A ~10-minute recorded presentation from Joe Polish featuring SEO expert Stephan Spencer explaining why Google may 'not trust' a website and how to improve search visibility by building trustworthiness (E-A-T: expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness). The talk covers trust metrics (Majestic Trust Flow), link-building strategies (reactive PR via HARO, resource pages, contributor pieces, press/TV opportunities), use of anchor text, and the importance of earned, high-quality links; includes promotional interjections for Joe Polish's book and examples from clients.
Chapters
On September 4, 1998, which by the way, was just 8561 days ago, Google was founded. The search engine wasn't known as Google at first. Its original name was anyone? Anyone? Backrub. Backrub. Since then, backrub. Can you imagine?
Yeah.
Google has grown to be the search engine for nearly everyone on the Internet. Since numbers are important, especially to Google, here are some important numbers for you to think about. 4.7 billion. That's the number of people who use the Internet. 56.5 billion. That's the number of web pages that are on the Internet. 201 million. That's the number of active websites that are on the Internet. Thinking of all those numbers, how could someone possibly find you in your website? There's this amazing discipline called SEO, which as you know, stands for search Engine optimization. Sure, it's not new, you know about it. However, there's a secret keyword to get even more traffic to your website. There is a word that Stefan Spencer has discovered that is used effectively to help his many clients such as Volvo, Sony and Chanel, just to name a few, plus many genius network members increase their web traffic. He's been doing this since Google arrived on the scene over 20 years ago. He's, he's an active writer, podcaster and speaker. His first three books titled the Art of SEO. And he has in this one, look at this, 994 pages. And what we're going to do is we're going to read this line by line, okay? Then we're going to discuss it every few sentences like you're in a 12 step group. Okay? It's over 900 pages. It's a gigantic book. But he's going to share the magic word concept for you in just 10 minutes. Wait till you hear the magic word so you can have it working for you. Stefan's title is Mastering the art of SEO. Here's why Google doesn't trust your website. Please welcome the master at this, Stefan Spencer. Thank you, sir.
Thank you. I love you guys. You changed my lives. I really mean that. So here in 10 minutes is why Google doesn't trust your website. What's that magic word that Joe referred to? Well, it's trustworthiness. Are you worthy of trust? And the problem here is Google doesn't trust you because you're guilty until proven innocent. As far as Google's concerned, so much of the Internet is spam and especially new websites that they just figure you're probably spam too. In fact, in Google's quality rater guidelines, 160 some pages of guidelines and advice for their quality raters. An army of human reviewers that work for Google. They use this data, of course, as training data for the machine language algorithms. And these human reviewers are looking for what Google refers to as eat. Eat Expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. I wrote a whole article for Search Engine Land on this topic. I highly recommend reading it if you have a chance. It's all about eat and how important it is for marketers. First thing we need to do is we need to understand what our trust score is. Well, there's an amazing free tool. It's actually a paid tool that gives you some free data so you can go in without paying for it. I do recommend signing up, but it's called Majestic. If we go to majestic.com, we put in our domain name, and in this case, I put in Capital Logic. Thank you, Howard, for being willing to use your site as a volunteer. So here's the problem. It's a 15 out of 100, and that's not very good. But it actually gets worse because that's on a logarithmic. That is on a logarithmic scale, meaning that it's not 15% of the way up the mountain. It is at that first little black flag in the inset in that little red area. I think an ant might have walked one step up that mountain. So what do we do when we have that kind of situation? Well, it actually even gets worse than that because. Yep, sorry, Howard. You're more important than you are trusted. Because there's another metric. If we go back, you see that 29. That is your importance. Here's the problem with that.
Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out, and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video, or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.
