The Power of Credible Links in SEO

Andrew says: "I'm the CEO and founder of LKOA SEO , and we specialize in SEO at a high level for enterprise clients. We deploy what we refer to as scientific SEO, analyzing what actually needs to be done at the URL and keyword level, specifically for clients on an ongoing basis.

Welcome, Andrew, why do you use Majestic?

"Well, that's really interesting from our perspective. It's the most accurate index of the web. It has what I would consider to be the most intense range of data sets that actually mean something when you're analyzing for backlinks , specifically for backlinks, it's different to the other types of tools out there, like the all in one types of tools, they tend to sort of, I would say, you can be a jack of all trades and the Master of None, although quite good at it, and then you can be basically the master of one.

I do believe that Majestic are the master of one, and that being link building intelligence, but it takes a special type of person to be able to utilize that data. I think it's more applicable for the more established and data centric individual, as opposed to someone who is just trying to sort of gather some general information about the latest links that one of the competitors has actually acquired or developed or received."

I like the phrase link building intelligence. So I was also interested in you talking about the special type of person, data centric person, as opposed to special type of brand or organization. Is there a certain type of company that is best suited to use Majestic or is it more about the special type of individuals you say?

"I think it's the so it's what the objective is. Every decision that you make is made based on what you want the final outcome to be. So if you're deciding to look at Majestic data, you're generally going to be trying to find the safest, the most credible and most relevant link partner that you can find.

Other people will tackle it slightly differently. They'll want people who've got high who've got high traffic levels. They'll want people who've got minimalized mentions from other brands in their sector. That's maybe in another layer of analysis. It can go over the top, most definitely, just to ensure that you're safe.

So the thing about Trust Flow is that it actually measures quality based on proximity of trusted sites, rather than just giving it a random score, saying, Okay, this is the strength of overall authority coming in via all of the other authorities passed on by a domain score or something. So they come up with that. So they kind of take the average or the mean of an of everyone's inbound authority on other tools, whereas Majestic actually measure it in a more complicated fashion. And it turns out to be more accurate. It's based on, like I said, the proximity of trusted seed sites. So, and that's something that a lot of people aren't aware of.

Again, a lot of people in the mainstream tend to side with some of the all in one tools, because their pricing structure is everything is there, and they market themselves slightly differently. And it's just sort of works easier with the sort of the more mainstream SEO operatives, whereas the more data centric operatives, they will tend to understand what seed sites are. And then we've got the Citation Flow, and it measures the not only the volume of the links, but the relationship of the links. Whereas other tools just measure the strength, give them a rating. And again, they work out the average rating.

You also get a lot more information about the languages the size of the overall sites, so you can compare that to any site maps that you gather from any research you do as well. So I collect about 70 something metrics from Majestic when I'm analyzing one domain, and that gives me enough information to to work with to identify whether or not this is safe.

Another thing is that the neighbour , so within the neighbourhood, are we in a situation where there's any, any danger with associated sites in that neighbourhood. And again, Majestic is really, really good at being able to identify those types of sites.

If you are in a situation where you're building links for a client and they go, I don't like this site because it feels like, feels like it's part of a network. It's got a. Similar GDPR, consent form, or something, something makes me feel it's similar that you normally using the other tools, you can't actually argue their point, but using Majestic you can say, look, this is the neighbourhood. They're not a network, they're not a PBN, they're safe to work with. And that's a massive advantage, because any links that you don't get of credibility is a lost course, because it takes a lot of people a lot of people a lot of time to find those links.

We use Majestic support our index of data. So we have a database of over 186 million domains, and that came through a process of taking every top level domain, so every TLD zone file, we then took those Zone Files, we tested them, pinged all those sites, we analyzed whether or not they were live. They were not live, they were parked, contained good, bad content, or whatever it was, and everything that was live and that was suitable was then put into our index, and we the result of that is 186 million and something. Then we cemented those domains into business divisions, into sectors, and we used our own algorithm to do that.

Then it got really interesting. We decided to start pulling in and feeding our stuff through Majestic and pulling out all the metrics that they had, and they set us straight. They set us straight, straight away, in terms of the Topical Trust Flow and all the varieties of industry sectors, the languages, everything, all of a sudden, our data just became 100 times better. And then we're able to identify contextual relevancy, authority, safety and rank driving influence as a result of that.

Now we are able to offer a link matchmaking service, or a PR or a site matchmaking service effectively, because you can use it for advertising, PR, news, backlinking, affiliations, whatever it might be. And we email these webmasters, because we collect their email addresses as well when we crawl and we email them asking what sort of relationship they'd like to take part in and what industry, industry sectors would they accept.

We work a lot in the casino and the gaming industry, and we've had phenomenal response, and we've been able to get a lot of potential partners agreeing. So we have a list of 10s of 1000s of sites now where people are saying 140 bucks for a link, we charge an override on top of that to put them in contact with the third party who wants to have that relationship, like the publisher. So without the Majestic data, we would have found it very, very hard, and the other tools out there don't offer that that that level of data, and they are tremendously expensive."

So how do you use Majestic data? Is it mainly through the API?

"We use the API. One of the wonderful features about Majestic is the bulk backlink analysis . So the fact that you can put a phenomenal number, I think it's a million domains in a CSV through their bulk analysis tool, and it all spits it out the other end. I mean, there's nothing else out there that does that.

