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Matt Diggity

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How to Block Google Fonts and More: A Paranoid Schizophrenic’s Guide to Tin Hat SEO

Most folks are familiar with the various types of SEO. We have black hat SEO, where people are using techniques like content automation, backlinking software, hacked sites, and sneaky redirects in order to climb the ranks. On the other side of the equation, we have our white hatters, who like to stay within the guidelines of Google’s terms of service. Somewhere in the middle, we have the grey hats, who dabble in a bit of both. But, you may not have heard about the ever elusive band of SEO’s called the “tin hats.”  In a nutshell, tin hat SEO has a lot less to do with actual “ranking” then it does with “generally being freaked the hell out about everything crashing down in a single instant and ruining everything you’ve setup for the past year.”  Read about the origin of the term “tin hat” here. Tin hats are often the butt of jokes in the SEO community.  They’re made fun of because of their lack of actual progress in ranking and earning due to the immense amount of time spent geeking-out about Google reading their emails, tracking their IPs, and discovering their foot prints. Laugh as you might, but we all have a little tin hat inside of us.  I know I do. Read More

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An SEO’s Guide to Flipping Websites: 9 Essential Steps

How would you like to collect 25 months of your website’s income right now?  Sounds pretty sweet, right? You can potentially cash-in on over two years of net income from your website and all you have to do is sell that website. You might be wondering… why would I sell a website when it is almost completely hands off? After all, at the end of the day, SEO can be pretty passive once you have the content, the web design, and the profitable rankings to support your site. So why would you let something like this go?  Let’s explore that. We’re about to take a look at the benefits of selling websites and by the end of this article, I’m going to make sure you know how to make sure you get the maximum value from your flips. Read More

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How to Properly Track and Manage Your Backlinks

I am absolutely O.C.D. when it comes to tracking, measuring, and recording data.  One of the best skills you can have in SEO is to be able to stay efficiently organized.  Only by keeping track of what actions you’ve taken, will you be effectively able to make correct decisions about what to do next. Famous management consultant Peter Drucker once said: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”   I couldn’t agree more. Unfortunately, not everyone has the same nerdy obsession I have over collecting data.  Every week, I perform SEO consultations for various clients.  When someone doesn’t show up with a list of the links pointing to their site, I simply can’t help diagnose their offsite SEO problems.  There’s simply nothing to talk about. I decided to make this post to help make your (and my) life easier by explaining how to properly track and manage your backlinks. Read More

SEO Spotlight

SEO Spotlight: Daryl Rosser, Lior Ohayon, Joseph Elshazly

Welcome back to Episode 2 of the SEO Spotlight series.  In the last episode, we visited three SEO’s that think outside-the-box in order to tackle their problems. Being a person who appreciates creativity, I’ll be keeping up with the same theme here by interviewing three more SEOs who have made great progress in the areas of affiliate SEO, PBN, and client scaling.  You’ll learn their thought processes and find out how you can apply these same ideas to your own SEO projects. Read More

SEO Spotlight

SEO Spotlight: Jacob Kettner, Daniel Moscovitch, Michael Landau-Spiers

I was a strange child.  I always seemed to do things a bit differently than the other kids.  The habit stuck. I use four fingers to hold a pen.  I’m right-handed but left-legged.  I never wear underwear.  You should see the process I use to tie my shoes. Needless to say, I’ve always been fascinated with the various ways we can solve the same problems.  In my own SEO business, I spend a majority of my time testing.  What I’ve found is there is no cookie-cutter blueprint for success in SEO.  It’s always going to depend on your particular situation, skill set, and resources. I appreciate SEOs who can think outside-the-box; clever folk that use their intuition and do things a bit differently, allowing them to get some amazing results.  I’d like to introduce you to three of them. Read More

The REAL Reason Why Your Backlinks Don’t Work

The REAL Reason Why Your Backlinks Don’t Work

Has this ever happened to you? You send some links to your money site and wait for the result.  One week goes by… nothing.  Two weeks… still flatline.   An entire month goes by and nothing has changed. Or even worse: after you send the links, you see the rankings actually drop. If you’ve ever been in this situation, you’re reading the right article.  I’m here to shed light on a commonly misinterpreted concept that can potentially help you understand why you’re not getting positive results from your backlinking efforts. This article is not about buying and setting up the right PBNs.  I’m assuming that you’ve already doing that right and that you’re testing your PBNs before you’re adding them to your network. This article is about revealing a blind spot on the topic of optimization.  I’ll be discussing various different scenarios, what the problem is in each, and how to deal with it. Read More

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How to Get Unstuck by Establishing Topic Relevance

Along this continual road as a student of SEO, there have been a handful of breakthrough techniques that I’ve picked up which helped me rise to new level.  Actually, I hesitate to call them techniques, since some of them are so simple, they really could be coined as “tricks” or “hacks”.  Nevertheless, before I had these breakthroughs I was stuck with a particular problem, and after I had integrated them into my knowledge-base, my entire suite of client and personal money sites experienced huge gains. Some examples of these breakthroughs can be found in my posts on: Anchor text selection PBNs that actually rank The black sheep principle Sandbox reduction technique The particular hack I’ll be discussing in this article is how to create “On-page Topic Relevance” Read More

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Quick Indexing with the Video Sitemap Trick

Indexing can be a pain in the ass.  Until I found this trick, I was fumbling around impatiently, trying to use pinging services and social bookmark blasts in order to get something indexed. This trick is: Reliable (at the time of this writing): If it doesn’t index your site, then your site won’t index period.  Its probably a penalized domain. Fast: 5 min – 2 hours Safe: Index-forcing with tools like pingers is an SEO tool.  Google doesn’t like SEO’s.  Don’t do stuff that only an SEO would do. Read More

Reduce Sandbox Length by Timing your Backlinks

Reduce Sandbox Length by Timing your Backlinks

What is Sandboxing? Definition: When you build links to a site and you see little to no ranking benefit. Back around mid-2014, we started to see a sandboxing effect on new domains that had been recently registered. Before that time, you used to be able to register a new domain, build some backlinks to it, and within 5 days it could potentially be on page 1.  Now a days, SEOs are reporting sandbox periods of 3-6 months long. People have been discussing various ways to beat the sandbox and reduce the time it takes to rank.  In general, the most widespread theory is that you want to create a viral effect. Here’s my recipe for sandbox reduction, and the results I’ve gotten by using it… Read More

SEO Testing Results CTR & Social Shares in 2015

SEO Testing Results: CTR & Social Shares in 2015

There’s a ton of buzz going around about what the next face of SEO is going to look like.  Those who stay ahead of the curve are going to reap the benefits.  In case you’re not up to speed, here’s a summary on a few SEO techniques are being hyped up right now and my testing results on each. Testing Results: Social Signals Tweets, Shares, G+’s, Facebook likes, Pins, and bookmarks. There’s been a ton of talk about social signals over the past 3 months.  People have come forth saying that they’re ranking local search YouTube videos solely on social signals.  The main debate seems to be over how the social signals are obtained.  Namely, if they should come from real accounts or automatically generated accounts. Here’s the test scenario I setup, comparing three different groups: Read More