Night

Well...  This remains the worst of the NYC Arc - and really, only because the stupid and a bit convoluted Sue plot.  Rachel’s arc is a bit silly too (really - I roll my eyes at the whole ‘oh no NYT reporter’ bit, especially when the dude just waxes praise on her like everyone else on the show) - but are some legitimately entertaining things going on during the Rachel side of things.  And I dare say the episode is a little underrated?  There are some good jokes and nice music, and it is exactly what you’d expect from Rachel’s first night (even if I still think Funny Girl should have been placed at the end of the show) and Rachel has been rather held back and used well during the NYC Arc so I don’t mind her spot light here.  

But man, the Sue stuff is tedious.  I kind of forget Will is apart of it (and did logic take some time off again? Because the Emma having a baby thing is...  let’s not get into it).  Sue actually has already arrived at her season 6 self - and even some of the early sequences with her kids aren’t bad, but there are really two scenes that drag this entire episode way, way down -- the date with Mario the restaurant guy, and the last five minutes with Mario the restaurant guy.  Oh my god - why is this the only thing they could think of to do with Sue?  I mean - everything about this plot line screams contractual obligation - needing to give Jane Lynch one episode during this 7.  But could they really not think of anything more interesting for her to do??  DId she really need a date so she and Rachel could sing that song together??  Ug - it is really frustrating that this takes up a third of the episode.  What a waste.  

But, I mean, as a whole, it’s not terrible in the way the worst of Glee is - and really, everything on the Rachel side (mostly) works for me.  It’s a good thing all that Sue/Mario stuff is pretty easily skipped.  

///

The Back-Up Plan

Hey! Another solid episode! It’s weird - the focusing only three story line lets the episode breathe - a lot - to the point it seems strange, lol.  But anyway...  

First there’s Rachel’s story - which I know people were annoyed that Rachel bails a month into Funny Girl, but idk - this seems like Rachel.  And this is the one and really only time she faces serious consequences for her actions.  It’s refreshing really.  Also - Jim Rash is a delight, and that audition scene is priceless.  

Meanwhile - Mercedes and Santana have a great story that I kind of wish there was more of.  Santana’s been gone for most of the arc so far, but I don’t mind her coming back - she’s rather civil and low key during these last few episodes, and it’s a bit refreshing, honestly.  Anyway - I like that pop business is treated with a little more realism than Broadway, as D’Shawn (Mercedes’s producer) seems to tell it like is.  But more so, I feel like there’s a genuine friendship between Mercedes and Santana and that’s pretty refreshing, too.  

And then there’s the June story line.  You know what? I really do not like June.  Sorry.  And I find it a little creepy she wants to mold Blaine into something of her own making.  I’m also... not sure what the purpose of this entire story was? Ah well...  At least we get some really lovely Klaine moments out of the whole thing.  

Bonus - the music in this episode is all pretty solid.  

///

Old Dog, New Tricks

You guys ever notice Artie’s eating dog biscuits in this? Weird things you notice when you watch the whole episode.  Anyway...

Hey - it’s that episode that Chris wrote.  And yeah, it’s a little awkward - in a - you can tell this is a new writer for TV kinda way not in a - this sucks kind of way.  I really wish Chris had stuck with TV writing, I think he showed some real promise, and writing for other shows would have been great experience.  Ah well.  It all just makes me miss Chris actually doing things that are not related to middle school fantasy novels.  

So, for the record, if you guys ever wonder who Chris is, seemingly, frustrated with? Watch this episode - and how he writes Rachel.  She’s been almost acting human in the rest of this arc, and in this episode, she really is back to being really awful.  At least multiple people get to tell her off again - it’s, again, refreshing.  How many times as she been told off during this arc? Not enough, but it’s been kind of nice when you string them all together.  

Anyway - this episode, as you’ve probably heard me say before, works pretty well.  Santana as a publicity is brilliant (and perhaps the best aspect of Chris’s writing), Sam and Mercedes relationship issues are handled rather maturely, Chris as Peter Pan is incredibly inspired, and the music is pretty solid (even if it’s not my personal favorite).  There’s even a sweet Klaine scene (though - I still maintain it was wise not to have Chris write too much Blaine).  The only thing that really doesn’t work to for me, and maybe we’re far enough away that I can say this honestly without feeling like there will be too much repercussion - I don’t think June Squibb is very good.  I mean, yeah - part of it is the awkwardness of the story itself.  But - Maggie just doesn’t work for me.  Sorry :(  

///

The Untitled Rachel Berry Project

I know a lot of people say that this episode feels like a finale for them.  And I kind of get that, I do. But, honestly, it feels more like a chapter break.  This episode is incredibly bittersweet - as if it knows (and it does) what’s coming in season 6.  But, also, it’s the ending of a show I kind of wish we had much longer, and I guess it feels a little sad to get to the end.  

The episode itself is solid - there are only really three plot lines here, and they all work pretty well.  The music might be the weakest element (I only like about half the songs in this one) but it’s got comedy and drama and warmth and sadness, and does make for a great season finale.  (It’s the best season finale the show did -- really, it is.)  And I guess - everyone ends up where they’re supposed to end up, and it works for me.  

I don’t really have a lot to say about it, or at least anything new to say.  It’s good, it’s solid, and while I’m super tired of watching TV all day, it’s a great ending to a really good chunk of TV.  

///

Final Thoughts: 

I am a little saddened that we didn’t get those two episodes that were taken from the season.  I feel like another couple of beats in the story lines would have worked wonders, and of course, selfishly, we’d have a little more of my favorite part of the story. 

Interestingly, though, I don’t know if this makes any sense - but I got the feeling the writers were always more comfortable writing stuff back at McKinley.  Like - they did this because they had the time, but they wouldn’t have been able to sustain an entire season writing it.  I know we could all come up with great stories, but I think it’s better that they were wrapping things up at this point, because the show feels like it’s headed towards an ending. 

I thought I’d get more insight about things watching them all in one sitting - but I’m not sure I did.  I think the show almost works better as a week to week so you can sit with each episode.  I think when strung together the arcs don’t seem as fluid as we have them in our heads now that we’ve spent years talking about each episode individually.  

Weirdly - the music of this arc is really hit and miss for me.  It’s interesting, to me, that a lot of times when the story is stronger, the music isn’t always as good.  A lot of other times, it’s vice versa.  The really, really good episodes can balance the two.  

I feel bad for Kevin McHale - who really had nothing to do other than be a giant STD.  

That said - one of the most refreshing things about this arc was the lack of toxic masculinity crap, as well as some of the best writing for the women ever on the show. 

I enjoyed the little bit of Santana and Brittany that we got - this was, like, the prefect amount of them.  

One of the downsides of everyone being paired off is that we didn’t get to see interesting mixed-up pairs - one of the draw backs of the show having such little time in New York.  

One thing that stood out to me, and god I hope I don’t get too much hate for this, is that Mercedes and Sam don’t really work... at least at this point.  Seeing the entire arc all together, it’s very apparent that while I don’t doubt how much they care for each other, they’re definitely in two different places in their lives.  And while I applaud the maturity that the relationship was handled with, it’s clear that they’re not ready to be in a long term relationship (yet).  

Rachel! Was bearable for most of the arc.  Yeah - there are still a lot of special snowflake Rachel moments.  But Lea Michele can do comedy well, and they let her do that.  

I didn’t find anything wrong or unusual about Chris’s acting choices.  **shrug**

Kurt’s mildly unhappy through a lot of these episodes - but much of that is at Rachel.  And really at his own place in life.  And the one episode where he’s super sexually frustrated.  

The Klaine stuff is delicious - and of course, discussed many other places that you don’t really need me to rehash it.  

It’s also unfinished.  

They should have made Adam Lambert a regular. 

Alright - bring it Season 6.  

[merry-kuroo]

My Top 10 Anime of 2018

Hello, everyone! It's my favorite time of the year! I get to talk about my favorite anime that I watched this year! This was such a hard decision to make, but I like my list ^_^

I will make a different list for honorable mentions :)

So, let's get to it!!

1.) Golden Kamuy

Ah, everything about this show is perfect. The humor, the action, the story, the developed characters and the historical aspects. I highly recommend this show to anyone interested in Japanese history! I really enjoyed watching it this year and I hope to see a 3rd season soon!

2.) A Certain Scientific Railgun

I was a little skeptical of getting into the To Aru series because I wasn't sure where to start. I started with the first season of Index and I couldn't get into it, so I started Railgun. It quickly became one of my favorites because of the humor and the characters. I like slice of life shows with action in them, so this was right up my alley. I am excited to continue to watch this series ^_^

3.) Revolutionary Girl Utena

Wow. This anime really messed with me, and it made me think too. I loved everything about this series; the animation, the story and the characters. Everyone was so unique. I also loved how the series ended too. I think it was perfect... I had to go through a few subreddits to understand what happened but it was enjoyable, and really meta. I highly recommend this series.

4.) Idolish 7

This is not your typical idol anime. These young men go through alot of personal problems and I think that is why I enjoyed this series to much. It did not have the same feel as Uta no Prince-Sama or any other idol anime. These guys worked hella hard to get respect and it took a long time for everything to fall into place for them. All the characters were realistic and I adored all of them. I reccomend this anime, if you want to watch a a different type of idol anime. You won't regret it.

5.) Darling in the Franxx

I was obsessed with this show over the summer. It was so good...Now, alot of my questions weren't answered and I wanted more from the story, but I still enjoyed it regardless. I would love to see another season tbh.

(MitsuKoko 4eva 💕)

6.) Cardcaptor Sakura Clear Card

Sakura Kinomoto is the best magical girl hands down. Don't argue with me. She is practically perfect xD

Anyway, this anime was super cute and relaxed. The music was fantastic and I loved the new animation. It was very pretty ^_^

Whenever I had a hard day at school, I would watch this and all my worries would wash away. However, I did get bored after a while. For some reason, I just felt it didn't have the same charm as the original. I don't know why.

Sucks that there won't be another season, so we'll just have to wait for the manga to be updated and then we can find out what the hell is up with everyone.

7.) Cardfight Vanguard 2018

Okay, I love animes about card games. They are super cheesy and overdramatic. So, I really enjoyed Vanguard alot! Even the English Dub is hella good.

I can't really tell you why I enjoyed this anime so much. I was watching it when I should have been studying for Biology (I passed somehow) and I became invested in Team Q4 xD

Overall, I love this anime and I'm so glad they didn't stop at episode 25.

8.) Bang Dream Pico

PARUPA PI PI PICO

Ahem. So.

In June, I started playing Bang Dream Girls Band Party! It is such a awesome game and all the characters in the game are so amazing. Plus, the music is freaking awesome. Along with the game, Bushiroad produces this 3 minute short - Bang Dream Pico.

It's so much fun and it's the source of many memes in the Bandori fandom. So, I love this show alot 💕

9.) Fullmetal Panic

Fullmetal Panic was enjoyable to watch. I love Sousuke and Kaname's relationship. Usually in mecha anime with the politics and different world, I get confused about what is going on plot wise. However, FMP was easy to understand and it eased into the world very nicely. I am excited to start watching the next 3 seasons of FMP next year!!

10 .) Free! Dive to the Future

The 3rd Season of Free! was really good! I loved seeing everyone navigating their semester of college and trying to realize their goal of competing at the world level. It was also very refreshing to see Makoto decide what he wanted to do.

I loved all the characters in this season (I was a big fan of Rin this season!!)

I am so excited for 2020! Thank you KyoAni for another amazing season!!

So, that is my Top 10 of 2018. This was a very hard decision to make. I watched so many good shows this year.

Thanks for reading ^_^

[kirbydevpostarchive]

HAL Laboratory イシダHAL_Laboratory 12/02/2016 4:16 AM Good to see everyone again! The time has finally come to reveal the winners of the drawing category of the "Kirby: Planet Robobot Drawing and Screenshot Challenge"! We'll get to revealing the artwork soon, but first, the director of the game, Mr Kumazaki, would like to say something!

クマザキ 12/02/2016 4:19 AM Hello everyone, Shinya Kumazaki here. I just want to say that it was a really enjoyable experience to look through all of your wonderful entries. It was obvious how much effort and enthusiasm went into each one. Thank you for sending in your work!

イシダ 12/02/2016 4:21 AM Then let's begin from the Platinum Prize. Take it away, Mr Kumazaki!

クマザキ 12/02/2016 4:24 AM Our Platinum Prize goes to… Kowal! Meta Knight plays a big part in this game, so we received a lot of entries featuring him, but Kowal's work really showcases his speed. It's also very well executed at a difficult angle. That white mask with the black cross cut into it looks particularly cool. Speaking of Galacta Knight, we came up with him back when we were working on Kirby Super Star Ultra because we wanted to create an ultimate enemy for Meta Knight. We gave him an angelic, godlike look to contrast with Meta Knight's bat-like wings. That was a while ago! Congratulations, Kowal!

イシダ 12/02/2016 4:26 AM Wow, what an intense image. It really makes you want to see how that showdown went! Next up is our Gold Prize.

クマザキ 12/02/2016 4:29 AM I'm happy to say that kirby！ has earned our Gold Prize! All of the submissions kirby！ made showed a high level of quality with their use of clean lines. And they all featured Labotories having fun, so I could see kirby！ has a lot of affection for this character! Incidentally, Labotories are in charge of researching and developing weapons and such in the Haltmann Works Co.'s laboratory towers. They're the hardworking citizens of another planet, hired by the Haltmann Works Co. and every morning they sing the company song from the bottom of their hearts. Congratulations, kirby！

イシダ 12/02/2016 4:31 AM Wow, I didn't know they had that much backstory! They always seem so happily busy, don't they? Oh, Kirby's in there too! I hope they all get along. Well, now it's time for the Silver Prize winners - and there are two of these.

クマザキ 12/02/2016 4:34 AM The first Silver Prize goes to ななし! This drawing features some incredible background work - even though it's all in black and white, you can really feel the blue sky and white clouds. The sunlight on the Robobot Armour in Jet Mode is fantastic, too.

クマザキ 12/02/2016 4:36 AM Silver Prize number 2 goes to アンテラ! アンテラ's work gives us a unique perspective. Lots of entries focused on the final boss and iconic scenes, so to see Circus Kirby reflected in one of the giant balls of Resolution Road was a really nice idea.

Congratulations, ななし and アンテラ!

イシダ 12/02/2016 4:38 AM Both of those entries were drawn so nicely - I especially like Kirby's expressions in them! Next we have the Bronze Prize, with five winners.

クマザキ 12/02/2016 4:40 AM The first Bronze Prize winner is yucky♪! At a glance, this looks like a fairly ordinary picture of Kirby, but look closer and you'll see it seems to be from the perspective of the Robobot Armour. Could this be one of the last pieces of data left in the Robobot Armour's fading memory banks as it floats in space after everything is over? If you think about it like that, it brings a tear to your eye... Just heartbreaking!

クマザキ 12/02/2016 4:42 AM Our second Bronze Prize goes to てるや! This is a particularly dynamic Robobot Armour, and what puts it over the top is the screen-shattering punch! It also sparked my imagination - is the Robobot Armour punching the camera itself, or maybe the monitor of an enemy robot?

クマザキ 12/02/2016 4:45 AM Our third Bronze Prize goes to key! This might look like a normal picture of Mirror Kirby, but it's actually showing off the old and new hat designs, which I thought was a unique touch. About that hat design - in older titles, due to issues with things like storage capacity, we often had to use the same hat design for multiple Copy Abilities, only changing the colour. So the original Mirror hat was a colour variation of the Beam hat. But when we brought it back for this game after a long absence, we gave it a big makeover to make it more unique and easier to differentiate.

クマザキ 12/02/2016 4:47 AM The fourth Bronze Prize goes to rH! This is Dark Matter's true form, that you only get to glimpse for an instant in this game. This was a submission from outside Japan but the artist's use of Japanese characters really draws the eye. You can tell that rH is a real fan of the character.

クマザキ 12/02/2016 4:48 AM Our fifth Bronze Prize goes to Shira! These Dedede Clones have such rich expressions. Their faces really give you a sense that they were formed from pure innocent destructiveness extracted from King Dedede's heart.

Congratulations, yucky♪, てるや, key, rH and Shira!

イシダ 12/02/2016 4:50 AM Right, last up in the drawing category is a set of special awards we're calling the Secret Kumazaki Faves! We have three to give out. Mr Kumazaki, if you'll do the honours?

クマザキ 12/02/2016 4:52 AM I chose these entries based on ideas that made me go "Wow!" The first Secret Kumazaki Fave goes to Lady!

Lady's picture really captures the goings-on "behind the scenes" of the game! After the Haltmann Works Co. destroys King Dedede's castle, the repair works get underway in this refreshing picture. And King Dedede has even taken off his crown! I never expected someone to try depicting that... Together with his clothes, it all makes for a very original image. As for his true hairstyle, maybe you'll get to see that one day...

クマザキ 12/02/2016 4:54 AM Secret Kumazaki Fave number 2 goes to クリームロール!

All of クリームロール's entries were very technically accomplished, but this was the one where I felt the concept really shone through. The pixel art in the centre seems to evoke a simpler time when Meta Knight was still himself. And the lines and dots at the bottom of the image are actually a message in Morse code! It says S, O... Ah, but I shouldn't spoil the fun. I'm sure you can work it out for yourselves! There are plenty of fun little things like this hidden in Planet Robobot as well, so if you want, you can go back and try to find them all.

クマザキ 12/02/2016 4:57 AM The final Secret Kumazaki Fave goes to ラリアット!

ラリアット's entry shows Meta Knight, ready for battle, reflected in Dark Matter's sword, and it's a really fantastic image. The heavy use of black gives it a chic look, and the portrayal of the characters is very nicely done. Incidentally, you may have noticed that in this game, Dark Matter's sword shines with a rainbow light. This light is materialised from Dark Matter's memories of the Rainbow Sword that he faced in Kirby's Dream Land 2. Those memories must have been included in the original data used to create the clone. Just like how in Kirby: Triple Deluxe, King Dedede faced Dark Meta Knight for the first time ever, in this game Meta Knight faces off against a version of Dark Matter for the first time. So Dark Matter must have sensed that Meta Knight's powers were truly formidable, and materialised the power of the Rainbow Sword to counter him. Seeing two expert swordsmen face off against each other is always a thrilling experience!

Congratulations, Lady, クリームロール and ラリアット!

イシダ 12/02/2016 4:59 AM And that's the end of the drawing category of our "Kirby: Planet Robobot Drawing and Screenshot Challenge". We'd like to thank everyone who entered! Don't forget, though, we still have the screenshot category of the contest to go! We received a lot of entries worldwide for this contest, so it'll take us some time to select our favourites. We know a lot of people are excited, but please wait a little longer for the results!

[housebeleren]

Ixalan Reprints & New Art

I’m always super interested in cards that are reprinted in Standard sets for several reasons. First, it’s interesting because it gives some insight into how the Development & Play Design teams decided to balance the set and the Standard format. Reprints give us a glimpse into the mind of the R&D team that is always intriguing. Second, it’s super fun when cards make their way into a format like Modern for the first time, particularly if they have potential to make an impact. Third, Standard set reprints (Core sets aside) pretty much always get new art, which fills my little Vorthos heart with glee. And finally, all of the above combine in interesting ways to have an effect on card pricing, which I follow semi-closely.

Let’s take a look at the cards that were reprinted in Ixalan, and see what, if any, impact they might have. I’ll also rank the artwork against its previous iterations, just for funsies. Quick note on that: I’m operating under the assumption that all Magic art is phenomenal, and just because I like one depiction over another doesn’t indicate that any one artist is “better” or “worse” than another. It’s just my preferences. So with that, let’s get to it!

It’s been a long time since Air Elemental was Standard-viable but I have always had enormous affection for this guy. For one, he’s the very definition of a Limited powerhouse. No matter the format, you’re basically always happy to find him in your pool. He’s also so quintessentially Blue, which is (forever and always) the best color. An oldie but goodie, I was super stoked to see him make his way into a Standard set, since it has actually been several years. Not only that, but this art by Tomasz Jedruszek is absolutely my favorite I’ve ever seen for the card. Fabulous.

Ixalan

Tenth Edition

Fifth Edition

Sixth Edition

Ninth Edition

Seventh Edition

Alpha

Cancel, the Modern era’s baseline Counterspell, is pretty much always guaranteed to be in Standard. It’s as fundamental as Blue countermagic gets, and serves an important purpose as a waterline by which to compare other counters. I’ve gotta say, I don’t love the art here. I mean, it’s wonderfully rendered, but it honestly took me about 50 viewings to get what’s going on. That said, the flavor text is glorious.

Time Spiral

Amonkhet

Shards of Alara

Khans of Tarkir

Ixalan

Zendikar

Return to Ravnica

Oooh this one’s tough. In terms of the art, I mean. I love the original Innistrad art so much just for its creepy weirdness, but this art has a really subtle, peaceful beauty. It’s like a gorgeous watercolor painting I’d want hanging at my beach house. (If I had a beach house, that is.) In terms of the card, this one’s Limited fodder for sure. But for the art, I think I’m going to have to declare this one a tie. I love both pieces of art so much!

Ixalan & Innistrad

Can I just ask: When are we going to stop printing this card? Seriously. It’s not good enough for Constructed, because the going rate where that stopped being good was 3 mana Stone Rain. It’s not good enough for Limited because destroying Lands in Limited is useless (Even in Battle for Zendikar limited it was useless). And in both cases, there are cheaper Artifact destruction options available. This is a sideboard card that isn’t even good in sideboards. Okay, rant over. As far as the art, I like this one. It’s fun and thematic and at least somewhat interesting, unlike the card itself. And so many of the artworks for this card have made no sense, that this is a refreshing change of pace. It’s actually my favorite Demolish art to date.

Ixalan

Kaladesh

Zendikar

Avacyn Restored

Theros

Odyssey

Ah, good ol’ 14th pick, Demystify. This is that card that you begrudgingly pull out of the sideboard into your main deck when your opponent somehow drafts 2 copies of Legion’s Landing. And maybe not even then. For a card that’s been around for as long as this has, I’m surprised this only has 3 printings. I do like the art here, though to me it doesn’t quite compare to the ROE whatever-the-heck is going on in that artwork.

Rise of the Eldrazi

Ixalan

Onslaught

I thought this was a super clever addition to the set. Whereas in Shadows Over Innistrad this was simply an easy way to remove small creatures, in Ixalan it serves dual purpose (har har) as an Enrage enabler. Very clever, very clever. I like this art very much, but the SOI one has so much motion in it I can’t help but be drawn towards that one more.

Shadows Over Innistrad

Ixalan

I love Duress. It serves an important role in Standard and should basically always be around to keep combo decks in check. As far as art goes, I think this one is very effective, but my favorite standard printing has to be from Dragons of Tarkir. Seeing Kolaghan roar in Zurgo’s face drives the point home pretty damn clearly. The very best art, however, definitely goes to the special media insert printing, showing Ashiok mind-yoinking Dack Fayden. I won’t include it in the rankings, but seriously: take a look.

Dragons of Tarkir

Magic 2010

Ixalan

Seventh Edition

Urza’s Saga

Gorgeous, honey, gorgeous! I’ve always enjoyed this card as basically the only Anthem effect Blue ever gets. There are just about enough good fliers in Standard to make a W/U or U/B Skies deck viable, and honey, that is something that I would love to see. Seriously, how fantastic would that be? In a world of Vehicles, Energy, Gearhulks, Shocking Lands, etc, how nice would it be to have a competitive Standard deck for which the entire theme is: flying creatures. How straightforward and glorious would that be? Super fucking glorious, that’s what. And this new art by Shreya Shetty is full stop stunning. One of the best pieces in the entire set.

Ixalan

Avacyn Restored

Threaten variants have never been super great, but occasionally they do serve a purpose in aggressive Limited decks. This particular variant is super cute as it’s flavored as a card meant to help you steal Vehicles, though to be fair, there are hardly any vehicles in Ixalan worth stealing. I like both arts for this card, but I think this one is a little more captivating to me. I like how the perspective is over the shoulder of a sailor who has clearly just been hijacked, and the depiction of Angrath and his flaming whip is pretty damn striking.

Ixalan

Kaladesh

Lightning strike is good. It’s very, very good. Having this card is good for Standard. Cute as the art is, however, I still love the hand of Keranos reaching out to smite you look. 

Theros

Ixalan

Probably no reprint in Ixalan has sparked as much conversation as Opt. While there are some wild claims out there that it’s going to completely change Modern, I doubt that’s the case. There are a few decks that will be happy to see this, but overall Modern has better tools. Standard, on the other hand, hasn’t had a good one mana cantrip in a long time, so this bodes super well for Blue going forward. Me? I’m just happy to see yet another card join the lineup in updated borders and new art. I like this art significantly better than the old Invasion art, though the Invasion flavor text definitely wins over this one. Be sure to check it out.

Ixalan

Invasion

Bet you didn’t remember that this card was a reprint! Hell, bet you didn’t even know this card was in Ixalan. Totally honest, I completely forgot this card existed, as it’s one of those that you just gloss over completely. This is pure Limited fodder, and not even particularly good Limited fodder at that. It’s for when you need some life gain to make your life paying strategies work and somehow didn’t draft enough creatures with native Lifelink. God, this set has me wildly hoping for an Exquisite Blood reprint like I can’t even say! As far as the art goes, this depiction by Yongjae Choi is simply gorgeous. The lush jungle landscape makes for a wonderfully sinister, eerie scene. No shade to the Winona Nelson one, which is excellent itself.

Ixalan

Magic 2013

This is another card I bed you had no idea was a reprint! Again, I totally forgot myself. I really don’t know exactly why this card is in the set, other than maybe they like to keep one or two of these types of effects in Standard at any given time? Maybe to replace some of the Shadows Over Innistrad looting effects that are rotating out? Who knows. It’s basically unplayable. I’m having a really hard time figuring out which art I like more for this one. The original by Karl Kopinski has the advantage of being A) more accurate by showing a single goblin and B) the amusement of the goblin tossing aside a presumably valuable book because of course goblins don’t read. On the other hand, the monkey goblins on Ixalan have a lot of personality and charm, and overall I think this scene is more interesting. I’ll give it to the Slawomir Maniak one, but it’s close.

Ixalan

Magic 2013

I enjoy this card being around for Standard. I really do. It means that they really have taken seriously the need for good answers. Sure, this card is pretty much a sideboard card for certain metas, but compared with most of the Artifact/Enchantment removal spells that have been in Standard recently, this is pretty solid. I mean, for all intents and purposes, this is way better than something like Creeping Mold, since Land removal is so unnecessary. Plus, we have Field of Ruin for that now! As far as art goes, I find the perspective on this one hard to read, so I still prefer the Scars of Mirrodin one.

Scars of Mirrodin

Ixalan

Speaking of good answers, this card is phenomenal for Standard. I love that this card is a thing. And I love this art. That said, however, there’s something about the abstractness of the original art that I can’t quite place, but I love. The Invocation is probably my favorite art, but really all of them are stellar.

Zendikar

Ixalan

Yay Limited tricks! This is another card I’m sure people completely forgot existed before, but I definitely remembered it. I remembered it because of its art. This new one is cool, since it’s not totally clear who’s making out better in this battle, but I really loved the original art. The lone goblin facing down an Eldrazi menace is a surprisingly evocative image, and also makes perfect sense with what the card actually does.

Battle for Zendikar

Ixalan

Wow. Rob Alexander did us right with this one. It may be one of the least impactful cards, but man is it one of the most stunningly goregous pieces of art in the set. The giant seashells from Theros were cool, but this is breathtaking.

Ixalan

Theros

Oath of the Gatewatch

Aaaaaaaaand finally, the Lands. This cycle of Lands is so good for Standard, and I’ve always been partial to them. And they did us right with this one, from an art perspective. Every single one is stunningly gorgeous. I particularly love this Sunpetal Grove. Jawdropping.

Ixalan

Magic 2010

So there you have it. Every single reprint in Ixalan, including my thoughts on the art. *Whew*

Ixalan did great with the new art, as well as the reprints in general. Lots of powerful, impactful cards. I’m super stoked.

[dantelaw21]

Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 301

Click on the video above to watch Episode 301 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.

The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

Announcement

We’re live. Ah, what’s up, everybody? Welcome to Episode 301 of Hump Day Hangouts, where we teach you some kung fu moves to get your rankings up there into other websites out there in the search engine. But that’s great. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts. Today is the 19th of August and this is your weekly meeting for anything SEO and good stuff and marketing and everything that has to do with that related so welcome to that before we dive into some of the good stuff that we have for today, just gonna go through the list of the awesome people that we have here. Nicole, what’s up Marco? How are you doing, man?

You see it. Now let me tell you about it.

That’s how it makes Groundhog Day. This is my life. I can’t help it. And as I always say, don’t hate the player. Hate the game, as I like this place.

Again, that’s it. If you don’t play the game as you should, then maybe you should start looking in the right place. When you’re starting out in the right place Hump Day Hangout, so here we go. But you go get some.

Let’s go. What’s up, Chris? How are you doing, man? Yeah, like I’m looking jealous over the marketplace. I don’t know. Like we had rained the last day. So like, not too excited to your brother. Well, everything else is good. And actually, I’m a little bit excited, but I cannot talk too much about it. Because I’ve been working on something for POFU.

But I think you mentioned a couple of things about that later. Yeah, for sure. For sure. What’s up, Bradley? How are you doing, man? Good. I’m good. I’m just trying to do what Adam usually does and drop these links on to the chatbox, but other than I’m good, glad to be here. Yeah, by the way, we’re missing a core, a core member of

The team in fact we’re not able to function we’re just basically barely scraping by which is because he’s like out there running the woods doing his stuff. So what’s up, Adam? So what’s up everybody? Welcome to Episode 301.

And we’re going to be diving into question soon but before we go there a couple of things number one people live is coming in hot, he’s going to be awesome. I’m really excited about getting that well on our way is going to be our third installment or the third slot live event although this one’s not going to be in person now which guy that said this is not live so he’s supposed to live online but if you want to go and get your virtual ticket, your POFU Live ticket to be attending to POFU Live, go to pofulive.com. It’s an event that we put every single year for the past three years, and it’s been pretty awesome. People are getting a lot of stuff usually stuff that we don’t share anywhere else. Just info for live. So go there.

Go grab your ticket, we’re going to be doing some fun stuff for VIP ticket holders and all of that good stuff. So go to pofulive.com. And I also believe that we have some sell happening right now. And mgyb. And we guys, yeah, and it’s in celebration of national potato day. Hey, go there.

So I dropped the coupon code in the chatbox below. But it’s if you go to mgyb.co is 25% off of our ys drive stacks for the next I guess three days and the coupon code is potato, my rankings all one word, potato, my rankings, all one word as the coupon code gets you 25% off of our ys drive stacks. There you go. You’re gonna use me, excuse me the SEO shield, which includes a drive stack but it’s the SEO shield orders. That’s what it’s for. There you go. Awesome. And by the way, Michael does

People need to buy right away as they can buy right now. And they need to submit the order right now how How’s that? How’s that working? They have a window so that they can submit basically, you know if somebody is watching this tomorrow, and they want to take advantage of the offer, but they don’t probably didn’t have data of their clients right away, what do you suggest?

Well, we understand that we understand that people can sometimes get the information right away. We understand that people need time, right? For whatever reason it is, or maybe they just want to take advantage of the coupons. Well, that’s fine. They can go ahead, buy, and then submit the information later. Now the problem is if you wait too long if you wait past 30 days, what we’re going to do is we’re simply going to refund you because we can’t let it sit there 5678 months until whatever it is that you decide to do.

So get it, hold on to it go ahead and take advantage of the offer. So that the coupon doesn’t expire, right because once it does, we can’t give you the offer.

Then get gather the information. That’s fine. Don’t wait more than 30 days because then we will refund you no question. It gets done on our we know that if you don’t submit your information within 30 days, you’re likely not to do it. And we’ll have to refund you anyway. So we might as well get rid of the problem to start with. Gotcha. So people can buy today get get get an advantage, take advantage of the coupon. And then you said, you know, submit the details over the next 30 days, basically. That’s awesome. All right. Cool. So and by the way, if you have more SEO needs, if you have more delivery needs, you know, because you shouldn’t be doing the grunt work, let us do it for you go to mgyb.co we have that sale going on. But there’s a lot of good stuff there. A lot of stuff that allegedly doesn’t work. But you know, the proof is in the pudding. We have a bunch of case studies there and more coming. So that’s going to be pretty awesome as well.

Yep. Anything that you guys want to add on? Let’s do this. Let’s do it. Actually, we ran over last week by like, almost 10 minutes because I just lost track of time. So you guys are gonna crack the whip on me today. I tight I’ve got an appointment actually have to get to so. Alright, uh, let me grab the screen.

All right, sweet.

Do you guys see my screen? Okay. Yeah. All right, we’re gonna start with

Is It Safe To Convert Gsites To Its New Format?

