Mike Friedman

Sorry. I haven't touched Norton in 15+ years.

I complained about it. Funny enough the admin locked my thread complaining about them locking threads too much. 🤷‍♂️

It doesn't matter. Anything you post they will just lock the thread within a day or two anyhow. That place is moderated by morons these days (or they are being led by morons). They stifle any conversations and don't understand how a forum or community works.

In general, I would worry about relevancy more than authority. But it's not that simple. I'd take a completely irrelevant link off the home page of CNN versus a highly relevant link on some blog that someone just started 6 months ago that nobody has ever heard of.

I don't think I would ever have the time to put together a complete guide like that, but once you have the keywords, I would use something like Semrush's cluster option or a tool like KeywordInsights.ai. Both do a pretty good job of clustering everything. You will still want to go through the results and make any changes you think are appropriate, but both of these options make it a lot easier than starting from scratch and manually clustering everything.

This would be a nice change. https://www.seroundtable.com/bing-webmaster-tools-24-months-data-37030.html

Well, when they first took over, they had those of us who were mods train some of their staff to help moderate. Then one day we logged in and we were no longer mods. No discussion. No explanation. Not even a thank you. Just a big 🖕

I bet you are going to see a lot of keyword tools expanding on or adding Reddit functionality in the very near future. Here is an early example from the team at KeywordInsights. https://redditinsights.ai/

Well, in their defense, there isn't enough traffic to warrant 15 mods there anymore. They probably barely need 4 other than for the sales area maybe, but they never let any of the volunteer mods get involved there anyhow. To be honest, I'm more interested in new blood with new ideas.

Not really my expertise, but it seems as good as anywhere else. It is pretty popular in some Reddit communities that I have seen.

I just updated my signature link there. Didn't really expect to get much traffic from it though as 1) that place is a freaking ghost town and 2) I'm not really active over there anymore. I made a post over there about how stupid it was that on a discussion forum they lock threads that are only a few weeks old, completely stifling many discussions. Ironically, it was locked by the admin in a few days. 🤣 Good to see you Shane.

I'll let someone else offer advice on that. I don't really pay attention to competition.

A few of the less common methods suggested that I frequently use to find keywords: Searching through reddits relating to the topic and seeing what kinds of questions people are asking. Go to a Wikipedia page about my topic. Then click on the Tools dropdown menu and click on "What links here". This give you a list of all the other Wikipedia pages linking to this one. There are often some great search terms, entities, and semantically related terms in here. Look at People Also Ask questions. If the site has been around for a while, I'll got to GSC and use a regex expression to find all the questions people are searching for that my content is showing up in SERPs for. I'll often find topics and search queries that my content is currently not addressing well because I wasn't really targeting them.

I agree. I was surprised by the amount of people who thought this was news.

The keyword thing is a discussion I have with clients when we first start working together. It's kind of hard to change their mindset once you start working together. I set up keyword tracking that they can look at whenever they want, but I don't present ranking reports to them on a regular basis. I will highlight something if we have a big win. I would do the same if we had a big loss. I explain to them that we want to focus on covering topics. Most of the high traffic pages I work on get clicks from 1000 different search queries each month. We would drive ourself crazy trying to track all of those and it would be a waste of resources. I try to pick out keywords that will let us track overall trends. Are we moving up or are we moving down? Their primary focus should be on conversions.

Frase has a big webinar in a couple of hours where they are supposed to be announcing big updates. I saw the beta. Looks like they are largely revamping it to look something a bit more like Surfer and other tools. It was missing a few functions I liked, but maybe they will be in the final release. What I saw in the beta, might make me go shopping for a new tool.

This is a cool little feature of Microsoft Edge. You can quickly search Google and Bing at the same time. search google and bing.mp4

Personally, I don't look for much. I want to see that the the page my link will appear on is relevant to the target page or site I will be linking to, and I want to try to gauge the link profile of the page my link will appear on. If it is going to be a new page, obviously there is nothing to look at, but I do try to look at the overall site structure. What does the site typically do with new posts? Do they use good internal linking practices? You can look at domain-level metrics like Authority Score in Semrush or DR in Ahrefs, but if there is no link path to the page your link will appear on, it will not benefit from the strength of the overall site. Traffic to me is a bonus. If the site is a high traffic site, that's even better, but my experience in building thousands of private network sites (most of which received little traffic) tells me it is not necessary.

I saw someone posting this question in another forum and thought it might be an interesting discussion. They were asking specifically about guest post opportunities, but I think the same things apply to basically any link opportunity. What are some things you look for in a link opportunity?

I tried it maybe 1 or 2 years ago. I didn't like it as much as Frase. I don't remember exactly why. I think because it didn't have an option to build content briefs and share them with writers. I don't know if they have added that feature since then.

I just put it into a PDF and uploaded it to the GPT.

What are you doing with expired domains these days? Redirects for all of them or are you building sites on them too?

For those who don't know me. I started online around 2003. I was doing affiliate marketing and using Google AdWords after they had just launched. Back then it was the wild west. You could spend pennies for a click and direct people straight to affiliate links. The ads didn't even have to match up with the destination. As I was working on my own sites, I started looking into other traffic sources. I figured if i could get people there by other means in addition to my ads, I could be even more profitable. I started doing SEO without even knowing it was called SEO. I spent a lot of time on forums like Warrior Forum, Wicked Fire, Backlinks Forum, etc. soaking up everything I could. Over time though, I realized that 95% of the people sharing information and advice on these forums had no idea what they were talking about. From my experience, it was obvious they had never actually ranked a page in their life. As a result, in 2007 I started The SEO Pub. For those who started following me back then, you may remember that it was basically just a blog where I offered practical SEO advice (mostly sorting through the BS and myths about SEO that were out there). There was also monthly beer reviews. 🍻 Before long I started getting messages from people asking if I offered SEO as a service. I started offering SEO services through The SEO Pub. A few years ago, I rebranded the service side of things as Clicked Marketing and started offering a weekly newsletter on The SEO Pub instead. I also changed my business model at that time and stopped offering full-service SEO. I now work as an SEO consultant with growth oriented businesses around the world.

In a case like this @Ross Sedawie, I would say don't try to out clever yourself. If the majority of the top ranking pages are a combination of informational and commercial, then that's how I would structure my pages as well. It makes a lot of sense on a broader term like that. You really don't know if a person is looking to buy a black opal or if they are looking for a wiki style page to learn about where black opals come from.