AP 0015: SEO—How Do You Stop Link Juice from Leaking from Your Website?

AskPat 15 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey, everybody! What's up? This is Pat Flynn, and welcome to Episode 15 of AskPat. I'm always happy to be here to answer your online business questions, five days a week. I hope you're doing awesome.

Today I want to mention today's show is brought to you by Long Tail Pro. This is a tool that I use to help me with search engine optimization, search engine competitiveness, and also finding those hidden keywords within your niche, around your blog, that you should be targeting. Again, Long Tail Pro by my buddy Spencer Haws. Great guy. My affiliate link for that is SmartPassiveIncome.com/LongTailPro. [Full Disclosure: As an affiliate, I receive compensation if you purchase through this link.]

And of course, we're talking about SEO today, so we have a question from Tony about link juice. So let's hear from Tony right now.

Tony: Hey, Pat. This is Tony from MoreWhereThatCameFrom.com and my question is in regards to links. Recently listened to you talk about how using follow links is like poking holes in your juice box. If that's the case, does it ever make sense to use follow links. I recently listened to Spencer Haws talk about how when he introduced affiliate lists to his site, his Google rankings tanked. So, his solution to fix that was that he made his entire page nofollow. Could he have got his rankings back by just introducing no follow links instead of making the whole page nofollow? Let me know. Thanks.

Pat Flynn: Tony, thank you so much for your question, and for those of you listening, you might not really understand what Tony was referencing. And he's talking about something I mentioned a long time ago. I would say maybe two and a half to three years ago, actually on my other blog SmartPassiveIncome.com. I talked a lot about SEO then because I did a lot of experiments with SEO. And he's talking about when I mentioned that your website is sort of, you can envision it like a juice box. And within your website you can do internal linking, where you link to other articles on your own site, or you can do external linking, and that's linking to sites outside of your own site.

And whenever you share an external link, it's sort of like poking a hole in your juice box. And so, you poke a hole in your own juice box with that external link, and leaked juice will leak out of there. And that decreases the authority, or the power, of that particular page or your website depending on where you're leaking that juice to. And some of those leaks are better than others, I guess. But that was a few years back. So much stuff has changed with Google and search engine optimization since then. It's hard to keep up. And I do try to read and stay with the times with SEO, but to be honest, I'm not an expert at this. Things change so often, I don't care anymore. I want to build a business where I don't have to rely on Google search in order to be successful, right?

I want to build a business where I don't need to rely on Google search in order to be successful. Things are always changing. There was Penguin, and Panda, and there's . . . what's next? Pterodactyl? I don't even know what's going to happen next. That's the thing. We don't know what's going to happen next. So when it comes to link juice and stuff . . . in SEO in general, there are just basic rules that I follow that I feel will always stay the same and I don't even worry about that other stuff. And that's why for those of you who are following along with Niche Site Duel 2.0, which you can get more information on at NicheSiteDuel.com, I created Niche Site Duel a while back using a bunch of gray hat SEO strategies, and they worked. They worked back then. And that's when I had started talking a lot about SEO, but then things changed. Those techniques don't work quite as well as they used to now.

And now, I'm doing a second niche site, and I'm publicly sharing everything that happens. This is on FoodTruckr.com. I’m building a niche site for people in the food truck resource, or a resource for people in the food truck industry. And I'm taking a completely different approach. And I'm just following these basic SEO rules that I followed on SmartPassiveIncome.com, because on Smart Passive Income I didn't really care about SEO. I just did these basic rules and just over time I've been found in search. And the same thing is already happening with FoodTruckr.com.

And so these are the basic SEO rules that I follow and I always suggest people follow, and then not even worry about all the other stuff. Yes, those other things are important and you can highly focus on those, and you can get ninja with some of those tactics, but like I said, who knows what's going to happen next? But these things are always the things that I do, that I feel will always come into play. So the first thing is, if you're going to be targeting a keyword, make sure you place that keyword in optimal places. For instance, the title of that article. Or if you're targeting a specific keyword for your website, it should be in, if possible, the domain name. And even then, that's not even that important anymore.

