Speaker 1: 0:54

Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of the SEO intelligence platform keywordfewpleasercom, where we help you discover the questions people ask online and then how to optimize your content to build traffic and authority.

Speaker 2: 1:06

I've been in.

Speaker 1: 1:07

SEO and online marketing for over 20 years, and I'm here to share the wealth of knowledge, hints and tips I've amassed over that time. Hello, welcome back to SEO is not that hard. It's me here, ed Dawson, as usual, and today we're diving into the fascinating world of digital PR and link building. In this episode, I'm joined by Chris Pantelli, who's the co-founder of Linkify, which is one of the world's top digital PR agencies, and we'll explore how to earn those really coveted editorial links from major publications that can really drive growth in your SEO, and we'll discuss smart strategies like inbound and outbound pitching, and even reveal the secrets behind how to do effective newsjacking. So, whether you're a seasoned SEO just starting out, whatever your level, I think Chris's insights are going to really help you build credibility and drive real traffic to your site.

Speaker 1: 1:54

So, yeah, let's jump in with Chris right away. So welcome Chris. This is Chris Pantelli and he's from Linkify. And, chris, if you just want to give a quick intro to the listeners so they know who you are and where you've come from, yeah, thanks for having me on, ed.

Speaker 2: 2:07

My name's Chris Pantelli. I'm the co-founder of Linkify. We're one of the world's leading digital PR link building agencies and done quite a few podcasts in recent months, and I think this one I am the closest, in actual proximity to the host, so I'm a stone's throw away from you, aren't I? Really we're in like the same. We almost could have done it in person so today we're here to talk about links.

Speaker 1: 2:34

Now Chris approached me and said could you come on, talk about um, kind of the digital pr type links that they're doing, and I thought it'd be just a real good to have someone who's a bit more of a link building expert than I am. I mean, anyone who knows me and listened to this podcast know I had my issues with link building. I used to do all sorts of link building pre-penguin, so pre sort of 2012, 2013, times13 times. I did quite a lot of bad link building, got penalized quite badly, and at that point I changed my philosophy and sort of have abandoned link building on a personal level since that time and I've concentrated very much on content, which is very safe.

Speaker 1: 3:09

But, as I always say to people, it is a bit of a slow burn to start with to get to where you want to be. So links are very powerful. All the content I build, I am aiming to build with to get to where you want to be. So links are very powerful. All the content I build, I'm aiming to build content to get links. But sometimes you want to accelerate that process and there are different ways of doing it, some with sort of much less risks than others. So first of all, chris, why don't you explain the kind of links that you build at?

Speaker 2: 3:34

link. We do digital pr link building, which is uh for us, um, because obviously in any form of link building uh markets, you'll get unscrupulous people operating, so they'll say it's one thing, they'll say it's another. So for us, digital pr link building is editorially earned links. So that's where, um, we are pitching on behalf of a client in order to earn them coverage on a tier one publication, with the hope that that publication includes a link back to the client's website. The issue with link building in terms of digital PR is we fundamentally don't transact for any link. So you can even reach out to what's seemingly, on the surface of it, very, very high authority publications. You may pitch them a press release or some expert commentary and they may come back to you and say this is good, we'll include it, but we have an administration fee or there's a £200 charge for us to place this coverage, which we do not engage with. So for us, it is 100% editorially earned and, like you said, ed, with content being a slow burn.

Speaker 2: 4:51

This is a slow burn link building process because it's very, very, very competitive. So it it's got the competitive nature, um, and then there are multiple um obstacles in the way from taking on a client, or you can do this yourself as well, um, and then engaging with the media and getting a link, and that can be anything from the first of all, impressing journalist to for them to include your quotes within within their article, right away through to the journalist, the publication that they work for, their editorial lead times, their editorial linking policies just a whole host and myriad of factors that can result in not getting the link that you want. So it's it's really time consuming, um, but for us it allows you to. We just actually this week, actually, we just landed links for clients in um, the national geographic um and uh hosting for one of our tech clients, which is a huge um hosting website. So the the quality is just insane, but like, yeah, like I said, it's, it's slow burn and um very competitive yeah, cool.

Speaker 1: 5:57

So for for anyone who's not, because obviously used the term tier one. So what do you Like? I said it's slow burn and very competitive. Yeah, cool.

Speaker 2: 6:01

So for anyone who's not, because obviously you used the term tier one so what do you define as a tier one sort of partner to get links from?

