Jim Boykin, CEO of Internet Marketing Ninjas

Jim Boykin, CEO of Internet Marketing Ninjas, speaks about backlinking strategies during Textbroker's 2020 Digital Marketing League.

Read the full transcript

[00:00:05.140] – Jim Boykin

OK, so there’s me and Ozzy Osborne has been my life for twenty-one years click. All right, so I’m the CEO and founder of Internet Marketing Ninja’s, we’ve had between 40 and forty-five employees for the past six, six years. I’ll just give my little finger wagging here.

[00:00:26.760] – Jim Boykin

All right. So if you’re wondering about the breakdown of our team, we have a service staff of 30. We have lots of content marketers that aim for link builders, six brand asset people, four analysts, a handful of content writers, reputation and support staff. All right, so you guys all know this all means ranking higher in the service. And, you know, your site could have the most amazing content that’s in the world and the most amazing your user experience compared to all your competitors.

[00:01:07.040] – Jim Boykin

But without good back links, your chance of ranking in Google is pretty darn slim that there’s even been studies about that. Know right next.

[00:01:21.910] – Jim Boykin

So if we look at some of the major ranking factors that kind of has broken down into four areas, there’s content, there’s links, there’s usability, there’s some technical aspects, but links tends to be the biggest aspect. So if we look about top 10 ranking factors, you know, there’s links, we’re looking at the quality, the expertise, the authority, the anchor text. Content, the key words are relevant to the accuracy, the trust. User experience as a core, irrelevant pogo stick, mobile, mobile friendly.

[00:02:06.300] – Jim Boykin

And and the technical, low time, mobile, et cetera. So links are often the biggest key to rankings. And ever since Google’s algorithm came out, the anatomy of a large scale, a perpetual search engines, links have been the core of Google.

[00:02:36.120] – Jim Boykin

But it’s a minefield link building. And you don’t want to end up like that guy. And we’re going to kind of dive deep into link building a little bit, but try not to get eaten by the shark when you go deep because it can be dangerous. So these days, I’m really amazed by two main things when it comes to link building, those that ignore link building, they think, hey, we’ll just write great content and it’s going to attract natural backlinks.

[00:03:11.060] – Jim Boykin

And there are some people that are just too scared to build backlinks. They know it’s dangerous and they’re like, well, I don’t want to do anything to get backlinks because I might get in trouble. And so they just ignore the fact that marketing says one of the biggest part of Google’s algorithm. That’s one of the things that surprises me.

[00:03:26.540] – Jim Boykin

And then the other things that surprises me is the people that buy links from databases. We’re going to talk about that a little bit more. But, you know, they go somewhere and they’re like, hey, you know, I’m a finance site or an education site or a car site or whatever. And someone says, hey, I’ve got a spreadsheet of a whole bunch of links and that are in this network. And I can give you a whole bunch of blog links from these sites that are related and all those come from spreadsheets that can be mapped.

[00:03:50.930] – Jim Boykin

And I’ll talk a little bit more about that later.

[00:03:54.650] – Jim Boykin

And here’s here’s what they were spreadsheets look like, here’s a list of URLs, here’s their category, here’s their domain authority page authorities. All that stuff, spreadsheets, not good. We’ll talk more about this. But I should let you know when doing building for twenty-one years, I’m I’m no angel. I’ve been around. I’ve been around the block. And so, you know, I don’t want to throw rocks in a glass house. That my house this is this was built by one of my employees.

[00:04:25.630] – Jim Boykin

My house has been build on links. My house and my business.

[00:04:32.610] – Jim Boykin

You know, it started out with linked trading years ago. And Pyramid Linking Strategies is an interview I did with Barry Schwartz back in 2004, and then I used to buy a lot of links on page seven, eight, nine until November 7th, 2003, when my house crashed. Basically, I was told by Google, thou shall not buy links. And so I had to rebuild the house that I bought links that were under the radar until November 13th, 2008.

[00:05:07.970] – Jim Boykin

I thought I was so clever. I’m getting links under the radar. Google is not going to know. That we are doing so good at building links between us. I think this is more than 10 years old, so hopefully the statue of limitations is over. But Google was actually paying us to build links. They were working with a company called fornix. Google bought them. And for a while, Google was paying us to build links to some sites or long ago.

[00:05:42.420] – Jim Boykin

And then again, the House crumbled again in November of 2008, and I had to come out with a blog post saying page links aren’t worth it to me. I basically had to do that or Google wouldn’t let my sites out of penalty. I had to kind of be the poster child in 2008 that I used to say building links is great, building things that are under the radar. You know, there’s ways to do that. And Google kind of made me a poster child of thou shall not do that, unfortunately.

[00:06:12.310] – Jim Boykin

So, you know, after that day, I was kind of done by buying links, that’s kind of like, ah, you know, I can’t play this game anymore. The house keeps crashing. I got to figure out how do I how do I get backlinks and not get penalized from Google? Because I’m always paranoid that Google is looking at what I’m doing. But I’m not alone in getting busted for buying links. I’ve certainly been busted back in 08 for buying links.

[00:06:47.690] – Jim Boykin

Google it, Google itself has been caught buying links as well. Here’s one that was written about two thousand nine. Google again caught my eye and links in 2012. It’s kind of a quote from Danny Sullivan. What is it that they were doing? Danny Sullivan thinks it’s X company paid bloggers. They paid bloggers with an Amazon certificate to write sponsored posts on Google Chrome, and that’s against guidelines. Now, this is Google. And there are some people that are working at Google that don’t know.

