Meh, Links — Busting Link Building Myths for SEO

Episode Notes

Transcript

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I am Gyi Tsakalakis of Attorneys Inc. And one interesting thing about me is that I once ate 30 Blimpy Burgers

Conrad Saam:

In one sitting. And I’m Conrad Saam. I remember to introduce the show as Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. One interesting point about me, I have had five fractures of my front teeth

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And this is Lunch Hour Legal Marketing where we talk all about marketing over your lunch break,

Conrad Saam:

Pull up a cheeseburger. Hey Gyi, I see in your background, you got a new sign back there. I love it.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I did. I’m trying to one up you because you’ve had your excellent signage and sadly mine’s a neon sign and it doesn’t work well on the camera, but also throw some pictures up. It looks awesome in person and from my iPhone, but recording on my video camera doesn’t look so hot.

Conrad Saam:

Alright, so I like when you fail on the one one-up attempt on the technology side even, although hardly technology. But listen, the reason I call that out, I think we talk a lot about having your brand and your logo everywhere. You and I spend a lot of time on camera. A lot of lawyers spend some time on camera. Oh yeah, we got the Lunch Hour Legal Marketing logo on your sweatshirt there. But it’s a really easy way if you’re going to spend time on camera to throw the logo behind you. Mine is just a, frankly it’s just a sticker that we had custom printed and we’re not being paid by this company, but maybe we should get wall drop.com. We’ll do a really professional looking background with a logo for you. So it’s a great way to keep your logo in front of people as if you tend to spend any amount of time in front of a camera

Gyi Tsakalakis:

In addition to turning yourself into a NASCAR driver. What else are we talking about today?

Conrad Saam:

As usual, we’ll be starting with the news and next we’re going to dig deeper into GIS tagline, meh links, what does he mean by this? And why is it so important? Hit it

Announcer:

And welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing, teaching you how to promote market and make Fat stacks for your legal practice here on Legal Talk Network.

Conrad Saam:

Alright everybody, welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. I hope you are sitting down with a delicious cheeseburger listening to me and Gyi, Gyi and I are both headed off this evening. I’m flying a red eye. Maybe you’re leaving in the morning. We’re going to be recording surreptitiously tomorrow, a next episode of lunch, our legal marketing. Maybe I’ve got that totally wrong. Is it on Friday?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Technically it’s Friday. Friday and today’s Wednesday as we’re recording. But it doesn’t really matter because this will all be in the past by the time people hear this.

Conrad Saam:

Okay, it will all be in the past, but we’re going to start with news and then we’re going to talk more about links. Alright, Gyi, we’ve talked recently about mergers and acquisitions. What is going on in the technology m and a world?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, places Scout was acquired by Yext and Places Scout. For those that aren’t familiar is a really fantastic, in my opinion, local SEO tool. I think it’s a huge pickup by Yext. Congratulations to, I think both parties here

Conrad Saam:

Who’s going to pay the cost key,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Right? As we’ve talked about in the past, these acquisitions tend not to mean cheaper subscription prices for users. And so I’ll be watching very closely what happens to our places scout pricing as this acquisition rolls out. Alright, I have a question

Conrad Saam:

For you. Gyi,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yes, Conrad,

Conrad Saam:

You are our surreptitious man on the inside at the American Bar Association. Can you tell me why they decided to pick a fight with Donald Trump yesterday?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, I do not view them as picking a fight with Donald Trump. I view them as standing up for one of the three branches of our government, that being the judiciary. But if you’re a lawyer and you’re listening to this, I don’t care what your politics are, you should be out there educating your community about how the government is supposed to work, checks and balances, judicial review and yada yada yada. Take your law one book off of your shelf, go reread it and go tell the world about why the A BA is standing up for

Conrad Saam:

Judiciary while the judiciary still exists. Alright, Gyi, I had a miserable weekend getting hit up by a bunch of clients. I suspect you had a miserable weekend as too, I believe this is two out of three miserable weekends brought to us by the people from Mountain View. This time it involved the apparent disappearance of people’s Google reviews on mass. What on

