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How to Build Your Own Portfolio of Authoritative Websites to Rank Your Clients, Part 3: Website Management (How to Build a PBN the Correct Way) - Episode 05
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Grumpy SEO Guy
This is Grumpy SEO Guy. Episode five, how to configure, add content to, and manage your private blog portfolio. 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. 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 make these private blog Portfolios or these PBNs or whatever you want to call them, and then they don't do the content right. They don't do the backlinking right, and it defeats the entire purpose of the whole thing. Come on. Anyways, I'm going to tell you how to do it the right way so that you can rank your clients and get them to the top of the search engines, and everyone will be happy. 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. Okay, so there's a few rules that you have to follow, and there's also a number of things that you cannot do. I'm going to tell you both of them, so let's catch up. You listened to episode three. You know how to buy authoritative domains. You listen to episode four. You know what to do for hosting. Okay, so now you got these domains, you got them hosted, you're ready to go. There's a couple more steps that you have to follow before you're actually ready to. To put some backlinks for clients on them. Don't worry, we're going to cover all of that. Okay, now let me just say that I mentioned this before, but I'm going to mention it again. Every domain that I have in my private blog portfolio has WordPress on it. There's no problem with putting WordPress on it. WordPress is so commonly used that it's not going to trigger any flags or anything. If all of your sites have WordPress on them. Okay, but you don't have to use WordPress. You can literally use whatever you want. I don't care. You could code it by hand if you want. I don't care. It doesn't matter. WordPress is just easy and there's a lot of plugins and pretty much like whatever you want to do on WordPress, you can discover how to do it. So just use WordPress. We're going to use WordPress for this episode, but you can do whatever you want. Okay, There's a couple things that you have to do before you can actually start making links to your clients websites. The first thing is you have to have some content on your site and your site has to be indexed. So we talked about how to check if a site is indexed before you type site colon the domain, then the extension.com or whatever and then you hit enter and you want to make sure that there are some results. Remember, don't put a space in between the colon and your domain. Anyway, you want to make sure that your domain is indexed and ideally you want to make sure that all of the content that's on your domain is indeed is indexed before you start making backlinks for your clients. Okay, so we got WordPress installed. You probably figure out how to do that. Most hosts have like a one click installation for WordPress. So let's assume that you've got WordPress installed. This is what you have to do. The first thing that you have to do is you have to put a site map on your site. Now there's plugins that do this. WordPress does it by default. It, it doesn't matter. You just need a sitemap. Sitemap xml. If you've never heard of a sitemap, it's a page on your site that basically tells what all the pages on your site are so the search engines can find it and then they can immediately see every site on your website and it will help you get indexed. It's pretty easy. The next thing that you have to do is you have to have some content on the site. This is how I would recommend doing it. You want on each site to somewhere from four to ten pieces of content. Okay. It doesn't have to be exactly 4, it doesn't have to be exactly 10. Somewhere in there is good. And mix it up. Don't use like four pieces of content on each site, all right? Put four on one, Put seven on another one. Put six on something else. Put ten on something else. You want differentiation here, okay? And when I say content, I'm talking about blog posts, okay? These are WordPress blogs. The content is going to be blog posts, okay? So you want each piece of content to be between 400 and 1,000 words. Again, don't make them all 400 because that would look weird. Nobody has exactly 400 words on every post on their blog. That's weird. You want variety. You want some of them to be closer to 400. You want some of them to be closer to 1,000. Now, before we even do the content, though, what you need to do is you need to come up with a theme for each blog. And I don't mean a theme like. Like what it looks like. I don't mean like a WordPress theme. I mean a theme like what is the overall topic of the website? Let me give you a couple examples here, so you know what I'm talking about. Do you remember in a different episode when I said, don't buy domains that have a very specific name? Because, for example, let's say you buy a domain that is dishwasherrepair.com. i don't even know if that's a real site. I'm just using this as an example. Let's say you bought a domain that was dishwasherrepair.com. okay? That's pretty obviously going to have to be about dishwasher repair. Okay, why is that going to have to be about dishwasher repair? Well, let's say you buy dishwasherrepair.com, but you don't have anything even remotely related to dishwashers on it. But you do have a lot of articles about sports. Okay, I'm just using this as an example. Okay? If your site ever gets a human review, and that is possible, by the way, sometimes if the search engines are suspecting manipulation, they will send a human to look at the website and see if it makes sense. Okay? If you have a website called dishwasherrepair.com and all the articles are about sports, guess what? They don't even have to look any further. That doesn't make any sense. You're going to get penalized. Have fun. When your site gets de indexed and you just wasted your time and money. So the sites have to be somewhat related to the domain name. Let me give you a very good way to do this. If the domain name doesn't really make Any sense to you, you can always use an acronym. Okay? You can turn pretty much anything you want into an acronym. So just do it like that. You can also have your blogs be very general purpose. You can also be kind of specific with them if you want. Another reason not to use something like dishwasherrepair.com is. Let's say you had dishwasherrepair.com, okay? And then your client is a fitness trainer, okay? And your client wants to rank for keywords like, I'm just making this up, okay, but like best weightlifting programs or something like that. Now, best weightlifting programs is a terrible keyword. We'll talk about that. We'll talk about why that's the case in another episode. I'm just using this as an example. It would literally make no sense to have a post about best weightlifting programs on a website called dishwasherrepair.com. that does not make any sense. That would never happen. So if the search engines detect this, you're getting penalized. Now, let me give you an example from my own portfolio. I'm not going to give you the actual domain name because I don't want anyone to go out and negative