Seth & Jim Boykin: SEO Wizard

BluShark Digital founder Seth Price is on with Jim Boykin, founder and CEO of The Internet Marketing Ninjas, discussing the growth of Internet Marketing Ninja as a digital marketing firm. Jim also speaks about the process of quality link building versus buying links, and how IMN differentiates itself as a link builder.

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BluShark Digital

Welcome to the SEO insider with your host, Seth Price founder of BluShark taking you inside the world of legal marketing and all things digital.

Seth Price

Welcome, everybody. So excited to have Jim Boykin here from the internet marketing ninjas founder and CEO, I gotta say, it's so I'm so excited to have you here. Because I remember where I first showed up a PubCon. Over a decade ago, you look around, I didn't really know anybody there. And I see that this company and this guy, and I'm like, What is going on here? Because somebody had figured out not only how to own a conference, but let's just somehow convince all these really bright, motivated people to leave their homes and moved to upstate New York to work tirelessly for this amazing company. So welcome. Thank you for being here

Jim Boykin

Thank you. Thank you, Seth. It is my pleasure to be here.

Seth Price

I tell me like you did something and I guess with COVID, you know, I think we both did something you inspired me because I literally, we turned our keys back into the landlord and went fully virtual. But you built something pretty incredible in upstate New York, tell me a little bit about how did this come to be?

Jim Boykin

Sure, by accident early I, I never set out to be a CEO and founder of a company. You know, I was a kind of a computer nerd all my life. Got on the internet and was like, Oh, my God, this is the future, I thought I was going to be a website designer. The original name of our company was we build pages, I remember really became a good designer, but I could get stuff ranked really high. And it just slowly, slowly happened. You I remember, I think it was in late 2002 When I had to hire the first people. And that was a huge jump, like, Oh, my God, I'm trying to feed myself. And now I gotta feed other people. And, you know, that was kind of the start of it. And the time, you know, it was a really hard decision, do I take that stage of actually hiring people. And then from there, I slowly grew over the years. And then at one point, I think about 2013, probably the time we were talking about there with all the All Stars, and we got really big and kind of my goal at that point was I want to be 100 person company. And you know, I want to be big and filled with all stars and kind of I had different different dreams. And kind of when we got all big, and we had all the All Stars was kind of wearing the you know, they always have too many, too many cooks and bad communication. And I wasn't on the frontline with clients and with the employees. And there's all levels and hierarchies. And I tell the assistant, someone who would tell the director of something who would tell the team leaders of something and you know, it's like the telephone game and realize that at one point that, you know, being in the biggest company isn't shouldn't really be the goal. Being a profitable company.

Seth Price

We will write we're delivering good clients and all of a sudden, where'd all my money go? At that moment? Hmm.

Jim Boykin

So you know, it's kind of the, you know, you know, business is never, you know, business is never like this, there's ups and downs. And certainly I've been been in business for more than 21 years, there's going to be ups and downs. And ideally, you get a little smarter each time you come back. Hope so. And you know, I've now realized, hey, you know, I don't need to be the biggest company in the world I want to be, we've kind of been the same size for the past, gosh, like seven or eight years, we've been between 40 and 45 employees. I kind of found that to size where I know all the employees names, I know what everyone's doing, I can manage that. And you know, we don't, we pretty much keep keeping the size that I like and I'd rather have a waiting list. So like right now we have a waiting list we can, we're not going to take on more people than we can handle. We had emoti a waiting list for gosh, probably most of the past three years until Corona hit and then Corona had we lost about 18% of our business the travel sites got decimated we had a few other clients that like their products took huge hits. But we've sent some fill that in so there's a waiting list again, I'm not going to hire more people. You know, I'd rather you know our average employee has been with us pretty close to nine years now. And I like that knowledge base and I'd rather keep it and have a waiting list than to take on more business and grow and some of the stuff that it doesn't scale good when you grow like you know you can keep your quality really good here but once you start hiring new people and trying to take on More the quality goes down, which I found. So I like our size. I like the way we run things, I feel like the past like seven or eight years, it's been like, I found like everything that works perfect for us, I just wanted to kind of keep it to that.

Seth Price

That's actually that it's very interesting and humbling to figure out because that's where we are size wise, as an agency, and I get it, the thing that scared me was when you have 100 employees, you have 100 worth at worst employee. That's not nothing. And so, you know, both interpersonal, and all these different things. I mean, I've seen, you know, I love the culture I've seen of yours from afar, you do amazing things. And I like you know, we we are different we are, we're younger company, and it's it's built on millennials, and we figured out their code, but you've really done this over an extended period of time, which I think is amazing, whether it be trips, whether it be meals internally, I'm just, uh, you could probably pivot and start a culture business, or you could.