Speaker 2: 6:13

In terms of, for us, digital PR spans the UK and the US And's it's mainstream media, uh, which is the publications that you've heard of in terms of like traditional news publications. So, as a fellow brit you'll know daily mail, daily star, guardian, uh, the mirror, all of the, the, the big newspaper publications that have websites as well, um, and then outside of that, on like a metrics. In terms of metrics, we would be looking at DR, ahrefs, domain rating and traffic. And for us, tier one is very, very high DR, so above a DR 70. And not just a few thousands organic monthly sessions, but tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of organic monthly sessions and that's just showing that's Google rewarding that site with significant organic traffic, which is, for us, puts it in that tier one bracket because it's so trusted by Google that it's receiving such significant amounts of organic traffic and that's going to be passing the maximum amount of A link juice and B protection in terms of it truly is an earned media link as opposed to any other sort of link building.

Speaker 1: 7:24

Okay, cool, yeah. And the other key thing I picked up was your description of links being editorial. So that editorial side bit and that's a word I think Google use themselves in their spam guidelines, don't they? They talk about non-editorial and non-editorial links. So so, if I'm right and you can tell me from wrong, the editorial is the fact that that is a um, whoever is placing that link, the author of the content and who's placing that link is they're making that decision for themselves, with no incentive one way or the other to place where to place that link, when to place that link and whether, to you know, essentially put a no follow on that link or a or or follow, although obviously there is no such thing as a followed link, because they're just, they're just links, or they're no followed or uh, or marked as sponsored and or you just see other things.

Speaker 1: 8:12

So it's the fact that, although you're engaging with the people to sort of put that content in front of them, or a story or a or a quote or any kind of anything in front of them, you can do that and that's legitimate, to sort of bring it to people's attention. But the the key thing is that there's no, there's nothing changes hands, whether it's cash or uh, or in, or goods in return, like you know, for any kind of anything coming back the other way, that editorial means the person has made that decision for themselves, with, with no coercion.

Speaker 2: 8:44

Essentially is that right yeah, yeah, a hundred percent. And actually just yesterday, um reach plc, which is one of the really big uh media houses in the uk that owns express, um mirror a few of the other huge publications they sent an email out. So this all came out on Twitter yesterday to all of their journalists to say that they were really unhappy about one particular journalist who had included a number of casino links throughout a number of articles, and so they've actually changed the policy now. So all links are included at the discretion of the journalist but must be approved by the editor, like the manager of that editing department, for that. Wow, as an SEO and a link builder, for us it's about the link, but on the other side of it, what we're really doing to the journalist is engaging with the journalist to be editorially involved in that article by way of providing commentary or unique data or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 1: 9:52

But as.

Speaker 2: 9:52

SEOs. We want the link. We want the link. We want the link.

Speaker 1: 9:55

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, building agency. We want the link, we want the link, we want the link. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but it's it's being careful to not cross that line between editorial and non-editorial, which you know, which is which you should. Obviously, if you're there in the discussions and you've got oversight of that, it's easy to know where you are. But obviously it's key to also make sure that you're not doing things that are going to flag up to google any kind of issues. Um, what kind of things do you have to do to sort of make sure that anything you're doing doesn't cross that line? You know, or? Or? Where are the boundaries? Is it opaque or have you got hard and fast rules?

Speaker 2: 10:33

um, I mean we don't really have to do anything because we're I mean, we never, ever lower our standards on what we deliver in terms of, like tier one media link. So very high DR, very high organic traffic, and it must be an earned media opportunity. So, for us, digital PR operates with inbound opportunities, which is like platforms like Harrow, that's now like SOS or the other inbound opportunities. So that is waiting for an inbound opportunity and responding to that opportunity and trying to win that pitch. Or outbound is building a list of journalists and sending out campaigns to the journalists that work for these tier one publications.

Speaker 2: 11:15

Now, having said that, there are, of course, caveats. Some of those inbound opportunities that come in are not from tier one publications and, in fact, some people spam that system by pretending to be a tier one publication and then they'll actually they're looking to do a three-way link swap. Let's say, this was prevalent on Harrow about six months before it shut down. Um, it was happening significantly so like there was like a number of people on that platform, uh, who were posing as, let's say, you know, doing an article that will go on msn or um, a website which looked sort of tier one-ish, like a reasonably high dr. I mean, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that it's not and we have systems for that. Just to check their outbound link profile, you can see if they're linking to a bunch of casino and stuff. Then it's a it's a well-dressed let's say, spammy affiliate site.

