← Grumpy SEO Guy
Grumpy SEO Guy
Doin' SEO: A Day in the Life. And a Question From Patreon, PBNs and OBL - Episode 104
00:22:06
Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:00]
Grumpy SEO Guy
This is grumpy SEO guy, episode 104, being an SEO consultant, a day in the life and answering a Patreon member's question. You're listening to Grumpy SEO Guy, the SEO podcast that doesn't waste your time with nonsense that doesn't work. I'm the grumpy SEO Guy, and I'm sharing with you the strategies that have helped me successfully run my SEO agency for the last 14 years. In this podcast, I'll be sharing my knowledge and experience, discussing tips and strategies, and trying to help you cut through the confusion that permeates this industry. If you listen to this podcast, you will know more about SEO than 99% of people on the planet. Ready? Let's get started. I'm the Grumpy SEO Guy. Let me tell you why I'm grumpy today. I'm grumpy today because people are asking me what I do every day running an SEO agency, and I don't really know how to answer that question. So I am going to try to tell you what I do every day. And after that, I'm gonna answer a question from someone on Patreon about PBNs and outbound links. Okay, but before we do that, my lawyer tells me that I have to say this right now. A quick disclaimer before we get started. Everything I say here is based on my experience and opinion from 14 years in the industry. I don't officially know how Google or any other search engines work. Everything I say here is hypothetical and based on my experience. This podcast does not constitute advice or services. What worked for me may or may not work for you. Okay, back to the show. So I wake up and I have breakfast. I take a shower. I check my email. So I want to, like, I want to be very clear here because it's very difficult to have a conversation about running your own business or being an entrepreneur and not have somebody say, well, if you want to be successful, you need to get up at 4 in the morning. Okay, look, I know a famous person said that and it became a big thing. And now everybody thinks, well, if you want to be successful, you have to get up at 4 in the morning. And their explanation for that is because a famous person said so. Like, okay, look, anyway, like, I will tell you, there are some people for whom getting up at four in the morning is probably a good idea. Some people are morning people. I am not a morning person. I actually tried to do the get up at 4 o'clock in the morning thing. I think I did it for Like a month. It was extremely difficult. I got almost nothing done, not only in the morning, but in that entire month, because I'm not. I can't. I can't think in the morning. I just. I can't. So here's the next part of this. Getting up at 4 in the morning requires going to bed at 8 at night. So for the rest of the discussion, let's figure that we are getting eight hours of sleep, okay? Somebody's gonna go, well, if you don't sleep as much, you have more time during the day. No, that's a bad idea, okay? You will probably make your productivity worse if you are getting the wrong amount of sleep. So let's just assume eight hours of sleep. You wanna get up at 4 in the morning, that means you have to go to bed at 8pm anyways. I struggle in the morning, okay? And I. I've. I'm just, I'm. I'm just. I'm not saying that person is wrong, but I'm saying giving that advice to everybody might not be the best idea. Look, everybody is different. Some people are evening people, some people are morning people, okay? I am not a morning person. I cannot. I cannot do morning. I don't do anything hard or complicated in the morning. It takes me a while to get going. But even when I got up at 4 in the morning, okay, going to bed at 8pm, getting up at 4 in the morning, I could barely do anything because my brain is just like, nope, it's morning. We're not gonna work. Somebody's gonna say, well, you gotta give it longer. I gave it a month, man. I don't know what else to tell you. Anyways, look, so I just wanna be very clear about this. And I also wanna say this because this is very important. I read something that said, okay? Cause you know how everybody says, well, successful people are morning people. Which is not true, by the way, but. Well, it might be true, but the reason they're successful is not because they're waking up early, okay? They're successful. And this is just what I think. They're successful because they have found something that works for them, okay? I bet you there are people that wake up at four in the morning and get a lot done and they're very successful, okay? But that doesn't mean everybody who does it is going to be successful, okay? If you're an evening person, that's probably a terrible idea. But anyway, so I found this thing and it said, if you are not a morning person, do not force yourself to become a Morning person, okay? Different people, their bodies work at different times of the day. And if you're an evening person, try to keep being an evening person. Or it said like, if you force yourself into the morning routine, it will make things worse for you. And I was like, yeah, finally, finally I had something to show everybody who's like, oh, you should get up early if you want to be successful, you should get up at 4 in the morning anyways. So look, here's the point. If you are a morning person, be a morning person, okay? If getting up at four in the morning sounds like a terrible idea, maybe don't get up at 4 in the