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Earth

Conrad Saam:

Happened?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, I think two things happened, and I’ll be honest, I am in the minority position in the chatter, the back room chatter of the local SEO community. Most people saw that the review count, so the number of reviews on their Google business profile went down. So let’s just for keeping it easy, say you had a hundred reviews, all of a sudden you had 80 reviews. In some cases it was much worse than that. You only went from a hundred to, it was only showing you had like the count was showing you had 10. Now, upon investigation, many people were like, well, the reviews are actually still there, they’re just not showing up in the count. But I will tell you that I received reports from people that unfortunately want to remain anonymous because they told me that they wanted to be anonymous, that actual reviews were missing too.

And so I believe two things are happening here. The new thing is that this review count bug was going on that Google acknowledged, they said there’s a problem with it, they’re fixing it. In fact, as of this recording, many of these issues are starting to resolve. But the other thing that’s not new is that Google does filter out reviews that it thinks violate their policy guidelines. And so the patterns that were brought to my attention were reviews that were submitted at the same time and co-located lawyers reviewing other lawyers firms that had high velocity. So all of a sudden they went from not getting very many reviews to a bunch of reviews at the same time, those reviews, it has been reported have been removed. But that’s something Google’s been doing regularly, whether there was a big push TBD, but certainly that was brought to my attention that it was not just accounts being off, the actual reviews were removed.

Conrad Saam:

And to further that point, there were your scores, scores were changing over this weekend.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yes, well, scores are going to change if the count is not counting all of the reviews, right? Because if it’s not counting, say you got fives at a couple fours and it stops counting fours, then your score is going to go up and vice versa. If it says counting fives, your score will go down.

Conrad Saam:

Okay? You’re saying that the change in the scores could be endemic of the miscounting as opposed to a change in the actual reviews.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So you can check this for yourself both ways. If all of your reviews are still there and your score changed and your count changed, that’s a reflection that it was due to the count. If you have actual reviews missing, then of course then your score is going to change as well. So your score can change for either of those reasons.

Conrad Saam:

Now we are going to get a little bit into links, and we’re coming back to this. This is one of my favorite things. This is why I really liked SEO from the beginning. Interesting posts from the Ahrefs blog about Google says links matter less. There was a study done on this by a h ruffs. What came out of that study, Gyi,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

A lot. And we’ll put a link in the show notes, and I’m very grateful for this post. It’s very well done. But the thing that I want to focus on today is that for local queries, links have an extremely high correlation with ranking, which is something that I’ve been saying for a long time, despite both Google and the Google, what I call the sycophant Google SEO crowd, who just parrots what Google says as SEO gospel. And again, well I’ll stop there because I know we’re going to talk more deeply about this.

Conrad Saam:

When we come back, we will unf the mystery that you’ve all been asking. What on earth does GH mean when he says meh

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Lynx? And we’re back. And the short version of this segment is Met Lynx, which is something that I am very proud. That’s become somewhat of a tagline for me. And I wanted to explain to folks what I mean by meta lynx. And then we’re going to dive into debunking some common link billing methods. So forever, as far as I can remember, we would get links for clients and all of a sudden they’d start ranking better. Now, I don’t work. I’m not a search engineer, I don’t work at Google. I’m not a big data scientist person. I’m not running these correlation studies. I just knew that when we got certain types of links, client sites ranked better. And so over the years, as reflected by things like the White Spark local search ranking factors study and other places, people started saying, I think links matter less.

And my thing was like, look, I get it. Google’s evolving. There are new signals, some factors seem to be growing in importance. And so maybe as an overall slice of the pie links might not be as big of a contribution as they were when it was purely page rank algorithm, but I’d always say all things being equal links, because the links still seem to be the competitive differentiator. That’s the gatekeeper. That’s the hardest thing to do, is to actually get another website to link to your website, especially in an editorial context or a local context. So that’s what I’ve meant by Matt Links. Conrad, what common link building myths have you heard over the

Conrad Saam:

Years? Well, there’s certainly the reduction in the value of links. I want to narrow this down into localized queries and localized links because in many cases we miss that nuance. And all of you, almost all of you are working on a very localized business, and so can you explain what we mean by localized links and why some of the traditional link building measurements may not actually be helpful?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, I am going to qualify by saying relevant links,

And I am going to qualify relevant links with two subcategories of relevant links topically, relevant links or thematically relevant links and locally relevant links, which is what I think you were alluding to in terms of local links. The myth here in my opinion, is that just go out and get authoritative links from any source, right? Go get links from all of the largest, most authoritative sites on the internet, and it doesn’t matter the domain authority or the trust authority or whatever these third party tool metrics are that try to measure authority of sites. That’s what your focus is on. And to me, and I’ve been saying this for years, that is a huge myth that those will help you rank or that certainly anybody that’s arguing that they’re more valuable, in my opinion, the topically, thematically relevant and locally relevant links move the dial a lot more for localized queries than the domain authority links do.

Conrad Saam:

So I’m going to say this back to you and then I want you to give an example What you’re saying, Gyi, is that just because a website has a high domain authority, which has sometimes been used to price the value or even the cost of acquiring that link just because it has a higher domain authority, you don’t think that’s going to help in search. Why on earth would that be the case, sir?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, there’s a lot of reasons. The first reason is that domain authority is a made up score. It’s loosely trying to be based on concepts and notions of page rank, but Google doesn’t use domain authority in any context to understand the quality of a link. Number two is that you can inflate your domain authority artificially. There are all sorts of things you can do. So we get these emails, we got DR or DA or whatever it is, 70 sites that we’re selling links to. Well, those high domain authority sites, they’re not even real. They’re private blog networks, they’re all sorts of weird stuff, but they found a way through building links to these sites to inflate the domain authority or page rank or whatever you want to call it. And so in those two contexts, it should be obvious to everyone why Google is actively trying not to give credit to sites that are artificially manipulating those types of metrics. But the thing that I think about is this, and again, I’m not a search engineer. I’m like for any query, any given query, you type into Google, say Detroit car accident lawyer, you want to know how, you know what the most relevant sites that Google thinks are the most relevant pages. What are they? How would you determine the most relevant pages in Google’s mind for any particular query?

Conrad Saam:

I would see what shows up in Google’s queries,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Right? The pages that Google returns, it’s almost like it’s too easy. And guess what you see in there? You see legal directories, especially legal directories optimized for those location pages. You see obviously competitors. And so my attitude is is that go not only just when you’re doing this prospecting for link opportunities, don’t just use your lower funnel target queries, but get into the tangentially related types of queries. What are other things that people that might be your clients, what are they looking for in the local community? What are other businesses in the local community? I think localized link building we’ve seen has been very powerful and even if you’re like, look, I want to get this in direct benefit from an SEO standpoint, from a link standpoint, when you show up on these other sites, you’re part of the conversation. Other machines are seeing that you’re part of the, it’s good from a branding standpoint, it’s good from a local engagement standpoint. There’s a lot of additional benefits than just the link equity to getting links on both these topically and locally relevant pages.

Conrad Saam:

So I think one of the reasonable questions that people would ask is, how does Google know that this website is reflective of Atlanta, Georgia or Issaquah Washington? And it’s actually, there’s a lot of signals that can be used to tie a website to a physical location. Your Google business profile or a Google business profile is frequently tied to a location. There’s also markup as well as things like your phone number and address that are often contained on your website,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Anchor text, the HTML of the page, URL structure. There’s all sorts of things. There are many signals that can help them understand the locality.

Conrad Saam:

It is very easy for a computer to figure out that this website is tied to this specific location that tends to be overlooked because it’s so much easier to look for a zero to a hundred score of a bullshit number like domain rank and be like, this is valuable or not.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Lemme give you another myth.

Conrad Saam:

Go hit me.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Quantity versus quality,

Conrad Saam:

Okay,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

The myth is I need a lot of links. Myth, not myth.

Conrad Saam:

Well, you need a lot of quality links depending on what you’re trying to do, a

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Lot of quality links. Why don’t you define what you mean by a lot of quality links?

