Kat Taylor

If you think it looks paid, chances are Google’s going to think it’s paid as well.

Chris Dreyer

Niche on how you market and the type of law you practice.

Kat Taylor

That’s kind of where I think link-building is kind of shifting, all this cool, new information for PI lawyers especially.

Chris Dreyer

Welcome to Personal Injury Mastermind. I’m your host, Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io, the preeminent personal injury marketing agency. Before we get started, if you like what you hear, head on over to Apple or Spotify and pound that five-star review button. And if you don’t like what you hear, tell me about it in a one-star review. I got a big hug for all my haters too. Each week, we talk to the best in the legal industry. Ready to dominate your market? Let’s go.
If you want to get to that number one spot on Google, you need backlinks. A backlink is simply when a website hyperlinks to your website. Every quality backlink is an upvote that can help boost your ranking. If you’re thinking that you can go out and snag all the links out there, hang on. Don’t flip off this episode just yet. Notice the keyword here, quality.
There’s a saying that goes, “You become like the people you spend the most time with.” This is true for websites too. If your firm’s page is featured on quality sites, you look really good to Google. Google will want its users to see your site because it assumes you’re providing relevant information, but when garbage websites link to you over and over again, Google will assume that your site is also garbage and is more likely to throw you in the trash AKA bury you way down in the search results.
You might be thinking, “Okay, Chris. But what is a good backlink, and what is a bad one, and how the heck do I know which ones are linking to my site?” First of all, don’t panic. To explain all of this, I caught up with Kat Taylor, the senior link-building manager here at Rankings. We’ve got you covered. In today’s episode, we break down good links, toxic links, and the truth about disavow files. She also explains how attorneys can be proactive about getting those great links and how to hold an SEO agency accountable. Here’s Kat Taylor, senior link-building manager at Rankings, explaining what she knows best, links.

Kat Taylor

Links are basically you’re building your site’s authority by reaching out to other authoritative websites in your industry, in your niche, and having them link and basically pass that link equity to your website, thus enhancing your site’s authority. I would love to jump into a quick analogy if you’ll allow me to here.

Chris Dreyer

Oh, yeah. Let’s do it.

Kat Taylor

I love analogies. Okay. So the way I kind of liken link-building is training a horse, okay? I have horses. Bear with me here. The horse is Google. You are your website, all right? In the world, if you take a wild horse, then you’re going to fall off. What I say is to get to ride that horse, to get to win those goal medals, you have to train it over a period of time so that it respects you, so that it looks at you as an authority.
It’s the same kind of concept when it comes to link-building. You can’t have a new site and then say, “Hey, I’m going to go the joeyjoejimson.com link and buy 1,000 random links, possibly PBN. You don’t even know what you’re buying. Buy 1,000 links and just send them all to my website, and I’m going to rank. No. What you’re going to do is you’re going to spook, Google, the horse, right? So you’re going to get bucked off, and your website is going to be left in the dust while all your competitors, who’ve done it the right way and have slowly over the course of time looked at the relevancy of the sites that are linked into them, and the traffic, and all that… And so, they’re the guys that are going to end up winning those horse competitions, and you’re going to be stuck in the mud.

Chris Dreyer

Winning the derby.

Kat Taylor

Right.

Chris Dreyer

So Kat out of the gate is going to be competing with Steven for best analogy, Steven, if you’re listening. That is definitely a unique one that I’ve never heard as it relates to Google, but I love it. I want to kick it back though. I want to learn more about you. How did you get into digital marketing? When did you become obsessed with link-building? Take us back to those days.

