Heads In Beds Show - The TRUTH Behind Link Building To Maximize Your Vacation Rental SEO Performance

Episode Date: February 8, 2023

In our longest episode yet, we dive into the dark and mysterious world of link building. Some SEO agencies in the vacation rental industry ignore this critical piece of the SEO process... but we break down WHY link building is critical to your long-term success with SEO.⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellMike King Twitter ThreadYandex Data Leak: The Ranking Factors & The Myths We FoundDon't Turn 25 Years OldDisavowing Links🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteFacebook PageInstagramTwitter🚀 About BuildUp BookingsBuildUp Bookings is a team of creative, problem solvers made to drive you more traffic, direct bookings and results for your accommodations brand. Reach out to us for help on search, social and email marketing for your vacation rental brand.

Welcome to the Heads & Bets show where we teach you how to get more properties, earn more revenue per property, and increase your occupancy. I'm your co-host Conrad. And I'm your co-host Paul. All right. Hey there, Paul. How's it going tonight? Just fantastic, Conrad.

Just starting the week out on a high note, I think here. We're different. I always think I'm going to gush for just 30 seconds here, but this is the best way to start the week. I truly believe that. I say that often. I joke with people. How's the podcast going?

It is. This is my most fun hour, 45 minutes, whatever we end up taking every week. So this is just, I'm always so bubbly coming into this conversation. So's where we're gonna leave it today but how's your day how's the week going how's the weekend what was it dude yeah doing pretty good i didn't have a lot of stuff going on personally or anything this weekend my son had a sleepover at his best friend's house for his birthday for his best friend's birthday not for julian's birthday that's coming up here and but my son has multiple best friends he's six years old about to turn seven and i don't know like they just they all they're all best friends which is cool goes over there to this kid's house

we hadn't been there before and everyone's super nice and oh we're having a great time and the kids are playing switch on the couch and it's just very wholesome to have a six-year-old who just loves everything i mean it's just like oh i love that game oh i love this my best friend it's just it makes me like wistful for that time when you had no responsibility and the kids just crushing chocolate milk every day and he has a rail it's just awesome so it's all good i show your optimism it's yeah it is that kids it's fun to have those young kids and just see the world a little experience the world a little bit through their eyes we can be a little jaded for just a moment here in a moment there and yeah i there's not too much better than hearing i love you data or i love you i love you mom and

dada that's just one of those things where whatever's wrong in the world it just wipes the day away or it wipes the worries away so true so true news having not a good day is the folks over at yandex yeah so a lot of people listening probably don't know yandex because it's not something that the audience here that we have in front of us listening would think about so yandex is basically the Google of Russia. That's the high level understanding or explanation of what that is, right? Now, a few days ago, I'm looking at an article here that was published on the 27th. So I think this happened on, I didn't see it until Friday, I think.

And then I was poking around at it. So Yandex source code was leaked and it revealed all the search ranking factors. And basically the algorithm, I'm putting this in air quotes that the listeners can't see, the algorithm that powers Yandex, that powers the Google of Russia, if you will. Now, the obvious to be said here is that this is not Google. They have no connection with Google. I'm just using that as a analogy so you understand what the logic is. The leak was put out. We're not really sure of the source. I think you had a read on the source of where it came from? It is. I think it was put on a code repository where it's just going to open source it's going to sit here for a while

and then we're going to i think we'll put together maybe moving it from server to server or doing something like that but it wasn't the traditional leak of someone going to a news agency or doing something like that but that's exactly it is it's source code with all 1900 ranking factors that yandex is currently using. That was out there. That's out there for the world to see. What were your thoughts on what, as you were reviewing that, the source code or did you dive in?

I took a few looks, but what were your thoughts there? So I tweeted this the other day. So Mike King on Twitter, we'll put a link in the show notes, did a good job of breaking it down. And I've originally met Mike, I think years ago at PubCon 2013.

And I followed him online ever since. And he's like a well-known person in PubCon 2013. And I followed him online ever since. And he's like a well known person in the SEO community. And he's very technical. So for him reading the code and understanding what the code does is not difficult, because he's incredibly smart and technical at that level. Now, for me, I can't really read the code and tell you what's going on. I can certainly look at the variable table and read the variables listed off. But who knows, they could have named something weight of text in heading, and then that could mean something else, right? So unless you actually read the code, don't try to open this

thing and understand it. That's my takeaway. And I am not going to sit here and pretend that I understood the actual construction of it. But assuming you know, Mike's thread is accurate, we'll give him the benefit of the doubt, because I think he does know what he's talking about. I was poking around and he had to basically be screenshotting it and giving different examples. I didn't see anything that I guess my takeaway, what I quoted was, let me get this exactly right. I said, this thread is proof that even if you knew the algorithm, or in this case, knew the Google algorithm, you'd be able to do much with it. Because this appears to be the algorithm index leak algorithm. And I understand basically nothing, meaning, meaning I don't see

anything in here where I'm like, Oh, my God, I didn't understand the search engines worked in this way. I guess that's my lack of lack of, I guess, like, juice behind the topic here for me is that it's interesting. I'm very interested by reading it and understanding it and seeing, oh, that's how they do that and things like that. But I don't see anything in here that's going to be a huge tactical shift. So although I like reading about this and consuming it, I guess what I'm trying to understand

from a lower level, maybe I'm just too literal at times, is what am I going to do with this information to make it more usable or viable for my approach to SEO? I think my approach to SEO feels very validated by reading through everything that I'm seeing here, right? Oh yeah, link from Wikipedia is good. Okay, page rank is good. Okay, that makes sense. Is the content relevant to the search?