Conrad Saam:

Okay, I was going to turn this around and Socratically ask you the exact same question, so I’m going to give kind of three facets to this. Okay? Quality links. You already talked about two of those elements and we’re very much speaking about local search here or localized queries, right? And all of you’re running a localized business, so you are playing against the directories, but you are playing a different game than the directories because they have nationwide coverage and that is fundamentally different and we can argue why Google has the makeup of the SERPs that are for low funnel terms like family lawyer, why there is a mix of directories and small businesses and the differentiation between those two is really seen in their link profile. You’re never going to catch up to AVOs domain rank or Dr DA, whatever you want to call it, but you can still compete against them because Google is really looking to put a mix of localized businesses and directories into those queries because some people are looking for a directory to make comparisons and some people are looking for a business to learn and contact.

Sorry, this is a very long-winded tangent to your question, what do you mean by quality links? There is location associated with that. That in and of itself is super valuable in indicating that you are playing the game within a specific geography. There is relevance. So that can be, for example, if you are doing birth injuries and you have a bunch of links from medical sites that is relevant to what you do and then hate it or not, there is value in getting links from places like the New York Times and so I don’t want to suggest that there’s no value in those really, really strong sites. I think that may be overstated, but you go get a bunch of links and I’ve done this for law firms, we’ll turn a big news story into a massive link building opportunity, which is why I personally like doing SEO more than anything else. That’s why I enjoy this game. You do that, you can be somewhat untouchable, right for a while. And so I look at those links. Now the contrapositive is what is a bad link, right? The business directory from the Ukraine not going to help you all that much and so there’s lots of garbage crappy links, but on the quality I would really talk about local relevancy and then there is some value in the big guys.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I generally agree with that. I would say this, if you’re going to look for an indirect leading indicator of link growth success, I am mostly interested in growth of linking route domains versus overall link numbers because getting a thousand million links from the same site in a site wide footer link is not as valuable in my opinion, as getting a hundred from a hundred different websites, especially if they’re local and relevant. I will also say this, that if you’re in a competitive market, say you’re in a major city, you’re in pi, you need to have a competitive number of total linking route domains. But I will say this, we have seen instances where less linking route domains but from much more quality sites can win the day over sites that have been established with many, many more linking route domains, but they tend not to be localized or topically relevant or someone’s been doing some of the link building that Connor is talking about with directories from Uzbekistan or something like that.

Conrad Saam:

We always pick on Uzbekistan,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Poor Uzbekistan, here’s another one for you. I have to make all of my anchor text match my target query. Is that a myth? What do you think where you land on anchor text?

Conrad Saam:

So let’s first define anchor text. If you want to rank for pencils and a link to your website says pencils, it’s going to help you rank for the term pencils. Now this was grossly abused by SEOs and I want to say eight years, 10 years ago there was kind of a pushback on anchor text spam. Having said that anchor text still matters.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Absolutely

Conrad Saam:

It does have an impact.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You want to know the best anchor text

Conrad Saam:

Click here.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Throwaway anchors are fine too, but I’ll tell you in my opinion, the best because this is very hard to distinguish, is when you’ve changed your business name from Conrad’s law firm to Conrad Personal injury Attorneys and your anchor tax is Conrad Personal injury attorneys because you are getting the benefit of the brand link as well as the non-brand anchor text

Conrad Saam:

Little tactic brought to you by Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. So just to reiterate, I was going to ask you because I thought you were leading me down the path of anchor text, doesn’t matter, Conrad.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

No, I’m not leading you in that direction.

Conrad Saam:

Okay, good. I do not want to lead our listeners in that

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Pitch, but what I would say is this, I think to me the myth is that the only valuable anchors are the ones that match your queries. And I would say that’s a huge mistake. And as you alluded to, I think that’s a huge signal for Google to say these are links that we should be totally discounting and don’t be afraid of these throwaway type of anchors like click here or home or contextual anchors that have nothing to do with the actual query you’re trying to optimize. Google is able to understand that quality link profiles include a mix of all of these different types of anchors.

