Ep 199: Backlink Due Diligence & Tech SEO with Rad Paluszak

Jaryd Krause (0:00)

Do you know the real risks of backlinks for your website? Hi, I'm Jaryd Krause host of the buying online businesses podcast and today I'm speaking with Rad Paluszak, who is a web developer and Software Architect with 20 years’ experience. He is a technical SEO mastermind in the industry since 2010. He has helped Matt Diggity run his SEO agency, the Search Initiative and Matthew Woodward with the Search Logistics, he has recently founded Husky Hamster outreach link building company.

Now, Rad specializations include international and technical SEO, machine learning and understanding as well as looking at SEO from Business and Management perspectives. Now, this is such a valuable episode if you're going to buy a website business that has backlinks, which I'm sure it does be crazy not to. This is the podcast episode that you need to listen to. Also, if you're going to buy a site and grow it, you need to listen to this. In this podcast episode, Rad and I talk about SEO due diligence. We talked about things that you should be looking at when you're doing SEO due diligence, specifically, backlink due diligence, why some backlinks are good, why some are not how to, you know, look at those backlinks, what tools you should be looking at how many tools you should be using when you're looking at backlinks and doing due diligence on them?

And what are some of the metrics? And what are some of the things around PBN that you should be looking for? And are there good PBN or bad PBN? And what's the difference between those, we also talk about how to measure backlinks, the ones that you may be purchasing when you're doing a backlink building strategy, how to measure the worth and the value of a backlink for your business. And for your site audit of just the DR. We talk about traffic, we talk about intent of traffic, and we’ll talk about where the links may come from.

We also talk about tech SEO fixes. Now, most websites, you can go into tech SEO, and you can just take SEO as a never ending battle. I shouldn't say battle but a never ending story of things that you can continuously fix. We talked about some of the main common ones like page rankings and site speed and how you can make those better. So you can have your site and your pages rank higher, bring in more traffic and so your site speed can be that much more efficient. We also talk about plugins and all that sort of stuff. So there's so much value in this podcast episode. Now we did talk about buying sites and doing due diligence in this episode.

If you are going to buy a website, don't go away and try and do this for free or by yourself. Well, I do have a free way that you can do it. But I have my due diligence framework 2.0, which a lot of people have been raving about, which helps you buy a website takes the guesswork out of buying a website includes a bunch of questions, you can ask the sellers and the brokers when buying this site. So make sure you get that up buyingonlinebusinesses.com/free resources.

That's my due diligence framework that I and my clients have used to make millions of dollars and save millions of dollars when buying a site. So check that out at buyingonlinebusiness.com/free resources. There's other awesome resources on that page too. Now let's dive in and have a chat with Rad.

Rad Welcome to the buying online businesses podcast.

Rad Paluszak (3:11)

Hi, Jaryd, thank you for having me.

Jaryd Krause (3:13)

First thing I want to ask you and super excited to dig into a lot of the SEO stuff, a lot of the black backlink stuff and content creation, that's going to be hugely valuable for everybody to listen to. But I wanted to first ask you have you bought websites before? Have you sold any before?

Rad Paluszak (3:29)

No, neither both nor sold myself, but we assisted quite a few folks in buying websites mainly not selling but buying. Obviously, when guys are selling websites, they usually want to do it on their own. Sometimes we give them some hints on monetization, but that's like, I wouldn't count it like a like a big assistance.

Jaryd Krause (3:56)

So you're not helping people with the due diligence, you're just helping them with a growth plan or like what did that look like?

Rad Paluszak (4:02)

No. So like you said, when we're helping them buy websites, obviously we look at many things because we support them in their due diligence. Okay, and I'm happy to jump into that in a little while. But when we are helping guys sell the websites, this is where we only support them with additional ways on how they can monetize it. If they're not doing something that we've heard of someone else doing when they're selling websites, so we offer them some help but this is, you know, any assistance in selling websites, this is like a very small thing that we do.

Jaryd Krause (4:46)

So when you assist people in looking at sites when they're purchasing them are there so you're looking at a lot of the SEO stuff throughout due diligence. We practice a lot of SEO due diligence when we're buying sites when I'm curious to hear what you guys looking at? What are some of the metrics you guys dive into and look at that you think others shouldn't be, you know, people listening should be knowing about when they're buying a content site.