Kat Taylor

This is a treat. So I worked for a vacation property website, and I was in the ownership transfer department. Then the company decided to get out of that part of the business, and they asked me, “Hey, you did a really good job. What do you want to do next?” It’s ’06, ’07. This is when SEO’s really getting exciting, and we had our own in-house team. All of my friends were in there, and they used to crank out Daft Punk on Fridays. It was just a cool team. Everyone in there was really excited about SEO.
I knew nothing about it. I’ve always been kind of a promoter personality who’s like, “Man, marketing seems awesome, and SEO’s kind of where it’s at right now. I really want to go in there.” So they kind of threw me into the wolves. A bunch of coworkers, and they were all very supportive, and they wanted to teach me what they knew. We were all learning together. It’s like a ragtag team of kids. I used to listen to Matt Cutts and Rand Fishkin’s Whiteboard Fridays. I don’t know if you remember those.
Yeah, I was very self-taught. I did copywriting. I did a lot of on-site stuff. I used to refer to myself as the SEO blob because I would just try to take it all in. Then I decided. I started doing a little bit of dabbling in link-building, and I was like, “Man, this is really exciting, talking to other webmasters, promoting our website to them, the outreach, the prospecting, learning Google search operators, and finding new opportunities that way.” I was like, “I need to do this.” It’s exciting. You can see the progress, the link that you build. You can see it effectively helping your site over the course of the year. Yeah, it was very exciting.

Chris Dreyer

Kat, I don’t know how many people listening are excited about Boolean operators and search operators, but for those of you that are, Kat’s the person to talk to. We went right to the deep end, and I know you transitioned. You went to an agency that specialised in link-building. Tell me about that experience.

Kat Taylor

It’s a completely different world from in-house to agency life. First of all, in-house is more experience. I know there’s a lot of probably lawyers out there that have considered doing an in-house project because you have more, I guess, sway, and you can do more things by-

Chris Dreyer

Control.

Kat Taylor

Control, exactly. However, you’re looking at a million-dollar-a-month operation because you’ve got all of these salaries that you have to pay. Then it’s a lot of strategy, and it’s a lot of you having to do a lot of the groundwork yourself.
Agency’s awesome because I get in there, and I’m able to just focus on link-building, but then also, you get a variety of different businesses that you’re working for. So it’s exciting because every single business has a different landscape in SEO, and so your competitors might be different over here. Your geo might be more competitive. If you’re in Austin, it might be more competitive than say, I don’t know, Vero Beach or something like that.
So I thought it was more of an exciting challenge because every single day, using get a new type of organisation to kind of figure out a strategy for from the beginning to the end versus in-house where you have one strategy. You kind of tweak it a little bit here and there, but it’s one website that you’re solely focused on. And so I actually think agency life is more fun.

Chris Dreyer

So when you worked for this other link-building agency, so you had all variety of industries, and strategies, and just different link opportunities. Then you came to work for us, and it’s 99% of our clients are personal injury. We talked kind of early on what a link is, but what in your definition because Google doesn’t really define this in detail… What makes a good link?

Kat Taylor

So I like to say link-building is an ART, A, authority… And I’ll get into each one. Authority, R, relevance, T, traffic. So authority, you want to look for a site that’s been around for a while, something that I call crusty. I think Google puts a lot of authority into sites that have been around for longer than three years. They’re there because they’re a real website as opposed to I’m a website so that I can link to you and whatever.
And so I think it looks at that, and then it also looks at referring domains this website has as well. If this site has hundreds of domain ratings of DR 50 and up, it’s looking at the authority of the referring domain. So you want to make sure that the backlink you’re obtaining is from a website that has its own authority.
Then relevance, I honestly think is the most important. If you’re a PI lawyer, and car accidents are usually the highest level bread-and-butter type of PI there is, so you want to look for motor vehicle blogs, something that’s really talking about that industry and also has referring domains that are relevant to that site as well. You want to look at that and then also health sites, lifestyle sites. Those types of websites are what a PI injury lawyer… Obviously, legal is the top one. Those are the kind of sites that a PI lawyer want to looks at.
Then for traffic, I always say a real website has at least 1,000 in monthly organic traffic. Anything below that is probably a newer site, really hasn’t built that traction up yet, and I think Google looks at the traffic as an authority signal. And so it looks to see to make sure the sites that you’re getting on are… They’re getting the traffic.