Conrad Saam:

When we come back, Gyi and I are going to talk about either link building, aios directories and our philosophical musings around how they’re correlated. Or we’re going to talk about tactics for great local link building, which are two fundamentally different segments. We’ve included both of them in the show notes and while you listen to this next advertisement and I are going to decide what we’re going to talk about. Alright, everyone, welcome back. I would encourage you to take a moment, find a local business, a small local business, go leave a review for them, build some business karma. That’s one of the best things that you can do. And while you’re at it, stop by Spotify or Apple Podcasts and leave Ian Conrad a review as well because there’s nothing for us to read for you this week because no one left a review in the last two weeks there that is good old Catholic guilts coming through Lunch Hour, Legal Marketing. We’d love to hear back from you. Okay, we were talking about links, localized links. I want to get into the question of how does one go about building those hard to get unique, very valuable, high quality, localized links. Gyi, what do you do?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, there’s a lot of different ways, but serendipitously, our good friend Bart Sinyard at senior law was recently posting about their support for a local barbecue establishment that had a devastating fire. And as I started to see some of the posts come out about this, I was clicking through links and it became clear that there was another barbecue place called lawler’s there. I think it was a food market in town. As I mentioned, the law firm were all rallying around supporting this barbecue place that had a fire. And so there was a GoFundMe set up. There were all sorts of community posts about this stuff. It’s still early on and so maybe we’ll report back and see if it actually earned any links, but this is the, this leadership in the local community. Hopefully it’s obvious to you why this is valuable from just doing good in your community standpoint, but these are the types of stories that get picked up by local newspapers.

They get picked up by other local business leaders. They’re writing about them and linking back to the story. There’s a variety of different execution details in this that you might talk about if you’re actually doing it for a link building campaign. This one is not an intentional link building campaign, but it’s such a great example of great local leadership and the PR impact of that and the indirect ancillary benefit that this is the kind of stuff that you can do to earn links and mentions in co-occurrences if you want to get into that kind of nerdy stuff. And it also makes you feel good and it’s also really good from just a good works in your community standpoint. So to me, some of the best local link building campaigns that we see and that we try to participate in are those that have a local community focus. It’s the doing well by doing good concept. That’s the kind of stuff that people actually want to links to. News reporters, local journalists, Conrad’s point about getting a link from the New York Times, that’s great. Getting links from your local digital newspapers, getting links from local bloggers who cover your community, getting links from other business blogs, getting links from schools that are also supporting these local community initiatives. To me, that’s the stuff that moves the dial the most.

Conrad Saam:

So you said I’m going to take exception with one thing that you said. Good. You said this was not, well, I’m not suggesting it’s not true. I’m just suggesting it was misguided. You said this was not a deliberate link building effort, which I believe is the case.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I believe it is not as well,

Conrad Saam:

Right? Right. I am not disputing that everything should be viewed through some lens of his zero link opportunity on this.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Okay.

Conrad Saam:

Your local engagement should be

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Viewed, viewed. That’s coming from an SEO agency and I don’t disagree with you.

Conrad Saam:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So everything you do, I remember you and I met up with Tim sro, we did a, I can’t remember exactly which conference this was in. I believe

Gyi Tsakalakis:

It was advocacy 360. Tim a fantastic there you fantastic presentation.

Conrad Saam:

He had a fantastic presentation. One of the slides, I took a picture of him speaking and I’ve now added it to my basic marketing 1 0 1 deck that I give. Sometimes when he looks for sponsorships in Iowa, he only considers local businesses where he can get a link out of it. That is the lens that he looks at.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s hardcore man.

Conrad Saam:

It shouldn’t be

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Hardcore.

Conrad Saam:

It should not be hardcore. If you care about SEO, you have a limited budget, you have a limited amount of time to spend on things in your community. I get that 100%. You can do good and be self-serving at the same time and there’s no shame in that.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, I guess I would qualify with this. I think when you’re doing proactive link outreach and proactive link building, you’re trying to identify places that you want to do sponsorships with or co-marketing things,

Conrad Saam:

I

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Think that totally should be part of your analysis. I just don’t want it to be lost that some of these stories, it’s not actually out there trying to build a link. You’re helping something in the community and that naturally people want to link to that.