Igor. Hey Brad. The NSM team just got an email about Google changing the old g sites. Is it safe to follow to convert them to the new g site? I have been? I’ve done about a dozen myself this week. Seriously, I haven’t even had VA is doing it. I’ve just because I’ve been tightening up projects and stuff. And so I’ve just gone in and click the button and made sure everything came out. Okay, Mark, I know you had some comments about that. We chatted about this yesterday. Yeah, Google has been really nice about it. They giving us everything we need. They’re just moving everything over for us all you have to just click yes it. I mean, how good is that doesn’t get any better than that. Now, you will

Hang on a second, well people do have to be careful about is that it doesn’t turn into a 302. So please monitor your URLs, right use a redirect checker every once in a while to see what it is that Google is doing it because they get sneaky. Remember what they did with geo GL? Yeah, it was a 301. Then without any warning, it turned into a 302. Then they offer Firebase, which was a three or two that you had to turn into a 301. gotta be really careful. Google is really sneaky, right? Do they change other URLs from 301 to three or two from

what do you call it? From a meta refresh, to attend meta refresh, where then it’s useless. So the only thing that I tell people is you got to be really careful. Keep track of your URLs, keep checking them from time to time. And of course, don’t you do it your time should be way more valuable than to be inserting the URLs into a checker to see if it’s a 301 or three or two, you should have a VA, doing all this menial work so you can concentrate on your business, growing your business, making more money.

That’s the way it’s supposed to be.

Yeah, what I was gonna say was a couple of things, one you brought up. Gotta be careful with Google because they’re tricky about how they’ll change stuff and make them three Oh, twos without even knowing. Yep, for example, what the old g sites I don’t know, I haven’t even checked it on the new one yet. With you know, once it’s been converted to the new ones, but I can’t imagine it would have changed. But if you left the trailing slash off of the end of the URL, then if you checked it in a redirect checker, it would throw to you the final URL with the trailing slash at the end of it. So like, if you’re looking at a home page of the G site, and you were building links to the URL without the trailing slash, then you were actually getting a 302 redirect to the home page, which I thought was crazy.

But second of all, the new g sites are a lot like page builders are now so they’re like, you know, modular and like kind of like a block editor. And there it just is a lot more intuitive than the old funky g sites. And I don’t know why I’ve wanted them for so long because it’s actually a pretty good editor now and it’s a good interface. So,

How Many Videos Are Needed For A YouTube Silo To Be Effective?

okay, let’s see, I got lost my track where I was let me try this again must have been from last week. Okay, so the next question was from when building YouTube silos? How many videos should be in a silo to be impactful to move the needle? I know it depends on the competition. But what should you start with five 750? And should we focus on building more in the silo or more silos? And if more silos, how many in the silo?

I got a little bit of a headache from that question.

It just depends on it depends on you know, how competitive the keyword is that you’re trying to rank for. So whatever your top-level keyword is the top of silo keyword that you’re trying to rank for. That’s really going to be what determines how much depth you should add to it, like how many videos essentially how many other keywords, variations, longer tail versions, that sort of thing, are you going to actually target within that particular silo? It’s just like doing it on your website, right? It’s the same principle. It’s the

How much is it going to take? I can’t tell you that because I don’t know what keyword is that you’re targeting. I don’t know what the competition looks like. It’s going to take as many as it takes. So really just it’s going to it’s very much like doing a silo on your website. That’s why we talk about theme mirroring, and all that kind of stuff because it’s, it’s all the same. Creating a YouTube silo is the exact same structure. And the mat, whether or not it ranks is going to depend on you know, a lot of factors, not just the silo structure itself, but having additional keywords in there more depth to that silo adds builds more relevancy, more topical relevancy, and there are more linking opportunities from within that silo as well. So it kind of helps to power up the entire silo, the whole playlist, if you’re adding more videos that are relevant. Does that make sense?

Anybody want to comment on that before I go to the second part of that, yeah, what you start with is more than one right? Absolutely.

And then it’s just how far you need to go to get to where you want to be. Period.

Yep. So how many are going to take as many as it takes? I was like a lot. We used to get questions all the time about syndication networks, how many posts Do you think it’s going to take for me to rank for whatever keyword now, we could always have the same answer as many as it takes to take. Yeah. So the next one is it should be focused on building more in the silo or more silos and more silos. Now, remember, guys, keep it simple. You know, you can take a top-level silo keyword, and you can create a bunch of subcategories from closely very closely related keywords that are, you know, longer tailed versions are the next level down, so to speak of that main keyword, but is it necessary to do so? That’s the point-like, again, I use this example more recently, uh, you know, I’m pretty much all I’m doing now is Tree Service stuff for SEO and, and lead generation and that kind of stuff. And for the longest time, I’ve always built a simple silo structure at least for several years.

I used to do complex silos. But I just got over doing that because most local, most local type businesses don’t need that. But and I don’t know that you’re targeting local, but I’m just using this as an example.

I used to always silo with the simple site for the last few years with simple silo structure for Tree Service stuff, Tree Service being the primary keyword. So essentially the homepage, but then the silo structure would be tree trimming would be one silo. Another one that would be tree removal. And then usually a third one, which would be additional services or arborist tree services, if it was a certified arborist on the, for the contractor that the site was for. And I saw I’d have three silos on the site, basically. But what I found was Google actually really considers tree trimming, Tree Removal tree cutting Tree Service, they’re all synonyms. So I could probably and I haven’t tested it just yet. I’ve got a couple of projects and I’m waiting on some infrastructure to be built and then I’m going to be testing that. But I could probably go with just one silo essentially tree services. And you because all that content is the same, however, I could create like, essentially subcategories, which would have been the silos of what I’ve already been what I’ve been doing right. So tree removal, tree trimming, perhaps arborist services, but if why overcomplicate things, why make the build more complex? Why make the content, you know, the interlinking between pieces of content, everything more complex than it needs to be, if I could just have a flat site with one silo tree services, and just have all the content, you know, properly structured and get the same results? Why would I go through all of that and so that my answer to you about the YouTube stuff is the same thing? I would rather focus on one silo and add more depth to it and have that whole silo be a lot more powerful than have a whole bunch of different silos with the month that is very, very specific or it’s kind of hard to get, you know, additional supporting it Now if you’ve got the main category with a bunch of different subcategories and it’s logical to do so. Then I would add additional you know, add create additional playlist and don’t forget, you can have one video and more than one playlist, so I mean, it

If you have a kind of like a parent category silo, the video can be in that playlist. But then you could also have like subcategory silos or playlists that want. You know, the video can also be in one of those, if that makes sense. So, but just don’t overcomplicate things is my point, especially when it comes to YouTube? It’s really unnecessary. Does anybody want to comment on that?

I totally agree.

Okay. Very good. And I think a lot of a lot of times we try, we try to be smart as SEOs and try to you know, well, if I get really creative with my silo structures, I can get better results and it just ends up being a lot of unnecessary work. So just keep that in mind.

How Do You Set Up A Sales Tax In A WooCommerce Site?

Jason says, Hey, guys, I’m working on an e-commerce site and I hearing rumors that I need to set up sales tax for every state in the U.S. if we sell something. Do you guys know how this would work with WooCommerce? I do not because I don’t do anything eCommerce related. Perhaps Marco might.

Do you know anything about WooCommerce being in taxes and stuff?

I don’t know, like, I don’t know how you either,

like I do, I have worked on WooCommerce websites, but that’s not the part of my job that I do.

The part of what I do on that is I get traffic, the owner is kind of like the one in charge of all that guy charges, taxes and I know, on the land, like each state has separate rules, right? for buying and selling land and how much is is due at the closing. But that all gets done, it gets taken out of the total when you close the deal. It’s like you never see it because it’s taken out. So like how much or whether each state is responsible, whether you’re responsible for collecting taxes, what you need to do is go and contact the tax attorney and have them tell you what it is that you’re responsible for, whether it’s each state, your state, what the rules are in each state because only a tax attorney would be the one to answer that question properly. I’m not a tax attorney. I’m not a tax expert by any means.

So try that. I can’t really help with that. Yeah, neither can I just don’t do any sort of e-commerce stuff. So I couldn’t help with that either. Sorry. Jason. Looks like Jason says he just joined the mastermind. That’s awesome. So he says that, by the way, welcome, Jason. He says I have five websites that I need to do this syndication networks with, I need to do two of them as soon as possible. Well, I’ll tell you what, as a mastermind member, you do get benefits, you know, so contact support, make about mgyb.co. So go to support@mgyb.co after you’ve placed your orders, and, you know, mentioned that your new mastermind members and see if you can get two of them expedited, I don’t know that we typically do that but I know mastermind members do get benefits. So Marco’s, that’s something that we can do is try to get it pushed a little bit.

Ah, we have other mastermind members. Also order. So how can we push everything? Um, yeah, that’s why I was asking. I said if we can do something we’ll try to but I don’t know that we can but what do you think? I mean if it’s just syndication if it’s just a brand that networks you know, they get pushed out and they’ll get delivered as soon as they’re done that’s how Jason yeah absolutely order right away. But we are improving the system. We’re making everything better we’re making things better right we’re training our team we’re trying to make things more fluid speedier so it’s not as if we’re just sitting there and not make trying to make things better we are

are you go and I know you guys have been working hard on streamlining stuff and all that so it will get better Pablo says Hey guys, I’m still confused with correct structure for city pages post question. One from for now top of silo on my money site is a broad category without local modifiers. If I need to cover two or more counties, I need to make each county like a separate silo or county can go after a broad topic and link back to the main silo topic example. This is one of those questions site slash Miami or slight slash appraiser Miami based on this question, how would posting look like okay?

Should You Make A Separate Silo For County And Connect It To The Main Silo?

Pavlo, I can tell you this you know I cover how I do how I reconcile those odd issues that I’ve talked about this many times and I cover this extensively in the mastermind I can’t do it here. I can give you a very high overview like a conceptual overview of it, but I can’t get into the nitty-gritty because it’s something that I only cover in our mastermind, but I use tags for creating location-based silos in a WordPress website. Okay, so I use the category structure for my topical silos. But then I use tags in a very specific way to create my location-based silos so that there are no conflicts with URLs are trying to share location-based stuff categories across topical silos or vice versa topical silos across location-based categories. Does that make sense? I don’t know if that makes sense or not. But I think you’re talking about the oddities that occur with the URL conflicts that occur when you try to use the same subcategory across multiple categories because it’s going to automatically append like a dash two dash three for each time you duplicate that subcategory into another category. WordPress is gonna automatically append to it like a dash two dash three because it has to have another permalink. And if that’s what you’re talking about, I learned to three years ago, probably three years ago now to build silo structure for location-based silos using tags and it’s a specific hierarchy, the way that I stack those tags and everything else. That’s as far as I can tell you right now.

The other way to do it was if you were going to if because remember if you’re talking about complex silo structure, which you are in this case, right? Because you’ve got, you know, topical silos and then you want to go sub silo from that, right? So subcategories that you want to add additional content pages to or even posts at that level. Right that that can create some issues. That’s why I recommend if you, if you can get away with just doing a simple silo, then and using just the post name, permalink structure, then you can stack you know, you can cross things, subcategories and other categories and things where the URL isn’t going to be displayed and it shows as just domain comm slash the post slug at that level, and that’s okay. But again, so So I mean, if you can get away with that, then that’s the way that I would do it. But again, I can’t talk specific can’t show you the structure, how to do tag-based location silos or location silos using tags here on Hump Day Hangouts. I couldn’t talk about it the mastermind though, but if you understand tags and how to use tag pages in WordPress, you ought to be able to figure it out as my point. So you want to comment on that at all, more.

The only comment that I’m going to make is that there are things that we reserved for our paid groups only. And it’s not fair for us to give it away here in a free group. If people are paying for it, people are paying for all this information. So you people who are here free, although we try to answer as much as possible, you do have to understand is that there are some things that we can’t answer, but we can answer them in the paid groups. That’s just the way it is. It’s the way we’ve always done it. We have given people what nearly six years of free information, actionable information, people have built businesses from the information we give away for free. So imagine what we give away in the free groups.

Yeah, the paid group you mean, um, but yeah. So probably just to get back to your URL question here. See, what I was talking about here is if you take a look at how you’ve got URL one versus URL to my point is if you’ve got like appraiser is your is like one of your services and if appraiser I don’t know what your Real Estate or what, but let’s just say it real estate. And so one of your categories is an appraiser and maybe one of them is home inspections, right?

Or Yeah, something like that, right, let’s just say appraiser and inspectors, let’s just use that just to show two different service categories. If you were to try to duplicate Miami, originally, if you set it up as a subcategory, as an appraiser, then if you tried to create Miami subcategory in the inspectors’ category, or home inspector category, or home inspections, category, whatever, however you name it, then you would end up having that weird URL structure. That said, it doesn’t really matter if you’re using the post name permalink structure because you don’t see it unless you’re looking at source code anyways. So it’s not a big deal. But again, it creates some conflicts that I just don’t like to try to live with when I’m building the site. It’s not really clear to me that way. That’s why I like to use tags. I don’t know if that was specifically a question, but that’s the way I interpreted it. So next is he says based on this, how should what should posting look like?

For each county, it should be the same topic or keyword, but content should be rewritten, including local modifiers. Yeah, I mean, that’s what I do. That’s why I have my blogger actually create. When we’re doing keyword plus location-specific content, my blogger just creates or curates a blog post that is targeting something very closely related to that topic. It doesn’t always necessarily have to be 100% then but she has my I have one blogger that handles all of this stuff for me now because she’s really good at it. She will curate top you know, stories that are topically relevant as well as something about the local area that you know, for the location modifier that we’re targeting. And then there will be a paragraph at the bottom that has a strong call to action and it has you know, a strong mention of the product or service or the services that would pertain to what the theme of the post was about. So my point is like, for example, in the tree clients I have don’t do landscaping work. However, landscaping is closely related to Tree Service stuff. Right. And so because of that, a lot of times there will be blog posts that are written about Lance a yard or keeping their somebody’s resident, you know, homes, the landscape beautiful or whatever. And then there will be a paragraph at the bottom about, you know, tree services, tree trimming, tree pruning, whatever that will kind of tie that concept to the landscaping, right? And then we just optimize the SEO title for it. And then use the tag-based silos and all of that, and it’s it works really, really well, especially when you use the SEO shield and the G site and you learn how to push keyword relevancy through backlink profile to your G site. So that’s what I do.

And so all of the content is unique because all of the blog posts each blog post is unique because there’s new newly curated content from my blogger, which is why I like it because it’s all it’s not. You know, one of the problems that I’m sure you are aware of this Pablo is is when you only have you know, a few seconds services? How do you keep rewriting about that same service over and over and over again, right, it gets to be very difficult to do so. And that’s why I kind of got away from trying to do it that way. And I just let my blogger kind of run away with it and it creates over time, it might take a little bit more time to get the traction that I like. But once you do, you have this kind of broad width of topical relevancy to that to what your primary services are, if that makes sense. So that’s what I do if you don’t have that ability yet for, you know, for curating posts and that kind of stuff, then you can just rewrite stuff I’ve talked about having like one article written about tree removal, in my case, right. And then having that rewritten by five different, you know, as a rewrite project, as opposed to a new writing project, it’s a lot less expensive, and now I’ve got six versions of the original article. And so that’s something you could use if you’re going to be reproducing keyword plus location across multiple locations. Does that make sense? I don’t know if that was clear or not. Do you have any other tricks for that?

No. Okay.

All right. And the second part of that I can’t answer because that question went way too long. Anyway, so we’re going to move on if we have time, we’ll come back to it.

How Do You Boost A Blog Subdomain?

Bobby, Ricky Bobby says, we have a client that uses a subdomain for their blog, their main site gets decent traffic 50,000 per month. But the blog that is blogged out example gets less than 1000 per month. Okay, they are not going to change it to a subfolder anytime soon. I’ve recommended it obviously, any advice on what to do to boost the blog subdomain. They have a few dozen articles on there. And we were starting to work on the content consistency going forward. Now that we have our keyword research and recommendations thanks to mgyb.

My suggestion would be just to start using the subdomain a lot more right. Your syndication network should be attached to it. You should be blogging consistently. And that’s essentially what I was just talking about in my previous reply or response to Pavlo’s question.

About overtime, just that the blog will start to gain more traction. And you’ll see in Search Console, especially as you publish more content, your total impression number will start to go way, way up. Because you’ll start being recognized by Google for a lot more keyword combinations. So different types of search queries will give your site impressions. And that’s actually a really good content strategy to go in the Search Console, and identify keywords that are relevant, like search queries that triggered an impression for your blog, find those queries that are relevant, that aren’t ranking well yet, but are that are close, like, for example, maybe their position is, you know, somewhere between 11 and 20? Well, those are good keywords than to start optimizing for producing more content for linking back to the original piece of content, that kind of stuff to help try to boost those to page one so that you start getting more traffic. My point is, you know, adding more content to the blog is would be my first step. And then you could always do things like, you know, paid traffic to some of the posts, and then do remarketing so that you can always be bringing people back, which will probably get more visits to the blog, even repeat visits, which is really, really good for SEO also. So those would be my two recommendations from you.

Yeah, that’s the SEO shield, SEO Power shield. It’s all part of the system. So it’s not just getting the syndication properties. It’s not just logging. It’s not just syndicating your content. It’s powering up your shield is powering up your right your @ID. It’s powering up everything that has to do with your entity. It has to do with getting your schema out there. It has to do with whatever you need to do to make the content right. So link building comes into play so embeds come into play. More link building more embeds. Press releases, link building to press release a stack the press releases if you’re local, posting, stalking your posts link building into your posts, local images, guys.

We’ve created a whole entire system for you to do this. We just can’t give you the pieces here for free.

I mean, we got to go back to that. People. Yeah, you want the system. It’s in the paid groups. It’s in Semantic Mastery and the heavy hitter, join Semantic Mastery. And you get a really good price for joining heavy hitter. But I like we can’t give you everything we’d love to. But then there would be no Semantic Mastery, if we gave everything away for free, right, the people who have to sit and think and do all of these things have to be able to make some kind of living, right, some kind of money, get rewarded for all the effort that we put into doing all of this.

So having said that, it’s the system ads, ads work perfectly well. If you do them the way that we say do. Don’t just go out and run any kind of ads that may or may not work. Use the system that we’ve set up to make the ads work. Use the system which we’ve created the

We make everything available in mgyb.co. But if you get it without really understanding what it is that you’re doing, then you’re actually doing yourself more harm than good, because you’re leaving so much power on the table, so much power that you could be using.

And that’s a good point, you know, press releases. I’ve shown this in our Facebook group, the SEO tutorials semantic mastery Facebook group. Somebody was asking a question about press releases. Well, it was more of a comment about how they read some article on some blog about our press releases doesn’t work. And so they were just relaying that information. And there was started to the discussion, a thread. And one of the arguments that the person that posted the question or the statement really was stating was, well, you guys are all saying they work, but I want to see proof. Right. And so I just took a screenshot of Google Analytics of just one project that I’m working on, that shows referral traffic. And it showed press advantage, right, which is the press release releases that we primarily use. And it showed for a 30 day period, I think was 287 or 267 visits directly from press advantage. So don’t discredit that either, like again. And that’s all part of what we teach is like the same content strategy. So in your blog, that’s one of the best things one of the strategies that I use, consistently, almost exclusively now is we publish blog posts for clients. And as soon as a blog post is published, not always a one to one ratio, depending on what their budget is, but we will publish a press release to promote the blog post. So every time a new blog post gets published, we have a press release that links back to the blog post. So we’re driving traffic from press advantage domain as well as a lot of you know, other news-type sites when it does get traffic press advantage tends to drive the domain itself tends to drive quite a bit of traffic, but that sends traffic to that newly public blog posts plus it builds a bunch of links to that newly built, newly published blog post. So it’s really, really good for building up the SEO value of your blog as well as driving traffic to it, which is what your original question was, is how to get more traffic to the blog. So that’s another great part of this strategy that we teach. Yep. So it was a great question.

Is It Harder To Rank Gdocs Than A Gsite?

Babies up with a list of questions just broken up this time a little bit. So maybe you’re getting better. Hey, guys, if I want to rank some Google property only, say a G doc and a G site? Is it harder to rank g docs than a G site? I have. I mean, for I guess I haven’t really set up any specific tests for that. But I tend to just focus on the G site because it has a lot more functionality than a G doc. I don’t know if one is harder to rank than the other what say you, Marco

would rank better.

So let me see that again. If I want to write some Google property on these, the G site because it is going to get all the power from the embeds the duck might rank faster originally. I like at first, but then the G site for sure will take over. Yeah, no, yeah. But that’ll convert better, won’t it? The G site will convert the dot some of the dots will rank right away. But the Gsite over time, it’s so powerful. And you still get leads from that Virginia. Right? Yeah, he’s still occasionally. Yeah. So I mean, the proof is in the pudding.

Is It Faster To Rank Google Properties Than Building A Shield To A Non-Google Property?

Is it faster to rank Google properties than building a shield on a non-Google property? Of course, it is. It is. I mean, it’s crazy. Because you get well you can just here’s the thing, even if you’re ranked trying to rank a non-Google property like so you got a self-hosted website is your main money site. You can still do all the same things to the SEO shield. That and that you would if you made the Google site, your primary money website.

It doesn’t really matter that because that’s the whole point of the SEO show, right? It’s to create a shield around your money site. So all the things that you’re going to do to that g site, if the G site was your primary money site, which will rank very quickly, you can still do all of that to the G site as part of your SEO shield when you have a self-hosted money site. So a non-Google property money site, because you’re not going to actually touch your non-Google property money site. with anything other than the SEO shield, you’re doing all your nastiness out to the actual SEO shield. So my point is, why not have both unless it’s just you don’t want to go through the trouble of setting up a self-hosted website and all that other kind of stuff, which I understand that so for example, for some lead gen assets, there’s no reason for to set up WordPress stuff if you’re just doing like a single location, lead gen assets and you’re going to do a bunch of them. You can get away with 100% with just GMB assets and the SEO shield assets and you can use the G site as your primary money site and the GMB website the two of those countries if combined, and you’ll do incredibly well that way. So again, but if you’re going to be building a brand, there’s in my opinion is no reason not to create a money site because you can still rank the G site before the money site ever ranks and still get the benefit of it. But you’re building that brand back to a domain that you have more control over. That’s, that’s my take on it. What do you think?

You know, it’s still effective, Google will say no.

But we see all these lawsuits as we see all of these things where Google prefer Google, over anything else. And we’ve proven it’s not something that we’re just saying. And it’s not just us giving you theory and concepts and all of these ideas that are nothing. We’re giving you facts. We’re giving you something that we actually showed on a webinar, how Google trusts itself above anything else, and because it trusts itself over anything else, it passes PageRank to itself, and it ranks its properties over anybody else’s. We see this time.

And again. So it stands to reason that if you build up your Google ecosystem, it’s why we’re in there in the first place. The whole idea to start with was Dr. Gary and I said, Google prefers itself over anything else. And we went from there, we set up, let that’s the scientific method. You start out you have a hypothesis, it’s a sentence, then you say that you ask a question. Does Google really prefer itself and why? And then you go out to prove it. And we did. And not only did we prove it, but we also showed it live. It’s not as if we just go we don’t we don’t hide that we showed it. How it is that Google prefers itself over anything else. So guys, understanding this, why are you not taking all of that power? and using it use Google was my original concept and idea, use Google to rank in Google?

But at least to be said,

How Do You Determine What Link Buiding Campaign To Use And Determine The Competition?

there you go. Next question. Say you are getting into a new niche. How do you determine the link building? We should use it? What is low, medium, hard competition? Which tool? Do you determine the competition?

Well, I mean, for me, I use a number of different tools. So it really doesn’t matter as I use for bigger projects. Now I’m using a digital marketer toolbox which is network empires towards a bit expensive, but you can also use stuff like sem rush and things. But honestly, what I do just to be what I do is I figure out what I how much relevancy I need to create with you on page right first, that’s, that’s always what I do like to do, am I going to need a lot of content Am I going to need to have proper, you know, how much content do I think I’m going to need so I always start with on-page but once I figure out what my plan is what I think is going to meet or exceed or meet and exceed whatever the competitors are in a particular space, then I set out to build that as far as the link building and everything. I just go by with it.

Exactly what you know we always talk about here, which is I do a ton of content marketing from the site through the blog to a syndication network, total SEO shield built around everything, I do a lot of press releases, which always link back through the blog posts mainly back to the back to the site. So that’s where I get most of my link building done and besides link building to the directly to the SEO shield through MGYB. Now, for most projects that I’ll start with a big link building package, so you know, the competitive What is it the Nitro I guess we call it the Nitro kit or the Nitro pack, link building just to kind of seed everything right off the bat, but then I just get into a regular schedule of doing either embed or link building or embeds plus link building. And now and I usually go with just depending on how competitive it is most of the local stuff, I mean, isn’t super competitive. So I’ll usually go with the starter kit, link building package or embed, you know, embeds plus link building to the embeds and I’ll just do that on you know, monthly or sometimes even by me

Monthly schedule depending on whether, you know if I’m ranking really well or where I want to be, then I really there’s no reason to just keep hammering away at it except for maintenance link building, which is, you know like I said, might be once every six weeks or every two months, or something like that, but I just how many links are going to take as many as it takes, right?

So it’s just it’s about the initial setup and everything and waiting for that Google dance to stop, which sometimes goes on a lot longer. And I think that’s the entity established. Go and Marco can talk on this speak to this, but I think it’s Google trying to establish or understand the entity itself when you first set it up because I got a treat care project that I’ve been working on and sharing in the mastermind. That’s just taken a long, long time for me to establish the brand name, like, you know, really solid but I think I’m finally there and with that particular thing, but what I’m saying is once you start getting past that, and it took shit like 10 weeks, it’s been dancing a lot, but I’ve also been noticing really aggressive with the content marketing and link building through press releases and everything. So I think that’s kind of along the Google dance. My point is, once you get past the initial Google dance, then it’s a matter of just monitoring Can I continually content market or do content marketing, excuse me, so publishing content, but then it’s just a matter of link building and embed, to try to get the desired result that you want. I can’t tell you which levels to use, because I just told you my plan, which is just I come out swinging hard, you know, come out with a lot right up front, just to initially seed the whole ecosystem that I’ve built. And then from there, it’s just more of an ongoing the tortoise, the tortoise wins the race type thing where I just constantly publishing new content and constantly powering up the SEO shield in strategic locations to get the desired result. What do you say, Marco?

Ah, man, and

yeah, it’s an excellent question. But that’s, that’s the

How It is, isn’t it?

I’m not sure how much to add to that. Okay. Good enough. So we got another Marco on he says, Hey, I’ll ask Will you guys be offering a coupon on national pasta day? Maybe lots of people will be looking forward to that, too. If we did it for potato day, we’ll probably do for pasta day as well.

That’s another reason another excuse to send an email right?

out of that gate. Can you hang on a second? Because just to go back to that, on how to define the competition, or how do you know, I use Jeffrey Smith’s method. I look at competing pages. And his it’s pretty accurate. When you look that up in Google, right? When you Google it and you look at the results, that’s usually a pretty good indication of what you’re up against. So I mean, if you don’t have it, I suggest that you go for the ultimate SEO Bootcamp, the best on-page training that there is I don’t care who says what, I agree, he rocks it. He kills it.

And I’m doing a lot of AdWords or Google Ad stuff now to a lot actually. And that’s something else that I determine what my SEO competition is not always the case. But in the local niches that I’m in, it’s, it’s pretty accurate. If my cost per click for a particular keyword is quite high, like and it changes by location to right, then I know that that keyword is probably going to be a lot more competitive SEO wise as well. And I think that’s only logical. You know, and I don’t know that that’s universal across the board for all keywords. Some see, maybe cost per click is very, very high. But the SEO isn’t so competitive, I don’t know. I’m just saying like for Tree Service stuff, which is, again, primarily almost all that I’m doing now. If I’m in an area, like for example, I’ve got some lead gen stuff going on and like Oklahoma City, for example, for Tree Service stuff and then others, and Fairfax, Virginia, Fairfax, Virginia, I might pay $35 per click for tree removal near me, but I might only pay $12 in Oklahoma City. So my point is like the keywords it doesn’t necessarily mean that the SEO is going to be you know, three times harder in Fairfax, Virginia as it would Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, it just typically means that the higher the cost per click, what I found is the more people that are bidding on those keywords are also paying for SEO. So it typically means you’re dealing with more competition and I and again, I don’t know that that’s universal across the board, but I found that to be the case for the niches that I’m in

MGYB Support Question

Okay, next is Nigel what’s up. Nigel he says hey gents, you were the best I wanted to give you money but now I’m about to be potato paid. That said I need help to get an order in so I can over-deliver for a new client just need some guidance on getting this order correct. Let me know your best route to do this. Right. Okay, so he must be this is it down here. I’ll come back to Ricky’s comment here in a moment is literally timing is perfect with a discount. Thanks, Bradley. I will also be taking you up on the calendly booking we discussed weeks back, as I have been getting real referral interest from SEO for luxury real estate niche and believe the SEO shows 100%. But I feel that I need to use this first experience to document the onboarding process and get the solid testimonials from my referral client and then have them as an ambassador, which is already working for other services. Yeah, that’s fine. I do I made that offer to you, it still stands. So whenever if you’ve got the link, if not just pm me on Facebook, and I’ll give it to you again. Whatever guidance you can give me or who to speak will help. I also will send you a quick video explaining if that’s better. And just so you know, I did contact support first to ask and they told me to reply before I asked but didn’t hit reply or hear back excuse me email could have gone to spam or deemed such please let me know. Thanks, guys. Yeah, as I said, I don’t think we’re connected on Facebook. Just reach out to my pm.

And I’ll get something scheduled with you because I know we made that offer to a few months ago. Okay. And you’ve been around for a long time. So no problem. Thanks.

Ricky says not a question. But when people ask my boss, how many does it take to do X, he would say 10 to the 12th. That basically means 10 to the 12th power, which is a trillion. He used to tell us, it doesn’t matter how many it takes, when it works, you’ll know but be prepared to do as much as it takes. The only time that question is relevant is if you don’t believe in the strategy. If you know the strategy works, it doesn’t matter how many it takes. We’ll keep doing it until it works. that’s a great way that’s a much more extended version of as many as it takes, but I like it.

It’s pretty good. We should copy that somewhere.

Alright, so Marco says like I understand a little No, none of what you’re all talking about. But I think your free content can help and that your team seems pretty cool. Okay. Thanks, Marco. Appreciate that. Next, Ricky says to be clear, we won’t mind paying for the services.

What was he asking about? The National potato day, but I don’t know what it was.

Do you want I mean, we have training on the SEO shield, the SEO, the SEO shoulder the SEO power shield. I can’t remember the name of the website, Rob put that up for free. It doesn’t get any better than that you can join heavy hitter the free section, tons of resources in there man, tons of free resources for you guys. The free SEO group this you have tons of stuff feedback.

So you can go to a heavy hitter club slash SEO shield or just go to because he set up a redirect the SEO shield calm. And I’ll just put both of these on a notepad file so you can see them on screen.

The other one would be HTTP books, that’s too many.

And it was the SEO shield.com.

Okay, so if you got either one of those specifically Marco on who was asking the question, then you can download them or opt-in or whatever for SEO shield training, which will explain to you what it is why it works and not and you know where to get it and all that kind of stuff. Okay?

So those are our methods Oh, by the way, you can also go here I still didn’t get the damn solid training done because I had another project pop up in the past week that I had to attend to. But if you go to semantic mastery comm slash process, you can learn much more about these are the training videos that I did, specifically for the semantic mastery process, which is what the SEO shield is built around, and all the different components and why we do what we do doesn’t give you the how it gives you the way if you want to how I point you in the where to find out the how you know where to purchase the training products or join our mastermind, that kind of stuff to where you can get the how, or you can just go or we point you just to go get it done. It’s mgyb so that you can spend your time building your business and generating more revenue instead of doing the execution of these processes. That makes sense

So either any of these right here will help you to get a much better understanding of what it is that we’re talking about. Okay.

All right, we’re gonna keep moving.

Unknown Speaker 48:12 The blog subdomain site, should we do the shield that the blog? Should we do the shield to that blog subdomain or to the main domain? Well, depends on both right and the Brian period, right, which when you build that you build out the brand, the subdomain is a part of the brand. That’s right. But it’s separate that you can’t separate that. You just have to do it. Right. You have to connect one to the other. It’s right to get disconnected. Does that a disconnect? Is that a separation? Yeah, the parent. It has a bit has a child, the child has a subdomain that the child has a parent is the main domain.

Right? So again, your primary URL, in this case, I would make the root domain, but you would include the blog URL and the building right

Just like you would your syndication network properties, so that that’s also being included with all of your drive stack files that are being created your G site, everything you see your blog is going to be constantly linked to and you remember from your primary route, you’re going to have a link to your blog. So you’re going to be transferring power through that anyways, to back to your blog. But just remember, you’re probably my opinion, your primary domain, your root domain should be your primary asset for the SEO shield. But you include the blog subdomain URL in the additional URLs that you’re going to submit with the order like your syndication network properties, for example. Okay. So there you go.

How Would You Deal With A Competitor That Is Using A Location He Does Not Occupy?

Aaron says arrived late and needs some advice. One of my main competitors is using a location that he does not occupy the property sold last week and he was never located there. Is there something I should or could do about this? Thanks. Yeah, just out SEO and that’s what I would say. I mean, I know there are people that will tell you that Yeah, you can report that and all that kind of stuff. I don’t do that. I just think it’s better Karma I understand even if they’re spamming and they got you to know they’re winning just outperform them and that’s just I don’t do negative SEO I don’t report shit like that I just don’t do it. It’s up to you whether you want to you certainly can go that route I just don’t like to do it because you know what goes around comes around and I would hate for somebody to do that and I’ve had it done and I don’t like it so I wouldn’t want to do it to somebody else and that’s just my opinion. And your comment no you know you know I agree I out power That’s it. That’s it. That’s what we did with this guy. The new client that I took on exactly what we did. We just blasted him out of the waterman. Now we’re after first place for the keywords. He had the knowledge panel. No longer got the knowledge panel. That’s the type of thing you do. You don’t go negative. Just hit it harder.