Chris Dreyer

I’ll give you my own analysis here. Authority, that first on the A… We’ll use your ART description here. This is one that can be manipulated a lot with expired domains and people just cranking no-follow links at a site. If you look at it just alone, it may not be a good indication. You got to kind of look at all three of these. It’s like a Venn diagram where it all kind of fits in the middle.
Then you got relevancy. So if the site doesn’t… There’s not a natural reason for it to link to your attorney website, then you shouldn’t receive that link. Also, Google’s not going to trust it. For example, these new sites that just take any type of content. A lot of times, Google doesn’t favor those. Now, there’s definitely exceptions to that, like these giant editorials, like your Forbes.
Then traffic. The reason I like traffic is because if the site has traffic, then Google favors it to some degree. They could have a super high DR, but they don’t have any traffic. It’s not going to be a good link. So I’m with you on all of those. I think a lot of times, other SEO specialists when they’re dealing with their clients will just say, “Hey, we got a DR 50 link.” “Okay, well, let me see the content. Oh, well, why is it linking to me? The content’s terrible,” or, “Oh, this site doesn’t have any traffic.” These are some of the things that you got to look at.

Kat Taylor

It’s really easy too. You take a website. Go to their About Us page. If they don’t have an About Us page, you’d probably want to move on anyway, but you want to make sure that it’s trying to build and that they’re leaning into what their index is chartering for. So if it’s a car blog, and you go to their About Us page, and it’s poorly written, grammatically incorrect, and they’re not really talking about anything having to do with motor vehicles, and it’s just SEO, lifestyle blog, what’s, that’s kind of a red flag to me. I think that’s an easy thing for someone to do if they’re trying to figure out the relevancy. Obviously, the domain name, and look at the majority of the posts and pages on the site, but also, look at their About Us page.

Chris Dreyer

I think too when you go to a site and you’re choosing if you’re going to try to obtain a link from this if you’re doing the manual effort, it’s like, “Are they curating their site? Is there a curation process?” Because from what I’ve seen, and you could speak to this too, the better sites, they have an extreme editorial review process. They don’t just let anybody post to them. You have to have great content. You have to go through this editorial process. So to me, a lot of times, that’s a red flag.

Kat Taylor

Yeah, and I always say, “I want to work with sites similar to my site.” So I’m not linking out to everybody. Personal injury lawyers that are linking this, they’re not linking out to everybody. So you kind of want to work with a site that cares as much about the quality of their site as you do.

Chris Dreyer

To recap, good sites have ART. That’s authority, relevancy, and traffic. At the other end of the spectrum, we have toxic links. Kat breaks down what they are and how to avoid them.

Kat Taylor

So my opinion of a toxic link… There’s a bunch different things. An exact match, which is a keyword that you’re trying to reinforce. So we’ll say car accident lawyer, exact match, site-wide language, meaning it appears on every single page of a website, in a sidebar. Now, you don’t see this too often. An exact match link, that clearly looks like spam.
That, to me, is a toxic or if it’s in the footer, and you just see. You’re looking down, and there’s just a random exact match link like, “Go over here for car accident attorneys.” Why is that there, if not to scam Google? So hidden text. There are people out there that will just hide your anchor text in a bunch of content. So you can’t even see it, but it’s there. That’s sketchy.
Then also, this is one that I think a lot of people probably don’t think about, but I think it’s more toxic as we move forward in SEO. Are press release links. I think, obviously, it’s fine… Like Mueller even came out and said, “We ignore these because we know they’re paid.” However, if you do a press release and you riddle it with a bunch of links, and it’s not a branded link talking about your firms, that’s fine.
But if it’s just like, “Car accident attorney, personal injury attorney, geo-modified Houston personal injury lawyer,” covered in links, that actually could end up hurting you because it’s now… especially Google already knows those are paid, and you’re just spouting those out across the search engine result pages. So I think those could possibly potentially be toxic as well.
Then, yeah, for the disavow… What disavow basically is is you can use Google Search Console or use another tool. You can use Semrush, Ahrefs to populate what they think is a toxic link. Then you can basically create a CSD file from that research, and then you can send it to Google and say, “Hey, can you neutralize?”
I don’t personally believe anyone really needs to do that unless you receive a manual penalty from Google. If you haven’t and you’re kind of worried, your traffic’s dipping or whatever, I don’t think it’s because of the links that you find in a disavow file. What I would say is I think Google is neutralizing those links naturally anyway or they’re ignoring them, so you don’t really need to send that file to them.