morning. I don't know. I just wanna put that out there because I know enough people have heard the get up at 4 in the morning thing that they're thinking, oh man, I would really like to be self employed and run a business, but I don't wanna get up at 4 in the morning. You probably don't have to. Look, I can see a case where you could get up at 4 in the morning and it's quiet and you can get a lot of things done. And the argument for getting up at four in the morning is you can get more things done during the day before other people even begin their day than like you could otherwise. Which, sure, if you can do it, yeah, that sounds great. I can't do it, but I can stay up late and get a lot of stuff done. And I know some people that can't do that. So what? Like, whatever, it doesn't. I don't know why this get up at 4am is such a thing, but I just want to be very clear about it. I do not believe that is the cause of anybody's success unless you are a person who flourishes in the morning. Okay, and now we're on to the next topic. So I get up, you know, take a shower, have breakfast, I'll check my email. I don't really, I don't really start my day until probably 11 or 12. I've probably checked email before then, but I can't really focus on anything until around then. So anyway, on a given day I will probably be in meetings between zero and three hours a day. Okay. Usually there's zoom meetings. Zoom meetings are very exhausting for me. So if I have a lot of meetings in one day, I probably won't do much else that day. I mean, I'll probably do like a couple hours of other work. But like, honestly it's very challenging to do like eight hours of work and Be in meetings, like during the. It's for me. I don't know what I'm just saying. And also, like on Zoom, like, zoom meetings can be fatiguing anyways. There's something called zoom fatigue. Seriously now? Anyway, look. And then it depends on what's going on. Some days I'm emailing, I probably check email my business email maybe four or five times a day. I don't check it again and again and again and again and again. Cause there's nothing really that urgent usually. Right, Usually. But I'll check it in the morning. I'll check it, you know, once I have breakfast and, you know, usually have lunch. And then I'll start working. And then I will check it before I go to the studio. Sometimes I will go to the studio, Sometimes I will just work from home. I probably spend 10 hours a week on the podcast, which most people don't have a podcast, so you can probably like ignore that for now. But I think I mentioned before that I spent about 10 hours a week doing the podcast, which by the way, is free and is the best source of SEO information anywhere. Because most people who teach SEO don't actually understand SEO and are just telling you nonsense that isn't going to help you at all. Hopefully you don't feel that way about this podcast anyway, so let's just forget that for now. So, you know, zero to three hours a day in meetings. Sometimes I'm writing content for our sites, by the way, not for client sites. Because remember, content is not an SEO strategy or building backlinks or doing research. Sometimes the research is a big deal. We're doing research for a client, maybe their website, their competition, their backlinks, like whatever. Whatever we're looking into. That can usually take a big part of my day. The research. When we're doing that kind of research project, it's often a thing that will take weeks to complete and it can really take a long time. So that can take a big part of my day. Sometimes I'm spending time on the Internet looking at SEO news or SEO forums. I don't really contribute on the SEO Forums forums that much. I feel like you guys all know what I think about most SEO forums, but there's some good information out there. But mostly it's people asking the same questions and getting unhelpful answers. So I don't really know. You know, it's really a weird question because I don't like. I don't have like a record of how I spend my time every day. So I'm Honestly, like, just guessing right now, but I will tell you this. If you, if you are an employee and you were like doing SEO for a company, you could probably forget everything that I've just said because I don't think it works that way when you are working for somebody. All right. When you're an employee, you usually work a normal 8 hour day, go to the office whenever. You probably maybe work more than that. And you've got somebody telling you what to do and you've got a plan every day for the things you have to do. That's not what it's like if you own a company or if you are an entrepreneur or if you're self employed. Like, it's not like that at all. So it's, it's very. I probably, I probably work anywhere from four to 10 hours a day, like depending on the day. But that's such a. There's been days that have been less than that and there's been days that have been more than that. So there's not like, I can't, I can't, I don't do the same thing every day, so I can't, like divide it up and answer your question specifically. And I don't know, I don't know how to. So I apologize if you're like looking to take notes on like what I have to do to run an SEO agency because, like, I just, I don't know, man. It's weird though. Like, if you ask an employee what they do every day, they could probably give you a response that makes sense, right? But like, if you're asking like an entrepreneur, like, what they do every day, like, it's different every