BluShark Digital 0:00
Welcome to the SEO Insider with your host, Seth Price, Founder of BlueShark, taking you inside the world of legal marketing and all things digital.
Seth Price 0:10
Thrilled to be here on the SEO Insider today with Gyi from AttorneySync as well as a formidable investor in early stage tech startups in the legal space. Welcome, Gyi.
Gyi Tsakalakis 0:19
Seth, always great to see you. Thanks for having me. Love chatting with you.
Seth Price 0:21
You know, we’ve been, you know, talking about this stuff for longer than I’d like to acknowledge and-
Gyi Tsakalakis 0:29
We’re getting old Seth.
Seth Price 0:30
We are, the people at the company keeps staying same, the same, but I keep getting older. But one of the things that has been top of mind, want to get your thoughts on is that as SEO has developed, the need is greater because paid search is getting harder and harder to do. But as you know, SEO, not for the faint of heart. And that in providing this to the public, you know, and something I’ve heard you espouse, you almost have to become a 360 consulting agency to make sure that different parts are aligned. Talk to me a little about your perspective on that.
Gyi Tsakalakis 1:04
Yeah, I mean, you know, I know you, and we’ve talked about this in the pre show, but I know your experience is similar. I mean, look, firms come to you at all sorts of different phases of their business, growth, maturity, whatever you want to call it. And, you know, they they go in, we’re in a lot of the same Facebook groups together, and you see the questions. They, who do you do you like, for SEO? Or like, what’s a good SEO thing? Or what should we be doing for SEO? And I’m always like, well, what’s your, first of all, what’s your business objective for this coming year? You know, are. you know, do you have fee targets? Do you have growth targets? Do you have cost per client targets? And then you start talking about, like, how you want to spend your time and money? Because you might think you want SEO? And I think this is the most clear example of this is people think, you know, when people, most people think about SEO, they think about ranking for something. And you can rank all day, but if you have negative reviews, bad reviews, no reviews, your phone’s not gonna ring, or maybe you got great reviews, and you’re ranking but you’re not answering the phone consistently. And you don’t have you know what I would, my hot button issue right now is this dual source attribution idea, where it’s like, you know, look, your your analytics, your web analytics, and your call tracking and your CRM, you know, they’re doing last click attribution. And people on the phone, when you ask them, like how they heard about you, they’re like, you, I was my neighbor referred me your name. And so I searched on your name. Now, your attribution system is gonna say, organic. And it’s like, well, was it organic? It’s like, well, you know.
Seth Price 2:41
Probably a referral, right? Yeah, I tell the story, the second largest case in Price Benowitz, history. I still to this day, don’t know how they really got to us. You know, it was somebody allegedly told them something. I’m convinced it was just regular search. But you just don’t know. And I think that you sort of started down this path, which is, you know, there’s a check the box, I got to do something, but understanding what you’re getting. And I think the one good thing that has happened for SEO geeks like us, is that the increase in cost for paid search. And that even though LSAS are really desired in the PI space, they really haven’t been a home run across the board, in the non PI, b2c legal space that all of a sudden what went from. And I still remember this, when we started our agency, somebody came from the Great Attorney sent to us and like, why the hell are they coming to us? Like, he’s great at what he does. And I remember you were charging, like $2,000 a month, and didn’t have those resources. And we were like, hey, we’re gonna charge 4 or $4500, or whatever it was, and the idea that you’re not paying a flat amount, but what resources do you want with the idea of how are you going to be able to, you know, if the answer is you just said, hey, I want to be able to get 10 cases a month, you know, it’s not a free lunch. And if you’re putting, you know, $2,500 a month into it, that’s 250 a case there’s not generally a way to get that. And so, I think that that has been, the good news is that people are taking a second look at SEO because despite it being pushed down on the page, it’s still with, with time one of the only places to beat that three to one ROI.
