I love a good link building service image, they’re full of such hope!
Anyway, If you had the opportunity to ask an SEO genius a question, what would you ask?
What about if you had the opportunity to ask an SEO genius a question whilst also gaining a free link from an amazing website?*
How about if I could offer you the opportunity to ask an SEO genius a question whilst gaining a free link from an amazing website* and the opportunity to look clever in front of tens of visitors?
For some reason Ross Hudgens has been kind enough to allow me to interview him for this amazing website*. I originally put together a list of SEO questions and thought to myself…
Do people really want to read the answers to these questions?
Probably not.
How can I be sure that people would be interested in the answers?
Easy, give them an opportunity to sound clever by asking Ross Hudgens a question and offer a free link out when the question is added for the interview!
A free link?
Yeah
From here?
Yeah, why not?
It’s not much of an incentive…
Dude, do one I’m the fucking rank king
So yeah, I’m looking for some cool, interesting and diverse questions to ask Ross. Think you’ve got a difficult question? Had problems with a certain SEO area and need some advice?
Rules:
- I will link out to the top ten questions asked in the comment section below.
- I might read tweets, inbound mentions etc but questions will only be used if you ask below.
- If there are no decent questions (sob) then I will proceed with my current list.
- Stupid questions will be lolled at but will probably not be passed on.
- Great point from Matthew (below) – If there are any questions below that you like then I will take that into consideration when choosing them.
Get to it!
*website linking out may or may not be amazing.
Free Links This Way...,
Dear Ross,
It seems much of the attention of linkbuilders these days is on tactics that are only scalable for large agencies working for large brands. Can you give me an example of a white hat content strategy for a small business with a limited budget?
All my love and kisses,
The best looking man in the world
Don’t know if we can vote for questions but this is a good one IMHO (besides the one I submitted).
Weird. Sweet concept. I’m game.
Q: What is one question you can ask an “SEO” to immediately gauge their level of technical experience and know how, within an order of magnitude?
What red flags would have to be triggered in order to pass on a “free” or “easy” link.
Do you think job title “SEO” is still valid on 2012? if not, what would you use (inbound marketer, digital strategist, inbounder…)? if yes. that is the answer. 🙂
thanks!
To piggyback off of Joel, What kind of link building would you recommend for category and product pages for e-commerce that is cost-effective, long-term and sustainable (i.e. not private blog networks, giveaways or paid links) – It’s easy enough to get links to the homepage of any site – but something like a “plus size dress pants” page that isn’t particularly attractive has a hard time getting link love.
What link building automation tools, if any, are safe and effective to use?
How important is it to alter SEO strategy now that Google has launched ‘Search plus Your World’? How has it affected your strategies?
Got another one for ya –
Is there really such thing as a pure SEO anymore? It seems as if the lines between and SEO and Digital Marketer are becoming more blurred. You no longer can just help your client rank higher on search engine results pages, you have to get involved in social strategy, conversion optimization etc…
How do you run SEO “tests” and experiments? With so many variables affecting the rank of a website, how can you select just ONE and then run a scientifically approvable test?
Social media sites (Twitter, Facebook) have been creatively used to build relationships and mine data for feeding the link building process. Now, what recommendations do you have to leverage them for link placement since Google has announced they include links from social media sites in their algorithm?
Obviously go beyond the obvious of – post it to your Twitter, Facebook & G+ streams.
Thanks!
-Matt
Nice some good questions already 🙂
Paid links–are they ever legit or always scammy?
If you were stranded on a desert island, and the island suddenly flipped over and turned into a bowl of pasta, what kind of pasta would it be?
or
Some people (by some people I mean me!) feel that the death of the internet as we know it is imminent and that the second .com bubble is about to burst; Google is slowly killing itself, Yahoo is turning into a more Social Mediaesque aggregation engine, Bing is…well Bing…and Search Engines in general are becoming more and more like dinosaurs in a tar pit. The future stability of SEO seems bleak, the future of Internet Marketing in General is becoming fuddled and confusing. Is there any hope for the future of the internet and SEO? Or is all hope lost? What is the future of the internet?
If you want, you can use either question =P and for a link (If I get lucky) My blog is launching on Monday! (right now it is just an empty void). So, you can use my linkedin link, or shoot me an email for my blog addy! =P
bit bleak that r kid… the future is now… grab hold or be left behind!
If forced to put a percentage on it, how much weight do you believe is still given to links amongst all ranking factors?
I’ll take 98% for 500, Alex.