Jim Boykin

I internet business, I'm kind of, you know, I come from, I think of myself as an old hippie, you know, I was definitely the hippie in high school and in college, and then, you know, for years, I traveled around the country and worked in national parks and, you know, took a lot of things and it was like, companies are evil, money's evil. And then, you know, a few years later, now, I'm running my own business, it's like, well, you know, now what do I do? And it's like, well, you try and be the best you can try and treat the employees the best, you can try and be different than other companies, you know. But it's all the little perks that add up. And the interesting thing about our company is probably 95%, almost, I think, like everyone, except for two people at our company all started out at the entry level position. And if you're really good at the entry level position, you're one of the highest paid people in the company, by the way, but like, everyone has kind of worked their way, not up, but into the right spot of the company are where they best.

Seth Price

This is like the best conversation ever. That's our model, our model. The reason I spun BluShark out of the law firm as I was doing it, I couldn't keep people as a cost center. So I said, Hey, let's share the wealth. And the people we brought in and become the managers, the ones that are great, they they circle into the right roles. Sometimes you're like, Hey, that's not right. And you bring them over there.

Jim Boykin

But yeah, it's I'm a big believer in getting the right people on the bus, right people on the team and finding what position they're in. And I've, I've had some crazy interesting things add, like, I remember one lady, she worked as a, you know, a content marketer for years. And one day were like, Hey, we really need to hire someone for HR, we're getting big enough, where, you know, there's that moment really shouldn't be the HR person. And so we and, and this lady walked into my office, and she says, You know, I have, you know, 30 years of HR experience I've taught in school, blah, blah, blah, I'm looking over a resume, and I'm like, why are you doing content marketing for us? And she said, Well, I've known about your company for years, I wanted to work for you for so bad. I knew you are growing. And I knew that one day, you would need an HR manager, and I would be the one and today's that day. And I'm like, Oh, my God, okay, you're here. And she's the best HR person we ever had. But there's been things like that like crazy experiences like that, but getting the right you know, I have I for years ago, I used to wait tables, I was a waiter in the restaurant before I started the company currently working for me as my old restaurant manager, one of the servers there, she's like the best server in the world and the bartender. And these were like people that when I worked in a lot of jobs like these are, these are go getters. These are hustlers. These are people that go above and beyond the call of duty.

Seth Price

That provides. For me calm down in Fort Lauderdale. He built his business with bartenders, one point, I mean, that they know how to manage it.

Jim Boykin

Exactly. Excuse me. And that's, and that's a lot of the people who we hire were bartenders, servers. You know, I remember but yeah, you know, it's knowing that people that can handle multiple tables at once and be under that pressure and be able to quickly organize and manage and stuff.

Seth Price

I've been hearing a lot, a lot of these sorts of talks I've listened to all of late and I know for myself, I was a waiter for three summers in New York City. One in the skating rink the summer they turned into well overpriced restaurant, and then America which was like in the heyday of the late 80s. But like a lot of these life skills, how do you deal with the customers, the manager, the expediter, the kitchen, the chef who's yelling at you, you know.

Jim Boykin

I am so glad for that experience. That customer service experience has served me very well with talking with clients. There's your years and years ago, I used to be a Schwann man as well. I don't know if you know the big yellow trucks that sell like ice cream and frozen food like door to door where you got an outcome reason.

Seth Price

I know that as a buddy was a chef, and he got himself into that truck. And I remember how big a deal that was me not as a worker, but as his frozen product.

Jim Boykin

Yeah, but like that, you know, that entry thing of having to like knock on knock on the door, and like, I've got a, I've got a book here and a..

Seth Price

Saying I get rejected 80% of the time and knowing you're gonna the next door, you're likely to get rejected again. But you know, you're gonna get one and make your money.

Jim Boykin

Yes. And that was a lot of it knocking on doors and being threatened and whatnot, really

Seth Price

No different than, you know, look. And as you know, I'm sure you've seen that were much for less far along. When we started, it was much more convincing people, you know, people coming to you. Let me pivot to that talk to me is one of the things that I've always admired. And you have some really smart people working for you was you seem to be able to scale high quality link building in a way that you were way ahead of your time. Talk to me a little bit about that. Because that to me was one of those things that you got in early, you knew that there was important you didn't you appeared not to go the Blackhat way of the private blog networks, but instead paid your dues, created relationships and found ways to replicate that talk to me, how did you go about that?

Jim Boykin

It's really been an evolution. I mean, up until, you know, for years, and honestly, up until November 16 2008. I still remember the day, we were buying links and getting exact match anchor text to money pages and ruling the world with that. It was pretty cool. And and yeah, it was really cool until Google kind of remember that. both the good and the bad. Yeah, you know, they took a bunch of our clients and push them down and kind of said, in so many terms, Thou shalt not buy links, especially you, Mr. Jim Boykin. And so you know, at the time it it was, it was 97% of our business 97% of our business was link buying. And, you know, overnight, we had to stop. So you know, first step

Seth Price

Was very profitable to because that was not expensive to get done. Oh, yeah.

Jim Boykin

And you know, and we had to reinvent it. And it took a couple of months to figure things out. But I remember where I was, when I read, it's like, how do you get backlinks, and still be within Google's guidelines, and still get something of value for the client. And that trick.

