Fatrank Podcast

James Dooley: Flumber Ego SEO competition. Today I am joined with Chris Walker, who actually won the competition. Pleased to be having you.

Chris Walker: Glad. Pleasure to be here.

James Dooley: So obviously, as being the founder of Legiit, I am going to jump straight in with regards to the SEO competition. You did several different things from looking at it, with regards to exact match domains. There was a knowledge graph machine ID that got created, like a knowledge panel.

Chris Walker: I might not. Yes.

James Dooley: There was the death of Tim Flumber, who was the founder of obviously Flumber Ego. By the way, for anyone watching this, it was a made-up term. So, just talk through what different strategies you tried to use to win the competition, and then the second question is why you did those as well.

Chris Walker: Okay, so just to set the stage so people understand, the way the competition worked was that it was in Jackie Chow’s community. What he did was pick a keyword and then everybody in it had to register a brand new domain. None of the parasites counted, even an existing expired domain. You could not use that. It had to be a brand new domain. And the goal was to rank for that term over 60 days. Flumber Ego, Flamberico, it is not even a real word, so I do not know the right way to say it. So that is kind of the contest. There were a lot of really good people in it. I thought, what can I do? What advantage do I have? Because everybody is going to try the same things. So, I grabbed the best exact match domain I could find, because the dot com, the network, the dot net, all the best ones were taken.

Chris Walker: What I did was, since it was a brand new keyword, I thought you could get obnoxious with the on-page optimisation and not have to follow the traditional rules and stuff. So if you look at the meta title, it is Flumber Ego, Flumber Ego, and then the meta description is just Flumber Ego repeated over and over and over again. Normally, obviously, that is not something you would do, but I thought because it is a made-up keyword, you have to just give it as much information as possible because Google does not know what to do with that. That worked okay.

Chris Walker: Then I thought, what advantage do I have over all these other people? One of them was that I have a pretty big audience. So, I thought I could leverage that for click-through traffic, actual human being click-through traffic. So what I would do was run a YouTube livestream or something like that, and use things like that and my email list, and I would send them all to that video. Then while they were there, I would ask them to go to that site, read the whole page, and then come back and tell me that they had done it. So that way it looks like real human being traffic is coming from YouTube.

Chris Walker: On Facebook, I literally screenshotted the website and said, “Can you please go search this term, click only mine, read the whole page, and then come back and tell me when you have done it?” That seemed to make a really big difference. I think that is real. It is like the CTR traffic that we all use, but it is almost kind of like white hat CTR. I figured that was an advantage I had over some of the other people there. That worked pretty well.

Chris Walker: Then as far as links, I did I think 20 or 15 or something like that, cheap niche edits. Not cheap, but not the stuff that is going to rank you for iGaming or anything like that. Every single one of them was exact match anchor because, again, I thought that I needed to be as obnoxious as possible with the optimisation because Google does not know that term yet. So I was making it understand that mine was the one about that. That worked.

Chris Walker: Then I did some LinkedIn posts and some Reddit posts and a bunch of the high-authority free parasite sites, for lack of a better term. That helped. Then I did a lot more traffic. I bought some traffic services too. I found some services on my platform that would send traffic through Facebook and through Reddit and through Pinterest. The whole idea was not just direct traffic but referral traffic, and that worked.

Chris Walker: Then the biggest one I did was a thing called Google Chrome signals. I am going to be perfectly honest, I do not 100 per cent know how it works, but it has something to do with manipulating signals through Google Chrome, and that really made the difference. There was one time that jumped me like five pages in one day.

Chris Walker: Now, all that stuff is cool. I would not do that if I was trying to do something traditional, but that seemed to work. I spent most of the competition at number one. Not just in first place, but literally at number one. Then toward the end, people were trying all kinds of creative stuff. One guy tried to create an entity around it and created Tim Flumberico, which was obviously a made-up person, and he created his site around that. He was the only one giving me any competition. Then as it got toward the end, he tried to get creative and did press releases and other things saying that the founder had passed away, trying to get more referral traffic from it that way, which is brilliant by the way. That is Tyler, if he is watching. That was his idea.