[00:07:29.630] – Jim Boykin

Thou shall not do that. And Google itself doesn’t know. I worry about other webmasters that think, you know, this stuff is OK. And Google had to say it’s not OK and they penalize themselves. The GLIC. Right by 2018, again, from Barry Schwartz, who will drop by and links. You’re going to be lots of clicks here, click, click, click. All right, so basically Google again being busted. On the flip side, Google can and also has gone after link sellers.

[00:08:15.000] – Jim Boykin

And what they do is they’ll stop from passing on sites they’ve done this for years. There used to be a site called Blocked Part, used to list all the sites that no longer pass page rank of power over. And it still goes on to this day. There’s people, you know, everyone gets those emails, get in this popular place or that popular place for being all of that stuff. And now I say Google has blocked those sites from passing drunk for years.

[00:08:42.540] – Jim Boykin

People just, I guess, don’t know it. They don’t know. Sites don’t pass. They drink. If they’re suspected of selling links. And we’ll keep going here, so Google, again, says that if you’re selling links, there are some other things that can happen in this. This is still original, but it’s still true. Google still doesn’t pass power from sites. You know, Google came out with Penguin was really you know, there are certain dates where because of links is one of the biggest part of Google’s algorithm.

[00:09:12.500] – Jim Boykin

A lot of it Google tries to do is find links that appear to be artificial within the map of the Web. And a lot of it is either not counting that or penalize them, sites that fit patterns that appear to be unnatural. And so Google that a lot of these penguin dates back in 2012, 13, 14, going into twenty sixteen. And then they kind of roll that into the algorithm. Next. OK, so Penguin is now part of the core girl next.

[00:09:51.310] – Jim Boykin

All right, so it’s interesting now the penguins rolled into the main algorithm and often can just affect things that are page level or a keyword level or a folder level. So I know that Google for years used to say you shouldn’t focus on your keyword rankings, but if you have a history of doing SEO, you should follow your rankings on pages and folders. And if there is a hit to it, you may want to look at the backlinks that are going to that page now.

[00:10:22.570] – Jim Boykin

Could be one of a couple of things that could be those links that you have. That page once counted and now they don’t. Or it could be that there’s something holding you back. Of course, if you have a manual penalty, that’s where you don’t want to look as well first. So, yeah, you know, this is John Mueller and he says that with regard to devaluing these low quality links, instead of punishing you in general trying to figure out what are the spammy tactics that are happening, we’ll say, well, we’ll just try to ignore that part.

[00:10:58.710] – Jim Boykin

A lot of people see droppings and they think it’s a penalty, especially if they’ve been doing a lot of link building throughout the years. And often the drops are just links that may have counted one day have been mapped and they no longer count. So penguins now part of the coral rhythm. And it’s real time, regular rather than regular refreshes the way that it used to be, and it’s no longer a citywide issue. It could be, but often it’s a page or folder issue.

[00:11:34.880] – Jim Boykin

So, yeah, I mean, like I said, watching your keywords on rankings and pages and folders and specific keyword phrases is really important. Now. So, you know, is the white hat in the black hat, you know, and I I’ve been to a lot of conferences and a lot of people come up to me and they’re like, hey, you know, we want white hat link building. You know, all right, click and then they follow it up with here’s the five phrases that we’re targeting and then they say, you know, we need at least X amount of links per month and make sure the domains at least have a domain authority of X and make sure they all come from pages about X topic and make sure the anchor text those blue widgets are a mix of other commercial phrase.

[00:12:19.180] – Jim Boykin

And we need to get links to these commercial pages. And, you know, sometimes they’ll come to us and we already got the low hanging fruit and I’m like, well, what is the low hanging fruit? Well, we submitted to lots of directories and articles, syndication sites, guest blog, post form links, paid blog reviews, hire some link builders, purchase some kind of blog network links. And that’s kind of what that fruit looks like to me.

[00:12:46.850] – Jim Boykin

You know, and I know why I know why it’s because the bosses, the bosses come to you and they’re like, we need to be number one for this raise or you’re fired. Boss looks at of rankings every single morning, you know, gotta keep moving. That’s what they’re here as a guest blog post on guest blog postings that are taken from an inventory of sites that are used to sell guest blog posts. But people buy it because they can go to their boss and be like, hey, you know, we’re a car website.

[00:13:16.070] – Jim Boykin

And we found these car bloggers and they wrote a story about cars and they gave us some anchor text going to our site. And the boss says, I have a great car blog or, you know, an anchor text like going to our money page. And this looks really good. But the problem is, is that stuff can be mapped. We’ll talk about that a little bit more. You know, if we look at this page here, you know, it’s kind of funny sites that sell links and, you know, placement is always guaranteed.

[00:13:45.250] – Jim Boykin

Here’s, you know, just some place out there that says, you know, we guarantee that we can get you these placements. So here’s from John Mueller, sent your recent tweet to totally clarify, as there now seems to be lots of confusion. We all know paying for guest blog posts is against the guidelines. But what about guest posts in general where no money changes hands? So Mark is asking John Mueller.

