Podcast Blog SEO: How Can Bad Links Penalize Your Site?

Want your podcast and videocast to be seen, heard, found and rewarded in this noisy digital world, you are not alone. Join the nonprofit community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works. Today, get ready to finish feed your brand with smart cut tactics proven to cast your original voice to the world.

Hey, everybody. Welcome to Feed you'd brand. I'm Tom Hazard, your host for today, and I'm going to take a deep dive into a topic that I'm sure many of you have heard about. And you may be wondering, is it still relevant in 2022? And that is about backlinks for your website. Now, this is a podcast show, so, you know, why am I talking about backlinks and your website ranking and why it's important for your website? Well, because at poditize, we believe fundamentally that your website is a integral part of your platform as a podcaster. And in order to really track the growth of your show, the success of your show, you've got to not only monitor your podcast analytics, but also your website. Analytics and backlinks are a big part of that. Now, I'm sure many of you have heard that term before, but what does it really mean? Are backlinks still important in 2022? Well, I'm here to tell you absolutely yes, they are, but the right kind of backlinks. And I'm actually going to share with you a cautionary tale of another website that actually have two different websites that I encountered very recently that had a huge problem with backlinks. So we're going to talk about not only what not to do and to be aware of, but what is a good backlink, a valuable backlink, and why? And so I'm going to share that with you today. And certainly also that as podcasters, we have the opportunity, most of us who do especially guest interviews, at least periodically, if not most of our episodes, have a big opportunity to get very valuable backlinks to your website and to benefit from them. So let's first define what is a backlink? Okay, so a backlink is a, quite simply a link on someone else's website to a page on your website. And there are many different kinds of reasons why, I guess you might have such a backlink on another site to your website. One would be you wrote a guest blog on someone else's website, and there's a link from that at the bottom of that blog. To you, the author of that blog, to information on your website. That's one type of backlink. You could also just have be a part of a list of providers of a certain service on somebody else's blank website. They could have a directory or some affiliate links. If you've been a guest on someone else's podcast, then there should be on their website. If that podcast host is doing a good job, There should be some information about you, the guest on that particular episode, and a link from their website to your website. So listeners of their show could learn how to get in touch with you and reach out to you, contact you. So the Internet as a whole is obviously that's why it's called the World Wide Web, right? This, this incredibly complex web of websites that are interconnected and reference each other. And the more that your website is linked to from other websites, wherever they are, that is a measure of the value of your website. It increases your level of authority in the eyes of Google. And then the keyword phrases that your site ranks on, which is a whole nother part of SEO that I'm not going to take a deep dive into in this particular episode.

Those keyword rankings, the things you do rank on Google will raise your rankings from maybe you start out in the between 50 to 60 out of 100 and you have more backlinks, your site is viewed as more authoritative. Google will increase those rankings, making reduce that number. You might be between the 40s and 50s or the 30s and 40s, and eventually the goal for as many rankings as you have is to be ranked on obviously page one of Google, which would be from result number one through 10, because they do 10 results for every page of the organic search results, not the paid search results. But again, backlinks are an important measurement. Now back in Internet 1.0, there were a lot of, I would say, tactics used that are not really an integrity, to put it nicely. And another way, a lot of times that's described as sort of black hat tactics and if things were on the edge, maybe gray hat tactics as opposed to white hat, meaning totally proper backlinks and integrity. There are many different computer hackers and companies that were selling, and unfortunately today are still selling programs to get you tens of thousands of backlinks in a very short period of time, so that Google would see this huge list of tens of thousands of backlinks to your site and say, oh my gosh, the site must be really authoritative. Look how many other sites are linking to it. But eventually, when Google looks at the integrity of those backlinks sees the sites they're coming from aren't worth much of anything, or many of them are coming from the same websites. Google's pretty darn sophisticated and they have a way of being able to tell are these backlinks useful or are they not? And if you have the wrong kind of backlinks, it can actually really hurt your website's authority and