Speaker 2: 12:05

Um, you would give your commentary to them. They would say, oh, this is great, I'm going to include it in my article, but I need you to give me a link on this article. So obviously we have in-house systems, we blacklist those domains and we avoid anything that looks like that. We never pay blah, blah, blah. But really it's. I mean, it's obvious, it's the links that you can't, it's it's coverage on websites that you can't buy links from. Um, yeah, you know, if I showed you a client link report like, for example, national geographic uh, huge website, um, we can either reach out to them with a story and hope they include it, or wait for one of their journalists to say I'm looking for an expert to give comments on this article. I'm writing and if, if we win, then we win, and if we don't, then we, we move on and keep going okay, so there's two, there's two kind of things from that.

Speaker 1: 12:52

You talk about the inbound channel and the outbound channel. So is that you, that you, I'm guessing? Obviously inbound is where you're looking at those um, those marketplaces where the journalists are um and where the um, the prs, are where they're putting out so that the journalists will say, where I'm writing a story on x, has anyone got anything they can provide on this? Or I'm looking to talk to people with who can quote on certain subjects, and then if you've got a client that matches one of them, then you'll pitch to that journalist. So that's, that's the that would. That's what you would call inbound, and outbound, I presume is obviously just the reverse, where you're going to journalists and saying, hey, we've got this story, we think it'd be fantastic for you. Is it that kind of? Those are the two major kind of yeah, exactly what ways? We, you do this right, okay, cool, so that's really interesting.

Speaker 1: 13:39

So what do you do? So what? You see, you've got a new client coming in then and um, obviously I'm well known for being in the broadband, I haven't been in the broadband space. So if you've got like a uh, broadband supplier that's coming in there, your new client and they want to um do digital pr with you. Where would you start with them? When it comes to a new client, what's your starting process to try and work out how you're going to push them?

Speaker 2: 14:04

Yeah, so we recently just did a campaign for a broadband comparison site, but in the Canadian market. So the first thing that we did with them was look at the credentials of the spokesperson for the website. So that's more an assessment on those inbound opportunities. So if you're going to pitch a journalist as an expert you need to have verifiable, relevant credentials to as broad a topicality, um of queries that match the niche of the website, if that makes sense. So broadband fits quite nicely into that sort of broad tech niche, that technology niche, um, and this guy was um, he was the owner of the of the website. So he may have just been like a money man, let's say um, but he was actually a tech guy. So he was like very, um, very ingrained in the like wi-fi technology, uh, arena, let's say, and had like really good technology credentials degrees, master's degrees in internet stuff. I can't off the top of my head, I can't remember, but he lent himself as an expert representative of the website perfectly for broad inbound technology related queries. So that could be things like LifeWire's writing an article looking for someone to give tips on where's the best place to position a Wi-Fi router in a two-story house, let's say. I mean that's a golden opportunity. We'd go as broad as possible. So if there was something even more broader but still fit within that general tech niche so looking for someone to give advice on hardware to do with a computer, let's say so. Even though that's not directly related to broadband or Wi-Fi, this guy is still a technology expert. It makes sense for him to be based on his credentials and expertise. It makes sense for him to be commenting on that. And then the link back to his website, if the journalist chose to include it, would also make sense from everybody else that's looking at that link's perspective, so Google's perspective, the journalist who's submitting that article to their editor for review. So it sort of ticks all the boxes and allows us to win those broad, niche-relevant links on huge publications. And then on the outbound side, well, it's quite easy because broadband is quite a PR-friendly sort of subject. So just the team have an ideation session and you come up with ideas that are going to resonate with the journalists with the current news cycle.

Speaker 2: 16:44

We also look at like data that we can news jack into the current news cycle and I think we did a campaign with him that was a little bluer. We did one around Christmas which was to do with can certain Christmasmas decorations being run all at the same time in the house um decreased the strength, the wi-fi connection, it was something like that. It did really really well um. And then another one was just a simple um like cheapest providers, uh. And then we also looked at um sky sky wi-fi. You know you can get like wi-fi in the planes now. So we looked at like which airlines are offering like actual wi-fi that works, uh. And then this is presented um from that company as, like their original research. They're the ones behind the story um, you go out to a bunch of publications and then you know the ones that, like it will run with it.

Speaker 1: 17:30

So yeah, no, that's. That's fascinating. There's lots of parallels there because I used to do I'm quoted in various newspapers, if you Google any they were always particularly interested in speed test data and finding out where which places have the fastest and the slowest broadband um speeds, that kind of thing yeah but I suppose what you're trying to get there is you're trying to build up it's.

Speaker 1: 18:07

It goes down to experience, expertise, authority and trust, really a bit like what google is. The journalists are looking for the same thing. I'm guessing they want someone with experience, expertise, authority who they can trust to, to be that sort of third person in their article that gives their article more weight, because obviously a journalist is a journalist. There might be a specialist journalist in certain areas, but I suppose they always they always want comment from other people, don't they? Because that boosts. That's part of the journalistic process, really, isn't it? To get that third party comment to add weight to an article, isn't it?