Seth Price

And the good news for you, is that everybody could do the old way, you wouldn't have been special. But once they've made these new rules, you, you know, you all that stuff is gone. And you really had there was especially for the corporate clients that you've been, you know, so great at getting those guys don't they didn't want to be the next JCPenney. Right, they wanted to stay away from that. And so there's all this in a market that you sort of were well positioned with your staff to jump into?

Jim Boykin

Well, I mean, at the time, when Google hit us, then it really stunk. Like there goes all my business, but you know, I guess, necessity is the mother of invention. So you figure out alright, what's next, then it took a little bit. And you know, our I think the first thing we stumbled upon, was broken link building. Like we like first we would write to people and be like, hey, what a great page. And I noticed you got a couple of broken links. And here's something that we would suggest. That was our eye, you know, and then one day, I'm looking at one of the emails we sent saying, hey, you've got a broken link. And I said, I wonder if other people are linking to the broken link. And I found there was like, 240 other websites linking to this broken link? And it was, it had something to do with like car parts, or no, it had to do with Henry Ford. And I'm thinking like, oh, we have a car site, you know, someone that does something with cars, like if we put the Henry Ford page, you know, if we rewrite the page of what used to be there, it's now a dead page and we go back into the Wayback Machine. So it used to be there, rewrite it better throw it on the client site, and then send an email to all 240 people saying I see you ever broken link that has the anchor text of this and I found a better pay if you want to fix it. I found this page over here on client so yeah, that was kind of the first thing that started to get us out. But that was we don't really do too much of that anymore. There's a tiny tiny piece of that broken link building but you know, that's what uh, you know, it was hard we had to figure out what is the type of content you can write to get links How do you get get links without without having to purchase them or get into you know, you had mentioned things like private blog networks. You know, I think one of the biggest thing is I pride myself on being the link guy you know, often I say like content marketing because Link building is a dirty word now. But you know, a lot of We do as well as analyzing backlinks. And a lot of my knowledge comes from our own tools where we're grabbing data from Moz majestic H refs, and we're combining that and looking at the link data. But beyond that, we've mapped it, we've mapped a lot of the link data. I'll just jump into this for a second. And I hope I don't upset anyone in the listening audience or anything. But anyone that sells links, we've taken a piece of their database and put it into our tool. So all the major sellers, and anyone that goes to conferences, or be searched for link building, or ever, like any one of those places, I've got a little piece of their database. And from that little piece of their database, we've mapped out their whole database, as well as I have a list of the top 1000 buyers for every suspected for every seller. So we've mapped out their networks plus all the sellers and where all the power comes from for every link by a network. So anytime that someone comes to us, the first thing I can do is pop their site and or link analysis tool and tell them if they've been been buying links and from where and which ones they are. And because of that knowledge, because of my knowledge of how we can map the links, when you talk about things like private blog networks, or you know, you know, the lawyer, lawyer sites, let's talk about lawyer sites from it. I know a little bit about just a little bit about lawyer sites. But I know that there's a lot of lawyers, sites that all have their own network of sites, you know, they've got the site about this case, the site about this case, it's late about the year they have all these satellite sites. Now there, there can be some good with that. You know, and we can certainly go into the debate, is it better to have all the satellite sites or the one real site, there's pros and cons to both. And sometimes there are already advantages to having those. But when you talk about the links between those, a lot of that can be mapped. And that's not to say that any of this is going to get you penalized. I you know, I know a lot of lawyers have their own separate satellite sites. And there's reasons for that. But the links between those might not have the full value of stuff from outside of that network.

Seth Price

And look, those people like myself, I built a firm with multiple sites, I intentionally noindex nofollow in between. I'm just like, I don't like I don't want to wake up and be gone. We if you do stuff, right, the stuff if you're able to map it, and you're a smart guy. Google's got resources well beyond Jim. Yeah, they know what's going on. They can tie this stuff together.

Jim Boykin

And there's one thing to have your own sites that are lawyer related and network but it's another thing to have a whole bunch of paid paid blog links from known paid blog, Link Sollars.

Seth Price

And that's we'll be careful. The headline right today, right? So we keep going. We went years ago, when we had our favorite Spamfighter Google, you know, there was don't do private don't do guest blogs, but you know what guest blogs are okay, just don't be paying for crap, right? Don't do the crap stuff. That was an iteration of the link farms from before. You know, don't do that. But if you have a real guest blog, great. Well, look, if I'm getting this I shudder to think what you're getting. I'm getting between LinkedIn and email 20 emails a day, if people wanted to sell me these domains, you know, these DRS, this links

Jim Boykin

And spreadsheets go into our tool, right? Every day, we're adding stuff to

Seth Price

everything that comes in. And then you can say, You know what, well, you're not you're the guy reselling it. I know the guy, you know, you've been doing this long enough, you know, the guy if I really wanted this, like, I'm not paying you at its 40 from this guy, because he owns the site, instead of you trying to make the markup. So great. But if I feel like we're at another tipping point with that now, maybe Google doesn't care we're seeing in local, they certainly don't care about spam. Maybe they've given up. But the idea that it's so public, what is going on right now, with paid links, if you're able to do this, and most people aren't, as you know, putting a chart together like this, there's no secret that this is a site for sale. Does that where are we on that continuum? Do we have time you think we're out?

