Fatrank Podcast

James Dooley: I'm sick and tired of people being obsessed with DR. What people don't get is there's a lot of research that goes into that. Majority of guest posts — they're not written to rank. That’s basic. You know, Google’s quite good when it comes to penalties. I think the big part of it is there’s no guarantees on ranking a power post. But obviously we've always been an advocate for tier 2 links. A power post is the holy grail of link building. It’s actually doing good quality content and generating traffic. What could I turn into power posts for the customer so it can end up sending not just traffic — it can bring sales, it can bring inquiries. The knock-on effects of what that can do is insane.

Karl Hudson: Hi, it’s Karl from Search Room and today I’m joined with my business partner James, and we’re going to chat about power posts, why the industry should be changing their approach on guest-post link building and focusing primarily on power posts. So — why power posts? And James, what do you think makes the difference with power posts?

James Dooley: So, in my opinion, power posts are the holy grail of link building. They’re by far the best type of links you can get. And the main reason I think they’re the best link is, in my opinion, the best link pointing to your website is placed on a webpage that is ranking for the keywords that you want your own webpage to be ranking for. That is the best type of link you can have.

A power post — some people call it a guest post on steroids — but fundamentally, most guest posts aren’t written to rank. They’re just 500 or 1,000 words. A power post is specifically, strategically written with the right entities placed on the page to give it the best chances to rank for the keywords that you want it to. And if it does rank, it’s not only driving page rank or link juice through to your website but also real traffic. It could even get you conversions.

Some people used to call this parasite SEO, but I hate that term. It’s not a parasite on somebody else’s site. If anything — and you know this, Karl — the guest-post website owners love us creating these posts because it strengthens their website. It’s definitely not weakening it. It’s actually producing good quality content and generating traffic. These site owners love that.

Karl Hudson: And what we try to do with ours is — there’s a lot of research that goes into it. Not only doing NLP entities and full optimization of the articles, but also looking into the website and seeing if they have the best chances. It could be a DR 10 website, it could be DR 60, it doesn’t matter to us. We’re looking at their linking patterns and seeing: does that website have the best chance of ranking this post? Will it benefit the owner having it ranking?

Obviously, sometimes there are industries where it’s not the best to do power posts, because they’re really tough industries to rank in, or there just aren’t many guest-post providers in that niche. But nine times out of ten there are some that we can get. And the results — usually within two weeks, you’ve got rankings there, first-page rankings. It’s really impressive.

James Dooley: I think the big part of it is there’s no guarantees on ranking a power post, but we do everything strategically we can — good quality content. And then, the next part is it’s not just 500 words — we write proper content. The next big bit is we’ll go and do five tier-2 backlinks.

I’m sick and tired of people being obsessed with DR of a website and not looking at the fact that a link is placed on a page — not a domain. It needs page-level power, not domain-level power. The five tier-2 backlinks strengthen and make that page a lot more authoritative and give it more power that can pass more link juice through. But it also gives it better chances of ranking in Google.

What’s your thoughts on the tier-2 backlinks that power up the power posts?

Karl Hudson: Well, obviously we’ve always been an advocate for tier-2 links. To the point that we even do it in niche edits, because obviously it's just about causing the Googlebot to come back and revisit a page that could be a few years old and doesn’t get visited frequently enough. Otherwise, it could take six to eight months for that bot to pick up that there's been an updated link on that page.

Whereas when we add new tier-2 links, that seems to trigger a lot more response from Google when it comes to crawling the page. It’s definitely something people overlook when it comes to guest posts specifically. The amount of websites we audit day in and day out — one of the first strategies I look at is: what of these links could I turn into power posts for the customer?

And then trying to explain what a power post is has its own battles, because it’s a term I believe we came up with, so it’s quite new. But like you mentioned, it's kind of parasite SEO — but not. We’re not just hammering the website it’s going on and abusing it. We’re looking at how do we add to the webmaster’s website and actually benefit their users.

James Dooley: And I think the last part to a power post is the social signals and engagement factors that come through. There have been quite a few articles recently saying people are struggling with indexing certain pages. Now you’ve got to give enough reason to Google just to put a page in the index.

So with social shares, traffic, and tier-2s, you’re giving it the best chances — as well as having a well-written article — you’re giving everything the best behavioral signals and engagement factors for Google to want to rank it on page one. After that, hopefully — and we’ve got a lot of success stories — they’re naturally acquiring links because they’re ranking for the main terms they want to rank for.

Not only is it the best type of backlink you can have, but it’s also got so many benefits with branding, online reputation management. The amount of people coming to us now to purchase power posts is insane. And I think the industry needs to open up more to understand it.

We had one the other day who came for 50 guest posts. We declined it and said: you should do 10 guest posts and 10 power posts. This was a while back — and since he went with it previously, now he says, “I don’t even want guest posts anymore. I just want to try get my power posts to earn me money.” Because they can send traffic, bring sales, bring inquiries. The knock-on effects of that are insane.

And it also mitigates your risk. Let’s face it — Google’s quite good when it comes to penalties. And if you’re getting these power posts on multiple websites and it’s all about your brand, you’re mitigating the risk. If your website gets slapped at some point, it shouldn’t matter, because you’ve got all these other websites that are trying to stay in the rankings.

Karl Hudson: Yeah, exactly that. You're diversifying your traffic signals as well. So that, in a nutshell, is why I believe power posts are the future of link building. And I believe power posts are the best type of backlink people can be doing as part of their link-building strategies.