Speaker 1: 18:37

So it's not just their opinion, so they're looking. So again it's yeah, I suppose you're following those EEAT principles, just with real people. They're only trying to convince a person rather than Google. So it goes to the same thing. Yeah, no, that's really, really interesting. So what kind of? You talked about newsjacking. Now, that's a phrase I've heard before. Can you cover just a little bit more in detail what the actual process of newsjacking is for those that have never come across it?

Speaker 2: 19:03

Yeah. So when the journalists, they're continually having to produce content and they're at the will of their bosses, their editors, to produce content, that's going to get get clicks which will drive like ad revenue and readership for their publications. So a sort of staple in the industry of producing a campaign that's going to get traction is if it's already happening in the news, sort of something around that topic. It's more likely if you've got a story that's either related, or at least tangentially related, to that, then because it's in the news, you've got like a high chance of them wanting to perpetuate the motion of that news cycle and run with your story as well. If maybe it's a different take on the news or maybe it's you know it's it's it's an extenuation of that current um virality of the of the main story that's happening, uh, which means it really increases your chances. So you want to jack into that by by coming up with an idea that's like quick and fast and in some way related to to what's happening. So if, for example, beyonce was was photographed walking down the high street with a broadband router, for some reason she was walking down the street holding a broadband router. It's unlikely but it might happen, it could happen. And if it did, then I guarantee all the PRs that have got broadband companies on their books at that time are going to jump on it and think of something like okay, it looks like it was broken.

Speaker 2: 20:39

You know five ways to the five reasons beyonce's router could have broken and what to do if this happens to you like a quick expert tips piece or, um, let's say beyonce happens to have been um, seen and photographed in in one of the states in the usa that happens to be. With a quick data research you can see actually it's got the poorest deliverability of high-speed internet out of all the states. Then you could quickly say Beyonce spotted in Texas walking down the street with a broadband router. If you can quickly get the data on all of the deliverability of speeds across all the states and it turns out that Texas is, let's say, the bottom three, then that would sort of can. If you can see why those two things correlate so strongly and how that's, that really increases the chances of that story getting picked up yeah, no cool, so that's so.

Speaker 1: 21:28

Do you with those sort of news jack opportunities, do you ever try and preempt it? You can ever try to think things that are likely to come up. So if obviously, like if you've got the World Cup coming up at some point, an event that might happen, do you try and preempt it so you're ready with certain ideas that maybe you tweak a little bit before they go out, but kind of 90% there so you can jump on it as fast as possible.

Speaker 2: 21:52

Yeah, of course. Yeah, and that's a really good thing to do. I mean, that is becoming increasingly competitive because everybody does that, so obviously it really good thing to do. It's. I mean, that is becoming increasingly competitive because everybody does that, so obviously it's valentine's day today, um. So if you owned a um flower delivery website, let's say roses, you was delivering roses.

Speaker 2: 22:12

You need it. You need to have stories pre-planned. They need to have been done. You know, weeks ago, um, all the outreach lists built, everything ready to go with. You know, two or three days before, let's say, or even the week before, maybe 10 days before valentine's day, with the hope that you're gonna be opened and in that journalist inbox at the exact right time for them to do their valentine's piece, or a couple of pieces they're going to do, um, but, like I said, everybody is doing valentine's day pieces, um, so you really do need to try and come up with something very, very different, very unique, or do a lot of ideas in that short space of time. But yeah, again, you can sort of newsjack the events as opposed to just saying it's Valentine's Day. There's other more unusual days, like National Pet Day, for example. There's a billion of these mental days.

Speaker 1: 23:03

Every day is a day of something, isn't it?

Speaker 2: 23:04

Every day is a weird day, yeah so you can jump on the weird days a bit less competitive, and if you can come up with an interesting idea that goes with the interesting day, then you could really be onto something special. But yeah, it's definitely a tool in the arsenal for how bound people are.

Speaker 1: 23:21

Yeah, yeah. So with all these obviously because it's all editorial you might get coverage without a link. Does that happen often? Is it a case of you'll get?

Speaker 2: 23:31

Ed.

Speaker 1: 23:33

I presume it's hard, because if you're doing this for people, it's hard to guarantee what they're gonna get. I suppose is it so is it? Is it you kind of end up over delivering or on delivering? How? How do you work the metrics when you're working with the client in terms of what, what they're actually going to get?