Yep, that's like half of the ranking factors. Now they have a lot of different, very nuanced ways of measuring. That may be worth digging into a little bit. Is the site up frequently? They have a whole section there about host reliability. So if a site goes down constantly, we've had some sites that have had this issue recently.

That's a factor. That's one of obviously almost 2000 factors, but it is one to consider. If your site's going down all the time, you might want to check that out and correct that. If Yandex works in a similar way to Google, but nothing I saw in here, I think this is actually a good thing in some respects,

if you think about it. Nothing I saw in here wanted me to change or adjust my approach or anything like that. So if you're good at SEO, and you've hired an agency, or there's someone on your team, or it's part of your vocational business, bringing it back to the core audience here, and you think SEO is some mystery black box, well, it's not a black box. I think this leak reveals that it's all just machine learning or machine code that reads this text and then tries to make sense of it and organize it in a logical way. But there's also 2000

ranking factors in Yandex. And I suspect Google is many times more complicated than index. So they might have 2 million or 20,000 ranking factors that they look at. And it's all based on the core principles that we talk about, right? It's like we talked about, right? Technical, keyword research, content production, and link building. And I know that's going to be the top topic of the show today. So that was my takeaway. What was it kind of your take looking at it and poking around i think major reveals for you i think i think it was anybody who's who like got excited and i think there are probably some people in seo space that got oh it got excited and said oh this is i've got the black box i've got the i've got everything behind the scenes but if you did and i think that assessment was really good i saw mortyy Oberstein from, he's been done SEO at Wix.

He's done SEO all over the place. And same thing. It was a very high level of, hey, if you're doing SEO right, and you're doing it right on Friday, it probably didn't change that much on Monday. Like it is, maybe you learned that this carries a little more weight. Maybe URL structure carries a little more weight or link building maybe carries a little more weight or domain of three carries a little more weight or domain authority. Some of these things, but ultimately when it comes right down to it, nothing fundamentally changed from your SEO strategy that you had last week than you did this week based on that week.

So I do. I think if you're actually search engine land did a kind of just an overview article maybe a couple weeks ago. It might have been Journal 2. But just talking about all of the confirmed updates and all the confirmed algorithm updates and core shifts and stuff like that are those core updates. And I think that was actually more beneficial, gave you a better hierarchical look of over the last decade, what's happened to SEO and the changes that have been made on the Google side of things, admittedly. And maybe that is, maybe that's more impactful. But I got more out of that article, just talking about all the changes and what the ranking factors were according to those updates, as opposed to just the index dump. So it is, I think for those of us who do nerd out over this a little bit, it's cool to see it is fun to get a peek behind the curtain. I still think with some of the

legal stuff that's now being brought up against Alphabet that also dropped, I think last Monday, last Tuesday, too, but more on the display side of things, they're certainly trying to to attack that side of the business. But I would not be surprised. I know there's been a pending lawsuit in Europe for the last two years and someone asking an SEO to get behind the scenes and actually see Google's algorithm. And they've been pushing pretty hard and delaying.

So that's the one where if we ever get to see, peek behind the curtain at the Google algorithm, I hope we'd find more but ultimately i still think we'd be in a position where it's not going to comprehensively change your strategy from one week to the next one day to the next just knowing versus not think of it this way even if we did have all of the again whatever the number is two thousand twenty thousand two hundred thousand list of the ways that google weights their ranking factors, it would get picked apart in so little time that like, if you're ranking well, and someone came up behind you and took you over, like you could figure out what they're doing

reverse engineering. So I guess that's my thought process too, which is that if you were in Russia, and you were trying to rank in, we'll just look at the top results. And you don't need to be an expert to figure it out. Look at the top sites. Why are they like, that's what they think you don't need to know the algorithm, you can understand the algorithm by just doing a search and then looking at the top results and going what kind of pages show up what kind of sites go up what are their characteristics things like that it's like have you ever seen that graphic and it's leonardo dicaprio and it's the age of his partner his like girlfriend or whatever yes and then every time this partner hits 25 he dumps the so i don't need to be inside of leonardo dicaprio's mind to know how he thinks which is that when she

gets 26 she is too old for him and he gets he dumps her which is wrong to be very clear i don't need to be inside of Leonardo DiCaprio's mind to know how he thinks, which is that when she gets 26, she's too old for him and he gets, he dumps her, which is wrong to be very clear. I don't support, I don't condone his behavior to be clear, but his motivation and his thinking, I don't even need to talk to the man. And I understand exactly how he thinks because he's done it again and again and again. So that's what I'm saying is that Google is Leonardo and you are a 25 year old woman and you're about to get killed. No, you're about to get knocked off. It's over. Back your stuff, leave, go home. No, I joke. But I think what I'm getting at is that when you can do a search, when you can look at the results, and you can see what types of sites rank, that's what you need. Now you need some investigative skills, you need this right here

in your brain, you need to think, and you need to look and evaluate and understand what you're looking at. That's all that's all skills that you can learn. But even if you gave this to a brand new SEO tomorrow, and say, Hey, go read all these 99 ranking factors and then set them loose on a website tomorrow, they wouldn't be able to rank a thing because they don't know what to actually do.