Rad Paluszak (5:09)

I think the most important thing is links, because that's something that you don't really have full control of, after you put the website. Okay, let's look at this from this perspective. SEO is usually, you know, three main things, let's say, right, or for if we're very specific, right, its content, links, and technical stuff, right. So with the technical stuff, whatever it is, you know, if there was something really bad on the site, it would probably not be ranking very well.

So it's high chance that you would not be even looking at it at buying it. Okay. However, anything that is broken the site from the technical perspective, then, even if you buy it, you know, knowing that perhaps little risk, you can obviously fix it afterwards. Right. So there's almost nothing that is unfixable when it comes to technical stuff. Now, second part content, okay? It's very similar, right? More complicated, but similar, right? If there's something broken with the content on the site, truth be told, it's very unlikely that it's going to be ranking. So you're probably not even looking at buying the site. Okay? Because you'd rather be wanting a site that is performing really, really well. Right.

Now, when it comes to the content, I am very careful with the with any assessments of the content, because content, especially if it's a big, with big info website that that you want to buy, like, like an affiliate website, for example, that is very content heavy, when there's something broken with the content. And this is why that website isn't performing as well as it should be. When there's a ton of content on the site, it's very difficult to fix, because sometimes you basically would have to rewrite everything.

Okay, so if I have any indication, during my assessment, that there's something you know, to do that is holding the site back that it's to do with the content, I would rather be, you know, measuring that is a big red flag. Okay. Now, the biggest and most important assessment you should do before buying website is in links. This is the last element. And I say that because links are pretty difficult to have full control of, you know, their, their, their place on external websites, you know, someone who's doing outreach or doing PBN, or doing whatever other link building they were doing.

And if you don't really look at it very carefully. It's very quick sometimes to get you back after you purchase the website and the grace period is, is passed. And, and you might have graded. So links, I would say would be something that I would pay the most attention to.

Jaryd Krause (8:25)

Yeah, cool. That's great to hear. We have some pretty important due diligence lessons on auditing links. And I find because it's usually a site will have a lot of links. It's a lot of effort throughout the due diligence to really understand their backlink profile to get a good assessment on how quality it is versus non quality. And more often than not, we find a lot of the sites we look at that they just don't have the best backlink profile. But there are some options right?

There are some options to go away and do some things once you have bought a site that has an okay backlink profile, but you want to clean it up what are some of those options? I know some of those options myself personally, but I just want to hear what you know, what you would be doing if you or what you would be advising somebody if they wanted to clean up a backlink profile.

Rad Paluszak (9:21)

So, one thing that I would advise them is not to look at only one source of the information about backlinks, okay. So if you rely on Ahrefs, and the only one to perform the backlink analysis, using Ahrefs only then I would say this isn't enough. Okay. Basically, the more tools you have at your disposal, the better and more comprehensive image of the site's link profile you will have, right Obviously, Google Search Console if you have access to it or you know the can, the owner of the site can give you access to Google Search Console, which I think I'm not sure how it works with the sellers. But if I was buying website, I would always push to get Google Search Console access we do is you can see a lot of stuff that.

Jaryd Krause (10:18)

We do try our best to get Google search console access. But it's pretty norm for sellers to not give Google search console access. But are you saying the look at both different like, you could use Ahrefs? And SEMrush? And are you saying this because it's a data is a guestimation? Is an estimation from that? The reason I asked that is because a lot of people do due diligence, and they look at keywords and look at like traffic volume and stuff on an hrs. And I'm like, Guys, you don't get it. Like that's an estimation. And it's not completely accurate, whereas Google Analytics is far more accurate. So you're saying, look at the links based on multiple tools because of that, that guestimation between those tools?

Rad Paluszak (11:04)

Well, not necessarily, or not only, okay, obviously, when it comes to links, you need a lot of sources, because only Google and Google itself knows all the links that they've seen point at your website. Okay. They don't show all the links that they now have in Google Search Console. So this is another reason not to over rely or only rely on Google Search Console on its own, as well. But basically, the more tools you have the bigger picture you get.

