Latest / Online Reputation Management Podcast / How to Power Up Backlinks With Tier 2s & Traffic (James Dooley Interviews Charles Floate)
Transcript
- James Dooley: Powering up your backlinks. Today I'm joined with Charles Floate and we're going to be talking about tier two backlinks, sending viral traffic through to your backlinks and improving backlink power. Obviously you've grown a huge agency with PressWhizz doing guest posting, entity stacking and different types of backlinks. Charles Floate, how important is powering up backlinks? Charles Floate: Number one, I think there is a massive amount of money left on the table by link building agencies and clients that build links and then do nothing with them afterwards. You might build a guest post on Forbes or even get featured in the New York Times. It costs a lot of money to acquire that link and then after the fact it is just left there to rot. There is a huge opportunity if you can continually improve those links in terms of power, relevance and supporting signals. If over 12 or 18 months you build extra links, send social signals and drive traffic through to those pages, those links should become significantly more effective than simply leaving them alone. There are two sides to this though. Traditional tier two link building today is mostly getting neutralised. A lot of people are just blasting thousands of Web 2.0 links at a page. Google sees that sudden spike and simply neutralises the links. If you can instead coordinate the signals properly by combining traffic, social signals, internal links and supporting backlinks all at the same time, the overall effect becomes much stronger. James Dooley: So if someone is trying to power up backlinks, should they only focus on dofollow backlinks or should they also activate nofollow links as well? Charles Floate: One hundred percent you can activate nofollow links and they can still pass value. Back in 2018, Google changed nofollow from a strict directive to more of a hint. Previously a nofollow link passed no value at all. But once Google changed that, it became possible for nofollow links to pass signals if Google believed there was a reason to trust them. That is where supporting signals come in. If the page has backlinks, traffic, social signals and internal links, those factors can help activate the nofollow link and allow value to pass through it. James Dooley: So when someone is powering up a backlink profile and they have tier one backlinks pointing to the money site, then tier two backlinks powering up the tier one pages, how important is relevance at tier two? Are you mostly looking for power or does relevance matter as well? Charles Floate: We are mostly concerned with contextual relevance. That means the surrounding text around the anchor text needs to make sense for the link itself. You cannot have a blog post about car washes linking to a pet guide and expect that to work properly. At minimum, the surrounding context needs to match the topic of the link. Google patents reference around 25 words either side of the anchor text as part of understanding relevance and passing topical signals onwards. James Dooley: Charles Floate, it has been an absolute pleasure. We hope you enjoyed the podcast series. We are covering a lot of different topics around SEO strategies, backlink power, ranking in LLMs and modern AI search visibility. This episode focused on powering up backlinks and activating the true power of a backlink profile. Charles Floate, thank you very much.