SEO me, I don't trust anyone in the SEO industry. You shouldn't either. I'm going to be ambiguous about this, but it will still make sense. One of the blogs in our portfolio, a blog about female entrepreneurs. Okay? So every post on the site is somehow related to the perspective of female entrepreneurs. So we've got a website about female entrepreneurs. That is a very. That might at first sound like a very specific topic, but it's not. Let me give you an example. Okay? For example, let's use the previous example of a fitness training client who is looking to rank for keywords like best weightlifting program. Again, terrible keyword, but let's just go with this for the example. It would be very easy to write a blog post from the perspective of a female entrepreneur about needing a fitness trainer. You know, I'm so busy running my company and blah, blah, blah, that I need to make sure that I stay in shape. And one of the things that I thought about doing was getting a trainer, and I thought about getting a trainer who might be able to share with me the best weightlifting program so that I could stay in shape, so that I could maintain my level of fitness while I'm running my company, et cetera. Makes perfect sense. Oh my gosh. That's flawless. That's how you have to do it. Do you see how the topic of the client was related to the theme of the domain. Hopefully that makes sense. Now what else do you need before you get started? You need an about page. Okay, so you know how like WordPress blogs, they've got all their posts but then usually they have like an about page like about this site. Just make a paragraph, kind of talk about the theme of the blog. So for example, in my female entrepreneur blog, I would say something like this website describes the experiences of women who founded their own companies and so on. I'm not going to give you the exact verbiage that I use because I don't want somebody to like exact match, search it and find my site and then, you know, publicize it or negative SEO me or something. That site is pretty great and it's providing a lot of link juice to our clients. I don't want somebody screwing with it. But you get the idea. Okay, like you get the idea. Your blogs have to have a theme. The theme has to be general enough that you can probably apply it to anything and then stay within that theme. Now some people are going to say, well, your sites all have to have the theme and the theme all has to match exactly and it has to be the same as the clients, blah, blah. No it doesn't. I've been doing this for over a decade. It doesn't. Okay, so if your client is a fitness trainer, I'm just going to keep using this example. You don't have to link to that site only from fitness related websites. Okay? You can. If you have the money to buy that many fitness related domains and build them, then yeah, you can do it. But the value that you get above and beyond using normal sites is not going to be worth your time or money. I've actually done something similar to that which I'll talk about. I built a portfolio specifically for a client once. That's a thing that can happen sometimes, but you don't need to like overall. So we've got our domains, we've got our Hosting, we've got four to 10 posts on each site, we've got our sitemaps, Everything is looking good. We've even got a theme and we've got our about page. What else do we need to do? In one or two of those posts you need to link to another website. Now make this a generic and random and powerful website. Why? Well, because that's what normal people link to. So I'm not going to really give any examples, but you can use Wikipedia if you want, you know, in whatever piece of content you wrote, blah, blah, blah, and then Link to something on Wikipedia contextually from within the article. The anchor text doesn't matter because you're linking to Wikipedia, okay? The point is you're telling the search engines this website links to high quality websites, okay? Don't link to any spammy nonsense. Don't link to any. Like, just don't link to anything dumb, okay? Link to well known, powerful, authoritative websites, okay? Like Wikipedia is always a good choice for this case. And then link to something else. It could literally be anything. Link to like a big company like Toshiba or something, whatever, it doesn't matter. I literally just picked Toshiba at random because I just saw a laptop that was made by Toshiba, okay? Like I literally, I literally don't care. Toshiba is just a company that is authoritative and has been around for a long time and nobody would think anything is bizarre if you link to Toshiba, especially if you're talking about Toshiba products in your post. Okay, but if you don't like Toshiba, you can link to someone else. I don't care. But you understand the point. Right now you're linking to an authoritative, established website. You're going to do that in one or two of the first four to ten posts that you made. Okay, good. Those are the things that you have to do before you start taking clients, before you start building links to your clients. Now what do you not do? Do not put analytics on your sites. Why? Well, if you use Google Analytics, Google is going to know that you own all of those sites. Trust me, that's going to prevent you from making any progress with your portfolio. Okay, Remember, we're trying to make this all look natural and organic. We're not trying to say, hey, search engines, guess what, I own all of these websites. Because then if one person owns a lot of websites that all link to the same website, that's a footprint that tells the search engines what you're doing. Don't do it. What else are we not going to do on these sites? We're not going to do blog roll links. Do you know what a blog roll is? So I don't think people really do this that much anymore. Gosh, I hope they don't. But anyways, a blog role is usually it's like on a side column on a WordPress blog and it's like links to other like related blogs. Right? Okay. It's kind of spammy. Why? Is it kind of spam? Nope. Actually here's the problem. So blog roll links in the beginning, like 15 years ago, were just fine. You know, it was a way of sharing other websites with people. Like, it's fine. But people started selling blog role links and so they became spammy. So you got a column on your website with like, check out these sites. And it's like, you know, might have like four or five different, other, I don't know, like 10, however many different blogs that they link to. And. And it appears on every single page on your domain, which is kind of spammy, but it's also just been kind of spammed. So there's not necessarily gonna be a penalty attached to it because people still do blog rollings but like, don't do it. And never, ever, ever put a client in a blog rolling. That's like the dumbest thing you could do, excluding maybe the next thing, which is footer links. Don't ever use footer links on your site, especially not to clients. Okay, Same thing. People used to sell footer links. Let's talk about what a footer link is. Really fast. A footer link is a link that appears at the very bottom of your page. And generally speaking, footer links will appear at the bottom of every page on your site. So for example, various WordPress themes will sometimes have an option or a plugin or whatever to