Chris Walker: So I decided to capitalise on that and made a video on my own channel memorialising him and saying that Tim had passed away. I showed the site and said he passed away before he was able to acquire Flumberico.io, which was mine. So I kind of hijacked his clever thing there. That was kind of it. I did all those different things, but the biggest thing was the traffic. I think the referral traffic really made the difference because that was something most of the other people there could not do because they did not have the leverage for that.

James Dooley: Yes. So obviously there are a few different things there that you have gone through. You spoke about CTR. So, they have gone and searched for Flumber Ego, they have gone and clicked through to your site, engaged, scrolled down to the bottom of the page, and then exited and not clicked onto another result. Obviously sending signals back to Google that they have had a good positive experience. These are real people. This is not manipulated using 4G or 5G proxies. This is actual real people that have probably got logged-in Gmail accounts.

James Dooley: But it was interesting on the Chrome signals. What did you use for the Chrome signals? Is that a Legiit service that someone is doing?

Chris Walker: Yes, his name is Niles Casterman, something like that. I do not know how to pronounce it exactly, but he actually came to me months ago saying, “I know how to do this thing. Can I list it on Legiit?” I tried it once and it worked really well, so that was the main thing.

Chris Walker: I should mention that the prize in this contest was a year subscription and a thousand bucks. I spent way more than a thousand bucks on it because I wanted the ego of winning and saying that I used all these Legiit services to win this competition. So, just full transparency. But yes, that was probably the biggest game changer. I wish I could explain the way that service works. I do not really know that well. I know it has to do with referral traffic from Twitter somehow and from Chrome, but every time I have used that, not just for this competition but in general, it has made a big difference.

James Dooley: Yes. So obviously, with regards to Navboost and Instant Boost within the Google leak, Google are tracking every single click that comes from Chrome.

Chris Walker: Yes.

James Dooley: They are also tracking, via what you were on about there with the Twitter link, a t.co redirect link. That t.co redirect link goes through to the site. They have got data on that all day long. So, if you can build up just normal Twitter ads as well, that can actually work. There are obviously these ad networks that you can be using. So, you can send 10,000 hits via Twitter redirects through to a URL and that triggers something called Instant Boost. A lot of people say it is called Navboost, but this is Instant Boost and it is temporary. It jumps it up.

James Dooley: Navboost is for longer-term rankings, where when you are there, the clicks and the impressions and how long they stay, the dwell time, the pogo sticking and stuff like that, the long-term kind of clicks come up for it, and they store it in Navboost for 13 months. But Twitter is a great source for referral traffic.

James Dooley: Another big one, if you did any via Gmail, I do not know if you did a link or not, but they also track clicks via Gmail. Obviously, they have got full access to Gmail, they have got full access to Google Chrome and stuff like that. So they can see a lot more traffic than what people let on for. That virality and CTR, a lot of people talk about CTR and have done for a long time, but not a lot of people talk about Twitter referral traffic or Reddit referral traffic, and that is huge.

Chris Walker: That is my SEO strategy right now, referral traffic.

James Dooley: Yes.

Chris Walker: And you mentioned email. That was another thing I did. We have a pretty massive email list and I sent it to every single one of them. So, not just from Gmail. We got direct email clicks and asked them to do it, and hopefully they like me enough that they will actually do that one simple thing for me.

James Dooley: Yes.

Chris Walker: Another thing we have is on Legiit, I can send a message to everybody’s inbox on Legiit through the messages. So, I did that too, and I would see the traffic coming through from Legiit to the Flumberico site, and I think that helped a lot too.

