Podcast

A listener asks, “Are too many links in a blog post a bad thing?”

Submit your questions at: https://www.massagebusinessblueprint.com/talk

Sponsored by Yomassage and Pure Pro Massage Products Peppermint Pedango

Transcript:

Sponsor Message This episode is sponsored by Yomassage. Registration for the first Yomassage virtual training is now open, with classes beginning in November. The Yomassage therapist training is an intensive 25-hour certification program. Over three weeks, you will be immersed in the Yomassage philosophy. Learn about the nervous system, the mind/body connection, fascial systems, mindfulness, benefits of touch, trauma-informed bodywork. Learn how to structure classes, understand body mechanics, how to encourage self-massage techniques, and utilize Yomassage positions and incorporate modifications, adjustments, and contraindications. You will build community with the other therapists going through the training. You’ll have assignments due each week, weekly discussion points, live Q&As, quizzes, and lots of one-to-one feedback from your instructor. Our listeners can go to yomassage.com and get $50 off of the virtual training registration using the code BLUEPRINTONLINE — one word — BLUEPRINTONLINE. Go to yomassage.com to learn more and register.

Allissa Haines Hello, everyone. Welcome to this Q&A, question and answer, episode of the Massage Business Blueprint podcast. I am Allissa Haines.

Michael Reynolds And I’m Michael Reynolds.

AH And we are your hosts, and I’m very proud of us because I feel like, I mean, I know — I’m confident we are going to make it through on this, the second take, of this episode.

MR [Laughing] We’ll see.

AH Doing a new format is super challenging for me, and I blew the last one. I came in with too much confidence and was unprepared and not ready.

MR That’s okay. Someday we’ll do a bloopers reel, and we’ll put all those into one episode, and you’ll hear all our bloopers.

AH Oh, good Lord. So tell me, Michael, what’ve we got today?

MR All right. We’ve got a great question about SEO, which is search engine optimization, which excites me because I’m all about the nerdy stuff when it comes to digital marketing. So let’s go ahead and play the question and then we’ll hit our sponsor and discuss it. So here we go.

Listener Question Hi, Allissa and Michael. This is Meg from Northern Virginia. My question is I have a blog post about my recent massage photoshoot, and within that post, I created a bio with link backs to each of the models. So there’s probably about 20 links in my blog post. The post itself talks about massage, so I’d really love for it to stay visible from a SEO perspective. But I have read that too many links in a blog post could negatively affect your SEO. So my question is how many links is too many links, and is there a way on the back end to keep links without having them negatively affect your SEO? Thanks so much for your answer, and I look forward to hearing it. Bye.

MR Awesome. Thank you, Meg.

AH Yay.

MR I can’t wait to talk about this.

AH I know. Meg’s awesome. But first, let’s talk about a sponsor for this episode.

Sponsor message Pure Pro Peppermint Pedango. I want to talk about your feet, people. Your feet. Your client’s feet. Because your feet are the foundation of every stroke that you do in massage, and we need to care for them a little bit better. And the best way I’ve found is Pure Pro Peppermint Pedango Foot Cream. It is 100% natural essential oils in there: peppermint, lemongrass, tea tree, arnica. You can use it on your own feet at the beginning and end of each day — I do. Your feet have never felt so good. You can use it on your clients’ feet — I do — and give them another reason to rave about you. It’s really great for cooling and reviving tired, swollen feet and legs. And in the winter, when people’s feet get a little cracked and callused, it’s super good. You can treat your clients, you can treat yourself with $10 off a 4 oz. Peppermint Pedango Foot Cream plus free shipping, people. There is a limit — one per customer — and it expires December 15th of 2019. So if you’re a late listener, I’m sorry, but not that sorry. You can get this offer of $10 off a 4 oz. bottle and free shipping by going to massagebusinessblueprint.com/feet and use the code — all caps — FEET10 — feet one zero. So go to massagebusinessblueprint.com/feet and use the code FEET10 — feet one zero. I love this stuff, and I actually use It on my whole lower leg, and it perks up my legs in the middle of the day. If I’ve had a lot of being on my feet, this Peppermint Pedango is awesome. massagebusinessblueprint.com/feet.