Okay, I think there's been a blog post recently where a guy tested, however many domains in all of these tools, and, you know, the differences were, you know, pretty significant. Okay, I think a trips came up as the most accurate one, considering the link profile, but he had full control of something. But nonetheless, both seem rush, and I think he, he used majestic, they all had some additional tool links, or that Atrus hasn't seen, okay, so the more data sources you use, the more comprehensive the image you get.

And obviously, you don't really want to miss, you don't want to get into a situation where, let's say you've analyzed for the sake of its 80% of the link profile of the website. And worst rubbish is in the remaining 20%. And this is something that that can be you know, that can that can bite you on the back later down the line. Right. So, you know, more tools, better picture bigger picture, and you're going to be safer.

Jaryd Krause (13:01)

Yeah, that's great. Yeah. Cool. Thanks, man. Love that explanation. So backlinks is a big one to look at, obviously, all of them correctly and know the level of risk that's involved with them. What are some of the things that people could be doing? If they go alright, I liked the site. Everything else is ticking a lot of the boxes and the backlinks are okay, like they're its justified still worth purchasing, but they want to do some work to the backlinks in terms of cleaning it up.

What do you do suggest a bit of a backlink audit and, you know, removing some of the links like what would be a standard case scenario, and this will be a general, this will be for a general site, because I know it's going to be dependent on each site. But what would you say in a general sense would be a good course of action to take?

Rad Paluszak (13:49)

I was going to say exactly before you added that general site that obviously depends our favorite answer. But I wouldn't necessarily go in and try to start removing or disavowing links, just like that. Because, you know, on one hand, Google, obviously they claim and we as SEOs need to verify those claims that they are good at ignoring links. So you don't really know which links to ignore which ones they don't, okay, something that might look, let's say suspicious to you might not necessarily need to look so suspicious to the algorithm.

And, you know, the thing is, it's always a numbers game. Right? So, first thing I wouldn't do is I wouldn't go in and start disavowing, you know, go going crazy removing links or letting Google know that there's something happening with the backlink profile that is that is out of the ordinary, okay, because I've seen a few times over the recent A year or two new owners of the sites who bought the site went in to do a huge cleanup. And apparently Google cool didn't like it. Google didn't like it when it comes to link building. Google didn't necessarily like it when it came to, you know, completely restructuring the site.

Okay, as the saying goes, don’t fix what's not broken. Right. What I would do, though, I would probably look through the link profile and mark any links that I think are suspicious, just to have them highlighted for later, okay, if something is, you know going down, let's say the traffic is dropping, or, you know, after an update, you think there's something affecting your site, I would then look at my list of everything that I highlighted and reevaluated less than maybe then do some sort of disavow. Okay, but this is like a pre empitive activity to have a kind of like, like a snapshot of the current situation, you know, your worries, somewhere documented, because you might need it later.

Okay, another thing that I would probably do, I would also look at good links that the site has, that I definitely don't want to lose. Okay. And in case I lost them, you know, you can do it actually, simply through an alert in a trips, one that sends since you lost links. And if I did lose those links, because for example, the previous owner was paying for them every month or something, I would probably try to try to get them back. Okay, that's, that's, that's a pretty important thing. And, obviously, depending on what links you have in your link profile, because, obviously, when you're buying a website, you know, there might be some PBNs.

And I don't mean, like PBN that everyone, you know, fears and hates. But obviously people are building good PBN to support their sites. And, you know, they're not public. They're more like private blog networks. Right, as the name says. So, yeah. So, you know, they might be used only for their network. So obviously, if they sell the side that will be removing those links, right. So I would try to split those as well and try to compensate for that loss of, of Link authority.

Jaryd Krause (17:44)

Yeah, we see that actually quite common in a lot of sites where somebody has a site attached to one of their other sites, and it's in completely legitimate leanings. It's not like, you know, you know, a PBN that people are fearing it's completely legitimate. But once they purchase the site, is that are those links going to stay in place? And what would that look like?