Conrad Saam:

I get it. I get that. So let me take the barbecue story as an example.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Okay?

Conrad Saam:

One of the things that’s missing in the barbecue story, this is a frequently failed opportunity for law firms, is, okay, I’m going to help the barbecue joint or whatever it is you might be involved in. Who is going to link to my website and why are they going to link to my website about that? Right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You got to put something on your site that’s a linkable asset on your site. Yes.

Conrad Saam:

So I call this anchor content. There’s got to be

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Something

Conrad Saam:

On your site that people are going to be like, wow, this is really cool. Now I’m riffing on this. Is it an interview with the owner where we talk about the owner and the barbecue and the history of that? Is it a video that you put together about rebuilding the building? What

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Is it? Is it the place to collect donations for the building? Is it the

Conrad Saam:

Place to collect, donate? Great, great. Here’s a great idea. Is it the place that you can collect donations or that you can sign up to actually volunteer or there’s got to be something,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Submit your user generated content here for the contest to win the thing.

Conrad Saam:

Yes, that needs to happen and we forget this component of it and it’s got to be compelling and it’s got to be unique and it’s got to live on your website. Otherwise you’re not doing link building. So it’s interesting, I think I did this a little too late, but we have a beautiful and very empty office in downtown Seattle. It’s been empty for ever since Covid started. We don’t use it. And I somehow ran into a lady who’s trying to start a gift basket business, and so she now stores all of her gift basket equipment. I gave her the opportunity to just leave it in our office, nothing else going in the office. And we used her to send out thank you gift to our clients for Valentine’s Day. So our clients are receiving the box of localized chocolates from the Seattle area and an explanation of how we’re supporting these small businesses.

What I should have done, Gyi, I should have had her talk about her story, talk about the gift baskets that she’s putting together, how it’s localized, and I should have put that on our site as an example of anchor content that people might want to link to and it’s just a happy story. We didn’t do that, so eat your own dog food, but you have to think about creating something that lives on your site and then encourage people to link back to it or make it implicit in how to engage. Like this is where we sign up for things. I love your examples there. This is where you do the donations. This is how we submit X, Y, or Z. So I love that. One of the link tactics that seemed to be somewhat localized, that was overused. Do you remember the college scholarships?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I still love scholarship link building by the way.

Conrad Saam:

So talk about kind of the low end, crappy college scholarship link building and then transfer that into how to do it the right way.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

The low end crappy scholarship link building is you have a general scholarship and you go out and do outreach to every university you can think of to get a link on their scholarship page where there are thousands of other businesses and law firms doing the exact same thing. I think those links are largely valueless and in fact, someone actually at some point showed an example of someone getting a penalty

For doing link building like this. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about a local community scholarship. Maybe you are giving scholarships and the only eligible candidates are people who are in a school at a local high school. I’ve seen it done for in the name of an injury survivor or someone who has not survived an accident. Those kinds of things. I think where you can get an intersection of local community and topical relevance for what you do. Those types of scholarships, they’re supported by the local community. The schools get involved, career services offices want to tell those stories, that local news wants to tell those stories. Years ago there was a law firm did the don’t go to law school scholarship. Those types of things get picked up not only by the schools themselves, but they’re actually, it’s newsworthy and it’s got that PR aspect to it. So that’s what I would do. And to Conrad’s point about the anchor content, the application for the scholarship is hosted on your site, and so people have to link back to your site to tell people that are reading the information about it, where to go apply and they’ll link back to that asset.