[00:14:14.020] – Jim Boykin

Here’s John’s response. He says that part is problematic, the part that’s problematic is the links. If you’re providing the content of links, then those links shouldn’t be passing signals and should have the rail sponsored RELLENO follow attached. It’s fine to see it as a way of reaching a broader audience. Not sure if everyone knows this or sees this. Google often is not a fan of guest blog post. And here’s an engineer from Google, maybe, and he’s kind of mapping your links.

[00:14:45.270] – Jim Boykin

We’ll talk a little bit about that here. All right, so here’s the dreaded email. Hey, Webmasters, you know, it appears if you’ve been buying links. That’s the email you don’t want to get. So. How do you measure the links you have that’s one of the biggest thing I know we’re going to talk about link building, but measuring the links so crucial to this, how do you measure?

[00:15:15.490] – Jim Boykin

And how do you get links that you don’t have to worry about? So let’s talk about measuring lengths for this, about. And again, Google puts a big warning on that tool when you’re analyzing links for this, although you can cause a lot of harm to your site and they have these big warnings. But beyond that. How often the site owners disavow the links that hurt them? And Larry’s response was, it’s often enough that if that if it were me and this is a guy who works at Google, that I would remove the disavow tool.

[00:16:04.960] – Jim Boykin

If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can shoot yourself in the foot. And that’s that’s a quote from Gary as a Google.. But there’s another thing that potentially, if you do it right, there could be some benefits. So disavowing bad links may help Google rhythmically trust your links. And that’s from. That’s from. So Marie Haimes asked John Mueller, is there any way that looks to say if we didn’t get a manual action or they didn’t get a manual action, that those links hurt them algorithmically because we feel we’re seeing some improvements on some sites after disavowing.

[00:16:49.060] – Jim Boykin

John says that that can definitely be the case, so sometimes there are algorithms, they look at it and they say, see that? Oh, there’s a bunch of really bad links here, that maybe they’ll be a bit more cautious in regards to in regards things in general from the website. So if you clean that up in the algorithm, look at it, say, oh, these are kind of OK, it’s not that bad. So there could be a potential that in doing the disavow, you could help your rankings.

[00:17:16.710] – Jim Boykin

But unfortunately, most people do. I believe so scary that most people do that just about wrong and they end up hurting themselves more. And the problem is that people people think they know how to measure or link. They use, like my straw stagecraft, Strauss Majestic Trucks.. So what do you use to find your backlinks, you use my eyes news, majestic aircrafts. Google Webmaster Search Console Backlinks? So one of our internal tools, we grabbed the data from Moz, HREFs, SEO and we can kind of look at the back links to a site using all those.

[00:18:04.670] – Jim Boykin

And I know you can’t kind of read those, but these are a list of back links. And one of those resources found those back links. You kind of see the X’s over on the right hand side. So it’s kind of back links in which place found them. And a lot of the more popular ones, all the places found them. But if you kind of go down the page a little bit on the tool, click. You’ll see that Mars knows of some links Majestic and those of others a trust knows of others that the others don’t know about.

[00:18:35.010] – Jim Boykin

They all kind of have if there is the web of the Internet, you know, there’s there’s a large part that Google knows. There’s a large part of that they’ve kind of thrown out. But when you look at Mars, Majestic and Atrius, they all have a little slice of the Internet and some of it overlaps with the others and some doesn’t. And if you’re looking at just one of those and thinking this is the complete picture, it’s not.

[00:19:00.980] – Jim Boykin

So, you know, we heard from Tyson earlier today from search metrics, great, great talk and I love be analyzing data, but Marcus Tober from Search Metrics, one point to the Post talked about in a talk, the eighty nine percent of sites that ranked seven years ago no longer rank today. And it’s interesting. So I had a talk with Marcus as well and I said, well how did you come up with that? And they basically grabbed seven years worth of data.

[00:19:33.950] – Jim Boykin

They looked at all the sites that rank seven years ago. They looked at how many of those sites ranked today and only 11 percent were left. Now, you know what happened to those sites today? Some may have just gone away, some might have been redirected elsewhere, but a lot of the sites have been penalized. And Google, they used to rank four phrases and now they don’t. And let’s talk a little bit about the majestic nature of their domain value and page value, and I’m so glad that Barry Schwartz was asked that question this morning, too, about domain authority and what are his thoughts on domain authority.

[00:20:12.200] – Jim Boykin

And, you know, Barry basically said, yes, it’s an interesting metric, but it’s not what Google uses. And there are lots of flaws with it. And I’ll show you a few of the flaws of using that. So here’s kind of a list of websites and we’re showing you the number of links going into these Web sites. And I pulled one of them out of here. So one of these sites that was outsourced to Philippines, it’s a links to someone’s website and I see, wow, there’s three thousand four hundred domain back links and that through the keywords that rank in the top one hundred, but it’s only worth seventeen dollars a month, according to ACM Rush Louis’ kind of mentioned earlier.

[00:20:58.920] – Jim Boykin

Looks at trophic levels, you know, one of the things to look at off site is potentially safe is, is it getting traffic? So it’s getting traffic. It probably isn’t penalized by Google. One of the metrics I look very similar. That is just the the value from maximum Russianness that value is based on. Does that page or site rank for phrases? How high does it rank, which is search volume average cost per click? Things like that.

[00:21:27.350] – Jim Boykin

That if you look at the site, you can see that the site used to run shrank for a whole bunch of reasons and then it got flat lined by Google. Here’s kind of another one I know you can’t see that sight, but underneath here, it’s the site here. So this this site goes one thousand six hundred and fifty-eight domain back lengths, two thousand and ten. It was worth one thousand five hundred and sixty-six dollars a month.

[00:21:50.590] – Jim Boykin

Twenty twelve eighty-seven. Today it’s worth zero. Another site that’s flat lined, but.

[00:21:58.660] – Jim Boykin

If you look at the domain and page authority on Mars, Majestic, great crafts, they all look good. If you are looking at other things, like I’d like to get a link from this site, but it’s like it’s like doesn’t rank for anything to be penalized for years, like, you know, no value here. So here’s another one, there’s another site, just one more example, and I see it’s got four thousand five hundred ninety five unique domain backlinks to it.

[00:22:32.140] – Jim Boykin

And, you know, if you look at those Moz, Majestic, and HREFs page and domain authority for these backlinks, you’d be like, wow, that is a really great I’d love to get a link from one of those, but to see how much value is only a dollar today. And it’s like, you know, I saw that. And I’m like, this sounds familiar, you know? But I went to the website. I’m like, all right, I recognize that.

[00:22:52.810] – Jim Boykin

And I’m going to go to the next page. And I look and I’m like, oh, yeah, here’s all the people that are buying links on here. I don’t know what happened after August. I went here again last night. I don’t know if the guy died or what you saw on links right up to August on this page. And I’m like, this kind of looks familiar. And I and I scroll way down the page. I’m like, oh, yeah.

[00:23:19.920] – Jim Boykin

I found that site back in December of 2002. And I think like it stopped passing page rank December of 2003. So it’s like people are still buying this. But talk about a red flag and something that’s not passing page rank. Again, a lot of people would look at these numbers and be like, I’d love to get on that site. And it’s like, no, it doesn’t rank as well. There’s no traffic. Eighty-nine percent of sites that rank seven years ago aren’t ranking today and majestic in any address, often in their scores, aren’t taking things like this into account.

[00:23:54.940] – Jim Boykin

So I don’t believe in any tool for link measurement, on any page authority, domain authorities, nontoxic links, scores. So this is. This is something I just added the past hour, I’ve never I haven’t showed this stuff off before, but I figured I would show this is one of our it’s a private internal link tool that we’ve built. And if you go to the next slide, I’ll show you something that I circled here. The link cellar’s.

[00:24:27.900] – Jim Boykin

So when I go to analyze links, one of the things that I look at when I’m analyzing someone’s backlink profile is do you have links from known sellers’? Here’s kind of another tool where I can throw in someone’s back links and go in and look to see, OK, now let me let me go. We’re going to go forward to slide. So I don’t know, you might not be able to read this. I kind of blacked out some names.

[00:24:56.590] – Jim Boykin

But what I’ve done is this and I hope I don’t get anyone out there upset. Anyone that writes to me and says, hey, Jim, I’ve got a bunch of sites you can get links from, I said, great, send me over the spreadsheet. I take that spreadsheet, I upload it to the tool. And when that selling links out there, I say, hey, you know, I got financing tomorrow. Can you give me some links and show me some links?

[00:25:19.520] – Jim Boykin

And I upload it to this tool from this tool. I’ve been able to map out their networks as well as link buyers. So let’s let’s go. Well, we’ll go ahead here. You know, when I say we’ve mapped out their networks, I can kind of show you this is kind of an example of mapping them out. So when I when I look at someone’s back links, I can look at no backlinks that they have from known sellers like here’s someone who got three thousand back links and here are known backlinks and sellers networks.

[00:25:52.910] – Jim Boykin

And then we have another section called Suspected Link Sellers. Oops. Let’s go back to that last slide, if you can. So on here, the the site on the left hand side, the left hand side, it it’s a backlink to someone site to a client and it’s listed as a suspected link seller. Someone might be. Why do you why Jim, why do you suspect that that’s a link seller. Well, the right hand side of that chart is all sites that we know are selling links within that network.

[00:26:24.500] – Jim Boykin

And those sites link out to the sites that are in the middle. And that site on the left hand side also links out to the site in the middle. And if you I blocked out the sites without wanting to get anyone upset or whatever, but if you looked at it, you’d be like, oh, yeah, the site on the left, which links to you. It’s a suspected link seller of that network, and it is a ton of hits in that network.

[00:26:46.790] – Jim Boykin

All right. So we’ll go forward. And here’s another scary thing that I can do for every network of companies that sell links, I also have a map out of what are the top one thousand suspected buyers within those networks. We also track their CRM value on a monthly basis and we get alerts when they drop in value by more than I think it’s 30 percent on any month. So we can also watch when people are affected by things, which is interesting.

[00:27:20.630] – Jim Boykin

Right, next. All right, so. Before I kind of move into this next section, I really got to talk about that wing stuff. A lot of people, when they’re analyzing backlinks, you know, they’re looking at that domain authority and trying to decide if this is good or they’re using some tool that says this is toxic or it’s not or it’s good.

[00:27:47.670] – Jim Boykin

And there’s a lot of problems with that. And a lot of people can do a link analysis. And sure, you can find stuff on duplicate ipis and duplicate content and that stuff, which I’m sure Google already knows about that. But what is Google really looking at when they’re analyzing back links? I think what they’re looking at is something like what I’ve got, you know, is this site selling links? And there was a slide we kind of passed through back there.

[00:28:12.270] – Jim Boykin

But, you know, I run a site through it can tell me what are the known links within each network and what are the suspected links. And anyone is going to every site out there is going to have links from suspected buyers. It just happens. Yeah, this one right here. Yeah. So like all sites, no matter what kind of like scrapers, you’re going to have links from people that sell links. It’s going to happen. But when it sticks out like this one here, here’s here’s some backlink ground and the guy has three hundred and sixty two known links from this particular person is when they stick out and it’s like, oh yeah, you don’t get that many links from one of the buyers sites by accident.

[00:28:52.680] – Jim Boykin

Like sometimes you get to go through it, it sticks out. And I 100 percent believe that’s what Google’s looking at. And the problem is when people are looking at links and they analyze and links what’s good or bad, they’re not thinking along that way of is this a link in some network that’s getting mapped? This person who was selling me links are they go on to the next car guy or they go into the next area. They’re going to the next guy.

[00:29:11.580] – Jim Boykin

Like, are they just sell them to the same people in any one of those people that gets under Google’s the magnifying glass and they start to map out the network. Are you going to be in that network? You know, are you going. And I know I believe they want to be number one. They go to their bosses. Is this a relevant blog post from this car blogger? Everyone’s like, hey, this is great. And they don’t realize that, like, that site is part of a network and they’re mapping themselves out with people that can be penalized.

[00:29:35.700] – Jim Boykin

Either they’re going to wipe out that network or they’re going to penalize all of us suspected buyers. And it’s clear when someone’s buying. I can see it. I can see it. Google can see it. All right. So let’s move on to methods for getting some trusted links. All right. So there’s broken link building. We’ll talk about that in a second. There is. Trust link building, we’ll talk about that real quick. There is competitor building.

[00:30:01.230] – Jim Boykin

We’ll talk about that real quick. And there’s brand asset building. We’re going to talk about those really quick, so get ready on the finger to keep pressing buttons because I still got a whole bunch of slides here. So broken link building. Let’s move on here.

[00:30:16.460] – Jim Boykin

OK, so here I am, I’m on this Web page and there’s what’s the word? There’s things you can get that tell you if there’s a broken link on a page because the type of word. But there’s also other tools. So I’m on this Web page and I know it’s that link on the bottom. It’s got the Red Arrow to it to fall for you. And I’m on I’m on some edu page here. And I’m like, all right, the CD you page, there’s a broken link on it.

[00:30:41.270] – Jim Boykin

So with that being said. I can go back into the Wayback Machine and see what that link used to be. Hey, they’re linking to some page, which is dead. And I look and I’m like, all right, that’s what the page used to be. OK, so now what I’m going to do is I’m going to go to my writer and I’m going to say, hey, here’s the link to the Wayback Machine. I want you to write something similar to this, but make it better and save some more resources than what we do is we tell the client, hey, you publish this educational paper on your website.

[00:31:12.130] – Jim Boykin

And then. We go to that college guy and we say, hey, I was researching this particular thing, I came across your Web page, I see you’ve got this broken link. I found this other really cool link about that topic that I think you should fix your broken link with and have a great day. And hopefully they say, OK, yes, now let’s go back to that page, I say, all right, there’s a new page and it’s linking to that broken link down there.

[00:31:38.620] – Jim Boykin

And I’ve already seen what the page was. And, hey, if this page is linking to that broken link, I wonder if there’s other pages that link to that page that used to be there. So I look and I say, wow, there’s 200 other sites linking to that page, that’s a broken link that the 82 page is linking to so.

[00:32:00.400] – Jim Boykin

What I do is I start writing to everyone. You got to going on your page, goes to here, doesn’t seem to work. Here’s another one. So I write to Professor Larry and I write to Professor Môn, Professor Curly and. All right, so let’s move on to Trusted Link building the next one. All right. So trusted link building.

[00:32:18.220] – Jim Boykin

So so here’s an example. We had a client who does website design and program, so we created a page that was something like ninety eight resources to build your own website. And you probably can’t read this because it’s really small, but this got a whole bunch of links from libraries and iTunes and some really fun stuff because he wrote to them and said, hey, you got a page about this topic and this is great. And you got some really cool resources.

[00:32:48.490] – Jim Boykin

And I found this other really cool resource that ninety eight things out. And it was a big help. I think you should add it to your page. OK, so here’s here’s part of how you can do that, so let’s say I don’t know, I think one of the bad examples there was like let’s say you’ve got a car part website. And so, you know, I think that article that I found that was the broken link was some page about Henry Ford.

[00:33:14.820] – Jim Boykin

And I’m like, all right. Car park site, Henry Ford. This is great. So another way that you can find sites is you might search for things and Google like, I don’t know, quote Henry Ford’s space history biography, Model T or saying you’ve run some search phrases and then kind of grab all the results and then I do. And when we’re doing this type of link building, I don’t write to bloggers why I don’t trust bloggers.

[00:33:44.740] – Jim Boykin

I’m looking for old sites that are not bloggers that were put on the Web to make the Web a better place. And I just honestly don’t trust bloggers. So we kind of pull down the results and then we look for pages that already have a bunch of other links to that resource is there are other pages that have a bunch of links to Henry Ford biography stuff. So we’re going to take those and I’m going to send an email I was researching this came across your great page.