Yeah.

Yeah, Austin says I’m gonna have a header club. If I join the mastermind. Is there a discount for either one? Yes. As far as well. Yeah.

If you’re in both there’s a discount, right Marco.

If you join the mastermind we will give you a steep discount for as long as you’re a mastermind member if you leave the mastermind then heavy hitter goes to regular price you can only have the discounted price and heavy hitter if you’re still in the mastermind.

There you go.

Austin dawn I’ve been trying to talk you into joining the mastermind for some time because I know you’re in the real estate industry as well. So

Jason says again Hi guys, I look forward to working with you all in the mastermind group I need to order the keywords in the shielded package as soon as possible and do it Jason quarter the damn thing and yeah if you got any questions Jason the mastermind you know you get a hell of a lot more access to us there’s no doubt and as we talked about I think I talked to you on the phone last week actually. Remember to use the question form and the mastermind you’ll know where it is because it’s in the mastermind. If not just post a question, I’ll send the link to you in the mastermind. But yeah, make sure you use that too because we’ll dig, you know, do deep dives and webinars for whatever it is that you want to discuss, have us look at as you know, analyze whatever it is you want to talk about. We do that stuff in the mastermind. So look forward to working with you as well. We’re almost out of time. We got a couple more.

What Value Do You See In A Set Of Twitter/Facebook Accounts That Retweets/Share Items Via IFTTT?

Next is Hey, fellas, what sort of value do you see and I set of Twitter Facebook accounts in the geographic area of my client that are used to be IFTTT to retweet share items coming from that client and probably other area businesses, so as not to look suspicious? Yeah, I mean, it may help. I don’t know, I just don’t go through all that trouble. It may.

I mean, I think social signals from real accounts where there’s a real activity that generates traffic, so click-throughs. Back to the target URL, not just these I don’t think just the sharing. I don’t know I haven’t done any testing on this. Like specific testing, social signals in several years now, many years now, probably five years. But traffic, referral traffic from social networks is very powerful for SEO. So if you had real people engaging with those profiles or pages or whatever it is that you’re trying to set up on social accounts, where there are real people engaging with that, even if it was automated on your end, but other people were engaging with the automated content, which can happen. And then they were actually clicking through and some of the posts that were being shared to those, you know, the links that were being shared and that kind of stuff that can have an absolute effect. There’s no question. I don’t know. And I may be wrong, but I don’t know that just social signals in and of themselves produce any results anymore towards SEO at all. But real active engaged accounts that those share URLs on those accounts will get clicks from real people. And that does help because it’s referral traffic. So I don’t know Do you have any different data than that, Marco?

No, no, I don’t.

So, it depends on what you’re doing then really, I mean, if you like, here’s an example where we were talking about David Nelson’s RSS masher technology, which can build these beautiful automated auto blog type sites that will start to generate real traffic because a lot of them are like new sites and we’ve got something that you know, we’re working with some somebody that we’re going to be bringing, perhaps bringing to you guys’ attention in the coming weeks or months. We’re starting to test with it now actually, but it’s something very similar. We’re RSS mashers that could complement it. But my point is creating like these traffic-generating sites that have relative route relevant content, either by topic or by location, that can be used to drive real traffic back to, you know, our own properties or own assets that we’re trying to rank or clients or whatever. And, you know, if you have built these sites that start to generate traffic and they start pushing clicks the nose that’s very valuable. So it’s the same thing with social media accounts, if you even if you automate it in some way, shape or form, as long as people are engaging with the content that is being generated by that profile or that page or that account, whatever, then I think there’s value to it. But it’s, you know, how much trouble going through to set all that up. That’s why I typically just don’t do it. Okay, okay. All right. So here’s the thing, Google said that it doesn’t take a look at social signals. Okay.

And this is where we have to separate the bullshit from us fact.

What are they really saying?

What they’re, it could be true that they don’t pay attention to the social signal itself, or a social signal, as whatever that concept could possibly mean. What Google pays attention to is a link because guess what, everything in Google the foundational principles in Google are links. Everything is built around makes the button cannot get the variables that it needs for the algorithms unless it travels. And traveling quotes unless it goes through a link from one server to another. That’s what’s happening. So let’s look at this the way that you’re supposed to look at it. Let’s look at this, as I always tell people, scientists, and what’s actually happening. Google is sending a signal from its server to another server through a link a hyperlink into an HTML hyperlink. It’s going through an IP, whatever it’s going through, it’s going to that server, and it’s looking for something specific. It could be that it’s going to as a social media property, whatever the hell it is, that is going to, it’s been coded to pick up this I call it a signal. Let’s call it donuts. It’s been coded to pick up donuts through those links. And it’s been coded to look at Brown donuts, white donuts, jelly, doughnuts, whatever chocolate-covered doughnuts, whatever you want to call it. All right.

And if it finds those, it brings them back and tells Google Hey, I thought, it fills in on the variables, hey, I found these. Now, let’s go back instead of donuts, let’s just call it, they looked at the LinkedIn, they saw a person, click on the link, the person clicked on the link that and they went to your website went to what Google’s Following this, they went to your website, and they filled out a contact form, you think that isn’t gonna trigger any part of Google at all? Do you think that’s not gonna matter?

Call it whatever you want, call it. Fuck Google, like I always say metadata will say they call it what you want. But Google is seeing that whole client transaction from beginning to end. And you really think that doesn’t make a difference when Google sees that transaction goes take place from beginning to end.

Looking at everything looking, especially on YouTube, and in Google ads, because we know that Google pays special attention to the people that they send you. Do you really believe that these don’t matter, call it what you want this I call it a social signal. call it anything you want. We know from our testing from everything we do from everything that we’ve been covering from all of our client work from all of our businesses, guys, you got to understand that we’re not just Semantic Mastery. Marco isn’t just mathematically I have businesses, I’ve other businesses that I run. I have clients that I work with, I have so many things that I’m into, I don’t know how I have time in the day to do them all. But this is Semantic Mastery, just a small part of what I do. But everything that we show in Semantic Mastery everything that we give, you have to hang out, heavy hitter club, the free SEO group, and Facebook, every bit of information that we share has been tested because I’m not gonna risk my businesses. I am not going to risk my client’s businesses. On theory. We go we set up the theory we formally the hypothesis, we ask the question, we go out and use the scientific method. It’s very simple. And then we print back the information that we said, we know that Google is tracking that person. Why in the world would there be a pixel? Otherwise?

Sweet?

Alright, so last is not really well, I guess it is a question, Aaron’s comes back is replying to his previous comment about a competitor, not trying to be whiny. But when people are deceptive, it makes it bad for all of us if a business doesn’t have a real address, shouldn’t they be sad? Yeah, no, I agree, Aaron. And here’s the thing. If you’re talking about a storefront type of business that is using a fake address, then I would, I mean, maybe I’m wrong here. But I would think that it would get reported by a pissed off customer who went to Google Maps to try to go to the storefront business, and they go to a building that’s empty if that makes sense. So I’ve always talked about if you’re going to do spam Google Maps listings that you should only be doing surface area just type or excuse me, surface area business type of Google Maps listings, because, you know, like a contractor, plumber that goes to other people’s, you know, to people’s homes or buildings, or offices or whatever to do plumbing work, they can hide their address. So nobody’s gonna is clicking driving directions. So I don’t know, Aaron, if it’s if you’re talking about a service area type of business where customers should be going to the location, then I would expect it to be terminated rather quickly because people cussed pissed off, customers would report it, unless it’s one of those odd situations where it can be a service area business, and a local business or storefront business. And then if that’s the case, where primarily that’s a store, if it’s a service area business, then that you know, might be able to get away with it. So I don’t know again, I just still don’t do it. I still don’t report other listings. I don’t negative SEO. I just don’t do it. Again. It’s a karma thing and I just don’t want to invite that into my life even though I’ve had it happen to me in the past I’ve never felt vengeful enough to want to do it to others that’s just my opinion so again you’re entitled to yours and I’m not knocking you for saying that you want to report it fucking report it then you know that’s, that’s on you buddy. And I’m not knocking you for it. I’m just telling you I wouldn’t want to do it myself. That’s all I’m saying. any follow up comments to that Marco? Karma is a bitch call it what you will. Anything that you do can and will come back to me and look, go, and power up your shit.

That’s my recommendation you do whatever the fuck you want. I mean, you’re a grown person. I can’t tell you what to do.

But I definitely would not report shit I would just go get rid of it out the power that’s what you do. Not negative never ever. I’ve never ever done I’ve come really close.

Some piss me off that much where I was gonna blast him and make him appear for like some porn term. But then I

You take a breath and say, okay, it’s okay. It’s okay. Let’s just move on and make money. Yeah, I agree that energy can be spent making money.

So, again, they’re good questions. But yeah, no, you could encourage a pissed off customer to report them. I don’t know. All right. Thanks, guys. We’ll see you all next week.

We appreciate everybody being here. And don’t forget the potato. My rankings are your coupon code for SEO shields for 25% off. It’s only I think for the next two or three days. So take advantage of we can see you guys all right later.

Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 301 published first on your-t1-blog-url

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Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 301

Click on the video above to watch Episode 301 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.

The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

Announcement

We’re live. Ah, what’s up, everybody? Welcome to Episode 301 of Hump Day Hangouts, where we teach you some kung fu moves to get your rankings up there into other websites out there in the search engine. But that’s great. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts. Today is the 19th of August and this is your weekly meeting for anything SEO and good stuff and marketing and everything that has to do with that related so welcome to that before we dive into some of the good stuff that we have for today, just gonna go through the list of the awesome people that we have here. Nicole, what’s up Marco? How are you doing, man?

You see it. Now let me tell you about it.

That’s how it makes Groundhog Day. This is my life. I can’t help it. And as I always say, don’t hate the player. Hate the game, as I like this place.

Again, that’s it. If you don’t play the game as you should, then maybe you should start looking in the right place. When you’re starting out in the right place Hump Day Hangout, so here we go. But you go get some.

Let’s go. What’s up, Chris? How are you doing, man? Yeah, like I’m looking jealous over the marketplace. I don’t know. Like we had rained the last day. So like, not too excited to your brother. Well, everything else is good. And actually, I’m a little bit excited, but I cannot talk too much about it. Because I’ve been working on something for POFU.

But I think you mentioned a couple of things about that later. Yeah, for sure. For sure. What’s up, Bradley? How are you doing, man? Good. I’m good. I’m just trying to do what Adam usually does and drop these links on to the chatbox, but other than I’m good, glad to be here. Yeah, by the way, we’re missing a core, a core member of

The team in fact we’re not able to function we’re just basically barely scraping by which is because he’s like out there running the woods doing his stuff. So what’s up, Adam? So what’s up everybody? Welcome to Episode 301.

And we’re going to be diving into question soon but before we go there a couple of things number one people live is coming in hot, he’s going to be awesome. I’m really excited about getting that well on our way is going to be our third installment or the third slot live event although this one’s not going to be in person now which guy that said this is not live so he’s supposed to live online but if you want to go and get your virtual ticket, your POFU Live ticket to be attending to POFU Live, go to pofulive.com. It’s an event that we put every single year for the past three years, and it’s been pretty awesome. People are getting a lot of stuff usually stuff that we don’t share anywhere else. Just info for live. So go there.

Go grab your ticket, we’re going to be doing some fun stuff for VIP ticket holders and all of that good stuff. So go to pofulive.com. And I also believe that we have some sell happening right now. And mgyb. And we guys, yeah, and it’s in celebration of national potato day. Hey, go there.

So I dropped the coupon code in the chatbox below. But it’s if you go to mgyb.co is 25% off of our ys drive stacks for the next I guess three days and the coupon code is potato, my rankings all one word, potato, my rankings, all one word as the coupon code gets you 25% off of our ys drive stacks. There you go. You’re gonna use me, excuse me the SEO shield, which includes a drive stack but it’s the SEO shield orders. That’s what it’s for. There you go. Awesome. And by the way, Michael does

People need to buy right away as they can buy right now. And they need to submit the order right now how How’s that? How’s that working? They have a window so that they can submit basically, you know if somebody is watching this tomorrow, and they want to take advantage of the offer, but they don’t probably didn’t have data of their clients right away, what do you suggest?

Well, we understand that we understand that people can sometimes get the information right away. We understand that people need time, right? For whatever reason it is, or maybe they just want to take advantage of the coupons. Well, that’s fine. They can go ahead, buy, and then submit the information later. Now the problem is if you wait too long if you wait past 30 days, what we’re going to do is we’re simply going to refund you because we can’t let it sit there 5678 months until whatever it is that you decide to do.

So get it, hold on to it go ahead and take advantage of the offer. So that the coupon doesn’t expire, right because once it does, we can’t give you the offer.

Then get gather the information. That’s fine. Don’t wait more than 30 days because then we will refund you no question. It gets done on our we know that if you don’t submit your information within 30 days, you’re likely not to do it. And we’ll have to refund you anyway. So we might as well get rid of the problem to start with. Gotcha. So people can buy today get get get an advantage, take advantage of the coupon. And then you said, you know, submit the details over the next 30 days, basically. That’s awesome. All right. Cool. So and by the way, if you have more SEO needs, if you have more delivery needs, you know, because you shouldn’t be doing the grunt work, let us do it for you go to mgyb.co we have that sale going on. But there’s a lot of good stuff there. A lot of stuff that allegedly doesn’t work. But you know, the proof is in the pudding. We have a bunch of case studies there and more coming. So that’s going to be pretty awesome as well.

Yep. Anything that you guys want to add on? Let’s do this. Let’s do it. Actually, we ran over last week by like, almost 10 minutes because I just lost track of time. So you guys are gonna crack the whip on me today. I tight I’ve got an appointment actually have to get to so. Alright, uh, let me grab the screen.

All right, sweet.

Do you guys see my screen? Okay. Yeah. All right, we’re gonna start with

Is It Safe To Convert Gsites To Its New Format?

Igor. Hey Brad. The NSM team just got an email about Google changing the old g sites. Is it safe to follow to convert them to the new g site? I have been? I’ve done about a dozen myself this week. Seriously, I haven’t even had VA is doing it. I’ve just because I’ve been tightening up projects and stuff. And so I’ve just gone in and click the button and made sure everything came out. Okay, Mark, I know you had some comments about that. We chatted about this yesterday. Yeah, Google has been really nice about it. They giving us everything we need. They’re just moving everything over for us all you have to just click yes it. I mean, how good is that doesn’t get any better than that. Now, you will

Hang on a second, well people do have to be careful about is that it doesn’t turn into a 302. So please monitor your URLs, right use a redirect checker every once in a while to see what it is that Google is doing it because they get sneaky. Remember what they did with geo GL? Yeah, it was a 301. Then without any warning, it turned into a 302. Then they offer Firebase, which was a three or two that you had to turn into a 301. gotta be really careful. Google is really sneaky, right? Do they change other URLs from 301 to three or two from

what do you call it? From a meta refresh, to attend meta refresh, where then it’s useless. So the only thing that I tell people is you got to be really careful. Keep track of your URLs, keep checking them from time to time. And of course, don’t you do it your time should be way more valuable than to be inserting the URLs into a checker to see if it’s a 301 or three or two, you should have a VA, doing all this menial work so you can concentrate on your business, growing your business, making more money.

That’s the way it’s supposed to be.

Yeah, what I was gonna say was a couple of things, one you brought up. Gotta be careful with Google because they’re tricky about how they’ll change stuff and make them three Oh, twos without even knowing. Yep, for example, what the old g sites I don’t know, I haven’t even checked it on the new one yet. With you know, once it’s been converted to the new ones, but I can’t imagine it would have changed. But if you left the trailing slash off of the end of the URL, then if you checked it in a redirect checker, it would throw to you the final URL with the trailing slash at the end of it. So like, if you’re looking at a home page of the G site, and you were building links to the URL without the trailing slash, then you were actually getting a 302 redirect to the home page, which I thought was crazy.

But second of all, the new g sites are a lot like page builders are now so they’re like, you know, modular and like kind of like a block editor. And there it just is a lot more intuitive than the old funky g sites. And I don’t know why I’ve wanted them for so long because it’s actually a pretty good editor now and it’s a good interface. So,

How Many Videos Are Needed For A YouTube Silo To Be Effective?

okay, let’s see, I got lost my track where I was let me try this again must have been from last week. Okay, so the next question was from when building YouTube silos? How many videos should be in a silo to be impactful to move the needle? I know it depends on the competition. But what should you start with five 750? And should we focus on building more in the silo or more silos? And if more silos, how many in the silo?

I got a little bit of a headache from that question.

It just depends on it depends on you know, how competitive the keyword is that you’re trying to rank for. So whatever your top-level keyword is the top of silo keyword that you’re trying to rank for. That’s really going to be what determines how much depth you should add to it, like how many videos essentially how many other keywords, variations, longer tail versions, that sort of thing, are you going to actually target within that particular silo? It’s just like doing it on your website, right? It’s the same principle. It’s the

How much is it going to take? I can’t tell you that because I don’t know what keyword is that you’re targeting. I don’t know what the competition looks like. It’s going to take as many as it takes. So really just it’s going to it’s very much like doing a silo on your website. That’s why we talk about theme mirroring, and all that kind of stuff because it’s, it’s all the same. Creating a YouTube silo is the exact same structure. And the mat, whether or not it ranks is going to depend on you know, a lot of factors, not just the silo structure itself, but having additional keywords in there more depth to that silo adds builds more relevancy, more topical relevancy, and there are more linking opportunities from within that silo as well. So it kind of helps to power up the entire silo, the whole playlist, if you’re adding more videos that are relevant. Does that make sense?

Anybody want to comment on that before I go to the second part of that, yeah, what you start with is more than one right? Absolutely.

And then it’s just how far you need to go to get to where you want to be. Period.

Yep. So how many are going to take as many as it takes? I was like a lot. We used to get questions all the time about syndication networks, how many posts Do you think it’s going to take for me to rank for whatever keyword now, we could always have the same answer as many as it takes to take. Yeah. So the next one is it should be focused on building more in the silo or more silos and more silos. Now, remember, guys, keep it simple. You know, you can take a top-level silo keyword, and you can create a bunch of subcategories from closely very closely related keywords that are, you know, longer tailed versions are the next level down, so to speak of that main keyword, but is it necessary to do so? That’s the point-like, again, I use this example more recently, uh, you know, I’m pretty much all I’m doing now is Tree Service stuff for SEO and, and lead generation and that kind of stuff. And for the longest time, I’ve always built a simple silo structure at least for several years.

I used to do complex silos. But I just got over doing that because most local, most local type businesses don’t need that. But and I don’t know that you’re targeting local, but I’m just using this as an example.

I used to always silo with the simple site for the last few years with simple silo structure for Tree Service stuff, Tree Service being the primary keyword. So essentially the homepage, but then the silo structure would be tree trimming would be one silo. Another one that would be tree removal. And then usually a third one, which would be additional services or arborist tree services, if it was a certified arborist on the, for the contractor that the site was for. And I saw I’d have three silos on the site, basically. But what I found was Google actually really considers tree trimming, Tree Removal tree cutting Tree Service, they’re all synonyms. So I could probably and I haven’t tested it just yet. I’ve got a couple of projects and I’m waiting on some infrastructure to be built and then I’m going to be testing that. But I could probably go with just one silo essentially tree services. And you because all that content is the same, however, I could create like, essentially subcategories, which would have been the silos of what I’ve already been what I’ve been doing right. So tree removal, tree trimming, perhaps arborist services, but if why overcomplicate things, why make the build more complex? Why make the content, you know, the interlinking between pieces of content, everything more complex than it needs to be, if I could just have a flat site with one silo tree services, and just have all the content, you know, properly structured and get the same results? Why would I go through all of that and so that my answer to you about the YouTube stuff is the same thing? I would rather focus on one silo and add more depth to it and have that whole silo be a lot more powerful than have a whole bunch of different silos with the month that is very, very specific or it’s kind of hard to get, you know, additional supporting it Now if you’ve got the main category with a bunch of different subcategories and it’s logical to do so. Then I would add additional you know, add create additional playlist and don’t forget, you can have one video and more than one playlist, so I mean, it

If you have a kind of like a parent category silo, the video can be in that playlist. But then you could also have like subcategory silos or playlists that want. You know, the video can also be in one of those, if that makes sense. So, but just don’t overcomplicate things is my point, especially when it comes to YouTube? It’s really unnecessary. Does anybody want to comment on that?

I totally agree.

Okay. Very good. And I think a lot of a lot of times we try, we try to be smart as SEOs and try to you know, well, if I get really creative with my silo structures, I can get better results and it just ends up being a lot of unnecessary work. So just keep that in mind.

How Do You Set Up A Sales Tax In A WooCommerce Site?

Jason says, Hey, guys, I’m working on an e-commerce site and I hearing rumors that I need to set up sales tax for every state in the U.S. if we sell something. Do you guys know how this would work with WooCommerce? I do not because I don’t do anything eCommerce related. Perhaps Marco might.

Do you know anything about WooCommerce being in taxes and stuff?

I don’t know, like, I don’t know how you either,

like I do, I have worked on WooCommerce websites, but that’s not the part of my job that I do.

The part of what I do on that is I get traffic, the owner is kind of like the one in charge of all that guy charges, taxes and I know, on the land, like each state has separate rules, right? for buying and selling land and how much is is due at the closing. But that all gets done, it gets taken out of the total when you close the deal. It’s like you never see it because it’s taken out. So like how much or whether each state is responsible, whether you’re responsible for collecting taxes, what you need to do is go and contact the tax attorney and have them tell you what it is that you’re responsible for, whether it’s each state, your state, what the rules are in each state because only a tax attorney would be the one to answer that question properly. I’m not a tax attorney. I’m not a tax expert by any means.

So try that. I can’t really help with that. Yeah, neither can I just don’t do any sort of e-commerce stuff. So I couldn’t help with that either. Sorry. Jason. Looks like Jason says he just joined the mastermind. That’s awesome. So he says that, by the way, welcome, Jason. He says I have five websites that I need to do this syndication networks with, I need to do two of them as soon as possible. Well, I’ll tell you what, as a mastermind member, you do get benefits, you know, so contact support, make about mgyb.co. So go to support@mgyb.co after you’ve placed your orders, and, you know, mentioned that your new mastermind members and see if you can get two of them expedited, I don’t know that we typically do that but I know mastermind members do get benefits. So Marco’s, that’s something that we can do is try to get it pushed a little bit.

Ah, we have other mastermind members. Also order. So how can we push everything? Um, yeah, that’s why I was asking. I said if we can do something we’ll try to but I don’t know that we can but what do you think? I mean if it’s just syndication if it’s just a brand that networks you know, they get pushed out and they’ll get delivered as soon as they’re done that’s how Jason yeah absolutely order right away. But we are improving the system. We’re making everything better we’re making things better right we’re training our team we’re trying to make things more fluid speedier so it’s not as if we’re just sitting there and not make trying to make things better we are

are you go and I know you guys have been working hard on streamlining stuff and all that so it will get better Pablo says Hey guys, I’m still confused with correct structure for city pages post question. One from for now top of silo on my money site is a broad category without local modifiers. If I need to cover two or more counties, I need to make each county like a separate silo or county can go after a broad topic and link back to the main silo topic example. This is one of those questions site slash Miami or slight slash appraiser Miami based on this question, how would posting look like okay?

Should You Make A Separate Silo For County And Connect It To The Main Silo?

Pavlo, I can tell you this you know I cover how I do how I reconcile those odd issues that I’ve talked about this many times and I cover this extensively in the mastermind I can’t do it here. I can give you a very high overview like a conceptual overview of it, but I can’t get into the nitty-gritty because it’s something that I only cover in our mastermind, but I use tags for creating location-based silos in a WordPress website. Okay, so I use the category structure for my topical silos. But then I use tags in a very specific way to create my location-based silos so that there are no conflicts with URLs are trying to share location-based stuff categories across topical silos or vice versa topical silos across location-based categories. Does that make sense? I don’t know if that makes sense or not. But I think you’re talking about the oddities that occur with the URL conflicts that occur when you try to use the same subcategory across multiple categories because it’s going to automatically append like a dash two dash three for each time you duplicate that subcategory into another category. WordPress is gonna automatically append to it like a dash two dash three because it has to have another permalink. And if that’s what you’re talking about, I learned to three years ago, probably three years ago now to build silo structure for location-based silos using tags and it’s a specific hierarchy, the way that I stack those tags and everything else. That’s as far as I can tell you right now.

The other way to do it was if you were going to if because remember if you’re talking about complex silo structure, which you are in this case, right? Because you’ve got, you know, topical silos and then you want to go sub silo from that, right? So subcategories that you want to add additional content pages to or even posts at that level. Right that that can create some issues. That’s why I recommend if you, if you can get away with just doing a simple silo, then and using just the post name, permalink structure, then you can stack you know, you can cross things, subcategories and other categories and things where the URL isn’t going to be displayed and it shows as just domain comm slash the post slug at that level, and that’s okay. But again, so So I mean, if you can get away with that, then that’s the way that I would do it. But again, I can’t talk specific can’t show you the structure, how to do tag-based location silos or location silos using tags here on Hump Day Hangouts. I couldn’t talk about it the mastermind though, but if you understand tags and how to use tag pages in WordPress, you ought to be able to figure it out as my point. So you want to comment on that at all, more.

The only comment that I’m going to make is that there are things that we reserved for our paid groups only. And it’s not fair for us to give it away here in a free group. If people are paying for it, people are paying for all this information. So you people who are here free, although we try to answer as much as possible, you do have to understand is that there are some things that we can’t answer, but we can answer them in the paid groups. That’s just the way it is. It’s the way we’ve always done it. We have given people what nearly six years of free information, actionable information, people have built businesses from the information we give away for free. So imagine what we give away in the free groups.

Yeah, the paid group you mean, um, but yeah. So probably just to get back to your URL question here. See, what I was talking about here is if you take a look at how you’ve got URL one versus URL to my point is if you’ve got like appraiser is your is like one of your services and if appraiser I don’t know what your Real Estate or what, but let’s just say it real estate. And so one of your categories is an appraiser and maybe one of them is home inspections, right?

Or Yeah, something like that, right, let’s just say appraiser and inspectors, let’s just use that just to show two different service categories. If you were to try to duplicate Miami, originally, if you set it up as a subcategory, as an appraiser, then if you tried to create Miami subcategory in the inspectors’ category, or home inspector category, or home inspections, category, whatever, however you name it, then you would end up having that weird URL structure. That said, it doesn’t really matter if you’re using the post name permalink structure because you don’t see it unless you’re looking at source code anyways. So it’s not a big deal. But again, it creates some conflicts that I just don’t like to try to live with when I’m building the site. It’s not really clear to me that way. That’s why I like to use tags. I don’t know if that was specifically a question, but that’s the way I interpreted it. So next is he says based on this, how should what should posting look like?

For each county, it should be the same topic or keyword, but content should be rewritten, including local modifiers. Yeah, I mean, that’s what I do. That’s why I have my blogger actually create. When we’re doing keyword plus location-specific content, my blogger just creates or curates a blog post that is targeting something very closely related to that topic. It doesn’t always necessarily have to be 100% then but she has my I have one blogger that handles all of this stuff for me now because she’s really good at it. She will curate top you know, stories that are topically relevant as well as something about the local area that you know, for the location modifier that we’re targeting. And then there will be a paragraph at the bottom that has a strong call to action and it has you know, a strong mention of the product or service or the services that would pertain to what the theme of the post was about. So my point is like, for example, in the tree clients I have don’t do landscaping work. However, landscaping is closely related to Tree Service stuff. Right. And so because of that, a lot of times there will be blog posts that are written about Lance a yard or keeping their somebody’s resident, you know, homes, the landscape beautiful or whatever. And then there will be a paragraph at the bottom about, you know, tree services, tree trimming, tree pruning, whatever that will kind of tie that concept to the landscaping, right? And then we just optimize the SEO title for it. And then use the tag-based silos and all of that, and it’s it works really, really well, especially when you use the SEO shield and the G site and you learn how to push keyword relevancy through backlink profile to your G site. So that’s what I do.

And so all of the content is unique because all of the blog posts each blog post is unique because there’s new newly curated content from my blogger, which is why I like it because it’s all it’s not. You know, one of the problems that I’m sure you are aware of this Pablo is is when you only have you know, a few seconds services? How do you keep rewriting about that same service over and over and over again, right, it gets to be very difficult to do so. And that’s why I kind of got away from trying to do it that way. And I just let my blogger kind of run away with it and it creates over time, it might take a little bit more time to get the traction that I like. But once you do, you have this kind of broad width of topical relevancy to that to what your primary services are, if that makes sense. So that’s what I do if you don’t have that ability yet for, you know, for curating posts and that kind of stuff, then you can just rewrite stuff I’ve talked about having like one article written about tree removal, in my case, right. And then having that rewritten by five different, you know, as a rewrite project, as opposed to a new writing project, it’s a lot less expensive, and now I’ve got six versions of the original article. And so that’s something you could use if you’re going to be reproducing keyword plus location across multiple locations. Does that make sense? I don’t know if that was clear or not. Do you have any other tricks for that?

No. Okay.

All right. And the second part of that I can’t answer because that question went way too long. Anyway, so we’re going to move on if we have time, we’ll come back to it.

How Do You Boost A Blog Subdomain?

Bobby, Ricky Bobby says, we have a client that uses a subdomain for their blog, their main site gets decent traffic 50,000 per month. But the blog that is blogged out example gets less than 1000 per month. Okay, they are not going to change it to a subfolder anytime soon. I’ve recommended it obviously, any advice on what to do to boost the blog subdomain. They have a few dozen articles on there. And we were starting to work on the content consistency going forward. Now that we have our keyword research and recommendations thanks to mgyb.

My suggestion would be just to start using the subdomain a lot more right. Your syndication network should be attached to it. You should be blogging consistently. And that’s essentially what I was just talking about in my previous reply or response to Pavlo’s question.

About overtime, just that the blog will start to gain more traction. And you’ll see in Search Console, especially as you publish more content, your total impression number will start to go way, way up. Because you’ll start being recognized by Google for a lot more keyword combinations. So different types of search queries will give your site impressions. And that’s actually a really good content strategy to go in the Search Console, and identify keywords that are relevant, like search queries that triggered an impression for your blog, find those queries that are relevant, that aren’t ranking well yet, but are that are close, like, for example, maybe their position is, you know, somewhere between 11 and 20? Well, those are good keywords than to start optimizing for producing more content for linking back to the original piece of content, that kind of stuff to help try to boost those to page one so that you start getting more traffic. My point is, you know, adding more content to the blog is would be my first step. And then you could always do things like, you know, paid traffic to some of the posts, and then do remarketing so that you can always be bringing people back, which will probably get more visits to the blog, even repeat visits, which is really, really good for SEO also. So those would be my two recommendations from you.

Yeah, that’s the SEO shield, SEO Power shield. It’s all part of the system. So it’s not just getting the syndication properties. It’s not just logging. It’s not just syndicating your content. It’s powering up your shield is powering up your right your @ID. It’s powering up everything that has to do with your entity. It has to do with getting your schema out there. It has to do with whatever you need to do to make the content right. So link building comes into play so embeds come into play. More link building more embeds. Press releases, link building to press release a stack the press releases if you’re local, posting, stalking your posts link building into your posts, local images, guys.

We’ve created a whole entire system for you to do this. We just can’t give you the pieces here for free.

I mean, we got to go back to that. People. Yeah, you want the system. It’s in the paid groups. It’s in Semantic Mastery and the heavy hitter, join Semantic Mastery. And you get a really good price for joining heavy hitter. But I like we can’t give you everything we’d love to. But then there would be no Semantic Mastery, if we gave everything away for free, right, the people who have to sit and think and do all of these things have to be able to make some kind of living, right, some kind of money, get rewarded for all the effort that we put into doing all of this.

So having said that, it’s the system ads, ads work perfectly well. If you do them the way that we say do. Don’t just go out and run any kind of ads that may or may not work. Use the system that we’ve set up to make the ads work. Use the system which we’ve created the

We make everything available in mgyb.co. But if you get it without really understanding what it is that you’re doing, then you’re actually doing yourself more harm than good, because you’re leaving so much power on the table, so much power that you could be using.

And that’s a good point, you know, press releases. I’ve shown this in our Facebook group, the SEO tutorials semantic mastery Facebook group. Somebody was asking a question about press releases. Well, it was more of a comment about how they read some article on some blog about our press releases doesn’t work. And so they were just relaying that information. And there was started to the discussion, a thread. And one of the arguments that the person that posted the question or the statement really was stating was, well, you guys are all saying they work, but I want to see proof. Right. And so I just took a screenshot of Google Analytics of just one project that I’m working on, that shows referral traffic. And it showed press advantage, right, which is the press release releases that we primarily use. And it showed for a 30 day period, I think was 287 or 267 visits directly from press advantage. So don’t discredit that either, like again. And that’s all part of what we teach is like the same content strategy. So in your blog, that’s one of the best things one of the strategies that I use, consistently, almost exclusively now is we publish blog posts for clients. And as soon as a blog post is published, not always a one to one ratio, depending on what their budget is, but we will publish a press release to promote the blog post. So every time a new blog post gets published, we have a press release that links back to the blog post. So we’re driving traffic from press advantage domain as well as a lot of you know, other news-type sites when it does get traffic press advantage tends to drive the domain itself tends to drive quite a bit of traffic, but that sends traffic to that newly public blog posts plus it builds a bunch of links to that newly built, newly published blog post. So it’s really, really good for building up the SEO value of your blog as well as driving traffic to it, which is what your original question was, is how to get more traffic to the blog. So that’s another great part of this strategy that we teach. Yep. So it was a great question.