Speaker 2: 23:48

yeah, it is. Oh, it's such a pain in the ass, honestly, and and sometimes and there's no single like, like I said, you can't identify a single issue like um like, okay, this, these 10 publications, they they never link. Okay, that's fine, every other publication does link will only pitch them. Because some publications that the journalist doesn't link or sometimes they link, sometimes they don't I mean they're journalists, they're not seos, they don't really care. Maybe they forget to put it in. Sometimes if you have tracking on your outbound emails so you can track the clicks and opens from the journalists, that um on outlook automatically adds like this weird tracking tag, and journalists are so lazy that they just copy. If they do include the link, they just copy and paste from the email which has has got that horrible tracking tag, so it makes the URL like a billion characters long and it's in the article like on the.

Speaker 2: 24:44

Sun or the Daily Mail. It's like your site with like a billion characters at the end of it. Some editors will remove links, although that's rare, it's normally they're removed pre-publication, so you don't actually know it's been removed, it's just you just think it's an unlinked mention. There's some, there's even two or three major publications that do not link and they've got like just a policy where they won't link. And if you happen to have been featured and quoted but you email one of the sister publications, then the editor at the sister publication will go in and amend that and obviously with our wording it's always you know you've taken our client's comments. A fair attribution would be to please credit the comments with a link back to their site. If they say no, then so be it. We've tried everything in the past to do that.

Speaker 2: 25:39

I know a couple of agencies currently that have gone pretty sort of ott on on threats to to do with like creative commons and things like that, to say you know, if you don't include the links, we're going to sue, and the publications like, no, you, you can't do that. Um, for us it's try, ask politely, say, come on, it's fair, they've given their time, they've given you some commentary. A fair attribution is is to at least, you know, give them a link back if they say no, um, certain publications we know they just don't link, like, they just will never, ever ever link you can. That's just their, just their policy. So we just don't pitch them, which is a shame because I think as unlinked mentions I think will start to become more of a prevalent sign in Google's algorithm with AI and the amount of data that it's having to process.

Speaker 2: 26:34

Um, I think if it can read it as an entity on a page, then it will start taking in on unlinked mentions, especially if it's the business name with the, the journal, the sorry the the person, the owner of the website, let's say, and the and the publication name. I think we'll start to take this into account. But, um, yeah, it's, it's a it's. It's a horrible thing because we want the link for the client. Um, yeah, we sorry to answer your original part of the question we do offer fixed deliverables. So if you buy a five link package of us, we will pitch the media until we land you five links, so we just keep going.

Speaker 1: 27:12

But sometimes it kind of goes naturally you might pitch, you aim for five, you end up with seven yes, I presume sometimes, because if there's no editorial, you can't tell people to stop can you, I suppose, at a certain point, yeah, yeah, um yeah, yeah, and you do have campaigns that blow up and go above and beyond, but um, we don't.

Speaker 2: 27:32

We don't like crawl back links or coverage. Like if they buy five links and we do a campaign against 10 links, like we finish the campaign, we don't get they buy five links and we do a campaign, they get 10 links. Like we finish the campaign, we don't get to like five links and then start emailing the journalist to say please don't include stop, don't write this story.

Speaker 1: 27:48

No, no, no, yeah, but like on the other side like, we will get you the amount yeah, and and is that? Are that do you aim for? Um, are those followed links or no follow, or do you just count them both the same? Where do you stand on that one?

Speaker 2: 28:04

We aim for a 50-50 mix if possible, but it is completely out of our control. That is down to the journalist and the publication. If you are going to build links, a lot of your audience are against link building, but those that want to dabble in link building then for me digital PR is the safest. If you're going to do anything outside of digital PR like, let's say, for example, guest posts on HeShedits or PBNs if you just build all do follow links, that's one of the telltale signs to google your link profile is going to look horrendously unnatural. So real links in the in the wild earned real links are a healthy mix of do follow, no follow, and some of the biggest publications in the world have, by way of editorial policy, no follow uh as their, as their standard policy.

Speaker 1: 28:54

So if you want to get a link from the bbc, it's gonna be a no follow yo, yeah, yeah, I mean, like I say, I've found that, obviously, with my more natural link building process since you know, the past 12 years or so, is that occasionally when we land a big link, you know, I just notice it appears in our metrics oh, we've got getting traffic from you know, this big site, um, or say the bbc get. You know, some of my sites get just naturally linked from places and then once you get that link, you're often quite. You see, it's often quite followed up by lots of smaller links where other people who run much smaller sites have cottoned onto the same story or the same kind of thing and then start their own piece and then start linking to places as well. So so, even because I just see, because I don't spend quite so much time thinking about links all the time, I know that there's that some people say, oh no, all no follows are rubbish and some people go, oh no, no follows are brilliant, and it's, there's.

