SEO Fighting Talk: Debunking SEO Myths

James Dooley: welcome back to a brand new series called SEO fighting talk and the sole purpose of this series is that we take SEO myths and we either figure out if they are true or if they are untrue. the reason why and I fight with Kasra.

Kasra Dash: yeah no fighting no Kasras were hurt in this series but one of the main reasons why we are able to talk so freely about this is that we have the in-house R and D testing team so anything that is being said on these videos we have actually tested ourselves.

James Dooley: so the first fighting talk is tiered link building tiered link building. there has been quite a lot of positive and negative signal there has been quite a lot of fighting talk on Twitter.

Kasra Dash: right there always is to be fair where some people are saying just keep getting more referring domains and just keep spending more money on guest posts through to the website where some are saying most of the guest posts they are getting are orphan pages with no tier twos and therefore have no value.

James Dooley: first and foremost I definitely think there is value in building referring domain counts and getting new guest posts but when they are orphan pages tier two backlinks make a huge difference. one of the first things I do when I take over a site is get the highest Dr do follow links that have no referring domains and hit each one with ten tier two backlinks. the growth we get within six weeks is insane.

Kasra Dash: what we should probably do is define what a tier two link is because that is where a lot of the fighting talk happens.

James Dooley: a lot of people think that tier twos are things like GSA Xrumer blog comments and since they are not hitting the money site people think it is fine. in my opinion a tier two is a powerful link that does not need to be relevant. you can get niche edits as tier twos pointing to your main guest posts and that passes power into the relevant page which then passes power and relevance through to your money page.

Kasra Dash: basically act like you own the page you built. you would never hit your money site with cheap GSA links so do not do it with your guest posts. that is where people go wrong. people tell me tiered link building does not work then I look at their sites and see cheap spammy links as tier twos. what we do at SearchU is look for links that are not premium but still powerful. dr20s dr15s dr30s. they still pass a lot of power especially when used at tier two. they have far fewer outbound links than the dr50 and dr60 sites so they often pass more power.

James Dooley: right let’s move on from tier two link building. last week on Twitter there was a massive debate. only relevant links move the needle. only relevant links move the needle. what are your thoughts.

Kasra Dash: anybody claiming that is not doing enough testing. if that was true then Yelp which is a good directory link would be useless since it covers hundreds of industries. Forbes links would be useless for a cleaning company. no relevance yet huge power. we build low Dr non relevant links all the time and they move the needle. but yes you should have both powerful and relevant links.

James Dooley: for the record I prefer powerful do follow relevant links high up the page. but there is a finite number of those. non relevant links can absolutely move the needle because of their power.

Kasra Dash: you also have layers of relevance. whole site relevance. category relevance. page level relevance. heading level relevance. paragraph level relevance. sentence level relevance. anchor text relevance. you start at the top and work your way down. but non relevant links can still move rankings.

James Dooley: next one only do follow links move the needle.

Kasra Dash: completely not true. no follow links work better than they ever have. digital PR campaigns send loads of no follow links and they still move the needle. Google sees brand mentions even without a link. people saying no follows do nothing are wrong.

James Dooley: what about site reputation abuse where people claim expired domains no longer work.

Kasra Dash: people multiply Google guidelines by 65 and invent rules that do not exist. if you redirect a bakery domain into a gambling site that is obviously not going to work. but expired domains still work great if you match relevance. you cannot redirect a thousand irrelevant referring domains into a site and expect magic. but relevant expired domains work perfectly well.

James Dooley: next one geo links. if you have a site in Dubai should you only build UAE links.

Kasra Dash: definitely get some local links but you do not only need UAE links. the biggest real estate company in Dubai has only 14 percent UAE links and ranks number one. sleepy dot es in Spain ranks number one with only 18 to 19 percent Spanish links. it is a mix.

James Dooley: the last one AI content is dead.

Kasra Dash: yes and no. if you plaster your site with millions of AI articles with no checks you will get slapped. if you produce thin pages you will get slapped. but mass AI content with proper briefs fact checking removal of fluff and real user value works better than ever. it needs to be an assistant to your content team not a replacement.

James Dooley: leave a comment and debate anything you want. if someone wants to come on and challenge any of this you are welcome. ask ten questions and we will go through them all. that is the first episode of SEO fighting talk and I think we owned peace.