And I think that's more so the frame that we have on it. And I think that's our topic for today, which is that what do you do with respect to link building? So do you want to dive in there or anything else you want to? I will say that the one thing

I think people underutilize just the skill of doing a quick search to do SEO research, do a quick search and do a little SERP review, whatever it is. But seriously, that is something that how can I rank? How can I rank? Have you looked at who else is ranking for the keyword right now? And I think so often that answer is no. And it is, I just, I want more people. We can talk about more frequently. It's just, this is the most simple keyword research you can do. This is the most simple SEO research you can do. Are there other tools that are going to help you out? Yes. But this is the baseline go from there. So I think now we can move into link building and yeah,

I mean, this is something that, yeah, I, I love the idea of link building. I think if you build it into a process, it can work as a flywheel. And certainly this is something where I got to see it work. At resortsandlunches.com, this is something where we did some heavy link building exercises. We were reaching out to, I mean, hundreds, and I'm not understating that, of events and festivals and these little chambers of commerce and all these little entities for every month and reaching out to try to see what was happening. And then writing a nice little blog post or writing a nice little article or writing a nice little overview about these local little areas. And this was a grassroots effort to just build up this domain. And over the course of 12 months,

at one given time, we put up a thousand blog posts and we had gotten back about 900 links. And it was incredible to see what it did to the overall structure and SEO of the website. Now, big case, big numbers, big payout. I think we had 65,000 pages on that website, but it is. When it comes right down to it, link building is just that work. It's putting in the work, it's writing the content or making sure that you're doing some keyword research to get the right domains, to get the right pages, to do all that behind the scenes. But talk about your experience with link building. Where have you seen it successful? Where have you seen it fail?

How does that work for you? Yeah, I don't know exactly when I first started going down this train or this path where I realized number one, how important link building is to like the overall SEO success of a website. But it's weird how often I stand alone on this, or I stand with minimal support, it feels like and candidly, I think this is actually like a, an advantage that we have with respect to like our services and what we do for a lot of people, because a lot of people don't do this, they don't focus on link building, there's companies in our space and some of them, and I know some of them as well that sell SEO services and they don't do any link building. And I'm very surprised by that because just think about it, right? A site with a low domain rating. Again, let's go back to our earlier commentary from a second ago about looking at the search results. I call this reading the skirt, the SERP, reading the SERP. I call this reading the SERP. I think this is a valid skill for people to have, right? And being able to look at the search results to see what type of sites rank, how often do you see a scenario or a case where a site has very low or no links and ranks at the top of Google? For a competitive search, the answer is never. You'd never see that. Every once in a while, unlike a long tail keyword with very minimal competition, you might see a low domain branding site that can do well. But you need some base level of authority to compete. That's basically what I've observed over and over again. I've looked at, I say this, I can't prove this to be true. But I think I've looked at more vacation rental search results than any human being on planet Earth. That may not be true. But I'm going to say until someone proves me wrong. And discussion at the very least. Yeah, no one else. No one else

here can challenge me on that, at least in the time frame. And what I noticed when I look at the search results is that there is always a variety and there's always a mix typically of local and national sites coming up. So you're to be clear when you're doing link building, like people come to this all the time. This is like one of my things I need like a pre built response for. Oh, I'm never gonna have more links than Airbnb. Yeah, duh. If you can build more links than Airbnb, sell your vacation rental business, sell your vacation rental business, start a PR agency or start doing something else and do that because that you're going to make way more money doing that than operating the best vacation rental company on planet Earth. So that's like when people that's like my other thing that I think we've done before where people say I'm never going to outspend for people. I know that's not the point. That's not the point. But anyway, back to SEO and link building. So you're never going to have more links than Airbnb. Hey, here's the secret. You don't need more links than Airbnb. Again, go look at the search results.

Go do a search. I'm not in this market currently. I've been in the past. We had a client there in the past. Go do a search for Palm Springs Vacation Rentals, a competitive SERP with all the big listing sites going after it, all the local competitors in there, probably a dozen management companies in that market,

all vying for that traffic for that keyword. And you'll find sites ranking at the top of Google that have domain ratings in the 20s and 30s. And they have a good amount of links for sure. They don't have nearly as many as Airbnb, they don't have nearly as many as Verbo, etc. But they're ranking a homepage against the interior page and you can win. So the truth is that link building is this essential part of the SEO process with respect to building authority, getting Google to actually respect the site, I guess, for if you want to make layman's terms, some people might call links votes, whatever you want to call it, it's up to you on how you want to describe it. But the truth of

the matter is that page rank, like we were talking about a second ago, and how all search engines work, it flows from page to page through links. That is how you get the page rank. That's how you get the authority, right? It's not visible anymore. You can't see it like you could use to be able to install a little toolbar thing. When I got started, there was like, click a button, you could see it's like a page rank seven, that's not visible to you anymore, but it's the same mechanics behind the scenes that power a lot of what is actually working with regards to ranking and indexing and actually crawling websites. So as a way to get us started here, I know that's like a long diatribe to get us going.

Links are ultimately, it's like the fundamental nature, I think, of doing SEO, at least giving yourself a chance to do, to rank well, right? You can make the most perfect piece of content on the planet for that particular keyword. But if you don't have it set on a site that has any sort of authority or juice behind it, I just think you're done external links. And those links coming from good sites is ultimately what determines like the authority and relevance of your website. So it's my if you want to do analogy, you're not seeing your analogy, I want to do the car car analogy because I do. I think this is the best analogy that I've heard

talking about link building. It's perfect. So go ahead. Oh, yeah. So this is my analogy, the car one. I was going to do a different one, but we'll do the car one.

Do two, whatever. I'll do two. Yeah, yeah. So there's two different ways. So having a website with like awesome design, great content, research all the right keywords

and no links is like having a Ferrari and putting no gas in it. That's basically what it is, right? Because you have something that's set up for success, but it needs that fuel to fire off. I was also going to say, it's like a singer who has a beautiful voice and records a stunning album with perfect vocal harmonies, and then puts it on CD and puts it in the box next to them and then never distributes it. That's like the same thing, which is you need multiple pieces for this to work well. You need to have the link building so that you can really get a

little bit of traction, like have Google show you, and then your content has the ability to rank. But like just making good content by itself, unless the competition is very low, which does happen. There are scenarios where we have sites with very low DRs doing well, and we're obviously working on improving that. That's part of our approach that we have with the clients. But we sometimes can get some early traction when it's very non-competitive. We have a mutual client, I think, that you and I both worked on that's in West Virginia that's had a good amount of success because there's very few people going after his market in West Virginia. Very few local competitors, very low levels of sophistication in that market from that side of it. So really, it's just, can my homepage outrank

Airbnb and Vrbo for this area plus cabin rentals? And the answer is yes, with domain rating two, by the way. But that's pretty uncommon. If you're in Destin, Florida, you're in Murdbeach, like you have no chance without a good amount of links. So that's my very long like philosophy. It's not even a philosophy. It's like this is my observed reality, if you will, of looking at link building when there's people that don't do it. Here's why I think agencies don't do it. Maybe we can go in this direction now that you've hopefully convinced a few people so far like, all right, this is important. I need to be focusing on it. Yes. The reason that this is hard, and this is hard for us too, I'm not going to sit here and

pretend it's not, is that your output of time does not map at all to the outcome of what you get with links. That's the hardest part about link building. So you spend weeks, months, we have someone on our team, Savannah, who does a lot of this. You spend a lot of time working and spending a lot of energy reaching out creating content doing this and there's no guarantee or promise of success so it's the hardest deliverable for us and i'll be super candid that's hardest deliverable for us to guarantee because there might be a link where we get 10 links then the next month we get zero or one for a specific campaign did we suddenly go from smart to stupid no it's just because it's hard and we're relying on other people to work

with us and find the right you know whatever you want to call it synergies or match between sites. So that's if you want like the quick reason of like, all right, so if it's so easy chief, like why is why do people not do this? And I think it's that I really do. I think that it's between outreach between content creation, promoting it, keeping it track with all that stuff. You could do resource page link building, you could do broken link building relationships with other travel blogs. These are all things that we've done in the past and they all work. The question is how well does it work and the answer is one month it may work awesome one month you may come up so i don't know your experience with it i think i've alluded to it earlier but you have to my knowledge been in a situation in the past where there were seo services

being sold in no link building what do you think was like reasoning behind that sort of decision it was i mean i think the tangible is i can see the content. I can read the blog content. I can feel good about, oh yeah, I'm approving the blog content. And it does. You can see sometimes, and I think a lot of times it was in those low competition areas where a couple of blogs out there, your internal linking certainly helps a little bit. And we did. We started to see growth in the organic placements, growth in the traffic coming through. So it was enough to say, okay, this justifies the cost that you're spending in getting all the content out there. It was, I mean, for admittedly, we did a

lot of link building for our own domain because again, big domain wanted to do all that stuff, but same thing. We ran into the same issues of that's why we had to reach out to 150 to two of these little events or these little websites or things like that. And we're trying to do our domain research, certainly, and trying to get 30s, 40s, 50s, whenever we can. But realistically, a lot of it was linking back to domain authorities of 10 to 15, where we were growing our domain authority up to 50, 60, I think we sat in that area for a good little while. But it felt weird to have to reach down a little bit to just, I mean, it is because that's the only place we were finding the links there. But I do, but knowing, I think that knowing the effort that it takes and having less than a predictable nature to it as

well. The fact that you don't know, you can do all the work in the world. You reach out to 40 people and nobody's interested or nobody wants to do the link or they want to get paid to get the link or something like that. Certainly that's another discussion altogether there is paying for those links. And when Google finds out,

again, that's a ranking factor there on the algorithmic side too. But it's, I think, as you continue to scale, same thing. Maybe you can do it at five to 10 partners, 10 to 15 partners, 15 to 20 partners. But trying to, once you're putting multiple partners or customers in the same location, in the same market,

you're going after, you're exercising those same relationships or partnerships. You're trying to get those link backs through. There is, there's a certain law of diminishing returns when you're trying to scale that link building side of things over a very large portfolio. And I think that was another reason, but it is, if you're showing growth on the organic side, if you're showing growth in organic traffic, if you're showing growth in organic placements, I think that is, in some cases, that's enough for partners or customers who, again, if they're early enough

in their business, they just want to see that initial growth. The hockey stick growth is cool because they don't know, they don't have any precedent to set it against. I think if you look at the long-term success, it is. There were many more opportunities to grow that traffic more over the long-term, maybe less in the short-term if you were building less content or doing less of the best practices behind the scenes for SEO. But I do, I think that certainly that's one thing that it's, I get the pros and cons of maybe that's the part you leave out from a work standpoint. But the long-term success and what it provides, we have, we've seen the results. The results do speak for themselves that the more you are able to do that link building and the more you're able to do it with high domain sites and domain.

Again, those authoritative sites goes back to the E, to the expertise, authority, and oh man. Thank you. Trustworthiness there. But it is that ultimately it's a part of that. And when we look at how it fits in the algorithm or how it fits into the core changes that have been made, that's where it sits. And I think anytime you're working up towards that, it's a benefit for the SEO side of things. Yeah, I guess that's, I guess maybe the interesting part to me is that number one having a conflict in the same market is something that we avoid generally

not signing clients over and over again the same market novel idea some of my people don't subscribe to that theory but that's fine moving along before i get myself in trouble there the yeah it is hard and i share your logic which is that as you scale you want an easy button solution right i click this i put this thing in place and then we get this outcome. And that may not necessarily be the case. And maybe it's that you need to like, to your point from a second ago, the harder link is to get the more it's worth, right? So it's easy for you to get the link, it's easy for everybody else to get the link. And just think about it mathematically, if you have a page with 100 different links on it, and we go back to page rank, and we read it, what happens all the equity gets chipped time it gets

