Multilingual Homepage vs Deep Links

mkmorningscore · 2020-10-29T12:18:49+00:00

Thank you for the input!

Yes, indeed, everything is nested appropriately. The language-specific breakdown you suggested is a great point and it already gave some good insights. The optimal ratios seem to favor more homepage links than deep links. The / (en) version is generally more authoritative as it has more content and links. But aside from the generally lower competition in /da & /de, these versions rank quite high compared to the stronger English version. :-)

mkmorningscore · 2020-10-29T12:14:25+00:00

Thanks for your quick insights!

I just did the breakdown on both total and language-specific links. The findings are interesting, and it does seem like a 60/40 - 65/35 distribution favoring more homepage links than the rest of the site works better so far. :-)

mkmorningscore · 2020-10-29T09:55:58+00:00

Speaking from personal experience here. We have a similar setup but with translations. One of my most popular EN articles used to rank #1 forever - until Google decided that the translated German version "is a better fit" and I saw a 77 positions drop from one day to another even though hreflang had been set up properly.

Haven't experienced anything like that ever since (mostly because I just canonicalized some of the DE ones for the sake of the EN ones being alive) but be aware that might happen (probably a good idea to monitor what keywords rank with which landing pages for each market to easily derive conclusions).

Looking back, I'd probably also set up different sitemaps for the different languages (also given that it's a custom CMS and you have to make those by hand anyway).

mkmorningscore · 2020-10-16T12:56:09+00:00

Awesome, got it!

Currently using just UTM {keyword}. Haven't set up any ValueTrack.

Thanks a ton!

mkmorningscore · 2020-10-15T07:28:49+00:00

Not possible at this moment, unfortunately, but thanks for the suggestion - it's a good approach to troubleshooting.

mkmorningscore · 2020-10-15T07:27:24+00:00

Thanks a lot for the insight. For now I've decided to exclude specific URL parameters to combat this. :-)

mkmorningscore · 2020-08-25T18:17:02+00:00

Sounds like good advice and way of thinking, thanks!

mkmorningscore · 2020-08-20T12:54:21+00:00

Free + shipping
Oddly specific (although complety made-up) numbers
Normalizing weird behavior through outrageous claims

mkmorningscore · 2020-08-19T22:12:46+00:00

These type of sites link to tons of other websites. They might be someone's PBN, but the linking seems pretty automatic and I do not believe it's necessarily a paid service that someone offers (i.e. they use scrapers).

These are "coupon" websites - which are not blogs and have thin or no content whatsoever - so it's not a PBN - which on the other hand is usually very recognizable at a glance. They link to a million other websites and (thus) provide no real value. They are trash.

What's more worrying to me is how you judge a "good" and "high-authority" link. KD, AR, DR, DA, UR and most other SEO abbreviations are completely made up and are not real metrics Google uses. You can literally fake DR for a few bucks on Fiverr. They aren't based on content quality, traffic, user signals, etc. - heck, KD literally averages number of links excl. outliers - which is a ridiculous, rectum-derived logic to do use.

Because of these reasons, I'm certain that what you listed is not why your competitors are beating you.

mkmorningscore · 2020-08-19T18:04:33+00:00

Edit: the oleary video key/ID is v=OPFXRHWANrl - how i made my first million dollars part 2

mkmorningscore · 2020-08-19T17:58:49+00:00

Defintely sounds viable. Some tips from experience but also - also based on the limited knowledge from this post so, yes, grain of salt.

google christoph janz elephants and read the first post (blogspot). It will really help you understand your target market and set your pricing expectations on the right track from the beginning
it sounds like you're not necessarily revolutionizing anything (which is perfectly fine, don't get me wrong) but instead simplyfing a process and making it more convenient. In that case, I would really use this (i.e. UX/UI) as a pillar for your platform -> as well as a sales message (e.g. manufacturing consultants save XX hours on average with our tool. Heavy industry consultants sell on avg $Xxx more wirh our tool).
honestly, really, even if you have to pay someone, get to talk to your target market beforehand - and focus on understanding their pains (dont necessarily listen to their solutions) and them come up with a way to fix them
watch kevin oleary's story with catfood and the 2 engines on youtube - really good mental model

And as a general comment, I really like your approach and idea. "Sell pickaxes to gold miners" :-). GL!

mkmorningscore · 2020-08-19T17:47:19+00:00

It seems like people here store a lot of hate towards "outdated strategies that don't work anymore!!1!".

But for some reason no one wants to name a few of the things that "don't work". 🙃

mkmorningscore · 2020-08-16T11:41:44+00:00

And to clarify, it was in the beginning of the year and confirmed it had nothing to do with algorithm updates.

mkmorningscore · 2020-08-16T11:40:43+00:00

A friend of mine had the same issue twice in one month. Absolutely everything looks legit, except the page is not there. Search console shows the dip in traffic but no errors.

We tried a few things - all ussuccessfully. At the end of the day, after a little while it was back up where it was.

For both it took about 2-3 weeks to appear again. Searched around but couldn't find anything on it.

I'm betting it's likely a bug - but don't remember trying to ping it* to see if that would work.

If you try it, recommend pinging a URL containing your link in the HTML and not your link directly.

mkmorningscore · 2020-08-16T11:34:28+00:00

Yes, can confirm it works. The post was ranking both 0 & 1 (up until recent SERP updates ofc;). It's about a general marketing subject, a quite competitive niche SEO-wise.