But at least in the title of your page, and in any metadata like the meta description of your site, or for a particular blog post or page, you want to always manually enter the meta description and put those keywords in there naturally. Because you don't want to just write for search engines, you want to write for people too. And that's where Google has been heading. They want to become as human as possible when it comes to providing search engine results for you. You can also include keywords as well.

A lot of plug ins like Yoast SEO plugin or the All In One SEO plugin for WordPress, it gives you a spot to insert keywords. And I still enter keywords for my articles. Primary, secondary, and tertiary keywords that I feel are related to that article. And I don't spend too much time trying to decide what those keywords are. You just know. And you can't really get it wrong. Nothing bad's going to happen if you put in the wrong keywords, but you should have some idea what the main keywords are that your article is about. And the thing is, Google doesn't even look at those anymore. Because back in the day, people were putting keywords in that didn't relate to those articles and were getting ranked for those non-related keywords. So Google doesn't even look at those anymore.

But Bing does, and Yahoo does, and you can't not pay attention to those search engines as well, because you will get a few hits here and there. And because a lot of people don't optimize for those other search engines, that's a really quick way that you can perhaps get ahead of the competition on these secondary and third-level search engines. I always also make sure to categorize and tag my articles as well. And I also . . . this is the tip for you, Tony, when it comes to link juice and having link leakage, or link juice leaking out of your site. Any affiliate links that I have, I always try to make nofollow. So those are nofollow affiliate links. If you don't know what that means, then don't worry about it. You don't even really need to worry about it. But affiliate links I will nofollow just so that link juice doesn't pass through to site that may not be trusted and Google has certain thoughts about affiliate pages, and landing pages, and those sorts of things.

Some other rules that I play with are including high quality media on blog posts that relate to those keywords that I'm targeting. So I'll include YouTube videos whether they're YouTube videos that I create myself, or YouTube videos that I find that would be helpful for people who read that article that relate to that keyword as well. Also, you can embed Slideshares. If you got to Slideshare.net you can find some great slideshows that you can also embed on your websites as well. And just adding as much value as you can to your articles, because you want your articles to be epic. Those are the things that get ranked high. Those are the things that really get shared. Right? I would much rather have people share articles of mine, than be ranked really high on Google. Obviously both would be awesome, and they both go hand-in-hand, because Google's looking to show off the best stuff, but I would much rather focus on writing for people, and having those things shared.

So that's my answer. And if you're listening to this and you're like, “Pat, you don't know what you're talking about. You don't know SEO.” I just do the basics and I don't care about all that other stuff. I let my articles, and my research, and my writing, and my connection to my audience, and the relationship I build with them, I let that do the marketing for me. And I don't even want to play these games anymore with Google. I just do the basic stuff, and you know what? I'm still getting ranked really high for a lot of the things I talk about.

But if you do want to read more about SEO and you want to get into that sort of thing, I recommend going to Moz.com/blog. That's where I'd read a lot about SEO and things that are happening in the industry. Rand Fishkin writes there and a lot of other great people, so that's Moz.com/blog. Yeah, that's my answer. So I would love to hear your comments. If you are an SEO expert and you want to give Tony some help or anybody else out there who wants to understand more about link juice and all that stuff. Just play it natural guys, just write.
I’m going to actually end with a quote that just sums this all up quite nicely. Before I mention that, I want to re-mention Long Tail Pro. SmartPassiveIncome.com/LongTailPro. [Full Disclosure: As an affiliate, I receive compensation if you purchase through this link.] That I still use, and I use that almost everyday when I write new articles, and I use that to discover what else I should be writing about, especially with my niche sites. Okay, so I'm targeting these keywords, what other keywords should I write? And I think I mentioned also SEMRush.com. That's another great resource and that one is free.

But here's a quote by Neil Patel that I want you to just think about. He says, “Write . . .” (and he actually said this in SmartPassiveIncome.com/session67, which was episode 67 of the Smart Passive Income podcast). Neil Patel said, “Write about what people want, search engines will eventually catch up.” So think about that. Write for the people. Search engines will figure it out. All right. Take care, thanks so much, and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat.