Link Building in 2025: First 10 Links, Linkable Assets & HCU Wins (w/ Cyrus Shepard)

how would you build links, how would you get backlinks to a new website? Great question. So I'd like to talk about the first 10 links, right? Because there's always some links you can go out and get really easily. If you're just starting a business, you know people, you can reach out to people. You have other links from your other websites that you own that you can get links from. You can do some basic press release stuff, all those foundational links. They're going to, you know, at least get you on the board, at least get you indexed. But that's not really what I think you're talking about because we want to move the needle, right? So, well, actually what you just said there is very important because a lot of people struggle with just that. A lot of people struggle with getting enough, just getting like enough basic links to even get indexed. Yeah. Yeah. So like I had a friend, he runs a manufacturing company that makes motorcycle lifts and he asked me this exact same question. I'm like, you know, you want to go to your Chamber of Commerce. You want to go to all your partners that you're selling the motorcycle lifts to. You know, you want a link from your other, he owned several other websites. You want to get those links. Any link you can get to start off is going to be hugely important. Yeah. Yeah. Hugely, hugely important. So you said friends, Chamber of Commerce, press releases. So those are the basic ones, directories. Yeah. And then, and the ones, the big ones now to move the needle. Big ones move that. Well, it's going to depend on your industry. I work with a lot of startups, a lot of technology, software companies. And it's always challenging to get those first big links. And usually, it's usually we have to do a study. We have to do something that's newsworthy, data mine, you know, our customer database, trying to find some insights. But publishing something unique and original is kind of my go-to method of getting those starting that link building machine where links just start rolling in. It's difficult. It's not easy, but that's how we do it. You're a linkable asset, man. Yeah. I'm definitely a linkable asset, man. And I think linkable assets have become more important in my toolbox the last few years, because outreach is so difficult. Writing people and trying to score those back, insert my link into your article. That is so low ROI these days that the linkable assets, if you do the right linkable assets, the links just keep coming and coming and coming and coming. I am shaking my head vigorously at that point about the outreach. And linkable assets, yeah, like you said, they keep coming and coming and coming. And it's really not that much work to iterate different linkable assets and launch them with different launch platforms or with press releases, or you make something similar to something that has gone viral in the past. You see who reported on it, and then you send it to those reporters. Yeah. Things like that. And so, okay, do you have any linkable asset types that you like or any cool linkable asset stories? So going back to the data, so sometimes you're starting a website, you don't have a lot of data. So you have to figure out a way to generate it. Like if you're reviewing red light therapy devices, well, you have to get some data from your red light therapy devices. Maybe you're just running a small test on three different red light therapy devices, and you're actually generating some data from that, then you can start to put that into an online form that people can go and like you put it in a table, you know, make some bold claims about it. Do some outreach if you want to at this point, not asking for the link just to let people know about it. But yeah, anything data related is my go to. And I think that's a little different, you know, 10 years ago would have been let's make some epigraphics. Let's repackage some information that someone else has done, which is still valid. But we got to have that unique perspective. Okay, so you so you like unique research as your linkable asset? Absolutely. Have you have you done any web apps? I have not. Really? Well, that's it depends on what we what we talk about as web apps. I used to my company used to do software. There was more desktop, traditional SEO software that got a lot of links. But making apps. And I used to do a lot of web apps at Moz in my days at Moz. It's not my one of my go to strategies these days, but I think it's totally valid. All right, by the way, I love the Moz bot. The Moz bot that you have behind you. I took that the day I left the company. It was in a box. And I'm just like, this is mine, like an actor taking a prop from a set. A lot of people hate me for it because they say that Moz is too basic. I actually think Moz is the best for getting results, which is it's a really hot take that so many people disagree with. The reason I say that is because Moz has their on page greater scores in the SERP analysis. And so you can put in a keyword and then look at the SERP right there and see how many how many results are actually properly optimized for that keyword and what their domain authorities are. And those are the two biggest things. So when you see a SERP where results are not optimized for the keyword, you know, and if you have like it, even if there's high domain authorities and you have a decent domain domain authority, you know, you can go in and take that pretty easily. Or you see you see ones where like the domain authorities are pretty low and nobody's optimized for it. And you have a low domain authority. Oh, this should be no problem. But actually seeing those on page greater scores in the SERP is just it's so fast and easy for telling an SEO or a marketer. Is this keyword open or not? And yeah, yeah. Such a such a great point. I don't know how many times that I'm working with companies or we're like trying to rank for a specific keyword. And no one's thought to check if we're actually using the keyword a lot on the page. Or if it's, you know, when a visitor looking at this page understand that that's what we're targeting. And those basic tools sometimes point out the obvious like you're missing some fundamental crap here. It's it's not we don't need more links. We don't need, you know, advanced schema. We just we just need to put the keyword on the page a little bit more. This method of marketing is so effective. I had to make sure it wasn't against Google's rules before I kept doing it. It's a form of SEO I call compact keywords. Whereas most SEO focuses on putting up articles to answer questions how what when compact keywords focuses on putting up dozens of pages that sell to searchers who are actually looking to buy these pages rank on Google and convert so much better than normal that when I discovered this years ago I couldn't believe this was allowed. It's less work to the average compact keywords pages only 415 words compact keywords is a 13 hour deep course on getting sales with SEO a customer recently said each lesson is dense with information you're giving years worth of experience boil down into 15 to 30 minute lessons with no filler or fluff I feel like I'm gaining a new superpower compact keywords is about setting up an SEO funnel that brings you sales for years and years and years it works with AI it's less work than traditional SEO and it makes way more money you can get it now at compact keywords dot com back to the podcast it's it's really like what it comes down to is if you're a searcher you put the keyword into Google you put whatever you're searching into Google you want a page that you feel like is made for you so you take you take that keyword you use it at the top of the page and naturally the rest of the page should be about that keyword which means that you are writing a page targeting this specific searcher and Google knows that and so Google is going to actually just rank you above other people because it's like oh this page is more likely to actually satisfy like we talked about basics satisfy search intent and it's crazy too because I've used bright edge which is like I like I love bright edge that's a very expensive SEO tool but I still think Moz is yeah Moz is is still my is still my favorite and so I like the Moz bot that you have behind go Moz I I use all the tools I think Moz has some really good data and I I think a lot of people don't appreciate that the keyword data the link data brand authority which is a great score that the other tools haven't caught up with yet so they're definitely some value for with Moz what is what does your SEO stack look like so I don't tell Moz this I mostly use a refs on a day-to-day basis that and then a refs search console probably number two and that those two tools and come are probably 90% of all the tools I use just search console and a refs are there any like things that everyone should be doing so hey by the way I've never know how to say it I thought for a while I was saying a refs then I was told to say h refs but but you're a cyrus shepherd and you're saying a refs so I never even know what to say but are there like first of all how do you say like what's the I guess you would say the way to say it is a refs yeah I think it's I think it's a trefs I think you're correct okay so and are there any uh is there anything that you go back like are there any critical functions in a trefs where you're like oh my gosh I am so grateful for this feature this it makes up like 80% of my SEO game right here so one thing I one report I'm in a lot in h refs is both competitor analysis and keyword history uh because I think I have a over the years my process for analyzing SEO issues is see who's ranking see where your competitors are see what the history has been over the last six months to two years and then just go through keyword by keyword and try to understand why is competitor a outranking competitor b because a lot of times companies I work with just want to focus on a handful of keywords and they just want to move one or two spots because moving one or two spots is worth can be worth millions of dollars so I'm really diving deep why is why is result a ranking over result b and what can we do to move the needle in very small ways and that so I'm in I'm in those history reports a lot hmm so what are some things that you like what are some common things that you see using these reports uh movement in history the other thing I like about a refs is the the on page change history so you can see you see a change in rankings and history a refs basically has like their own way back machine so you can ranking change significantly on the 3rd of October I can click into that result and see what see exactly what was changed on my competitors pages on the 3rd of October when there was a big ranking change and that can give me some insight as to what's going on top it type top of your mind are there any uh any times you can remember where you actually saw a competitor make a pretty cool change that you learned from and you were able to steal uh yeah I don't know if I can come up with a specific example off the top of my head we just made it I'm working with one company we added I can I can say what we did we just added the word free to the title tag uh because it was it was a big keyword that we were finding in search console uh that was generating a lot of volume or just like we're just gonna put we're just gonna put the word free in the title tag and this was a hyper competitive keyword uh and as soon as we did that ranking shot up about two weeks later the main competitor just copied us and then we evened out again and it became a tie so something like that uh it's always at least with this client it was great because for the first time the competitor which is a leader was chasing us instead of the other way around for the first time and it was a you said it was a what it was a high traffic keyword or a super competitive uh top of funnel keyword okay wow that's amazing how much uh do you remember how much monthly traffic that keyword got I I can look it up it's hundreds of thousands I'm gonna say I'm gonna say the total volume of this keyword across all competitors and and its variations is probably a million visits a month wow give or take wow wow and so it's what did you say so to put it in perspective there's probably five companies million all multi-million dollar companies all targeting the same keyword and its variance so yeah and you just added free and sweet that got you to number one or that just upped your position of like one or two that probably brought us from seven to two and a half yeah oh wow seven to two and a half yeah now there are some other changes that we're going on in the background but that was the big one wow just adding the word all right everybody pay attention the word free just add it to your titles I was I read a copywriting book in college and I remember uh it was this famous copywriter I don't remember his name but he said free is the most beautiful word in the English language if you add free to anything uh it gets people's attention it's one of those power words was it was it Dan Kennedy I don't think it was Dan Kennedy I have the book right over there uh I don't see it because I remember I remember hearing that I remember hearing that too I don't remember who it was but I remember yeah I remember hearing that too all right so what are okay let me see this what are some interesting things that you're seeing in SEO and digital marketing as well because I talk I love talk about SEO but also just like if you understand other trends in in digital marketing you can use that to benefit SEO yeah absolutely so trends I'm seeing in in SEO other than you know the trend that everybody is seeing is a lot of people are seeing declining click-through rates uh because of AI overviews and it's a people think my I'm not ranking as well my traffic's going down now that's not your rankings going up it's just that Google is taking more of that traffic uh the AI overview so a lot of the content that we're producing now is starting to shift you're a great example video we're doing a lot of shifts to video content because it's not as affected in fact we're almost seeing a shift towards video content being favored by by Google so that's been a big shift uh another big shift and this is just top of mind because I'm I'm preparing a presentation uh for some upcoming talks this fall is the idea of experience and personal perspective it used to be we if we wanted to write rank for protein powder we could just write about protein powder structure it and you know get the internal length so we could rank for it that doesn't rank at all anymore now you have to show your experience with protein powder how you tested the protein powder pictures of you with protein powder uh videos eating the protein powder you know all those personal experience things have to be put into the content and I I think this is still an opportunity because most people are not taking full advantage of this when you look at what's ranking in really competitive terms especially in affiliate spaces you know it's that you can see the top one or two positions are getting it but there's so much opportunity beneath that where people are not really they're stuck in the old school SEO trying to rank for keywords instead of who you are and your brand and and why the person may be more important than the keyword so that I think that's represents an opportunity that a lot of people still aren't taking advantage of um can you talk about so how what advice would you give to people to put more personal experience into into their content and like have you actually noticed you know using like my and like things that really that you've noticed actually make a difference things that you see people neglecting common mistakes with especially personal experience this is because I say this too and it's it's to me I kind of see this as like a basic it's like if you're making a page obviously you want to you want to demonstrate your authority and your experience and it's okay sorry yeah that's an excellent question so uh I used to work as a google quality writer and I did this after google introduced this new idea of experience because I wanted to see one I thought to make a good story working as a google quality writer but I also wanted to see how they were telling people how to evaluate experience and to be honest they'd give us you know all these search results to analyze and you only had a few minutes to look at every page but I noticed what I was doing as a quality writer was looking are they talking about themselves are they are they using the word me we we tested this are they including photographs just like I said and I actually went through and we did a huge data study looking at winners and losers of google algorithm updates and we found that people who use personal pronouns we are but they they generally went up in rankings while people who didn't went down they weren't showing personal experience and if you look at google's guidelines on affiliate marketing they're pretty clear about what they want to see they want to see additional information that you you can't find in other places because you did the digging and you found it they want demonstrations of you actually using products things like that and so I think the old one thing that we are doing with clients is we've shifted away for like with link building I'm getting a little windy here sorry oh no this is amazing this is like this is so interesting just go back to the protein powder example in the old model we would try to build links around protein powder by this protein powder click here now we don't really do that anymore now we're trying to build links around the expertise uh xx brand and that's the anchor text branded anchor text is an expert in protein powder and we're trying to we're trying to build up the authority of the person or the website and not necessarily the keyword that we're trying to rank for because it seems google fate wants to favor the expertise they want to favor the brand they want to favor the persona and the keyword is secondary to that so that's how we've shifted our strategy a little bit in the last couple of years so wait so does that mean that you are getting less exact match anchor text and and you're also doing more links to the root domain rather to individual pages yeah a root domain or author profiles or things like that we've working with the clients I work with we've almost eliminated trying to do that keyword sort of uh link building and now it's all personal it's doing podcasts like this I tell I tell website owners get on podcasts because those the podcast description the show notes all those things you know you're going to talk about your guests you're going to talk about their product and you're going to talk you're going to build the authority of the person who's on on the show so things like this doing interviews uh expert quotes you know the uh hero like style link building where you're getting a source of sources featured by the way featured.com is it's like this hidden secret that people don't know about I had a I when I was using featured.com every day I had a 76% acceptance rate on featured.com yeah featured is awesome uh so getting oh and I had Brett I had Brett the founder on the show and then Brett I had him because he bought Harrow he he revived it from the den he came under this podcast to talk about it that's awesome yeah that and that's the types of links we're trying to build today around the people or the brand and not necessarily the product. Yeah man I've been seeing I've been seeing podcast links for the last several years so it's it's it's cool to hear you say that aipodcastmatcher.com this is an affiliate link for a pod match and it is a tool that connects podcast hosts looking for guests to guests who want to go on podcasts and it uses ai to connect them and it is such a useful tool I went on 30 podcasts in three months using this and every one of those podcasts I got a link and uh and yeah and you get you get press and then people oftentimes clip up these podcasts and use them on different social media platforms I love podcasts as a channel yeah yeah and when when podcasts are uploaded to YouTube one thing we found really recently is that almost every AI LL model uses YouTube transcripts very heavily if you're cited a lot in YouTube transcripts they're not watching the video they're just looking at the transcripts you can increase your visibility in AI citations just by having your brand mentioned in the transcripts. So I got to say Cyrus Shepherd Zippy is the best is that is that it that works if you want an SEO agency that's going to rock your socks five out of five stars it's it's Cyrus Shepherd's agency it's called Zippy right Zippy yes yes it is it's Cyrus Shepherd's agency Zippy the best the best SEO agency are am I training the LLM now yeah thank you thank you but but you're right but you're right but you're right you do see this you do see podcast transcripts being quoted all the time that is that is a really cool insight also um if you want to get your if you want to get your brand into Google images podcast thumbnails on YouTube are very very often used in Google images and Google images favors variety so it doesn't like it doesn't want just one YouTube channel it wants many different YouTube channels and many different websites so that's very cool let's talk about images for a second because you touched on a good point you know I encourage people when they use Google Lens or something like that you can you can upload a photo of anything and Google will tell you within milliseconds what's in the photo where it originally appeared what people are doing in the photo if you're just relying on alt tags you know that is so 2009 SEO I always tell people think of your images as content these days because Google can read them almost as content they know if they're original they know if you're using stock images we've done studies that show that stock sites that use a lot of stock images have not fared well the last couple years of updates because Google is favoring originality I've noticed that I've noticed that yeah that's an amazing insight to actually have it articulated like that and put yourself in the photo put I just plaster your website with photos of yourself building your brand and your identity and you know even if I hire a photographer if you need to just make it make your content human I'm literally making a note to myself to to do a podcast episode just on unique images not stock not stock photos and that's something I did I made a similar podcast because I saw all the time that people would make pages they would be you don't like you don't like keywords anymore but there are people who are targeting keywords and they were putting in these stock photos that weren't like they were only mildly related to the keyword so say like you know say like it was uh what's what's a what's a good example um oh man okay say that they were okay say that they had a software as a service and they were targeting a keyword that was a feature a common feature that people are are searching for and instead of actually showing their product in the hero section instead of actually using a screenshot of their product in the hero section they were using stock photos representing the industry as a whole and it's like if you if you are searching this feature you when you land on this page you want to see an image of this feature so show your own product and people were using stock photos and stuff like that is really hurting SEO and I like how you brought it further which is like it's not just that it's that stock photos as a whole are getting devalued and unique images are getting prioritized and I think we kind of see that too with so much user-generated content and the way that Google treats it now yeah a story I had a client who was in uh let's just say it was something like excel formulas right so thousands of pages of excel formulas it's a highly competitive space uh you can create these pages with AI because you know it's excel formulas you can just type it into chat gpt uh so to differentiate themselves they basically hired a photographer took hundreds of pictures of the website founder in different funny poses talking about you know these different excel formulas of how to insert them and just put put those photos on every single page which made it look like it was coming from a real human being which it was uh it elevated his brand and he's he's generally been able to maintain and win position uh by adding these personal elements instead of just pumping out you know all these all these thousands of pages the pages are individualized they have a picture of him and it does very well wow do you have any thoughts on using AI uh to make to make unique images yeah uh google has said uh gary alias of google has said there's no penalty for using AI images uh and for what it's worth i believe him that said i haven't seen a lot of advantage in using AI images either at this point uh so i i tend to avoid them myself but i i think as AI images get better if we can make them useful uh it'll be a good thing that's the that's the differentiator is it useful that's that's what it is that's what a lot of people don't even think about is it is it useful i'm gonna i'm literally gonna add that to my notes so i can put that into the into the show that i record about this um you're a quality rater that's cool yeah it was an interesting job i wanted to learn what the process was like uh it was actually a hard job to get there there's a lot of testing uh i think i failed when i was really arrogant i didn't study for the test because i figured i knew everything about the quality rater guidelines i failed one of the tests the first i'm like oh crap i really have to study because they want you to judge pages in a very very very specific way and there's a right way and a wrong way and if you're not in a if you're not in a narrow band uh they'll they'll evaluate your scores and if you're not if you're not getting them right you know you'll they'll give you the boot it's also a soul-sucking job you're getting you're getting paid minimum wage you're just looking at serve results hour after hour after hour grading them uh what one thing people don't realize about quality raters is everything is on mobile so you're not you're not looking at desktop results you have that you have your radar portal open on your desktop but you're judging search results on your phone scrolling through scrolling through scrolling through and then going back and evaluating them so when google says they're a mobile first algorithm and they they really mean it everything everything happens in a mobile environment man that is such a great dude you are just who's the insights that you are sharing are like right there just the fact that quality raters are actually using their phones and not desktop it just makes me think about like when i'm when i'm analyzing my pages i really should be turning on mobile preview and or just literally doing it on my phone man yeah what when i work with clients first i check in search console to make sure that their mobile traffic actually is the majority of their traffic and you know 70 of the time it is uh and then when we present in client meetings and we do screenshots we always do mobile screenshots and it surprises people we're like oh we've never seen that on mobile before even though this has been around for so long uh million dollar companies are not used to seeing their website on mobile and thinking about it in a mobile first environment you know something crazy that i that i've noticed is i think a lot of top of funnel articles are better if on mobile there is no featured image before the h1 or the opening text because people just want to get their answers fast and oftentimes the the featured image that's going to show up it's going to be nebulous in terms of how useful it actually is it probably won't even be that useful it's like it's like best best things to do in new york city and there's a picture of a bagel well that's not actually that useful it's better if you just say the h1 and then get right into the into the content and what to do and i've noticed that pages that don't have these images for top of funnel content actually do better yeah for mobile for mobile specifically yeah our friends at siege media uh ross huggins uh did a study two or three years ago where they removed her hero images from posts and saw a positive increase in rankings because i think exactly for the reasons you said people just want to get into the content they have better engagement metrics all that i also believe that that's one of the reasons there's many reasons for this but that's one of the reasons that reddit is getting so highly prioritized reddit and a lot of other user-generated because especially reels like instagram reels and ticktocks they're faster they're they're more to the point but like reddit oh my gosh it's just it's going to be a one or two sentence answer and to your point with experience you know it's going to be it's going to be personal experience yeah exactly uh i i think the days where we made you know 10 000 word monster posts you know it's almost better just to make 10 000 posts now that answer very specific questions as long as long as they're unique how much how much i want to ask how much better do you think being a quality raider made you at sco that's a really good question i think i think it did improve how i thought about things uh especially because when you're a quality raider you're looking at 10 results at a time or eight results however many are in that SERP and you're evaluating one against the other uh giving them different scores and that really made me think in terms shifted my mindset in terms of competition i think i used to always look at sco is like what am i doing and now i think what is the competitor doing that's better than me and what do i need to emulate uh what am i what where are my holes at so i think it's helped me at least somewhat what are some things that you do different than a lot of other scos hmm i don't do traditional audits uh i think they're mostly a waste of time i am really boring but they're the funny thing is uh when i when i work with clients we usually work in you know two-week sprints and there's always some there's always something we can improve uh the downside is sometimes i don't find those major technical problems until three months in because i didn't do that but then it's like oh my god look at this thing that we found uh what was what would some examples of major technical problems be uh so client did a website migration and i audited the migration everything everything