add footer links. Okay? And it's a link that will be at the bottom of every single page on your site. Don't do it. It's spammy for the same reasons blog roll links are spammy. Just don't do it. Okay, so now your sites are ready to go after they're indexed. Don't forget they have to be indexed. Let's talk about the content a little bit. 400 to 1000 words. Make sure that this is good quality handwritten content. Now I did say in episode one that content doesn't matter. And it's possible to rank with bad quality content and it is. However, the purpose of these sites is not to be the most popular website in the world. It's to have an authoritative website that shares link juice with your clients and look natural. So if the search engines ever suspect that you're manipulating them and they send a person to check out your website, you don't want to have bad quality content because bad quality content says, look at me, I made this website only to provide link juice to clients. It's a low quality website. You should penalize me. Do not ever have bad quality content on your sites. I seriously believe, and I'm not joking here, I seriously believe that 50% of the reason that My agency has had so much success getting and keeping clients at the top of the search engines is because we use very good quality content on our sites. Let me give you an example. Everything that we use is handwritten by humans, okay? Now, to be fair, when I created this portfolio, ChatGPT didn't exist. I can't say I wouldn't have used ChatGPT, but if I were going to use ChatGPT, I would probably make some pretty specific prompts so it doesn't sound like everything else the ChatGPT makes. So I'm just gonna leave it at that. But let me tell you what not to do. Do not use spun content. Those of you that don't know what spun content is, there are programs called spinners. And what they do is they take a piece of content and they basically put every word through a thesaurus. So you get like a synonym or mostly a synonym for each word. The purpose of spun content is to create unique content because the search engines do like unique, unique content. However, spun content is terrible. It's annoying to read, and it tells the search engines, hey, look at us. We didn't even write this. This website is trash. Trust me. Let me give you an example and then we're done talking about it. Because spun content is the worst. Let's say you had a sentence, the man went to the store, okay? If you put that through a spinner, it's going to come out with something like a boy traveled toward the shop, okay? Because those words are all kind of the same, but not really. And the meaning, the overall meaning is lost because the boy traveled toward the shop. That's a pretty stupid sounding sentence in English. Like, it makes sense. But nobody would ever say that, right? Like literally nobody would ever say that. Now imagine you don't have one sentence like that. Imagine your entire website sounds like that. Like the concept is there, but it doesn't make any sense. You've probably seen spun content before and you probably were like, what is this? And just clicked off of it. If the search engines review your site and you have spun content, you will be penalized. Do not use spun content. Do not encourage your clients to use spun content. In fact, when you're looking at a client's website prior to taking them on as a client, do not accept them as a client if they have spun content on their website. If you link to a website with spun content, it puts you in the same group as spammers who use spun content. Literally nobody uses spun content besides spammers. You do not want to be associated with them. There's something called a bad neighborhood where certain websites are considered bad and other websites that link to and from them are also classified as bad. Do not implement involve yourself with spun content on your client sites, nor on your own sites. That's all I'm gonna say about it. People are gonna disagree, but I don't care because those people are wrong. Don't use spun content. Actually, the only people that are gonna disagree with that are gonna be the people who are selling spun content. So, sorry, guys, I don't know what to tell you. Like, stop using spun content. It's dumb. So how do you get this content? How do you get your 400 to a thousand words? Oh, no, it sounds like a lot. It actually kind of like. It's not really a lot. Like 400 words is like half a page, but it's not. Look, take the time to write it yourself or hire somebody. Trust me. Do not try to take shortcuts, okay? Don't. Because just trust me. Look, six months down the line, 12 months down the line, three years down the line, okay? When your websites are still awesome and they're still indexed and your clients are still at the top of the search engine and they're still paying you, you're gonna be very happy that you decided to use high quality content. You're. Because if your websites ever get a human review, and they might, they're gonna pass with no problem because you didn't do anything shady and you're following everything that I'm telling you to do. So take the time. Look, you've already spent all this money. I don't mean to sound like a salesman, okay, but you've already spent all this money on domains and hosting. Whatever. Spend money on good quality content if you need to, okay? Make sure it's unique. Don't steal content from someone else's website. Even though there's no such thing as a duplicate content penalty, which we talked about in the first episode, still don't do it. Because in the future, if the search engines ever change their algorithm to actually care about duplicate content, you don't want to be the second site to have that content on the Internet. Whoever you stole it from, they're already probably indexed. The search engines already know that they have that content. And then you put that content on your site after them. Guess what? You lose, they win. But like I said, right now, duplicate content isn't a thing. But it could be later. So future, proof yourself by not using duplicate content. Now, let me tell you something. That I do for my portfolio. I would strongly recommend you do this too. I make a spreadsheet, and I have every domain of mine in the spreadsheet, and I have every password, every host, all the things, and then I have every client. So the way I set it up is like this. In the first. And you can do whatever works for you. I'm just gonna tell you how I do it. In the first column, you've got all the domains in rows. Okay? So you've got your first domain, and then the next line, you have the next domain. And then the next line, you have the next domain, and so on. Now you're gonna probably put some extra rows in between each of these domains because you're gonna come up with more information that you need to put there. But just for now, you'll get the theory. It doesn't matter. Okay? To the right of each domain, you put where it's hosted, where it. What your username and password is to sign in, what IP address it's on. You can put what city and country it's in if you want. I do that because sometimes I need to reference it and I can't remember, Like, I don't remember which sites are hosted, where you should put your WordPress username and password, and you should put the email address that is associated with that WordPress account. They can all be the same. It doesn't matter. But like I said, if you're a little bit paranoid about the search engines, don't use an email that is owned by a search engine for your WordPress installations. Okay? Now, to the right of that, for each client, I have three columns. Those three columns include the following information. One of them is going to be the URL of the client's website. So whatever their URL is, if you're not linking to the homepage, then whatever URL you are linking to, okay? The second thing is the keywords that you are using to link to them, okay? And we'll talk about keyword research later because we can't cover it right now. And then the third thing is the URL of the post on your site that links to them. So you post a piece of content for them that's gonna go on its own URL. That's what goes in that column. You've got their site that you're linking to. That's what's gonna go in the first column. And you've got the keywords that you're using in the anchor text. You remember anchor text from the first episode. That's what's gonna go in that column? The order doesn't matter. I. But you need those three things for each client. Okay. That way you can just scroll up and down and say, oh, this client has links here, here, here, and here. Oh, we use these keywords. Oh, whatever. You can find all the things that you need. It's very easy. Your spreadsheet's gonna get big over time, depending on how many blogs you have. But that is the minimum that you need in it in the event that a client cancels or for whatever reason you need to change something. Actually, well, there's two ways I do it. This is just me. You can do whatever you want, and we'll talk about this later. But red text means the post is still online, but I removed the link, and a strikethrough means the post was deleted. Okay, we'll talk about why you should do each of those later. There's basically two ways of doing it. If the client cancels or for whatever reason you're not working with them anymore, you can either delete the link and keep the post online, or you can delete the entire post. So it doesn't really matter. But I just like to specify, just so I know which one I did for my own documentation. Okay, let's talk about what to do when you get a client and it's time to start making content to post on your site and link to the client. Your sites are online. They have sitemaps, they have content. They have a couple links to authoritative sites. They're indexed. You don't have analytics on them. You aren't going to use blog roll links, and you aren't going to use footer links. Okay, you're ready to go. You get a client, and it doesn't have to be a client. It can be your own website. There's two reasons people do SEO. One is for clients, one is for their own websites. It doesn't matter. It's literally the same. So let's go forward. We're gonna talk about a few things. We're going to talk about how to post content on the site for a client, how to link to the client, how quickly you should do it, because this is very important. And we're gonna talk about what to do if the client cancels, how you should remove the links, and what to do if the client wants to change keywords or change URLs. These are all situations that you might encounter. You're gonna need to know what to do the right way. Okay, so you got your blogs. They're good, they're authoritative, everything's awesome, and you get a client. Great job. All right, this is what you do. You're going to write blog posts anywhere between 400 and 1,000 words. It can be longer, I don't care. You can have a 1500 word blog post, it's just fine. I'm just saying, on average, don't go under 400 words. Anywhere between 400 and 1000 is fine. If you want to every once in a while make one that's like 1500, that's awesome too. It doesn't matter, matter. 400 to 1000 words is a normal guideline. Okay, so this is what you're going to do. For each blog from which you're linking to your client, you're going to write a piece of content that fits within the theme of the website. Okay? Remember my female entrepreneur blog that I told you about? Whatever client I get, if it makes sense for them to be on that website, I'm going to write it from the viewpoint of a female business owner. Okay? And I'm gonna make it fit within that theme. You have to do this. So hire writers or do it yourself, it doesn't matter. But it needs to fit within the theme. You're going to have a link somewhere within the content. This is called a contextual link, by the way. You're gonna have a link somewhere within the content that links using the keywords, which we learned from episode one is called anchor text, to the client's website. And we're not going to talk about keyword selection here, okay? Because that is a totally separate topic. But the links have to be within the content. Okay? Put it in a sentence. It's not hard. Let's say, for example, best weightlifting program is the keywords. And again, that is literally like one of the worst keywords that you could ever pick. But I'm just using it as an example. Your content might say something like, so I talked to my trainer about the best weightlifting program because I wanted to make sure that I was doing it correctly or something like that. And then best weightlifting program is the link. That's all you have to do. Put it somewhere in the middle of your 400 to 1000 word blog post. And listen, the entire post has to be about this topic. So in this case, your post is about wanting to find a trainer so you can learn weightlifting or something like that. And then you have your link contextually in the middle of the blog post somewhere. Now that's how you do it. There's literally nothing more to it than that something else you need to do. And you need to do this for every post that you make, you need to put a picture in the post. Okay? Because otherwise, if you don't use any pictures, then you just have a whole bunch of text. And that seems kind of weird for two reasons. One, it's kind of boring. And two, who actually has a blog with no images on it? Right. Remember, these have to look natural. What looks natural? Having images in your blog. So how do we get images? It's super easy and it doesn't cost any money. There's two websites that I recommend. The first one is pexels.com. that's p e x E-L-S.com. it's like pixels, but it's pexels. Okay? You can go there, you can search for images. They're royalty free. You might have to give credit to the photographer, but that's not a big deal. And the other website is unsplash.com. unsplash unsplash.com, same thing. Go there, Search for a picture that's related to the content of your blog. Put it in your blog somewhere. It can be an image that you put in the middle of the text. It can be a featured image. It doesn't matter. You just need to have some images in there. It'll make your blog pretty awesome. Do not use copyrighted images. Whenever you see advice online for how to make a private blog network, somebody's always like, oh, you could just get images from Google Images or from wherever. Do not use copyrighted images unless you want to be sued. Now let's talk about how quickly you need to do these. Overall, you're going to want to take into consideration how many links does the client have already. Now, you did do research on the client before you took them as a client, right? Don't worry, we'll talk more about that later. But you should have used ahrefs.com or semrush.com or majestic.com actually, you should probably use all of them. But. But you should have an idea. How many referring domains does this client have already? If they have a lot, you can probably be less precise about this one. If they don't have a lot, you need to go slower rather than faster because does it look natural if a brand new site suddenly gets a ton of authoritative links all at once? No. Would that ever happen? Of course not. So if you do it, you're telling the search engines, hey, hey, we're manipulating the system. Please come penalize us. Don't do that generally speaking. And I generally follow this rule no matter what. Unless it's like a weird case, you're probably safe doing this. For every link that you're making for them, you want to take between one and a half to two days on average to do it. So, for example, let's say you have 10 sites in your portfolio and you sold a client a package of 10 backlinks. Okay, you're going to want to take again, this is a general average rule. You're going to want to take between 15 and 20 days to do that. But don't just put a day in between each one. Okay, look, I'd probably do one on the first day, I would probably wait a day, I'd probably do one on the next day, I'd probably wait two more days. I'd probably do one on the next day, I'd probably do two on the next day, I'd probably wait another day, and so on. You want to like diversify it a lot so that the average is one and a half to two days between each post. Trust me, this is the way to do looks natural, it's totally normal, and it's not going to raise any red flags because nobody is going to say, oh my gosh, look at this brand new website that's getting all these links out of nowhere. Now what if you have a website that already has a lot of backlinks? Maybe you're in a pretty competitive industry and this person has been around for a while and they just need a little extra boost so they hired you. Right. Maybe they already have a couple hundred referring domains. Yeah. Then you can go a little bit faster. But you also want to look at how quickly they've been getting backlinks. And the tools that I mentioned, like Ahrefs, will tell you this. So if they've been recently getting a lot of links at a rate that looks normal, you can go a little bit faster. If they've been getting a lot of links out of nowhere at a rate that looks totally unnatural, like maybe they got like one link and then another link and then a thousand links the next day. Like, that looks weird. I'd probably slow down with that client and I might actually not take them on as a client. I would definitely ask them before letting them become a client, I would send them a screenshot from ahrefs.com and I would say, look at this. What's going on? Why did you guys, after getting no backlinks, get a thousand backlinks, like randomly one day? What happened? If they don't know. I'd look into it a little bit more and find out. Maybe like, I don't know, maybe some news story got like syndicated or something, right? Like, I don't know. That's like a feasible explanation that like is could happen. But maybe they got like a thousand spammy blog post comments because they decided to hire somebody to do some cheap spammy SEO for them and it didn't work. Yeah. Guess what? You probably don't want to be associated with a client who has had that done to them. Just FYI, remember the bad neighborhoods, okay? But you got to look at what's going on and you have to kind of like consider that information to determine how you're going to do it. But generally speaking, one and a half to two days per link is a good rate. Okay? Now that's how you do it. Okay? So it's like, it's not that hard. You write content, you put a contextual link in it, you build one link every day and a half to two days and then you're done. That's it. Okay? That's going to be the case, generally speaking, no matter how many blogs you're selling links on. So if they buy a five link package, take seven and a half to 10 days to do it. If they need 10 links, take 15 to 20 days to do it. If they Need 50, take 75 to 100 days to do it. SEO is not a fast game, okay? Good SEO takes a while and you're doing good SEO, so you shouldn't have any problem with this. Now the way I've been describing it is if they buy like a certain number of links, okay? That's a thing. Depending on what you're doing, you may or may not do it that way. We'll talk about this more later. But generally speaking, if you're an SEO vendor and I'm doing air quotes, but you don't know that. If you're an SEO vendor, you're probably going to be selling backlink packages with a certain quantity of links, okay? But if you're doing SEO for like a big company that hires your agency to do it for them, they don't care about number of backlinks, okay? I actually transitioned from that first one into that second one. And it was very weird for me because I was so used to being so specific and precise and technical with everything, everything that I started getting big companies as my clients that like literally were so uninterested in that I'm just like, okay, guys, so you just want me to do the SEO for you. And they're like, that's why we hired you. And I'm like, do you want to know about the links? And they're like, nope, just get us to the top of the search engines. It's very weird. Like, I'll talk about this more. But I would say probably the most challenging thing in my SEO career was when I transitioned from being an air quotes SEO provider to taking on bigger companies directly as a client. Anyway, now we know how to get links for our clients online. We're good. Now there's three more things that can happen. We're gonna talk about all of them. Number one, the client cancels. That happens sometimes. It's sad. You should probably take some steps to see if you can keep them as a client. But we're not talking about sales in this episode, so we're not gonna talk about that now. But in the event they cancel for whatever reason and it does happen, this is what you do. You remove the links even more slowly than you built them. I would say two to three days per link, minimum. Sometimes I take like a week between each one because I'm paranoid. You probably should too. But if you don't want to, minimum of two to three days. More is always better. Now, there's two different ways to remove the links. You can go into the post and remove the link, and you keep the text, but you just remove the link. That's fine. That's totally fine. Or you can just delete the entire post, which is also fine. I generally delete about 20% of the posts, and I keep about 80% of the posts, and just delete the link from the post itself. To me, that feels pretty natural. Like in real life, how would it work, you know, if a person with a blog sees that, you know, decides they're not gonna link to someone anymore, they probably just delete the link, you know, but sometimes I like to change it up. Sometimes I just remove the entire post. That's why, remember I said in my spreadsheet, I make it red if I remove the link, and I strike through it if I delete the post. So that's how I do it. Okay, two more things that can happen. Sometimes an