And what's the risk to this to the owner, the new owner of the site, if they were to remove those links, and what's the, what's the backup plan, they can do continue to see, which is something that we definitely audit and consider all of those risks that level of risk, how to reduce and minimize it as soon as possible once purchasing the site, which is pretty key. So backlinks, that's really good. And so, so glad that we had a good discussion around. So you're going to say something?

Rad Paluszak (18:31)

Yeah, sorry, I think, because when you said have a contingency plan, this one more thing that is actually so obvious that I didn't even mention it. But it might be beneficial for the listeners. So every website has some sort of link velocity, which is the number of links it's getting every month. Okay, so after you purchase the website, you should try at least to maintain the velocity. Okay? Because, again, you know, once you bought it, Google will see that there's something changed, that the site isn't getting as many links as you used to get, or something and, you know, might start getting little suspicious little touchy feely on the site, and, and, you know, start looking more at it.

Right. So you should actually, you should have ready your own link plan, and just maintain at least maintain what was happening for a few months if you want to, you know, build less links, obviously, in many cases, if the site is authoritative enough, you can, although, you know, I would be careful with that, but don't do a big switch at the same time. You know, do it gradually?

Jaryd Krause (19:52)

Yeah, that’s good to know. Because it sounds like what you're saying is those people that want to sell their site a year before they sell it, or six months before they sell it, they just spend a lot of money on links and buy a big chunk of links, and then they do nothing. So that link velocity would have gone down, which would not be good compounding growth for the new owner of the site. Right. So something to be aware of when doing due diligence.

Rad Paluszak (20:16)

Yeah, of course. I mean, honestly, I think, you know, due diligence on its own is, is not only looking at the websites that you're attempting to purchase, but also looking at the strategy that is yours, after you bought the site. Okay, and this is quite often how we approach that, because we have clients who buy sites, because they just want to milk them. Okay, but there's a lot of people who book by size, so just keep developing them and keep growing them.

Okay. And my opinion is that when you're thinking about buying sites, obviously, if you're not just having it for a few months, or flipping it or whatever, I mean, even if you want to flip the site afterwards, you already should be thinking about your strategy, right. So have your link plan, or at least, at least linked plan ready for the site have some, some strategy in terms of the optimization in terms of the content, at least a draft, okay, because obviously, you can analyze it in more depth and, you know, refine it after you purchase the site, because obviously, you wouldn't want to invest too many resources, you know, building strategy for a site that you don't end up buying.

But have something have a draft plan, have some sort of backup plan, if, you know, in case something goes wrong, you know, do good, diligent due diligence, and, and you're maximizing your chances of not getting burned.

Jaryd Krause (22:01)

Yeah, even if somebody was thinking about wanting to milk the site, you'd still want to have a growth plan put in place, so you can grow it and milk more from the site, and then still sell it at a higher price, you don't just like think it's bad practice to just buy something and let it decay, which is a massive shame for the business. And for everybody else, even the users, you know, coming to the sites, it's a shame to see so.

Rad Paluszak (22:28)

But surprisingly, I've seen it a few times where the new owner only wanted to sign because it was making, I don't know, six or 10 grand a month. And they were like, Okay, so I'm going to sit on it for 10 months, or, a year, and then sell it for whatever I'm going to get later, right. But unfortunately, especially in recent years, when Google is very active with its updates, you know, it's not easy not to have a plan, as you said, if you don't work in something, it's very likely it's going to decay. And you're not going to have an ROI on this. Right. So then, what's the point?

Jaryd Krause (23:10)

I had that happen to me, I left a content site for over a year. And, I did okay, and then eventually just started like going down. I was like, Okay, there's some work that needs to be done here. So we really had to roll up our sleeves.

I was going to ask about another question about backlinks later in our discussion, but whilst we're on it, when people do have a plan in terms of growing backlinks, and part of that might be buying backlinks Where do people go wrong when they're buying backlinks? For example, metrics that they might be looking at and thinking it's just I just need links with this DR. What is you know, where are people going wrong by not understanding the as much as they should, or knowing how having an education around what should be what a good backlink actually should look like before they go away and purchase because a lot of people will get taken advantage of right? There's so many companies that will sell just links that have this der but no traffic.