Is It Harder To Rank Gdocs Than A Gsite?

Babies up with a list of questions just broken up this time a little bit. So maybe you’re getting better. Hey, guys, if I want to rank some Google property only, say a G doc and a G site? Is it harder to rank g docs than a G site? I have. I mean, for I guess I haven’t really set up any specific tests for that. But I tend to just focus on the G site because it has a lot more functionality than a G doc. I don’t know if one is harder to rank than the other what say you, Marco

would rank better.

So let me see that again. If I want to write some Google property on these, the G site because it is going to get all the power from the embeds the duck might rank faster originally. I like at first, but then the G site for sure will take over. Yeah, no, yeah. But that’ll convert better, won’t it? The G site will convert the dot some of the dots will rank right away. But the Gsite over time, it’s so powerful. And you still get leads from that Virginia. Right? Yeah, he’s still occasionally. Yeah. So I mean, the proof is in the pudding.

Is It Faster To Rank Google Properties Than Building A Shield To A Non-Google Property?

Is it faster to rank Google properties than building a shield on a non-Google property? Of course, it is. It is. I mean, it’s crazy. Because you get well you can just here’s the thing, even if you’re ranked trying to rank a non-Google property like so you got a self-hosted website is your main money site. You can still do all the same things to the SEO shield. That and that you would if you made the Google site, your primary money website.

It doesn’t really matter that because that’s the whole point of the SEO show, right? It’s to create a shield around your money site. So all the things that you’re going to do to that g site, if the G site was your primary money site, which will rank very quickly, you can still do all of that to the G site as part of your SEO shield when you have a self-hosted money site. So a non-Google property money site, because you’re not going to actually touch your non-Google property money site. with anything other than the SEO shield, you’re doing all your nastiness out to the actual SEO shield. So my point is, why not have both unless it’s just you don’t want to go through the trouble of setting up a self-hosted website and all that other kind of stuff, which I understand that so for example, for some lead gen assets, there’s no reason for to set up WordPress stuff if you’re just doing like a single location, lead gen assets and you’re going to do a bunch of them. You can get away with 100% with just GMB assets and the SEO shield assets and you can use the G site as your primary money site and the GMB website the two of those countries if combined, and you’ll do incredibly well that way. So again, but if you’re going to be building a brand, there’s in my opinion is no reason not to create a money site because you can still rank the G site before the money site ever ranks and still get the benefit of it. But you’re building that brand back to a domain that you have more control over. That’s, that’s my take on it. What do you think?

You know, it’s still effective, Google will say no.

But we see all these lawsuits as we see all of these things where Google prefer Google, over anything else. And we’ve proven it’s not something that we’re just saying. And it’s not just us giving you theory and concepts and all of these ideas that are nothing. We’re giving you facts. We’re giving you something that we actually showed on a webinar, how Google trusts itself above anything else, and because it trusts itself over anything else, it passes PageRank to itself, and it ranks its properties over anybody else’s. We see this time.

And again. So it stands to reason that if you build up your Google ecosystem, it’s why we’re in there in the first place. The whole idea to start with was Dr. Gary and I said, Google prefers itself over anything else. And we went from there, we set up, let that’s the scientific method. You start out you have a hypothesis, it’s a sentence, then you say that you ask a question. Does Google really prefer itself and why? And then you go out to prove it. And we did. And not only did we prove it, but we also showed it live. It’s not as if we just go we don’t we don’t hide that we showed it. How it is that Google prefers itself over anything else. So guys, understanding this, why are you not taking all of that power? and using it use Google was my original concept and idea, use Google to rank in Google?

But at least to be said,

How Do You Determine What Link Buiding Campaign To Use And Determine The Competition?

there you go. Next question. Say you are getting into a new niche. How do you determine the link building? We should use it? What is low, medium, hard competition? Which tool? Do you determine the competition?

Well, I mean, for me, I use a number of different tools. So it really doesn’t matter as I use for bigger projects. Now I’m using a digital marketer toolbox which is network empires towards a bit expensive, but you can also use stuff like sem rush and things. But honestly, what I do just to be what I do is I figure out what I how much relevancy I need to create with you on page right first, that’s, that’s always what I do like to do, am I going to need a lot of content Am I going to need to have proper, you know, how much content do I think I’m going to need so I always start with on-page but once I figure out what my plan is what I think is going to meet or exceed or meet and exceed whatever the competitors are in a particular space, then I set out to build that as far as the link building and everything. I just go by with it.

Exactly what you know we always talk about here, which is I do a ton of content marketing from the site through the blog to a syndication network, total SEO shield built around everything, I do a lot of press releases, which always link back through the blog posts mainly back to the back to the site. So that’s where I get most of my link building done and besides link building to the directly to the SEO shield through MGYB. Now, for most projects that I’ll start with a big link building package, so you know, the competitive What is it the Nitro I guess we call it the Nitro kit or the Nitro pack, link building just to kind of seed everything right off the bat, but then I just get into a regular schedule of doing either embed or link building or embeds plus link building. And now and I usually go with just depending on how competitive it is most of the local stuff, I mean, isn’t super competitive. So I’ll usually go with the starter kit, link building package or embed, you know, embeds plus link building to the embeds and I’ll just do that on you know, monthly or sometimes even by me

Monthly schedule depending on whether, you know if I’m ranking really well or where I want to be, then I really there’s no reason to just keep hammering away at it except for maintenance link building, which is, you know like I said, might be once every six weeks or every two months, or something like that, but I just how many links are going to take as many as it takes, right?

So it’s just it’s about the initial setup and everything and waiting for that Google dance to stop, which sometimes goes on a lot longer. And I think that’s the entity established. Go and Marco can talk on this speak to this, but I think it’s Google trying to establish or understand the entity itself when you first set it up because I got a treat care project that I’ve been working on and sharing in the mastermind. That’s just taken a long, long time for me to establish the brand name, like, you know, really solid but I think I’m finally there and with that particular thing, but what I’m saying is once you start getting past that, and it took shit like 10 weeks, it’s been dancing a lot, but I’ve also been noticing really aggressive with the content marketing and link building through press releases and everything. So I think that’s kind of along the Google dance. My point is, once you get past the initial Google dance, then it’s a matter of just monitoring Can I continually content market or do content marketing, excuse me, so publishing content, but then it’s just a matter of link building and embed, to try to get the desired result that you want. I can’t tell you which levels to use, because I just told you my plan, which is just I come out swinging hard, you know, come out with a lot right up front, just to initially seed the whole ecosystem that I’ve built. And then from there, it’s just more of an ongoing the tortoise, the tortoise wins the race type thing where I just constantly publishing new content and constantly powering up the SEO shield in strategic locations to get the desired result. What do you say, Marco?

Ah, man, and

yeah, it’s an excellent question. But that’s, that’s the

How It is, isn’t it?

I’m not sure how much to add to that. Okay. Good enough. So we got another Marco on he says, Hey, I’ll ask Will you guys be offering a coupon on national pasta day? Maybe lots of people will be looking forward to that, too. If we did it for potato day, we’ll probably do for pasta day as well.

That’s another reason another excuse to send an email right?

out of that gate. Can you hang on a second? Because just to go back to that, on how to define the competition, or how do you know, I use Jeffrey Smith’s method. I look at competing pages. And his it’s pretty accurate. When you look that up in Google, right? When you Google it and you look at the results, that’s usually a pretty good indication of what you’re up against. So I mean, if you don’t have it, I suggest that you go for the ultimate SEO Bootcamp, the best on-page training that there is I don’t care who says what, I agree, he rocks it. He kills it.

And I’m doing a lot of AdWords or Google Ad stuff now to a lot actually. And that’s something else that I determine what my SEO competition is not always the case. But in the local niches that I’m in, it’s, it’s pretty accurate. If my cost per click for a particular keyword is quite high, like and it changes by location to right, then I know that that keyword is probably going to be a lot more competitive SEO wise as well. And I think that’s only logical. You know, and I don’t know that that’s universal across the board for all keywords. Some see, maybe cost per click is very, very high. But the SEO isn’t so competitive, I don’t know. I’m just saying like for Tree Service stuff, which is, again, primarily almost all that I’m doing now. If I’m in an area, like for example, I’ve got some lead gen stuff going on and like Oklahoma City, for example, for Tree Service stuff and then others, and Fairfax, Virginia, Fairfax, Virginia, I might pay $35 per click for tree removal near me, but I might only pay $12 in Oklahoma City. So my point is like the keywords it doesn’t necessarily mean that the SEO is going to be you know, three times harder in Fairfax, Virginia as it would Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, it just typically means that the higher the cost per click, what I found is the more people that are bidding on those keywords are also paying for SEO. So it typically means you’re dealing with more competition and I and again, I don’t know that that’s universal across the board, but I found that to be the case for the niches that I’m in

MGYB Support Question

Okay, next is Nigel what’s up. Nigel he says hey gents, you were the best I wanted to give you money but now I’m about to be potato paid. That said I need help to get an order in so I can over-deliver for a new client just need some guidance on getting this order correct. Let me know your best route to do this. Right. Okay, so he must be this is it down here. I’ll come back to Ricky’s comment here in a moment is literally timing is perfect with a discount. Thanks, Bradley. I will also be taking you up on the calendly booking we discussed weeks back, as I have been getting real referral interest from SEO for luxury real estate niche and believe the SEO shows 100%. But I feel that I need to use this first experience to document the onboarding process and get the solid testimonials from my referral client and then have them as an ambassador, which is already working for other services. Yeah, that’s fine. I do I made that offer to you, it still stands. So whenever if you’ve got the link, if not just pm me on Facebook, and I’ll give it to you again. Whatever guidance you can give me or who to speak will help. I also will send you a quick video explaining if that’s better. And just so you know, I did contact support first to ask and they told me to reply before I asked but didn’t hit reply or hear back excuse me email could have gone to spam or deemed such please let me know. Thanks, guys. Yeah, as I said, I don’t think we’re connected on Facebook. Just reach out to my pm.

And I’ll get something scheduled with you because I know we made that offer to a few months ago. Okay. And you’ve been around for a long time. So no problem. Thanks.

Ricky says not a question. But when people ask my boss, how many does it take to do X, he would say 10 to the 12th. That basically means 10 to the 12th power, which is a trillion. He used to tell us, it doesn’t matter how many it takes, when it works, you’ll know but be prepared to do as much as it takes. The only time that question is relevant is if you don’t believe in the strategy. If you know the strategy works, it doesn’t matter how many it takes. We’ll keep doing it until it works. that’s a great way that’s a much more extended version of as many as it takes, but I like it.

It’s pretty good. We should copy that somewhere.

Alright, so Marco says like I understand a little No, none of what you’re all talking about. But I think your free content can help and that your team seems pretty cool. Okay. Thanks, Marco. Appreciate that. Next, Ricky says to be clear, we won’t mind paying for the services.

What was he asking about? The National potato day, but I don’t know what it was.

Do you want I mean, we have training on the SEO shield, the SEO, the SEO shoulder the SEO power shield. I can’t remember the name of the website, Rob put that up for free. It doesn’t get any better than that you can join heavy hitter the free section, tons of resources in there man, tons of free resources for you guys. The free SEO group this you have tons of stuff feedback.

So you can go to a heavy hitter club slash SEO shield or just go to because he set up a redirect the SEO shield calm. And I’ll just put both of these on a notepad file so you can see them on screen.

The other one would be HTTP books, that’s too many.

And it was the SEO shield.com.

Okay, so if you got either one of those specifically Marco on who was asking the question, then you can download them or opt-in or whatever for SEO shield training, which will explain to you what it is why it works and not and you know where to get it and all that kind of stuff. Okay?

So those are our methods Oh, by the way, you can also go here I still didn’t get the damn solid training done because I had another project pop up in the past week that I had to attend to. But if you go to semantic mastery comm slash process, you can learn much more about these are the training videos that I did, specifically for the semantic mastery process, which is what the SEO shield is built around, and all the different components and why we do what we do doesn’t give you the how it gives you the way if you want to how I point you in the where to find out the how you know where to purchase the training products or join our mastermind, that kind of stuff to where you can get the how, or you can just go or we point you just to go get it done. It’s mgyb so that you can spend your time building your business and generating more revenue instead of doing the execution of these processes. That makes sense

So either any of these right here will help you to get a much better understanding of what it is that we’re talking about. Okay.

All right, we’re gonna keep moving.

Unknown Speaker 48:12 The blog subdomain site, should we do the shield that the blog? Should we do the shield to that blog subdomain or to the main domain? Well, depends on both right and the Brian period, right, which when you build that you build out the brand, the subdomain is a part of the brand. That’s right. But it’s separate that you can’t separate that. You just have to do it. Right. You have to connect one to the other. It’s right to get disconnected. Does that a disconnect? Is that a separation? Yeah, the parent. It has a bit has a child, the child has a subdomain that the child has a parent is the main domain.

Right? So again, your primary URL, in this case, I would make the root domain, but you would include the blog URL and the building right

Just like you would your syndication network properties, so that that’s also being included with all of your drive stack files that are being created your G site, everything you see your blog is going to be constantly linked to and you remember from your primary route, you’re going to have a link to your blog. So you’re going to be transferring power through that anyways, to back to your blog. But just remember, you’re probably my opinion, your primary domain, your root domain should be your primary asset for the SEO shield. But you include the blog subdomain URL in the additional URLs that you’re going to submit with the order like your syndication network properties, for example. Okay. So there you go.

How Would You Deal With A Competitor That Is Using A Location He Does Not Occupy?

Aaron says arrived late and needs some advice. One of my main competitors is using a location that he does not occupy the property sold last week and he was never located there. Is there something I should or could do about this? Thanks. Yeah, just out SEO and that’s what I would say. I mean, I know there are people that will tell you that Yeah, you can report that and all that kind of stuff. I don’t do that. I just think it’s better Karma I understand even if they’re spamming and they got you to know they’re winning just outperform them and that’s just I don’t do negative SEO I don’t report shit like that I just don’t do it. It’s up to you whether you want to you certainly can go that route I just don’t like to do it because you know what goes around comes around and I would hate for somebody to do that and I’ve had it done and I don’t like it so I wouldn’t want to do it to somebody else and that’s just my opinion. And your comment no you know you know I agree I out power That’s it. That’s it. That’s what we did with this guy. The new client that I took on exactly what we did. We just blasted him out of the waterman. Now we’re after first place for the keywords. He had the knowledge panel. No longer got the knowledge panel. That’s the type of thing you do. You don’t go negative. Just hit it harder.

Yeah.

Yeah, Austin says I’m gonna have a header club. If I join the mastermind. Is there a discount for either one? Yes. As far as well. Yeah.

If you’re in both there’s a discount, right Marco.

If you join the mastermind we will give you a steep discount for as long as you’re a mastermind member if you leave the mastermind then heavy hitter goes to regular price you can only have the discounted price and heavy hitter if you’re still in the mastermind.

There you go.

Austin dawn I’ve been trying to talk you into joining the mastermind for some time because I know you’re in the real estate industry as well. So

Jason says again Hi guys, I look forward to working with you all in the mastermind group I need to order the keywords in the shielded package as soon as possible and do it Jason quarter the damn thing and yeah if you got any questions Jason the mastermind you know you get a hell of a lot more access to us there’s no doubt and as we talked about I think I talked to you on the phone last week actually. Remember to use the question form and the mastermind you’ll know where it is because it’s in the mastermind. If not just post a question, I’ll send the link to you in the mastermind. But yeah, make sure you use that too because we’ll dig, you know, do deep dives and webinars for whatever it is that you want to discuss, have us look at as you know, analyze whatever it is you want to talk about. We do that stuff in the mastermind. So look forward to working with you as well. We’re almost out of time. We got a couple more.

What Value Do You See In A Set Of Twitter/Facebook Accounts That Retweets/Share Items Via IFTTT?

Next is Hey, fellas, what sort of value do you see and I set of Twitter Facebook accounts in the geographic area of my client that are used to be IFTTT to retweet share items coming from that client and probably other area businesses, so as not to look suspicious? Yeah, I mean, it may help. I don’t know, I just don’t go through all that trouble. It may.

I mean, I think social signals from real accounts where there’s a real activity that generates traffic, so click-throughs. Back to the target URL, not just these I don’t think just the sharing. I don’t know I haven’t done any testing on this. Like specific testing, social signals in several years now, many years now, probably five years. But traffic, referral traffic from social networks is very powerful for SEO. So if you had real people engaging with those profiles or pages or whatever it is that you’re trying to set up on social accounts, where there are real people engaging with that, even if it was automated on your end, but other people were engaging with the automated content, which can happen. And then they were actually clicking through and some of the posts that were being shared to those, you know, the links that were being shared and that kind of stuff that can have an absolute effect. There’s no question. I don’t know. And I may be wrong, but I don’t know that just social signals in and of themselves produce any results anymore towards SEO at all. But real active engaged accounts that those share URLs on those accounts will get clicks from real people. And that does help because it’s referral traffic. So I don’t know Do you have any different data than that, Marco?

No, no, I don’t.

So, it depends on what you’re doing then really, I mean, if you like, here’s an example where we were talking about David Nelson’s RSS masher technology, which can build these beautiful automated auto blog type sites that will start to generate real traffic because a lot of them are like new sites and we’ve got something that you know, we’re working with some somebody that we’re going to be bringing, perhaps bringing to you guys’ attention in the coming weeks or months. We’re starting to test with it now actually, but it’s something very similar. We’re RSS mashers that could complement it. But my point is creating like these traffic-generating sites that have relative route relevant content, either by topic or by location, that can be used to drive real traffic back to, you know, our own properties or own assets that we’re trying to rank or clients or whatever. And, you know, if you have built these sites that start to generate traffic and they start pushing clicks the nose that’s very valuable. So it’s the same thing with social media accounts, if you even if you automate it in some way, shape or form, as long as people are engaging with the content that is being generated by that profile or that page or that account, whatever, then I think there’s value to it. But it’s, you know, how much trouble going through to set all that up. That’s why I typically just don’t do it. Okay, okay. All right. So here’s the thing, Google said that it doesn’t take a look at social signals. Okay.

And this is where we have to separate the bullshit from us fact.

What are they really saying?

What they’re, it could be true that they don’t pay attention to the social signal itself, or a social signal, as whatever that concept could possibly mean. What Google pays attention to is a link because guess what, everything in Google the foundational principles in Google are links. Everything is built around makes the button cannot get the variables that it needs for the algorithms unless it travels. And traveling quotes unless it goes through a link from one server to another. That’s what’s happening. So let’s look at this the way that you’re supposed to look at it. Let’s look at this, as I always tell people, scientists, and what’s actually happening. Google is sending a signal from its server to another server through a link a hyperlink into an HTML hyperlink. It’s going through an IP, whatever it’s going through, it’s going to that server, and it’s looking for something specific. It could be that it’s going to as a social media property, whatever the hell it is, that is going to, it’s been coded to pick up this I call it a signal. Let’s call it donuts. It’s been coded to pick up donuts through those links. And it’s been coded to look at Brown donuts, white donuts, jelly, doughnuts, whatever chocolate-covered doughnuts, whatever you want to call it. All right.

And if it finds those, it brings them back and tells Google Hey, I thought, it fills in on the variables, hey, I found these. Now, let’s go back instead of donuts, let’s just call it, they looked at the LinkedIn, they saw a person, click on the link, the person clicked on the link that and they went to your website went to what Google’s Following this, they went to your website, and they filled out a contact form, you think that isn’t gonna trigger any part of Google at all? Do you think that’s not gonna matter?

Call it whatever you want, call it. Fuck Google, like I always say metadata will say they call it what you want. But Google is seeing that whole client transaction from beginning to end. And you really think that doesn’t make a difference when Google sees that transaction goes take place from beginning to end.

Looking at everything looking, especially on YouTube, and in Google ads, because we know that Google pays special attention to the people that they send you. Do you really believe that these don’t matter, call it what you want this I call it a social signal. call it anything you want. We know from our testing from everything we do from everything that we’ve been covering from all of our client work from all of our businesses, guys, you got to understand that we’re not just Semantic Mastery. Marco isn’t just mathematically I have businesses, I’ve other businesses that I run. I have clients that I work with, I have so many things that I’m into, I don’t know how I have time in the day to do them all. But this is Semantic Mastery, just a small part of what I do. But everything that we show in Semantic Mastery everything that we give, you have to hang out, heavy hitter club, the free SEO group, and Facebook, every bit of information that we share has been tested because I’m not gonna risk my businesses. I am not going to risk my client’s businesses. On theory. We go we set up the theory we formally the hypothesis, we ask the question, we go out and use the scientific method. It’s very simple. And then we print back the information that we said, we know that Google is tracking that person. Why in the world would there be a pixel? Otherwise?

Sweet?

Alright, so last is not really well, I guess it is a question, Aaron’s comes back is replying to his previous comment about a competitor, not trying to be whiny. But when people are deceptive, it makes it bad for all of us if a business doesn’t have a real address, shouldn’t they be sad? Yeah, no, I agree, Aaron. And here’s the thing. If you’re talking about a storefront type of business that is using a fake address, then I would, I mean, maybe I’m wrong here. But I would think that it would get reported by a pissed off customer who went to Google Maps to try to go to the storefront business, and they go to a building that’s empty if that makes sense. So I’ve always talked about if you’re going to do spam Google Maps listings that you should only be doing surface area just type or excuse me, surface area business type of Google Maps listings, because, you know, like a contractor, plumber that goes to other people’s, you know, to people’s homes or buildings, or offices or whatever to do plumbing work, they can hide their address. So nobody’s gonna is clicking driving directions. So I don’t know, Aaron, if it’s if you’re talking about a service area type of business where customers should be going to the location, then I would expect it to be terminated rather quickly because people cussed pissed off, customers would report it, unless it’s one of those odd situations where it can be a service area business, and a local business or storefront business. And then if that’s the case, where primarily that’s a store, if it’s a service area business, then that you know, might be able to get away with it. So I don’t know again, I just still don’t do it. I still don’t report other listings. I don’t negative SEO. I just don’t do it. Again. It’s a karma thing and I just don’t want to invite that into my life even though I’ve had it happen to me in the past I’ve never felt vengeful enough to want to do it to others that’s just my opinion so again you’re entitled to yours and I’m not knocking you for saying that you want to report it fucking report it then you know that’s, that’s on you buddy. And I’m not knocking you for it. I’m just telling you I wouldn’t want to do it myself. That’s all I’m saying. any follow up comments to that Marco? Karma is a bitch call it what you will. Anything that you do can and will come back to me and look, go, and power up your shit.

That’s my recommendation you do whatever the fuck you want. I mean, you’re a grown person. I can’t tell you what to do.

But I definitely would not report shit I would just go get rid of it out the power that’s what you do. Not negative never ever. I’ve never ever done I’ve come really close.

Some piss me off that much where I was gonna blast him and make him appear for like some porn term. But then I

You take a breath and say, okay, it’s okay. It’s okay. Let’s just move on and make money. Yeah, I agree that energy can be spent making money.

So, again, they’re good questions. But yeah, no, you could encourage a pissed off customer to report them. I don’t know. All right. Thanks, guys. We’ll see you all next week.

We appreciate everybody being here. And don’t forget the potato. My rankings are your coupon code for SEO shields for 25% off. It’s only I think for the next two or three days. So take advantage of we can see you guys all right later.

Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 301 posted first on http://beyondvapepage.blogspot.com

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Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 301

Click on the video above to watch Episode 301 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.

The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

Announcement

We’re live. Ah, what’s up, everybody? Welcome to Episode 301 of Hump Day Hangouts, where we teach you some kung fu moves to get your rankings up there into other websites out there in the search engine. But that’s great. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts. Today is the 19th of August and this is your weekly meeting for anything SEO and good stuff and marketing and everything that has to do with that related so welcome to that before we dive into some of the good stuff that we have for today, just gonna go through the list of the awesome people that we have here. Nicole, what’s up Marco? How are you doing, man?

You see it. Now let me tell you about it.

That’s how it makes Groundhog Day. This is my life. I can’t help it. And as I always say, don’t hate the player. Hate the game, as I like this place.

Again, that’s it. If you don’t play the game as you should, then maybe you should start looking in the right place. When you’re starting out in the right place Hump Day Hangout, so here we go. But you go get some.

Let’s go. What’s up, Chris? How are you doing, man? Yeah, like I’m looking jealous over the marketplace. I don’t know. Like we had rained the last day. So like, not too excited to your brother. Well, everything else is good. And actually, I’m a little bit excited, but I cannot talk too much about it. Because I’ve been working on something for POFU.

But I think you mentioned a couple of things about that later. Yeah, for sure. For sure. What’s up, Bradley? How are you doing, man? Good. I’m good. I’m just trying to do what Adam usually does and drop these links on to the chatbox, but other than I’m good, glad to be here. Yeah, by the way, we’re missing a core, a core member of

The team in fact we’re not able to function we’re just basically barely scraping by which is because he’s like out there running the woods doing his stuff. So what’s up, Adam? So what’s up everybody? Welcome to Episode 301.

And we’re going to be diving into question soon but before we go there a couple of things number one people live is coming in hot, he’s going to be awesome. I’m really excited about getting that well on our way is going to be our third installment or the third slot live event although this one’s not going to be in person now which guy that said this is not live so he’s supposed to live online but if you want to go and get your virtual ticket, your POFU Live ticket to be attending to POFU Live, go to pofulive.com. It’s an event that we put every single year for the past three years, and it’s been pretty awesome. People are getting a lot of stuff usually stuff that we don’t share anywhere else. Just info for live. So go there.

Go grab your ticket, we’re going to be doing some fun stuff for VIP ticket holders and all of that good stuff. So go to pofulive.com. And I also believe that we have some sell happening right now. And mgyb. And we guys, yeah, and it’s in celebration of national potato day. Hey, go there.

So I dropped the coupon code in the chatbox below. But it’s if you go to mgyb.co is 25% off of our ys drive stacks for the next I guess three days and the coupon code is potato, my rankings all one word, potato, my rankings, all one word as the coupon code gets you 25% off of our ys drive stacks. There you go. You’re gonna use me, excuse me the SEO shield, which includes a drive stack but it’s the SEO shield orders. That’s what it’s for. There you go. Awesome. And by the way, Michael does

People need to buy right away as they can buy right now. And they need to submit the order right now how How’s that? How’s that working? They have a window so that they can submit basically, you know if somebody is watching this tomorrow, and they want to take advantage of the offer, but they don’t probably didn’t have data of their clients right away, what do you suggest?

Well, we understand that we understand that people can sometimes get the information right away. We understand that people need time, right? For whatever reason it is, or maybe they just want to take advantage of the coupons. Well, that’s fine. They can go ahead, buy, and then submit the information later. Now the problem is if you wait too long if you wait past 30 days, what we’re going to do is we’re simply going to refund you because we can’t let it sit there 5678 months until whatever it is that you decide to do.

So get it, hold on to it go ahead and take advantage of the offer. So that the coupon doesn’t expire, right because once it does, we can’t give you the offer.

Then get gather the information. That’s fine. Don’t wait more than 30 days because then we will refund you no question. It gets done on our we know that if you don’t submit your information within 30 days, you’re likely not to do it. And we’ll have to refund you anyway. So we might as well get rid of the problem to start with. Gotcha. So people can buy today get get get an advantage, take advantage of the coupon. And then you said, you know, submit the details over the next 30 days, basically. That’s awesome. All right. Cool. So and by the way, if you have more SEO needs, if you have more delivery needs, you know, because you shouldn’t be doing the grunt work, let us do it for you go to mgyb.co we have that sale going on. But there’s a lot of good stuff there. A lot of stuff that allegedly doesn’t work. But you know, the proof is in the pudding. We have a bunch of case studies there and more coming. So that’s going to be pretty awesome as well.

Yep. Anything that you guys want to add on? Let’s do this. Let’s do it. Actually, we ran over last week by like, almost 10 minutes because I just lost track of time. So you guys are gonna crack the whip on me today. I tight I’ve got an appointment actually have to get to so. Alright, uh, let me grab the screen.

All right, sweet.

Do you guys see my screen? Okay. Yeah. All right, we’re gonna start with

Is It Safe To Convert Gsites To Its New Format?

Igor. Hey Brad. The NSM team just got an email about Google changing the old g sites. Is it safe to follow to convert them to the new g site? I have been? I’ve done about a dozen myself this week. Seriously, I haven’t even had VA is doing it. I’ve just because I’ve been tightening up projects and stuff. And so I’ve just gone in and click the button and made sure everything came out. Okay, Mark, I know you had some comments about that. We chatted about this yesterday. Yeah, Google has been really nice about it. They giving us everything we need. They’re just moving everything over for us all you have to just click yes it. I mean, how good is that doesn’t get any better than that. Now, you will

Hang on a second, well people do have to be careful about is that it doesn’t turn into a 302. So please monitor your URLs, right use a redirect checker every once in a while to see what it is that Google is doing it because they get sneaky. Remember what they did with geo GL? Yeah, it was a 301. Then without any warning, it turned into a 302. Then they offer Firebase, which was a three or two that you had to turn into a 301. gotta be really careful. Google is really sneaky, right? Do they change other URLs from 301 to three or two from

what do you call it? From a meta refresh, to attend meta refresh, where then it’s useless. So the only thing that I tell people is you got to be really careful. Keep track of your URLs, keep checking them from time to time. And of course, don’t you do it your time should be way more valuable than to be inserting the URLs into a checker to see if it’s a 301 or three or two, you should have a VA, doing all this menial work so you can concentrate on your business, growing your business, making more money.

That’s the way it’s supposed to be.

Yeah, what I was gonna say was a couple of things, one you brought up. Gotta be careful with Google because they’re tricky about how they’ll change stuff and make them three Oh, twos without even knowing. Yep, for example, what the old g sites I don’t know, I haven’t even checked it on the new one yet. With you know, once it’s been converted to the new ones, but I can’t imagine it would have changed. But if you left the trailing slash off of the end of the URL, then if you checked it in a redirect checker, it would throw to you the final URL with the trailing slash at the end of it. So like, if you’re looking at a home page of the G site, and you were building links to the URL without the trailing slash, then you were actually getting a 302 redirect to the home page, which I thought was crazy.

But second of all, the new g sites are a lot like page builders are now so they’re like, you know, modular and like kind of like a block editor. And there it just is a lot more intuitive than the old funky g sites. And I don’t know why I’ve wanted them for so long because it’s actually a pretty good editor now and it’s a good interface. So,

How Many Videos Are Needed For A YouTube Silo To Be Effective?

okay, let’s see, I got lost my track where I was let me try this again must have been from last week. Okay, so the next question was from when building YouTube silos? How many videos should be in a silo to be impactful to move the needle? I know it depends on the competition. But what should you start with five 750? And should we focus on building more in the silo or more silos? And if more silos, how many in the silo?

I got a little bit of a headache from that question.

It just depends on it depends on you know, how competitive the keyword is that you’re trying to rank for. So whatever your top-level keyword is the top of silo keyword that you’re trying to rank for. That’s really going to be what determines how much depth you should add to it, like how many videos essentially how many other keywords, variations, longer tail versions, that sort of thing, are you going to actually target within that particular silo? It’s just like doing it on your website, right? It’s the same principle. It’s the

How much is it going to take? I can’t tell you that because I don’t know what keyword is that you’re targeting. I don’t know what the competition looks like. It’s going to take as many as it takes. So really just it’s going to it’s very much like doing a silo on your website. That’s why we talk about theme mirroring, and all that kind of stuff because it’s, it’s all the same. Creating a YouTube silo is the exact same structure. And the mat, whether or not it ranks is going to depend on you know, a lot of factors, not just the silo structure itself, but having additional keywords in there more depth to that silo adds builds more relevancy, more topical relevancy, and there are more linking opportunities from within that silo as well. So it kind of helps to power up the entire silo, the whole playlist, if you’re adding more videos that are relevant. Does that make sense?

Anybody want to comment on that before I go to the second part of that, yeah, what you start with is more than one right? Absolutely.

And then it’s just how far you need to go to get to where you want to be. Period.

Yep. So how many are going to take as many as it takes? I was like a lot. We used to get questions all the time about syndication networks, how many posts Do you think it’s going to take for me to rank for whatever keyword now, we could always have the same answer as many as it takes to take. Yeah. So the next one is it should be focused on building more in the silo or more silos and more silos. Now, remember, guys, keep it simple. You know, you can take a top-level silo keyword, and you can create a bunch of subcategories from closely very closely related keywords that are, you know, longer tailed versions are the next level down, so to speak of that main keyword, but is it necessary to do so? That’s the point-like, again, I use this example more recently, uh, you know, I’m pretty much all I’m doing now is Tree Service stuff for SEO and, and lead generation and that kind of stuff. And for the longest time, I’ve always built a simple silo structure at least for several years.

I used to do complex silos. But I just got over doing that because most local, most local type businesses don’t need that. But and I don’t know that you’re targeting local, but I’m just using this as an example.