existing client will say, hey, can you change our keywords? Like, 90% of the time? The answer to this is no. The reason is because that would probably never happen naturally. And nothing says, hey, I'm trying to manipulate the search engine results, like randomly changing keywords, especially if you change them all at once. That's super. Suspicious. You don't get to change your keywords. But if we have a service up and running, maybe they've got, let's say they've got 10 backlinks, okay, that we created on 10 different sites. I would say no, you can't change your keywords. First I'd ask, why are you trying to change your keywords? Because how often do you think somebody who has a website goes back over their previous posts and changes the keywords that they use to link to somebody? Right. That's anchor text. How often do you think that happens? Like, probably never. Okay, I have a lot of websites, personal websites that are not part of my portfolio. I've literally never done that that I can think of. Okay, so changing keywords is super suspicious. You have some clients who don't understand how SEO works and think that you can just change the keywords every month and like rank for new stuff. No, it doesn't work that way. If you want new keywords, you buy a new link package. But we don't change existing keywords. Maybe we'll change 10% of them, but you have to have a very good reason. And probably then we wouldn't even do it. Okay, what's another thing that can happen? They might want to change their URL. Let's say, for example, they bought a better domain. Or maybe they got penalized and they want your high quality links to go to their new domain. Not a problem at all, as long as it doesn't happen constantly. Okay, I will change URLs for a client if they need it once every 12 months or so. If they need to do it more than once every 12 months, they're probably doing something wrong with their business. Okay, but like, I've had it happen. And this is what you do. You change one link every three to five days. Maybe they bought a big package from you and they have 30 links or something. Yeah, it's gonna take a couple months to do that. Because what is the top priority, the safety of your portfolio if you change all of them at once? Hey, search engines, we're manipulating the system. Don't do it that way. Look, I've had that happen like twice. I think I've actually had two clients in over a decade want to actually change their URLs. And it's not like, it's literally not even a problem. But think about it like this. Let's say they weren't using you for their ranking. Okay, if you change the URL of your website, what do you do? You go get A list of people that you think are linking to you and you say, hey, you know, we changed our URL. Can you please update your links? And maybe some of them will say yes. People, like, don't really do that a lot. Like, people get emails like that. I feel like they just don't respond to them, you know, so probably you won't get all of the links changed, but if you do, it's not all gonna happen at once. So don't be dumb. And change all of your backlinks for this client all in one day. That's the dumbest thing you could do. But one every three to five days, totally fine, I've done it. No problem. Okay, that actually sums up, I think, everything that you need to know about putting content on your private blog portfolio. We talked about what to do. We have the domains, we have the hosting, we have a site map. We talked about how to add the content, 400 to 1,000 words. We talked about how to start with the backlinks, one or two backlinks to authoritative websites. Wait until all the posts you've made are indexed. Then you can start building links to whatever site you want. Your client site, your own site, whatever. We talked about things that you aren't supposed to do, like putting analytics on your website or using blog roll links, or using footer links, or using spun content. So I just want to make something really clear. Analytics is awesome, but you don't use it on your private blog portfolio. Put it on your normal site. Encourage your clients to utilize it on their sites. In fact, depending on the capacity of the SEO work that you're doing, you may even need to look at their analytics. Okay, analytics is awesome, but you do not put it on your private blog portfolio because then the search engines will know that one single person owns all of the websites and you will get penalized. That's called a footprint. The search engine will look at it, they will know that you own all of the sites that's making a footprint. And then your sites will be penalized or de indexed. If you follow these rules, your private blog portfolio is going to be phenomenal. These are literally the rules that I've used for over a decade to keep our clients at the top of of the search engines. There's something else that I want to mention about this too. This is pretty important, so I think we need to talk about it. You might be curious about which of my blogs should I build links on. Maybe you have a portfolio of 10 blogs and you sell a package of five backlinks which of those 10 sites do you use? Okay, for this example, let's just call your blogs like blogs one through ten. Okay, let's say you have ten blogs, blog number one, blog number two, and so on in your portfolio. Okay. And you sell a package of five backlinks. Okay, cool. Let's say for the first five backlinks, you put them on sites 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Okay, no problem. That's just fine. Then you sell another five link package. Okay, so let's put those on 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10. It's very important not to ever duplicate the same links on the same group of blogs. So what that means is if you have a certain client that you're linking to from sites 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, you cannot use sites 1, 2, 3, four and five together for another client because that would leave a footprint. The search engines would say, hey, wait a minute, these blogs are linking to this site, and these same blogs are all linking to this other site that doesn't look right. And then they would look further into it and you might end up with a penalty or you might get DE indexed. I've seen this happen constantly. There are people who have poorly built and poorly managed PBNs, as they call it, and they are always complaining about getting DE indexed. Of course they're getting DE indexed. They're not doing it right. Like, I don't know what to tell you. Don't leave a footprint. And I'm trying to tell you every way that I know of that would make a footprint, so you don't ever do it. By the way, another reason that people's PBNs get DE Indexed is because they use spun content and sometimes because they use SEO hosting. Remember when we were talking about how C class IPs are stupid and you don't want to mess around with that. Yeah, Somebody makes a poorly made pbn, they put it on some SEO hosting, and then they get penalized and they get DE indexed. Yeah, no kidding. So don't do any of those things anyway. So you got your first group of five links on sites 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. You got your second group of five links on sites 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Then you