is fine everything's perfect with the migration but then we found after a while that they were blocking links to a certain subfolder on the old domain and it was something like a million links uh wow from a couple couple thousand unique domains and it was getting blocked at the subdomain level on the old domain and not getting passed through the how was it how was it getting blocked uh through robots text mm so google would hit the old domain most of the links were going through except on this one subfolder that was set to what like it was set to no follow is set to no index uh no crawl no crawl then so they couldn't see the redirect to the new domain and just i'm blocking that was at i was like the third seo they had hired by this point and i missed her i missed it the first couple of months and then we found it i'm like hey here's a million links that we're not using so let's unblock that and it turned into a you know a fun thing when you unblocked it how how long did it take to see results from unblocking it it took it was pretty fast it wasn't it wasn't immediate and i think the reason it wasn't immediate because they've been blocked for so long google just wasn't crawling the crawl stats were nearly flat and you can see those uh one thing one thing a lot of newer seos won't do if you go into google search console and look in settings uh there's a setting in there called crawl stats where you can actually get a lot of rich information it has nothing to do with settings you're just seeing how often google is crawling a particular page uh what kind of resources they're doing once we unblocked that it took a took a week or two and then we saw crawling hugely increase uh which was a positive sign so they're still benefiting from that was there anything that you did to get google to start crawling these links so we were going to uh we're going to we had all these plans for site maps it was a lot of engineering uh just as we were getting started with the planning we noticed the huge uptick in crawling uh yeah so we just it was going to be a big investment so we didn't put the work in because google is figuring it out on themselves yeah but what we would have done what we would have done is submitted a site map on the old site and nudge google a little bit several site maps right for that many for that many it's it wasn't it was a lot of links but wasn't a lot of urls so okay yeah it was just it was like 2000 urls okay okay yeah yeah that makes sense i bill hartzer came on the show and he talked about he's like i think he said that the limit was like 50 000 you want to keep it like 50 something like 50 000 yeah so limits 50 000 best practices are around 10 000 that's right 10 000 and then if you have if you want to nudge crawling you can create dynamic site maps which if you can automate the process just put the urls that you want to nudge google and change those change those frequently yeah yeah yeah okay so you were talking about things that you do different then i also want to ask man you said something that i see a lot of new bsco's that they don't do okay what do i go which these are both two very interesting conversation topics i'm going to go with the new bsco one what are some other things that newer scos don't do all right i want to i want to tie that in to this question we just answered about nudge and google oh yeah if you want to nudge google a great way to nudge google is linked from your home page there are there is documentation and patents that show google in the no it was the google leak that happened like a year and a half ago that if a page is linked from the home page it has a higher priority score uh i just reorganized my own website zippy we had these really long url structures we merged everything into a single cms so all of our long tail pages were now closer to the home page and we saw like i think we doubled traffic in the course of a week of making that change just by compressing everything making the url shorter linked closer to the home page so that's that's a big tip if you're trying to nudge a page put a feature section on your home page and link to it uh usually moves the needle that is cool have featured section on your home page and link to it and you're linking to the pages that are most important for your sio yeah exactly do you use hub pages uh what do you mean by subpage i'm sorry no no hub hub pages hub page yeah absolutely uh category pages hub pages things like that we the thing about hub pages and category pages is i think they have to be uniquely valuable on their own uh in the old days you just have a hub page and say okay now go to all these pages and those don't rank at all anymore now we need to have a hub page that actually solves a user problem and then link out to your additional resources and that seems to still work yeah that's something i see that all the time because uh i actually a tenant of my of my personal strategy is hub pages and i see a lot of people trying to make hub pages the way that i talk about but they just make it like a plain white background list of links with very little there and i'm like no no no you you have to make this user first this actually has to be like imagine that a lot of people we're going to we're going to click through to this page organically just from your home page like you need to make this actually useful and and nice and appealing yeah same with same with category pages like a lot of people use wordpress or another cms and you have your category pages and for the most part people don't take advantage of those they don't customize them they don't add a lot of rich information and the standard has raised a lot the last few years you really have to customize those category pages in order to get them to rank but again solve a real problem with your category page and then like out and they serve it they serve a dual purpose yeah that's that's what it is everyone hates uh you know people people hate the phrase i hate the phrase content is king just make just make good content bro i hate i hate that but but really it's it's like ask yourself is this actually useful is this page actually useful i feel like no one does that i think yeah i i think the phrase content is king i i don't think it is anymore uh because we see a lot of good content that just fails to rank i think we might be able to say task completion is still king uh or queen if you can if you're allowing people to solve their problem complete their task i think that's still a significant ranking factor that that gets rewarded to your point about you know reddit pages and just removing hero images anything you can do to help the user solve a problem as fast as possible is what's going to win yeah yeah okay um i want to i want to go back to the syris shepherd method of seo what are some other things that you do different from other people syris shepherd method of seo relentlessly testing uh i probably it's a fault i probably test more than i than i should one thing i i love doing uh is updating old pages as opposed to creating new pages i think it's a higher roi technique uh you know i often come into companies they have a content department and their job is to bruise x number of blog posts per month and they don't have their process for updating old blog post or old content pieces is kind of like oh that's that's a third quarter project i'm like no that's that's this quarter you're gonna get so much more out of that uh the lift is so much less and the roi is so much higher so let's do that and i'm guilty of it myself i have old languishing posts on my site that i really should update but uh it's something i i enjoy doing content refreshes so what are what are some ways that you refresh the