Beyond DR: Smarter SEO Signals You’re Not Using Yet with Shaurya Jain

If you look at those websites, the quality ones are investing in their content, their back links and their tech, the the tech on the website. So I like to use this tool called builtwith. What it does is it shows you how much money is the website spending on its tech. Let's say it's spending like $5,000. I've seen a correlation. The higher the number as reported by buildwidth, the higher is the legitimacy of the website at least in terms of I do in fact see that it

is a real company. I've seen this correlation by going through like hundreds of website. So what I did was I did a small scale study where I studied a lot of websites of a thousand websites for 10 different keywords. And what I noticed is I set the threshold at $120 per year as the text and I noticed that websites that had a text spend of less than $120, they ranked average position of 62.

And the websites that had a text spend of more than $120, they had an average position of 51. So there was a 11 point difference on average. So that gives us some idea that yes, websites that do spend more, they are also probably investing in their content and backlinks. So you like if you're thinking as an investor while buying a link, you want to be on a website that's investing in itself.

I'm John Wright and you're listening to AffiliateBI, a business intelligence and affiliate marketing podcast brought to you by Stap. Stap. Stap. [Music] [Music] And I think if you're good to go, let me know. Yeah, we good to go. Welcome to the AffiliateBI podcast. Today we're chatting with Shia Jane who's the founder of herculeanseo.com and we've known each other for quite some time going way back meeting in the Facebook group called the super cool Dan Ray White hat link building.

There's a couple more keywords in there but Shia welcome to the show. Hi. Hi John. How are you? I'm great and I'm happy to chat with you because it's it goes without saying we've been in the link building space for a long time. I've not been living and breathing it as you have. So, I know you just before we recording we started talking about what you've been up to.

So, I want to pass it back to you to say what have you been up to and you told me that you've been pivoting back into link building. So, you tried a bunch of different SAS things and it sounds like you've got something new to share with us. Yeah. Yeah. So, I've been noticing this trend a lot that people are focusing a lot on a couple of metrics.

Basically like earlier back in the day it was MOS GA now it's HSG gr and it's I to explain how this is backfiring at us SEOs I like to tell this story of the Cobra effect so what's the Cobra effect let me first share that with you so back in the 1800s the Britishers were ruling India and they saw that there was a big snake problem in the streets like there were too many snakes in the streets So what they did was they introduced a reward

program where every time you brought in a dead snake you got rewarded. So people started initially like everything starts with great intentions and then it goes to So people started breeding snakes just for the purpose of killing them later and then claiming the reward. So as the result of this program that was intended to reduce the number of snakes, it actually resulted in an increase in the number of snakes.

So how it relates to SEO? So basically we SEOs really reward highdrites when it comes to link building. So whenever we see that hey this is 70DR website, people go crazy. Let's buy a link from this. It must be a really cool strong website. If it has 5,000 traffic, let's get a link from this. But what web masters have figured out is how to game DR and traffic.

They have started like they can just go to Fiver and order of $50 gig and just increase their DR from 20 to 70 in just two weeks. And same is the case with traffic. They can use bots to to emulate traffic and that shows up as real traffic in hres. But if you look closely into the keywords they are ranking for but they're ranking for they are pretty much made up keywords or like the brand name of the website and the website is just like a

random website and 3,000 people aren't searching for that website for in reality it's just bots. Google in fact has a patent called uh let uh let uh let me systems and methods for detecting click spam. Those websites are not fooling Google for sure. Google can see click spam being done via bots both to websites and to the ad ads on the ad network. I'm pretty sure those websites are not in the good books of Google.

And if you buy links from such websites, you are also on their naughty list. probably if you get too many of such links. So yeah, so what I propose is a different method. Now you use different kind of metrics. Some are from different SEO tools and some are more like you got to dig deep, dig into the data and then figure out like if they pass the test or not.

So, it's a 30-step process, but uh later in this podcast, I'm going to share just eight of the eight easy and important steps with you guys so that you can at least put some of it to use right away. I wasn't expecting that Cobra story at first. It was like, okay, we're going to get rewarded by reducing them. But I that's hilarious that it did the opposite.