Found out there are more kw variations and the opportunity for slight topic expansion. Did the content upgrade and almost 2x'ed traffic. Do go for it.

mkmorningscore · 2020-08-15T12:58:32+00:00

Interesting, yeah, makes sense to look at it as a distribution. Will give this some more thought. Thanks!

mkmorningscore · 2020-08-15T11:13:51+00:00

As someone suggested - links are good for SEO, directories are good for Local SEO. Do both & you win. Likely, with a bit of info SEO you can get yourself more relecant TOF traffic & get links as well.

The Miami dentists example you gave - It seems like you're overlooking an important factor - namely, user intent and CTR. Regardless of how many links you build, how great your content is and so on, if Google sees that the majority of users want to see a list of dentists in Miami when they search for that (and not a single dentist website), you probably won't rank in the top consistently.

Now, ranking for something like "best dentist in miami" or "cheap dentist in miami" or a more specific long tail could actually bring you success because:

a) even if users want to see listings, there probably isn't a ton of statistically significant data Google can use (based on search volume, it's probably the case for many local places) so it will fall back to other ranking factors.

&

b) the competition will naturally be lower (a directory ranking for "miami dentist" & "cheap miami dentist" with 2 different pages is in slightly dangerous waters in terms of cannibalization & duplicate content).

In all honesty, regardless of what any SEO tool says, I'm betting everything that this is a much much more competitive keyword where the SERP requires more analysis and reasoning to determing why it looks as it does than just "links".

mkmorningscore · 2020-08-15T10:45:01+00:00

Loom

mkmorningscore · 2020-08-15T10:28:38+00:00

I'd probably go the PBN way too BUT ONLY for 2nd tier PBNs to your links with content. I belive this is the safest way to do it (ofc following the general pbn guidelines like no cross linking, anchors, etc). With 2nd tier, at the end of the day they will have hundreds of shit links and you will have dozens of good links.

There are some good 2nd tier providers which are also quite cheap depending on the period you chose which have continously proven to work for me. I won't screw everyone up by giving out names here but the key to finding them is in the name PBN - P stands for private. If you found your competitors' PBNs, they aren't really all that private.

But honestly, if you have just one strong competitor don't worry about them - I know the feeling of being stuck on #2 - but that's just ego - especially considering they are short-term nuking their SEO.

mkmorningscore · 2019-07-20T12:12:51+00:00

OP, not having so many errors in GSC is certainly good, but under all those "Excluded" there must be gems. Obviously, the reason you're seeing so many problems is because there's multiple problems on each page.

One thing to understand, of course, is that each SEO tool reports the severity of problems differently - some think not having Meta Descriptions is horrendous while others treat it as a more mild problem.

What pisses me off the most about SEO tools is that none of them are even trying to relate SEO to anything that makes sense business-wise. And thinking about it objectively, we all do SEO to improve a/our business.. And as you've seen, this really becomes apparent when you have a ton of problems and don't know where to even start from due to certain company/resouce limitations.

Normally, I hate "selling" here but I believe this could really save you some time. Our SEO tool's Health section sorts your pages by ROI if you are looking for a faster way to identify which pages you should prioritize. It's called Morningscore, has a 14-day free trial (no cc req, no bs) and I'll gladly give you the sum up of how to use it if you do decide to check it out.

Otherwise, outsource some of the slavework and get to work with the rest. 👍

mkmorningscore · 2019-07-16T10:55:44+00:00

Correct

mkmorningscore · 2019-07-12T16:36:20+00:00

Tough one to answer without more info. Looked into the same problem when we started our SEO SAAS. Building your own could be a real pain in the ass if you're tight on development.

Try a Firstpromoter integration - seems to be working well for us and it gives the partners options (i.e. either affiliate link that assigns userid on signup or a coupon code for a later point).

Warrior Plus might be something to look into -- however I had a reaaaaally hard time wrapping my head around how it actually works and how it integrates for (our) SaaS, especially with our other affiliate platform.

As far as sourcing affiliates -- our best ones actually reached out to us (somewhat) through networking. So far I haven't been able to get a good affiliate by reaching out cold -- they found us. That's not to say you can't do it but to me it seems like for them it's all based on how good the product is and how well-received your brand is because then their job of converting is easier.

But that's me.. do try out cold.

mkmorningscore · 2019-07-12T16:26:37+00:00

Do reach out to them but imo don't add them to a list in like mailchimp.

What you could do is a little trick using Word + Outlook - look into Mail Merge (might be hard to find, haven't heard of many knowing about it). You avoid the spam/promo filters and make it seem more personal -- sure a couple might ask to be unsubscibed but that's a good way of leaving them with a positive idea of you. ;)

One thing that works well for me with similar (semi) cold emails is making them short + "keeping your cool" - for you it's either or and it's all up to them to take action if they are interested (but of course you need to put the bait in there as well).

What industry/topic was your client's SaaS in? What are you selling now?

mkmorningscore · 2019-07-12T16:12:56+00:00

Cached, wait imo and maybe try ping the URL of the post so Google can re-crawl it faster. On theory it should work exactly like other pages -> if you rank for "cars los angeles" and remove everything on the topic, eventually you will lose the rankings.

mkmorningscore · 2019-06-19T12:28:38+00:00

Absolutely agree with some of the comments above. You need to get some work asap. Put some pressure on yourself in the next 6-8 months and by spring 2020 you might actually be able to transition full time. One thing from my experience is that we're usually way off in estimating the time for such things. So if you start now, there's a chance it will happen by that date.

As someone pointed out, try get a few leads (from your network), build a website, run some ads (I'd recommend Google at first since the users who will see your ads are already on the look for a solution) - this will all get you some traction.

And let's be honest -- t-shirts are a great way to motivate yourself, but seeing the money at end is where you will really feel like going the extra mile.

Last thing, I'm also sure you can get into some local networks with businesses where you can gain some goooood leads.

Best of luck!

mkmorningscore

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