you on the bottom, what's even left, Like you're getting a drop of the syrup that you need to cure your cough, right? It's just not going to make any sense. So the harder the link is to get, the more it's worth. It takes a lot of time to get the links, right? So these things are all true. But the truth is that long-term, again, this is my takeaway. There's sites that we don't need to do much link building on anymore because they're already ranked. But we have a client that we worked with for a long time in Georgia whoia who ranks pretty much number one number two for his market he actually had pretty solid seo done before we even showed up we've expanded it built on it obviously but like we could really not do a lot of link building for him and he's still going to do because he's

already at the top of google so if you're already at the top of google you probably don't need a lot more link building you probably just need more content and you just want to keep your foot on the gas there with respect to building out relevant information on the site and things like that but if you're new and you have domain authority to write go into Ahrefs, or whatever the case may be, you put your domain in there. And when you see what you have, then you're just like a little minnow in an ocean, right? Like you just have no there's no reason for Google to actually show you over other sites. So that's part of it, too, I think, ultimately, which is that call this link building, that's fine. That's what it is. But call it brand building,

when you think of it that way. And you think, okay, I'm starting to start a new brand. The way that I'm going to build awareness for my brand is I'm going to make these types of investments. Then it's a very different calculus. It's a very different way of thinking about things. And I think that's a good way. If we're too in the weeds for the listener on the SEO side, just think about it that way. I need to build my brand and build awareness so that people can come and find me and what I have to offer. And what I have to offer is unique and it's defensible and it's offer a great experience. And I deliver for the homeowner,

I deliver for the guests, I deliver for my community. Like these are hard things to do. And that's another thing that comes up sometimes is people come to us and they, I want to have success and I want to rank very highly right away. And I'm even willing to make investments to do that.

Well, music to my ears, right? That's good. Like you understand it's not going to be easy. But my logic is always with link building in particular, with SEO in particular, is it was easy for someone to come in here and just rank for a competitive area plus vacation rentals. And what's to stop someone eight months from now from doing the same thing to you. I've said that to people before, because I'm like, it's hard for a reason. Like it's hard because that traffic is incredibly valuable. It's hard

because that traffic over a year or two years or three years isn't deliver you in some markets, literally millions of dollars of gross bookings will occur because of the way that you rank on Google. So the fact that it's difficult and challenging and hard means that it shouldn't be easy for someone to come in cold off the street, build a new website and rank number one in Google in any short period of time in a competitive market. In fact, if that happened to you, you'd be, you'd be livid, you'd be mad as hell. You'd be like, you'd be like, what are you talking about? I paid you for SEO. I was at the top. And now someone came in and got me and i'm like so you can't be entitled to the success too with regards to seo and a lot of my feelings on this too is like getting the

client in the right mindset getting the person listening maybe to this in the right mindset to be like okay this is this is how this is the strategy or the tactic i want to use my strategy might be like increasing direct bookings from organic that's the strategic decision at this top level as we go down a layer the tactic might be okay part of a key part of my seo strategy is going to be developing new content a key part of my seo strategy is going to be building links to my website from other relevant sites that have you know expertise authoritativeness and trust great that's a good tactical explanation the mechanics of doing that is going to be through outreach it's going to be through promoting my content it's going to be through resource pages it's going to be through broken link building it's going to be through outreach. It's going to be through promoting my content. It's going to be through resource pages.

It's going to be through broken link building. It's going to be through building relationships. All true. And then the way that I'm going to measure that is going to be on a six month horizon or a 12 month horizon or something like that. Not a six week horizon or a six day horizon, which happens every once in a while. I talked to someone who has that mindset and we've been at this for two months and we don't rank number one yet.

It's again, yes, that's intentional in some respect on Google sign. So those are like some of the philosophical, I think mindset things, but let me shift gears a little bit. We've talked a little bit about like domain authority. We've talked a little bit about these different concepts. You may not maybe necessarily understand what, maybe you can explain that real quick for us, Paul, domain authority, page authority. These are domain rating in particular is a third party metric. Could you break down a third party metric versus Google and just understanding what those numbers mean? Yeah, it is. I think that, and that's, that was kind of be my next question too, is domain authority versus page authority. I think

domain authority is this for the entire domain. And that was something that it's really important to you. If we can get it on the base domain, we get it on that homepage. They're right there. I want to get my link back coming from that homepage there. Page authority is under every domain, you're going to have that individual page authority. That's this. The blog page is not as or may not be as powerful as your base domain, your root domain, your homepage. Same thing. Your contact us page probably has lower page rank than the rest of the pages on your site

there. So that is that's certainly something where it's not just, it's, that's how it's broken down domain page wise. It is every individual page does have its own page rank. And that domain rank of 25 doesn't necessarily carry down to every page on the website. You may have anything from, you may have some pages that are a two page rank, but they're sitting under your main domain there. It is on the third party side of things. That's, I think when everybody throws their unique spin on it, we get to see some different areas of, I think it draws back to the, what we don't know about the algorithm, what we don't know about how that plays, comes into play there.

So everybody, I think there's probably three or four little domain checkers or domain reviewers that are going to give you, they are, they're going to calculate how many links you have coming in, typically how much traffic they're going to estimate from those links. And then they're going to give you a score based on that. Now, is it more beneficial, less beneficial than what's coming great from Google or the search engines? No, it gives you a visualization, I would say, and certainly it allows you to have some idea, but I think it is whenever you can, you certainly want to find something that is tying as closely as you can to the actual search engines themselves. Because anytime you are putting some third party in there, they're trying, ultimately a third party is trying to sell you on something. So their score is better than Google's score is better than Bing's score is better than

all these places. But that was something where looking at the domain rank versus looking at the page rank, we certainly went back to some of the little events and festivals and said, oh, this is great. Love seeing this link on your blog page or your contact us page or your Venn's page, something like that. If we could get on the homepage though, that's exactly, that's really what we're looking for. And then we're gonna share that link juice

and we're gonna share all the great benefits of SEO together. We're gonna really grow this together. And I think that's as important as which page, which domain, you know, it is. If you've got multiple domains, which domain, you know, it is if you've got multiple domains, which domain is linking back to you? Is that something that you put into your, your link building strategy or link building as you're doing the research there? What does that

look like for you? Are you trying to find specific pages that you're going to get those links from? Are you just trying to look at the domain and hoping for the best there? What is it? I think it all depends on what level of control we have with the ask right so if you have a lot of control in the ask then yeah you can be very specific and you're like a sniper right you're like i'm exactly one on this page to this exact page on my site and there's a lot of logic to be had in the the trouble is that usually it's more we're a boat in the motorstead and the tide's gonna take us where the tide's gonna take us right yeah it's like yes we're going out sea. So that's sometimes how it is with link building. And you're often on the other side of the equation, not talking to someone who may have a

deep, sophisticated understanding of a page rank and how things flow. And oh, this page actually has a ton of links pointing to it for externally. So really that page is actually more valuable than this page for this reason. You mentioned a homepage versus an interior page is a very common way it would manifest itself in the real world. But I think ultimately, beggars can't be choosers. That's my problem. That's right. If we're out there and we're doing outreach and we're asking for a link on your travel blog because you mentioned St. Simon's Island, Georgia, and we want you to link to our St.

Simon's Island, Georgia vacation rental company, we got to take what we get a little bit. So the benefit of the tools, in my opinion, Ahrefs is our kind of flavor, if you will, of choice. I call this like a Ford versus Chevy or a Pepsi versus Coke thing. You're going to ask people to get different opinions. I don't know if it matters too much. I'm sure we could have the same levels of success with SEMrush or even Moz, even though it's like that tool is not as popular today as it used to be in the past.

But I'm sure we would have pretty directionally accurate numbers. Hey, this site appears to have 10,000 links pointing to it. This site appears to have 10. The Ahrefs catches a little bit more. That's my belief. And that's what I've experienced in the real world using the tool for eight years now. But I don't think it matters significantly, to be honest with you. So if someone's paralyzed and has SEM rush or SEM rush, right, and it's like considering dumping it for Ahrefs, I don't think that's gonna really make you necessarily a stronger, better person at doing link building or doing like your overall SEO

strategy. So that's my overall take on like tools and placement, which I think is get what you can get. I think that the link itself is more valuable than obsessing over where it goes. If you have that button of control and you can turn that dial a little bit up and be very specific about where the link is, if we want to get really down in the weeds, what anchor text the link uses, and how that link flows into your website. Those are all valid considerations, I think, to consider. But generally, if you're like starting out and you have a very low DR as measured by Ahrefs, which is again, is third party company, like we're mentioning,

but it's directionally pretty accurate in my experience. You gotta take what you can get. You can't be out there demanding. I need a link on this page when you really aren't giving typically a lot of value back in that scenario. That's my take. So here's the, and then this,

and then I guess this is the loud, I think this is a good spot to land on the last area is disavowing links. Now, this is something that I've seen you write about previously. And this is something that I think there's a lot of questions as to what validity it has to disavowing links. Understand for link farms and click farms, maybe trying to get rid of those, but are they impacting your actual SEO? Are they not impacting your SEO? That's the one thing about SEM rushes. They do have the toxicity score, the toxicity of those linked facts. And again, it's a third party. So what do we know? How do we know? Again, I think this is a little bit of a soapbox moment for you. So I'm going to just

give you the floor and let you go with this one. No, I think the trouble that I have with it is that number one, I call this filler. This is SEO filler a lot of time where people are claiming that they're doing something positive by disavowing the link. So there's a lot of angles to go down here.

The thing to start with, right? If you're considering disavowing links is why? That seems like a logical starting point. Why are you considering disavowing the link? Are your site rankings falling? Okay, I like that. yeah why are you considering disavowing link is your site are your site rankings falling okay like that you might want to consider disavowing links at least that might be your thought process okay great do you have a manual action inside of google search console have you done anything that would necessitate you to disavow links are you doing some kind of spamming link building tactic that maybe you think google

is not benefiting or rewarding from these are all things to consider but i but I have disavowed, again, for the folks listening, my hands up four or five times, maybe. I can count them on one hand. Four or five times in, what, seven, eight years of doing this kind of work. And the reason is that I've never seen that to be an effective tactic or strategy in most of the cases where rankings are slipping.

Rankings are usually slipping because of some other content or structural flaw on the website, or who knows, right? Google might just hate your site for that, some reason i was talking to buddy mine about examine the other day and it looks like they're finally back but this is a site that did everything right by the book from an seo perspective they're in a very different space they're like the health and supplement space and just got absolutely crushed algorithm update after algorithm update until recently google figured out oh these guys are like actually legit and now they're rewarding

them so it also that is also the case sometimes like of those 1900 ranking factors that we opened the show with that might be impacting you at any given moment in time. A lot of them are outside of your control. A lot of them maybe have to do with how Google perceives other content in that search result or how Google wants to show people in the search result and you no longer match what they're looking for. Again, read the SERP and you can figure it out usually with some directional level of accuracy. So the reason that I rarely disavow links is that I've never necessarily found it to be a useful tool in fixing rankings. That's one side of it. The other side of it is I've not, I don't trust the SEMrush. I don't trust that you can use like pure, you can use pure like math or a weighted set of factors inside of a tool like