sell another group of five links. How do you do that? Well, as long as you don't have it closely matching or exactly matching any other client, it's fine. So you could do 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9 for the next group of five and so on, but there's a limit to how much you can do this. With a specific number of blogs. This is why. Well, this is one of the reasons why your portfolio will probably grow over time. You might start out with five or 10 sites and you might realize, hey, this isn't enough, Then you need to buy more. By the way, that's a good problem to have. If you're getting enough clients where you need to buy more domains to accommodate them, that's a great place to be in. I just wanted to make that clear because I don't want somebody to get confused and like, you know, put. They sell five links and they put them on 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, and then they sell five more and they put them on 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and then they sell five more AND put them on 1, 2, three, and then they sell, you know, later they put five more on 1, 2, 3, four, and five. Like, no, don't do it that way. Oh, and this applies because we're talking about selling a number of links here. This basically applies, like if you're selling, you know, if you're selling SEO packages with a certain number of links, which is a very likely scenario depending on how you go about it. Okay. In some cases, there are people who just sell links, buy the link, and that's their business model. I did that for years. You can be very successful doing that. However, as I mentioned before, once you start doing SEO campaigns for big companies, they don't care about number of backlinks or any of that. So in that case, it doesn't matter. You're not going to be telling them, well, we're giving you five backlinks on this because it doesn't matter. Like, it doesn't work that way. We'll talk about that later. But I'm just saying, I was using selling five backlinks as an example. So you would know what to do if you sold five backlinks and you had 10 sites in your portfolio. Now, that same rule applies, by the way, if you have a portfolio of 30 sites and you sell a 20 link package. Okay, let's say you put those links on sites 1 through 20, and then you sell another 20 link package. Well, you don't have 20 more sites. So what do you do? I would probably do 10 through 30 for the next package. And then if you sell another 20 link, which, by the way, great job if you find yourself in that spot, I'd probably divide them up in a different way. Now, remember, you have to fit 20 links into 30 sites, and you can't reuse the same group. So I'd probably do something like 1 and 2, 5 and 6, 9 and 10 and so on. Just because you want to change it up and diversify it. And you do not want the search engines to be able to look at your blogs and say, these are all run by the same person. So you mix it up however you want. This is why we use a spreadsheet, like I mentioned before too, because then you can look and say, okay, this client has links on this site and this site and this other site, and this other client has links on this other side and this other side and this site. This. There's no connection. There's no patterns. Okay, good. We're good. And here's a general rule for this. If you're selling links by the number, try not to sell packages that are bigger than half of the number of sites you have in your portfolio. Okay? So if you have 10 sites, don't sell any packages that are bigger than five, okay? If you have 30 sites, don't sell any packages you are bigger than 15. Like, you might, look, you might get a client sometime, like an existing client or something who, who knows that you do a good job. And they're like, hey, you know, we wanna buy more. Do you have anything available? And you know, you're like, not really, but. Cause you don't wanna go over half, right? You don't wanna sell more than 15 links to a single domain on a portfolio of 30 sites. You can do it like once. Okay, look, if you need to go over like once, it's okay. But generally speaking, if you don't go above half, you will not even have this problem. So you have 10 blogs in your portfolio. Don't sell more than five links in a package, okay? That means you can do 1 through 5, you can do 6 through 10, you can do evens, you can do odds. Okay? You can mix it up. It's better if you keep it under half, but at the maximum, don't go over the halfway point unless you need to. Okay, look, if you have one client who uses every site in your portfolio, that's fine. That's not a footprint. It becomes a footprint when you have two clients who use every site in your portfolio. Okay? Just try not to go above half. But it's fine if you do it once, but try not to. So technically, for those of you who are paying attention, my example of what if you sell 20 links on a 30 blog portfolio, you shouldn't, you shouldn't be selling 20 link packages if you have 30 blogs in your portfolio. Okay? There's another thing that's related to that, and that is outbound links. Now you might see this abbreviated as obl. OBL is outbound links. An outbound link is. Is a link from your site to another site. Why is this important? It's important for two reasons. The first reason is when you get past a certain number of OBLs, you run the risk of being categorized as something called a link farm. Now what's a link farm? A link farm is a site that has way too many links on it for what would ever normally happen. A stereotypical example of a link farm would be, imagine a site that's got hundreds of pages on it, and each of those pages is nothing but link after link after link. Maybe each page has a hundred OBLs on it, and then there's hundreds of pages on the site. Like, that site isn't providing any value to anybody. It's just making links that like, there's literally not even a reason for a person to be on that site ever. Like, what's a person going to do with a giant list of links? That's a pretty extreme example, but it's also a good example of a link farm. And yes, there are sites like that that exist. I have seen them when I was researching clients or when I was researching competitors. I have found things like that before. You're just like, why? Like, why did anybody think this was a good idea? But you know, that's a whole different topic. So Anyway, number of OBLs. Once you get to a certain point, your site might get categorized as a link farm. I don't know exactly what that point is. The calculations, I'm sure, are private and the search engines won't tell you how they work. But. But let me tell you how I run my blogs. I try not to have more than 10 OBLs per domain in my portfolio. And remember when we were creating these sites, we put one or two random links to other sites, remember? So those count. Now, 10 is a very small number, and I'm quite certain that I could do a lot more than that and not even get penalized. But every website has a finite amount of link juice to give out, okay? So if you have 100 OBLs, each site that you link to is getting less link juice than if you had 10 OBLs. Because remember, you only have a certain amount of link juice to give out, and it gets divided amongst all of the OBLs on your site. Now don't hoard link juice. Don't be like, I'm never