Working with journalists

Through publications in regional and leading media, you can not only get high-quality links for free, but also increase company awareness. Therefore, Western SEO specialists highly value working with journalists.

One of the most popular resources in the English-speaking segment for interacting with journalists is helpareporter.com.

It is a platform where journalists and experts in various fields interact. If a journalist needs the opinion of a lawyer or a doctor, the service allows you to quickly contact them and get a comment.

How can an SEO specialist work with it? By subscribing to the service, you will receive examples of applications from journalists by mail. Filter them by your topics and keywords. When you need to get a link, write the necessary expert commentary on the application (a small, literally a couple of sentences with the mention of your keyword or link will be enough). The comment will be sent for review, which usually takes 2-3 days.

The example on the left shows a comment from a journalist seeking the opinion of a music analyst. Right – a journalist is looking for a tax specialist.

This is how an example with an active link, published in an article by a journalist, looks like:

Some media outlets do not put a link, but they can insert a mention. This is what an example looks like with a mention:

After such publications, there can be about 50-100 conversions for brand queries.

In Runet there are almost complete analogues of the service. These are pressfeed.ru, prprof.ru, deadline.media.

Multilevel links

Another method that receives little attention on the Runet is multilevel links.

By default, when you place an active link on an external page (in a press release, an article as a purchase link), no one will link to that external page. That is, the link will reveal its potential by 10%.

If you “feed” a page with a link with external links, then its potential can be increased by 40-50% and even brought to 100%. This is efficient and safe because no sanctions are propagated across link levels.

The essence of the method is to concentrate a large link weight on the pages you need:

The specifics of the link levels are such that at the first level everything should be “white”. That is, it should be unique content from a copywriter, a well-thought-out page structure, and so on. At the second level, you can already use content of lower quality, but unique. And from the third level onwards, you can work with copied and duplicated content, free blogs.

For example, the following sites are suitable for promoting a blog according to this scheme:

• wordpress.com

• blogger.com

• livejournal.com

• diary.ru

• ucoz.ru

• liveinternet.ru

It is advisable to choose those that are well indexed by Yandex.

The advantage of Runet over the English-speaking segment is that we have very convenient link exchanges. Platforms can be used:

You can also use crowd marketing. Works well on sites:

It is advisable to connect at 2-3 levels to dilute the reference weight.

Pinterest and its analogues

An interesting promotion method that is not used on the Runet is the use of the Pinterest network.

It is the fourth most trafficked social network in the world. Its distinctive feature is that 70% of users are women. It is arranged approximately like Instagram, and differs in that you can put a link from each message. This increases the attractiveness of the social network for driving traffic to the site.

50% of Pinterest users are US residents. At the same time, most importantly, 40% of users have an annual income of more than $ 100,000 per year. By American standards, these are well-to-do, wealthy people who make large purchases.

About 80% of messages on the network are reposts. That is, there is no need to create unique content for it.

The specialty of Pinterest is long-term traffic. According to research, the average fasting activity is 3.5 months. For comparison: Facebook activity is 90 minutes, Twitter – 24 minutes.

The popularity of topics on Pinterest is completely similar to the indicators of picture social networks on the Russian Internet.

Pinterest is often in the TOP of Google:

According to alexa.com, Pinterest gets the most organic traffic from social media.

Here’s an example of a successful beauty blog:

Its traffic is about 124,000 users per month. At the same time, 76% of visitors come from social networks.

And almost all traffic goes to Pinterest.

The method works like this:

First, you need to find popular groups on Pinterest. This can be done through the network itself or through the pingroupie.com service. Then you need some time (2-3 weeks) to comment on the necessary boards, like, become familiar to the admins. Then you can write messages to admins by exchanging reposts. You can develop your board up to 2-3 thousand visitors. If you work correctly and switch to an editorial position, then you can reach hundreds of thousands of subscribers and even millions on popular boards.

Yandex has a similar project, Collections.

If the project shoots like Pinterest on Google, then on many topics in the search results one or two places will always be behind collections. Therefore, it is better to prepare collections now. Moreover, now in Moscow the collections have good visibility for more than 3 million requests.

On women’s topics, the search results often come across blocks from Yandex.Collections.

And in the pictures on Yandex search, there are also blocks from Collections:

Another service analogue of Pinterest on Runet is Postila.ru.

Service visibility – about 2 million requests.

On it, you can also create analogs of boards for the future. Of course, there is a chance that this project will not develop. Nevertheless, it is worth working with it, it is not so labor intensive.

Blog grids

The method of building a grid is little used in Runet, but it is a very effective tool, albeit risky. Its essence lies in the creation of satellite sites.

To do this, you can use drops (expired domains with history), create new regs (new domains), use web 2.0 sites (free blogs on blogging platforms where you do not need to pay for hosting and domain).

These sites are filled with content, and from them links to the desired pages are placed. The first results should be expected in 2-3 months.

Here’s an example of a site that actively and successfully uses a blog network:

The site was created at the end of 2018. Here are his indicators:

Very good parameters – 44 thousand visitors per month. Site positions are growing.

The site is monetized through Amazon. On average, these sites receive $ 100 for every 1000 visitors. That is, 44,000 visitors per month and, accordingly, $ 4,400, or approximately 280,000 rubles per month.

The site is in the TOP for many requests.

Example blog grid links:

…

The name shows that this is not a subject address. Here are some more examples of sites in the grid:

What tips can you give for working with blog grids?

This is a risky method and it is important to be careful when working with it. I use a Windows VPS, put a VPN there. I do not use Google products in any way. I try to make satellites varied so that there are no templates. If one of the satellites gets sanctioned by Google, I receive an alert that it has dropped out of the index. In this case, I remove links to the promoted site.

Services for finding drops:

If you have a grid, for example, of several dozen blogs, then you can use ready-made solutions to manage them:

Free or expired blogs can be used. In most topics, 15-20 blogs are enough in the grid. Better to bet on quality, not quantity.

Refinement of pages

Research by ahrefs.com found that the most important internal ranking factors are page age and content size.

Google has been running the Freshness algorithm since 2011, which measures the relevance of content, and its impact must be taken into account.

Here is an example of a regularly updated page with a set of knives.

Content update dates are displayed, they coincide with traffic growth.

In 2012, there were about 2000 words on a page, and now there are about 8000 words. The volume of content has increased almost 4 times.

Page in the TOP for many queries.

How to use this method in Runet? You need to find pages that had good traffic, but fell over time (you don’t need to modify all the pages) and add new information to them regularly. Inserting videos from YouTube works well.

Thus, many conclusions from English-language SEO can be used in Runet. It is interesting, promising and realistic.

The report was read by Mikhail Shakin at Optimization 2019.