rankings. And in fact Google, if they believe your site is completely out of integrity, you're going to be in their penalty box and they won't send any traffic to your website. So really good backlinks remain an incredibly valuable SEO tool for your website and they are really a must have for website visibility. So now I'm going to share a brief cautionary tale of an example of actually somebody I met just a couple of months ago and tell you this is a good example of what not to do. And then I'm going to come back after that and talk about what are good backlinks, how do you get them and how can your podcast generate them. And those people that are working with podties to produce their podcasts have this done for them and I'll share a little bit about how that's done. So I had a prospect reach out to me who is a person who's been in business for many, many years, I mean at least 20 years in the book publishing space, among other. There are other aspects to her business, but in the book publishing space primarily also has a podcast, actually I think a couple, and her name's Janine. I'm not going to add her with the last name because I just don't need to do that. But Janine came to me and for an audit of her podcast and I provided that evaluated her podcast and her podcast looked just fine. But when I got to looking at her website, which I always do when I audit a podcast, there were some major red flags that concerned me tremendously in what I was seeing. She wasn't ranking on really anything keyword ranking wise and had a ton of written content on her website. I mean she's in book publishing, she's an author, she wrote a lot of conventional blogs, a lot of good content, but it wasn't ranking. So I was seeing some things in some of the tools that I look at that said, hmm, something's not right here. So I had our in house SEO and website expert take a good look and I've never seen such a report come back from this person that there's some major problems. And actually one of the Things about every website that exists. That website leaves a digital footprint. And you can go back and read that digital footprint back in time. I mean, even if you fix something today, something that was wrong six months ago, you can still go back in the history and look at that and see that data. So there was a digital trail, a digital footprint. And he looked and found out probably sometime in 2017 that Janine might have hired some other company to do SEO to get them a lot of backlinks in a short period of time. And what they did, it was either that he thought, or some malicious malware, a bot had gotten their hooks into her website. And what happened is this bot or this agency used a script to create tens of thousands of backlinks to her website from some Russian servers. And nothing against Russia in this regard, but that is a location where a lot of black hat tactics go on. And, you know, it probably doesn't surprise anybody listening to this podcast that while there are people of integrity in Russia and good companies to work with there, there's also a lot of hacking and malicious stuff that tends to happen in that country. So not particularly knocking Russia, but in this case, there was a Russian bot that had created all these backlinks that were really worthless. But for a short period of time in the eyes of Google, before it dug deep and took a look at the integrity of the backlinks, for about six weeks, maybe eight, all these backlinks to the website put these rankings of the website through the roof. It was like, wow, this is an authoritative website. It was getting all kinds of traffic from Google until Google finally did a deeper dive, as they always do. And it's automatic. It just takes time for them to do it. And they saw, okay, this is all very spammy backlinks, Forget it. This website isn't worth anything. Boom. Dropped like a rock in the level of authority that it had in the eyes of Google. And the website essentially was blind to anybody searching on Google. Very, very bad news for her. And unfortunately, she didn't even know it for a few years. So Janine comes to me as a couple podcasts. I'm evaluating them. I'm looking at her four websites that she had, two of the four, we're in Google's penalty docs. And in fact, the recommendation from our SEO expert was, you know what? You can't even repair this. It's probably not worth repairing. And he had a whole strategy recommendation for moving content from one of her sites to the other that still was in integrity in the eyes of Google. And didn't have the same problem and had sort of a plan for what to do with those sites. And eventually in a couple years, those domains could probably be used again. But for right now, really, she needed to abandon them. I mean, this was like catastrophic for two of her web domains. Very disheartening to learn that. But at least she had two good domains that were in integrity with Google and could be worked with and a lot of the content could be moved there. Fortunately, one of the domains, the website she had, she's like, well, is it okay to use this one? Yes, it is. Okay, great. I'm okay with moving all my content and basically give her a roadmap for what to do. And then she's gone and done that. So she's on the road to recovery.