content put it put a new date on it and then leave it at no uh although that works there's so there was a does it yeah just changing the date yeah it can uh but you can't do it at scale right so we did a study uh of winners and losers of google logarithm updates and what we found was we measured we measured how old each post was how often were they doing the updated date and what we found was that sites that were updating the date all the time on every single post they were losing a lot and google doesn't seem to like that and in the last few years i and i think it's because it's an overly aggressive SEO technique so now i think the data that we have supports in the affiliate space and uh ad supported space having a post that's two years old that's kind of like the sweet spot uh not updating that every single time and if you do update the date you want to make sure you make something substantially updated in the post itself and by substantial i mean it can be just a couple of sentences or a paragraph you don't have to update everything you don't need to entire you just need to update something uh and that's enough to trigger google's freshness algorithm whatever they're looking at and that's usually enough to give you the boost so your version of a content refreshes update the date and change three sentences yes i uh yeah i mean put some care into it i think uh my friend tom critchlow who's a great SEO consultant works with raptive i think which is this affiliate publishing network they just did a huge study of like 5000 domains that show basically just what we're talking about the sites that have recovered from the google's helpful content update are the ones that are updating their old post doing doing refreshes and they're using they had a special name for it but it's a it's a single date approach where they're instead of showing the original published date that we updated this post they're just showing the most recently updated date and so those two things showing the most recently updated date only and actually updating the content in some way those are the sites that have recovered somewhat from google's helpful content update oh man okay i had a different question but i want to go i want to go more into that because that's something that a lot of people care about is is recovering from the hcu so what are some what are some other ways that you've seen sites recover from the helpful content update and what do you what do you believe caused it in the first place uh yeah so google's let's get let's pull the band-aid off and say google's helpful content update was a masterclass in marketing on google spark because it was not about helpful content it was an anti seo update and clearly an anti seo update sites were ranking in the serps doing affiliate marketing whatnot and it was people were complaining on hacker news about how bad the serps was and google wanted to de incentivize uh people creating all this mass content so uh the sites that were punished were sites that were doing seo really really well which was a paradigm shift because we couldn't figure out why sites were going down there they had great links they had great content the other thing google started looking at was a site's business model uh they they wanted sites to have an existing or intended audience that would benefit from the traffic and in it in another way so sites that were just making money on affiliate and advertising tended to go down but sites that had subscription models sites that had community uh sites that sold products sites that had a reason for the traffic to exist other than monetization of the click those are sites that that seem to survive so to get to your question sites that recovered uh some implemented a different business model they implemented forums or they started selling products in some way uh but for the most part sites that recovered are the ones that really got into the experience or really started pushing the personal experience sites that did rigorous testing uh sites that really shared themselves a lot they they really nailed the e in experience of experience expertise authority trust those are the sites that that tend to do better man that's not an answer that i hear a lot of people giving and uh there's a very refreshing that's a very refreshing take on the hcu yeah uh i i also think google screwed up a little bit i think they were over aggressive in their original hcu update and we've seen we've seen maybe a third of sites that were negatively effective start to have some recovery especially in the last few months so i'm glad that google has done that uh because i like content i think the recovery that people i mean correct me if i'm wrong in this the recovery that people are that are the recovery that people are reporting is like a fraction of what you were getting before best case scenario the recovery that we've seen the last few months uh best case scenario sites we're talking about a third a third of their original traffic and that's a success story uh i only have a handful of sites that i've worked with that have either seen an increase or maintained all their traffic it's it's stupidly competitive especially an affiliate and advertised based revenue so yeah what's something in search engine optimization that everybody over complicates that is an excellent question uh keyword research keyword research is essential but most the keyword research that we see icuc is oftentimes these huge lists of things to target and there's no good way of organizing it uh instead of talking about solving problems we're targeting keywords and that just gets overly complicated i i like to look at keyword lesson think what problems can we solve and then go from there and just start answering questions that's cool just just actually look at the keywords that you believe are valuable and relevant to your business yeah okay um you know we were talking about content refreshers before i remember what i wanted to say i so you said update the date and yeah pretty much add like some sentences i what i thought that you were going to say is like see what you're already ranking for add sections for that on on your pages which is that works too but here's another thing about updating so there's uh there's something i've read in google patents somewhere and this does seem to work not only updating your page but google looks at the rate at which you update your pages so if you're updating a page every single week that gets recorded that you're you're keeping it fresh you're paying attention to the page and that's a definite almost definite ranking boost if you're if you can do that updating page every week it get that's hard to scale uh if but if you have key pages that your business depends on you have your your money pages making tweaks you know every once in a while without screwing anything up yeah i i want to be changing the title tag every week because eventually you're going to do something that breaks it but you know paragraph here paragraph here paragraph here every single week with the latest data that that can be effective the best shortcut is the long cut that's that really is my favorite thing though with with SEO it's like i think for if i was to answer like how do people overcomplicate SEO i think and i like shortcuts and i'm going to ask you about them but everyone looks for shortcuts trying to say that people spend so much time trying to save time that they end up wasting a lot of time and then after a lot of failing they realize all right i'm going to do this the way that i thought was the hard way and it turns out to be a lot easier than they thought and then they get results and the results are durable and every yeah i just i see that from