Rad Paluszak(24:05)

Yeah, Definitely. And that question is actually very complex. And not only complex, because it's difficult overall to assess an individual link, because you have to take a few a few things into consideration that I'm going to explain in a second. But I think this is the bigger issue. When assessing links. Everyone has their own different opinion about quality of links and what quality entails.

Jaryd Krause (24:41)

Yeah, just like every SEO thought process around like the disavow backlinks and the backlink building strategy and content creation is everybody's Yeah, its cool. It's good though. It's good that you can we can listen to all these different SEOs and make our own assumptions. So I will definitely take that in consideration, right? Because, yeah, we're respectful.

Rad Paluszak (25:05)

Yeah, look. So I've seen people who say, you know, any link is a good link, especially if it's free. Which I partly agree with that because, you know, every signal to Google, this is a signal to go, right. But I've also seen people will say, Oh, yeah, now you can't even ask for links, because, you know, Google might get pissed off. But I think, you know, and this is what we do. This is what we believe in, the truth is somewhere in the middle.

Okay, So our process is usually to, obviously, look at DR which is just an industry standard, that allows you to somewhat understand the authority of the site, obviously, DR you can pump, which is its easy. There are a gazillion offers on Fiverr, where they will just pump and usually dump your DR. So together with DR we actually look at the ratio of inbound links versus DR and that tells us you know, if there's, for example, if there's 3000 referring domains and DR is on the let's say, 40, then that's an indication that this car might not be necessarily of high quality and or authority. Okay, we use another, let's say, twin metric that we also look at, which is referring domains versus backlinks, the number of, of individual backlinks.

And that tells us for example, if a site gets a lot of site wide links, because obviously, then there's only one referring domain, but might be 1000s of, of individual backlinks. Okay. And, obviously, these are the metrics that you can get from H refs. And I think it would be too easy or, or at least too easy to manipulate and too easy for Google to actually be smarter than that. So another thing that we look at this ad is actually the site itself, if it looks legitimate, if it has like a contact page that has more than just a form or an email address, if it has some about us pages, or something that indicates that it's a more or less legitimate site.

Okay, obviously, you know, I've worked with many affiliates who, who hide their identity behind sites behind the site, and they would even have it verified in Google My Business. So obviously, everything is, is manageable in terms of faking, right, you can fake pretty much everything. But if you think about it, you know, let's say, Google looks at the site, and it checks all the boxes, right? The quality is good, the content on the site is good. It's not, you know, generating tons of content on it.

And every single post has like five outbound links to different domains, which is, by the way, not a thing that we look at. But from Google's perspective, what's the difference if the site is legitimate, is provided provides value to the internet to the users. What’s the difference between PBN or you know, at TechCrunch website? Right. Obviously, there's a big brand behind it, but you know, if you're, thinking about growing site, even if it's your PBN, you can actually build it into being a well-respected, let's say, niche site. That is nothing but the PBN, right? And, you know, I don't see anything wrong and getting a link from a site like this.

Jaryd Krause (29:16)

Right? Yeah, I like it a lot. And I guess sometimes people will hold. And this will be, I don't know if it's a mistake, but sometimes we will, people will hold more value in a site that has a big brand and a big der and all that sort of stuff, versus something that's so within their niche, say they're in the fishing space, and they're getting something a link from Tech Crunch versus like, one of the biggest Fisher people, fisherman fisherwoman in the States or the world.

Obviously, I would be trying to go for a link that's very in the niche because that's going to send authority and traffic our way for within that niche plus, yeah, the traffic there, so I don't know it. It's obviously that's Going to be dependent on the link from, you know, TechCrunch and, and the Fisher person, but I think a lot of people may not see Val or just see the DR and the big brand and go for that rather than knowing that it may actually be better for the user of that link coming from that site to come to your site, rather than somebody going from TechCrunch to a phishing site.