AH All right, Michael. Teach us about SEO.

MR [Laughing] I like how you’re sorry, but not that sorry.

AH Yeah, really.

MR All right. So Meg, great question. I’m going to give you a definitive answer, which doesn’t happen too often because life is full of, you know, gray areas and “what ifs” and continuums. But in this case, I’m going to give you a very definitive answer — you are just fine. There is nothing wrong with what you are doing. Do not worry. [Laughing] I just want to say that outright because I think we get hung up on a lot of things. There’s conflicting information sometimes and lots of details and stuff in digital marketing and SEOs specifically. But in this case, you are just fine.

Here’s why. So I don’t know what you — what source you read, and there may be some validity in certain situations to what you’ve read, but in general, the key to remembering how to approach SEO is to simplify it back to put yourself in the shoes of the person reading your website. And Google is always, always, always focused on the user experience. And in your specific example, you wrote a blog post about your photoshoot. You linked to the models in the photoshoot. You are providing more contextual information about the event, and that helps people. That helps the user reading it because maybe they are professional photographers reading about your photoshoot, and they would like to work with these models in their business. And so you make it very easy for them to find the people you worked with. That is only helpful to the people that are reading your blog post.

So this is going to be a really short — well, I’ve got a few more things to add so maybe not super short, but the short answer is you are just fine because you are doing exactly what Google wants you to do, which is to provide additional contextual information about the subject you are writing about. So as far as too many links, generally, there’s no such thing as too many links if you are providing relevant information.

Now, I think the too many links thing comes into play if you are, you know, creating these spammy directories just to kind of game the system, you know, then too many links may come into play. And it’s more about the approach you’re taking versus the number of links. But in your case, I mean, you are providing exactly as many links as you need to to be helpful to people reading your blog post. So if you worked with 20 models, then link to all 20 models, and that’s useful to people. So that’s my answer to you.

Now, the caveat — not really a caveat, but there’s additional information to go with that. Google does have ways of labeling links to kind of give them hints on what type of links they are. So I’m going to say that for 99.9% of the people listening to this podcast episode, it’s not going to matter for you, but I want to include it just because I’m a big nerd.

So Google does allow you to label certain links as — things like sponsor links or no follow or user-generated contents. Those are situations where if you are linking to a sponsor, someone who is sponsoring your blog post or sponsoring your website or sponsoring your content, you can link to them and label it as a sponsored link, so that Google indexes that as a sponsored link. This is a brand-new feature, and 2020 is kind of when it’s supposed to be rolled out site-wide or internet-wide or Google-wide, so to speak. So it’s relatively new and Google has, basically, come out saying, hey, we’re just going to take these as hints. We’re still going to do what we’re going to do, but we’re going to kind of let you give us hints on what type of link this is.

So again, for 99.9% of the people listening, that’s not going to matter. Just link like you normally do. But just be aware that when you’re thinking of building links from your site out to other sites, any link that provides additional helpful, useful, contextual information for the person reading your content is going to be a good thing, and you should do that as often as you need to. That’s my answer. That make sense?

AH That totally makes sense. Thank you.

MR Cool. Thank you, Meg, for allowing me to geek-out a little bit and talk about search engine optimization techniques. That warms my heart. [Laughing]

AH It is really nice when we let Michael talk.

MR That’s what I got. [Laughing.] So all right.

AH So everyone, we want your questions. You can record your questions at massagebusinessblueprint.com/talk. And if for some reason you feel like you need a little extra anonymity, dude, you can have your friend or your partner or your spouse or your kid read your question. That’s totally okay. So go to massagebusinessblueprint.com/talk and record your question, and we’ll probably answer it on an upcoming episode.

And that is all I have to say. I hope you have a super productive and healthful day.

MR Thanks, everyone.