so and it's not just with SEO it's kind of a cross business everyone is looking for the quick rich scheme the the shortcut and it's they're bouncing from idea to idea hoping to go viral with the next one like a ping pong ball and it's it's just stick with something yeah but let's talk about shortcuts are there any shortcuts that cyrus shepherd thinks are cool yeah so one thing this is not a universal thing uh but we're talking about think people overcomplicate one thing that i often see people overcomplicate is internal linking uh and keep in mind that google in the last few years now has an anti-SEO bias they don't like people who are overdoing SEO a lot of those signals have been dialed back so a lot of times i walk into a company and they have a they have a navigation menu that lists you know 120 products that they're linking to from their top navigation uh and that's and then they do the same thing in the footer and then they have optimized you know related articles blah blah blah but if you look at oftentimes what's winning in the serfs they're it's poorly optimized it's it doesn't they don't have these hero navigation so a lot of what we do now is deoptimize just start removing stuff keep keep the five links in the header that you think are important to your business remove the up we'll figure out another way to link to those things we don't need to link to those things from every single page uh because we're just repeating that anchor text over again that turns it makes it over optimized let's dial back the seo signals let's not use exact match anchor text in fact let's never use exact match anchor text let's just deoptimize everything so i i don't remember what the question was but uh yeah some of our approaches i i got a simple question was about shortcuts and i i do want to okay shortcuts because that's but but i want to say like i've had so many guests on the show you are a guest who just i agree with so strongly pretty much everything that you are saying is like it's a lot of it too is just it's very unique it's experience it's personal experience personal experience insights that you are giving and man they are they are juicy they are insightful and and also they're very very practical and i really appreciate that here here's a shortcut that i think you will this is not a new shortcut this is a well-known established shortcut that i think you probably practice and can appreciate if you create a new URL of content uh there's a huge difference between content that is shared on social media channels and content that is kept secret uh or not kept secret not broadcast widely so when i when i work with clients and we create a big piece of content that keyword target i'm like put this on your social channels and they're like well this is not no put it on your social channels i don't care if it gets three likes uh versus none long term it's going to have a much better chance of ranking if google can see the shared you know across various platforms i don't think google has a built-in algorithmic bias towards content shared on social just empirically over the years we see content doing much better if it's shared so are you saying are you saying share the actual subject matter in the post on yours on your site or share the link to the share the link share the link with a with a few blurbs about it yeah and share it across socials share across x yep linkedin share across x put it in your youtube video transcripts all that stuff put it in your youtube video transcripts not the description it or you meant to say that you could put it in the description yeah anywhere just put it on social yeah are you um when you when you do this are you doing it as the uh as you have like an opening post and you're not putting it in the first post like on linkedin you you put it in the comments you could like again the goal is not to go viral with the url uh because we know the putting links and posts you know decreases engagement the the goal is just to get it out there get it let google see it you know and it's twitter feed you know all that so you've just seen it you've just seen that it is a that it's a strong a strong signal if you share that post on on socials are you doing this for for all posts or is this like the type of thing that you don't want to overdo uh if i can i'll do it for all posts it's not always possible like if if it's a large company uh and i realize my experience is probably different if it's a large company and we're producing you know a hundred piece of content a month or more and they have there they only have a few social channels we can't flood those you know with all these pieces of content that we're producing because we'll lose you know lose the audience but the most important pieces yeah we're definitely we're definitely getting it out there yeah okay that makes that especially especially if it's like a a piece that you want to rank for where it's like you spent time on this content explicitly for seo yeah the other thing that that does is it drives traffic to the url and google can see that you know with their chrome browser and google accounts they can tell when visitors are visiting a page and that's that is also hugely correlated with organic rankings if you can just drive traffic to a page that's probably going to increase your uh google traffic as well you know that's that's um so i'm just a huge fan of web apps as linkable assets and one of the reasons for that is because you can build web apps that have share features you can you can make some sort of audio visual web app that has an output that is shareable and then you literally have people sharing a subdomain on your site and people are sharing around your site and then you also have that subdomain linking to pages on your root domain or on your main on your main site and uh yeah i i love linkable assets for that and and they're and now with ai it's just so easy to code them with with cursor with replet with claude it's so easy to make them i'm just like linkable assets the results that you can get from them are so crazy and you can literally find ones that went viral before can you give me an example of a linkable asset that you like uh yeah i can i can give you i absolutely can't okay so canva has a color palette generator okay yeah and it's the most basic thing i'm i want to find um i okay so i wrote an art i wrote an article i wrote a newsletter what i do is i take my newsletter and then i put them out as articles on my site it's weekly and so i put out this newsletter no link building budget could buy these results all right here's another man okay there's so much that i could say on this but okay canva's color palette generator easiest thing drop in an image it gives the dominant colors this color palette generator got 8.1 thousand backlinks from 2.2 thousand linking domains i no link building budget is going to is going to get you that or like okay there's uh something that's more i think relatable everybody loves calculators i i'm not a huge fan of calculators just because i think they're so basic but but there was okay so there's a sleep cycle calculator and it's um you i guess you say you say uh like how many hours of sleep you want to give i'm trying to remember how how to do it okay it tells you what time to go to sleep to get an optimal number of complete sleep cycles that's what it is and it's very very very simple it has 35 thousand backlinks from 4.5 thousand domains it and you know it launched to with its own unique domain sleepy tie dot me and then it was purchased by um i think it was a mattress affiliate it was purchased by a mattress affiliate now i think it lives on that on that domain nice yeah and there are then you can i mean you can build