I used to always silo with the simple site for the last few years with simple silo structure for Tree Service stuff, Tree Service being the primary keyword. So essentially the homepage, but then the silo structure would be tree trimming would be one silo. Another one that would be tree removal. And then usually a third one, which would be additional services or arborist tree services, if it was a certified arborist on the, for the contractor that the site was for. And I saw I’d have three silos on the site, basically. But what I found was Google actually really considers tree trimming, Tree Removal tree cutting Tree Service, they’re all synonyms. So I could probably and I haven’t tested it just yet. I’ve got a couple of projects and I’m waiting on some infrastructure to be built and then I’m going to be testing that. But I could probably go with just one silo essentially tree services. And you because all that content is the same, however, I could create like, essentially subcategories, which would have been the silos of what I’ve already been what I’ve been doing right. So tree removal, tree trimming, perhaps arborist services, but if why overcomplicate things, why make the build more complex? Why make the content, you know, the interlinking between pieces of content, everything more complex than it needs to be, if I could just have a flat site with one silo tree services, and just have all the content, you know, properly structured and get the same results? Why would I go through all of that and so that my answer to you about the YouTube stuff is the same thing? I would rather focus on one silo and add more depth to it and have that whole silo be a lot more powerful than have a whole bunch of different silos with the month that is very, very specific or it’s kind of hard to get, you know, additional supporting it Now if you’ve got the main category with a bunch of different subcategories and it’s logical to do so. Then I would add additional you know, add create additional playlist and don’t forget, you can have one video and more than one playlist, so I mean, it

If you have a kind of like a parent category silo, the video can be in that playlist. But then you could also have like subcategory silos or playlists that want. You know, the video can also be in one of those, if that makes sense. So, but just don’t overcomplicate things is my point, especially when it comes to YouTube? It’s really unnecessary. Does anybody want to comment on that?

I totally agree.

Okay. Very good. And I think a lot of a lot of times we try, we try to be smart as SEOs and try to you know, well, if I get really creative with my silo structures, I can get better results and it just ends up being a lot of unnecessary work. So just keep that in mind.

How Do You Set Up A Sales Tax In A WooCommerce Site?

Jason says, Hey, guys, I’m working on an e-commerce site and I hearing rumors that I need to set up sales tax for every state in the U.S. if we sell something. Do you guys know how this would work with WooCommerce? I do not because I don’t do anything eCommerce related. Perhaps Marco might.

Do you know anything about WooCommerce being in taxes and stuff?

I don’t know, like, I don’t know how you either,

like I do, I have worked on WooCommerce websites, but that’s not the part of my job that I do.

The part of what I do on that is I get traffic, the owner is kind of like the one in charge of all that guy charges, taxes and I know, on the land, like each state has separate rules, right? for buying and selling land and how much is is due at the closing. But that all gets done, it gets taken out of the total when you close the deal. It’s like you never see it because it’s taken out. So like how much or whether each state is responsible, whether you’re responsible for collecting taxes, what you need to do is go and contact the tax attorney and have them tell you what it is that you’re responsible for, whether it’s each state, your state, what the rules are in each state because only a tax attorney would be the one to answer that question properly. I’m not a tax attorney. I’m not a tax expert by any means.

So try that. I can’t really help with that. Yeah, neither can I just don’t do any sort of e-commerce stuff. So I couldn’t help with that either. Sorry. Jason. Looks like Jason says he just joined the mastermind. That’s awesome. So he says that, by the way, welcome, Jason. He says I have five websites that I need to do this syndication networks with, I need to do two of them as soon as possible. Well, I’ll tell you what, as a mastermind member, you do get benefits, you know, so contact support, make about mgyb.co. So go to support@mgyb.co after you’ve placed your orders, and, you know, mentioned that your new mastermind members and see if you can get two of them expedited, I don’t know that we typically do that but I know mastermind members do get benefits. So Marco’s, that’s something that we can do is try to get it pushed a little bit.

Ah, we have other mastermind members. Also order. So how can we push everything? Um, yeah, that’s why I was asking. I said if we can do something we’ll try to but I don’t know that we can but what do you think? I mean if it’s just syndication if it’s just a brand that networks you know, they get pushed out and they’ll get delivered as soon as they’re done that’s how Jason yeah absolutely order right away. But we are improving the system. We’re making everything better we’re making things better right we’re training our team we’re trying to make things more fluid speedier so it’s not as if we’re just sitting there and not make trying to make things better we are

are you go and I know you guys have been working hard on streamlining stuff and all that so it will get better Pablo says Hey guys, I’m still confused with correct structure for city pages post question. One from for now top of silo on my money site is a broad category without local modifiers. If I need to cover two or more counties, I need to make each county like a separate silo or county can go after a broad topic and link back to the main silo topic example. This is one of those questions site slash Miami or slight slash appraiser Miami based on this question, how would posting look like okay?

Should You Make A Separate Silo For County And Connect It To The Main Silo?

Pavlo, I can tell you this you know I cover how I do how I reconcile those odd issues that I’ve talked about this many times and I cover this extensively in the mastermind I can’t do it here. I can give you a very high overview like a conceptual overview of it, but I can’t get into the nitty-gritty because it’s something that I only cover in our mastermind, but I use tags for creating location-based silos in a WordPress website. Okay, so I use the category structure for my topical silos. But then I use tags in a very specific way to create my location-based silos so that there are no conflicts with URLs are trying to share location-based stuff categories across topical silos or vice versa topical silos across location-based categories. Does that make sense? I don’t know if that makes sense or not. But I think you’re talking about the oddities that occur with the URL conflicts that occur when you try to use the same subcategory across multiple categories because it’s going to automatically append like a dash two dash three for each time you duplicate that subcategory into another category. WordPress is gonna automatically append to it like a dash two dash three because it has to have another permalink. And if that’s what you’re talking about, I learned to three years ago, probably three years ago now to build silo structure for location-based silos using tags and it’s a specific hierarchy, the way that I stack those tags and everything else. That’s as far as I can tell you right now.

The other way to do it was if you were going to if because remember if you’re talking about complex silo structure, which you are in this case, right? Because you’ve got, you know, topical silos and then you want to go sub silo from that, right? So subcategories that you want to add additional content pages to or even posts at that level. Right that that can create some issues. That’s why I recommend if you, if you can get away with just doing a simple silo, then and using just the post name, permalink structure, then you can stack you know, you can cross things, subcategories and other categories and things where the URL isn’t going to be displayed and it shows as just domain comm slash the post slug at that level, and that’s okay. But again, so So I mean, if you can get away with that, then that’s the way that I would do it. But again, I can’t talk specific can’t show you the structure, how to do tag-based location silos or location silos using tags here on Hump Day Hangouts. I couldn’t talk about it the mastermind though, but if you understand tags and how to use tag pages in WordPress, you ought to be able to figure it out as my point. So you want to comment on that at all, more.

The only comment that I’m going to make is that there are things that we reserved for our paid groups only. And it’s not fair for us to give it away here in a free group. If people are paying for it, people are paying for all this information. So you people who are here free, although we try to answer as much as possible, you do have to understand is that there are some things that we can’t answer, but we can answer them in the paid groups. That’s just the way it is. It’s the way we’ve always done it. We have given people what nearly six years of free information, actionable information, people have built businesses from the information we give away for free. So imagine what we give away in the free groups.

Yeah, the paid group you mean, um, but yeah. So probably just to get back to your URL question here. See, what I was talking about here is if you take a look at how you’ve got URL one versus URL to my point is if you’ve got like appraiser is your is like one of your services and if appraiser I don’t know what your Real Estate or what, but let’s just say it real estate. And so one of your categories is an appraiser and maybe one of them is home inspections, right?

Or Yeah, something like that, right, let’s just say appraiser and inspectors, let’s just use that just to show two different service categories. If you were to try to duplicate Miami, originally, if you set it up as a subcategory, as an appraiser, then if you tried to create Miami subcategory in the inspectors’ category, or home inspector category, or home inspections, category, whatever, however you name it, then you would end up having that weird URL structure. That said, it doesn’t really matter if you’re using the post name permalink structure because you don’t see it unless you’re looking at source code anyways. So it’s not a big deal. But again, it creates some conflicts that I just don’t like to try to live with when I’m building the site. It’s not really clear to me that way. That’s why I like to use tags. I don’t know if that was specifically a question, but that’s the way I interpreted it. So next is he says based on this, how should what should posting look like?

For each county, it should be the same topic or keyword, but content should be rewritten, including local modifiers. Yeah, I mean, that’s what I do. That’s why I have my blogger actually create. When we’re doing keyword plus location-specific content, my blogger just creates or curates a blog post that is targeting something very closely related to that topic. It doesn’t always necessarily have to be 100% then but she has my I have one blogger that handles all of this stuff for me now because she’s really good at it. She will curate top you know, stories that are topically relevant as well as something about the local area that you know, for the location modifier that we’re targeting. And then there will be a paragraph at the bottom that has a strong call to action and it has you know, a strong mention of the product or service or the services that would pertain to what the theme of the post was about. So my point is like, for example, in the tree clients I have don’t do landscaping work. However, landscaping is closely related to Tree Service stuff. Right. And so because of that, a lot of times there will be blog posts that are written about Lance a yard or keeping their somebody’s resident, you know, homes, the landscape beautiful or whatever. And then there will be a paragraph at the bottom about, you know, tree services, tree trimming, tree pruning, whatever that will kind of tie that concept to the landscaping, right? And then we just optimize the SEO title for it. And then use the tag-based silos and all of that, and it’s it works really, really well, especially when you use the SEO shield and the G site and you learn how to push keyword relevancy through backlink profile to your G site. So that’s what I do.

And so all of the content is unique because all of the blog posts each blog post is unique because there’s new newly curated content from my blogger, which is why I like it because it’s all it’s not. You know, one of the problems that I’m sure you are aware of this Pablo is is when you only have you know, a few seconds services? How do you keep rewriting about that same service over and over and over again, right, it gets to be very difficult to do so. And that’s why I kind of got away from trying to do it that way. And I just let my blogger kind of run away with it and it creates over time, it might take a little bit more time to get the traction that I like. But once you do, you have this kind of broad width of topical relevancy to that to what your primary services are, if that makes sense. So that’s what I do if you don’t have that ability yet for, you know, for curating posts and that kind of stuff, then you can just rewrite stuff I’ve talked about having like one article written about tree removal, in my case, right. And then having that rewritten by five different, you know, as a rewrite project, as opposed to a new writing project, it’s a lot less expensive, and now I’ve got six versions of the original article. And so that’s something you could use if you’re going to be reproducing keyword plus location across multiple locations. Does that make sense? I don’t know if that was clear or not. Do you have any other tricks for that?

No. Okay.

All right. And the second part of that I can’t answer because that question went way too long. Anyway, so we’re going to move on if we have time, we’ll come back to it.

How Do You Boost A Blog Subdomain?

Bobby, Ricky Bobby says, we have a client that uses a subdomain for their blog, their main site gets decent traffic 50,000 per month. But the blog that is blogged out example gets less than 1000 per month. Okay, they are not going to change it to a subfolder anytime soon. I’ve recommended it obviously, any advice on what to do to boost the blog subdomain. They have a few dozen articles on there. And we were starting to work on the content consistency going forward. Now that we have our keyword research and recommendations thanks to mgyb.

My suggestion would be just to start using the subdomain a lot more right. Your syndication network should be attached to it. You should be blogging consistently. And that’s essentially what I was just talking about in my previous reply or response to Pavlo’s question.

About overtime, just that the blog will start to gain more traction. And you’ll see in Search Console, especially as you publish more content, your total impression number will start to go way, way up. Because you’ll start being recognized by Google for a lot more keyword combinations. So different types of search queries will give your site impressions. And that’s actually a really good content strategy to go in the Search Console, and identify keywords that are relevant, like search queries that triggered an impression for your blog, find those queries that are relevant, that aren’t ranking well yet, but are that are close, like, for example, maybe their position is, you know, somewhere between 11 and 20? Well, those are good keywords than to start optimizing for producing more content for linking back to the original piece of content, that kind of stuff to help try to boost those to page one so that you start getting more traffic. My point is, you know, adding more content to the blog is would be my first step. And then you could always do things like, you know, paid traffic to some of the posts, and then do remarketing so that you can always be bringing people back, which will probably get more visits to the blog, even repeat visits, which is really, really good for SEO also. So those would be my two recommendations from you.

Yeah, that’s the SEO shield, SEO Power shield. It’s all part of the system. So it’s not just getting the syndication properties. It’s not just logging. It’s not just syndicating your content. It’s powering up your shield is powering up your right your @ID. It’s powering up everything that has to do with your entity. It has to do with getting your schema out there. It has to do with whatever you need to do to make the content right. So link building comes into play so embeds come into play. More link building more embeds. Press releases, link building to press release a stack the press releases if you’re local, posting, stalking your posts link building into your posts, local images, guys.

We’ve created a whole entire system for you to do this. We just can’t give you the pieces here for free.

I mean, we got to go back to that. People. Yeah, you want the system. It’s in the paid groups. It’s in Semantic Mastery and the heavy hitter, join Semantic Mastery. And you get a really good price for joining heavy hitter. But I like we can’t give you everything we’d love to. But then there would be no Semantic Mastery, if we gave everything away for free, right, the people who have to sit and think and do all of these things have to be able to make some kind of living, right, some kind of money, get rewarded for all the effort that we put into doing all of this.

So having said that, it’s the system ads, ads work perfectly well. If you do them the way that we say do. Don’t just go out and run any kind of ads that may or may not work. Use the system that we’ve set up to make the ads work. Use the system which we’ve created the

We make everything available in mgyb.co. But if you get it without really understanding what it is that you’re doing, then you’re actually doing yourself more harm than good, because you’re leaving so much power on the table, so much power that you could be using.

And that’s a good point, you know, press releases. I’ve shown this in our Facebook group, the SEO tutorials semantic mastery Facebook group. Somebody was asking a question about press releases. Well, it was more of a comment about how they read some article on some blog about our press releases doesn’t work. And so they were just relaying that information. And there was started to the discussion, a thread. And one of the arguments that the person that posted the question or the statement really was stating was, well, you guys are all saying they work, but I want to see proof. Right. And so I just took a screenshot of Google Analytics of just one project that I’m working on, that shows referral traffic. And it showed press advantage, right, which is the press release releases that we primarily use. And it showed for a 30 day period, I think was 287 or 267 visits directly from press advantage. So don’t discredit that either, like again. And that’s all part of what we teach is like the same content strategy. So in your blog, that’s one of the best things one of the strategies that I use, consistently, almost exclusively now is we publish blog posts for clients. And as soon as a blog post is published, not always a one to one ratio, depending on what their budget is, but we will publish a press release to promote the blog post. So every time a new blog post gets published, we have a press release that links back to the blog post. So we’re driving traffic from press advantage domain as well as a lot of you know, other news-type sites when it does get traffic press advantage tends to drive the domain itself tends to drive quite a bit of traffic, but that sends traffic to that newly public blog posts plus it builds a bunch of links to that newly built, newly published blog post. So it’s really, really good for building up the SEO value of your blog as well as driving traffic to it, which is what your original question was, is how to get more traffic to the blog. So that’s another great part of this strategy that we teach. Yep. So it was a great question.

Is It Harder To Rank Gdocs Than A Gsite?

Babies up with a list of questions just broken up this time a little bit. So maybe you’re getting better. Hey, guys, if I want to rank some Google property only, say a G doc and a G site? Is it harder to rank g docs than a G site? I have. I mean, for I guess I haven’t really set up any specific tests for that. But I tend to just focus on the G site because it has a lot more functionality than a G doc. I don’t know if one is harder to rank than the other what say you, Marco

would rank better.

So let me see that again. If I want to write some Google property on these, the G site because it is going to get all the power from the embeds the duck might rank faster originally. I like at first, but then the G site for sure will take over. Yeah, no, yeah. But that’ll convert better, won’t it? The G site will convert the dot some of the dots will rank right away. But the Gsite over time, it’s so powerful. And you still get leads from that Virginia. Right? Yeah, he’s still occasionally. Yeah. So I mean, the proof is in the pudding.

Is It Faster To Rank Google Properties Than Building A Shield To A Non-Google Property?

Is it faster to rank Google properties than building a shield on a non-Google property? Of course, it is. It is. I mean, it’s crazy. Because you get well you can just here’s the thing, even if you’re ranked trying to rank a non-Google property like so you got a self-hosted website is your main money site. You can still do all the same things to the SEO shield. That and that you would if you made the Google site, your primary money website.

It doesn’t really matter that because that’s the whole point of the SEO show, right? It’s to create a shield around your money site. So all the things that you’re going to do to that g site, if the G site was your primary money site, which will rank very quickly, you can still do all of that to the G site as part of your SEO shield when you have a self-hosted money site. So a non-Google property money site, because you’re not going to actually touch your non-Google property money site. with anything other than the SEO shield, you’re doing all your nastiness out to the actual SEO shield. So my point is, why not have both unless it’s just you don’t want to go through the trouble of setting up a self-hosted website and all that other kind of stuff, which I understand that so for example, for some lead gen assets, there’s no reason for to set up WordPress stuff if you’re just doing like a single location, lead gen assets and you’re going to do a bunch of them. You can get away with 100% with just GMB assets and the SEO shield assets and you can use the G site as your primary money site and the GMB website the two of those countries if combined, and you’ll do incredibly well that way. So again, but if you’re going to be building a brand, there’s in my opinion is no reason not to create a money site because you can still rank the G site before the money site ever ranks and still get the benefit of it. But you’re building that brand back to a domain that you have more control over. That’s, that’s my take on it. What do you think?

You know, it’s still effective, Google will say no.

But we see all these lawsuits as we see all of these things where Google prefer Google, over anything else. And we’ve proven it’s not something that we’re just saying. And it’s not just us giving you theory and concepts and all of these ideas that are nothing. We’re giving you facts. We’re giving you something that we actually showed on a webinar, how Google trusts itself above anything else, and because it trusts itself over anything else, it passes PageRank to itself, and it ranks its properties over anybody else’s. We see this time.

And again. So it stands to reason that if you build up your Google ecosystem, it’s why we’re in there in the first place. The whole idea to start with was Dr. Gary and I said, Google prefers itself over anything else. And we went from there, we set up, let that’s the scientific method. You start out you have a hypothesis, it’s a sentence, then you say that you ask a question. Does Google really prefer itself and why? And then you go out to prove it. And we did. And not only did we prove it, but we also showed it live. It’s not as if we just go we don’t we don’t hide that we showed it. How it is that Google prefers itself over anything else. So guys, understanding this, why are you not taking all of that power? and using it use Google was my original concept and idea, use Google to rank in Google?

But at least to be said,

How Do You Determine What Link Buiding Campaign To Use And Determine The Competition?

there you go. Next question. Say you are getting into a new niche. How do you determine the link building? We should use it? What is low, medium, hard competition? Which tool? Do you determine the competition?

Well, I mean, for me, I use a number of different tools. So it really doesn’t matter as I use for bigger projects. Now I’m using a digital marketer toolbox which is network empires towards a bit expensive, but you can also use stuff like sem rush and things. But honestly, what I do just to be what I do is I figure out what I how much relevancy I need to create with you on page right first, that’s, that’s always what I do like to do, am I going to need a lot of content Am I going to need to have proper, you know, how much content do I think I’m going to need so I always start with on-page but once I figure out what my plan is what I think is going to meet or exceed or meet and exceed whatever the competitors are in a particular space, then I set out to build that as far as the link building and everything. I just go by with it.

Exactly what you know we always talk about here, which is I do a ton of content marketing from the site through the blog to a syndication network, total SEO shield built around everything, I do a lot of press releases, which always link back through the blog posts mainly back to the back to the site. So that’s where I get most of my link building done and besides link building to the directly to the SEO shield through MGYB. Now, for most projects that I’ll start with a big link building package, so you know, the competitive What is it the Nitro I guess we call it the Nitro kit or the Nitro pack, link building just to kind of seed everything right off the bat, but then I just get into a regular schedule of doing either embed or link building or embeds plus link building. And now and I usually go with just depending on how competitive it is most of the local stuff, I mean, isn’t super competitive. So I’ll usually go with the starter kit, link building package or embed, you know, embeds plus link building to the embeds and I’ll just do that on you know, monthly or sometimes even by me

Monthly schedule depending on whether, you know if I’m ranking really well or where I want to be, then I really there’s no reason to just keep hammering away at it except for maintenance link building, which is, you know like I said, might be once every six weeks or every two months, or something like that, but I just how many links are going to take as many as it takes, right?

So it’s just it’s about the initial setup and everything and waiting for that Google dance to stop, which sometimes goes on a lot longer. And I think that’s the entity established. Go and Marco can talk on this speak to this, but I think it’s Google trying to establish or understand the entity itself when you first set it up because I got a treat care project that I’ve been working on and sharing in the mastermind. That’s just taken a long, long time for me to establish the brand name, like, you know, really solid but I think I’m finally there and with that particular thing, but what I’m saying is once you start getting past that, and it took shit like 10 weeks, it’s been dancing a lot, but I’ve also been noticing really aggressive with the content marketing and link building through press releases and everything. So I think that’s kind of along the Google dance. My point is, once you get past the initial Google dance, then it’s a matter of just monitoring Can I continually content market or do content marketing, excuse me, so publishing content, but then it’s just a matter of link building and embed, to try to get the desired result that you want. I can’t tell you which levels to use, because I just told you my plan, which is just I come out swinging hard, you know, come out with a lot right up front, just to initially seed the whole ecosystem that I’ve built. And then from there, it’s just more of an ongoing the tortoise, the tortoise wins the race type thing where I just constantly publishing new content and constantly powering up the SEO shield in strategic locations to get the desired result. What do you say, Marco?

Ah, man, and

yeah, it’s an excellent question. But that’s, that’s the

How It is, isn’t it?

I’m not sure how much to add to that. Okay. Good enough. So we got another Marco on he says, Hey, I’ll ask Will you guys be offering a coupon on national pasta day? Maybe lots of people will be looking forward to that, too. If we did it for potato day, we’ll probably do for pasta day as well.

That’s another reason another excuse to send an email right?

out of that gate. Can you hang on a second? Because just to go back to that, on how to define the competition, or how do you know, I use Jeffrey Smith’s method. I look at competing pages. And his it’s pretty accurate. When you look that up in Google, right? When you Google it and you look at the results, that’s usually a pretty good indication of what you’re up against. So I mean, if you don’t have it, I suggest that you go for the ultimate SEO Bootcamp, the best on-page training that there is I don’t care who says what, I agree, he rocks it. He kills it.

And I’m doing a lot of AdWords or Google Ad stuff now to a lot actually. And that’s something else that I determine what my SEO competition is not always the case. But in the local niches that I’m in, it’s, it’s pretty accurate. If my cost per click for a particular keyword is quite high, like and it changes by location to right, then I know that that keyword is probably going to be a lot more competitive SEO wise as well. And I think that’s only logical. You know, and I don’t know that that’s universal across the board for all keywords. Some see, maybe cost per click is very, very high. But the SEO isn’t so competitive, I don’t know. I’m just saying like for Tree Service stuff, which is, again, primarily almost all that I’m doing now. If I’m in an area, like for example, I’ve got some lead gen stuff going on and like Oklahoma City, for example, for Tree Service stuff and then others, and Fairfax, Virginia, Fairfax, Virginia, I might pay $35 per click for tree removal near me, but I might only pay $12 in Oklahoma City. So my point is like the keywords it doesn’t necessarily mean that the SEO is going to be you know, three times harder in Fairfax, Virginia as it would Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, it just typically means that the higher the cost per click, what I found is the more people that are bidding on those keywords are also paying for SEO. So it typically means you’re dealing with more competition and I and again, I don’t know that that’s universal across the board, but I found that to be the case for the niches that I’m in

MGYB Support Question

Okay, next is Nigel what’s up. Nigel he says hey gents, you were the best I wanted to give you money but now I’m about to be potato paid. That said I need help to get an order in so I can over-deliver for a new client just need some guidance on getting this order correct. Let me know your best route to do this. Right. Okay, so he must be this is it down here. I’ll come back to Ricky’s comment here in a moment is literally timing is perfect with a discount. Thanks, Bradley. I will also be taking you up on the calendly booking we discussed weeks back, as I have been getting real referral interest from SEO for luxury real estate niche and believe the SEO shows 100%. But I feel that I need to use this first experience to document the onboarding process and get the solid testimonials from my referral client and then have them as an ambassador, which is already working for other services. Yeah, that’s fine. I do I made that offer to you, it still stands. So whenever if you’ve got the link, if not just pm me on Facebook, and I’ll give it to you again. Whatever guidance you can give me or who to speak will help. I also will send you a quick video explaining if that’s better. And just so you know, I did contact support first to ask and they told me to reply before I asked but didn’t hit reply or hear back excuse me email could have gone to spam or deemed such please let me know. Thanks, guys. Yeah, as I said, I don’t think we’re connected on Facebook. Just reach out to my pm.

And I’ll get something scheduled with you because I know we made that offer to a few months ago. Okay. And you’ve been around for a long time. So no problem. Thanks.

Ricky says not a question. But when people ask my boss, how many does it take to do X, he would say 10 to the 12th. That basically means 10 to the 12th power, which is a trillion. He used to tell us, it doesn’t matter how many it takes, when it works, you’ll know but be prepared to do as much as it takes. The only time that question is relevant is if you don’t believe in the strategy. If you know the strategy works, it doesn’t matter how many it takes. We’ll keep doing it until it works. that’s a great way that’s a much more extended version of as many as it takes, but I like it.

It’s pretty good. We should copy that somewhere.

Alright, so Marco says like I understand a little No, none of what you’re all talking about. But I think your free content can help and that your team seems pretty cool. Okay. Thanks, Marco. Appreciate that. Next, Ricky says to be clear, we won’t mind paying for the services.

What was he asking about? The National potato day, but I don’t know what it was.

Do you want I mean, we have training on the SEO shield, the SEO, the SEO shoulder the SEO power shield. I can’t remember the name of the website, Rob put that up for free. It doesn’t get any better than that you can join heavy hitter the free section, tons of resources in there man, tons of free resources for you guys. The free SEO group this you have tons of stuff feedback.

So you can go to a heavy hitter club slash SEO shield or just go to because he set up a redirect the SEO shield calm. And I’ll just put both of these on a notepad file so you can see them on screen.

The other one would be HTTP books, that’s too many.

And it was the SEO shield.com.

Okay, so if you got either one of those specifically Marco on who was asking the question, then you can download them or opt-in or whatever for SEO shield training, which will explain to you what it is why it works and not and you know where to get it and all that kind of stuff. Okay?

So those are our methods Oh, by the way, you can also go here I still didn’t get the damn solid training done because I had another project pop up in the past week that I had to attend to. But if you go to semantic mastery comm slash process, you can learn much more about these are the training videos that I did, specifically for the semantic mastery process, which is what the SEO shield is built around, and all the different components and why we do what we do doesn’t give you the how it gives you the way if you want to how I point you in the where to find out the how you know where to purchase the training products or join our mastermind, that kind of stuff to where you can get the how, or you can just go or we point you just to go get it done. It’s mgyb so that you can spend your time building your business and generating more revenue instead of doing the execution of these processes. That makes sense

So either any of these right here will help you to get a much better understanding of what it is that we’re talking about. Okay.

All right, we’re gonna keep moving.

Unknown Speaker 48:12 The blog subdomain site, should we do the shield that the blog? Should we do the shield to that blog subdomain or to the main domain? Well, depends on both right and the Brian period, right, which when you build that you build out the brand, the subdomain is a part of the brand. That’s right. But it’s separate that you can’t separate that. You just have to do it. Right. You have to connect one to the other. It’s right to get disconnected. Does that a disconnect? Is that a separation? Yeah, the parent. It has a bit has a child, the child has a subdomain that the child has a parent is the main domain.

Right? So again, your primary URL, in this case, I would make the root domain, but you would include the blog URL and the building right

Just like you would your syndication network properties, so that that’s also being included with all of your drive stack files that are being created your G site, everything you see your blog is going to be constantly linked to and you remember from your primary route, you’re going to have a link to your blog. So you’re going to be transferring power through that anyways, to back to your blog. But just remember, you’re probably my opinion, your primary domain, your root domain should be your primary asset for the SEO shield. But you include the blog subdomain URL in the additional URLs that you’re going to submit with the order like your syndication network properties, for example. Okay. So there you go.

How Would You Deal With A Competitor That Is Using A Location He Does Not Occupy?

Aaron says arrived late and needs some advice. One of my main competitors is using a location that he does not occupy the property sold last week and he was never located there. Is there something I should or could do about this? Thanks. Yeah, just out SEO and that’s what I would say. I mean, I know there are people that will tell you that Yeah, you can report that and all that kind of stuff. I don’t do that. I just think it’s better Karma I understand even if they’re spamming and they got you to know they’re winning just outperform them and that’s just I don’t do negative SEO I don’t report shit like that I just don’t do it. It’s up to you whether you want to you certainly can go that route I just don’t like to do it because you know what goes around comes around and I would hate for somebody to do that and I’ve had it done and I don’t like it so I wouldn’t want to do it to somebody else and that’s just my opinion. And your comment no you know you know I agree I out power That’s it. That’s it. That’s what we did with this guy. The new client that I took on exactly what we did. We just blasted him out of the waterman. Now we’re after first place for the keywords. He had the knowledge panel. No longer got the knowledge panel. That’s the type of thing you do. You don’t go negative. Just hit it harder.

Yeah.

Yeah, Austin says I’m gonna have a header club. If I join the mastermind. Is there a discount for either one? Yes. As far as well. Yeah.

If you’re in both there’s a discount, right Marco.

If you join the mastermind we will give you a steep discount for as long as you’re a mastermind member if you leave the mastermind then heavy hitter goes to regular price you can only have the discounted price and heavy hitter if you’re still in the mastermind.

There you go.

Austin dawn I’ve been trying to talk you into joining the mastermind for some time because I know you’re in the real estate industry as well. So

Jason says again Hi guys, I look forward to working with you all in the mastermind group I need to order the keywords in the shielded package as soon as possible and do it Jason quarter the damn thing and yeah if you got any questions Jason the mastermind you know you get a hell of a lot more access to us there’s no doubt and as we talked about I think I talked to you on the phone last week actually. Remember to use the question form and the mastermind you’ll know where it is because it’s in the mastermind. If not just post a question, I’ll send the link to you in the mastermind. But yeah, make sure you use that too because we’ll dig, you know, do deep dives and webinars for whatever it is that you want to discuss, have us look at as you know, analyze whatever it is you want to talk about. We do that stuff in the mastermind. So look forward to working with you as well. We’re almost out of time. We got a couple more.

What Value Do You See In A Set Of Twitter/Facebook Accounts That Retweets/Share Items Via IFTTT?

Next is Hey, fellas, what sort of value do you see and I set of Twitter Facebook accounts in the geographic area of my client that are used to be IFTTT to retweet share items coming from that client and probably other area businesses, so as not to look suspicious? Yeah, I mean, it may help. I don’t know, I just don’t go through all that trouble. It may.

I mean, I think social signals from real accounts where there’s a real activity that generates traffic, so click-throughs. Back to the target URL, not just these I don’t think just the sharing. I don’t know I haven’t done any testing on this. Like specific testing, social signals in several years now, many years now, probably five years. But traffic, referral traffic from social networks is very powerful for SEO. So if you had real people engaging with those profiles or pages or whatever it is that you’re trying to set up on social accounts, where there are real people engaging with that, even if it was automated on your end, but other people were engaging with the automated content, which can happen. And then they were actually clicking through and some of the posts that were being shared to those, you know, the links that were being shared and that kind of stuff that can have an absolute effect. There’s no question. I don’t know. And I may be wrong, but I don’t know that just social signals in and of themselves produce any results anymore towards SEO at all. But real active engaged accounts that those share URLs on those accounts will get clicks from real people. And that does help because it’s referral traffic. So I don’t know Do you have any different data than that, Marco?

No, no, I don’t.

So, it depends on what you’re doing then really, I mean, if you like, here’s an example where we were talking about David Nelson’s RSS masher technology, which can build these beautiful automated auto blog type sites that will start to generate real traffic because a lot of them are like new sites and we’ve got something that you know, we’re working with some somebody that we’re going to be bringing, perhaps bringing to you guys’ attention in the coming weeks or months. We’re starting to test with it now actually, but it’s something very similar. We’re RSS mashers that could complement it. But my point is creating like these traffic-generating sites that have relative route relevant content, either by topic or by location, that can be used to drive real traffic back to, you know, our own properties or own assets that we’re trying to rank or clients or whatever. And, you know, if you have built these sites that start to generate traffic and they start pushing clicks the nose that’s very valuable. So it’s the same thing with social media accounts, if you even if you automate it in some way, shape or form, as long as people are engaging with the content that is being generated by that profile or that page or that account, whatever, then I think there’s value to it. But it’s, you know, how much trouble going through to set all that up. That’s why I typically just don’t do it. Okay, okay. All right. So here’s the thing, Google said that it doesn’t take a look at social signals. Okay.

And this is where we have to separate the bullshit from us fact.

What are they really saying?

What they’re, it could be true that they don’t pay attention to the social signal itself, or a social signal, as whatever that concept could possibly mean. What Google pays attention to is a link because guess what, everything in Google the foundational principles in Google are links. Everything is built around makes the button cannot get the variables that it needs for the algorithms unless it travels. And traveling quotes unless it goes through a link from one server to another. That’s what’s happening. So let’s look at this the way that you’re supposed to look at it. Let’s look at this, as I always tell people, scientists, and what’s actually happening. Google is sending a signal from its server to another server through a link a hyperlink into an HTML hyperlink. It’s going through an IP, whatever it’s going through, it’s going to that server, and it’s looking for something specific. It could be that it’s going to as a social media property, whatever the hell it is, that is going to, it’s been coded to pick up this I call it a signal. Let’s call it donuts. It’s been coded to pick up donuts through those links. And it’s been coded to look at Brown donuts, white donuts, jelly, doughnuts, whatever chocolate-covered doughnuts, whatever you want to call it. All right.