Chris Dreyer

I think John Mueller’s been really public about this, and this is why I get really frustrated because a lot of these SEO specialists are going to email a client, prospect them, and say, “Oh, your links are spam. That’s why you’re not ranking.” No, it’s actually Google algorithmically ignores those, and they’re not passing authority. They just need better links.
One of the first things that we do… And there’s some really prominent agencies that do this, is they’ll upload a disavow file. One of the first things that we do, oh, there’s no manual penalty, we go delete that file because we let Google determine what a good link is. If someone’s linking to the site, we’re not going to just automatically shut down these links. So I think it’s a big, big no-no. I think a lot of people do it.
Let’s talk about what attorneys can do. A lot of the attorneys listening… It’s very common for us when we speak to them. They’re like, “Yeah, you’re building all these links. We’re happy with the links we’re receiving, but I’ve got this free time, and I want to contribute. What can I do as an attorney to go build links myself?”

Kat Taylor

Oh, yeah. Well, I think a lot of times, people forget the impact of local link-building. That’s something that’s really easy for any lawyer to really do. You can go out and look for business associations in your area, the chamber of commerce. Search operators are amazing to use for this, and we can always go into another podcast discussing those. Yeah, just do local outreach to the websites in your geo that have their own authority.
Those are great sites for not only helping Google understand that you’re an authority in that geo, but also, you can get national referrals from those sites as well. Obviously, traffic going to your site is always a good thing for SEO, and referrals are great. Who doesn’t want those? A lot of those are going to give you a lot of referrals because they’re going to get a lot of people going to the sites to find information locally.

Chris Dreyer

Yeah, and I would say that in some specific examples here, FindLaw, and then recently Justia’s really popped up in the search results now. Sometimes those links are no-follow, and that’s a whole different discussion. They don’t pass equity. In some areas, they don’t pass any authority, right? They don’t rank. They’re not in those top results, but in other situations, they can rank. You can get some referrals. We’ve seen Justia move up. Even if they do have the no-follow, and that’s a whole different discussion, it could be a good signal for Google. I know that there’s some people that just ostracize FindLaw, and just talk negatively about FindLaw or Justia or even Avvo, but in some markets and some practice areas, those are good. Tell me about Help a Reporter Out. Maybe that’s an action that attorneys could use.

Kat Taylor

Oh, yeah. Help a Reporter Out is basically a site that has all these journalists going to it, and they’re writing a story. They’re like, “This is my story.” You can get an email that sends to you every single day with all these different inquiries about stories that all these journalists from different online publications are working on, and they need help. They typically will link back to you once they quote you in the article.
It’s a free thing to do. You go onto haro.com, sign up for the free email. You can choose I want business inquiries only or legal inquiries, and choose the ones that are most suitable for your website niche. I think there’s might be a motor vehicle one as well. There’s a health one. I know that.
Then, yeah, each day, you’ll get auto emails. It’s almost like the reporters are coming to you. So then you can choose the ones that you want to reach out to, and get a quote for yourself in there, and get a link back to your site. They’re usually really good publications as well, so it’s awesome.

Chris Dreyer

Yeah, we’ve got links from American Express. We’ve got them from Reader’s Digest and using this tactic. So there can be exceptional links. You got to be interesting though. You got to have something noteworthy to be included. In addition to HARO, one of the things I’ve noticed is just having awareness of the importance of links is just so incredible. What I mean by that is imagine you want a new vehicle. You want a new Bronco. You want a new Range Rover, and then you start to see them on the road all the time. You’re aware of them.
It’s the same thing. I like to say with link-building is you may have already had these opportunities. Maybe you’re already mentioned in the news, and all you had to do was just ask and be aware of those opportunities. Maybe you’re sponsoring an event. Sometimes they have a sponsorship page, a local fundraiser. Those opportunities are around you. You just got to see them.

Kat Taylor

So I am going to say something, okay? Unlinked mentions are amazing. Yes, I wish I said that earlier. Unlinked mention’s amazing to… They’re going to link to you. I’ve done it often for some of our clients. I’m like, “Hey, you’re mentioned. Let’s get that link.” It’s so easy to do.
Anything that could be thought of as paid to Google, Google is going to ignore. Anything that says, “Here are our sponsors,” just be aware that it’s almost the same thing as a no-follow attribute being added to it. It’s going to get ignored, but if you think that you might get some referral traffic from it, totally do that. I mean, I’m not saying don’t do a sponsored page, but always be aware that if you think it looks paid, chances are Google’s going to think it’s paid as well.
So what you’re trying to do is get national recommendations from authority websites, and so when Google sees you have all of these national recommendations, then you’re authoritative. Whereas if you only built backlinks that were on sponsored pages or things like that, chances are that’s not going to help you as much, but you might get referral traffic.