Of course, you give someone an opportunity to game the system. This is the world of Google, especially with like building links, fake DR link sales. Yeah, I just get annoyed all the time with all the spam that comes into my inbox going, "Hey, you're looking for this link." I had one where obviously we know that helpful content updates have smashed a lot of sites. So, yeah, sites that were actually ones you would consider buying links from have actually, in my opinion, they've disappeared because if they've

lost the traffic, like I'm interested in the traffic as well as that. So knowing that people can fake the traffic, but let's pretend. What else are you looking for as signals? What are some of the things that you go, okay, how am I going to know that this is a site that's worth me getting? Yeah, that's a great question. Things that I wanted to share with your audience today.

So, let me start with that. One thing that I've noticed is that the quality websites they if you look at those websites the quality ones are investing in their content their back links and their tech the the tech on the website. So I like to use this tool called build with what it does is it shows you how much money is the website spending on its tech.

Let's say uh let's say it's spending like like like $5,000. I've seen a correlation. The higher the number as reported by buildwidth, the higher is the legitimacy of the website at least in terms of I do in fact see that it is a real company. I've seen this correlation by going through like hundreds of website. So what I did was I did a small scale study where I studied a lot of websites of a thousand websites for 10 different keywords.

And what I noticed is I set the threshold at $120 per year as the text and I noticed that websites that had a text spend of less than $120, they ranked an average of 61 on position number 62. they had an average position of 62 and the websites that had a text spend of more than $120, they had an average position of 51. So there was a 11 point difference on average.

So that gives us some idea that yes, websites that do spend more, they are also probably investing in their content and backlinks. So you like if you're thinking as an investor while buying a link, you want to be on a website that's investing in itself. Yeah, that's actually interesting. I've never thought about it that way where it's I know some of the bigger gambling affiliate sites I know they spend a lot of money.

Sometimes you I don't use builtwith all the time, but I just use I'll view the source code and I'm like what are they using? Are they actually doing ABsplit testing or do they have any CRO tools behind it? That actually would be very insightful for affiliate managers. If you're an affiliate manager and you've got this affiliate that says, "Hey, we have all this amazing traffic." And they go to hrefs and it's all fake.

I think you're going to want more signals. Yes. Yes. All right. So, moving on to some other methods that affiliate managers, affiliate sites, and even like other business types should be looking at while getting links. One is you got to look at the link acquisition velocity of the website. So it must be like positive net positive. So if you look at any website at any point of time it's both getting more links and losing also losing links.

So if you uh look at the net result for the last 3 months you can see if it's gaining links or losing links if you understand like what I'm trying to say that if it's as a net result it's getting more links or is it losing more links. So you want to be on websites that is getting more links as opposed to losing more links because you don't want to be on a sinking ship and the sites that are losing links especially month on month those

are sinking ships. You don't want to be on that. So that's one thing that I like to look at and in fact Google has a patent called document scoring based on link based criteria. So in this patent what they talk about is they look at every page on a website and it they mark it as tail if it's not getting any new links. So I I'm assuming that they are also doing it on a domain level that if a website is not getting new links and

just losing more and more links then it's going to dep prioritize the website in the SERs. So that's one thing. What else? So here's a interesting fact. So most people in SEO industry, they believe that HS has the biggest backlink database. database. Yeah, you would agree. I think they do, but I think there's a couple others that have it and I've heard it's maybe it's not common knowledge that the backlinks that HF shows you isn't fully complete.

I don't know if they actually purposely hide links because maybe they don't want people scraping them. I have no idea. possible. That's interesting because in my research I found out there's a this little known company. You might have probably heard about it, Link Research Tools. Yes, I know them. I haven't used them in a long time, but yeah, Kristoff Camper. Yeah. So, they have the biggest link database and I've tested it for multiple sites and they do have the receipts for it for this claim.

