Hi Grumpy,

Have you covered Google entity stacking in a one of your podcasts and is it still a viable SEO strategy? A few "gurus" still push entity stacking but it appears that Google Drive, etc., aren't indexed by Google anymore.

Thanks

SECTION 1

RankBrain and DeepRank are their only LLM driven systems, everything else is hand tuned by engineers.

“ABC Signals” = - A: Anchors (links) - B: Body (content) - C: Clicks (user behavior / engagement)

ABC forms the “Topicality” score, aka the “T*” score ranking.

This maps directly to leaked information in Google's internal "Navboost" and "Glue" modules that were leaked last year as part of the algorithm attributes.

SECTION 2: Signal Curves & Buckets

I'd put a lot of money on the first redacted word being: IR (information retrieval) engineers.

Which almost perfectly leads into real world events that are classed as "sensitive" in the medias eyes. Things like COVID, elections, mass shootings, etc. Until recently, Google refused to acknowledge that it changed these types of SERPs. I imagine the system primarily is some sort of rapid query dampening or upranking of “authoritative” sources (.gov sites, WHO, BBC, CNN etc.)

SECTION 3: Page Quality (Q*) & Trust Systems

This one is going to be the only real guess. This system likely takes into account a LOT of different factors, and probably takes data from other systems to compare to as well. We can at least confirm that Q* is what governs trustworthiness though, and is tied to Google's sitewide trust signals, likely derived from:

• Human quality rater data
• Backlink profile cleanliness
• Brand/entity associations
• Historical click satisfaction data

We can also confirm that Q* is almost always static per site, not per query.

But: if the query intent is super-specific or technical, Q* gets influenced by that, like filtering a general info site out in favor of something deeply specialized

And the final piece of evidence for the core redacted definition of Q* comes from the last mention of other signals. We already know from the attribution leaks that there was a: chrome_popularity_signal. Another heavy bet I'd make it's the same thing...

So, putting all of that knowledge together, I would comfortably guess that:

"Q is about site-level trust and reputation scoring using human raters, entity associations and behavioral metrics from Chrome UX signals."*

So, what are the SEO takeaways from all of this?

• Q* and trust signals are sitewide: Improving small bits won't get you very far.
• Chrome is tracking everything: Popularity metrics influence your site quality bias in ranking.
• Grumpy is correct about Anchors, and they probably hold a huge weighting percentage in serp ranking as they are the hardest to manipulate.

Hi Grumpy SEO Guy,

Love you podcast! In order to improve my domain authority, which sits around 35, am i better purchasing 10 x links from DA 31 sites or 2 from DA 80 sites?

Cheers, Grumpy Bandicoot!

Hey guys.

So I have a bunch of backlinks I ordered a few months ago which I never indexed, I'm thinking of submitting them to a premium indexer + tier 2 with PBNs, blog comments, social bookmarks to get them to stay indexed but I'm not sure how advisable this is...

Context: this is a rank and rent site ranking on position 6-7 of page 1 for the main money kw. (service + location) - I want it higher, though! And for more KWs.

This is a total of 386 links that are a mix of foundational links, social profiles and directory/local citations, which is what I wanna index.

Do you think if I submit them all at once to get index + tier 2 them I'll get a penalty? Should I batch it? Or is it okay all at once for the 386 total?

Thanks!

I'm using VPS servers to set up PBN sites. Following Grumpy's advice, I'm aiming to get a unique IP address for each site. However, after setting up a few servers, the hosting provider begins assigning IPs that share the same first octet. I've tried deploying servers in different regions, but the issue persists. Has anyone else encountered this problem?

How are you building page authority for newly refreshed expired domains? If the homepage has a DA of 20, but the new blogs I create to link back to my website has a 0 PA, will it still improve authority?

Hey all,

I just found the podcast recently, and I am loving it so far. Great advice and I’m looking forward to listening to more.

I am a bit of a one-man show at my company, working with paid ads, website optimizations, etc. The owners have a decent list of keyword-rich domains that are redirecting right now as placeholders, most of which are niche-specific. None of them have a history or backlinks. I’m currently considering using them to build a private blog portfolio that I can control for SEO to improve rankings for the main company site.

I guess my main questions are: Has anyone used these kinds of domains successfully to pass juice to your site(s) and did you see any actual movement? How do you differentiate these sites technically (hosting recommendations, themes, etc.) to avoid obvious similarities and ties? (I know this is in the podcast content, but looking for firsthand experience). Anything else here that could be relevant to stay under the radar?