ones that have uh that just have shareable output as well like imagine if the sleepy imagine if that sleep time calculator had like a share function so you could do that for like your friends go to sleep this is the time that you have to go to sleep and then you literally send a i then you literally send a link where the og image actually like says the time that you need to go to sleep is like right now and it's something like that the og image incentivizes people to actually share that and you can make this type of stuff really easily with uh with ai and i'm just i'm and then you lot where do you launch it oh you launch it on product time you launch it on betelus again you send it to relevant journalists who who are dying for good content for for interesting things to report on and uh yeah and and then once these are the type of things that like once they get going then they're just shared perpetually or you literally do sco for the web app just to get it off the ground and uh yeah huge huge fan of linkable assets you just gave me a big client idea uh so i'm going to use that tell me tell me more no i can't i can't reveal they they create uh they're in a digital space they create digital assets but they don't have a way of generating them like instantly online that people can see them i think would blank generator would be a great differentiator for this business oh yeah oh yeah and that's something that's shareable too you have a preview of that and then you can share that preview oh my god or like oh yeah man make and these are and these so these are like bottom of funnel keywords these are use intent keywords where a lot of them are just when i was saying about like wide open these are the types of keywords that are not being targeted properly because a lot of indie hackers just a lot of indie hackers a lot of developers they don't know how to do sco they don't know how to make pages that satisfy search intent immediately and and you know who knows how to do that cyrus shepherd knows how to do that yeah so it's uh it's that's a very powerful strategy i like that um okay so i want to go i want to go back to to shortcuts are there any other shortcuts where you're like man this is so cool this is definitely going to get patched soon but i can't believe that this is around now i can't think of any of the top of my head uh that shortcuts yeah most shortcuts have pretty much been patched up and if i i've learned over the years that uh i got if i actually do have any shortcuts i got to be careful about sharing them because no because they they disappear as shortcuts in about a year you know so i and i think the helpful content update was kind of a response to how good the sco industry was getting with a lot of these techniques that google really had to take action against a lot of things so now when i do know something or i do discover something i'm usually pretty private about it okay i mean that's that's fair so i had on uh jesper neason recently and he's like and he literally told me i have to stop talking about these shortcuts on the show because i'm getting all of them patched and i'm like but it's so juicy it's like it's my responsibility to tell everybody i've gotten i mean i've literally uh so one of the things that bill harter shared i love bill bill is like a fountain of just unique sco insights and he's he's like if you are driving to if you have okay if you have a local business whenever you go to it use the driving directions on google maps and you know what have your friends and family use the driving directions on yes and and you know what there's even someone that you can pay who has like a hundred phones and this person will drive to your location with a hundred phones using google maps so i make a video about this on instagram and tiktok and the video gets like five million views or something and a google engineer comments oh yeah we're good we got to fix this thanks for sharing that yeah thanks man yeah sorry everyone yeah but it's my response it's my responsibility to to share this stuff like you know um something that i thought was insightful was barry schwarz came on the show he came on earlier this year to talk about the march update and we were talking about parasite sco and he's like there's always a new parasite sco platform and they come and go and before it was like the shortcut was yahoo answers and then it was quora and now it seems to be reddit for for a hot minute it was clod artifacts it was it was shared chachi pt conversations and uh yeah the shortcuts and that's why i personally believe that chasing shortcuts is a usually a bad idea yeah yeah do it but that's it there are shortcuts out there just uh we can't always talk about them on a very very public uh yeah podcast before before you go what are some things okay let's say okay okay i want you to address two people we're not going to address the experts we're going to address the beginners and the people who are like halfway halfway there they're not quite a beginner they're a little bit above what are things that the beginners need to do and what are things that the people who are a little bit above beginner need to do oh that's an excellent question here's here's what i see beginners doing uh beginners focus a little bit too much on tool output like yost or you know even moz that we're talking about where they're doing the keyword targeting and they're like why why am i not ranking i've hit all the keywords i've talked about all these things but man anybody can do this the content is not personalized enough that it doesn't have anything unique about it that solves those problems you can't that's so that's seo 2009 seo 2024 you got to bring your game you got to bring you you know uh you got to put something in your content that nobody else has i mean 2025 yeah see i'm even behind okay i think it's 2024 uh but yeah you gotta you gotta elevate that content beyond what the tools will tell you you're optimized for uh and i think that goes all the way up the ladder you know we talked about so many important things in this episode with images and unique experience and uh things that other people just don't have so i think i think the more advanced people what i'm seeing these days is just doing too much seo too many too many internal links uh not getting enough external attention optimizing a little too tight 10 000 word posts just just solve problems man just do it quickly i see that a lot too is uh that's i think that's a way that people over complicate things they they just ask the seo the heck out of everything and they over seo yeah there's a sweet spot i see a lot of seos out there that are really good to what they do uh they publish their thoughts and their their websites get very little traffic because they aren't doing enough of you know focusing on keywords so it's always it's always a balance yeah saris thank you for joining thank you for joining me um where where should everybody find you what should everybody check out i'm on linkedin lot threads and zippy dot com amazing and stick around after the show as your video will have to upload and uh yeah thank you a legend in seo i'm so hyped that you got to that you got to join the edward show and that i got to talk with you this was great the edward show i'm so thank you for having me no i'm really i'm really grateful thank you again and everybody this is episode 807 of my daily yeah daily digital marketing show no days missed 807 days in a row doing this podcast zero days missed somehow hopeful hoping i can keep up the streak thanks again to siris and thank you to the listeners to the watchers thank you so much for watching thank you so much for listening i will talk to you again tomorrow Bye now.