And if it finds those, it brings them back and tells Google Hey, I thought, it fills in on the variables, hey, I found these. Now, let’s go back instead of donuts, let’s just call it, they looked at the LinkedIn, they saw a person, click on the link, the person clicked on the link that and they went to your website went to what Google’s Following this, they went to your website, and they filled out a contact form, you think that isn’t gonna trigger any part of Google at all? Do you think that’s not gonna matter?

Call it whatever you want, call it. Fuck Google, like I always say metadata will say they call it what you want. But Google is seeing that whole client transaction from beginning to end. And you really think that doesn’t make a difference when Google sees that transaction goes take place from beginning to end.

Looking at everything looking, especially on YouTube, and in Google ads, because we know that Google pays special attention to the people that they send you. Do you really believe that these don’t matter, call it what you want this I call it a social signal. call it anything you want. We know from our testing from everything we do from everything that we’ve been covering from all of our client work from all of our businesses, guys, you got to understand that we’re not just Semantic Mastery. Marco isn’t just mathematically I have businesses, I’ve other businesses that I run. I have clients that I work with, I have so many things that I’m into, I don’t know how I have time in the day to do them all. But this is Semantic Mastery, just a small part of what I do. But everything that we show in Semantic Mastery everything that we give, you have to hang out, heavy hitter club, the free SEO group, and Facebook, every bit of information that we share has been tested because I’m not gonna risk my businesses. I am not going to risk my client’s businesses. On theory. We go we set up the theory we formally the hypothesis, we ask the question, we go out and use the scientific method. It’s very simple. And then we print back the information that we said, we know that Google is tracking that person. Why in the world would there be a pixel? Otherwise?

Sweet?

Alright, so last is not really well, I guess it is a question, Aaron’s comes back is replying to his previous comment about a competitor, not trying to be whiny. But when people are deceptive, it makes it bad for all of us if a business doesn’t have a real address, shouldn’t they be sad? Yeah, no, I agree, Aaron. And here’s the thing. If you’re talking about a storefront type of business that is using a fake address, then I would, I mean, maybe I’m wrong here. But I would think that it would get reported by a pissed off customer who went to Google Maps to try to go to the storefront business, and they go to a building that’s empty if that makes sense. So I’ve always talked about if you’re going to do spam Google Maps listings that you should only be doing surface area just type or excuse me, surface area business type of Google Maps listings, because, you know, like a contractor, plumber that goes to other people’s, you know, to people’s homes or buildings, or offices or whatever to do plumbing work, they can hide their address. So nobody’s gonna is clicking driving directions. So I don’t know, Aaron, if it’s if you’re talking about a service area type of business where customers should be going to the location, then I would expect it to be terminated rather quickly because people cussed pissed off, customers would report it, unless it’s one of those odd situations where it can be a service area business, and a local business or storefront business. And then if that’s the case, where primarily that’s a store, if it’s a service area business, then that you know, might be able to get away with it. So I don’t know again, I just still don’t do it. I still don’t report other listings. I don’t negative SEO. I just don’t do it. Again. It’s a karma thing and I just don’t want to invite that into my life even though I’ve had it happen to me in the past I’ve never felt vengeful enough to want to do it to others that’s just my opinion so again you’re entitled to yours and I’m not knocking you for saying that you want to report it fucking report it then you know that’s, that’s on you buddy. And I’m not knocking you for it. I’m just telling you I wouldn’t want to do it myself. That’s all I’m saying. any follow up comments to that Marco? Karma is a bitch call it what you will. Anything that you do can and will come back to me and look, go, and power up your shit.

That’s my recommendation you do whatever the fuck you want. I mean, you’re a grown person. I can’t tell you what to do.

But I definitely would not report shit I would just go get rid of it out the power that’s what you do. Not negative never ever. I’ve never ever done I’ve come really close.

Some piss me off that much where I was gonna blast him and make him appear for like some porn term. But then I

You take a breath and say, okay, it’s okay. It’s okay. Let’s just move on and make money. Yeah, I agree that energy can be spent making money.

So, again, they’re good questions. But yeah, no, you could encourage a pissed off customer to report them. I don’t know. All right. Thanks, guys. We’ll see you all next week.

We appreciate everybody being here. And don’t forget the potato. My rankings are your coupon code for SEO shields for 25% off. It’s only I think for the next two or three days. So take advantage of we can see you guys all right later.

Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 301 published first on your-t1-blog-url

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Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 301

Click on the video above to watch Episode 301 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.

The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

Announcement

We’re live. Ah, what’s up, everybody? Welcome to Episode 301 of Hump Day Hangouts, where we teach you some kung fu moves to get your rankings up there into other websites out there in the search engine. But that’s great. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts. Today is the 19th of August and this is your weekly meeting for anything SEO and good stuff and marketing and everything that has to do with that related so welcome to that before we dive into some of the good stuff that we have for today, just gonna go through the list of the awesome people that we have here. Nicole, what’s up Marco? How are you doing, man?

You see it. Now let me tell you about it.

That’s how it makes Groundhog Day. This is my life. I can’t help it. And as I always say, don’t hate the player. Hate the game, as I like this place.

Again, that’s it. If you don’t play the game as you should, then maybe you should start looking in the right place. When you’re starting out in the right place Hump Day Hangout, so here we go. But you go get some.

Let’s go. What’s up, Chris? How are you doing, man? Yeah, like I’m looking jealous over the marketplace. I don’t know. Like we had rained the last day. So like, not too excited to your brother. Well, everything else is good. And actually, I’m a little bit excited, but I cannot talk too much about it. Because I’ve been working on something for POFU.

But I think you mentioned a couple of things about that later. Yeah, for sure. For sure. What’s up, Bradley? How are you doing, man? Good. I’m good. I’m just trying to do what Adam usually does and drop these links on to the chatbox, but other than I’m good, glad to be here. Yeah, by the way, we’re missing a core, a core member of

The team in fact we’re not able to function we’re just basically barely scraping by which is because he’s like out there running the woods doing his stuff. So what’s up, Adam? So what’s up everybody? Welcome to Episode 301.

And we’re going to be diving into question soon but before we go there a couple of things number one people live is coming in hot, he’s going to be awesome. I’m really excited about getting that well on our way is going to be our third installment or the third slot live event although this one’s not going to be in person now which guy that said this is not live so he’s supposed to live online but if you want to go and get your virtual ticket, your POFU Live ticket to be attending to POFU Live, go to pofulive.com. It’s an event that we put every single year for the past three years, and it’s been pretty awesome. People are getting a lot of stuff usually stuff that we don’t share anywhere else. Just info for live. So go there.

Go grab your ticket, we’re going to be doing some fun stuff for VIP ticket holders and all of that good stuff. So go to pofulive.com. And I also believe that we have some sell happening right now. And mgyb. And we guys, yeah, and it’s in celebration of national potato day. Hey, go there.

So I dropped the coupon code in the chatbox below. But it’s if you go to mgyb.co is 25% off of our ys drive stacks for the next I guess three days and the coupon code is potato, my rankings all one word, potato, my rankings, all one word as the coupon code gets you 25% off of our ys drive stacks. There you go. You’re gonna use me, excuse me the SEO shield, which includes a drive stack but it’s the SEO shield orders. That’s what it’s for. There you go. Awesome. And by the way, Michael does

People need to buy right away as they can buy right now. And they need to submit the order right now how How’s that? How’s that working? They have a window so that they can submit basically, you know if somebody is watching this tomorrow, and they want to take advantage of the offer, but they don’t probably didn’t have data of their clients right away, what do you suggest?

Well, we understand that we understand that people can sometimes get the information right away. We understand that people need time, right? For whatever reason it is, or maybe they just want to take advantage of the coupons. Well, that’s fine. They can go ahead, buy, and then submit the information later. Now the problem is if you wait too long if you wait past 30 days, what we’re going to do is we’re simply going to refund you because we can’t let it sit there 5678 months until whatever it is that you decide to do.

So get it, hold on to it go ahead and take advantage of the offer. So that the coupon doesn’t expire, right because once it does, we can’t give you the offer.

Then get gather the information. That’s fine. Don’t wait more than 30 days because then we will refund you no question. It gets done on our we know that if you don’t submit your information within 30 days, you’re likely not to do it. And we’ll have to refund you anyway. So we might as well get rid of the problem to start with. Gotcha. So people can buy today get get get an advantage, take advantage of the coupon. And then you said, you know, submit the details over the next 30 days, basically. That’s awesome. All right. Cool. So and by the way, if you have more SEO needs, if you have more delivery needs, you know, because you shouldn’t be doing the grunt work, let us do it for you go to mgyb.co we have that sale going on. But there’s a lot of good stuff there. A lot of stuff that allegedly doesn’t work. But you know, the proof is in the pudding. We have a bunch of case studies there and more coming. So that’s going to be pretty awesome as well.

Yep. Anything that you guys want to add on? Let’s do this. Let’s do it. Actually, we ran over last week by like, almost 10 minutes because I just lost track of time. So you guys are gonna crack the whip on me today. I tight I’ve got an appointment actually have to get to so. Alright, uh, let me grab the screen.

All right, sweet.

Do you guys see my screen? Okay. Yeah. All right, we’re gonna start with

Is It Safe To Convert Gsites To Its New Format?

Igor. Hey Brad. The NSM team just got an email about Google changing the old g sites. Is it safe to follow to convert them to the new g site? I have been? I’ve done about a dozen myself this week. Seriously, I haven’t even had VA is doing it. I’ve just because I’ve been tightening up projects and stuff. And so I’ve just gone in and click the button and made sure everything came out. Okay, Mark, I know you had some comments about that. We chatted about this yesterday. Yeah, Google has been really nice about it. They giving us everything we need. They’re just moving everything over for us all you have to just click yes it. I mean, how good is that doesn’t get any better than that. Now, you will

Hang on a second, well people do have to be careful about is that it doesn’t turn into a 302. So please monitor your URLs, right use a redirect checker every once in a while to see what it is that Google is doing it because they get sneaky. Remember what they did with geo GL? Yeah, it was a 301. Then without any warning, it turned into a 302. Then they offer Firebase, which was a three or two that you had to turn into a 301. gotta be really careful. Google is really sneaky, right? Do they change other URLs from 301 to three or two from

what do you call it? From a meta refresh, to attend meta refresh, where then it’s useless. So the only thing that I tell people is you got to be really careful. Keep track of your URLs, keep checking them from time to time. And of course, don’t you do it your time should be way more valuable than to be inserting the URLs into a checker to see if it’s a 301 or three or two, you should have a VA, doing all this menial work so you can concentrate on your business, growing your business, making more money.

That’s the way it’s supposed to be.

Yeah, what I was gonna say was a couple of things, one you brought up. Gotta be careful with Google because they’re tricky about how they’ll change stuff and make them three Oh, twos without even knowing. Yep, for example, what the old g sites I don’t know, I haven’t even checked it on the new one yet. With you know, once it’s been converted to the new ones, but I can’t imagine it would have changed. But if you left the trailing slash off of the end of the URL, then if you checked it in a redirect checker, it would throw to you the final URL with the trailing slash at the end of it. So like, if you’re looking at a home page of the G site, and you were building links to the URL without the trailing slash, then you were actually getting a 302 redirect to the home page, which I thought was crazy.

But second of all, the new g sites are a lot like page builders are now so they’re like, you know, modular and like kind of like a block editor. And there it just is a lot more intuitive than the old funky g sites. And I don’t know why I’ve wanted them for so long because it’s actually a pretty good editor now and it’s a good interface. So,

How Many Videos Are Needed For A YouTube Silo To Be Effective?

okay, let’s see, I got lost my track where I was let me try this again must have been from last week. Okay, so the next question was from when building YouTube silos? How many videos should be in a silo to be impactful to move the needle? I know it depends on the competition. But what should you start with five 750? And should we focus on building more in the silo or more silos? And if more silos, how many in the silo?

I got a little bit of a headache from that question.

It just depends on it depends on you know, how competitive the keyword is that you’re trying to rank for. So whatever your top-level keyword is the top of silo keyword that you’re trying to rank for. That’s really going to be what determines how much depth you should add to it, like how many videos essentially how many other keywords, variations, longer tail versions, that sort of thing, are you going to actually target within that particular silo? It’s just like doing it on your website, right? It’s the same principle. It’s the

How much is it going to take? I can’t tell you that because I don’t know what keyword is that you’re targeting. I don’t know what the competition looks like. It’s going to take as many as it takes. So really just it’s going to it’s very much like doing a silo on your website. That’s why we talk about theme mirroring, and all that kind of stuff because it’s, it’s all the same. Creating a YouTube silo is the exact same structure. And the mat, whether or not it ranks is going to depend on you know, a lot of factors, not just the silo structure itself, but having additional keywords in there more depth to that silo adds builds more relevancy, more topical relevancy, and there are more linking opportunities from within that silo as well. So it kind of helps to power up the entire silo, the whole playlist, if you’re adding more videos that are relevant. Does that make sense?

Anybody want to comment on that before I go to the second part of that, yeah, what you start with is more than one right? Absolutely.

And then it’s just how far you need to go to get to where you want to be. Period.

Yep. So how many are going to take as many as it takes? I was like a lot. We used to get questions all the time about syndication networks, how many posts Do you think it’s going to take for me to rank for whatever keyword now, we could always have the same answer as many as it takes to take. Yeah. So the next one is it should be focused on building more in the silo or more silos and more silos. Now, remember, guys, keep it simple. You know, you can take a top-level silo keyword, and you can create a bunch of subcategories from closely very closely related keywords that are, you know, longer tailed versions are the next level down, so to speak of that main keyword, but is it necessary to do so? That’s the point-like, again, I use this example more recently, uh, you know, I’m pretty much all I’m doing now is Tree Service stuff for SEO and, and lead generation and that kind of stuff. And for the longest time, I’ve always built a simple silo structure at least for several years.

I used to do complex silos. But I just got over doing that because most local, most local type businesses don’t need that. But and I don’t know that you’re targeting local, but I’m just using this as an example.

I used to always silo with the simple site for the last few years with simple silo structure for Tree Service stuff, Tree Service being the primary keyword. So essentially the homepage, but then the silo structure would be tree trimming would be one silo. Another one that would be tree removal. And then usually a third one, which would be additional services or arborist tree services, if it was a certified arborist on the, for the contractor that the site was for. And I saw I’d have three silos on the site, basically. But what I found was Google actually really considers tree trimming, Tree Removal tree cutting Tree Service, they’re all synonyms. So I could probably and I haven’t tested it just yet. I’ve got a couple of projects and I’m waiting on some infrastructure to be built and then I’m going to be testing that. But I could probably go with just one silo essentially tree services. And you because all that content is the same, however, I could create like, essentially subcategories, which would have been the silos of what I’ve already been what I’ve been doing right. So tree removal, tree trimming, perhaps arborist services, but if why overcomplicate things, why make the build more complex? Why make the content, you know, the interlinking between pieces of content, everything more complex than it needs to be, if I could just have a flat site with one silo tree services, and just have all the content, you know, properly structured and get the same results? Why would I go through all of that and so that my answer to you about the YouTube stuff is the same thing? I would rather focus on one silo and add more depth to it and have that whole silo be a lot more powerful than have a whole bunch of different silos with the month that is very, very specific or it’s kind of hard to get, you know, additional supporting it Now if you’ve got the main category with a bunch of different subcategories and it’s logical to do so. Then I would add additional you know, add create additional playlist and don’t forget, you can have one video and more than one playlist, so I mean, it

If you have a kind of like a parent category silo, the video can be in that playlist. But then you could also have like subcategory silos or playlists that want. You know, the video can also be in one of those, if that makes sense. So, but just don’t overcomplicate things is my point, especially when it comes to YouTube? It’s really unnecessary. Does anybody want to comment on that?

I totally agree.

Okay. Very good. And I think a lot of a lot of times we try, we try to be smart as SEOs and try to you know, well, if I get really creative with my silo structures, I can get better results and it just ends up being a lot of unnecessary work. So just keep that in mind.

How Do You Set Up A Sales Tax In A WooCommerce Site?

Jason says, Hey, guys, I’m working on an e-commerce site and I hearing rumors that I need to set up sales tax for every state in the U.S. if we sell something. Do you guys know how this would work with WooCommerce? I do not because I don’t do anything eCommerce related. Perhaps Marco might.

Do you know anything about WooCommerce being in taxes and stuff?

I don’t know, like, I don’t know how you either,

like I do, I have worked on WooCommerce websites, but that’s not the part of my job that I do.

The part of what I do on that is I get traffic, the owner is kind of like the one in charge of all that guy charges, taxes and I know, on the land, like each state has separate rules, right? for buying and selling land and how much is is due at the closing. But that all gets done, it gets taken out of the total when you close the deal. It’s like you never see it because it’s taken out. So like how much or whether each state is responsible, whether you’re responsible for collecting taxes, what you need to do is go and contact the tax attorney and have them tell you what it is that you’re responsible for, whether it’s each state, your state, what the rules are in each state because only a tax attorney would be the one to answer that question properly. I’m not a tax attorney. I’m not a tax expert by any means.

So try that. I can’t really help with that. Yeah, neither can I just don’t do any sort of e-commerce stuff. So I couldn’t help with that either. Sorry. Jason. Looks like Jason says he just joined the mastermind. That’s awesome. So he says that, by the way, welcome, Jason. He says I have five websites that I need to do this syndication networks with, I need to do two of them as soon as possible. Well, I’ll tell you what, as a mastermind member, you do get benefits, you know, so contact support, make about mgyb.co. So go to support@mgyb.co after you’ve placed your orders, and, you know, mentioned that your new mastermind members and see if you can get two of them expedited, I don’t know that we typically do that but I know mastermind members do get benefits. So Marco’s, that’s something that we can do is try to get it pushed a little bit.

Ah, we have other mastermind members. Also order. So how can we push everything? Um, yeah, that’s why I was asking. I said if we can do something we’ll try to but I don’t know that we can but what do you think? I mean if it’s just syndication if it’s just a brand that networks you know, they get pushed out and they’ll get delivered as soon as they’re done that’s how Jason yeah absolutely order right away. But we are improving the system. We’re making everything better we’re making things better right we’re training our team we’re trying to make things more fluid speedier so it’s not as if we’re just sitting there and not make trying to make things better we are

are you go and I know you guys have been working hard on streamlining stuff and all that so it will get better Pablo says Hey guys, I’m still confused with correct structure for city pages post question. One from for now top of silo on my money site is a broad category without local modifiers. If I need to cover two or more counties, I need to make each county like a separate silo or county can go after a broad topic and link back to the main silo topic example. This is one of those questions site slash Miami or slight slash appraiser Miami based on this question, how would posting look like okay?

Should You Make A Separate Silo For County And Connect It To The Main Silo?

Pavlo, I can tell you this you know I cover how I do how I reconcile those odd issues that I’ve talked about this many times and I cover this extensively in the mastermind I can’t do it here. I can give you a very high overview like a conceptual overview of it, but I can’t get into the nitty-gritty because it’s something that I only cover in our mastermind, but I use tags for creating location-based silos in a WordPress website. Okay, so I use the category structure for my topical silos. But then I use tags in a very specific way to create my location-based silos so that there are no conflicts with URLs are trying to share location-based stuff categories across topical silos or vice versa topical silos across location-based categories. Does that make sense? I don’t know if that makes sense or not. But I think you’re talking about the oddities that occur with the URL conflicts that occur when you try to use the same subcategory across multiple categories because it’s going to automatically append like a dash two dash three for each time you duplicate that subcategory into another category. WordPress is gonna automatically append to it like a dash two dash three because it has to have another permalink. And if that’s what you’re talking about, I learned to three years ago, probably three years ago now to build silo structure for location-based silos using tags and it’s a specific hierarchy, the way that I stack those tags and everything else. That’s as far as I can tell you right now.

The other way to do it was if you were going to if because remember if you’re talking about complex silo structure, which you are in this case, right? Because you’ve got, you know, topical silos and then you want to go sub silo from that, right? So subcategories that you want to add additional content pages to or even posts at that level. Right that that can create some issues. That’s why I recommend if you, if you can get away with just doing a simple silo, then and using just the post name, permalink structure, then you can stack you know, you can cross things, subcategories and other categories and things where the URL isn’t going to be displayed and it shows as just domain comm slash the post slug at that level, and that’s okay. But again, so So I mean, if you can get away with that, then that’s the way that I would do it. But again, I can’t talk specific can’t show you the structure, how to do tag-based location silos or location silos using tags here on Hump Day Hangouts. I couldn’t talk about it the mastermind though, but if you understand tags and how to use tag pages in WordPress, you ought to be able to figure it out as my point. So you want to comment on that at all, more.

The only comment that I’m going to make is that there are things that we reserved for our paid groups only. And it’s not fair for us to give it away here in a free group. If people are paying for it, people are paying for all this information. So you people who are here free, although we try to answer as much as possible, you do have to understand is that there are some things that we can’t answer, but we can answer them in the paid groups. That’s just the way it is. It’s the way we’ve always done it. We have given people what nearly six years of free information, actionable information, people have built businesses from the information we give away for free. So imagine what we give away in the free groups.

Yeah, the paid group you mean, um, but yeah. So probably just to get back to your URL question here. See, what I was talking about here is if you take a look at how you’ve got URL one versus URL to my point is if you’ve got like appraiser is your is like one of your services and if appraiser I don’t know what your Real Estate or what, but let’s just say it real estate. And so one of your categories is an appraiser and maybe one of them is home inspections, right?

Or Yeah, something like that, right, let’s just say appraiser and inspectors, let’s just use that just to show two different service categories. If you were to try to duplicate Miami, originally, if you set it up as a subcategory, as an appraiser, then if you tried to create Miami subcategory in the inspectors’ category, or home inspector category, or home inspections, category, whatever, however you name it, then you would end up having that weird URL structure. That said, it doesn’t really matter if you’re using the post name permalink structure because you don’t see it unless you’re looking at source code anyways. So it’s not a big deal. But again, it creates some conflicts that I just don’t like to try to live with when I’m building the site. It’s not really clear to me that way. That’s why I like to use tags. I don’t know if that was specifically a question, but that’s the way I interpreted it. So next is he says based on this, how should what should posting look like?

For each county, it should be the same topic or keyword, but content should be rewritten, including local modifiers. Yeah, I mean, that’s what I do. That’s why I have my blogger actually create. When we’re doing keyword plus location-specific content, my blogger just creates or curates a blog post that is targeting something very closely related to that topic. It doesn’t always necessarily have to be 100% then but she has my I have one blogger that handles all of this stuff for me now because she’s really good at it. She will curate top you know, stories that are topically relevant as well as something about the local area that you know, for the location modifier that we’re targeting. And then there will be a paragraph at the bottom that has a strong call to action and it has you know, a strong mention of the product or service or the services that would pertain to what the theme of the post was about. So my point is like, for example, in the tree clients I have don’t do landscaping work. However, landscaping is closely related to Tree Service stuff. Right. And so because of that, a lot of times there will be blog posts that are written about Lance a yard or keeping their somebody’s resident, you know, homes, the landscape beautiful or whatever. And then there will be a paragraph at the bottom about, you know, tree services, tree trimming, tree pruning, whatever that will kind of tie that concept to the landscaping, right? And then we just optimize the SEO title for it. And then use the tag-based silos and all of that, and it’s it works really, really well, especially when you use the SEO shield and the G site and you learn how to push keyword relevancy through backlink profile to your G site. So that’s what I do.

And so all of the content is unique because all of the blog posts each blog post is unique because there’s new newly curated content from my blogger, which is why I like it because it’s all it’s not. You know, one of the problems that I’m sure you are aware of this Pablo is is when you only have you know, a few seconds services? How do you keep rewriting about that same service over and over and over again, right, it gets to be very difficult to do so. And that’s why I kind of got away from trying to do it that way. And I just let my blogger kind of run away with it and it creates over time, it might take a little bit more time to get the traction that I like. But once you do, you have this kind of broad width of topical relevancy to that to what your primary services are, if that makes sense. So that’s what I do if you don’t have that ability yet for, you know, for curating posts and that kind of stuff, then you can just rewrite stuff I’ve talked about having like one article written about tree removal, in my case, right. And then having that rewritten by five different, you know, as a rewrite project, as opposed to a new writing project, it’s a lot less expensive, and now I’ve got six versions of the original article. And so that’s something you could use if you’re going to be reproducing keyword plus location across multiple locations. Does that make sense? I don’t know if that was clear or not. Do you have any other tricks for that?

No. Okay.

All right. And the second part of that I can’t answer because that question went way too long. Anyway, so we’re going to move on if we have time, we’ll come back to it.

How Do You Boost A Blog Subdomain?

Bobby, Ricky Bobby says, we have a client that uses a subdomain for their blog, their main site gets decent traffic 50,000 per month. But the blog that is blogged out example gets less than 1000 per month. Okay, they are not going to change it to a subfolder anytime soon. I’ve recommended it obviously, any advice on what to do to boost the blog subdomain. They have a few dozen articles on there. And we were starting to work on the content consistency going forward. Now that we have our keyword research and recommendations thanks to mgyb.

My suggestion would be just to start using the subdomain a lot more right. Your syndication network should be attached to it. You should be blogging consistently. And that’s essentially what I was just talking about in my previous reply or response to Pavlo’s question.

About overtime, just that the blog will start to gain more traction. And you’ll see in Search Console, especially as you publish more content, your total impression number will start to go way, way up. Because you’ll start being recognized by Google for a lot more keyword combinations. So different types of search queries will give your site impressions. And that’s actually a really good content strategy to go in the Search Console, and identify keywords that are relevant, like search queries that triggered an impression for your blog, find those queries that are relevant, that aren’t ranking well yet, but are that are close, like, for example, maybe their position is, you know, somewhere between 11 and 20? Well, those are good keywords than to start optimizing for producing more content for linking back to the original piece of content, that kind of stuff to help try to boost those to page one so that you start getting more traffic. My point is, you know, adding more content to the blog is would be my first step. And then you could always do things like, you know, paid traffic to some of the posts, and then do remarketing so that you can always be bringing people back, which will probably get more visits to the blog, even repeat visits, which is really, really good for SEO also. So those would be my two recommendations from you.

Yeah, that’s the SEO shield, SEO Power shield. It’s all part of the system. So it’s not just getting the syndication properties. It’s not just logging. It’s not just syndicating your content. It’s powering up your shield is powering up your right your @ID. It’s powering up everything that has to do with your entity. It has to do with getting your schema out there. It has to do with whatever you need to do to make the content right. So link building comes into play so embeds come into play. More link building more embeds. Press releases, link building to press release a stack the press releases if you’re local, posting, stalking your posts link building into your posts, local images, guys.

We’ve created a whole entire system for you to do this. We just can’t give you the pieces here for free.

I mean, we got to go back to that. People. Yeah, you want the system. It’s in the paid groups. It’s in Semantic Mastery and the heavy hitter, join Semantic Mastery. And you get a really good price for joining heavy hitter. But I like we can’t give you everything we’d love to. But then there would be no Semantic Mastery, if we gave everything away for free, right, the people who have to sit and think and do all of these things have to be able to make some kind of living, right, some kind of money, get rewarded for all the effort that we put into doing all of this.

So having said that, it’s the system ads, ads work perfectly well. If you do them the way that we say do. Don’t just go out and run any kind of ads that may or may not work. Use the system that we’ve set up to make the ads work. Use the system which we’ve created the

We make everything available in mgyb.co. But if you get it without really understanding what it is that you’re doing, then you’re actually doing yourself more harm than good, because you’re leaving so much power on the table, so much power that you could be using.

And that’s a good point, you know, press releases. I’ve shown this in our Facebook group, the SEO tutorials semantic mastery Facebook group. Somebody was asking a question about press releases. Well, it was more of a comment about how they read some article on some blog about our press releases doesn’t work. And so they were just relaying that information. And there was started to the discussion, a thread. And one of the arguments that the person that posted the question or the statement really was stating was, well, you guys are all saying they work, but I want to see proof. Right. And so I just took a screenshot of Google Analytics of just one project that I’m working on, that shows referral traffic. And it showed press advantage, right, which is the press release releases that we primarily use. And it showed for a 30 day period, I think was 287 or 267 visits directly from press advantage. So don’t discredit that either, like again. And that’s all part of what we teach is like the same content strategy. So in your blog, that’s one of the best things one of the strategies that I use, consistently, almost exclusively now is we publish blog posts for clients. And as soon as a blog post is published, not always a one to one ratio, depending on what their budget is, but we will publish a press release to promote the blog post. So every time a new blog post gets published, we have a press release that links back to the blog post. So we’re driving traffic from press advantage domain as well as a lot of you know, other news-type sites when it does get traffic press advantage tends to drive the domain itself tends to drive quite a bit of traffic, but that sends traffic to that newly public blog posts plus it builds a bunch of links to that newly built, newly published blog post. So it’s really, really good for building up the SEO value of your blog as well as driving traffic to it, which is what your original question was, is how to get more traffic to the blog. So that’s another great part of this strategy that we teach. Yep. So it was a great question.

Is It Harder To Rank Gdocs Than A Gsite?

Babies up with a list of questions just broken up this time a little bit. So maybe you’re getting better. Hey, guys, if I want to rank some Google property only, say a G doc and a G site? Is it harder to rank g docs than a G site? I have. I mean, for I guess I haven’t really set up any specific tests for that. But I tend to just focus on the G site because it has a lot more functionality than a G doc. I don’t know if one is harder to rank than the other what say you, Marco

would rank better.

So let me see that again. If I want to write some Google property on these, the G site because it is going to get all the power from the embeds the duck might rank faster originally. I like at first, but then the G site for sure will take over. Yeah, no, yeah. But that’ll convert better, won’t it? The G site will convert the dot some of the dots will rank right away. But the Gsite over time, it’s so powerful. And you still get leads from that Virginia. Right? Yeah, he’s still occasionally. Yeah. So I mean, the proof is in the pudding.

Is It Faster To Rank Google Properties Than Building A Shield To A Non-Google Property?

Is it faster to rank Google properties than building a shield on a non-Google property? Of course, it is. It is. I mean, it’s crazy. Because you get well you can just here’s the thing, even if you’re ranked trying to rank a non-Google property like so you got a self-hosted website is your main money site. You can still do all the same things to the SEO shield. That and that you would if you made the Google site, your primary money website.

It doesn’t really matter that because that’s the whole point of the SEO show, right? It’s to create a shield around your money site. So all the things that you’re going to do to that g site, if the G site was your primary money site, which will rank very quickly, you can still do all of that to the G site as part of your SEO shield when you have a self-hosted money site. So a non-Google property money site, because you’re not going to actually touch your non-Google property money site. with anything other than the SEO shield, you’re doing all your nastiness out to the actual SEO shield. So my point is, why not have both unless it’s just you don’t want to go through the trouble of setting up a self-hosted website and all that other kind of stuff, which I understand that so for example, for some lead gen assets, there’s no reason for to set up WordPress stuff if you’re just doing like a single location, lead gen assets and you’re going to do a bunch of them. You can get away with 100% with just GMB assets and the SEO shield assets and you can use the G site as your primary money site and the GMB website the two of those countries if combined, and you’ll do incredibly well that way. So again, but if you’re going to be building a brand, there’s in my opinion is no reason not to create a money site because you can still rank the G site before the money site ever ranks and still get the benefit of it. But you’re building that brand back to a domain that you have more control over. That’s, that’s my take on it. What do you think?

You know, it’s still effective, Google will say no.

But we see all these lawsuits as we see all of these things where Google prefer Google, over anything else. And we’ve proven it’s not something that we’re just saying. And it’s not just us giving you theory and concepts and all of these ideas that are nothing. We’re giving you facts. We’re giving you something that we actually showed on a webinar, how Google trusts itself above anything else, and because it trusts itself over anything else, it passes PageRank to itself, and it ranks its properties over anybody else’s. We see this time.

And again. So it stands to reason that if you build up your Google ecosystem, it’s why we’re in there in the first place. The whole idea to start with was Dr. Gary and I said, Google prefers itself over anything else. And we went from there, we set up, let that’s the scientific method. You start out you have a hypothesis, it’s a sentence, then you say that you ask a question. Does Google really prefer itself and why? And then you go out to prove it. And we did. And not only did we prove it, but we also showed it live. It’s not as if we just go we don’t we don’t hide that we showed it. How it is that Google prefers itself over anything else. So guys, understanding this, why are you not taking all of that power? and using it use Google was my original concept and idea, use Google to rank in Google?

But at least to be said,

How Do You Determine What Link Buiding Campaign To Use And Determine The Competition?

there you go. Next question. Say you are getting into a new niche. How do you determine the link building? We should use it? What is low, medium, hard competition? Which tool? Do you determine the competition?

Well, I mean, for me, I use a number of different tools. So it really doesn’t matter as I use for bigger projects. Now I’m using a digital marketer toolbox which is network empires towards a bit expensive, but you can also use stuff like sem rush and things. But honestly, what I do just to be what I do is I figure out what I how much relevancy I need to create with you on page right first, that’s, that’s always what I do like to do, am I going to need a lot of content Am I going to need to have proper, you know, how much content do I think I’m going to need so I always start with on-page but once I figure out what my plan is what I think is going to meet or exceed or meet and exceed whatever the competitors are in a particular space, then I set out to build that as far as the link building and everything. I just go by with it.