Chris Dreyer

You can go out and get links by providing links value to external media hubs that will link to you as a source. In addition, check out Help a Reporter Out and also look for associations in your local market. You can also attract links to you. Kat has done an amazing job leveraging original studies and using them for link attraction.

Kat Taylor

I’m super excited about this because I think it’s kind of where link-building is going. It’s more of a digital PR situation because you want to curate your own data that’s not found everywhere else online. People are typically just scraping their information from FTC and things like that, where you can go out and create your own data that hasn’t been seen anywhere else, where basically other reporters can… If they’re looking to source somebody, and they google it, and you’re the only real result that has that data, you’re always going to be used. A lot of natural link-building is just going to happen.
And so what I do is I brainstorm. I’ll take a topic. Again, I’m going to use car accidents. Bring that topic in. Create a web. Figure out, okay, what are all the different reasons a car accident can happen? Distracted driving, drinking and driving, all that. So just create an entire web of it all. Then try to figure out what hasn’t been discussed. You google all these different topics that come that.
Once you figure out your main topic, use a outside party like SurveyMonkey, get them to basically do the survey for you. Then you create this nice piece of optimized… a data point essentially that has bullets, that’s easy for a journalist to be like, “Ooh, information, percentages. Really easy and digestible.” That’s kind of where I think link-building is kind of shifting, all this cool, new information for PI lawyers especially. So I’m excited about that.

Chris Dreyer

If your website has content that can be sited, the… and it’s easy for them, they’re going to incorporate it into their content, and then give you that link back to your site. We’ve done this tactic through motorcycle accident statistics or truck accident statistics. There’s a number of tactics that we’ve used, but you do have to do the outreach. You do have to promote it and get those keywords to rank to make it more discoverable. That’s a huge tactic.
We even went through the Department of Transportation, and they have all this data, but a lot of times, it just hasn’t been cleaned up, and it’s a few years behind. They’ll give us the raw data, and then we can deconstruct it into our own assets. We’ve done accident maps. We’ve done everything of that nature.
Let’s just talk about another tactic that is played out. Let’s talk about scholarship campaigns. I wrote an article in Moz, which is a big SEO publication, in 2015 that detailed this strategy.

Kat Taylor

I read it.

Chris Dreyer

Tell me why is this played out, and why do attorneys and law firms just keep doing it?

Kat Taylor

Well, because of you. They all read that article back then too most likely, and honestly, it worked out really well back then. It really did because .edus… I remember back in my day, we actually would get paid bonuses if we were able to attract a .edu. It was a big deal because it’s a harder TLD or top-level to get. It’s much like a .gov. It’s harder. The links that the harder to get are the links that are really going to propel your site forward. So it was an amazing tactic.
It worked so well because it kind of fooled Google, but then Google kind of caught on because everyone did it. Then Google was like, “Hey, let’s ignore these because it’s clear that people are spending all this money to create a scholarship just to get that backlink.” And so it tweaked their algorithm. So that way, it’s like, “Okay.”

Chris Dreyer

Yeah, I think to give you the audience some background is basically what the tactic entailed from the basics is you’d create a scholarship for $1,000 to $10,000. Then what you would do is you’d put that landing page on your website. Then you would reach out to financial aid departments at these universities to get them to include your scholarship on their website. It was very effective. Back in the day when we started doing this, there might be five or 10 people on that financial aid page, five or 10 scholarships. Now, there’s thousands. So not only is there dilution. It’s just oversaturated.
The other thing, I think there’s a lot of scenarios here, right? You can say, “It’s not binary. It’s not yes or no.” You could put out a legit scholarship that’s goodwill for the consumer, for your local market, a legit one, and do it right with goodwill, grassroots marketing, good digital PR, be selective on which universities you talk to, and only do the premier universities, maybe even only the extreme relevant ones. I think it might still be beneficial, but if you do the just standard page up, $1,000 scholarship, and you spray it out to 10,000 universities, it’s just not going to work.