Speaker 1: 29:54

There's no hard and fast rule on it and I think, think, reading the rules, as Google says now, they used to say originally that no follows do not pass page rank, but they changed those rules, that documentation, a while ago that says we only take it as a suggestion on whether to pass page rank or not.

Speaker 1: 30:11

So to me that's Google saying, yeah, we generally probably won't, most no followers, we probably won't pass any page rank. But if it's from a big site which generally does all their links as no-followers because Google have noticed that that, like big sites like the BBC no-follow everything they Google is going to want those kind of sites to pass some kind of juice out. Otherwise there's going to be a massive black hole sink, like they said. I think there's a very fair chance that links from a site like the BBC, if it's nofollowed, is still gonna be beneficial for your rankings, whereas a nofollow link from a user-generated comment on Reddit is probably not going to do you any good ranking-wise. So I think I would come down on the side of, if I had to put my money on it, that those nofollows do have value if they're from the right sites. Sorry, go ahead.

Speaker 2: 31:06

Yeah, I mean, we did a test with Kyle Roof, who's one of the big SEO testers. So we did a test with uh, kyle roof, who's one of the big like seo testers. So we did a single variable test. Um, we, we ranked five pages in lauren ipsum uh, waited for them to index. Um, so, identical pages in lauren ipsum. Um, we took the page that was in spot three. We sent one no follow link to page. Uh, the page in spot three, I mean in 24 hours it went to to spot one and held spot one for still to this day. Um, and the two caveats of that were it was yeah, one no follow link and that no follow link was sent from a page that had traffic, so above 1000 organic monthly. So so it sent a signal.

Speaker 2: 31:51

If you want to see it happen, you just do it in the wild, in an isolated test environment, on Google's own index, and you can see. One nofollow link was enough to move that page above all the others.

Speaker 1: 32:01

Yeah, yeah, yeah and that's good. So I'm a big believer that any organically earned link, editorially earned link, nofollow or not, is a good link. As far as I'm concerned, I'd take a no follow off the BBC any day of the week over a followed link from a site with no traffic or a page with no traffic, because even if I got nothing other than just traffic, that came from the BBC it's worth it, and I'm pretty sure there's something else coming as well.

Speaker 1: 32:27

So obviously this is all about white hat link building now. But what if someone's looking to do this kind of digital pr and is looking for help? Because I know there's so many services out there and I know you've got your service, which is, you know, to me looks and looks completely legit, and everything you've said is like all the kind of advice I would give people when it came to this is the kind of activity to do to get links in a natural editorial way. But there are, as you sort of alluded to earlier, and I know as well there are services out there that say they're doing it in in the right way but aren't. So what are the kind of sort of red flags that people need to look out for if they're trying to find someone to help them with this kind of thing?

Speaker 2: 33:08

yeah, that's a really good question, um, really really good, and I don't want to like bad mouth or sort of like name any any companies, so my general advice would be first, first and foremost, um is ask any agency that you approach if you want to engage with digital pi. If you, if you make the decision that you want to do some link building uh, because I mean we can can all agree that links work whether or not you're going to earn them via amazing content or not.

Speaker 2: 33:39

I mean links power the internet. So if you do make that decision to make an investment and it is a sizable investment my first advice would be do it yourself. I've got like a free cheat sheet you can go and get, uh, at linkifyio slash free dash cheat sheet tells you all of the like free platforms that you can start pitching yourself as um. You can pitch, you know, a couple of times a week, two, three times a week. I tell you some target publications. You've got a really good chance of winning if your expertise match um their queries. So that would be my first advice. If you want to get yourself like what I call a press badge, so like five foundational tier one links that you can put on your featured you know you have a banner on the homepage. Yeah, I would advise time intensive, which is why people use agencies, but if you are an expert in your field, then go out there and get those first three, four, five links yourself. Outside of that, ask the agencies that you're engaging with to give you a sample link report. So this isn't bulletproof, because they could just give you a made up link report, link report, um, but at the very least, at least that's your first place to say okay, what are they thinking is is like a billable, deliverable link from their side? Um, obviously I can spot a bad link report from a mile away. But for you, what you want to do is, first of all, have you heard of any of the websites? So, yeah, if you've heard of all the websites, if it, it's like okay, bbc, hubspot, the Guardian, the Independent, if that's like the 10 links they're putting that they built in a single campaign for a client, then yeah, go and pay for the services and see if that's what they give you.