Exactly what you know we always talk about here, which is I do a ton of content marketing from the site through the blog to a syndication network, total SEO shield built around everything, I do a lot of press releases, which always link back through the blog posts mainly back to the back to the site. So that’s where I get most of my link building done and besides link building to the directly to the SEO shield through MGYB. Now, for most projects that I’ll start with a big link building package, so you know, the competitive What is it the Nitro I guess we call it the Nitro kit or the Nitro pack, link building just to kind of seed everything right off the bat, but then I just get into a regular schedule of doing either embed or link building or embeds plus link building. And now and I usually go with just depending on how competitive it is most of the local stuff, I mean, isn’t super competitive. So I’ll usually go with the starter kit, link building package or embed, you know, embeds plus link building to the embeds and I’ll just do that on you know, monthly or sometimes even by me

Monthly schedule depending on whether, you know if I’m ranking really well or where I want to be, then I really there’s no reason to just keep hammering away at it except for maintenance link building, which is, you know like I said, might be once every six weeks or every two months, or something like that, but I just how many links are going to take as many as it takes, right?

So it’s just it’s about the initial setup and everything and waiting for that Google dance to stop, which sometimes goes on a lot longer. And I think that’s the entity established. Go and Marco can talk on this speak to this, but I think it’s Google trying to establish or understand the entity itself when you first set it up because I got a treat care project that I’ve been working on and sharing in the mastermind. That’s just taken a long, long time for me to establish the brand name, like, you know, really solid but I think I’m finally there and with that particular thing, but what I’m saying is once you start getting past that, and it took shit like 10 weeks, it’s been dancing a lot, but I’ve also been noticing really aggressive with the content marketing and link building through press releases and everything. So I think that’s kind of along the Google dance. My point is, once you get past the initial Google dance, then it’s a matter of just monitoring Can I continually content market or do content marketing, excuse me, so publishing content, but then it’s just a matter of link building and embed, to try to get the desired result that you want. I can’t tell you which levels to use, because I just told you my plan, which is just I come out swinging hard, you know, come out with a lot right up front, just to initially seed the whole ecosystem that I’ve built. And then from there, it’s just more of an ongoing the tortoise, the tortoise wins the race type thing where I just constantly publishing new content and constantly powering up the SEO shield in strategic locations to get the desired result. What do you say, Marco?

Ah, man, and

yeah, it’s an excellent question. But that’s, that’s the

How It is, isn’t it?

I’m not sure how much to add to that. Okay. Good enough. So we got another Marco on he says, Hey, I’ll ask Will you guys be offering a coupon on national pasta day? Maybe lots of people will be looking forward to that, too. If we did it for potato day, we’ll probably do for pasta day as well.

That’s another reason another excuse to send an email right?

out of that gate. Can you hang on a second? Because just to go back to that, on how to define the competition, or how do you know, I use Jeffrey Smith’s method. I look at competing pages. And his it’s pretty accurate. When you look that up in Google, right? When you Google it and you look at the results, that’s usually a pretty good indication of what you’re up against. So I mean, if you don’t have it, I suggest that you go for the ultimate SEO Bootcamp, the best on-page training that there is I don’t care who says what, I agree, he rocks it. He kills it.

And I’m doing a lot of AdWords or Google Ad stuff now to a lot actually. And that’s something else that I determine what my SEO competition is not always the case. But in the local niches that I’m in, it’s, it’s pretty accurate. If my cost per click for a particular keyword is quite high, like and it changes by location to right, then I know that that keyword is probably going to be a lot more competitive SEO wise as well. And I think that’s only logical. You know, and I don’t know that that’s universal across the board for all keywords. Some see, maybe cost per click is very, very high. But the SEO isn’t so competitive, I don’t know. I’m just saying like for Tree Service stuff, which is, again, primarily almost all that I’m doing now. If I’m in an area, like for example, I’ve got some lead gen stuff going on and like Oklahoma City, for example, for Tree Service stuff and then others, and Fairfax, Virginia, Fairfax, Virginia, I might pay $35 per click for tree removal near me, but I might only pay $12 in Oklahoma City. So my point is like the keywords it doesn’t necessarily mean that the SEO is going to be you know, three times harder in Fairfax, Virginia as it would Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, it just typically means that the higher the cost per click, what I found is the more people that are bidding on those keywords are also paying for SEO. So it typically means you’re dealing with more competition and I and again, I don’t know that that’s universal across the board, but I found that to be the case for the niches that I’m in

MGYB Support Question

Okay, next is Nigel what’s up. Nigel he says hey gents, you were the best I wanted to give you money but now I’m about to be potato paid. That said I need help to get an order in so I can over-deliver for a new client just need some guidance on getting this order correct. Let me know your best route to do this. Right. Okay, so he must be this is it down here. I’ll come back to Ricky’s comment here in a moment is literally timing is perfect with a discount. Thanks, Bradley. I will also be taking you up on the calendly booking we discussed weeks back, as I have been getting real referral interest from SEO for luxury real estate niche and believe the SEO shows 100%. But I feel that I need to use this first experience to document the onboarding process and get the solid testimonials from my referral client and then have them as an ambassador, which is already working for other services. Yeah, that’s fine. I do I made that offer to you, it still stands. So whenever if you’ve got the link, if not just pm me on Facebook, and I’ll give it to you again. Whatever guidance you can give me or who to speak will help. I also will send you a quick video explaining if that’s better. And just so you know, I did contact support first to ask and they told me to reply before I asked but didn’t hit reply or hear back excuse me email could have gone to spam or deemed such please let me know. Thanks, guys. Yeah, as I said, I don’t think we’re connected on Facebook. Just reach out to my pm.

And I’ll get something scheduled with you because I know we made that offer to a few months ago. Okay. And you’ve been around for a long time. So no problem. Thanks.

Ricky says not a question. But when people ask my boss, how many does it take to do X, he would say 10 to the 12th. That basically means 10 to the 12th power, which is a trillion. He used to tell us, it doesn’t matter how many it takes, when it works, you’ll know but be prepared to do as much as it takes. The only time that question is relevant is if you don’t believe in the strategy. If you know the strategy works, it doesn’t matter how many it takes. We’ll keep doing it until it works. that’s a great way that’s a much more extended version of as many as it takes, but I like it.

It’s pretty good. We should copy that somewhere.

Alright, so Marco says like I understand a little No, none of what you’re all talking about. But I think your free content can help and that your team seems pretty cool. Okay. Thanks, Marco. Appreciate that. Next, Ricky says to be clear, we won’t mind paying for the services.

What was he asking about? The National potato day, but I don’t know what it was.

Do you want I mean, we have training on the SEO shield, the SEO, the SEO shoulder the SEO power shield. I can’t remember the name of the website, Rob put that up for free. It doesn’t get any better than that you can join heavy hitter the free section, tons of resources in there man, tons of free resources for you guys. The free SEO group this you have tons of stuff feedback.

So you can go to a heavy hitter club slash SEO shield or just go to because he set up a redirect the SEO shield calm. And I’ll just put both of these on a notepad file so you can see them on screen.

The other one would be HTTP books, that’s too many.

And it was the SEO shield.com.

Okay, so if you got either one of those specifically Marco on who was asking the question, then you can download them or opt-in or whatever for SEO shield training, which will explain to you what it is why it works and not and you know where to get it and all that kind of stuff. Okay?

So those are our methods Oh, by the way, you can also go here I still didn’t get the damn solid training done because I had another project pop up in the past week that I had to attend to. But if you go to semantic mastery comm slash process, you can learn much more about these are the training videos that I did, specifically for the semantic mastery process, which is what the SEO shield is built around, and all the different components and why we do what we do doesn’t give you the how it gives you the way if you want to how I point you in the where to find out the how you know where to purchase the training products or join our mastermind, that kind of stuff to where you can get the how, or you can just go or we point you just to go get it done. It’s mgyb so that you can spend your time building your business and generating more revenue instead of doing the execution of these processes. That makes sense

So either any of these right here will help you to get a much better understanding of what it is that we’re talking about. Okay.

All right, we’re gonna keep moving.

Unknown Speaker 48:12 The blog subdomain site, should we do the shield that the blog? Should we do the shield to that blog subdomain or to the main domain? Well, depends on both right and the Brian period, right, which when you build that you build out the brand, the subdomain is a part of the brand. That’s right. But it’s separate that you can’t separate that. You just have to do it. Right. You have to connect one to the other. It’s right to get disconnected. Does that a disconnect? Is that a separation? Yeah, the parent. It has a bit has a child, the child has a subdomain that the child has a parent is the main domain.

Right? So again, your primary URL, in this case, I would make the root domain, but you would include the blog URL and the building right

Just like you would your syndication network properties, so that that’s also being included with all of your drive stack files that are being created your G site, everything you see your blog is going to be constantly linked to and you remember from your primary route, you’re going to have a link to your blog. So you’re going to be transferring power through that anyways, to back to your blog. But just remember, you’re probably my opinion, your primary domain, your root domain should be your primary asset for the SEO shield. But you include the blog subdomain URL in the additional URLs that you’re going to submit with the order like your syndication network properties, for example. Okay. So there you go.

How Would You Deal With A Competitor That Is Using A Location He Does Not Occupy?

Aaron says arrived late and needs some advice. One of my main competitors is using a location that he does not occupy the property sold last week and he was never located there. Is there something I should or could do about this? Thanks. Yeah, just out SEO and that’s what I would say. I mean, I know there are people that will tell you that Yeah, you can report that and all that kind of stuff. I don’t do that. I just think it’s better Karma I understand even if they’re spamming and they got you to know they’re winning just outperform them and that’s just I don’t do negative SEO I don’t report shit like that I just don’t do it. It’s up to you whether you want to you certainly can go that route I just don’t like to do it because you know what goes around comes around and I would hate for somebody to do that and I’ve had it done and I don’t like it so I wouldn’t want to do it to somebody else and that’s just my opinion. And your comment no you know you know I agree I out power That’s it. That’s it. That’s what we did with this guy. The new client that I took on exactly what we did. We just blasted him out of the waterman. Now we’re after first place for the keywords. He had the knowledge panel. No longer got the knowledge panel. That’s the type of thing you do. You don’t go negative. Just hit it harder.

Yeah.

Yeah, Austin says I’m gonna have a header club. If I join the mastermind. Is there a discount for either one? Yes. As far as well. Yeah.

If you’re in both there’s a discount, right Marco.

If you join the mastermind we will give you a steep discount for as long as you’re a mastermind member if you leave the mastermind then heavy hitter goes to regular price you can only have the discounted price and heavy hitter if you’re still in the mastermind.

There you go.

Austin dawn I’ve been trying to talk you into joining the mastermind for some time because I know you’re in the real estate industry as well. So

Jason says again Hi guys, I look forward to working with you all in the mastermind group I need to order the keywords in the shielded package as soon as possible and do it Jason quarter the damn thing and yeah if you got any questions Jason the mastermind you know you get a hell of a lot more access to us there’s no doubt and as we talked about I think I talked to you on the phone last week actually. Remember to use the question form and the mastermind you’ll know where it is because it’s in the mastermind. If not just post a question, I’ll send the link to you in the mastermind. But yeah, make sure you use that too because we’ll dig, you know, do deep dives and webinars for whatever it is that you want to discuss, have us look at as you know, analyze whatever it is you want to talk about. We do that stuff in the mastermind. So look forward to working with you as well. We’re almost out of time. We got a couple more.

What Value Do You See In A Set Of Twitter/Facebook Accounts That Retweets/Share Items Via IFTTT?

Next is Hey, fellas, what sort of value do you see and I set of Twitter Facebook accounts in the geographic area of my client that are used to be IFTTT to retweet share items coming from that client and probably other area businesses, so as not to look suspicious? Yeah, I mean, it may help. I don’t know, I just don’t go through all that trouble. It may.

I mean, I think social signals from real accounts where there’s a real activity that generates traffic, so click-throughs. Back to the target URL, not just these I don’t think just the sharing. I don’t know I haven’t done any testing on this. Like specific testing, social signals in several years now, many years now, probably five years. But traffic, referral traffic from social networks is very powerful for SEO. So if you had real people engaging with those profiles or pages or whatever it is that you’re trying to set up on social accounts, where there are real people engaging with that, even if it was automated on your end, but other people were engaging with the automated content, which can happen. And then they were actually clicking through and some of the posts that were being shared to those, you know, the links that were being shared and that kind of stuff that can have an absolute effect. There’s no question. I don’t know. And I may be wrong, but I don’t know that just social signals in and of themselves produce any results anymore towards SEO at all. But real active engaged accounts that those share URLs on those accounts will get clicks from real people. And that does help because it’s referral traffic. So I don’t know Do you have any different data than that, Marco?

No, no, I don’t.

So, it depends on what you’re doing then really, I mean, if you like, here’s an example where we were talking about David Nelson’s RSS masher technology, which can build these beautiful automated auto blog type sites that will start to generate real traffic because a lot of them are like new sites and we’ve got something that you know, we’re working with some somebody that we’re going to be bringing, perhaps bringing to you guys’ attention in the coming weeks or months. We’re starting to test with it now actually, but it’s something very similar. We’re RSS mashers that could complement it. But my point is creating like these traffic-generating sites that have relative route relevant content, either by topic or by location, that can be used to drive real traffic back to, you know, our own properties or own assets that we’re trying to rank or clients or whatever. And, you know, if you have built these sites that start to generate traffic and they start pushing clicks the nose that’s very valuable. So it’s the same thing with social media accounts, if you even if you automate it in some way, shape or form, as long as people are engaging with the content that is being generated by that profile or that page or that account, whatever, then I think there’s value to it. But it’s, you know, how much trouble going through to set all that up. That’s why I typically just don’t do it. Okay, okay. All right. So here’s the thing, Google said that it doesn’t take a look at social signals. Okay.

And this is where we have to separate the bullshit from us fact.

What are they really saying?

What they’re, it could be true that they don’t pay attention to the social signal itself, or a social signal, as whatever that concept could possibly mean. What Google pays attention to is a link because guess what, everything in Google the foundational principles in Google are links. Everything is built around makes the button cannot get the variables that it needs for the algorithms unless it travels. And traveling quotes unless it goes through a link from one server to another. That’s what’s happening. So let’s look at this the way that you’re supposed to look at it. Let’s look at this, as I always tell people, scientists, and what’s actually happening. Google is sending a signal from its server to another server through a link a hyperlink into an HTML hyperlink. It’s going through an IP, whatever it’s going through, it’s going to that server, and it’s looking for something specific. It could be that it’s going to as a social media property, whatever the hell it is, that is going to, it’s been coded to pick up this I call it a signal. Let’s call it donuts. It’s been coded to pick up donuts through those links. And it’s been coded to look at Brown donuts, white donuts, jelly, doughnuts, whatever chocolate-covered doughnuts, whatever you want to call it. All right.

And if it finds those, it brings them back and tells Google Hey, I thought, it fills in on the variables, hey, I found these. Now, let’s go back instead of donuts, let’s just call it, they looked at the LinkedIn, they saw a person, click on the link, the person clicked on the link that and they went to your website went to what Google’s Following this, they went to your website, and they filled out a contact form, you think that isn’t gonna trigger any part of Google at all? Do you think that’s not gonna matter?

Call it whatever you want, call it. Fuck Google, like I always say metadata will say they call it what you want. But Google is seeing that whole client transaction from beginning to end. And you really think that doesn’t make a difference when Google sees that transaction goes take place from beginning to end.

Looking at everything looking, especially on YouTube, and in Google ads, because we know that Google pays special attention to the people that they send you. Do you really believe that these don’t matter, call it what you want this I call it a social signal. call it anything you want. We know from our testing from everything we do from everything that we’ve been covering from all of our client work from all of our businesses, guys, you got to understand that we’re not just Semantic Mastery. Marco isn’t just mathematically I have businesses, I’ve other businesses that I run. I have clients that I work with, I have so many things that I’m into, I don’t know how I have time in the day to do them all. But this is Semantic Mastery, just a small part of what I do. But everything that we show in Semantic Mastery everything that we give, you have to hang out, heavy hitter club, the free SEO group, and Facebook, every bit of information that we share has been tested because I’m not gonna risk my businesses. I am not going to risk my client’s businesses. On theory. We go we set up the theory we formally the hypothesis, we ask the question, we go out and use the scientific method. It’s very simple. And then we print back the information that we said, we know that Google is tracking that person. Why in the world would there be a pixel? Otherwise?

Sweet?

Alright, so last is not really well, I guess it is a question, Aaron’s comes back is replying to his previous comment about a competitor, not trying to be whiny. But when people are deceptive, it makes it bad for all of us if a business doesn’t have a real address, shouldn’t they be sad? Yeah, no, I agree, Aaron. And here’s the thing. If you’re talking about a storefront type of business that is using a fake address, then I would, I mean, maybe I’m wrong here. But I would think that it would get reported by a pissed off customer who went to Google Maps to try to go to the storefront business, and they go to a building that’s empty if that makes sense. So I’ve always talked about if you’re going to do spam Google Maps listings that you should only be doing surface area just type or excuse me, surface area business type of Google Maps listings, because, you know, like a contractor, plumber that goes to other people’s, you know, to people’s homes or buildings, or offices or whatever to do plumbing work, they can hide their address. So nobody’s gonna is clicking driving directions. So I don’t know, Aaron, if it’s if you’re talking about a service area type of business where customers should be going to the location, then I would expect it to be terminated rather quickly because people cussed pissed off, customers would report it, unless it’s one of those odd situations where it can be a service area business, and a local business or storefront business. And then if that’s the case, where primarily that’s a store, if it’s a service area business, then that you know, might be able to get away with it. So I don’t know again, I just still don’t do it. I still don’t report other listings. I don’t negative SEO. I just don’t do it. Again. It’s a karma thing and I just don’t want to invite that into my life even though I’ve had it happen to me in the past I’ve never felt vengeful enough to want to do it to others that’s just my opinion so again you’re entitled to yours and I’m not knocking you for saying that you want to report it fucking report it then you know that’s, that’s on you buddy. And I’m not knocking you for it. I’m just telling you I wouldn’t want to do it myself. That’s all I’m saying. any follow up comments to that Marco? Karma is a bitch call it what you will. Anything that you do can and will come back to me and look, go, and power up your shit.

That’s my recommendation you do whatever the fuck you want. I mean, you’re a grown person. I can’t tell you what to do.

But I definitely would not report shit I would just go get rid of it out the power that’s what you do. Not negative never ever. I’ve never ever done I’ve come really close.

Some piss me off that much where I was gonna blast him and make him appear for like some porn term. But then I

You take a breath and say, okay, it’s okay. It’s okay. Let’s just move on and make money. Yeah, I agree that energy can be spent making money.

So, again, they’re good questions. But yeah, no, you could encourage a pissed off customer to report them. I don’t know. All right. Thanks, guys. We’ll see you all next week.

We appreciate everybody being here. And don’t forget the potato. My rankings are your coupon code for SEO shields for 25% off. It’s only I think for the next two or three days. So take advantage of we can see you guys all right later.

Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 301 published first on your-t1-blog-url

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Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 301

Click on the video above to watch Episode 301 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.

The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

Announcement

We’re live. Ah, what’s up, everybody? Welcome to Episode 301 of Hump Day Hangouts, where we teach you some kung fu moves to get your rankings up there into other websites out there in the search engine. But that’s great. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts. Today is the 19th of August and this is your weekly meeting for anything SEO and good stuff and marketing and everything that has to do with that related so welcome to that before we dive into some of the good stuff that we have for today, just gonna go through the list of the awesome people that we have here. Nicole, what’s up Marco? How are you doing, man?

You see it. Now let me tell you about it.

That’s how it makes Groundhog Day. This is my life. I can’t help it. And as I always say, don’t hate the player. Hate the game, as I like this place.

Again, that’s it. If you don’t play the game as you should, then maybe you should start looking in the right place. When you’re starting out in the right place Hump Day Hangout, so here we go. But you go get some.

Let’s go. What’s up, Chris? How are you doing, man? Yeah, like I’m looking jealous over the marketplace. I don’t know. Like we had rained the last day. So like, not too excited to your brother. Well, everything else is good. And actually, I’m a little bit excited, but I cannot talk too much about it. Because I’ve been working on something for POFU.

But I think you mentioned a couple of things about that later. Yeah, for sure. For sure. What’s up, Bradley? How are you doing, man? Good. I’m good. I’m just trying to do what Adam usually does and drop these links on to the chatbox, but other than I’m good, glad to be here. Yeah, by the way, we’re missing a core, a core member of

The team in fact we’re not able to function we’re just basically barely scraping by which is because he’s like out there running the woods doing his stuff. So what’s up, Adam? So what’s up everybody? Welcome to Episode 301.

And we’re going to be diving into question soon but before we go there a couple of things number one people live is coming in hot, he’s going to be awesome. I’m really excited about getting that well on our way is going to be our third installment or the third slot live event although this one’s not going to be in person now which guy that said this is not live so he’s supposed to live online but if you want to go and get your virtual ticket, your POFU Live ticket to be attending to POFU Live, go to pofulive.com. It’s an event that we put every single year for the past three years, and it’s been pretty awesome. People are getting a lot of stuff usually stuff that we don’t share anywhere else. Just info for live. So go there.

Go grab your ticket, we’re going to be doing some fun stuff for VIP ticket holders and all of that good stuff. So go to pofulive.com. And I also believe that we have some sell happening right now. And mgyb. And we guys, yeah, and it’s in celebration of national potato day. Hey, go there.

So I dropped the coupon code in the chatbox below. But it’s if you go to mgyb.co is 25% off of our ys drive stacks for the next I guess three days and the coupon code is potato, my rankings all one word, potato, my rankings, all one word as the coupon code gets you 25% off of our ys drive stacks. There you go. You’re gonna use me, excuse me the SEO shield, which includes a drive stack but it’s the SEO shield orders. That’s what it’s for. There you go. Awesome. And by the way, Michael does

People need to buy right away as they can buy right now. And they need to submit the order right now how How’s that? How’s that working? They have a window so that they can submit basically, you know if somebody is watching this tomorrow, and they want to take advantage of the offer, but they don’t probably didn’t have data of their clients right away, what do you suggest?

Well, we understand that we understand that people can sometimes get the information right away. We understand that people need time, right? For whatever reason it is, or maybe they just want to take advantage of the coupons. Well, that’s fine. They can go ahead, buy, and then submit the information later. Now the problem is if you wait too long if you wait past 30 days, what we’re going to do is we’re simply going to refund you because we can’t let it sit there 5678 months until whatever it is that you decide to do.

So get it, hold on to it go ahead and take advantage of the offer. So that the coupon doesn’t expire, right because once it does, we can’t give you the offer.

Then get gather the information. That’s fine. Don’t wait more than 30 days because then we will refund you no question. It gets done on our we know that if you don’t submit your information within 30 days, you’re likely not to do it. And we’ll have to refund you anyway. So we might as well get rid of the problem to start with. Gotcha. So people can buy today get get get an advantage, take advantage of the coupon. And then you said, you know, submit the details over the next 30 days, basically. That’s awesome. All right. Cool. So and by the way, if you have more SEO needs, if you have more delivery needs, you know, because you shouldn’t be doing the grunt work, let us do it for you go to mgyb.co we have that sale going on. But there’s a lot of good stuff there. A lot of stuff that allegedly doesn’t work. But you know, the proof is in the pudding. We have a bunch of case studies there and more coming. So that’s going to be pretty awesome as well.

Yep. Anything that you guys want to add on? Let’s do this. Let’s do it. Actually, we ran over last week by like, almost 10 minutes because I just lost track of time. So you guys are gonna crack the whip on me today. I tight I’ve got an appointment actually have to get to so. Alright, uh, let me grab the screen.

All right, sweet.

Do you guys see my screen? Okay. Yeah. All right, we’re gonna start with

Is It Safe To Convert Gsites To Its New Format?

Igor. Hey Brad. The NSM team just got an email about Google changing the old g sites. Is it safe to follow to convert them to the new g site? I have been? I’ve done about a dozen myself this week. Seriously, I haven’t even had VA is doing it. I’ve just because I’ve been tightening up projects and stuff. And so I’ve just gone in and click the button and made sure everything came out. Okay, Mark, I know you had some comments about that. We chatted about this yesterday. Yeah, Google has been really nice about it. They giving us everything we need. They’re just moving everything over for us all you have to just click yes it. I mean, how good is that doesn’t get any better than that. Now, you will

Hang on a second, well people do have to be careful about is that it doesn’t turn into a 302. So please monitor your URLs, right use a redirect checker every once in a while to see what it is that Google is doing it because they get sneaky. Remember what they did with geo GL? Yeah, it was a 301. Then without any warning, it turned into a 302. Then they offer Firebase, which was a three or two that you had to turn into a 301. gotta be really careful. Google is really sneaky, right? Do they change other URLs from 301 to three or two from

what do you call it? From a meta refresh, to attend meta refresh, where then it’s useless. So the only thing that I tell people is you got to be really careful. Keep track of your URLs, keep checking them from time to time. And of course, don’t you do it your time should be way more valuable than to be inserting the URLs into a checker to see if it’s a 301 or three or two, you should have a VA, doing all this menial work so you can concentrate on your business, growing your business, making more money.

That’s the way it’s supposed to be.

Yeah, what I was gonna say was a couple of things, one you brought up. Gotta be careful with Google because they’re tricky about how they’ll change stuff and make them three Oh, twos without even knowing. Yep, for example, what the old g sites I don’t know, I haven’t even checked it on the new one yet. With you know, once it’s been converted to the new ones, but I can’t imagine it would have changed. But if you left the trailing slash off of the end of the URL, then if you checked it in a redirect checker, it would throw to you the final URL with the trailing slash at the end of it. So like, if you’re looking at a home page of the G site, and you were building links to the URL without the trailing slash, then you were actually getting a 302 redirect to the home page, which I thought was crazy.

But second of all, the new g sites are a lot like page builders are now so they’re like, you know, modular and like kind of like a block editor. And there it just is a lot more intuitive than the old funky g sites. And I don’t know why I’ve wanted them for so long because it’s actually a pretty good editor now and it’s a good interface. So,

How Many Videos Are Needed For A YouTube Silo To Be Effective?

okay, let’s see, I got lost my track where I was let me try this again must have been from last week. Okay, so the next question was from when building YouTube silos? How many videos should be in a silo to be impactful to move the needle? I know it depends on the competition. But what should you start with five 750? And should we focus on building more in the silo or more silos? And if more silos, how many in the silo?

I got a little bit of a headache from that question.

It just depends on it depends on you know, how competitive the keyword is that you’re trying to rank for. So whatever your top-level keyword is the top of silo keyword that you’re trying to rank for. That’s really going to be what determines how much depth you should add to it, like how many videos essentially how many other keywords, variations, longer tail versions, that sort of thing, are you going to actually target within that particular silo? It’s just like doing it on your website, right? It’s the same principle. It’s the

How much is it going to take? I can’t tell you that because I don’t know what keyword is that you’re targeting. I don’t know what the competition looks like. It’s going to take as many as it takes. So really just it’s going to it’s very much like doing a silo on your website. That’s why we talk about theme mirroring, and all that kind of stuff because it’s, it’s all the same. Creating a YouTube silo is the exact same structure. And the mat, whether or not it ranks is going to depend on you know, a lot of factors, not just the silo structure itself, but having additional keywords in there more depth to that silo adds builds more relevancy, more topical relevancy, and there are more linking opportunities from within that silo as well. So it kind of helps to power up the entire silo, the whole playlist, if you’re adding more videos that are relevant. Does that make sense?

Anybody want to comment on that before I go to the second part of that, yeah, what you start with is more than one right? Absolutely.

And then it’s just how far you need to go to get to where you want to be. Period.

Yep. So how many are going to take as many as it takes? I was like a lot. We used to get questions all the time about syndication networks, how many posts Do you think it’s going to take for me to rank for whatever keyword now, we could always have the same answer as many as it takes to take. Yeah. So the next one is it should be focused on building more in the silo or more silos and more silos. Now, remember, guys, keep it simple. You know, you can take a top-level silo keyword, and you can create a bunch of subcategories from closely very closely related keywords that are, you know, longer tailed versions are the next level down, so to speak of that main keyword, but is it necessary to do so? That’s the point-like, again, I use this example more recently, uh, you know, I’m pretty much all I’m doing now is Tree Service stuff for SEO and, and lead generation and that kind of stuff. And for the longest time, I’ve always built a simple silo structure at least for several years.

I used to do complex silos. But I just got over doing that because most local, most local type businesses don’t need that. But and I don’t know that you’re targeting local, but I’m just using this as an example.

I used to always silo with the simple site for the last few years with simple silo structure for Tree Service stuff, Tree Service being the primary keyword. So essentially the homepage, but then the silo structure would be tree trimming would be one silo. Another one that would be tree removal. And then usually a third one, which would be additional services or arborist tree services, if it was a certified arborist on the, for the contractor that the site was for. And I saw I’d have three silos on the site, basically. But what I found was Google actually really considers tree trimming, Tree Removal tree cutting Tree Service, they’re all synonyms. So I could probably and I haven’t tested it just yet. I’ve got a couple of projects and I’m waiting on some infrastructure to be built and then I’m going to be testing that. But I could probably go with just one silo essentially tree services. And you because all that content is the same, however, I could create like, essentially subcategories, which would have been the silos of what I’ve already been what I’ve been doing right. So tree removal, tree trimming, perhaps arborist services, but if why overcomplicate things, why make the build more complex? Why make the content, you know, the interlinking between pieces of content, everything more complex than it needs to be, if I could just have a flat site with one silo tree services, and just have all the content, you know, properly structured and get the same results? Why would I go through all of that and so that my answer to you about the YouTube stuff is the same thing? I would rather focus on one silo and add more depth to it and have that whole silo be a lot more powerful than have a whole bunch of different silos with the month that is very, very specific or it’s kind of hard to get, you know, additional supporting it Now if you’ve got the main category with a bunch of different subcategories and it’s logical to do so. Then I would add additional you know, add create additional playlist and don’t forget, you can have one video and more than one playlist, so I mean, it

If you have a kind of like a parent category silo, the video can be in that playlist. But then you could also have like subcategory silos or playlists that want. You know, the video can also be in one of those, if that makes sense. So, but just don’t overcomplicate things is my point, especially when it comes to YouTube? It’s really unnecessary. Does anybody want to comment on that?

I totally agree.

Okay. Very good. And I think a lot of a lot of times we try, we try to be smart as SEOs and try to you know, well, if I get really creative with my silo structures, I can get better results and it just ends up being a lot of unnecessary work. So just keep that in mind.

How Do You Set Up A Sales Tax In A WooCommerce Site?

Jason says, Hey, guys, I’m working on an e-commerce site and I hearing rumors that I need to set up sales tax for every state in the U.S. if we sell something. Do you guys know how this would work with WooCommerce? I do not because I don’t do anything eCommerce related. Perhaps Marco might.

Do you know anything about WooCommerce being in taxes and stuff?

I don’t know, like, I don’t know how you either,

like I do, I have worked on WooCommerce websites, but that’s not the part of my job that I do.

The part of what I do on that is I get traffic, the owner is kind of like the one in charge of all that guy charges, taxes and I know, on the land, like each state has separate rules, right? for buying and selling land and how much is is due at the closing. But that all gets done, it gets taken out of the total when you close the deal. It’s like you never see it because it’s taken out. So like how much or whether each state is responsible, whether you’re responsible for collecting taxes, what you need to do is go and contact the tax attorney and have them tell you what it is that you’re responsible for, whether it’s each state, your state, what the rules are in each state because only a tax attorney would be the one to answer that question properly. I’m not a tax attorney. I’m not a tax expert by any means.

So try that. I can’t really help with that. Yeah, neither can I just don’t do any sort of e-commerce stuff. So I couldn’t help with that either. Sorry. Jason. Looks like Jason says he just joined the mastermind. That’s awesome. So he says that, by the way, welcome, Jason. He says I have five websites that I need to do this syndication networks with, I need to do two of them as soon as possible. Well, I’ll tell you what, as a mastermind member, you do get benefits, you know, so contact support, make about mgyb.co. So go to support@mgyb.co after you’ve placed your orders, and, you know, mentioned that your new mastermind members and see if you can get two of them expedited, I don’t know that we typically do that but I know mastermind members do get benefits. So Marco’s, that’s something that we can do is try to get it pushed a little bit.

Ah, we have other mastermind members. Also order. So how can we push everything? Um, yeah, that’s why I was asking. I said if we can do something we’ll try to but I don’t know that we can but what do you think? I mean if it’s just syndication if it’s just a brand that networks you know, they get pushed out and they’ll get delivered as soon as they’re done that’s how Jason yeah absolutely order right away. But we are improving the system. We’re making everything better we’re making things better right we’re training our team we’re trying to make things more fluid speedier so it’s not as if we’re just sitting there and not make trying to make things better we are

are you go and I know you guys have been working hard on streamlining stuff and all that so it will get better Pablo says Hey guys, I’m still confused with correct structure for city pages post question. One from for now top of silo on my money site is a broad category without local modifiers. If I need to cover two or more counties, I need to make each county like a separate silo or county can go after a broad topic and link back to the main silo topic example. This is one of those questions site slash Miami or slight slash appraiser Miami based on this question, how would posting look like okay?

Should You Make A Separate Silo For County And Connect It To The Main Silo?