Gyi Tsakalakis 4:26
Search hasn’t, you know been saying this for years , search has intent, you’re capturing interest, demand capture, when they’re looking for you know, what they’re looking for, that’s always going to be searches’ leg up. You know, the other thing that I think though that I’ve, it’s been refreshing to see it’s almost like a, one of these full circle ideas, but and this isn’t really it’s more on like the demand generation side. But I do think that that’s been the other consequence of the, you know, the performance non-brand paid search prices going up. Is that people are redeploying ads towards demand generation. Right. So they’re doing more like some of its display, some of its offline, some of its paid social. But that to me, when you start trying, like and we all know, we’ve we’ve seen, I’m sure you have people that have the whatever pound gorilla you want to talk about, or moved into the DC area, it’s super competitive. Same thing in all major markets. You’re seeing these lawyers partner up with local lawyers, or they’re opening their own offices or, you know, all that kind of stuff. In order to compete with that, you know, Ben Glass talks, does a nice job talking about this, I think, you got to be doing demand generation, you’ve got to be getting people to actually want, they’re thinking of you at that key time, you know its- and lawyers know this stuff, right? Like, it’s like, but they forget that like, people forget about you, you have to be top of mind with them all the time. I mean, I can’t tell you how many times we’ve talked to lawyers, and they’re shocked when someone they know refers them, refers somebody else a case. And we’re like, we’re like best friends. And you didn’t refer me that case? What’s going on? It’s like, oh, I totally, you’re just not the person I thought of when that key moment came up. And so I think, you know, that’s not so much. It’s SEO, to the extent of tracking your brand growth, right? Are people searching for your name and your firm name and permutations of that? Is that growing, that’s a good leading indicator of like, yeah, we’re in demand, like we are in demand. And it’s a lot easier to rank for, you know, Price Benowitz than it is to rank for, you know, DC Car Accident Lawyer, although you probably rank for both of those.
Seth Price 6:35
Absolutely. And it’s interesting, we did a radio spend not that long ago, and numbers shot up. And I gotta tell you, one or two people attributed their phone call to radio. But our numbers substantially shot up with the campaign. I think, ultimately, what you’re saying, which is, if you can hit your demographic, which is very hard to online, you know, the idea that you’re always there with them, that it translates just, some of it is subconscious, when they’re going through the SERPs. They have the intent, they’re looking for a lawyer, oh, I know this brand. I think that’s the advantage that some of the big TV players have brought to the table in that it’s, you know, a, as, as you get something hit into to your noggin enough times. And, you know, I, we’ve always talked back and forth over the years about sort of the, the advantage of paid Google, paid PPC, in getting you out of the sandbox quicker or with SEO. And it’s kind of evil, if you think about it, like they could easily not count that traffic. And there’s, you know, there are articles about it once in a while, but there’s nothing really definitive about it. But the thought, you know, the fact that, you know, traffic and that Google is not changing, whether you mentioned paid search, whether it’s social, whether you’re talking offline, whatever that is, that these these touch points, not only are good for the noggin, but it’s also feeding the search engine, and that the idea in a competitive market that you’re only going to do digital, I think is, you know, for the first time, I’m thinking, hey, there needs to be other stuff in the mix.
Gyi Tsakalakis 8:07
Yeah, and I, a lot to unpack in there. I’ll tell you my take on this. And I, I, I’m probably in, maybe I’m in the minority camp. But you look at the stuff that came out of the Google antitrust case, look at the slides. You read stuff like AJ Cohn at Blind Five Year Old, his article, It’s Goog Enough! People should check that out. It’s pretty obvious to me that Google is using user interaction data to inform their or to train their organic ranking algorithms. So what, why is that relevant? Well, because if you have a brand, and people are disproportionately searching on your brand, and disproportionately clicking on your pages, when your brand is coming up in search, whether it’s because they recognize your brand name, or your favicon, or you know, the there’s, there’s data for Google to latch on to there. I think that that does reward those sites and those pages and so yeah, I, do I think it’s as nefarious as or as evil as there’s some kind of like, hey, you buy ads and your organic rankings go up? I mean, if that’s if that’s going on, I mean, massive lawsuits are coming for Google. I don’t think that that’s what they’re doing. I think maybe there’s like hey, you know, we we saw this in the email, right, that ads team email going back and being like, hey, we got to hit these numbers. Can you do something organically to get globally more clicks like that, I think that’s even problematic. But I think the real magic is, is the brand investment, you know, and Eric Schmidt maybe he wasn’t thinking about it to the extent that we’re talking about it today, but, you know, brands sort out the cesspool, that whole idea of if people come to your brand, you know, you’re looking for a lawyer and you know, Price Benowitz or you’re looking for a lawyer and you know, you see the brand, and those pages are getting a disproportional number of the clicks because of the brand. I’m very convinced that you’re getting rewarded on the non brand search side of the house to organic.