that and be very accurate. Make a lot of assumptions that turn out to not be true. But here's what, if I could sum it all up in reason, or in one sort of sentence, this would be it. How do you know that those links are hurting? That's the key. That's the key. Because how can you look at a link and be like, I know this link is hurting me, you can't do that. You can't do that. Because you don't know if that link is hurting you or not, it may look bad. I've seen links all the time that look horrible, that look spammy, that are scraper sites out there over and over again. But I think, I don't know if this is helping or not. And anyone that says they know, I believe they're full of nonsense. I don't think they can, I don't think they know. I think they look at it and they go,

based on this documentation, this looks bad, but they can't prove it. Like maybe you disavowed it and then maybe later you have some benefit, but who knows, you might've changed things in the meantime. You might've improved your content or built new links that are better. So it's one of those things that's very difficult to test unless you're on the cusp or have received manual actions and penalties, I don't think you should ever consider disavowing links. And I think if your agency is saying every month, we're going and we're looking in SEMrush and we're looking in things and we're scraping, you know, we're pulling out links and putting them into a disavow file and uploading that. There's agencies in the space that do that. I know that because I'm still on Webmaster Tools or Search Console for a few of them. And I get

CC'd when they upload a disavow file. And I'm sure that they think, I actually think many of them mean well, I think they're actually doing something that they think might be helpful. But I believe it's filler. In my experience, it's filler. And I also reserve the right to change my mind, as with all things. I've not necessarily seen that to be impactful or effective. And I think even if you are getting bad links, the best thing for you to be spending time on is working on getting more good links. It's not to panic and worry about the negative aspect of it and trying to disavow things that may or may not even be helping you or hurting you at all. It may have no impact, which is what Google is trying to trend towards anyways, with respect to links.

As if a few years ago, they said that publicly, okay, when we see sketchy stuff nowadays, it's going to be like plus zero, it's not going to take or add weight to your score. That's their current philosophy. And then there's public statements about that we can link in the show notes. If that were the case, then the best thing to do when you're getting plus zeros is to figure out how to get more plus ones and plus twos and plus threes and plus tens in the algorithm score if you will it's not to overly index and worry oh maybe this is the rare case where it's a negative one and i better disavow it so don't disavow under only under extreme circumstances should you ever be considering disavowing in my opinion i think it's like we just saw there's 1900 ranking

factors for yandex it may play a, but it's one of 1,900. Obviously, there are link building, there are other link building algorithmic factors that are playing into play there. But let's say it's 100 out of 1,900. There's still 1,800 factors that are making just as big or making some type of impact on your SEO that you can optimize for.

So I would agree. The only times I've seen it actually be beneficial making some type of impact on your SEO that you can optimize for. So I would agree. The only times I've seen it actually be beneficial is when there is a broken site out there. That's the only time. And I still don't necessarily know that it's negatively impacting, positively impacting. But I make an educated guess that, okay, there's a server on the other end of this link. Google maybe doesn't think that's so cool. So that's fine. And I think you can make better inroads

just making sure your internal links are in line because how many times have you gone into a website where there's 404s flying over the place, there's a few 500-level errors? Those are impacting your SEO. Those are things you should be working on. Those are the fixes that are actually going to make an impact. Disavowing a number or a

10 domain authority or an eight domain, what more beneficial things to do. So I would agree with that. I just wanted to hear you go off a little bit. I would like to ask the agencies that are disavowing links for their clients and charging them money to do so every single month. Do they disavow links to their own agency site? One wonders. Also, I also wonder if there's agencies out there that have their website built on WordPress, but then they sell websites that are based on another platform. Why that would be the case. I also find that pretty interesting. We caught that on the other day as well.

So yeah, it's like a do what I say, maybe don't do what I do. And I get it. The cobblers children have no shoes. And yeah, like SEO isn't like your key to success or whatever. Put your money where your mouth is. If you owned a website and you had a limited amount of resources and time to spend on it, would you be spending five hours a month disavowing links? And my answer almost always, and barring a manual penalty, is hell no. Hell no. It's not worth your

time or your effort for sure. So yeah, look, one more thing I want to touch on before we maybe put a bow on this thing. And look, I go five hours on link building, so don't tell me where I will. You said about paying for links, and I think that's worthy of a minute or two of discussion a few minutes ago. So I believe that there are circumstances where we would consider and have paid for links. I don't think that it's a pure black and white, oh my God, money changed. Therefore, it's a black box, right? Because first of all, the person that's on the other side of that is having to take up

some time, effort, energy, et cetera, to put that link on your website. Maybe it's minimal if it's just, hey, add me to this post that you already have. Maybe it's more of a time investment where you're writing a guest post, they have to format, add images and things like that. So for them to charge a publishing fee or something like that, I think is completely reasonable from a purely ethical nature of the conversation. Now, I think what, think about what Google is trying to avoid and stop, right? What they're trying to avoid and stop is people that have bestcreditcardfinder.com from just going and paying every single finance blogger on planet earth a thousand bucks to link to their content site about credit cards. That is not really the

tactic that I think you should have. And the easier it go back to my earlier commentary, the easier it is to buy a link, the worse the quality tends to be correct. So most of the time, once we've added a site, if they want to charge us at that point, I'm fine with it for the most part, because we've already vetted the site, we already know its quality, we already know their audience has overlap with our audience, or marketing in a logical way. How many people are going to link to you for free without any sort of compensation or swap back their way or no?