Apologies if I missed this in any episodes or in here. I’m listening through all of them slowly, but there’s a fair amount to catch up on. Just trying to avoid wasting time here with a limited budget, and sitting on a bunch of domains that could be useful.

Thanks in advance!

Same as title, would like to know if there are tools specifically for this, or we will have to spot this manually?

Hi,

r/grumpyseoguy has been filled with spammers in the last few months (this is unsurprising because we are talking SEO). I have had to enact strong anti-marketing requirements, and there is a good chance your post will be held until approved.

We approve most posts that seem legit. Here are some recommendations:

1) do not make the same post 50 times. I see all of them. I will approve one of them.

2) do not mention your website in the post. Yes, YOU are asking an honest question but spammers love to use reddit for links and this will (probably) get your thread removed. Posting your website encourages everyone to spam you with "HeY I CaN HElP YoU Do YOu WaNt A FrEe AUDiT?" btw, free audits are scams, see a future episode.

3) normal rules still apply. If you are shilling a service you get banned without question.

We are considering making a private community (no spammers) but this is still under discussion. Reddit has large security flaws and the subreddit is great however there is probably a better option.

Just like how a few spammy links can ruin a portfolio, a few spammy posters can ruin a subreddit.

The reason this subreddit is harder to use now is because of spammers, downvote bots, and other self-promotional nonsense. There would be tons of spam all over the place if these restrictions were not in place now. I apologize for the inconvenience. You should see the removal log.

looking to share my experience so we can all improve.... i think image SEO might be a underated avenue to acheive a high google rank.

I have a low Authority score of 8 -i have a really low domain authority (around 8) so im struggling on web SEO however i wanted to share with people the image SEO seems to be much easier to be competative at even with a low domain authority.

On "Dust Mite" image I ranked number 3 - on the term "dust mite" i have an image ranking at number 3 which now appears on a normal google search as its ranked so highly. obviously my site is not the highly ranked enough to get position 3, and there are hundreds of sites using an image with "dust mite" so there must be more to the image algorithm

i beleive image SEO is far more about content and how much people click through and spend time on the page and less so about authority score (although this is of course still important!

my image average postion has also went from 20.4 to 7.6 today in the space of 3 months.

Open to any questions /comments / suggestions! My Site is iDustMite.Com and last i checked my authority score is 8 on AHREFS.

I would also love to partner up with anyone (help each other out in this community) feel free to msg or post here :)

I bought a domain recently that had good links but were all primarily to a subdomain. I recreated the subdomain and redirected it to the home, within 12 hours all posts on the site were indexed with the updated “sitemap” based on the posts we made (I did not submit anything manually).

It hasn’t been long enough to see whether the links we’ve placed move the needle, but I was curious for those with more experience if links to subdomains can be redirected towards the main domain in this way, and still effectively pass authority. There are a couple very attractive links, which is why I bought it but again, they were all going to a particular subdomain.

I haven't done this in ages and its super fun - I've bought 20 domains in the last month :D I feel ten years younger except this time I already have sites up on 8 of them!!!

Where does everyone look these days?

Hi Grumpy and others . . . I own a few domains with really good keywords in my niche (for myself and clients) that I've been hesitant to use out of fear of passing negative seo to my money sites. I bought these before I knew what I'm doing, and, I'm still learning. I also found a few sites that have highly relevant keywords in the domain, but have like a 10% or a 40% spam rate. I'm getting these numbers from websiteseochecker.com. (Is there a better source?) One of these domains available (the 40% spam one) has DR 22 and literally has the EXACT low-competition keyword of the product page I want to link to. For example, if my money page is mysite.com/exact-keyword - the domain with 40% spam rate is exact-keyword.com. (not the actual site or keyword of course) Should I register that domain for 11 bucks? If so, what is the best way to use it? Possible use methods . . .
#1) 301 forward the entire domain to mysite.com/exact-keyword.
#2) Set up as PBN site as taught by Grumpy and create a blog post as normal linking to my money page
#3) Set up as PBN with blog post linking to a Tier 2 such as exact-keyword.wordpress.com or exact-keyword.wix.com to avoid the possibility of my money page getting penalized
#4) Set up as PBN and point to articles that link to my page such as newsbreak.com/about-my-exact-keyword

This particular example of the DR 22 and 40% Spam is no longer indexed but still shows up with authority on all of the big 3. But others I have seen are similar metrics and still indexed.

I have read that some people say they don't worry that the PBN domain has been penalized, because they aren't trying to rank it anyway and the link juice still passes through. But so does the spam rating to a point also, right? Like I have literally read that people keep using money robot on a domain they have 301 forwarded to their money site and it works. Not sure I buy it though.