[00:34:06.940] – Jim Boykin

I found this other really cool page. And I think you should add to your site and you can do that to a lot of people. Competitor link harvesting. Now, you got to be careful with this because your competitor may have like bombs and they may have really bad links. Maybe they got penalized, maybe all that stuff isn’t there. Disavow file and you don’t know. And so you go harvesting their back legs and you’re like, hey, great, you know, you’ve got to be real careful.

[00:34:30.670] – Jim Boykin

So here are some ways on how to do it. You want to identify three to ten of your competitors, you want to download their back links, mods, investigate. Drafts are good places you got from. And essentially you kind of want to do a disavow, you know, here’s good or that I’d pull out all the blog stuff, forum stuff, newspaper stuff. I kind of see what our what’s left that you might be able to get the back link from new categories, blogs, form news articles, resources, and you make a list of the sites that you think you might be able to get on.

[00:34:56.830] – Jim Boykin

And then in a perfect world, you want to get on that same link that links to your competitor. That’s kind of the perfect world. I’d be really good, CIT.. But if you can’t get a link on that page that links to your competitors, then the second best places to get a link anywhere on that site. OK, the next story, brand assets. How are we doing for time? All right. We’re going to rock and roll your create brand assets for links.

[00:35:18.070] – Jim Boykin

So here’s kind of another thing that we do a lot for creating links. All right. So some examples. This is an graphic or interactive info. Graphic is really cool. I think it’s about Birju. You can click on it. The birds do things. That’s super cool. This particular one. Let’s see, five months after releasing it, it’s kind of sunny. It’s kind of funny. Not everything kind of this is stuff that we create to kind of go viral.

[00:35:42.310] – Jim Boykin

It’s a little bit different than the educational bait. This is the stuff that we want to spread across the Web. They’re what we call brand assets. And sometimes things can go viral, like at the beginning. Sometimes things never go viral and sometimes things go viral later. This particular one, I think month one, two, three, four, month five, it got over a million visits to that particular page. And then the line below that is the total referring to total referring domains.

[00:36:10.270] – Jim Boykin

It’s up to seven hundred and forty six links to that.

[00:36:14.050] – Jim Boykin

None of those links did we ask for. We repeat that. None of those links did we ask for. They all came naturally, so to speak. You know, we’re marketing it. We’re trying to get the stuff in front of as many eyes as possible. And I know I’m going to jump into one of my other slides really well. How do you market them? You know, all right. There’s going to be social things. You’re going to market.

[00:36:37.450] – Jim Boykin

I’m social. There is the right tagging. We’re going to submit things to Reddit. They’re popular categories, possibly mix, which used to be stumbled upon. I’m going to submit to, you know, depending on what it is. I think that was like an infographics assessment to some infographics. If it’s relevant to a news topic, especially if it’s a location based, then we’ll write to journalists and be like, hey, you know, see you cover whatever.

[00:37:00.730] – Jim Boykin

Did you see this? And sometimes we’re not even sending them right to the client link, like if someone else writes about it. Hey, so you cover whatever you see this article over here. So it doesn’t look like you’re trying to promote that. But this is through spreading. This is the thing. Just spread, spread, spread. All right. Next slide. 246, you need no back legs, that’s beautiful, next. Yeah, man, five over a million visits like crazy and you know, let’s talk a little bit about referral stuff for a second.

[00:37:32.390] – Jim Boykin

You may be like, hey, you know, I don’t know what that guy sold, but it was a bird thing, you know? But one of the interesting things to think about is your referral traffic. A lot of people don’t even think about this. If all of your traffic is from Google, it basically says people you know, you’re good at. That’s what it says you’re going to do. All that you’re found out is Google great.

[00:37:52.990] – Jim Boykin

You’re good at SEO. And that tells Google that. But it also tells Google, you know, why aren’t you getting visits from other sites? And that could very well be a signal if you’re getting a referral traffic from other sites, if you’re if you’re 90 percent of traffic from Google and your referral traffic is two percent, that tells you to Google, you’re really not popular on the Web. All right. Now, here’s another one. We did all sorts of traffic, all sorts of back links.

[00:38:18.960] – Jim Boykin

There’s another one we did. I grabbed one client that we did a bunch of brand assets for. And I just said, you know, let’s let’s just look at how many links they got, because a lot of times people come to us and they want links. And so we do. The brands that we used to do expansion reports here, so much traffic a got here is all these other signals here is retweeted it, retweeted it, brother blood.

[00:38:39.810] – Jim Boykin

And then they would always be like, that’s cool. But how many links that it gets. So there are a whole shift. You know, an internal of bonus is how many links to you. But I took this one client just click and click and we’ll fill in these three fields. So I looked at how many backlinks. So it’s something like eight. So these are all a number of backlinks that their brand asset got, that their brand assets got, and I just wanted to look, you know, what’s kind of the average?

[00:39:10.950] – Jim Boykin

They’re average in forty two lengths. Some got 10, some got two hundred forty six. It’s kind of like not everything you create is going to go viral. We always hope everything we create is going to go viral, but everything is not if but when something goes viral and suddenly a site goes offline because there’s so much traffic or whatever, like, hey, that’s that’s great. We love that right next. OK, Chip talked about that all sorts of wonderful things, a whole bunch of good back legs will do next, here are some other examples, getting links from Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, Distractor Fibreboard, Pande, and a lot of these sites just found it from being on other places and we’ll keep going.