going to link to anybody. Because I want all the link juice. Like, no, first of all, it doesn't work that way. But, you know, don't go crazy. Don't think that you get, you know, a site with a lot of authority and you can just sell backlinks on it forever. Because you can't. I mean, you could, but you'd eventually get penalized and then your clients would lose their ranking and then your clients would get mad at you, and then your clients would stop paying you. And if your clients stopped paying you, that's pretty much the reason you started doing SEO in the first place, right? Was to get paid. So, I don't know. You don't want your clients stop paying you, obviously. Okay, sales 101, we're good. But I just want to let you know, personally, I try to never exceed 10 OBLs. Now, obviously there are exceptions and whatever, and you could probably do 15 or 20 and get basically the same effect as you get with 10. Okay. But I'm just saying that's how I do it. And most of our clients have been at the top of the search engines for a very long time, so it seems like it's working. I'm not going to try and change a successful system right now. That's my advice. You can do whatever you want, but I'm just telling you the correct way to do it. One more little comment that I want to make really fast is this. Different pages on your site will have different amounts of authority. Now, this is obvious. In some cases, the homepage will have more authority than some of your inner pages with different blog posts on them. Depending on how you're running your services. Sometimes people will offer backlinks and call them permanent homepage backlinks. What does that mean? It means this is a backlink and this post is going to stay on the homepage forever. Why is that important? Well, if the homepage has more authority than any other page on the site, then by keeping that post there, you're giving your client more authority. Now, why might that even be a concern? Well, sometimes people sell links and they make posts and they make posts and they make another post and they make another post. And eventually, depending on how their site is set up, the recent posts will push the earlier posts off of the homepage. When they're off the homepage, they might be losing some authority, which means those links will not be providing as much authority as they once were. Now, I don't know how much of a concern this is for you. I'm just mentioning it because I want you to be aware of it, because sometimes it's a thing. And if you're trying to maximize link juice, you want to make sure that the links are on the page of your site with the most authority. So there's actually probably some additional stuff that I could say about this topic, but I think we've got an introduction to it now, so I'm not gonna dig in any deeper to that right now. Overall, don't worry so much about that. Just make sure that the posts that you create for your clients are getting indexed, okay? Because if a page is not indexed, it doesn't count. You could have the best article with the greatest anchor text on the highest authority domain on the Internet. And if that post is not indexed, your client is not getting any link juice from it. Now, if you have a high quality website, your post should be indexed pretty quickly. I generally don't have to wait more than 24 to 48 hours for any post that I make to ever get indexed. So anyway, I just wanted to mention this stuff because I didn't want you to listen to this whole episode and be like, wait a minute, well, what happens? How do I. Which sites do I put the links on? Okay, hopefully that's not a question anymore because I explained it, but it is pretty important. It is actually a mistake that people make. People for some reason don't realize that it's a footprint. If you use the same sites to link to the same clients, like over and over again. Just don't do it that way. So, okay, this should make sense. Now, this is the last thing I'm going to say about this because it's kind of important. It's also kind of silly, but it's kind of important. Once you get your blogs online, once you get your clients links online, once your website is good, you're providing value to your clients and your clients are at the top of the search engines, you still periodically need to post new posts on your blogs. One of the things that the search engines like is freshness or newness or whatever you want to call it. Basically, they like websites that update themselves regularly and they don't like websites that seldom update themselves. It's kind of silly, honestly, because it's possible that you could have a website that has enough information to be useful to everybody. And if you never update it, you're going to eventually lose some of your rank or you're gonna lose some of your favor in the search engines. Why? Because other websites are updating themselves all the time. Even if your website is better. Remember How? I said content doesn't matter. This is just another case where content doesn't matter. You can have the best content, someone else can have terrible content, but they update more often than you. That's going to go in their favor. It's super dumb. I hate that this is a rule, but this is how the search engines work. And on this topic, if you've ever noticed, a website just kind of seems to be posting the same thing over and over again. Like that's probably the reason they're probably trying to stay relevant in the search engines. And so they've probably approached every topic that's relevant to their industry. But they know they need to post new stuff. So they just keep rewording stuff and rephrasing stuff and posting the same lists over and over again. Just phrase slightly. You know what I mean? I'm sure you've seen that before and you're like, ooh, a new article. And then you read it and you're like, pretty sure I've read this article on the same site before, but it's a little bit different. That's part of the reason why people do it. Here's what I would recommend. If you're worried about your client's posts getting pushed off the homepage when you're posting these new blogs, just make the client's posts stuck to the homepages. Most WordPress themes give you an option to do that. You can pin posts to the homepage or make them sticky or whatever they're called. There's ways around it. If that doesn't work for whatever reason, you can give the newer posts an earlier date and then they will appear underneath. It doesn't matter. You just need something that tells the search engines, hey, look, we're still publishing fresh content on our site. Yay, you like us. So anyway, just a thing that you need to do and I just wanted to tell you that. Alright, I didn't mean for this episode to be so long, but now you know more than 99% of people in the industry about managing a private blog portfolio and if you follow this advice, you won't get penalized and you will get amazing results for your clients. Thanks for listening. Don't forget to subscribe. I hope this episode was helpful and if you have any questions or if there's anything that you want me to talk about on a future episode, you can email me@hellorumpyseoguy.com and I'll 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 when we talk about the best and the worst clients I have ever had and what I learned from them.