day, even though it's not. I know, guys, I know this answer doesn't make any sense, but it's very. Like right now I'm doing a podcast and then I'm gonna spend probably some hours today editing it and then I'm going to go check my email and then I have to get back to this research that we're doing, which is probably gonna take a bit of time. And then I'm probably gonna check email again. I have some messages to respond to. Probably not going to. I don't, I don't know. It's very, it's very, it's very weird. And I know this answer isn't what you're looking for, but I hope that the fact that it was such a difficult question to answer might answer the question itself. So anyway, on to part two. I have a Patreon subscriber who sent me a message and asked the following question. So I'm going to read the question and then I'm going to answer the question. Here's the question. At what point do outbound links from a PBN start hitting diminishing returns? And just to explain if you're unfamiliar with the term outbound link, an outbound link is a link from a website. Okay? So a backlink is a link to a website, and an outbound link is a link from a website. Okay? If somebody links to you, they have an outbound link that goes to you and you have a backlink from them. Great question. I'm not entirely sure if this person is referring to outbound links from a pbn, weakening the PBN or outbound links from a PBN to a client site having diminishing returns on the client's website. So I'm going to answer both of those questions because this question came from a Patreon, and it's important to me that my Patreons are happy. So, by the way, patreon.com grumpy SEO guy, you know, this podcast is free, and it's the only good source of SEO information anywhere on the Internet. Please help keep it free by supporting the podcast on Patreon. So let's start by answering diminishing returns from that particular site. Okay, so one question that people sometimes have is, if I have too many outbound links, will that, like, dilute the link juice? Right? Like, imagine a website has a predefined amount of link juice, and every backlink from that website, so outbound links is taking some of that link juice. And people think they should, like, never backlink because they think it's like, hoarding link juice and you gotta keep it all for yourself and you never wanna share it with anyone. No, that's bad advice. Okay, first of all, websites with no outbound links look weird. So that, you know, what's the first rule in SEO? Would this ever naturally happen? Would there ever be a website with no outbound links? No. That's weird. That's weird. So probably not. Okay, look, at what point do they start decreasing in effectiveness? Okay, let me respond to this question both in terms of per post and also per site. Okay? Because I'm not sure what they're asking, but I want to answer both of these questions anyway. So per post, I would say there's probably not, like, a number. Okay, I'm sure there probably is a number. I don't know what the number is. I bet Google knows what the number is. Is, but probably no one else does. But as long as it doesn't feel forced, right, and you're not approaching, like, link farm territory, it's probably fine. Let me explain link farm really quick, because I've used that term before. So maybe you've seen a link farm before when you're researching a competitor's website or a client's website or something. A link farm is a website that, like, literally only has outbound links on it. So maybe you click on a website and you go to it and, like, whatever page you're on, just every line is a new link. Like, it doesn't even have text. I mean, well, it does have text. It doesn't even have, like, a blog post. It's literally just like a link and then another link and then another link, and there's like hundreds of links on a page, right? That's a link farm, okay? Especially if you have multiple pages like that on your site, it is very improbable that that link is helping anybody, okay? Because that website has probably been categorized as a link farm and probably was devalued. Again, I'm not sure how it works, but it probably works this way. So stop doing that. I'm not saying you're doing it. Just. It's a bad. Just, you know, try to not do it that way. Okay? Now, if you've got. Let's say you've got like a post on your site, right? On your PBN. If you've got, you know, let's say 0 or 1 or 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 outbound links from it, I'm sure that's fine, because what's the first rule in SEO? Would this ever naturally happen? Okay. Would it ever naturally happen that you have a post with five outbound links on it? Yeah, that sounds normal. That sounds totally normal. Would you ever have zero? Yeah, that sounds normal, too. Any of those are normal. You could even go beyond five and it wouldn't be a problem. What you don't want is for every post to be exactly the same. That's weird. Would anyone ever make posts where every post is exactly the same and has the same number of outbound links and looks exactly the same? Like maybe. Like maybe. But you probably wouldn't have more than probably not very often. So I probably would avoid doing that. But I don't think there's, like, a number. Right. But ask yourself, how many links make sense in this post? Okay. Does the two links make sense? Then have two links? Does four make sense? Then have four links? What about ten. Does ten backlinks make sense? Sure. If it makes sense, it's probably okay. All