Here's how. Backlinks from low authority or spammy sites can really hurt your position, impacting traffic and if you have a podcast impacting listenership. Because if you've been listening to this podcast at all, you've heard me say probably several times that one of the paths to more listeners from your podcast is having related blog content on your podcast website that casts a much wider net for you to be found by more your ideal listeners. But if Google has got your website in the penalty box and they're not going to send any traffic your way, so it's going to hurt your listenership of your podcast too. So that's why this is so important, why I'm talking about this on a show about podcasting to market and grow your brand, your show, your business. So now let's return to good backlinks and what they are and making some of the different kinds. And then I'm going to show you some examples. And for those of you listening to the podcast, you're going to want to go to politize.com to check out the blog post for this episode because you can then look either at the video where I'm actually going to share my screen and show you some examples, or there'll be still images there as well. You can see some of the things I'm going to talk about, so please remember to do that. But so good backlinks, okay, really are just legitimate genuine links for a good reason from one website to another. I'll give you a couple examples. Tracy wrote a column for Inc. Magazine for over four years. She's got 150 to 200 articles she wrote that are on inc.com and each of those there is a graphic image of and a title of And a reference to from one of Tracy's websites. I believe it's hasdesign.com I don't know if there are any from the bingefractor.com, but anyway, all of her articles that were written on Ink are listed on her own website. And there is a not only a link to that article on inc. But on inc.com for every one of those articles she wrote, there's an author portion of that and a link from inc.com to Tracy's website. So people who read her articles on Inc. Will go to learn more about her on her own website. That's a very powerful backlink from a very authoritative website. So that's just one example. If you're a contributor, a writer of blogs of some kind on another website, having that link even just back to your main web page of your website or your about page, maybe your press and media page on your own website, that's one way. Another very powerful backlink. For a lot of us podcasters, this is sort of a lot more common is you have a guest on your show, you have many guests on your show, and you feature them in your blog post on your website about your episode. You have a little guest bio section and you link to their website. So your listeners who go to your blog post as a resource, how can they get in touch with the guest? They get a link, they click, they go to their website. You're giving your guest value in a powerful backlink from your website to theirs. Now, it's very common to require, and to require a request, I would say, but also common to require that your guests post a little information on their website about your show with a backlink to the blog post for that episode on your website. Now, if you work with Politize for us to produce your episodes, we set this up for you. We incentivize the guest to do this. And I'm going to show you right now how that happens. Let's see. I'm first. Here we go. I'm going to share with you my screen. Those of you listening to the podcast won't see this, but please check out the blog post on poditize.com As I mentioned, for those of you watching the video, I'm sharing my screen. And right now, what you're seeing is a graphic image that we create at Politize. This happens to be, for Tracy's podcast, the Binge Factor. This is a quote of something Tracy said about her guest that is very flattering. Makes her guest look really good. It Also features Tracy's face and the brand of her show. We provide this to the guest the day the episode publishes in an email and suggest how they can use it. One of the things we provide, and I'm going to see if I can show this to you. Now, this is a page where we have all the links to everything created for this episode. One of them is that graphic link, which, by the way, if you look at the URL for that link, it's on the bingefactor.com okay. When we send the email to that guest, we actually provide them a piece of HTML code that all they have to do is to edit their about page on their website, or if they have a press page or a media page, whatever page they want to on their website, edit it and copy and paste that code on their webpage. And what that will do is populate this image on that page saying, hey, Benjamin Wong was on the Binge Factor podcast, so why wouldn't he want to do that? So he puts us on his that code on his website. If he doesn't know how to do it, he gives it to his web person to drop in. But this is a real simple thing. Paste it onto his website. This is magic, because what I showed you, and if you look here carefully at this URL, because this image exists on thebingefactor.com the code we give each guest, it will populate this image on Benjamin's website. But that image doesn't exist on Benjamin's website. Benjamin's website is pulling that image from Tracy's website over to his website. That's a backlink in and of itself. It's loading an image from someone else's website to his. Therefore, the image it's pulling it from is seen as very valuable. You Benjamin wants to display this image on his website. It's coming from over here, this other website. That's a backlink, but also when that, it becomes a clickable image. When anybody clicks on this image on Benjamin's website, it brings them to this page on Tracy's website. So this is something we do automatically for all of our production podcasters who we're producing their episodes for. And you can see there's all sorts. It can play the video here, you can listen to the audio. You've got all sorts of information. And here is Benjamin Wong's guest bio information and all that. So it's when people click on that on Benjamin's website, it brings them here to Tracy's website. That is a powerful backlink. That is why we were doing this with every podcast episode that contains a guest, incredibly valuable. Makes your website very authoritative. Now I also want to show you here on the poditize.com this is one of our podcasters named Michael Zapiersky has a podcast called Consulting Success. He's been podcasting for a number of years and he's got almost 5,500 organic keyword rankings. Now that's a different part of SEO. Very important. Not taking a deep dive into that today, but you can see he's got almost 46,000 backlinks to his website. He's got thousands of them from his podcast episodes. We know because we've been producing his episodes for four or five years. But he's also got a lot more from other places and he and his team have worked very hard to get mentions on other websites and increase this number. This is a very realistic number for any podcaster to achieve within a couple of years. I'm also going to quickly show you. This is the Politize.com client portal where we're looking at the our website analytics. We're the only podcast hosting platform that gives you your key website analytics in addition to your key podcast analytics. That's very important. Like I mentioned earlier, it's critical to track your podcast analytics as well as your website analytics because this is a part of your platform. We give you your top 20 organic keyword phrases you rank on. You can export that list right here in the upper right corner. And if you export a spreadsheet of it, I think you get your top 100 keywords. But look here, all these ones that say position 1, 3, 4, 2. Almost all of his top 20 are on the first page of Google Search. That's what podcasting can do for you and should do for you. If you consistently publish episodes over time and create a comprehensive blog post for each episode on your website. Now, it has to be a significant blog post. 5, 600 words does not cut it anymore. With Google it's gotta be at least 2,000 words. But if you publish at least a 20 minute episode, that would produce about a 3,000 word blog post. At least the way Poditize does it.