It's very rare. Like some people will just do it out of the goodness of their heart. But nowadays, site owners are inundated with emails and messages saying link to me. So they want some benefit out of that. I don't think that's wrong or unethical. Now, I think if you were to take it purely at face value

and you were to say that to a Googler and you said, I paid this webmaster for their time and effort and energy, I didn't pay them for the link, you get into a very nuanced discussion that I think Google probably would say, yeah, but you paid for the link ultimately, and we could penalize you in that scenario. So your goal in buying links, I guess, if you're to engage in that activity, is to buy sites, buy from sites or work with sites that even if it was a paid link, it would still make sense, right? And once you apply that thinking to your way that you approach sites, then you realize that it's somewhat, it's just a budgetary concern. Do we have enough budget to pay for a few opportunities

every month for the webmasters time? But I would put any paid link that I've engaged in on myself or people on my team over the past two years against, what I always tell internally too, is every link we build, we'll show you because we're proud of links that we build. We're not doing anything sketchy. Now, if someone comes up and we do this all we build, we'll show you because we're proud of links that we build. We're not doing anything sketchy. Now, if someone comes up and we do this all the time, we disqualify sites. We go on the homepage of the site and the top article is roofers in Indianapolis. And then the next article is mesothelioma lawyer in Florida. And then the article after that is like vacation rentals in Destin.

Yeah. Like those types of links. Yes. Don't. My goodness. That's like taking a needle off the street of San Francisco and plunging in your arm. Please do not do that. That is the stupidest thing you can do. But if you're buying links from sites, and it's 10 awesome reasons I got to go to Destin, Florida, and it's mommy blogger in chicago.com, right? And it's like her site is

full of here's the places I go on vacation and this and that and you pay for a link on that site. I'm perfectly fine buying those links because I never under any scrutiny from either Google or the client or myself, I feel like we did the right thing to connect the right audience with the thing that matters so that's my take on it by the book are we doing things that might slightly be against the webmaster guidelines I don't know like at one point Google said anything you do to manipulate search results is not good so I'm like just doing SEO is against the webmaster guidelines like obviously I'm trying to yeah obviously I'm trying to manipulate the search results to my client's favor that's like why they hired me they They didn't hire him to sit in a desk

and look pretty, right? They get they need results out of it. You need to decide for you like what your level of risk tolerance is what you're okay with. Maybe you find that idea important. I will say this, though, one little tool to like slide in here at the very end, Google now has a capability where you can add in tags, you can put in a sponsor tag on every single link that you pay for. So if you're very worried and you think that what you're doing is on the wrong side of what Google would consider okay,

then the simplest thing for you to do is to just basically say, hey, a webmaster, I'm willing to pay your $100 placement fee, your $200 placement fee. Here's my content. Here's my article, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Please go ahead and put a sponsored

rel equal sponsor tag on the link so that it's very transparent and honest that this is one that we did exchange money for. If you want to do that, go ahead. I don't feel the need so that it's very transparent and honest that this is one that we did exchange money for. If you want to do that, go ahead. I don't feel the need for that. I don't think that's necessarily something that's going to massively change your results. But if you want to be by the book as humanly possible, do that. And then it'd actually be curious, you know, report back on your results, email me and I'd love to see how your performance either stayed flat or went up from that level of disclosure. I actually suspect it wouldn't even be

that negative. In fact, I think you fact, I think you'll still see success. I'd rather build rel equal sponsored links that have no link at all. Those are my two options available to me. So I'd consider that. Yeah, anything else that you want to dive into on like paid links or? It is, I think the one,

it's very difficult for Google or Bing or anybody else to actually figure out what is a paid link and what's not a paid link. But I think as we move more towards influencer marketing, influencer marketing is link building. Whether there's a direct link back, obviously that is the key there. But the paid influencer, if you're paying an influencer to write something, if it's just staying on social, maybe not so much on the link building side.

But if they have a website, if the Mommy Blogger is a great example, a family travel blogger, something like that, that is. Those are the targets for a paid link back. And it is. I would consider that much more to be influencer marketing now than a paid link building strategy, though it all follows into play there. something where i think maybe because google understands what's happening in in kind of the new digital marketing era that we're using i would hope that it is it's that the paid link back is not as bad as big a black mark as it used to be and i think it is and the fact that you just can't find it that easily i think that contributes as well there so it's if you find the right links they're worth paying for just make sure they are the right links i think that contributes as well there. So if you find the right links, they're worth paying for.

Just make sure they are the right links. I think that's the key. Yeah, I think that's a good key. Maybe we could put a bow on it. Like I said, I'll go all day if you let me on this one. So I'm sure the people are tired at this point of listening to the nuances of link building at this stage of the show. Thank you so much for listening.

If you made it this far, we appreciate it. Email me your link building questions. Congratulations. I would love to debate with you or talk to you about what I think is the best way of doing things. Conrad, C-O-N-R-A-D at buildupbookings.com. We will look for some more reviews. I learned, Paul, that we have several listeners on Spotify that haven't left a review.

I don't know what an appropriate punishment is. Maybe we, I don't know. Maybe we do something. I was going to say, I've seen a dramatic lift on the Apple side of things. So if people are still doing out there, but keep it up and Spotify, come on, just give it. Yeah. A little.

I don't want to have to beg. Yeah. I'll beg. More than we are already. Yeah. If you're a Spotify listener and you're made it this far and you haven't left a review, could you be our, I think it's second or third or something. Could you be, could you consider it?

You could be the one. Anyways, you could be the one. Let's be the Valentine's day is coming up. Maybe we'll give, send them some. What's your favorite Valentine's day candy. Do you like you like those little little hearts a little like chalky i don't know if i like chalky hearts the conversation hearts not the sweet tart ones they got to be like the old like barely sustainable flavors a little minty a little chalky yeah i'm happy let's give them boxes let's give them a bag if you're a spotify listener and you leave us a, I will send you a bag of Valentine's Day candy.

But you have to email me and screenshot your review. So that's my promise. There you go. All right. Thank you guys so much for listening. We appreciate it. And we will catch you on the next episode.