right. But you kind of want to just make it not look like your post exists to have backlinks, right? Which is why I said, does this look normal? Does this make sense to do it this way? Have you ever been, like, checking on a competitor and you find some PBNs and you click on them and, like, every post has a lot of backlinks to related or unrelated websites. That looks a little weird. That looks a little bit like a pbn. If you're ever concerned, use fewer backlinks. But I don't think there's a real number. But I know people are going to ask for a number because everybody always wants, like, a precise, like, figure for everything. So three. That's my answer. Okay. Zero, one, two, or three. Don't exceed three. But it's totally fine to actually go above three outbound links per post. But I'm just saying, for the people who require a definite number, three. Okay, but again, it doesn't matter, right? Like, as long as it looks fine, then it probably doesn't matter. But you're probably safe with three or fewer. Now, the next thing I was talking about was talking about the site. Okay. Diminishing returns from a site. How many outbound links can a website have? Ultimately, there's not really a correct number. I have mentioned on previous episodes that we like to do 10 outbound links from a website, but that was because of the nature of the theme and the content management system that we were using. You can have more than 10, you can have fewer than 10. It doesn't matter. Please do not think I can't make any more backlinks because they will start to lose effectiveness. No, you can have as many as you want, but just try to do it in a way that looks normal. Okay? Like, I know that's not specific and some people need specifics, but if you've got 10 posts on your site and each post has one outbound link, that's fine. If you've got 20 and everyone has one outbound link, that'S fine. Or two outbound links, that'S fine. If you've got 50 posts and they all have an outbound link, that's fine. Does each outbound link provide a smaller quantity of link juice the more you get? Yes, probably. But don't think about it that way. Don't think, oh, I need to conserve as much link juice as I can. No, because then all you're watching websites are just Going to be clones. Have number of posts that make sense for that site. Have a number of outbound links on each post. That makes sense. That's the answer to the question. Now, the other question, because I wasn't entirely aware which question he was asking, the other way that I interpreted this question was at what point do they start having a diminishing returns to a client site? Right? So in other words, can you get a certain amount of PBN backlinks and then after that point, do they start having a smaller effect? No. The answer is no. Remember, SEO is really the same as a competition, right? And I specifically compared it to racing. Right? So if you're in a race, whoever is winning the race, that person is in the top position in the search engine results. Okay? You can be winning by 5ft, you can be winning by 30ft, you're still winning. And every good quality backlink you get gives you more link juice. But. And it's going to make you winning by a bigger amount, okay? So if you're winning by five feet and you get some good backlinks, now you're winning by 20ft. Okay? So there's no limit to how much you can win by either. Okay? The difference between position one and position two might be a big amount of authority, or it might be a little amount of authority, right? Ultimately it doesn't matter because one website is in position one and one website is in the second position. But that could be a huge distance that like, would be very difficult for the second position to overtake. Okay, but as far as a client's website, no, there's no such thing as too much link juice, to the best of my knowledge. And every good quality, good quality backlink helps. Not all backlinks. Some backlinks are garbage. And if you're buying them to get more, you're probably doing it wrong. Cause remember, low quality backlinks don't really help. But as far as getting backlinks to your site, no, there's no diminishing returns. It's only going to help you as long as they are great quality backlinks. So I hope I have adequately responded to your question. Thank you for messaging me this question. Thank you to all of my Patreon supporters. Thank you to everybody who listens to this podcast and I hope this was a productive episode. Thanks for listening. Don't forget to subscribe and if you enjoy this podcast, please leave a review. It would really help the show out. I hope this episode was helpful. If you have any questions or want to suggest a subject for a future episode, you can contact me on Reddit. My username is Grumpy SEO Guy. You can visit the Grumpy SEO Guy subreddit, or you can email me@hellorumpyseoguy.com if you email me, please either whitelist my email address or or check your junk folders, because I've been told that my replies are going into the junk folder, and it's probably because we're talking about things like SEO and backlinks, and I think those words will classify an email as spam. And if you want to support the podcast, because it's the best source of SEO information on the planet and it's free, you can do so@patreon.com grumpy SEO guy and I will talk to you later. You're listening to Grumpy SEO Guy, the SEO podcast that doesn't waste your time with nonsense that doesn't work. Join us next Wednesday for another episode.