Rad Paluszak (30:22)

Yeah, I mean, that's, spot on. I mean, I wouldn't say no to a link from BBC or Tech Crunch, obviously. Right. But if I have a niche site about kayaking, or fishing, and you know, I get linked from the fellow niche sites in kayaking about kayaking or, or fishing, then that's, that's golden, right? That's probably the best. The best link relevance you can you can get towards your site. Okay, What one thing, one thing I would I would distinguish here is, why are you getting that link?

Okay, because quite often, if you get a link from something big, something with a lot of traffic, like TechCrunch, if we're using this example, now, then you're probably going to get a lot of traffic from that link to. Okay. So, you know, from SEO perspective, I think it's actually pretty difficult to measure how much a link from TechCrunch is going to bring you. Like, generally, you know, you're going to get traffic you're going to get, you know, you're dry, probably hate for the roof. You know, you’re going to get a lot of trust and authority.

But in terms of pure SEO, all of these things are somewhat difficult to measure. Okay. So if you're getting a link from a phishing site, and it's, you know, relevant from the article that is relevant to your article and has great, has a great anchor text, then you're definitely you're definitely going to feel that link. Okay. Whereas TechCrunch, quite often, it's only a domain name or a brand name. Right. But again, you know, depends what you get this link for, right? What's the purpose?

If it's, if the purpose is building trust, building your brand name, or getting traffic, then obviously, TechCrunch is better when this link is, you know, about getting niche relevance, getting trust, within the niche? And for purely SEO, SEO slash ranking purposes, then the link from a phishing site might be better for you just to highlight that? I wouldn't say no to neither of them.

Jaryd Krause (32:51)

Yeah, is they've got their own pros and cons, right? Like, I think about the intent of the traffic coming from each of these links, for example, the intent of the traffic is from the fishing site to your own fishing site is going to be a lot higher than the intent, say, from a tech site to your fishing site. And that's a very general statement, because there might be a lot of people that are in the tech space that love fishing as well.

But more so I would put more weight in the intense for coming from fishing to fishing, and then it's come back to us being dependent, right? Like it depends on depends on the length depends on the traffic and on the site depends on so many things.

Rad Paluszak (33:35)

It's interesting that you mentioned that, because another thing that we quite often take for granted is or as SEOs we take for granted in terms of Google is trust, okay? I even you know, when I was talking about TechCrunch lingo, I said, you know, you're going to get a lot of trust and blah, blah, blah, but this trust is purely from the, from the, from the search engine perspective, okay, this is like, this imaginary thing that we measure, you know, trust authority, you know, DR and things like this, but, you know, referring to what you said about, about the very, very niche site in the same niche that you are, you know, this is where you're going to, you can get people's trust.

Okay, on TechCrunch you know, everyone knows, they publish a lot of stuff that is not necessarily relevant to their sites anymore, you know, some reviews or epilators or something, or some other, you know, technical bubble and tools and little things and you're like, you know that they publish it for, you know, affiliate money for whatever ads and stuff like that right promoted content. Okay. So you're like, Yeah, okay, they land on the side. So don't take crunchy, my bite or my might not. But if you're very in the niche, if you're doing research as a user, if you're, you know, looking at fishing girls or whatever, and you're stumbling upon an article that references something else that is on a very niche site, you know, your trust is probably is probably higher. But again, like human trust, not search engine trust.

Jaryd Krause (35:33)

Yeah. Which is very valuable to have human trust. Because that can equal if you've got affiliate site can equal more affiliate sales, it's easy to think about, and I just need some backlinks for my site. But I don't think people really go into the depth in the thinking that we have just in this discussion on Route, unlike the quality of the links, and what actually makes them quality outside of just DR. And just pure brand behind that that link.

That's pretty important, you know, people might be able to pay less in a in a backlink building, campaign, getting strong links with higher trust from people in the space. Rather than going after I want something from Forbes, I want something from bbc.edu sort of link, it's really, really cool to think about. So thanks for bringing that up. And having a breaking that down for us. I want to switch gears to tech SEO.

Rad Paluszak(36:26)

Just quickly maybe go on. Sorry, before we switch gears, just two very quick tips for the audience. So in our opinion, this is we built into our QA process for all the links, there's two things that you can look at fairly quickly that obviously other than DR and all of the other things that are already mentioned, but are very reliable to tell you if this link will count towards what Google thinks about that link, or if it's going to give you a pop. Okay. And first thing is looking at the site's traffic.