Seth Price 10:23
Oh, absolutely. I mean, and it look, it’s when you look at the paid side, they look at click through rate is so so important. And that when you, when you raise that there’s some version of that going on on the organic side. Let’s pivot into local, very exciting news for those of you who have not heard, but Gyi is going to be co hosting a Local U event in Detroit with Joy. Tell us a little bit about that.
Gyi Tsakalakis 10:45
Come to Detroit for local you. I’m very grateful. I got my Redwings hat. I know we’re in a battle for that last wildcard spot with the Capitals, which is as we’re recording that game is tonight. Right? So-
Seth Price 10:57
It is, so basically what Caps win they’re in, they lose and you win, you’re in?
Gyi Tsakalakis 11:03
I think that that’s right. You know I was looking at it, it was funny. I went to the game last night. I’m gonna go short on this, but I was looking up the NHL playoff rules. If we’re tied in points, I don’t know if Caps go up in points if they win tonight, and we win. I thought there might be tied.
Seth Price 11:19
I think I think it is tied.
Gyi Tsakalakis 11:20
And if we’re tied than that, I think that goes to who has most wins overall, or they call it like non overtime wins or something. Anyway, it gets a little complicated. Anyway. Back, come to Detroit, I am so grateful to that, to be help participating, and post Local U. Joy Hawkins, you know, one of the preeminent local SEOs, and that whole community really, I think that they’ve
Seth Price 11:45
Mike Blumenthal will be there I assume?
Gyi Tsakalakis 11:48
Um, you know, I honestly don’t know, I know, for the Detroit sessions, they’re running one in New York too. So if you can’t make it to Detroit get to the New York one, they do these, they’re doing more of them on a regional basis. But Greg Gifford will be there in Detroit, another super sharp SEO. And you know, and I think that we’re, you know, it’s very, very local focused. So I know your audience is probably mostly lawyers, we’re going to spend some considerable time talking legal because that’s what I’m interested in too. But if there are other if you know, people that are in Detroit, or in the looking for an excuse to come in, and we are going to go catch a Tigers game, too. If you’re a small business marketing person, get to Local U, I think it’s a super, super valuable opportunity for folks.
Seth Price 12:25
Yeah, I found that when early, early on as local was burgeoning. And people like Mike Blumenthal, and eventually Joy, who entered the scene later, I mean, the the amount of time and thought they put into this stuff. Talk to me a little bit about local, it obviously, is dominating the search landscape, particularly the legal space. What what are you seeing, you know, we went when, its funny, I went back and looked, our original recording of this is when I first started this, this, this a podcast number years back, and one of the things that we looked at was the Spam was so crazy, it was and it was, I kind of feel like to their credit, they did get rid of a lot of the Russian bots that were doing the one review, and that was sort of for niche names. They seem to have done a decent job of cleaning up what’s your perspective on that.
Gyi Tsakalakis 13:14
Man, and they’re, you know, they have really, their PR team has really gotten to work and trying to be more transparent about how they’re combating spam. But to me, it’s like a drop in the ocean. I mean, the fake reviews are out of control. There seems to be little, I mean, you see some big examples being made. But I still think that that’s a huge problem. You still and again, is it spam, not spam, to have business keywords in your business name, you know, if you change your business to include keywords in your business name-
Look, the good news is they give you a path to do it legitimately. You know-
And to me, that’s almost like table stakes. Now I’m always like, I’m always super impressed when a firm who hasn’t changed their name is ranking, I’m like nice job. Yeah, I think more big picture outside of the context of spam, the thing that’s been really interesting to me, is to see their testing of location of the local pack and SERPs. So you know, historically, we think of local pack is like being the preeminent real estate under ads, right, like local pack usually comes up for those lower, lower funnel specific queries. But I’ve seen a lot of, a lot of tests where the traditional localized organic listing, there’s actually a couple of them above the local pack. And so whether you’re, you get back into this old game of like, well, you’re competing with directories and stuff, but when you’re the, you become the only game in town, and you’re doing structured data markup, and it’s showing a rich aggregate review snippet, which its not supposed to because that’s against their guideline, too. We’ve seen that disproportionally have a huge impact, where we’re like, hey, this is weird. Our average position in the local pack has gone down but because we’re ranking you know, in the one spot, in the traditional organic result, phone calls are still, are even going up So that’s another thing I tell people. And we talked about this a little bit in the pre show is like, what should you be focused on? And you know, again, it’s like, it’s got to be cost per qualified consultation, cost per client by channel. That’s what I would be focusing on. Think, especially in PI, it’s tough to think about like return on investment, because the time window is just too big. Eventually, I think those are good things to look at. But if you’re looking short term, like, hey, you want to, is my marketing department or is my SEO partner, or my digital marketing partne more generally, is this working? It’s got to be couched in terms of like, volume and cost per acquisition of consultations and cases.
Seth Price 15:40
I think, but also, what makes it particularly challenging is that you don’t know that up front. That’s, that’s the payoff. And I think that the bane of the SEO company’s existence is getting people to the point where that’s there, and that once somebody is there, then you’re sort of off to the races. But before that, it’s a dream, you know, it’s sort of, I was talking to you offline about the philosophy of not sort of presenting SEO to people that aren’t interested in it. But people who are like, hey, I’m ready for SEO, what do you do? And why should we use you? And that sort of rub I think, has become sort of a, to me, as, as we’ve evolved as an agency, that the, finding the client, that’s a rational player, so so important, because if people don’t know what they’re getting, it really just makes it a heck of a lot harder to and it takes a toll on staff.
Gyi Tsakalakis 16:37
100%. And, you know, we just, I was just, I just posted about this on LinkedIn the other day, because it was coming up in some context of conversations that we’ve been having. But kind of two things I think about and the first one is, it’s really about expectation alignment. But like, if you’re, if you’re a small business of any kind, law firms included, if you can’t talk about a p&l, and your, you know, target fees, and target marketing budget, and where you’re deploying resources, and the different timeframes for various marketing activities, going out there and being like, I want SEO, its like you’re not, it’s like going out there and buying like widgets, it’s like, you don’t you don’t even know what you’re buying. And, you know, to their defense, to a lot of their defense, you know, there’s a lot of obfuscation. I mean, you go to a lot of these conferences, I can’t tell you how many times I go to these conferences, and people that are paying to speak there are getting up on stage and saying things like, you know, I guarantee you return on investment from SEO in a couple of months. And I’m like, you know, look, maybe some, maybe in some instances, that happens. But think about what that person is saying. They’re saying someone’s going to search a non brand, what they’re implying, maybe they’re not laying this out. They’re implying that on a non brand query, that person is going to call, you hire, you and pay you within a couple of months in PI? I mean, come on.
Seth Price 18:07
Well, right. But I look, to be fair, I’ll give you the flip side of it, which is-
Gyi Tsakalakis 18:10
Go ahead.
Seth Price 18:10
PI lawyers are looking at it based on cases coming in.
Gyi Tsakalakis 18:13
Right.
Seth Price 18:13
They don’t fund it, so like, take that as a given. But no, I think this goes back. This goes back for as long as we’ve been talking, which is there are techniques and I’m seeing more and more of this, I sort of put my head down and about myself. And yeah, we reverse engineer everybody in the space. But I am seeing spam come back at a level that I have not seen in a while. And I’m curious to see what happens this will either age very well or not. But that early May, we’re supposed to see some real significant spam updates from Google. And curious as to, you know, look, I’ve personally price bounces not in such a major market where we need to spam reviews, right, we’re getting legitimate reviews. Whereas if I was in Florida, I can’t say that I’d have that same philosophy. If you’re competing against aguy with 3000 reviews, you know, your 150 or 300 isn’t going to move the needle. And so I think that, you know, I’m curious to get your thoughts if you’re seeing this, but I’m seeing it with some of the larger players out there. The, at the, the, the pile of spam onto listings in a way that I hadn’t seen, since you know, maybe those early days where we were using the the blog post commenting.
Gyi Tsakalakis 19:27
Yeah, man, people ask me all the time, they’re like March core update, spam upd- So just to be clear for folks, you can go look at the Google update dashboard, because they, at least with these two, they’ve been transparent about the starts and the completion dates. So the spam, their latest spam update is already completed. And people are like, Hey, do you see any impact? And I’m like, nope, not in legal. And you see a lot of these prominent enterprise SEOs who are dealing in big areas, you know, helpful content update, and they’re seeing major swings.
Seth Price 19:58
Correct, so for the most part for people that, you know that it didn’t like, my attitude is I just don’t want to wake up one morning and see stuff gone. So we, for the most part plowed forward with that, but I feel that the enterprise level guys have really gotten crushed on this.