They have this proprietary metric called power into trust score just like Google has one just HS has one domain rating they have a power into trust score so power into trust score is one of the only SEO scores in the industry that is two-dimensional most of them are one-dimensional DR mos GA and what else yeah Samrush Samrush so these guys have tried to emulate the two metrics used by Google itself or at least Google used to use those like page rank and trust rank the Google

used to have two of those metrics. So they have tried to emulate that and they have come up with this power into trust score. So each metric power and trust is out of 10 and the power into trust score is out of 100. If either the power score is zero or the trust score is zero the net result is zero. So what I like to do is go with websites that have at least a power into trust score of one.

That means like both power and trust is at least one according to link research tools. Since and I like to believe that since they are totally focused on links as their specialtity of the tool is links. They don't have any they don't report about keywords. They not reporting about like how well your content is doing. They are just focused on links. I like to believe that their metric is accurately telling us about the link strength of a website.

That's one thing that I like to use. Another thing that I like to look for in a website is if a website has an about us page and a privacy policy page. So in Google's search quality raers guidelines they have specifically me asked their readers to look to search for the about us page for a website because it plays a big part in the E8 signals of a website and most of the websites that are built for selling links they don't give a flying about if

they look legit. They are just there to increase their DR and get the traffic to a minimum threshold of thousand and just sell as many links as possible. And even if they have an about us page, they don't give any they don't care at all about privacy policy page because the privacy policy page if you see it's more of a legal requirement and only companies that have a lot on the line, they care about complying with laws.

people like from third world countries spinning up new websites that just want to make a quick buck. They don't they are not scared of loss because they know no one's coming to catch them. So they don't care about having these pages. So it's easy to filter out lowquality websites just built for selling links with no real business behind the websites just by just seeing if there's a privacy policy page or not.

Yeah. Yeah. That that reminds me I've got a competitor that doesn't have a terms conditions or privacy policy page, but hopefully they're not watching this anyways. anyways. All right. So, what else? Yeah. So, I was actually the next thing that I'm going to share is I was quite surprised by this finding of mine. So I was looking at the traffic value of websites of 1,200 and 1,300 some websites that sell links that I know for a fact sell links and they all had some kind of

traffic going to them probably around minimum of,000 traffic and when I ran those in batch analysis in Hrefs 629 of those had a traffic value of zero. So about half of those had a traffic value of zero. What it tells me is that these websites are not ranking for anything valuable. And I don't think if they are not ranking for anything valuable, they will be able to help you rank for anything valuable yourself.

That's what I like to believe. Yeah, that's something I care about as well. It's if I believe the site has no traffic, like the things that I look for, and I'm sure you're probably going to say it very soon, is I care, do they actually have a social media channel? like multiple channels. Are they actually active on those channels? When they're not active, it's I don't hold it against them, but a more real site will actually have legit channels.

Yeah, you are absolutely correct. Although I haven't it's one of the steps in my 30-step process that I share share share with a free master class on my website, but I haven't included in my list for today. But yes, social media is definitely one giveaway. Like I said, these guest post firms, they don't care about privacy policy page, about this page or social media. They are just there to quickly rank their website and sell as many links as possible.

So that's one giveaway for sure. Yeah. I I have a quick question. One thing that I've been recommending for a bunch of gambling affiliates that are struggling to get traffic, like they're struggling to even build links because some of them don't even have a link budget. I'm recommending to them, it's not just social media, but I'm saying if you've got a channel where you can do a podcast and you've got no competition, you can be number one in that channel.

And I actually think those are strong link signals. Would you say that's something else that's like one of these real signals that could actually be an indicator that hey this site's real and Google might respect it a bit more? Yeah, if we see there was this interesting so I'll share two insights that I have regarding this. First is I went to this conference in Chiang Mai in Thailand and the guy over one of the guys over there they shared that when you send traffic to your

website from from any other place other than Google like via ads or via social media those pages started ranking higher and some of the pages even stick on those new rankings. So, you got to have a way. You need to have a way to send traffic to your website via something outside of Google like doing it from a podcast makes sense. And the other thing is uh MOS did a study I guess around one year ago where they they have a new metric called brand authority.

So the old one is domain authority, a new one is brand authority. So they saw that websites that had a higher brand authority they ranked basically they rank better after the SEO update. Building a brand is definitely important and how you build a brand is basically how much mind like how much space are you having in a user's like a person's mind. So content is one of the best ways to grab a space in someone's mind.

So yes, I'll definitely say that doing a podcast is very important especially I don't know if you suggest audio podcast but I suggest video podcast. Yeah. Yeah. Audio into because you can get 20 links in different channels. Always use them. You know, I think most my audience is still consuming this podcast on audio, but there's it would be a crime to not do this with video. Yes, it takes about the same amount of time and you get more reach.

YouTube suggests to the right people. It's algo is really smart. So yeah, that's why even I have started this YouTube channel because I realized that YouTube is very powerful. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Yes. Apologies for interrupting, but I just got more questions because I think this rabbit hole we're going down is I'm super interested. So, if we're looking for realness of getting links and we're also trying to understand that Google's looking for brand signals/ authority, would you say that newsletters are another signal?

Think about top ranking websites. Usually, they'd have a newsletter because they want to own their audience. They want to capture them and they want to send that user back. So, would you say that's another strong metric? And also a smart thing to do from an SEO perspective of saying hey when Google sees that people are coming back whether it's Chrome data or whatever it is these things are like it's bas you're stacking wins here.

Yes. As long as people are coming back to the website I would say yes it's it's going to be helpful. If it's just native in the email itself then probably not. But if they are sending the people back I I do vaguely remember some sort of stat around this that it does help if you the more the people come back to your website the more people search for your brand name.

So yeah you have to do it. My suggestion would be to just stick to one channel be it your newsletter be it YouTube and just keep at it. Okay. Yeah, there's just way too much to absorb there. But I actually think newsletters are like I'm actually trying to build a tool that understands affiliate sites linking to operators and I'm trying to go what are the strong signals because we know HRES can be manipulated.

So I wanted to know is this an interesting asset because if I'm an affiliate manager, I actually want to know that they actually have a database, you know, because if they don't have a newsletter, they don't have socials, they don't have privacy policy, everything you said makes sense. like how do you feel that they're not spending extra money on the $20 a month Cloudflare plan? Don't know.

Yeah. Yeah. All right. So, basically a tool to like assess the quality of the affiliate website. Yeah. But I think there's ways of doing it. One is using thirdparty data like chefs and link research tools. But I think the secondary part is once you know those sites, you have to scan them. So it's like building your own built width. But taking builtwith and going okay built with is just analyzing the text stack.

I need to know what emails are on the site. I need to know the social channels and I need to know do they have a newsletter. That's cool. Okay. Yeah. More qualitative data. Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense. Do you want me to share more? Yeah, of course. Don't stop. All right. All right. Let me share with you guys how to see if a website is manipulating its traffic.

So you put it into hrefs and you go to the top pages report. Now if you see any of the following two keywords then the traffic is definitely being manipulated. First is if it's getting a lot of brand traffic. So this website called naturalpluck.com it's a really some random blog and HR shows that it has 2400 people searching for its brand name. So if you can't like really associate if this kind of website is getting this kind of search like brand searches if it doesn't add

up then it's being manipulated and the other one being if there's any keyword like XYZ PQRS 7 Edge these things. Yes. So everywhere then yeah I don't know how they are doing it. I've heard there are a couple of tools like Babylon traffic and I don't know how they do it but yes it's an easy tool to build unfortunately and it's I'm surprised we haven't endured more of this but here we are.

Yes. So that's one way to stay away from these websites. Please guys look at the traffic. It just takes 2 minutes more and it's going to save you probably 100 bucks that you spend on the link. And with the how to how to detect manipulated DR, you go to HS again. What you do is you look at the domain rating graph of the website. You switch on the last 5 years report.

And in the last 5 years report if you see at any point of time the DR goes from like a DR has a 20 point increase within a week or two weeks then it's been manipulated. I have used these gigs myself and there's always a hockey stick growth within a very short period like one week or two weeks. If there's hockey stick growth at any point of time then DR is manipulated and you are just overpaying for links.