Conrad Saam:

The issue here is this takes time. It is more expensive, it gets you more involved in the community and as opposed to just blasting out the college scholarship to thousands and thousands of pages on which that scholarship will sit with thousands and thousands of other law firm links. I did find this Google Site scholarship links in a manual action penalty. This goes back to 2021. So the scholarship concept done well, the way Gyi just described is getting involved locally, it is generating localized links and it can really have an impact. Most of you guys are too lazy and most of the agencies realize it’s too hard to do profitably to bother doing it, but this is what we are arguing is a difference maker in localized SEO queries period.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

The other one that I think about a lot too, and I know that maybe there’s a split of authority on this one because maybe some people will consider it great, but I love sponsorship links. If you’re sponsoring local organizations and they put up a link up to say, Hey, we want to thank our sponsors, technically someone might argue that those are paid links, right? You put money for a sponsorship and they put a link up. Is that quid pro quo linking? Maybe in some context it is, but I just have a hard time believing that Google wants to go around penalizing people who are supporting local businesses, who are supporting local organizations, who are supporting local schools, and these businesses are linking to each other to highlight the sponsors for their events and that kind of stuff. And so I’m still very pro on local sponsorship, link building. What do you think about local sponsorships?

Conrad Saam:

Hey, Gyi, 100% great. The right way to handle a paid for link is to put a no follow on it. So assuming that the local charity or whomever it’s sponsoring is going to do a no follow, which basically says, Hey, Google, don’t take any link value from this because it was a paid link. Gyi, do you believe Google doesn’t give any value to no followed links from a local sponsorship?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

It’s funny because we didn’t cover this in myths debunk, we didn’t have enough time to, but that was on my list is I would say, not to worry so much about follow versus no follow the language around this is that no follow has been a suggestion, but again, Google’s a big data company. They are very focused on the resources they index and keep track of no followed links. I would suspect that they are using them for some purpose, especially the ones that we’re talking about. I would say that those are fine. I think Joy did a thing on this, so maybe we can come back and give a shout out to her, but I am still pro on do not obsess about only focusing on followed links. Totally agree. Here’s another local link building tactic that I really like and this goes, this is more of the old school grind type of link building, but the big category is broken link building on the local level.

So how this works, you go find, we’ve done this in the past where you find a municipality site, so it’s like your city’s website or maybe it’s your county’s website or maybe it’s a local school and you crawl the site with Screaming Frog. That basically figures out if there are any broken links on that site, and what I mean by broken link is that that site is linking to something. That page that it links to no longer exists, so it’s 4 0 4 and then you create whatever it was that was there, or maybe you make a better version of it or you upgrade it or whatever that resource, whatever that, whatever reason, that site was linking to that thing. You create that on your site and then you go out and say, Hey, you got a broken link on your site. I want to let you know we actually recreated this over here.

If you update the link, it’ll be helpful for people that are looking for this information on your site. When that happens, I can tell you that especially with some of these local government, it’s very difficult to get a local government site to link to a law firm website, but you can do it with this idea of broken link building because again, the government doesn’t want to go out and recreate whatever that resource was. They do want the information to be available and people don’t want broken links on their site. There’s a matter of site hygiene that is a really effective way to do broken link building

Conrad Saam:

And if you’re really lazy, go find the old piece of content on the way back machine, throw it through ai, make sure it’s accurate it, and then republish it. Alright, with go ahead, go. No, I was going to try and wrap this up here. You do. How

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Was I

Conrad Saam:

Always bungle? Go, go. You

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Wrap it this

Conrad Saam:

Time? No, no, no. You know I bungle the wrap.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Alright. Thank you for once again our dear Lunch Hour Legal Marketing audience. If you enjoyed this episode, please do leave us a review comment, or if you didn’t like it, do the same. Reach out to Conrad and I, we’re happy to answer your questions. If you have topic suggestions, we’d love to hear from you. Now I’m bungling. I caught a case of the Conrad,

Conrad Saam:

The

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Word soup. You’re good. Until next time. Conrad and Gyi, for Lunch Hour Legal Marketing.

Announcer:

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Gyi Tsakalakis:

Oh, what happened to local review? I thought, did you already do that? We go review a local business?

Conrad Saam:

No, no, that’s coming after this part.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Oh, I’m sorry. I’m in the wrong. The

Conrad Saam:

Gyi is not Following directions.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I found my place.

Conrad Saam:

This is third time, right, Ally?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah. I’m getting a little Lost.

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