[00:39:56.950] – Jim Boykin

We even had one, George Takei is actually share two of ours. That’s fun. I’m not a huge I’m not a huge Amancio. I’m a link builder. And if you’re ask how much does Ushio play in the equation? And hardly any.

[00:40:11.920] – Jim Boykin

But if it but if it spreads through social, then some people might write about it. And that’s kind of the goal. All right. Next, here’s another one. I think we just got some examples we can flip through here quick. Yep. That did great. Yeah. Yep. Yeah, yeah, so advertising on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google, Reddit, mix, others. Oh, and here we are at the end. So now go forth, create great content and then promote it to the right eyes and get one more click there.

[00:40:52.230] – Jim Boykin

Stay away from spreadsheets, they can be mapped. All right, guys, sorry I couldn’t do my own clicking on that, but thank you, everyone. Thank you, Cody and Phillip, especially for inviting me here. Cassandra, I think’s going on behind the scenes there. Thank you, Cassandra. Barry, and Luis, and Tyson did awesome. This more rate to be in on that. And I’ll get Matthew and Kevin coming later. So I’m excited about that thing.

[00:41:18.810] – Jim Boykin

Thank you all. Great, thank you. I hope I tried to keep up with your slides, but sorry about that.

[00:41:29.420] – Jim Boykin

You did really good. We made it work.

[00:41:32.190] – Jim Boykin

No, no big deal. So I. I think, Phillip, I don’t know if you I was monitoring the slides, so. No, no, I go right.

[00:41:41.990] – Jim Boykin

I we we don’t have too much time left. I think I have about 100 questions for you, Jim. So I’m just going to give you I’m just going to ask a few of them before I ask any. I do want to mention, Jim, I think you’re up to ninety three free SEO tools on your website. Maybe you can just tell people where to find it, you know, what kind of tools are there or maybe what is the most popular tool that I’d really be interested in is which tool has the most links to it.

[00:42:11.120] – Jim Boykin

Well, you know, that’s that’s, you know, for ninja’s, one of our best ways to get links has been building tools. Yeah, we’ve got the blog and an smartie often blogs, and I love that. But the tools are something that we can build in just over the course of years. They pick up pretty free links. If you go to Internet marketing and just dotcom, I think at the top menubar there’s a link for tools and there is, I think, free and paid defreeze.

[00:42:42.530] – Jim Boykin

Pretty cool. I mean, almost everything on there. It’s it depends on what you’re endue. There’s SEO tools, there’s design tools. There’s nothing in there super fancy that’s going to be earthshattering. They’re free.

[00:42:56.060] – Jim Boykin

But there are some really cool tools. If you look through all of it, you may be like, oh, I never knew something like this existed. I think I’ll bookmark that one or better yet, link to it. And you could do a blog post about here’s a really neat tool. All right, look, let me start.

[00:43:10.880] – Phillip Thune

Yeah. We don’t have too much time. Let me start with a few questions. I think there’s some people who’ve been in the world for a while. There’s kind of the rise and fall and maybe rise again of guest post blogging. You talk about know you didn’t mention that, right? And Luis didn’t mention that either. I’m just curious. Like you clearly you made it you made it very clear you shouldn’t be buying links. But what about that outreach where you say, hey, I got to do a guest post on your blog and maybe you can do a guest post on my blog?

[00:43:41.000] – Phillip Thune

Sure. My theory, and it’s only a theory, is that there are certain words. That I think Google may look at if they appear on a page and they may not count the external links on that page, if the word sponsor is on a page, if the word guest is on a page, potentially if the word scholarship is on the page and a fellowship building was so huge for so many years, every conference I went to where we talked about link building and scholarship links and, you know, for the past few years, I used to have a couple of slides about let’s talk about scholarship lengths, not pull up pages where there was like payday loan scholarships, gambling scholarships.

[00:44:26.720] – Jim Boykin

I’m like, this has been so over abused that I don’t think Google would ever hurt you for them, but they may not count them. And I don’t know if that’s the same with the guest blog post. I mean, they’re certainly real sites that accept, I guess, blog posts that are great and have a really high value. The problem is, as you know, they’re one percent like to be Dinty diverse under the guest blog post. That’s how they’re set up for, you know, there used to be made for ads and sites and others made for blog post sites.

[00:44:58.870] – Jim Boykin

You know, I guess if it’s a real site, then definitely, definitely even for the branding and to capture that audience, like, I would never be like, you know, there’s a real site. I never really I’m not going to do our blog post. Certainly, you know, of search engine land said, hey, we want you to do a guest blog post. I’d be like, I’m there. You know, I know that site.

[00:45:17.170] – Jim Boykin

I know it’s my audience. I would definitely. But if Joe Schmo or whatever says, you know, that you get that mass email, you know this because I’ve got a bunch of sites where you can get your blog post from and then it’s like those now. Right.

[00:45:33.760] – Phillip Thune

Let me ask you about nofollow, because I think that’s sort of interesting, too. Right. So so now I guess the stuff better than me, but the latest advice is nofollow actually could have value. Right. So people used to be so, so particular going back to this blog post and wherever they make sure it’s it’s not a nofollow link. And then Google says, well, we do kind of look at those details about that a little bit.

[00:45:59.900] – Jim Boykin

Sure, you know, for years, I pretty much felt that if a link was not followed, there’s no value in it not to say that there’s any negative value. Some people like you should make sure at least 20 percent of your earnings are not followed or something like.