Jim Boykin

Here's the interesting thing. So I have another tool. That so for each of the big paid link sellers. I have another tool that says here's the top 1000 suspected buyers within each network, the top 1000 buyers, we have another tool that runs their search engine value price from sem rush on a monthly basis. And anything that falls by less than 30%. And a month is kind of put up into a chunk. So what happens is we can see when chunks of these networks get mapped. And then either sites are penalized or the value goes away by looking at suddenly there's a huge drop across these networks. Now, it's interesting because I can map this and I can follow this and maybe it's because when anyone writes to me, I take those sites like whenever they write commands are like, Hey, we've got a whole bunch of sites, I'm always like, great. I've got some finance sites, I got some education sites, you know, send me over a big spreadsheet. So I can look through it. And you know, whatever they send me I feed it in, or a tool which maps out everything.

Seth Price

Maybe Maybe that's your next paid service.

Jim Boykin

But if I can get it, I kind of assumed that you're right. Like, I would assume that Google picks it up. And as soon as I pop in a site, like I instantly can tell, oh, you're buying links from Bob's network, like, I would think that Google, you know, and you can kind of spot how Google, sometimes we'll catch things, and you see sites drop within a network. But it's not as much as I would suspect, how much time you know, I worry about anyone that's in any of those those networks, because you know, either one, one of two things happen either suddenly, the links don't pass value, which I think is fairly common to see.

Seth Price

And that seems to be the new thing. We're not seeing a lot of manual things the way exactly

Jim Boykin

just suddenly, you know, they go down, but nothing's happened. But it's like all the stuff that did have value you were buying from Bob's network, and Bob's network just got hit, you didn't get a manual penalty. But yeah, everything, you know, starts going down. Because that stuff that did that power once now no longer has it. So I guess, you know, it's, you know, like

Seth Price

Everything in moderation. But do you okay, if you get 100 emails? Do you find any of them bringing you something that's you like, you know, unique because I was there selling it to the world? But are there? Are there values out there that are not interlinked, that are not going to bring you down? You know, is there? Are there opportunities out of the people who are now, you know, everywhere trying to push these things? I'm not sure if I understood the question, do you still find in this, this this research that you're doing? Obviously, you don't want something tied together? And you don't want something where there's major buyers? But, you know, do you find that there is value? If you do your research, and you you know, find the one diamond in the rough of what you're being offered, that there's something that has an order, they eventually get bastardized? You know, if you're, if you if they if there are beings, is there any value to be found in that whole world?

Jim Boykin

I mean, in the link buyer world, now, any site that's in someone's spreadsheet, they're selling to you, and they're selling to hundreds or 1000s of other people, any site that sells links is doing it to 1000s of other people.

Seth Price

What about the legitimate places? A lot of them went noindex, nofollow, but a lot of people made a lot of money with like, the Forbes and things like that, you know, what about the quaza the the places with a brand, but it was still for sale for a large number?

Jim Boykin

You know, I mean, links are the most powerful piece, right? Talk about content and usability and the technical aspects. But I mean, you know, in one sense, any link that you can get is going to be valuable, certainly some more than others. You know, I guess the, the takeaway is don't don't get links that comes from people spreadsheets, where those sites are selling them to lots of other people. But if there's something certainly where you're like, hey, here's here's a lawyer resource site. And there. I mean, he, there's a couple of things you got to keep in mind, like Google is trying to filter out things that appear to be like anything, like any page that has the word guest on it could be filtered by Google, any page with the word sponsor on it could be filtered by Google. And by filtered MIS, and penalized. Just say, like, they.

Seth Price

Just they're like, Hey.

Jim Boykin

We get it. This is not free. Yeah. And so you know, if you're like, hey, here's some great lawyer site, and I want to put something on there. Yeah, I'm gonna send an email to him, and he's gonna do something, and he's not doing it for everyone. And it doesn't look like, you know, how do I say, you know, whatever happens in private email, who knows what Google is gonna know, if you're not in work or whatever? You're on

Seth Price

Gmail, which they're reading it anyway.

Jim Boykin

Yeah. Yahoo, you'll notice? That's my email

Seth Price

Question. So let me ask you a bunch of stuff that I asked you is 10 years ago. And I mean, five years ago, when I've seen you over time, knowing, you know, nofollow sites, no index, no follow sites. So you still, you know, you're still fighting for the Wikipedias. And for the Forbes even though they're they're not, they're not following? It's still there. What's your feeling on that?

Jim Boykin

Um... well, Forbes, I know isn't past Page Rank in 10 years, I'm just using that

Seth Price

As an example of what the things that never you know, Wikipedia, things like that. Do you still want the links without the fall?