Someone like Michael Zapiersky that's been doing this, I mean, look at this. Consultancy fees. He ranks number two on Google search for that. And 590 people searched on that term last month. That's 590 people that saw his result. And many of them, I'm sure clicked it. Consultation fees, same thing. I mean so many different Keywords he ranks on consulting business. How would you like to rank number four in Google search for consulting business? And 2,400 people searched on that last month. I mean, that's the power of what podcasting could do for you. Of course. Again, talking about backlinks today, I'm just, since I was on this page, I'm showing you a little glimpse. But that's the power of podcasting your way to a powerful blog post like this one on the binge factor. And it's a yes, is largely a speech to text conversion, but it's a multimedia blog post and it is just SEO gold for your website and backlink gold. And that is really the whole point for today, what I'm sharing. So I just want to make sure here that I'm not forgetting anything regarding backlinks. Again, remember, links from low authority or spammy websites can hurt you. You might get an immediate bump in the eyes of Google before they look too deeply in it, which, which happens. But there's what I like to tell people is there's really no shortcut to powerful backlinks. There's no shortcut to hacking SEO. What you really want to do is produce the kind of content that Google wants to serve people when they search in the search bar. And I'm talking about again, the organic search results, not the paid search results. Anybody can pay money to come up in the advertisements, the first few above the organic search results. If you want to pay enough money, you can get visibility there. But I'm talking about organically speaking, your way to create SEO content on your website. But blogs that are going to get you backlinks from other websites. Another backlink I should mention that is in every one of these blog posts that works for people that work with Poditize, anything, any podcast host or their guest mentions that there is a link to somewhere on the Internet that link gets populated. All those links get populated within the blog post on your website. So you have all these outbound links to other websites and there's usually a summary of those links, not just within all the text, but a summary of links within that blog post. And a lot of those companies, when they have professional IT people working on their websites, especially if they're big companies and if you have mentioned them in your blog, they probably follow you back, meaning put a link from their website back to yours as a reciprocal sort of thing, that's how a site like Consulting Success will get, what was it over about 45,000 backlinks. That's how it happens Every one of these blog posts, like the one I showed you on the bingefactor.com contain at least a dozen or more links to other websites. So it's kind of a, how do you say, cooperative thing where you link to other sites, they're going to take notice and link back to you. Becomes a very reciprocal type of relationship. Certainly with your podcast guests, that absolutely should be happening. And those working with Potter ties, we know it is happening for them because we're incentivizing that guest to do it, flattering them, making it easy for them to do it, giving them a roadmap. So, but so those backlinks still very important. And really they become important for search not just from other from Google, but search from other websites. I mean, this is that tangled world wide web. We talk about all these different sites interconnected. It's how your website can become authoritative and you can be found by more of your ideal listeners. At the end of the day, that's the whole point, isn't it? Raise awareness for your show by people that are likely to be in alignment with what you talk about. Not only searches in Google, but being on other websites. And of course, that also markets and grows not only your podcast brand, but your business, if your podcast is related to your business. Okay, well, there you go. That's my deep dive for today in backlinks for your website. Hope you've enjoyed that. We have a lot of other great topics on our website@poditize.com if you go to the feed your brand podcast page where all our blogs are, there's a search bar. You can search on any of these topics and find any of the past episodes, blogs or articles that we've written so you can get some support there. All right, thanks so much, everybody. It's been great to share this with you today. Come back next time for another great episode. Here on feed.

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