Speaker 2: 35:24

The other thing you need to be really careful about is sponsored content. The other thing you need to be really careful about is sponsored content. So I've seen this multiple times actually recently and I've had a few like prospective client calls with people saying you know, I'm talking to another agency, I'm talking to you. They said that they can get me like entrepreneurcom, guardian, like 200 quid a link. I'm like that seems cheap, like they're like the rare gems. If you win that, that's fantastic, but it's not every day. That's super cheap and then they'll send over.

Speaker 2: 35:58

The last person I spoke to actually had a sample link report and I looked at the entrepreneur article that they sent me and I just right-clicked and went to inspect, went into the HTML code, I typed sponsored To see if there was a sponsored tag in the HTML and it said this is a sponsored article. So that means it's being paid for, which is fine, like no one's breaking the law. The company that paid for it with entrepreneur entrepreneur informed Google by well, uh, by way of the um, the rel tag that it used within its article um, and that passes no value whatsoever because, yeah, the publication is telling google this article has been paid for. So, yeah, which is fine. You know, there's nothing wrong with that. That's a legitimate form of marketing.

Speaker 2: 36:49

Know, many big companies like Adidas may do a sponsored article in Entrepreneur to tell the world about their new CEO. Let's say it's fine, but in terms of like link juice, value zero. You can also get like these PR wire releases and if you've seen these, they're like a hundred quid. You can like literally plug them, play a press release. It goes to 500 different websites for 200 quid, 200 pound. It's normally really weird.

Speaker 1: 37:19

Us-based radio stations that's got DW9, fox.

Speaker 2: 37:21

FM38.com in it like a billion of them.

Speaker 2: 37:24

They're useless. If they're going to charge you 200 quid a link for them, they've paid 20 quid a link for them and they're going to charge you, you know, 200 quid a link for them, they've paid 20 quid a link for them and they're just marking up. So, yeah, link report. Try and get on a call with the owner and just say look, you know, I'm happy with nofollow, dofollow, but there can't be any sponsored links and I want to know that you're pitching the media. Ask them how they're pitching and what platforms. Finally, the thing that I notice there is a couple of platforms out there that position themselves as expert commentary. Platforms like Harrow used to be so a platform to connect journalists with experts and the experts pitch to the journalists and hopefully, the journalists include the experts comments within the article.

Speaker 2: 38:07

There is a couple of platforms I won't name them publicly, but they are posing as that sort of opportunity, but in actual fact it's like a content factory for, in fairness, like good websites, but the websites are paying for the content and then the website is providing opportunity for quotes within, like an article that will then go to that website. So it's quite convoluted, but you can spot them because when it gets published it'll be experts, give advice on how to run your business well, and there'll be 15 quotes and it'll just say expert's name quote John from a plumbing company. Expert's name quote Tom, who's a lawyer. Expert's name quote such and such who's a Disney World expert Absolutely zero relevancy 20 links in an article, not editorially earned media. So a few things to look out for. I would say.

Speaker 1: 39:13

Yeah, yeah, that's interesting and, like I say, just to reiterate to people that you know I've always been very cautious in how I talk about links. I have no problem with people doing whatever kind of link building they want. To me, it's all about understanding what type of links you are building, who you're paying for what and where it stands on the line of what Google thinks about it. So if you want to go all full black hat, build a PBN public plug network, pay for links wherever you want and you want to go ahead and just do that, knowing that these are dodgy links If you get caught, google's going to burn you You're just going for the quick win, churn and burn strategy. That's absolutely fine. I don't moralise about it at all. But it's more where it comes to, when, if people are buying a service because a lot of people who are business owners have websites that's their living and they're not on SEO and they're not trying to do these churn and burn systems they're trying to build something for the long term. So if they do do link building and engage someone to help them with their link building which, again, it's fine to pay someone to help you build links that's not paying for a link, is it? That's just, that's just someone helping you do the work to to gain those links. It's a case of understanding what the risk is and what the you know what the reward is, you know. So if you want to buy it by links, by ways that are against Google's guidelines, fine, as long as you know that's what you're doing.

Speaker 1: 40:34

It just bums me off a bit when people, some people out there, advertise services as being completely clean and white hat and then a little bit of digging and you see, no, that doesn't meet the guidelines. And it's then if their customers get burned because of it, unwittingly. That's when I feel really bad for those people who've been normally done, which is why, you know, I'm always say to people educate yourself, go and learn, read the, just read google's guidelines about what is what they consider good link building and bad link building so you can, helps you spot where, on the scale, anything that you're doing or anyone proposes to you is so that you can make an informed choice. And if you make an informed choice, not you're doing, fill your boots to whatever you want. But that's, that's the way I see it. So well, but it's nice to nice to hear what you're doing. Hopefully people listening can understand just the amount of work that goes into gaining those links. Digital pr is is, by its very nature, not cheap, is it no?