Gyi Tsakalakis 20:15
Yeah, I mean, look, you can go look at, if you just look for a helpful content update, you’ll see the winners and losers, Lily Ray does a good job of that. And, but people ask me all the time, what are you seeing in legal and I challenge and people listening to this, I’d be like, if you have a pure spam manual action for your law firm website, come talk to me, I want to see it. If you’ve seen major fluctuations, based on the, whether it was the window of the latest spam update, completing. And as Seth mentioned, the March core update, they’re saying is really not going to be finished until sometime in May. If you see major changes, I’d love to see them because I’m just not seeing them. And the other thing that comes up as this thing about AI and chat GPT. And Google’s trying to get rid of all this AI content. Go search, I just did it before the show. And just in case this came up, go search for Chat GPT for legal marketing, and the, I’ll get myself in trouble if anybody from, nobody from Google’s gonna watch this show. But maybe if they do get myself in trouble, but our page ranks! And I just disclose at the top of the page, this page is written by Chat GPT, completely. Just copy and paste job. And it still ranks. Now, if you abuse it, can you can you abuse it? Sure, right. We’ve seen that-
Seth Price 21:29
And that’s my theory on why some of the spam may be working, because on the enterprise level, the spam level is crazy. Whereas on legal it may be layered in and that I feel like that as much as the legal people abuse it. They’re not as crazy as some of these other industries, and therefore the algorithm just hasn’t been excited about it to date.
Gyi Tsakalakis 21:51
I think that’s right, I think so two things you said that I think that resonate. One is is that, you know, look. And I always, another person that I’ve always liked to have his point of this is Wil Reynolds from SEER interactive, you know, he was real company stuff a long time ago. And so, if you’re doing real company stuff at your firm, you’re gonna I think you’re gonna offset a lot of the signaling, if even if you’re like doing some spam stuff. I also do think, you know, post Panda and Penguin and all this stuff, a lot of the stuff that you might have, that you might still be doing, because when we look at this, we’re doing that reverse engineering stuff you talked about, you know, we see this stuff, but it’s correlative. We don’t know that those new influx of like really spammy PBN links are actually the thing moving the dial, we just see that they’re not getting penalized, right. It’s not hurting their rankings, they seem to continue to go up. My instinct is that some of them are still working. But I think a lot of them are probably like, they’re, you know, you’re getting them, you’re getting the influx, but it’s probably not having a huge effect. Now, when you talk about fake reviews. Yeah, that that one probably, I don’t think Google is very good at distinguishing between real reviews and fake reviews.
Seth Price 22:58
I don’t think, they have not invested in it. They could look I remember-
Gyi Tsakalakis 23:02
They say they have! They come out talking about it. I don’t remember the- I’m gonna make up a number. They say they nukef like, I don’t know, 4 million or something fake reviews. I mean, that’s a drop in the bucket.
Seth Price 23:12
Look, I hate to tell you we, I remember competitor in one market had reviews that said, I’ve never used the firm, but they handed me a Frisbee at the, at the, you know, some event. And I’m like, if that’s sticking, anything’s sticking?
Gyi Tsakalakis 23:26
Well, that’s the thing. You know, they have very inclusive guidelines. I think that one example you just gave is like pretty loose, but you know if someone has an experience with your firm-
Seth Price 23:36
But and that’s the piece that I’ve started to evangelize to clients, which is if somebody calls your firm, and they don’t like the tone of the person that answered the phone, that’s an experience, I think I feel for restaurants, because if you don’t have a reservation, and you walk up to the podium and say I want in, and they say no, to me, I would like, when I’m in charge, you’re going to have to have a retainer, or eat some of the food you can’t talk about an experience. You know, like on TripAdvisor. When we, when you look at the one stars for the hotel, you’re going, the good places, their one stars are, I cancelled at the last minute they didn’t give me my money back. It’s that type of a situation. And I feel that what what, I’m what I’m seeing more and more is that lawyers, if they want to compete have to morphed their feeling of what a review is to an endorsement. This isn’t like you should sit there with all your buddies at a mastermind or a conference, hey I’ll do you, you do me. Google sees those spikes, and that’s obviously bad. But the idea that it needs to, you know that if you’re going to get dinged for nominal interactions with your firm, a positive interaction like somebody called and you can’t help them but they love you, and they thank you for their time. The thank you translates into that because if you’re gonna take the negatives, you mighty as well take the positives.