If you're a data centric person, and you happen to get your hands on half a million domains, or you download a zone file from, say, Canada or something that's got in the five or 6 million domains in it, it only takes you 12 uploads to gather that information. And then, if you want to put that into your pivot tables and start putting it into your different databases and play with that, it's a very achievable thing to do, whereas none of the other tools will do that. And if you were to do that, you'd probably have to remortgage your house to do it, because they're that expensive and they're just not that flexible. They tend to focus more on rankings. But then you could, everyone's got a rank checker, not every. And these ranks that these other third party tools deliver, they're always out of date anyway. They're like two, three months old. And the only refresh every now then, and also, they always get it wrong, because they always get do it with a wrong proxy, so the ranking is never accurate. They're just an indicator.

So, yeah, I think Majestic are the kings of backlink intelligence. They will remain to be the kings of backlink intelligence. I think more people should be using them. And I think with the development of AI, it's more possible and more viable now that people can use that data and interrogate that data without actually being a techie, which is really advantageous. So I think you're going to see a massive growth of clientele coming into Majestic I just think is about people becoming more aware of them."

So you talked, you give so many wonderful examples there. I've got about 10 follow up questions based upon what you just shared there. And one of the things that you started off talking about was neighbourhoods, identifying, identifying good and bad neighbourhoods. And what metrics within Majestic do yo use to identify bad neighbourhoods, and what do you do about that when you've identified them?

"Well, I'm not going to go into I'm not going to give the crown jewels away in terms of how I how I work, because I've built my business and my career off learning my own skills. But I can tell you that if you spend enough time in Majestic and you follow the tutorials, and you follow the support guidelines that are available through their support team, you'll very easily be able to identify what's good and bad about particular referral domains and their associations.

The way I would liken it is, if you're after a link, you're after something really, really credible. You're after you know, effectively, you're after a link from the royal family, that's what you want, as opposed to 100 links from the scalies, from the local estate. And I mean, they're offensive by that, that you know, you're talking about the royal family, versus a bunch of sort of regular folk just running around doing regular stuff. So the neighbourhood will enable you, if you are going after lower quality sites, the neighbourhood will allow you to identify, are they all buddies? Are they all mates? Do they have an association? Do they have a relationship?

If you're building a backlink profile out, the first thing you need to do is obviously identify the IP ranges and the subnets that you've currently got domains on. And those domains, of course, you then to then to be able to negate that information against potential elite partners. And one of the things that Majestic does is it gives you access. If you own the site, you can import all of your information and get all your information, and all of a sudden you've got free data to play with on your own domain, which is massively beneficial, and then with that full visibility, which you won't get anywhere else, you're able to start playing with some of the features inside Majestic to identify. Will other partners affect the quality of my backlink profile? Will they overuse IP ranges? Will they overuse subnets? Will they overuse host types? Will they overuse different types of domain extensions? Will they overuse different types of domains with similarities in their names?

So when you're looking into those those neighbourhoods, you're able to identify those elements of over usage which will prevent you from getting a penalty, prevent you from overspending and wasting money on the wrong types of lead partners. Because, let's face it, right, something someone said to me a long, long time ago was, you know, you're trying to get people to give you web real estate. They can use that for anything. They can use that for affiliate marketing, advertising, whatever. But, and the world is a monetary system. Now it always has been, and webmasters are more aware of the monetary worth of their site than they have have been. So you have to incentivize them to do that. So you're going to have to offer them some form of money or some form of compensation to achieve and gain that space. That's just the way link building goes.

And then you've got the PR side of it, where you're trying to send something out that's interesting and engaging and gets people's attention, sort of content that they put on that Bible, and then you've got the possibility of news and infographics and information at some point there's going to be a monetary exchange, so you need to make sure that you're not wasting that money or time achieving that relationship."

Andrew, thank you so much for taking the time to talk extensively about how you use Majestic where can the viewer find out a little bit more about you?

"I've been doing SEO for 26 years. I had a small break. Someone told me I'd make a good recruitment consultant, so I gave that a go. I didn't realize that was an insult at the time, so I just did it. And then I realized that was an insult and it was wasn't the best maneuver for me. No harm to recruitment consultants. But then I went back into internet marketing. My objective really was. I was working for a lot of the larger London agencies, and I was seeing that no one was really paying any attention to data. What they were trying to do was hide things from Google or just get away with large maximized profits through SEO activities charging very, very large fees and delivering very little in return. And that tended to be the agency world back then, and in some instances it still is. I decided that I wanted to focus on data. Data was the answer. So I started building crawlers and becoming very interested in understanding how Google made its decisions. And then after a while, I sort of understood the data sets, the data ranges, and then started building systems that would be able to decipher that. And that's where we are today.

With LKOA, we have systems that are able to, I would say, in. A very loose, loose frame of the word reverse engineer, not 100% because that's almost impossible, but definitely within a 90% level of accuracy, and be able to identify cause and effect in the SEO landscape. So the things that we have within our reporting systems are timestamps as to when competitors have done something, have they changed their content? Have they added some extra links? Timestamps when we added links, and what those are timestamps when we edited the on page content and did the scientific optimization? Because we when we do often, we generally see, for example, with on page activity, we see changes within 48 to 72 hours, we see search terms go from positions 48 to five. It's just something. When you tell clients that's going to happen, they don't believe you. So we tend to take clients on in very small capacity, to start with, blow their socks off, and then grow. And that's us as a business, and we're we're a great team. We thoroughly enjoy working with each other, and we thoroughly do enjoy what we do every day. I don't really know what more to say about it, really, but we just deliver results."

Andrew Stubbs is Founder and CEO of LKOA SEO, and you can find him over at lkoa-seo.com