Kat Taylor

Yeah, and also, I think universities are starting to catch on as well. I’ve noticed that a lot of them are kicking these links out to third parties. It’s scholarshipsrus.com. That’s where your scholarship’s going to end up living as opposed to getting that nice, juicy .edu link that really worked well back in the day. I think that moving forward, eventually, it’s going to die out. Yeah, I think the local colleges around you, why not? It’s great. It makes you look good, goodwill to the local community. I think that’s fantastic, but as far as the .edu…

Chris Dreyer

Let me give you another scenario. This is what happens frequently. When a client with an attorney is working with an agency, their agency is telling them, “Hey, we’re link-building.” You can see it in air quotes. I’ve even heard some of the big agencies say, “Oh, well, this is our proprietary tactics on how we acquire links.” There’s a couple big ones, prominent ones that say this, and it drives me nuts. How do you hold your agency accountable? How do you really know if they are building links? Even if they’re not giving you a report, what are some tactics you can take to hold them accountable to determine if they’re actually doing link-building properly?

Kat Taylor

I would definitely invest in a Ahrefs account because you can go in there and view the referring domains coming through if they’re not sending reports, which they should be sending you reports. They should be sending you monthly reports on what they’re doing. Yeah, log into your Ahrefs account, look at the referring domains in the last month or so, and see what new ones are coming through.
Link-building shouldn’t take more than 45 days to start getting the leads coming through. There’s a lot of prospecting. There’s a lot of outreach. There’s writing the content, but that typically doesn’t take two months. If you are working with somebody, they should be like, “Hey, we’re going to send you these monthly reports.” That’s number one.
If you see that your DR is just sitting there… You’re getting all these referring domains, but nothing’s really happening, and you’re not seeing those referring domains coming in, chances are a lot of the sites that they’re building links on aren’t even getting indexed or it’s taking a long time or they’re just building a bunch of links on the same domain. That never gets counted. So you’re going to get one referring domain for seven referring backlinks on that same site. You’re only going to get count of one.
If you end up working with this company, and they’re building 30 links on two websites, you’re going to get two links out of that. So just make sure that you tell them to send you a report and that you’re checking in on Ahrefs every once in a while as well, is what I would recommend.

Chris Dreyer

Yeah, I had an actual example literally yesterday where I had a prospect. I looked at their link profile, and they had a decent amount of links. They had 500 referring domains. Referring domain is a website linking to them. But when I dug in and I looked at their link profile, about 450 of them had less than a DR 10, and there were only, I think, 50 sites that had over 1,000 organic traffic. It was just clear. It was a vanity number that they had 500, but in actuality, they only maybe had 50-plus solid links.
When you do a competitor analysis and you look at your competitors in your markets, you say, “Hey, well, I’ve got 500 referring domains, and they have 300. I should be beating them.” But it’s not just quantity. It’s quality too. So I highly recommend buying a tool. Look, it’s less than 100 bucks a month the fee. Ahrefs.com, that can hold your digital agency accountable because you can see the content that goes on your website, right? There’s typically some type of editorial process there. But a lot of times, your agency’s going to air quote and tell you they’re link-building when they’re not or the quality of their links aren’t just up to the standards of Google standards. I’d say there’s a couple big ones.
The other thing is how many. How many links does a firm need? What’s the question here? When you’re going to benchmark and you have certain goals as a firm… I can hear Gyi Tsakalakis from AttorneySync saying, “Go get as many as you can because they’re just fantastic endorsements.” But what’s your thoughts here?

Kat Taylor

I think it really depends on the competitive landscape, and it depends on how old your site is as well. If you’re a brand-new website in a hyper-competitive landscape, you don’t want a bunch of referring domains right off the bat if you’re brand-new. You can have a slower ramp-up. The quality is more important than focusing on how many I have to get right away.
And as your site becomes older and more authoritative, then you can build a lot more at that point because it makes more sense that an older site that already has authority is going to be getting all these national like tonnes of them each month as opposed to if you’re brand new. You’re domain rating of two. It doesn’t make any sense that all of a sudden, all these entities are going to start linking to you because you’re an authority. You’re not yet. So I really think it depends on the stage of your website and how competitive it is in your area and your niche.
Then eventually, yes, I think volume and quality should go together. There isn’t one that’s better than the other. That has been a huge link-builder debate since the beginning of my time. There’s the volume count and then the quality count. I think it’s both, and I think it depends on where you are.