Or if you're doing a link linking session, at the pages traffic that is going to link to you. Because, you know, I know there was a study by a trust, where they said that whatever it was it like 90% of the internet isn't getting any traffic. So you know, thinking about that, if you are getting links from the 10%, or however many was in a study of the sites that are getting traffic, then obviously, this is probably something that Google will notice, right? It's a simple calculation.

If Google thinks that the page or the site is good enough to rank it, then it probably thinks is good enough for it to link to you. Right. So probably this thing is going to be good. Another thing is, we try to, obviously, depending on the niche, because for example, in gambling niche, you can't get links, without, like, right for us advertisement on the sites, and stuff like that. But we try whenever possible, we try to avoid any websites that are, you know, directly advertising, hey, we're selling links, a, you know, right for us, you know, we get you give us article, usually also money or whatever, and they're going to get the link back. Right. So we try to avoid these, because it's like, Google looks at it, and it knows that they're probably selling links, right?

Jaryd Krause (38:42)

Yeah. Love it. I love that. Thanks for those tips. That's great. So coming into the tech SEO, I know that we're going to go deep into a few of these. So maybe we just stick to a few. But what know when somebody either buys a site or their very own a site, what are some of the most common tech SEO fixes a site usually needs? I know, it's, again, dependent on the site. But what are some like generally common ones that you see that people should be aware of? And there could be like, two, three, I'm sure there's a lot, but let's stick with two to three for now. And we'll go into those. And then if we need us can we can jump on more?

Rad Paluszak (39:14)

Okay. So, first one, I would, I would always look at myself is index management. Okay, so basically looking at, you know, doing the site search on Google for your domain, looking with Google has indexed, especially paying attention to what Google has indexed at, you know, towards the end of what it's showing you in the index, right? Because this a few things, obviously, you know, it will be difficult for me to go into how to fix some of the issues that you might find there because it's like plenty, but a few things that you should definitely pay attention to.

So if you have an average sized website, let's say, I don't know 100 blog posts. For example, right? If you look at what's Google's index, and you know, you have 100 100 blog posts, you know, we have additional pages like, obviously homepage and about us contact and things like this plus category pages, or some other Hub Pages, you can estimate that, you know, what Google should see in the indexes, let's say, up to double of W, the number of your articles. Okay? So if you look at Site Search, and you see this a lot more, for example, then you already know that Google is indexing something that it shouldn't be indexing. And very common problem. Within the indexation is tags. And I don't know why.

But most websites that I've worked with ever, is when doing tagging in WordPress, the right way, because they were either going too granular or too general. And then, you know, when they go too granular, then they end up having tag pages that only have like one or two articles on them. And obviously, that's just, you know, straight up thin content. Or if they go too narrow, general, they, they end up having the same, the same tag or tags with Tag pages with the same articles in them, or tag pages that correspond with the category pages. And then what's the point having them at all? Okay, so I would definitely look at that. Another thing is, when you're looking at what's Google index, obviously, I'm mainly mentioning the site search on Google itself.

But you know, one thing that I'm also, let's say obsessed with that also reveals what Google has in the index is Google Search Console, but I'll leave it on the side because this there's a lot of help and the Internet around, you know, what all these things that were crawled but not indexed and stuff like that mean? So let's stick to the site search itself. So let's say, again, you have those 100 article pages and one of those that you definitely want to rank and is very important for you, because say it's an affiliate site, and you have high commission on is showing in the site search on the fourth page. Okay, so that's a clear indication that Google has a problem with that, or most likely has a problem that if looking at Site Search, you know, in general, Google should rank those pages that shows you by what it thinks is the quality weight on those pages, right.

So most of them, in most cases, would have your homepage as number one, and then you would have your second and third and so on most popular slash authoritative pages on the site. I think it still stems from the old PageRank metric, how they, how they rank it in the site. So obviously, if you have your important page ranked very low, when doing site search, that's an indication that you got to work on this, right, you got to either look at the content, right? There's something wrong, maybe it's over optimized, you have to look at the navigation that points towards that page, maybe you need to bring it higher, maybe you need to build more internal links towards that page, just to you know, get this page rank up within the site.