And one last thing that I would share with you guys is Samrush they used to be like this mediocre tool but I really like their new metric. It's called authority score and it takes into account the both the website's backlink profile strength website's current traffic and the spaminess of the backlink profile. So if we don't even consider the spam spaminess of the website if we just see the backlink strength and the organic traffic it has some algorithm that computes a single score.

So how this helps is people use GR a lot but DR doesn't tell you about how much traffic the website is getting according to its strength but what Semrush does is it takes into account if a website with this much backlink authority is getting more than average of its weight or less than average of its like if it's yeah doing better than the average or worse than the average according to its backlink profile.

in terms of the traffic it's pulling. So that's one quick way to assess the quality of links. If you're really short on time, you don't even have the time to look at both traffic and domain rating, just go with Simrush authority score. So those are some ways that I think you can put to use right away. Yep. Let me know if you have any questions for me.

Of course. So, would you say it's not a good idea to do like a link building campaign, whether you're doing it in-house and earning it or you're paying for links and then you just stop and then couple months later you start again. Is this like a bad thing to avoid? Do you just want to be like try to have this weird flatline velocity where okay, it's going to go up but just try to be consistent.

Would you say that's more important or does it matter? I as long as there's some kind of baseline backlinks that you are getting either naturally by doing it manually you are good to go because digital PR links you tend to get a lot of links in a short amount of time that doesn't hurt the website like it doesn't hurt the website that they got a lot of links in one month and then they stopped getting that many links so I don't think it's bad as long

as you are doing at le I think most of the websites get some sort of links naturally as a baseline they pick it up naturally so I don't think it's a bad practice okay so you obviously know what we do like stats strong cuz you actually gave us some really good help critiquing our kind of like our calls to action so what would you do in our situation as we've got an okay DRDA we've got some good links we're still building more but a lot of

it's been natural. What would your advice be to us and go how do we what's what should our link building strategy be? Okay. [Music] [Music] So, how have you looked into link exchanges so far? I've done some of them. I'm actually planning to do more of them, but I'm trying to do it from a for a different reason. I always like links, but I'm actually sometimes a bit more interested in the traffic behind the link.

For example, if it's a website, I'm going to give an example like Rev Panda. So, Rep Panda does they do SEO, they do content translation. So, they focus more in the eye gaming space. They have a pretty good reputation. So, they have real traffic. For me, I'm actually in this situation, I want the link because it's a signal from Google. I'm actually more interested that I actually believe that the users that would click through it, let's say it's an article talking about affiliate marketing, that to

me is they have my audience. So, I my my top choice always is my audience. I have done some links where and I actually like doing them. It's I go with times of Malta. So I try to make an article that's maybe useful. So I will go all over the fence when it's top ofunnel. I like middle of funnel and I still also like doing bottom of funnel.

So I like mixing it up but I try to avoid top ofunnel. Like I don't care to write about what's affiliate marketing. No. But what the things that we do as a company, we do things like postbackic variables. There's actually not a lot of really good content written about it. So, I'm actually interested in probably diving a bit deeper and having people discover our content outside of us before coming in.

Yeah, that makes sense. In your space, so you are in the B2B space basically. So, in the B2B space, link exchanges work the best. They are the highest quality links out there. And you just what I would say you do is you take links from guests farms. You give the those to your link partners and get the highquality links from the link partners to your own website.

So first of all there would be less of a footprint and you are basically getting $300 link for $50 because a guosome would sell you the link for $50. But a link from a legitimate website that's like worth a lot. So that's the best way I would say for you guys. If you had prompted me, if you have given me some more time, I would have come up with more.

Yes. And a budget too. budget too. No, this you could B2B link building is pretty cheap, but it's not very scalable. Link exchanges. It's not very scalable. Like after you get 100 or 150 links, you'll probably exhaust your pool of prospects. Yeah. But I don't know about you, but when I ran affiliate sites and casino affiliate sites, getting links was like you almost always had to pay for them.