Jim Boykin

98% of the time, I would say a nofollow link, and my guess zero value. Now the Wikipedia now, but now Google has said hey, we may follow some of the nofollow. So Of course, they may follow the Wikipedia, although I think Danny Sullivan said that's what everyone thought, but we actually didn't. She was interesting because yeah, that was the first thing I figured. But Wikipedia has other side benefits more like the knowledge panel and things like that you can get with a wiki pedia. But I guess normally no, if I found some, you know, if I'm a lawyer, and I found some great lawyer site, and they had some advertising and they said all the advertising as a nofollow on it, then my thought was okay, there's zero SEO value, if I think it's worth it to get the clicks or branding. Sure.

Seth Price

We're talking SEO geek wise, LinkedIn ads, and..

Jim Boykin

No no follow links to me no value. Yeah, you know, there's there certainly can be exceptions. Yeah. When Google said that we might start following the nofollow. They kind of said he, they gave some hints about what sites they might. And the sites that they said they might were like, super highly trusted site sites where every link on the site is no followed. Because they're overly paranoid, right? So it's not like someone's like, hey, this nofollow off of this little blogger guy is suddenly going to count now, I don't think so. But there's not..

Seth Price

You're not finding that there are what you're talking about. Makes sense, right? If they were doing it manually, you'd be like, Hey, these are trusted places. They don't they for 10 years, they haven't been passing it, you know, does that show some form of authority, because it's almost like people are not chasing it. Along those lines, what's your take on the scholarship or charity games these days?

Jim Boykin

It's one of the filters that we put in. So scholarship links, here's, here's kind of the problem with scholarship links. Every conference that I've been through the past 10 years, there's always a link builder panel, where someone on the link builder panels has scholarship links, and everyone rates it down and everyone starts them up. And the past couple years, I was doing a couple of slides about scholarship links. And I would show off payday loans, scholarship pages, casino scholarship pages, or pull these up really look guys, it's kinda because it's been talked about so much. And everyone in their mother has done it. And the payday loan sites of Donna and gambling sites have done it. And once they've done it, you know, they've ruined it for everyone ever. Like, to me, it's one of those things where, again, I don't think Google would ever hurt you for doing any scholarship link building. But it wouldn't surprise me if any page that has the word scholarship on it also doesn't pass PageRank. It is one of the checks that we do with our tool, I can see if any of your pages have scholarship on them and see if someone's doing scholarship link building. I don't think it would ever, ever hurt you. But then again, if I were Google, and I know they've been in a lot of their sessions, and I'm sure there's someone a Google rep and one of those sessions when they hear scholarship linkbuilding that writes down, don't pass PageRank on pages with scholarships out of all the SEOs are doing it now.

Seth Price

Well, I got a question. You know, that Mike Blumenthal on on the show, and we were talking local, and local is so filled with spam. And it's like we're back when you could buy your overseas links and be successful, exact match domain spam is winning the day. Now it's not long term, it gets knocked out. But it's infuriating how much it is embedded. You know, you're talking about this, like, you know, Google's coming and taking notes on the organic side. Why do you think there's such a dichotomy between the spam fighting on organic, which seems particularly sharp and moving in the right direction, where I like each algorithm update because it gets rid of the riffraff and my good quality stuff rises? I love it. Like every time there's a core up other than that one crazy one where it's almost a break things go. But other than one time, it was 24 hours or went back? We're fine. What's your take? Why is Google doing such a bad job of spam fighting local?

Jim Boykin

I think they're still trying to figure it out. We don't do a lot of local internet marketing. Thank goodness, because

Seth Price

Then, thank god. I'm glad to have Jim floating around.

Jim Boykin

But you know, yeah, I think, you know, it's, it's hard to every month, if you follow local rankings, especially in the local packs, like month to month to month, you're in, you're out, you're up, you're down. It's just it changes so much that if I was if we think you know, if we were like, Hey, I'm a local internet marketing company, I'd be bald and gray and...

Seth Price

It'd be a lot harder. Why I think Google is still trying to figure it out. And Corona probably didn't help any because now businesses are open close our address change like I'm sure that just

Jim Boykin

The other crazy part you know, virtual offices are illegal now. We're all virtual. So talk to me if you if you were It's sort of lower, I love sort of cutting through the BS, give me again, without giving away the state secrets, two or three things that you think are working that if somebody's sort of starting out, they should be focused on and then I'm gonna follow up just so that no surprise on the other side, what are the two or three things people are chasing that probably aren't paying ROI from like building perspective?

Seth Price

Check keep all the link building or SEO in general? Well, he..

Jim Boykin

I'll let you answer it the way you wish.

Seth Price

Well, I mean, in general, you know, I guess there's four, four main areas that everyone should be focusing on, you know, there's, to me, the order would be link building first, which means creating something that's going to be understood

Jim Boykin

what I'm pushing you on is telling me what you think, generally is like, you know, we know what's not working, you know, and there are things that work, but the ROI of sending out a gazillion emails on broken links, you know, the gig is up, it's sort of like it was cool when it first started, but you get too many of them, and they seem there. Now it's they're going to Viagra sites, and you're not really wondering, I think...