Or, or I don't know, maybe there's something else. There's a lot of things you could look at. You know, that's an indication, right. And while we're at it, you know, like I said that, for most healthy websites, your homepage would be ranked number one when you're doing site search. And don't take it as a rule of thumb, but think about it as, as a warning site. If Google is not ranking your homepage, number one, then it might indicate that there's some sort of devaluation going on. It might not. Right, but it's something to, you know, investigate for sure. You know, spend a little time on, you know, don't not obsess with but, you know, it might be indicating that there's something already brewing something that you don't want already brewing in Google, around your website.

Jaryd Krause (44:52)

When you come to take SEO. It seems like you've got a lot of work that can be done and you can get it focused in on one direction, and your app may not actually get you spending too much time and effort on that, if you go too far deep into it, it may not actually get you the best return. So it may be best to come back to some other Texas Tech SEO fixes and be like, This is what's going to allow us to move the needle more. And that'll be what those what those tasks are, will be dependent on the site, right.

But for the one that you mentioned, is, you know, page rankings and getting the unit making sure that you’re most important pages are ranked higher? And if not, how do we get them higher? What does that look like in terms of do we need to get more, you know, fix the traffic up internal links, maybe backlinks to them, what will be another big one that people should be probably looking at when they go in and the IRR when it fix them fixing things?

Rad Paluszak(45:48)

Oh, probably, I would probably look at Page Speed Okay, and don't get me wrong, I'm not obsessing about Page Speed. Because I think, you know, a lot of these tools, they're not necessarily actually measuring the real page speed of the page. So the one that actually the actual user sees, but obviously, Page Speed is nothing that you want to neglect.

And, well, surprisingly, especially when you're on WordPress, Page Speed is actually a fairly easy thing to, you know, get higher, you know, fix, implement, you know, install plugins, like WP Rocket, for example, nitrile pack, tamper with the settings, you know, use, for example, Cloud flare with, you know, auto magnification, and rocket loader, if you've got a lot of JavaScript, hopefully, it's not going to break anything. But overall, you know, those, those plugins are, are there for you to use, they've got a lot of settings that you can tamper with play around with a lot, but not that many that, you know, an average user or an average site owner cannot actually, you know, take and play around with.

And I think, you know, quite often, just changing a few things and you can get much better page speed. And, by the way, speaking of Page Speed, and plugins, one thing that Page Speed definitely and very rigorously looks at is image optimization. Okay, and WordPress, tell all this, like, bunch of plugins that you can use the old grades I myself use short pixel, you know, on fully automated turns your images into web P format, which might sometimes be a problem with the Apple users. Because not all safaris support WP. But I've tested a few plugins.

And according to my tests, short pixel was the best when it comes to the optimization, even if you're not using those next gen formats, like what P. And you're just doing the simple optimization. Jpg to optimize JPG short pixel is always giving me the best results in terms of the how much the file was lighter. And the best thing about all of this is implemented using few plugins, and its working side wide. So you know, one thing you're spending, let's say, a couple of hours on this playing around, and testing and improving, but it's going to benefit your entire site. It's going to roll over all of your pages.

Jaryd Krause (48:55)

Awesome. Love it. Guys, check out that plugin. Also Rad, thank you so much for coming on this. I feel like we're just scratching the surface. So we might have to get you back on and have another chat if you're open to it. But where can we send people to find out more about you and what you're doing?

Rad Paluszak (49:11)

So you can find me on social media with Rad Paluszak as my handle. Pretty becoming more active on all of them LinkedIn, Twitter, come find me you can visit our website huskyhamster.com. Where we're offering free link building consultations, and obviously link building packages and individual links as well. So come here, say hello. I don't bite. And I'm very happy to help everyone who needs.

Jaryd Krause (49:44)

That. Yeah, guys, as you can tell, just from having read on here. He knows his stuff. So definitely get in touch with him. There'll be links to that in the show notes. Right. Thank you so much for coming on everyone.