Speaker 2: 41:32

no, it's not. And um, and yeah, I, I agree with everything you've said. I I. That's the thing that disheartens me as well is is if you are gonna like, well, not agonize, but if you are gonna sort of, uh, educate yourself to the point where you put the effort into, like, make a decision and let's say you go. Well, look, I've made the decision. I am going to build guest post links let's say to to this page, because it's really important to me. I'm aware of the risks blah, blah, blah. And then they find a vendor that says it's a guest post link, but it's not, it's a pbn link. It's like you've, you've sort of, not only have you made that hard decision, or or well-informed and educated decision, you're then getting burned from the provider.

Speaker 2: 42:12

So it's yeah but, I mean google does also say anything that you do to gain its algorithm is against its guidelines. So, by by its very nature, even if you write a piece of content that you write because you want it to rank, that is in breach of its guidelines.

Speaker 1: 42:28

I know, yeah, yeah, yeah, with all these things, there's no very, there's very few hard lines in SEO, is there? Everything's graduated of, you know, like, how well it works, what the risk is? Yeah, everything has got. It's ambiguous, basically. Yeah, no, it's tricky, it's tricky. I mean that's absolutely fantastic. I mean, if people wanted to A, you mentioned that cheat sheet. I'll put a link. I'll get that for you and I'll put it in the show notes. But if people wanted to get in touch with you or wanted to look at what your services were and to see if there's anything that you can help them with, where do people go to find that?

Speaker 2: 43:34

no-transcript can like massively increase your chances of journalists taking you seriously, so happy to do that as well that's fantastic.

Speaker 1: 43:45

Well, I'll make sure all those links go in the show notes. So, yeah, just go to the show notes, find those links for chris and his company. And yeah, just just I want to say thanks for what's coming on. It's been a fantastic chat and very interesting to see the process you go through, um, and how it works for people. It's been brilliant.

Speaker 2: 43:59

Thanks for coming on thanks for having me, and hopefully we'll have you on ours as well yeah, fantastic, awesome, right, take care cheers.

Speaker 1: 44:06

So that was fascinating. Uh, great chat with chris. I think there's a few key points I just wanted to sort of really go over before finishing the podcast. One was obviously the importance there. It's all editorial links, um, and how important that is. You know there's kind of editorial links aren't going to get you into trouble with google. So it's important to remember that this isn't link buying, this is link building.

Speaker 1: 44:24

Still, and using that drive of digital pr, and with that digital pr, it's always based around content. You have to have good content pieces for that digital PR to work. So you've got to on the outbound side. You know that's all about content on the inbound side, where people are looking for comment, where you've got journalists who are trying to find sources who they can talk to to give comment on particular news pieces. That's when it's really all about the expertise, the authority, not just of the website, but really the spokesperson who's going to be there. So, whether that's you yourself or someone who works for you, building up that, that expertise. It goes into that eeat thing that google always talk about. It's important for journalists too. So I think those are the the real key things there to remember this.

Speaker 1: 45:07

All about editorial. It's all about having great content. You know I always bang on about how important good content is. Links are important, yes, but links pointing to no content will not get you anywhere. You've always got to have great, great content and that's a real key to focus on. So, anyway, that's it for today and you know, until next time. Keep optimizing, stay curious and remember seo is not that hard when you understand the basics. Thanks for listening. It means a lot to me.

Speaker 1: 45:33

This is where I get to remind you where you can connect with me and my seo tools and services. You can find links to all the links I mentioned here in the show notes. Just remember, with all these places where I use my name, the ed is spelled with two d's. You can find me on linkedin and blue sky. Just search for ed dawson on both.

Speaker 1: 45:48

You can record a voice question to get answered on the podcast. The link is in the show notes. You can try our SEO intelligence platform, keywords People Use at keywordspeoplesusecom, where we can help you discover the questions and keywords people are asking online, poster those questions and keywords into related groups so you know what content you need to build topical authority. And finally, connect your Google Search Console account for your sites so we can crawl and understand your actual content, find what keywords you rank for and then help you optimize. Continually refine your content, targeted, personalized advice, keep your traffic growing. If you're interested in learning more about me personally or looking for dedicated consulting advice, then visit wwweddawsoncom. Bye for now, and see you in the next episode of sgo is not that hard.