[00:46:17.000] – Jim Boykin

But Google’s change that where they say now we may count those links, follow those links, whereas before they didn’t. Now, how often? So I guess the next questions could no follow links count. Now, some may. And I think anyone specifically knows the links from the Wikipedia account. Now they may if there’s a great newspaper that, you know, 10 years ago, someone there heard about some Google stuff and said, we need to know, follow every single link in our newspaper.

[00:46:51.200] – Jim Boykin

And Google sees one hundred percent of the links out from this site or no follow. They may ignore that. But I think the person who’s getting any I don’t want to say is. Level C site, you know, think of something that’s no followed, I don’t think girls are going to start following it now. You know, you’re you know, if it’s just some junkie link and no traffic place and you think there’s going to be a value now that Google’s following links, I don’t think there is.

[00:47:24.740] – Jim Boykin

I don’t think anyone when Google said, you know, we’re going to stop start to count those, I never saw some big update or anything like, oh, like everything changed now. Google must be really following all those. No. Followed.

[00:47:38.560] – Jim Boykin

So, yeah. And I know I would I’m never one to volunteer if I had sites I would never put the word sponsor on there, you know, I would just say nofollow. I know Google is like help us to identify sponsored links.

[00:47:50.620] – Jim Boykin

So it’s like no, like I would agree that seem like a strange request. I couldn’t a time for one more.

[00:47:58.420] – Phillip Thune

Cody, who you have to move on to the polls?

[00:48:01.390] – Cody Christensen

If it’s short one more. We’re we’re kind of running close to the end to Jim.

[00:48:06.490] – Phillip Thune

One of the things that was a little surprising to me probably shouldn’t be, but that, you know, disavowing is still a still a thing. I totally when Penguin came, obviously, this was maybe the only thing or the number one thing. But we’re now, what, six, seven, eight years later? And you see this much more than we do a textbook or is that still a thing?

[00:48:30.820] – Phillip Thune

Are there people who have these huge issues and they have to do major disavow for?

[00:48:35.680] – Jim Boykin

Kind of you know, usually when a new client comes to us, the first one of the first things I do is analyze the back links. And usually what I’ll start with, as I’ll look at the current just about two thirds of the time when I look at the current disavow, I go, oh, my God, you know, four years a lot of people had to disavow as they went in there and stripped out anything.

[00:48:56.200] – Jim Boykin

A lot of people that are super whitehat and they’re like, when in doubt, I’m disavowing it. You know, they wipe out like 90 percent of someone’s links and then, you know, and even people got it. You know, you can search on Google for like manual penalty or disavowing stuff. There’s a lot of people that shout out we’re ninety eight percent successful. Ninety seven percent. They all brag about it. And I know what’s happening.

[00:49:17.290] – Jim Boykin

They’re disavowing everything. To me, it’s Google, the person that Google is looking at it going like, oh, sure, you’re forgiven, are you?

[00:49:25.510] – Jim Boykin

Get out tomorrow. All right. You just disavowed everything. All right?

[00:49:28.420] – Jim Boykin

You’re out on there like you got you got a penalty in the clients, like a penalty. And then six months go by and they’re like, why is there traffic is continuing to go down? And it’s like you wiped out all your back legs. So one of the first things that I do are the new client is this will get your company disavowed because often I find there’s a lot of stuff in there that should not be in there. That’s the first thing.

[00:49:49.420] – Phillip Thune

And then what happens when you find that? So you get rid of the disavow?

[00:49:56.200] – Jim Boykin

I’ll remove them from the disavow, or I can upload it and then I can check on stuff to remove from the disavow and then I’ll go after I’ve done that, which is instantly it’s like, hey, I just gained you a whole bunch of links back. And then I guess the next thing is looking, looking at their links. And I think, you know, to me, anyone that’s analyzing back links, I don’t want to say.

[00:50:21.370] – Jim Boykin

I think that my tool where I’m analyzing the sellers is what Google is using. And I think anyone else using stuff, they’re either finding stuff like, oh, I disavowed the global network or whatever, like some common stuff or all the stuff on the same IP. It’s like Google already knows that what they’re looking for is are you in any paid link network? And so any time I’m doing a disavow, I’m really conservative. I’m not out there to remove links.

[00:50:46.570] – Jim Boykin

They’re really hard to get, you know, and if someone doesn’t have a penalty, especially I’m going to be incredibly conservative. And all that I’m really going to do is I’m going to look at what are the paddlings links or suspected paid links, and I’m going to remove the lowest value stuff of that if there is no issue. And so the thought is now you can sleep a little bit better at night because your odds of getting caught up in some filter are going to be a lot less.

[00:51:14.500] – Jim Boykin

And I have to say, like, I’m going to remove every even every known paid link. But if there is a list of two hundred and fifty paid links that I know are paid and there’s no penalty and I look at the value of all those sites, probably the bottom hundred have zero value on me. I’m going to wipe out these bottom one hundred. Now you have half. You haven’t been penalized yet. Now you have half as many.

[00:51:35.410] – Jim Boykin

You should be able to sleep a lot better at night. So I guess that’s more the disavowals. They don’t want anyone ever to get caught up in a penalty and it’s usually around. Are you buying links?

[00:51:46.200] – Jim Boykin

OK.