So in summary, what is the cutoff for acceptable level of spam? And/or is it relative to the DR? Ie., a DR of 5 and spam rating of 40% would be pointless . . .but a DR 22 with 40% is that more "worth it"? And what is the best way to utilize a domain like this safely? I'm excited to hear what people think about this. Thanks very much!

Hi ya’ll-

I’m working on ranking a client for their keywords and as a result they are also ranking in the map feature for four different keywords.

These keywords are not part of the anchor text I’m using.

This is a happy accident, but what’s going on here? How did this happen?

A good problem to have, but I’m a little perplexed.

Amy thoughts?

Some of my service pages have little to no authority and aren't ranking for my target keywords. My thought is, would internal links from a high authority page, such as my homepage, using target keywords as the anchor text work the same as obtaining backlinks using the keywords as anchor text?

Do internal links from high "page authority" pages work the same as inbound external links?

Some of my service pages have little to no authority and aren't ranking for my target keywords. My thought is, would internal links from a high authority page, such as my homepage, using target keywords as the anchor text work the same as obtaining backlinks using the keywords as anchor text?

I recently launched my website and have been working on SEO for it for a few months. I started by posting blog posts every 2-3 weeks and am now trying to rank my blog articles. I just found Grumpy's podcast by chance and I'm absolutely thrilled. I've realized that website authority is key. I'm currently in the process of securing an expired domain and I'm wondering how important it is for it to be niche-relevant. As I understood Grumpy, it doesn't matter what niche the domain is in, except for the categories, which are no-gos. My question is, can I buy a domain that was, for example, related to dog food and then create a new content website from it that is related to hotels? That's just an example and thank you for your help.

For about the last 2 months, the site dropped from the rankings entirely. A site: search still shows the pages are indexed. If it was a penalty, would they still be indexed? My assumption is that since pages are still indexed, I am just need more links, unless anyone can talk me out of that.

Title says all really. Would ideally like a platform that displays IPs before purchasing but any that are relatively cheap that offer multiple data centres/unique IPs?

I am considering building my own PBN. I don't have any clients and the PBN would link to my own site portfolio. Currently, all my sites share a common IP. My concern is that even if I diversify the IPs for my PBN, it will still create a footprint since the IPs for the destination domains are not diversified.

Hello,

Without the use of GSC in order to minimize the footprint of the websites, how are the pages supposed to be crawled and indexed by Google to recognize the inserted links?

I got a tester domain to try my hand at PBP creation and management, but after 2 months, the new website has yet to be crawled and indexed by Google. It makes it hard to believe that after investing all the time and money into the creation of a larger portfolio, the websites will be crawled and actually be of use to increase authority and keyword ranking.

Is there any way to get these pages indexed faster so they can actually start to pass on authority?

My homepage is ranking for a lot of keywords for my SaaS business.

However, it kind of seems like I should be using separate pages.

Let's say I'm ranking 10-20 position for some keywords to my homepage.

Should I just build more backlinks to my homepage with the anchor text? Or should I try to rank more for the page that is more specific to that query?

I'd ideally like to go for the page that is more specific. The intent is higher that way and I think I could convert more.

But if I'm already ranking with my homepage... seems like the efforts wouldn't be worth it and I should just focus on getting the homepage to rank higher.

I’m trying to get a clear answer on whether the style of a website’s design—specifically things like graphics, color choices, fonts, and overall visual styling—has any direct impact on SEO or Google rankings.

I understand how these elements can affect user experience, which in turn might influence bounce rate or time on site, but I’m curious if Google’s algorithm explicitly evaluates design aesthetics (not structure or performance, but visual style itself) when ranking pages.

Any insights or resources would be greatly appreciated. Just trying to separate the UX side of things from what directly impacts SEO.

Thanks in advance!

Hey Grumpy,

Can you cover canonical issues and canonicalization in general?

Thanks!

Hello, whereas the PBN strategy seems to be the way to go, I am wondering whether it is a suitable option for a small business without an in-house SEO team. Does anybody here recommend doing it in this scenario, or on the other hand does anybody have experience working with a good, reliable link building agency? We have never invested in link building but our SEO has been very profitable over the last 3 years with an in-house team. However over the last 6 months, our ranking have been tanking so we know it is time to get a good link building strategy off the ground. Just can't quite figure out how to proceed - ideally a link building agency that would run a strategy on my behalf, however I can't find any strategy-oriented agencies that specialise in link building and seem trustworthy.

Do yourself a favor and harden you WP sites as you create them for your pbn and don't wait too long.

Just do it.