James Dooley: Yes, that diversification of traffic is key, in my opinion. I own a link building agency and I used to always say link building is the number one ranking factor, and then kind of moved towards semantic SEO and making certain you are doing stuff with semantic triples and making certain that your on-page content is bang on.

James Dooley: But for me at present, what you are talking about there, virality and CTR, is what is winning. To be fair, that is what is happening a lot in the iGaming sector. A lot of people with these parasite websites, the main thing they are doing is the virality signals.

James Dooley: But just going on then to the other bit, you said that you did 20 niche edits with exact match anchors. Was that the only type of backlinks? Did you do any citations? Did you do any pillow links? Did you do any naked URLs? Any PBNs? Any guest posts?

Chris Walker: No PBNs, no guest posts. I think the only other thing I did was buy a bunch of I will post on your LinkedIn, I will post on Reddit, and that sort of thing. So not really any, I do not think I did any web 2.0s. If I did, it was like 10. So no, the only real heavy link building was those niche edits. It was mostly from the traffic manipulation and the niche edits.

James Dooley: Yes. So with regards to the niche edits, you did not do any press releases then or anything?

Chris Walker: No.

James Dooley: Because I saw, when I was searching on this, and this must have been other people trying to beat you out, there were quite a lot of press releases like GlobeNewswire, AB Newswire, and stuff like that. None of them were you then?

Chris Walker: No, that was other people in the competition. If you look, there are all sorts of different parasites and press releases and search query type things ranking for that, and none of that was mine. I pretty much covered the entire above the fold. I had the number one organic and then I had like three videos ranking, and then the rest of it was other stuff. But no, I did not do any of that. I considered it, but I did not think it was going to work, to be honest. I thought that was going to rank the news sites and not my site, which was not the competition.

James Dooley: Ah right. So if you actually ranked the AB Newswire website or, let us say, GlobeNewswire, that would not have mattered?

Chris Walker: No, it had to be just your domain.

James Dooley: Ah right. Okay. You would not have wanted to do an exact match anchor too much normally, but that is exactly what you did because you wanted to theme that this is what the site is about because it was a keyword that did not even exist before the competition.

Chris Walker: I am sure there was something that would show up for it.

James Dooley: So, if you have got an existing site, just for any SEOs that are watching this, and they are all going to go, “Right, I am going to go buy 20 niche edits, exact match anchors, and loads of virality.” I am going to say for a money site, you would not be looking to do that.

Chris Walker: No. If this was a real client site, a big casino affiliate site, or even my site Legiit, I would never do that. One of the things I enjoyed about this competition was that I got to be really unorthodox in the stuff that you could do. A lot of people did the fake persona and then killing the guy off and all that stuff.

James Dooley: Yes.

Chris Walker: But do not do this to your client site, please.

James Dooley: Yes. Then with regards to one or two others, we spoke about how a lot of people went with the exact match domain route like yourself. You went Flumber.io. Some people went down the route of doing press releases and stuff. I also saw that someone went down the route of trying to rank the podcast. But are you saying that if the podcast would have ranked, that would not have mattered then?

Chris Walker: Yes.

James Dooley: Right. I wonder why they did that then.

Chris Walker: The only thing I can think is they thought that was going to help the website rank, but I do not see why it would.

James Dooley: Yes. This was a good lesson in what parasites were the most effective because if you look, other than my site and one or two others, it is all parasites for that term. So it kind of gives you a clue on which ones work the best.

Chris Walker: Yes.

James Dooley: I got a few key takeaways with regards to AB Newswire and GlobeNewswire beating out quite a lot of the others. There were about seven different distributions used and those two seemed to beat all the others out for a very similar article. So then at that point you are going, now I know which ones can compete the best.

Chris Walker: Yes, in some competitive terms they can even beat Yahoo Finance, which did surprise me to be fair, because that normally is very powerful.