In B2B, you can actually earn them. Like we've done some where I think Harrow shut down, so we used Harrow back in the day and it's like we had some pretty awesome links. And I actually think for what we do as a company, we have an immense opportunity to get so many links. So we can talk about SAS, we can talk about affiliate marketing, we can get links from affiliate programs, affiliate websites themselves as potential customers.

Like I think if we were to spend some time mapping out what is a link building plan, I think we could probably build something out that's not just amazing, but then the second part is all right, what are you going to prioritize and what's going to be executed? I suppose you guys have a lot of proprietary data. We actually have Yeah. quite a bit. Like we don't see the data of our own customers, but we actually are aggregating lots of really weird stuff that no one's

really talking about. To give you an example, we just publish we have integrations for about 1500 gambling affiliate programs and we have them broken down by software. So, we actually have this list and every month we're like we're actually updating it daily, but every month we curate the list and people are telling us all the time they're actually going to our website to get this list and they're trying to download, they're trying to scrape it and in some situations we actually just straight up email it

to them. They're like they're so grateful for it. So, when we start publishing the stuff on LinkedIn, we've heard people, they've told us, they're like, "I screenshotted your post and sent it to our Slack team." So that might not be ending up all the time on like a blog post, but that actually has happened. We've had one software called My Affiliates, and they basically said according to our database, they were the most used gambling affiliate program software in i Gaming, which I believe is true.

So they basically did an article on it and when they published it, 20 other industry news covered it. Like they all just covered it at the same time. We only got like two or three links out of it, but we had about 20 brand mentions. Like every site mentioned our brand which I'm happy about because if people didn't know what Statron is, we're all about the what is Statone?

Yeah. Search for it. Yes. Yes. Yeah, that makes sense. If you are more proactive about it and could make a story out of the data that you have. Yeah, that's a good idea. Then you and then reach out to like the industry publication, the general news outlets. then you could run a successful outreach uh like a digital PR campaign. I wouldn't put it in the category of link building.

For me, link building is because with link building you can get links to your target pages with but you have to pay for those. But with uh digital PR, you can get really high quality links for free but you don't have to pay for those. Okay. I differentiate between those and I would suggest you guys do link exchanges and digital PR. I don't get into this thing paid links that what's that's what I do because since you are boost I suppose you don't have a lot

of budget. Um it's we're slowly building a budget for SEO. So it's not like we're zero budget but for a couple years we've had no budget. We've had I mean in terms of ROI because you go to a web master they see betting casino on your website the alarms go off and they'll start charging you the casino price the they charge different price for like linking out to casino websites as opposed to normal websites.

So you'll end up paying more for no reason. At least for us they don't necessarily do that cuz they see us and they're like okay this is pure sass. So they don't always do that. Our audience is gambling affiliates and we need to go where are they? So I think what you're saying is a good point. We've got digital PR over here. We've got certain types of link exchanges and we can put that in a box because there's five different ways of doing link exchanges.

And then there's targeting pages that are actually valuable to us. Like we have a dynamic variables feature. We're launching a postback feature. So when people are looking for like how do I connect an API to this program? We need to start planting the seeds of content as links going outside. Yeah. Either you have ideas for that or we'll talk after the call and we'll see we'll see how we can formulate that and be good to do some work.

Yes, definitely. All right. I have no more questions, but I'm going to have more after the call. Yeah, I'm super interested in the stuff you're working on. There's actually a lot of amazing ideas here. I think a lot of these ideas could actually be taken over to affiliate managers and I think some of these insights should be used by them. There there needs to be training on this.

So Shia, I want to pass back to you. How can people get a hold of you? You guys can head over to herculines.com if you want to learn more about my method. It's called the fractionate link building method. There's a free training on the website. And if you want to connect, you can connect with me on Twitter. John is probably going to link to it. I will.

Yes. Okay. So I'll do that. And then that's in going to be in the show notes. Sharia, thank you so much for doing this. really good catching up with you. Thank you very much for having me. Thank you for tuning in to the AffiliateBI podcast. I'd like to take this time to ask for a small favor to leave a rating and review wherever you listen to your podcast.

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