Seth Price

What people go have to think about is what can earn links in their industry? So many people think that it's like, you you work with lots of lawyers, right? So let me give like a, you know, someone's like, hey, my, my personal injury New Jersey page? No, I want to get backlinks to it. And it's like, well, why? Why would anyone linked to that specific page? We ask the question a lot. Yeah. Now, certainly, you do want to create the world's best personal injury, New Jersey page, you want to you know, original research would be great, you know, certainly create the world's best page. But when we think about what can be built to attract links to the site, it's not that you gotta, you have to create other stuff, you have to think outside of, you know, your this site. But in order to build backlinks, you need to create this linkable content, you know, you know, if you're something on, you know, a law site or personal injury, there's, there's different types of stuff that you could create, you just basically have great high quality content that somebody wants to link to. That's, that's SEO. So when you're saying before, it's like, if you look at link building in a vacuum, you have shit content, you're trying to get somebody to link to it, it's not gonna work.

Jim Boykin

Yeah. And it's not just the quality of that content, I think you have to think outside the box, you know, if you're a lawyer site, you need to start creating other resources that are linkable. You know, maybe it's a, you know, 100 resources for lawyers. Maybe it's, I don't know, Abraham Lincoln's law days. You know, maybe it's study about famous Supreme Court case, what you're.

Seth Price

Saying is like, the stuff that's going to convert after an accident may or may not be sexy, but you could actually get law schools rank linking to you if you're giving them useful information? And how do you how do you meld that to that mean? That's the job of the SEO? How do you meld it together to have stuff? That's interesting enough? Yes, you can get it to the site, can you get it on the page? That's the that's the hustle.

Jim Boykin

Yeah. And then within that content, you're going to be linked into your money pages as well. But like, how do you get super highly trusted links? And or how do you go viral? You know, I mean, there's another way to get links, and I talked about writing trusted content. You know, if you write that trusted content, say something about like Abraham Lincoln and his law days, you know, you can write to Ed use orgs, teachers, schools, those are certainly great links to have your site. And who cares if the Abraham Lincoln page ranks high. But if that page has some internal links to your money pages, as making your site more trusted, by getting those links posted, is pushing power the pages you're targeting. Now, if we talk about another way of link building, maybe it's something that you want to go viral, you want to create something that's going to spread across the internet, you know, your, your personal injury lawyer in New Jersey pages, not going to go viral on Reddit, you know, something, maybe you know, 101 lawyer jokes is gonna go viral on Reddit. Or maybe it's some kind of study about which state has the most lawyers or something new. And you can be like, an original study conducted by whatever company you're in, you can grab all the data and doesn't have to be like, super study, so to speak, when you grab some data sets, you write it, you put it out, it goes viral, you get all these links. And but it's like, Link building is different, I think, than what a lot of people think they think it's like, here's my money pages, and I need to create the world's best page and get links to my money page. And it's like, well, no, in order to get great lengths, you got to think a little bit outside the box and think about what is linkable content that you can write, you don't have to feature it on your site, you're gonna feature it on your blog, you don't gotta have it's a page in and get food for Google. You need something for that food. So Google, so people will link to your site.

Seth Price

But let me ask you this is along these lines. Something I've sort of struggled with going back to we'll go back to the days of the spammy anchor tag Next, you know where it was sort of at first, it was like no more than 5%. Now 1%, once per paragraph, maybe, what's your feeling because I feel for myself, I've gotten so white hat for lack of a better word, we're not focused on it, I feel that we've possibly as new players have come in, they're not as sensitive hadn't lived through those penalties, and that they're a bit more aggressive with anchor texts, and that can sting or be disadvantaged. What's your take on the use of anchor text? In balancing.

Jim Boykin

I've ever told anyone ever how to link to any of our clients and 10 years? You know, it's, it's kind of if someone's doing something, right, I know that they're gonna link or something, either I don't tell them how to link, which is 99% of the case. Or if they ask, I'll just be like, whatever seems to make sense to you.

Seth Price

But you talked about the power of links, it appears that the power of anchor text carry and I look, I follow your home, this has been a great conversation. I feel like I've unwittingly followed much of your playbook. And I do exactly what you're talking about. It's very, very rare. Somebody says what it is whatever makes sense. Get it, but I have guys that are competing against that aren't playing that game and have a significant percentage. When you look at the distribution of agrotech. It's there. And for certain terms, it works.

Jim Boykin

Yeah, see, I guess, in you're right, it totally 100% works. I think what happened is, you know, in November of 2008, when Google came after me, I got I got scarred so hard. That's what that's my point is that like, I'm always paranoid that Google is looking at me and what I'm doing

Seth Price

You have more of a target, you believe because you're you. I don't think.

Jim Boykin

I am anymore, like Matt Cutts has moved on and life has moved on. And I'm not buying by buying links anymore. So like, you know, but when you know, when I look at anchor text, you know, and even with our tools, you can easily sort things by anchor text, and a human can easily tell if all of your anchor text is Personal Injury Lawyer, New Jersey.