More important than trusted. Think of somebody, I don't know, maybe in the White House, who is more important than trusted. You don't want to be that guy now. It's an unfair comparison, I know. But here's my little personal website with more trust than importance. So you want that. How do we do it? We get links, but not any old links. Not links from Jim Bob's personal homepage, but from sites that are highly trusted, like FirstGov or Harvard, Stanford MIT, Princeton. How do we do that? Well, I'm going to give you a handful of different strategies and we're going to look at specific examples that have achieved those strategies successfully. The first is reactive pr. And here we have a tool that is free called Haro. Help a reporter out. Who's heard of that? Awesome. You just sign up, you get these emails. Here's an example. Email from Merriam Webster. This opportunity is Merriam Webster. Yes, the dictionary people. And Scott Donald's not in the room. Gravy Stack. It's an educational app that's for financial literacy for kids. Well, this opportunity is educational apps for kids. And they're looking for education experts to weigh in. So this is reactive pr. The journalist, the TV producer is already looking for sources for experts, and you could be the one. Unfortunately, that particular opportunity, the deadline closed on the 8th. But here's one that actually came through. This is askmen.com, very high authority, high trust website. And this is my lovely, amazing, beautiful, talented wife getting a great link and mention and a quote. She's referred to as a relationship expert and life coach. Nice quote from her. There she is right there. I love you, baby. And yeah, it's a great opportunity, right? And it was just there for the taking. Looking for sites like Haro and Cishin that list these opportunities and then you just sign up. Look at AskMen's trust score. 73, not too shabby. Example number two is looking for resource hubs. These are sites that list lots of different resources and yours could be one of them. One of my clients is whatismyipaddress.com and I found Stanford Accelerator Laboratory had a resource page all about network monitoring tools. And hello, whatismyfutures.com is one of those amazing network resource tools that should be listed on this page, but wasn't. All it took was clicking on that link for Les Cottrell, the guy who runs this page, sending him A quick email 15 minutes later, I kid you not, he emails back. Done. Link is added. It can be that easy. Example number three is being a contributor or a columnist. Yes, it's working for free, but if you pick the right media outlets to work for free for, like for example, Harvard Business Review. This is an article I wrote and got accepted, and it includes links to my site. Example number four is when you get inquiries from your press page from TV producers and journalists. So let's see how that looks. Now, this is whatismyipaddress.com's media page, their press page, which they didn't have five years ago when we started working together that was one of the first things I recommended. And he had no idea that he was getting mentioned by the Washington Post and Gizmodo, USA Today, cnn, Mashable, the Independent, cbs. Amazing, right? It was so easy to find this because just go to Google News and you put in your brand and look at that. There's PC magazine coverage just from last month. I don't even know if it's on his press page yet but it should be so you can put in your own brand. If it's a multi word phrase like gender intelligence, it's Barbara Andis company definitely put quotes around that so that it doesn't find the word gender somewhere on the page and then intelligence somewhere else. And this is the end result for Chris. Pretty cool. ABC15 Arizona featured him. He didn't have to go find that opportunity. They found him through his press page. Example number five, what I call TV appearance plus. But wait, there's more. The TV producer in this case wanted my daughter, my oldest daughter Chloe, who is an SEO expert. Yes. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree to be on msnbc. And she pitched well, how about I contribute an article as well and and I'll go into further depth that I can't do in the TV segment because we only have three or four minutes. And they said yes. And look at that. She is now published on nbcnews.com with a couple of links at the bottom, including one that says SEO expert. And you know how Google works is Google takes the words that are underlined or the anchor text and associates them with the page you're linking to. So in this case taking the words SEO expert and applying that to her website. Now that's why you don't want to use Click here as your anchor text because unless you're wanting to rank for Click here in Google, that's not going to help you. I mean it won't help you as much. And then the great thing here she did was she worked in a mention of her story of being a 14 year old SEO expert and you know, online marketer making passive income at the time and then able to grow that into speaking at conferences by age 16. She linked to her about page and shared her signature story in further depth on her about page. And here's a picture of her at 16 years old doing a speaking engagement at SMX. Actually this was an interview after she did her speech and you can take it to a whole other level with your about page and actually Turn it into a timeline. So look at this. If you start scrolling down in my about page, you see I have a whole story of struggle, a hero's journey. And you know, there's my daughter, there's me on my first magazine cover. And look at that. My before and after. I had big physical transformation thanks to Tony Robbins. In fact, if you want to see that a little bit more in detail, look at that. That was me in 2009 and then 2010, just not even a year later. All thanks to walking on 2000 degree hot coals in my bare feet and not getting burned. The last thing I want to share with you is that trusted links are earned by merit and their hard work and you cannot game the system. If you try, you could end up like this guy. This site is in almost penalty territory. They have a lot of toxic links. I'm not going to say who it is, but this is a new client that had me audit their site and I found this sites from virus and malware infected sites and all kinds of really unsavory sites linking to them. Get out there and build some links.
Okay. I hope you found that video awesome and useful. So if you want to get a free copy of my book, I want you to click here. And if you want to watch some more videos that will be useful and awesome, click here. Go ahead, you're over here. Do it now.