Gyi Tsakalakis 24:58
Absolutley. And again, and some of it is like, it’s focusing on what you can control, you can only control your side of the exchange on the client service side of things. But you better find ways to provide more remarkable experiences, you better find more friendly people to answer the phone. You better find-
Seth Price 25:15
And when bad reviews, you need to make sure. Is there a reason that it’s happening? Or is it you know, is it? Is it that person? Have you, one thing that was waiting for that I’ve never seen. I wonder if you have any data on this was keywords in the firm responses? Have you seen any anything pick up that that would be helpful in any way?
Gyi Tsakalakis 25:35
No. And I think Darren Shaw at Whitespark who know you’ve had on SEO Insider, so folks can go check out that episode, too. I think he, and I think Joy to have done some research on impact on that. I haven’t seen, the, the thing that I have seen though. That’s you know, it’s not, I wouldn’t call it a direct ranking factor. But again, if you start, when you start looking at search engine result pages through the lens of user interaction, it really reframes things for you. Because what will happen is the keyword might show up as, in a justification. And so that is helpful from a user experience standpoint. It might be bolded, you know, that they might, if it matches-
Seth Price 26:10
But are that from the responses or just from the review itself?
Gyi Tsakalakis 26:14
I? That’s a great question. I believe I’ve seen it in both. But if you twisted my arm to give you an example, I can’t think of one.
Seth Price 26:23
The next time we have you on, we’ll get it, we’ll get a definitive answer on, what the latest is, um, anything what’s in what excites you about that look, wherever Detroit and our New York Local Us, but what sort of what, what, what areas are you putting your thumb on when it comes to local search?
Gyi Tsakalakis 26:39
I mean, you know, we’re, you know, they kind of break it down into like three different buckets for local search. One is just, you know, the visibility, share of local voice showing up. And again, I when I think of local, I don’t even think about it in terms of like organic versus paid. I mean, look, as of right now, like them or not LSAS are at the top of the page, you want to be competitive, you want to have visibility. To your point, I think that there are certain practice areas that the economics don’t work out, right, because the cost per lead, and the conversion rate, and the fee generated might not make sense.
Seth Price 27:16
Right, I see it very often within the same practice area, a low dollar trust and estates person might do better than a high dollar trust in the states plus, you just can’t get the conversion for certain niches.
Gyi Tsakalakis 27:28
I think that’s right. And just for the record, like, that’s the way, what you just said is the way people need to be thinking about this is like, lifetime value of a client, cost, target cost per client, target cost per consultation, where the conversion rates at each of these stages, but LSAs, you know, you got reviews they’re at the top of the page, finding ways to increase, you know, the spend, which is tough, you know, we’ve seen, we’re setting, we’re setting spend levels, way through the roof, and they’re still not spending, but then it’s like booking rate and influx of reviews seem to make a difference in engagement with the platform. But then I’m moving down the page. And I’m like, you know, look, if you look at, if you got target queries, where there’s Google is showing a traditional localized organic result, not a local pack, you better have a page that’s optimized to try to take advantage of that. And I see a lot of firms that, there has been this idea of like content consolidation, which I’m, I’m pro generally. But if you killed your page, that was your quote, unquote, more like a doorway or directory page, but it ranked, you might re-look at that. Because you might that, if Google’s showing those traditional local pages, you better be there with a localized resource to rank and, you know, we can debate about whether or not to add aggregate review markup. But if, if competitors are showing it for the query, I’m kinda like, try to play it. I haven’t seen any manual actions based on self serving review markup violations. But-
I mean, what was the last time you saw, I mean granted, your world is cleaner than most, but what was the last time you shot manual action in your extended world?
I’ve only, in legal, so I’ve seen them outside of legal. But the only one that we’ve that I’ve seen directly in legal was a site that we created with the goal of trying to get a manual action, and we were able to trigger one, but it wasn’t on a client site. It was on this like, test site, but we, I haven’t seen one.
Seth Price 29:26
What did you have to do to get that?
Gyi Tsakalakis 29:28
There was an unnatural link violation?
Seth Price 29:31
And you were using, you know, third party spammy links.
Gyi Tsakalakis 29:36
Yeah, we were hammering links.
Seth Price 29:37
What percentage of them were that?
Gyi Tsakalakis 29:41
100%.
Seth Price 29:41
100%. So and that’s really the question is if somebody’s you know, it’s sort of like the AI content, if you’re at 25% can, does Google know or care versus you know, when, when you’re where you’re at 90% they’re like, hey, enough’s enough.