Seth Price

Of course, no. And that's what I want. And obviously, that's gone. But the idea that you are with a dirty anchor text stuff that I haven't talked to anybody about in 10 years, I've just sort of done take this, hey, whatever comes in comes in. And now I'm seeing Hey, we're ranking for criminal, but not for DUI as powerfully, at least locally, let's say for something. And I'm like, and I look at see these these guys doing it. And again, they're doing it a level, I wouldn't do it. But is there a point where you say, You know what, let's make sure that there's a DUI somewhere in that inbound text so that we're not just the schmucks out there with nothing.

Jim Boykin

Yeah, I tend to, in any working of anchor text, I tend to focus more internally links. So a lot of what we do is well is how do you get the power from some of your pages that are backlinks to go to the pages that you really want to rank that you're trying to rank that is going to take place through internal links, and variations of anchor text plus we we have programs where, you know, if you have a page, which is which will I'll stick with a personal injury, New Jersey page, let's say you've got a whole personal injury law slide that covers every single state and one of them's the New Jersey page. I lost my train dude.

Seth Price

You basically the question of specific anchor text for.

Jim Boykin

An internal poll? Yeah. So let's say that the New Jersey page, I would say you're number 13. For New Jersey Personal Injury Lawyer, you're number 12 For New Jersey personal injury attorney, you know, another variations, but will kind of create a spreadsheet of here's your important pages, here's all the variations of anchor text are important. And then internally throughout the site, sometimes it's linking with this phrase, sometimes

Seth Price

You're mixing it up to get all the different variations and you're not always the same, obviously, the days of New Jersey Personal Injury Lawyer as the one piece at the money term. First, there's no money term search that much anymore. And secondly, you want the diversity to seem somewhat natural.

Jim Boykin

Yeah, I want it to look completely natural. So if a Google guy was looking over my work, you would be like, alright, everything looks natural, including anchor texts. Like you certainly know when asked me phrase.

Seth Price

Right, and we talked, you know, I talked about the law. It's does it pass the laugh test? You're in front of a judge? You could say it without laughing if they said, Hey, Mr. Jim, like you look at look at all these things, and you start cracking up like yeah, you can't make that argument. But if it's really diverse, and it just happens to be that you have one of each have different versions you want floating through to three times not going to kill you on a on a mega site. What do you see people doing that you sort of laugh at? You go to these conferences and you see the people presenting from stage and One stage times they cook, what are the two or three things that you think people are chasing their tail? That's just complete nonsense.

Jim Boykin

I hate to say events, it's a lot of the other link building companies that say like, we have big spreadsheets, and you're like, Alright, I've got a Law website. I'm like, Oh, great, you know, we've got 10,000 bloggers on our list, and 100 of them are law bloggers, and we're gonna write a page about your New Jersey criminal, or was it New Jersey Personal Injury here, and we're gonna write a page on this, you know, law Blogger site, and it's going to link to you and the money phrases to your and, and it sounds good, you know, they can the page gets published, they show it to your boss, and the boss is like, Oh, great. It's a lawyer, blogger, they wrote all about us, they got the money laying in the boss's like, Great job, keep up that work. But what they don't know is that site is in a spreadsheet that can be mapped, and they're selling to every other lawyer, and they're selling to every other kind of sites. And I think that's the part that drives me nuts is, so many people think I'll get on that blog. And they don't know, they don't realize that blog is selling their neighborhood.

Seth Price

Like we talked about that for years, right? It's a bad neighborhood. And, you know, it

Jim Boykin

Is and then you That's what drives me nuts at the show is that, you know, a lot of people they come up, you know, would come up to us and be like, you're different than these other people. Everyone else says, you know, they have hundreds of bloggers that they have access to. And it's like, we don't we don't I don't even write to bloggers, I don't trust bloggers.

Seth Price

It's so funny. I'm thinking about whether you could use this analogy in seven different dubious industries, where you think you're the only one and yet everybody's going to that? Well, it can be used in a bunch of blue areas of budget.

Jim Boykin

See, here's the thing, one of those lawyers sites is gonna get busted by Google guarantee it. I know, they have a lot of lawyer sites. And when and when Google when the Google guy maps it out. The guy who's obviously been busted, and they map out his legs, and they say, Oh, here's a bunch of other lawyers doing the same thing. Oh, boom, boom, boom, boom, that's what happens.

Seth Price

Or what is it? Is it if you go back to those early days, is it you know, look, you take a very extreme view as I do, and want to keep it super clean. But it's one of those things, if you don't get greedy, you know, if you're, if your sole business model is buying blogger links, that's going to be a problem. If you happen to get a blog post here and here and here. You know, like anything else, that's not going to bring down your site? The worst? Oh, yeah.

Jim Boykin

I love blog links that come naturally, like if we do something, and it goes viral, and the news picks it up, and bloggers write about it and great, right?