Chris Dreyer

Yeah, if Google looked at your link profile, why are these spikes? That’s unnatural versus a natural progression. But it could look at a spike, and it’s an indication that they need to research. Maybe you did create an access linkable asset, and maybe that’s not unnatural, but if you do it too frequently or if you’re using brokers, which we’re very against buying links, those get you in all kinds of trouble because of PBNs, private blog networks, and just being in bad neighborhoods with high spam ratio scores. You just want to avoid that.
You want to do natural outreach. You need to build relationships with webmasters, go through their editorial review process, and create content that you would want on your website. Don’t shortcut it because if the content’s not getting crawled, it’s not getting served up to Google and Google doesn’t favor it, well, then it’s probably not going to pass much authority. So all those factors come into play. How can people get in touch with you, and just any final thoughts?

Kat Taylor

I did want to talk about the most recent spam update with Google. A lot of people worried about it. I know I kind of talked about it earlier, but I just wanted to underline don’t sweat it, everybody. Unless you’ve got that manual penalty from Google and something’s kind of askew, do not worry because what it is essentially doing is disavowing junkie scraper links for you. In my opinion, it’s kind of cleansing your site of anything kind of spammy.
All you have to do really moving forward is be intentional with your link-building and just replace anything that was neutralized by the spam update by something that’s weighty, and authoritative, and super relevant. I promise you you’re going to be fine.
Then if anyone wants to contact me for all of your link-building needs, my email address is kat@rankings.io. That’s K-A-T, not C-A-T. Yeah, I’d love to talk to anybody. If anyone has any questions about Google search operators, I love talking about that, and just strategies in general. I’m always loving talking about link-building, so I welcome it.

Chris Dreyer

Thanks so much to Kat Taylor for everything she shared today. Let’s hit the PIMM Points. PIMM Point number one, when it comes to links, you have to know what to look for. Good links have authority, relevancy, and traffic or ART for short.

Kat Taylor

Authority, you want to look for a site that’s been around for a while, something that I call crusty. I think Google puts a lot of authority into sites that have been around for longer than three years. Relevance, I honestly think is the most important. You’re a PI lawyer, so you want to look for motor vehicle blogs, something that’s really talking about that industry and also has referring domains that are relevant to that site as well.
Then for traffic, I always say a real website has at least 1,000 in monthly organic traffic. Anything below that is probably a newer site, really hasn’t built that traction up yet, and I think Google looks at the traffic as an authority signal. And so it looks to see to make sure the sites that you’re getting on are… They’re getting the traffic.

Chris Dreyer

And PIMM Point number two, what can attorneys do to help build links for their firm? Go out and get them. Provide value to the media. Start with sites like Help a Reporter Out. Gives quotes and your insights. This is a great way to contribute and boost your authority as a thought leader.

Kat Taylor

Do local outreach to the websites in your geo that have their own authority. Those are great sites for not only helping Google understand that you’re an authority in that geo, but also, you can get national referrals from those sites as well.

Chris Dreyer

And PIMM Point number three, make sure the SEO agency you hire is doing the job you paid them to do. How can you hold them accountable for link-building? Ask for reports and ask how the links are being acquired. If they come back saying things like, “This is our proprietary technique,” red flag. That’s a bunch of garbage. You can do a little verification on your own too. Buy tools that scrape your site and evaluate if you’re getting links. We like Ahrefs or Semrush.

Kat Taylor

Look at the referring domains in the last month or so to see what new ones are coming through. Link-building shouldn’t take more than 45 days to start getting the leads coming through. There’s a lot of prospecting. There’s a lot of outreach. There’s writing the content, but that typically doesn’t take two months.

Chris Dreyer

I’m Chris Dreyer. Thanks for listening to Personal Injury Mastermind. If you made it this far, it’s time to pay the tax. No, I’m not talking about taking your cash like Big G. I’m asking you for a five-star review on Apple or Spotify. Leave me a review, and I’ll forever be grateful. If this is your first episode, welcome, and thanks for hanging out. Come back for fresh interviews where you can hear from those making it rain. Catch you next time. I’m out.