Gyi Tsakalakis 29:56
Yeah. And you know, look, spamminess is a spectrum in of itself, this is the one that I always get in, you know, look, if you’re if you’re getting these emails, like I’m getting, like everybody’s getting, like domain authority 90 guest blog post, and you’re buying those links, I think you’re at a higher risk, for and those representing, you know, 90% of the links that you’re building, I think you’re at a higher risk of triggering a spam, however.
Seth Price 30:18
But the question is, if you add ten of those links to a site that has 1000s of links.
Gyi Tsakalakis 30:23
And it’s in there and, you know, they’re, they’re known, you know, domains, like there are real domains that they have somebody there that are like, you know, brokering links on the site. Yeah, I don’t I, I think at worst, most of those maybe Google’s devaluing. You know, again, so I was gonna let me give you the other end of the spectrum. The other spectrum is is like you sponsor, a youth sports team. And as part of that sponsorship, they put up something on their website that links back to your website. Now, technically, you’re supposed to put a sponsored tag on that link, right, you’re supposed to nofollow it? Do I think that Google really wants to penalize local law firms that are sponsoring youth baseball teams and local community? Like no, I don’t.
Seth Price 31:07
And generally the site it’s coming off of is not all that great to begin with.
Gyi Tsakalakis 31:11
But see, that see, this is maybe an interesting, maybe this is something that we have a slightly different viewpoint on. But I throw domain authority and page authority out the window for local link building, give me something topically relevant, it’s a real site. And it’s, or geographically relevant, like it’s in your local community, man, more and more often, you don’t even need a high volume of them, like, we’ve made simple broken link building stuff where you’re like, you crawl your local city or county site, and they’re linking to some data resource and it’s bro- it’s not doesn’t work anymore. You recreate the resource on your site, you got to strip back some of your marketing stuff. You don’t want to be on a template that’s like super, you know, advertising your law firm. And you’ve, you email reach out to the Municipality. And you’re like, hey, you got some broken links on your site. People in this community might want to have this, we recreated it over here, linked to it. That can move the dial a lot.
Seth Price 32:00
Yeah, the fundamentals, it’s amazing how more things change, the more they stay the same.
Gyi Tsakalakis 32:04
Well, that’s the thing is I tell people all the time, I’m like, you know, look, I’m a, I’m just like you, right? I’m one of these lawyers turned SEO people. I didn’t study. I mean, I did. I studied computer science for a little while. So, but I wasn’t an, I’m not an information retrieval expert. I don’t work on the search quality raters side of things. All I know is if I think, I think if I’m Google, I’m like, I’m trying to sort out all these pages, what would I do? Links still as the gatekeeper, you can go, I can go to Price Benowitz right now. Copy every single page, put it on a new domain, and our content matches exactly. You can send me a cease and desist letter or DMCA takedown. Like there’s that kind of stuff. But, but content, it’s only a difference maker to the extent that it drives signals that Google can use to to distinguish it from other pages. And so what is that, it’s links? It’s, I think that some of the brand stuff goes into that, you know, there’s some technical things you can talk about. And when I say links, you know, internal linking structure matters a lot. You know, I think some of the, as the, as their content analysis algorithms get better. Maybe you know, we can spend a lot of time debating about this EEAT stuff. But, but links are still the they’re the, they’re the gatekeeper, because it’s not that easy. Unless you pay somebody, it’s not that easy to go out and get a link, to get to, can motivate somebody to link back to your site.
Seth Price 32:04
Well with that, I appreciate your time. Can’t wait to catch up in Detroit and or New York, but that is very exciting. And we will love to bring you back on the show in a little bit to see where this, if what we prognosticated comes true.
Gyi Tsakalakis 33:45
Can’t wait Seth. So thanks so much for having me. For your benefit. I hope the Capitals do well tonight. But for the Redwings, I’m cheering for- I’m cheering for Philly.
Seth Price 33:55
I still have no idea how they beat a Boston team last night that just seemed crazy.
Gyi Tsakalakis 33:59
Huge win.
Seth Price 34:00
Huge win. Very good.
Gyi Tsakalakis 34:02
Alright my friend. Be well.
Seth Price 34:03
Bye Bye.
Gyi Tsakalakis 34:04
Bye.
BluShark Digital 34:04
Thank you for tuning in to The SEO insider with Seth Price. Be sure to check back next week for fresh insights into building your brand’s online presence. Episodes are available to stream directly on BluShark Digital’s Website