James Dooley: Is there anything else to add in there then with regards to the SEO competition? Anything else that you thought, actually, do you know what, I am going to try now and implement this for my actual money site? Because these competitions, I find them brilliant because, like you just said there, you find what distribution services are working well or what works well. But was there anything else that you think, actually, do you know what, I should be trying to implement this, or even being slightly more aggressive on your anchor text?

Chris Walker: Yes, those were the two things. I think we probably tend to play a little too safe on the anchor text on backlinks, so I am going to get a little bit more aggressive with that. Not as aggressive as I was here, but a little bit more aggressive with that.

Chris Walker: But the real one was the referral traffic. I kind of already knew how well that worked, but this was like flipping the on switch to ranking, basically. Maybe that is a good way to put it. It is like having an actual brand where you can leverage people to do this for you. Like I said in the beginning, that was the advantage I felt like I had over some of the other people. I have people that trust me and will go and search this site for me, not having a clue what it means.

Chris Walker: By the way, I should mention that too. The text on the website was complete gibberish. It was complete nonsense, you know, and I just had them do that. So I think there is an SEO advantage to a personal brand. You have probably experienced this too because you have done a very good job of that. Just having people that can go and search things, having real human beings doing that, non-CTR bot traffic, I think that is something I am going to find a way to leverage for client sites.

Chris Walker: Now, to be clear, I would be very reluctant to share a client’s site and have them do that, but I think there are probably ways I can make that work. Even my staff, when I do a new YouTube video and stuff now, I have them go search it, click it, leave a comment and watch the whole thing. So it is getting real people to do it. I was surprised how well that worked.

James Dooley: Do you know what? What is very surprising, and my key takeaway from this video and the interview with yourself, is how building an actual brand, so you have got a community of people, allows you to leverage that community to help you rank for certain things.

James Dooley: Even just with what I have done for a while now with regards to building up subreddits, building up Quora answers, building up an actual Twitter following, if I go and do a good tweet, then go and spend $5 to boost that to a specific target audience. People say to me, “Yes, but you are telling me that a tweet is a ranking factor.” I am like, “No, I am saying the Twitter referral traffic is a ranking factor.”

James Dooley: When you add it up, you are getting some referral traffic from Twitter and some from Facebook and some from LinkedIn and some from Reddit and some from Quora. Then you start speaking to some old-school marketers and they just go, “Yes, you are just doing branding. That is what we have always talked about.” Me, I come initially from a black hat background where I am trying to manipulate things and stuff like that. Actually, if you do things well and then spend little £5 and £2 and $10 to boost certain things, do some decent infographics and boost them on Flickr and stuff like that, the amount of referral traffic you can get from these different places, those clicks, and sometimes it is very surprising how few clicks you need, can make a difference from multiple platforms.

James Dooley: I have done a lot of referral traffic via t.co and sent 10,000 clicks in. But then there are other times where you only need 50 or 100 clicks and it is good enough to rank for local keywords and some competitive finance and law firm local keywords with under 100 clicks, that are real logged-in accounts via Google Chrome, and it makes such a big difference.

James Dooley: There are certain people out there doing 4G proxies, non-logged-in accounts, sending 10,000 clicks in and saying CTR does not work. I am like, “No, your method of CTR just does not work.” If you are sending real people in who are actually engaging, who actually might inquire, obviously this was a competition, but if you have got a real site where someone might be interested and might enquire, that is even better. They click through, spend a bit of time on your site, click on the contact form, fill in the contact form, hit the thank you page. There are no better signals than that. That one conversion massively can help your rankings long term as well. So there are lots of benefits to it.

Chris Walker: Yes, taken to it. And it might pay for itself too.

James Dooley: Exactly that. Yes.

James Dooley: So anyway, Chris Walker, it has been an absolute pleasure. Obviously there are going to be one or two other follow-on videos as well. I wanted to get you on with regards to the SEO competition specifically for this video. Congratulations on the win. Big win for you there. Well done. I will see you again soon.

Chris Walker: All right. Sounds good. Cheers now. Bye.