99.6% for 350 pls, Alex
Hey Ross and Sean –
How do you evaluate and determine what new/different practices can be integrated into your process so it continues to evolve/scale? Not just talking tools, but actual practices like should we send a secondary broken request to a webmaster who already obliged us once or try to get them all in one drive. Having limited success with both, it would seem logical to choose to get more than one all at once because it saves time. The problem I’ve run into with this method is it has proven to reduce success rates of my outreach.
How would you go about trying to scale where you see opportunities for improvements in both positive return frequency and number of acquisitions per outreach drive? Or is it your opinion that these secondary/tertiary link requests are a negligible loss because they are not from unique linking domains but contain authority to different key phrases in a mid-level competitive space?
If you could ask yourself one SEO related question, what would it be?
When rankings dip after building 20 local citation links how do I explain this to a client?
Wil actually does a great of explaining a possible remedy for this situation here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYeQ4jDyVXI (2:42)
u didnt go down r kid – the “competition stepped up its game – hence we now need more money to sustain and compete in this serp…”
and if that works – ROFL
How do you manage link quantity expectations?
Haha, Jon, you wanna be more vague?? 😉
Sorry Sean, hope this helps:
When you bring on new clients, how do you quantify your link building efforts? I.e. do you say you’ll get 100 links the first month, and then 120 the next month, etc. (I know you wouldn’t, be just trying to make sure you get what I’m saying).
Hope that clarifies a bit.
My question: can you think of any more brazen way to blag content than asking someone to do an interview then asking everyone else for the questions?
Hahaha. Quite.
Apologies for trying to give people an opportunity to ask a question they probably wouldn’t normally 🙂
I’m kind of like the Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu of SEO…
The question that I ponder is what makes a link an advert or a bought link (mainly text but I guess it counts for images too)? How would you decide which was which if you were on the Google teams.
When assessing a site or writing a proposal what factors, formulas and indicators do you use to measure how much time and resource it will take to rank for a specific keyword in a specific niche so you can give the client an accurate estimation.
(I was looking for something more detailed than simply competitive volume and amount of competitor back links. Tools and formulas used would be useful.)
Look forward to the article.
heres one 1010101
ill write in binary for ya
100011010010101001110120 oops finger slipped
but yer – he’s one for ya – a client asked you – so how many links will I get for my $50,000,000 geekplex?
and you say..?
iDCx
Do you think social network business pages will ever take over the use of a website?
Hi Ross & Sean,
My question is this:
If your site exists in a niche where every top competitor is buying links, should you also buy links in order to compete? (i.e. is the risk of penalty reduced?).
Merci, Au Revoir
Hi Ross/Sean,
What methods have you employed to get consumers/site users to build links of significant scale/quality for you and how do you measure their effectiveness?
Who needs links when you’ve got hustle? I’ll sell you 1,000 PR100 hustles for $15! deal?
Hello!
What are your typical processes for developing a content strategy for clients? Specifically, the amount of content (number of articles, infographics or videos?), how to syndicate the content, any guest blogging strategies and so on. Thanks very much!
For me, content is one of the strongest tools we can use for clients but there are always questions around resources/time and coming up with ideas for really niche industries.
One great link from an amazing domain (High PR, Auth, Trust) or 15 links from 15 different domains (non-spammy, but low PR, low readership, etc)?
Vary Gaynerchuk as I live and breathe!
Crush It!?
Fuck off.
If you ask someone for a free link on their blog, but they in return give you a media kit ‘with prices of links etc’,
If you then went back to them and told them that if they didn’t give you a free link, you’d send all correspondence to Google that shows that they’ve been selling links.
Is that white hat or black hat?
I have a second question that I’ve been trying to work out.
If someone has a very popular WordPress hosted blog , and they offer you a link, is that worth more than someone with a self hosted (not so popular) blog.
This question is based on the fact that you already have links from Wordrpess hosted blogs.
Are directory links still worthwhile? I have been submitting to directories again recently, but just not sure if it is time spent well or not. Would 30 minutes submitting links to a directory be better spent writing a short post to guest publish somewhere?
Sorry if I’m late to the party…
Ross,
There are many ways to overcome challenges within search engine optimization, but what’s the one thing that the vast majority of SEOs have wrong?
Thanks.
Sorry Bill the questions have been sent and Ross is in the process of answering them. I’ll add the question to the post though to see whether anyone wants to answer it in the comments section.
I found the source of the picture!
topseolinks{dot]com
I demand a prize, in the form of much linkage to my money site. J/k