Seth Price

That's not what I'm talking about, when I'm talking about the in between the gray stuff, where there is the bloggers need to make their money? And the question is, is it a blogger who doesn't normally like it's almost like your, your back to dating days? Is somebody like seeing everybody? Are they just gonna see you?

Jim Boykin

Well, here's the thing you can, you can, if you're if you're like, hey, law, blogger, Bob is offered to put my link on a site, there's a couple of things you can run to check. One of the one of the things that I would check would be, I would go to sem rush and look at the domains value, and look at the organic turquoise, that's the first thing you're going to

Seth Price

Do but but that...

Jim Boykin

Is zero value, then like run, the site's been penalized. So you want to look at the chart, like the chart over time, you know, the site's always been low value, and only has a few backlinks, no problem. But if the site used to rank for 1000s, of phrases, and boom flatline, like stay away from that. The other thing that you can do, if you're thinking of buying the links on it, there's a couple of quick checks, you can either spider the whole site and look at the external links and see how easy, you know, to there's a couple of quick checks, you can do you know, like site colon, Bob's lawyer, site.com, space paydayloans, right, you know, space casino space Viagra? Like, are they solid links to everyone in the world? Like, you know.

Seth Price

Right. So like, if you find out no, they're not, it's just lawyers a little bit safer than it certainly

Jim Boykin

Can be, you know, if it looks like you know, there's, there's stuff that whenever I find a pattern, and it's probably the same for Google, you have to kind of decide how something fits a pattern.

Seth Price

Does that mean it's good or bad? Because not everything that fits a pattern is bad. There's certainly a lot of things that can fit a pattern, it's good. If I go in, and I see a pattern, it's like, Alright, there's a bunch of law sites that you know, are linking to this directory, or this directory for whatever is linking these last slides, because it makes sense, then, you know, it may fit a pattern, but that's okay. It's when it's when something appears to fit a pattern or who is like you're obviously in some network, or you're trying to manipulate something. But if it's a pattern, it's a real pattern for real reasons, no problem. And that's one of the things I found fascinating about local search for us. And I don't know how many of you even speak to it. But you know, Google said they want the best answer for this query. And they really made a thing that they wanted an end user and And look over the years, the top of organic. Now if you're playing the game, right, you can, you can pop it, but there's going to be somewhere between one and six, four of those slots are taken by national directories that are not necessarily a great user experience. Now, I always thought maybe they were worried about antitrust issues they were trying to give other people bite at the apple. And if they gave people some love and traffic, they wouldn't get sued. I, it never made any sense to me. They know what a user wants when they're going there. And yet, they're giving people all these other things. And we have to, you know, now not only you're trying to get to the top, but you want to you have to fight some national players to get there.

Jim Boykin

I think a lot of it is that branding stuff to those national players may have that the brand factor, I mean, we all know, a national players national directories

Seth Price

I'm talking about not just a powerful law firm, but people that are not an answer, but there's like, is it no low or when there's no law? There's just dia, there's five Super Lawyers, there's all this. Yeah.

Jim Boykin

And because of that brand, and because of the brand searches, they kind of do have that advantage. And so and that's an interesting thing, because something that every SEO should think about, as well as turning your company into a brand. How do you increase your brand searches now? Brands win every time there's an update?

Seth Price

Well, they do win, but then you lose your anchor text. So they do win. But we have a client with with an exact match anchor text has a branded firm name, and I gotta tell you, it's frickin brilliant. They are crushing people that are spending 7x what they're spending for years. And that, you know, so yes, brand wins. But anchor text bottle.

Jim Boykin

Yeah, I especially if you know, your brand is, you know, you know, New Jersey criminal defense Exactly.

Seth Price

If they don't if you have if you're a lawyer.com. Exactly. That's pretty powerful.

Jim Boykin

Oh, definitely. Especially because everyone's going to be linking into it with that name. And like you alluded to earlier. Yeah, anchor text is definitely a huge signal for Google. And, and, and yeah, I mean, don't get me wrong. Of course, I like good anchor text going in. What am I going to say on public here? You know, keep it 100% natural. But yeah, I know.

Seth Price

And guess what it showed the question is the balance. I mean, I assume you are you are calculated enough. You know, is there do you internally have a number you're willing to go to? Do you have a sort of a metric saying, Hey, don't do this, or you're doing so little of it that when you add it back in? You're not worried? Because you're so far below the industry?

Jim Boykin

I'm not sure.

Seth Price

Wow, I've never I don't think I've ever not got an answer to a question. I've actually directly I feel like that is as good a time to say we, you know, I'd love to have you back out. But this this has been awesome. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you I think the stewardship you had in the industry has been it's just been fantastic. And watching you know, getting to know a lot of your team guys, they're really you built such a pyramid and the talent beneath you is so so immense that uh, it's been great just over the years getting to, to get getting to know some of these guys is has been awesome.

Jim Boykin

Thank you. So it's been a pleasure to talk with you tonight. It's always a pleasure to talk to you. Talk to you soon. Bye. Bye.

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