Pavlo, I can tell you this you know I cover how I do how I reconcile those odd issues that I’ve talked about this many times and I cover this extensively in the mastermind I can’t do it here. I can give you a very high overview like a conceptual overview of it, but I can’t get into the nitty-gritty because it’s something that I only cover in our mastermind, but I use tags for creating location-based silos in a WordPress website. Okay, so I use the category structure for my topical silos. But then I use tags in a very specific way to create my location-based silos so that there are no conflicts with URLs are trying to share location-based stuff categories across topical silos or vice versa topical silos across location-based categories. Does that make sense? I don’t know if that makes sense or not. But I think you’re talking about the oddities that occur with the URL conflicts that occur when you try to use the same subcategory across multiple categories because it’s going to automatically append like a dash two dash three for each time you duplicate that subcategory into another category. WordPress is gonna automatically append to it like a dash two dash three because it has to have another permalink. And if that’s what you’re talking about, I learned to three years ago, probably three years ago now to build silo structure for location-based silos using tags and it’s a specific hierarchy, the way that I stack those tags and everything else. That’s as far as I can tell you right now.

The other way to do it was if you were going to if because remember if you’re talking about complex silo structure, which you are in this case, right? Because you’ve got, you know, topical silos and then you want to go sub silo from that, right? So subcategories that you want to add additional content pages to or even posts at that level. Right that that can create some issues. That’s why I recommend if you, if you can get away with just doing a simple silo, then and using just the post name, permalink structure, then you can stack you know, you can cross things, subcategories and other categories and things where the URL isn’t going to be displayed and it shows as just domain comm slash the post slug at that level, and that’s okay. But again, so So I mean, if you can get away with that, then that’s the way that I would do it. But again, I can’t talk specific can’t show you the structure, how to do tag-based location silos or location silos using tags here on Hump Day Hangouts. I couldn’t talk about it the mastermind though, but if you understand tags and how to use tag pages in WordPress, you ought to be able to figure it out as my point. So you want to comment on that at all, more.

The only comment that I’m going to make is that there are things that we reserved for our paid groups only. And it’s not fair for us to give it away here in a free group. If people are paying for it, people are paying for all this information. So you people who are here free, although we try to answer as much as possible, you do have to understand is that there are some things that we can’t answer, but we can answer them in the paid groups. That’s just the way it is. It’s the way we’ve always done it. We have given people what nearly six years of free information, actionable information, people have built businesses from the information we give away for free. So imagine what we give away in the free groups.

Yeah, the paid group you mean, um, but yeah. So probably just to get back to your URL question here. See, what I was talking about here is if you take a look at how you’ve got URL one versus URL to my point is if you’ve got like appraiser is your is like one of your services and if appraiser I don’t know what your Real Estate or what, but let’s just say it real estate. And so one of your categories is an appraiser and maybe one of them is home inspections, right?

Or Yeah, something like that, right, let’s just say appraiser and inspectors, let’s just use that just to show two different service categories. If you were to try to duplicate Miami, originally, if you set it up as a subcategory, as an appraiser, then if you tried to create Miami subcategory in the inspectors’ category, or home inspector category, or home inspections, category, whatever, however you name it, then you would end up having that weird URL structure. That said, it doesn’t really matter if you’re using the post name permalink structure because you don’t see it unless you’re looking at source code anyways. So it’s not a big deal. But again, it creates some conflicts that I just don’t like to try to live with when I’m building the site. It’s not really clear to me that way. That’s why I like to use tags. I don’t know if that was specifically a question, but that’s the way I interpreted it. So next is he says based on this, how should what should posting look like?

For each county, it should be the same topic or keyword, but content should be rewritten, including local modifiers. Yeah, I mean, that’s what I do. That’s why I have my blogger actually create. When we’re doing keyword plus location-specific content, my blogger just creates or curates a blog post that is targeting something very closely related to that topic. It doesn’t always necessarily have to be 100% then but she has my I have one blogger that handles all of this stuff for me now because she’s really good at it. She will curate top you know, stories that are topically relevant as well as something about the local area that you know, for the location modifier that we’re targeting. And then there will be a paragraph at the bottom that has a strong call to action and it has you know, a strong mention of the product or service or the services that would pertain to what the theme of the post was about. So my point is like, for example, in the tree clients I have don’t do landscaping work. However, landscaping is closely related to Tree Service stuff. Right. And so because of that, a lot of times there will be blog posts that are written about Lance a yard or keeping their somebody’s resident, you know, homes, the landscape beautiful or whatever. And then there will be a paragraph at the bottom about, you know, tree services, tree trimming, tree pruning, whatever that will kind of tie that concept to the landscaping, right? And then we just optimize the SEO title for it. And then use the tag-based silos and all of that, and it’s it works really, really well, especially when you use the SEO shield and the G site and you learn how to push keyword relevancy through backlink profile to your G site. So that’s what I do.

And so all of the content is unique because all of the blog posts each blog post is unique because there’s new newly curated content from my blogger, which is why I like it because it’s all it’s not. You know, one of the problems that I’m sure you are aware of this Pablo is is when you only have you know, a few seconds services? How do you keep rewriting about that same service over and over and over again, right, it gets to be very difficult to do so. And that’s why I kind of got away from trying to do it that way. And I just let my blogger kind of run away with it and it creates over time, it might take a little bit more time to get the traction that I like. But once you do, you have this kind of broad width of topical relevancy to that to what your primary services are, if that makes sense. So that’s what I do if you don’t have that ability yet for, you know, for curating posts and that kind of stuff, then you can just rewrite stuff I’ve talked about having like one article written about tree removal, in my case, right. And then having that rewritten by five different, you know, as a rewrite project, as opposed to a new writing project, it’s a lot less expensive, and now I’ve got six versions of the original article. And so that’s something you could use if you’re going to be reproducing keyword plus location across multiple locations. Does that make sense? I don’t know if that was clear or not. Do you have any other tricks for that?

No. Okay.

All right. And the second part of that I can’t answer because that question went way too long. Anyway, so we’re going to move on if we have time, we’ll come back to it.

How Do You Boost A Blog Subdomain?

Bobby, Ricky Bobby says, we have a client that uses a subdomain for their blog, their main site gets decent traffic 50,000 per month. But the blog that is blogged out example gets less than 1000 per month. Okay, they are not going to change it to a subfolder anytime soon. I’ve recommended it obviously, any advice on what to do to boost the blog subdomain. They have a few dozen articles on there. And we were starting to work on the content consistency going forward. Now that we have our keyword research and recommendations thanks to mgyb.

My suggestion would be just to start using the subdomain a lot more right. Your syndication network should be attached to it. You should be blogging consistently. And that’s essentially what I was just talking about in my previous reply or response to Pavlo’s question.

About overtime, just that the blog will start to gain more traction. And you’ll see in Search Console, especially as you publish more content, your total impression number will start to go way, way up. Because you’ll start being recognized by Google for a lot more keyword combinations. So different types of search queries will give your site impressions. And that’s actually a really good content strategy to go in the Search Console, and identify keywords that are relevant, like search queries that triggered an impression for your blog, find those queries that are relevant, that aren’t ranking well yet, but are that are close, like, for example, maybe their position is, you know, somewhere between 11 and 20? Well, those are good keywords than to start optimizing for producing more content for linking back to the original piece of content, that kind of stuff to help try to boost those to page one so that you start getting more traffic. My point is, you know, adding more content to the blog is would be my first step. And then you could always do things like, you know, paid traffic to some of the posts, and then do remarketing so that you can always be bringing people back, which will probably get more visits to the blog, even repeat visits, which is really, really good for SEO also. So those would be my two recommendations from you.

Yeah, that’s the SEO shield, SEO Power shield. It’s all part of the system. So it’s not just getting the syndication properties. It’s not just logging. It’s not just syndicating your content. It’s powering up your shield is powering up your right your @ID. It’s powering up everything that has to do with your entity. It has to do with getting your schema out there. It has to do with whatever you need to do to make the content right. So link building comes into play so embeds come into play. More link building more embeds. Press releases, link building to press release a stack the press releases if you’re local, posting, stalking your posts link building into your posts, local images, guys.

We’ve created a whole entire system for you to do this. We just can’t give you the pieces here for free.

I mean, we got to go back to that. People. Yeah, you want the system. It’s in the paid groups. It’s in Semantic Mastery and the heavy hitter, join Semantic Mastery. And you get a really good price for joining heavy hitter. But I like we can’t give you everything we’d love to. But then there would be no Semantic Mastery, if we gave everything away for free, right, the people who have to sit and think and do all of these things have to be able to make some kind of living, right, some kind of money, get rewarded for all the effort that we put into doing all of this.

So having said that, it’s the system ads, ads work perfectly well. If you do them the way that we say do. Don’t just go out and run any kind of ads that may or may not work. Use the system that we’ve set up to make the ads work. Use the system which we’ve created the

We make everything available in mgyb.co. But if you get it without really understanding what it is that you’re doing, then you’re actually doing yourself more harm than good, because you’re leaving so much power on the table, so much power that you could be using.

And that’s a good point, you know, press releases. I’ve shown this in our Facebook group, the SEO tutorials semantic mastery Facebook group. Somebody was asking a question about press releases. Well, it was more of a comment about how they read some article on some blog about our press releases doesn’t work. And so they were just relaying that information. And there was started to the discussion, a thread. And one of the arguments that the person that posted the question or the statement really was stating was, well, you guys are all saying they work, but I want to see proof. Right. And so I just took a screenshot of Google Analytics of just one project that I’m working on, that shows referral traffic. And it showed press advantage, right, which is the press release releases that we primarily use. And it showed for a 30 day period, I think was 287 or 267 visits directly from press advantage. So don’t discredit that either, like again. And that’s all part of what we teach is like the same content strategy. So in your blog, that’s one of the best things one of the strategies that I use, consistently, almost exclusively now is we publish blog posts for clients. And as soon as a blog post is published, not always a one to one ratio, depending on what their budget is, but we will publish a press release to promote the blog post. So every time a new blog post gets published, we have a press release that links back to the blog post. So we’re driving traffic from press advantage domain as well as a lot of you know, other news-type sites when it does get traffic press advantage tends to drive the domain itself tends to drive quite a bit of traffic, but that sends traffic to that newly public blog posts plus it builds a bunch of links to that newly built, newly published blog post. So it’s really, really good for building up the SEO value of your blog as well as driving traffic to it, which is what your original question was, is how to get more traffic to the blog. So that’s another great part of this strategy that we teach. Yep. So it was a great question.

Is It Harder To Rank Gdocs Than A Gsite?

Babies up with a list of questions just broken up this time a little bit. So maybe you’re getting better. Hey, guys, if I want to rank some Google property only, say a G doc and a G site? Is it harder to rank g docs than a G site? I have. I mean, for I guess I haven’t really set up any specific tests for that. But I tend to just focus on the G site because it has a lot more functionality than a G doc. I don’t know if one is harder to rank than the other what say you, Marco

would rank better.

So let me see that again. If I want to write some Google property on these, the G site because it is going to get all the power from the embeds the duck might rank faster originally. I like at first, but then the G site for sure will take over. Yeah, no, yeah. But that’ll convert better, won’t it? The G site will convert the dot some of the dots will rank right away. But the Gsite over time, it’s so powerful. And you still get leads from that Virginia. Right? Yeah, he’s still occasionally. Yeah. So I mean, the proof is in the pudding.

Is It Faster To Rank Google Properties Than Building A Shield To A Non-Google Property?

Is it faster to rank Google properties than building a shield on a non-Google property? Of course, it is. It is. I mean, it’s crazy. Because you get well you can just here’s the thing, even if you’re ranked trying to rank a non-Google property like so you got a self-hosted website is your main money site. You can still do all the same things to the SEO shield. That and that you would if you made the Google site, your primary money website.

It doesn’t really matter that because that’s the whole point of the SEO show, right? It’s to create a shield around your money site. So all the things that you’re going to do to that g site, if the G site was your primary money site, which will rank very quickly, you can still do all of that to the G site as part of your SEO shield when you have a self-hosted money site. So a non-Google property money site, because you’re not going to actually touch your non-Google property money site. with anything other than the SEO shield, you’re doing all your nastiness out to the actual SEO shield. So my point is, why not have both unless it’s just you don’t want to go through the trouble of setting up a self-hosted website and all that other kind of stuff, which I understand that so for example, for some lead gen assets, there’s no reason for to set up WordPress stuff if you’re just doing like a single location, lead gen assets and you’re going to do a bunch of them. You can get away with 100% with just GMB assets and the SEO shield assets and you can use the G site as your primary money site and the GMB website the two of those countries if combined, and you’ll do incredibly well that way. So again, but if you’re going to be building a brand, there’s in my opinion is no reason not to create a money site because you can still rank the G site before the money site ever ranks and still get the benefit of it. But you’re building that brand back to a domain that you have more control over. That’s, that’s my take on it. What do you think?

You know, it’s still effective, Google will say no.

But we see all these lawsuits as we see all of these things where Google prefer Google, over anything else. And we’ve proven it’s not something that we’re just saying. And it’s not just us giving you theory and concepts and all of these ideas that are nothing. We’re giving you facts. We’re giving you something that we actually showed on a webinar, how Google trusts itself above anything else, and because it trusts itself over anything else, it passes PageRank to itself, and it ranks its properties over anybody else’s. We see this time.

And again. So it stands to reason that if you build up your Google ecosystem, it’s why we’re in there in the first place. The whole idea to start with was Dr. Gary and I said, Google prefers itself over anything else. And we went from there, we set up, let that’s the scientific method. You start out you have a hypothesis, it’s a sentence, then you say that you ask a question. Does Google really prefer itself and why? And then you go out to prove it. And we did. And not only did we prove it, but we also showed it live. It’s not as if we just go we don’t we don’t hide that we showed it. How it is that Google prefers itself over anything else. So guys, understanding this, why are you not taking all of that power? and using it use Google was my original concept and idea, use Google to rank in Google?

But at least to be said,

How Do You Determine What Link Buiding Campaign To Use And Determine The Competition?

there you go. Next question. Say you are getting into a new niche. How do you determine the link building? We should use it? What is low, medium, hard competition? Which tool? Do you determine the competition?

Well, I mean, for me, I use a number of different tools. So it really doesn’t matter as I use for bigger projects. Now I’m using a digital marketer toolbox which is network empires towards a bit expensive, but you can also use stuff like sem rush and things. But honestly, what I do just to be what I do is I figure out what I how much relevancy I need to create with you on page right first, that’s, that’s always what I do like to do, am I going to need a lot of content Am I going to need to have proper, you know, how much content do I think I’m going to need so I always start with on-page but once I figure out what my plan is what I think is going to meet or exceed or meet and exceed whatever the competitors are in a particular space, then I set out to build that as far as the link building and everything. I just go by with it.

Exactly what you know we always talk about here, which is I do a ton of content marketing from the site through the blog to a syndication network, total SEO shield built around everything, I do a lot of press releases, which always link back through the blog posts mainly back to the back to the site. So that’s where I get most of my link building done and besides link building to the directly to the SEO shield through MGYB. Now, for most projects that I’ll start with a big link building package, so you know, the competitive What is it the Nitro I guess we call it the Nitro kit or the Nitro pack, link building just to kind of seed everything right off the bat, but then I just get into a regular schedule of doing either embed or link building or embeds plus link building. And now and I usually go with just depending on how competitive it is most of the local stuff, I mean, isn’t super competitive. So I’ll usually go with the starter kit, link building package or embed, you know, embeds plus link building to the embeds and I’ll just do that on you know, monthly or sometimes even by me

Monthly schedule depending on whether, you know if I’m ranking really well or where I want to be, then I really there’s no reason to just keep hammering away at it except for maintenance link building, which is, you know like I said, might be once every six weeks or every two months, or something like that, but I just how many links are going to take as many as it takes, right?

So it’s just it’s about the initial setup and everything and waiting for that Google dance to stop, which sometimes goes on a lot longer. And I think that’s the entity established. Go and Marco can talk on this speak to this, but I think it’s Google trying to establish or understand the entity itself when you first set it up because I got a treat care project that I’ve been working on and sharing in the mastermind. That’s just taken a long, long time for me to establish the brand name, like, you know, really solid but I think I’m finally there and with that particular thing, but what I’m saying is once you start getting past that, and it took shit like 10 weeks, it’s been dancing a lot, but I’ve also been noticing really aggressive with the content marketing and link building through press releases and everything. So I think that’s kind of along the Google dance. My point is, once you get past the initial Google dance, then it’s a matter of just monitoring Can I continually content market or do content marketing, excuse me, so publishing content, but then it’s just a matter of link building and embed, to try to get the desired result that you want. I can’t tell you which levels to use, because I just told you my plan, which is just I come out swinging hard, you know, come out with a lot right up front, just to initially seed the whole ecosystem that I’ve built. And then from there, it’s just more of an ongoing the tortoise, the tortoise wins the race type thing where I just constantly publishing new content and constantly powering up the SEO shield in strategic locations to get the desired result. What do you say, Marco?

Ah, man, and

yeah, it’s an excellent question. But that’s, that’s the

How It is, isn’t it?

I’m not sure how much to add to that. Okay. Good enough. So we got another Marco on he says, Hey, I’ll ask Will you guys be offering a coupon on national pasta day? Maybe lots of people will be looking forward to that, too. If we did it for potato day, we’ll probably do for pasta day as well.

That’s another reason another excuse to send an email right?

out of that gate. Can you hang on a second? Because just to go back to that, on how to define the competition, or how do you know, I use Jeffrey Smith’s method. I look at competing pages. And his it’s pretty accurate. When you look that up in Google, right? When you Google it and you look at the results, that’s usually a pretty good indication of what you’re up against. So I mean, if you don’t have it, I suggest that you go for the ultimate SEO Bootcamp, the best on-page training that there is I don’t care who says what, I agree, he rocks it. He kills it.

And I’m doing a lot of AdWords or Google Ad stuff now to a lot actually. And that’s something else that I determine what my SEO competition is not always the case. But in the local niches that I’m in, it’s, it’s pretty accurate. If my cost per click for a particular keyword is quite high, like and it changes by location to right, then I know that that keyword is probably going to be a lot more competitive SEO wise as well. And I think that’s only logical. You know, and I don’t know that that’s universal across the board for all keywords. Some see, maybe cost per click is very, very high. But the SEO isn’t so competitive, I don’t know. I’m just saying like for Tree Service stuff, which is, again, primarily almost all that I’m doing now. If I’m in an area, like for example, I’ve got some lead gen stuff going on and like Oklahoma City, for example, for Tree Service stuff and then others, and Fairfax, Virginia, Fairfax, Virginia, I might pay $35 per click for tree removal near me, but I might only pay $12 in Oklahoma City. So my point is like the keywords it doesn’t necessarily mean that the SEO is going to be you know, three times harder in Fairfax, Virginia as it would Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, it just typically means that the higher the cost per click, what I found is the more people that are bidding on those keywords are also paying for SEO. So it typically means you’re dealing with more competition and I and again, I don’t know that that’s universal across the board, but I found that to be the case for the niches that I’m in

MGYB Support Question

Okay, next is Nigel what’s up. Nigel he says hey gents, you were the best I wanted to give you money but now I’m about to be potato paid. That said I need help to get an order in so I can over-deliver for a new client just need some guidance on getting this order correct. Let me know your best route to do this. Right. Okay, so he must be this is it down here. I’ll come back to Ricky’s comment here in a moment is literally timing is perfect with a discount. Thanks, Bradley. I will also be taking you up on the calendly booking we discussed weeks back, as I have been getting real referral interest from SEO for luxury real estate niche and believe the SEO shows 100%. But I feel that I need to use this first experience to document the onboarding process and get the solid testimonials from my referral client and then have them as an ambassador, which is already working for other services. Yeah, that’s fine. I do I made that offer to you, it still stands. So whenever if you’ve got the link, if not just pm me on Facebook, and I’ll give it to you again. Whatever guidance you can give me or who to speak will help. I also will send you a quick video explaining if that’s better. And just so you know, I did contact support first to ask and they told me to reply before I asked but didn’t hit reply or hear back excuse me email could have gone to spam or deemed such please let me know. Thanks, guys. Yeah, as I said, I don’t think we’re connected on Facebook. Just reach out to my pm.

And I’ll get something scheduled with you because I know we made that offer to a few months ago. Okay. And you’ve been around for a long time. So no problem. Thanks.

Ricky says not a question. But when people ask my boss, how many does it take to do X, he would say 10 to the 12th. That basically means 10 to the 12th power, which is a trillion. He used to tell us, it doesn’t matter how many it takes, when it works, you’ll know but be prepared to do as much as it takes. The only time that question is relevant is if you don’t believe in the strategy. If you know the strategy works, it doesn’t matter how many it takes. We’ll keep doing it until it works. that’s a great way that’s a much more extended version of as many as it takes, but I like it.

It’s pretty good. We should copy that somewhere.

Alright, so Marco says like I understand a little No, none of what you’re all talking about. But I think your free content can help and that your team seems pretty cool. Okay. Thanks, Marco. Appreciate that. Next, Ricky says to be clear, we won’t mind paying for the services.

What was he asking about? The National potato day, but I don’t know what it was.

Do you want I mean, we have training on the SEO shield, the SEO, the SEO shoulder the SEO power shield. I can’t remember the name of the website, Rob put that up for free. It doesn’t get any better than that you can join heavy hitter the free section, tons of resources in there man, tons of free resources for you guys. The free SEO group this you have tons of stuff feedback.

So you can go to a heavy hitter club slash SEO shield or just go to because he set up a redirect the SEO shield calm. And I’ll just put both of these on a notepad file so you can see them on screen.

The other one would be HTTP books, that’s too many.

And it was the SEO shield.com.

Okay, so if you got either one of those specifically Marco on who was asking the question, then you can download them or opt-in or whatever for SEO shield training, which will explain to you what it is why it works and not and you know where to get it and all that kind of stuff. Okay?

So those are our methods Oh, by the way, you can also go here I still didn’t get the damn solid training done because I had another project pop up in the past week that I had to attend to. But if you go to semantic mastery comm slash process, you can learn much more about these are the training videos that I did, specifically for the semantic mastery process, which is what the SEO shield is built around, and all the different components and why we do what we do doesn’t give you the how it gives you the way if you want to how I point you in the where to find out the how you know where to purchase the training products or join our mastermind, that kind of stuff to where you can get the how, or you can just go or we point you just to go get it done. It’s mgyb so that you can spend your time building your business and generating more revenue instead of doing the execution of these processes. That makes sense

So either any of these right here will help you to get a much better understanding of what it is that we’re talking about. Okay.

All right, we’re gonna keep moving.

Unknown Speaker 48:12 The blog subdomain site, should we do the shield that the blog? Should we do the shield to that blog subdomain or to the main domain? Well, depends on both right and the Brian period, right, which when you build that you build out the brand, the subdomain is a part of the brand. That’s right. But it’s separate that you can’t separate that. You just have to do it. Right. You have to connect one to the other. It’s right to get disconnected. Does that a disconnect? Is that a separation? Yeah, the parent. It has a bit has a child, the child has a subdomain that the child has a parent is the main domain.

Right? So again, your primary URL, in this case, I would make the root domain, but you would include the blog URL and the building right

Just like you would your syndication network properties, so that that’s also being included with all of your drive stack files that are being created your G site, everything you see your blog is going to be constantly linked to and you remember from your primary route, you’re going to have a link to your blog. So you’re going to be transferring power through that anyways, to back to your blog. But just remember, you’re probably my opinion, your primary domain, your root domain should be your primary asset for the SEO shield. But you include the blog subdomain URL in the additional URLs that you’re going to submit with the order like your syndication network properties, for example. Okay. So there you go.

How Would You Deal With A Competitor That Is Using A Location He Does Not Occupy?

Aaron says arrived late and needs some advice. One of my main competitors is using a location that he does not occupy the property sold last week and he was never located there. Is there something I should or could do about this? Thanks. Yeah, just out SEO and that’s what I would say. I mean, I know there are people that will tell you that Yeah, you can report that and all that kind of stuff. I don’t do that. I just think it’s better Karma I understand even if they’re spamming and they got you to know they’re winning just outperform them and that’s just I don’t do negative SEO I don’t report shit like that I just don’t do it. It’s up to you whether you want to you certainly can go that route I just don’t like to do it because you know what goes around comes around and I would hate for somebody to do that and I’ve had it done and I don’t like it so I wouldn’t want to do it to somebody else and that’s just my opinion. And your comment no you know you know I agree I out power That’s it. That’s it. That’s what we did with this guy. The new client that I took on exactly what we did. We just blasted him out of the waterman. Now we’re after first place for the keywords. He had the knowledge panel. No longer got the knowledge panel. That’s the type of thing you do. You don’t go negative. Just hit it harder.

Yeah.

Yeah, Austin says I’m gonna have a header club. If I join the mastermind. Is there a discount for either one? Yes. As far as well. Yeah.

If you’re in both there’s a discount, right Marco.

If you join the mastermind we will give you a steep discount for as long as you’re a mastermind member if you leave the mastermind then heavy hitter goes to regular price you can only have the discounted price and heavy hitter if you’re still in the mastermind.

There you go.

Austin dawn I’ve been trying to talk you into joining the mastermind for some time because I know you’re in the real estate industry as well. So

Jason says again Hi guys, I look forward to working with you all in the mastermind group I need to order the keywords in the shielded package as soon as possible and do it Jason quarter the damn thing and yeah if you got any questions Jason the mastermind you know you get a hell of a lot more access to us there’s no doubt and as we talked about I think I talked to you on the phone last week actually. Remember to use the question form and the mastermind you’ll know where it is because it’s in the mastermind. If not just post a question, I’ll send the link to you in the mastermind. But yeah, make sure you use that too because we’ll dig, you know, do deep dives and webinars for whatever it is that you want to discuss, have us look at as you know, analyze whatever it is you want to talk about. We do that stuff in the mastermind. So look forward to working with you as well. We’re almost out of time. We got a couple more.

What Value Do You See In A Set Of Twitter/Facebook Accounts That Retweets/Share Items Via IFTTT?

Next is Hey, fellas, what sort of value do you see and I set of Twitter Facebook accounts in the geographic area of my client that are used to be IFTTT to retweet share items coming from that client and probably other area businesses, so as not to look suspicious? Yeah, I mean, it may help. I don’t know, I just don’t go through all that trouble. It may.

I mean, I think social signals from real accounts where there’s a real activity that generates traffic, so click-throughs. Back to the target URL, not just these I don’t think just the sharing. I don’t know I haven’t done any testing on this. Like specific testing, social signals in several years now, many years now, probably five years. But traffic, referral traffic from social networks is very powerful for SEO. So if you had real people engaging with those profiles or pages or whatever it is that you’re trying to set up on social accounts, where there are real people engaging with that, even if it was automated on your end, but other people were engaging with the automated content, which can happen. And then they were actually clicking through and some of the posts that were being shared to those, you know, the links that were being shared and that kind of stuff that can have an absolute effect. There’s no question. I don’t know. And I may be wrong, but I don’t know that just social signals in and of themselves produce any results anymore towards SEO at all. But real active engaged accounts that those share URLs on those accounts will get clicks from real people. And that does help because it’s referral traffic. So I don’t know Do you have any different data than that, Marco?

No, no, I don’t.

So, it depends on what you’re doing then really, I mean, if you like, here’s an example where we were talking about David Nelson’s RSS masher technology, which can build these beautiful automated auto blog type sites that will start to generate real traffic because a lot of them are like new sites and we’ve got something that you know, we’re working with some somebody that we’re going to be bringing, perhaps bringing to you guys’ attention in the coming weeks or months. We’re starting to test with it now actually, but it’s something very similar. We’re RSS mashers that could complement it. But my point is creating like these traffic-generating sites that have relative route relevant content, either by topic or by location, that can be used to drive real traffic back to, you know, our own properties or own assets that we’re trying to rank or clients or whatever. And, you know, if you have built these sites that start to generate traffic and they start pushing clicks the nose that’s very valuable. So it’s the same thing with social media accounts, if you even if you automate it in some way, shape or form, as long as people are engaging with the content that is being generated by that profile or that page or that account, whatever, then I think there’s value to it. But it’s, you know, how much trouble going through to set all that up. That’s why I typically just don’t do it. Okay, okay. All right. So here’s the thing, Google said that it doesn’t take a look at social signals. Okay.

And this is where we have to separate the bullshit from us fact.

What are they really saying?

What they’re, it could be true that they don’t pay attention to the social signal itself, or a social signal, as whatever that concept could possibly mean. What Google pays attention to is a link because guess what, everything in Google the foundational principles in Google are links. Everything is built around makes the button cannot get the variables that it needs for the algorithms unless it travels. And traveling quotes unless it goes through a link from one server to another. That’s what’s happening. So let’s look at this the way that you’re supposed to look at it. Let’s look at this, as I always tell people, scientists, and what’s actually happening. Google is sending a signal from its server to another server through a link a hyperlink into an HTML hyperlink. It’s going through an IP, whatever it’s going through, it’s going to that server, and it’s looking for something specific. It could be that it’s going to as a social media property, whatever the hell it is, that is going to, it’s been coded to pick up this I call it a signal. Let’s call it donuts. It’s been coded to pick up donuts through those links. And it’s been coded to look at Brown donuts, white donuts, jelly, doughnuts, whatever chocolate-covered doughnuts, whatever you want to call it. All right.

And if it finds those, it brings them back and tells Google Hey, I thought, it fills in on the variables, hey, I found these. Now, let’s go back instead of donuts, let’s just call it, they looked at the LinkedIn, they saw a person, click on the link, the person clicked on the link that and they went to your website went to what Google’s Following this, they went to your website, and they filled out a contact form, you think that isn’t gonna trigger any part of Google at all? Do you think that’s not gonna matter?

Call it whatever you want, call it. Fuck Google, like I always say metadata will say they call it what you want. But Google is seeing that whole client transaction from beginning to end. And you really think that doesn’t make a difference when Google sees that transaction goes take place from beginning to end.

Looking at everything looking, especially on YouTube, and in Google ads, because we know that Google pays special attention to the people that they send you. Do you really believe that these don’t matter, call it what you want this I call it a social signal. call it anything you want. We know from our testing from everything we do from everything that we’ve been covering from all of our client work from all of our businesses, guys, you got to understand that we’re not just Semantic Mastery. Marco isn’t just mathematically I have businesses, I’ve other businesses that I run. I have clients that I work with, I have so many things that I’m into, I don’t know how I have time in the day to do them all. But this is Semantic Mastery, just a small part of what I do. But everything that we show in Semantic Mastery everything that we give, you have to hang out, heavy hitter club, the free SEO group, and Facebook, every bit of information that we share has been tested because I’m not gonna risk my businesses. I am not going to risk my client’s businesses. On theory. We go we set up the theory we formally the hypothesis, we ask the question, we go out and use the scientific method. It’s very simple. And then we print back the information that we said, we know that Google is tracking that person. Why in the world would there be a pixel? Otherwise?

Sweet?

Alright, so last is not really well, I guess it is a question, Aaron’s comes back is replying to his previous comment about a competitor, not trying to be whiny. But when people are deceptive, it makes it bad for all of us if a business doesn’t have a real address, shouldn’t they be sad? Yeah, no, I agree, Aaron. And here’s the thing. If you’re talking about a storefront type of business that is using a fake address, then I would, I mean, maybe I’m wrong here. But I would think that it would get reported by a pissed off customer who went to Google Maps to try to go to the storefront business, and they go to a building that’s empty if that makes sense. So I’ve always talked about if you’re going to do spam Google Maps listings that you should only be doing surface area just type or excuse me, surface area business type of Google Maps listings, because, you know, like a contractor, plumber that goes to other people’s, you know, to people’s homes or buildings, or offices or whatever to do plumbing work, they can hide their address. So nobody’s gonna is clicking driving directions. So I don’t know, Aaron, if it’s if you’re talking about a service area type of business where customers should be going to the location, then I would expect it to be terminated rather quickly because people cussed pissed off, customers would report it, unless it’s one of those odd situations where it can be a service area business, and a local business or storefront business. And then if that’s the case, where primarily that’s a store, if it’s a service area business, then that you know, might be able to get away with it. So I don’t know again, I just still don’t do it. I still don’t report other listings. I don’t negative SEO. I just don’t do it. Again. It’s a karma thing and I just don’t want to invite that into my life even though I’ve had it happen to me in the past I’ve never felt vengeful enough to want to do it to others that’s just my opinion so again you’re entitled to yours and I’m not knocking you for saying that you want to report it fucking report it then you know that’s, that’s on you buddy. And I’m not knocking you for it. I’m just telling you I wouldn’t want to do it myself. That’s all I’m saying. any follow up comments to that Marco? Karma is a bitch call it what you will. Anything that you do can and will come back to me and look, go, and power up your shit.

That’s my recommendation you do whatever the fuck you want. I mean, you’re a grown person. I can’t tell you what to do.

But I definitely would not report shit I would just go get rid of it out the power that’s what you do. Not negative never ever. I’ve never ever done I’ve come really close.

Some piss me off that much where I was gonna blast him and make him appear for like some porn term. But then I

You take a breath and say, okay, it’s okay. It’s okay. Let’s just move on and make money. Yeah, I agree that energy can be spent making money.

So, again, they’re good questions. But yeah, no, you could encourage a pissed off customer to report them. I don’t know. All right. Thanks, guys. We’ll see you all next week.

We appreciate everybody being here. And don’t forget the potato. My rankings are your coupon code for SEO shields for 25% off. It’s only I think for the next two or three days. So take advantage of we can see you guys all right later.

Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 301 published first on your-t1-blog-url