James Dooley: Powering up your backlinks.

Today I'm joined with Charles Floate and we're going to be talking about tier two backlinks or sending viral traffic through to your backlinks.

Obviously you've grown a huge agency with Press Whizz doing a lot of different guest posting, different types of links, entity stacking and things like that.

How important is powering up backlinks?

Charles Floate: Number one, I think there is just a massive amount of money left on the table by link building agencies, clients and SEOs that are building links and then doing nothing after the fact.

You might go and build a guest post on Forbes or get featured in The New York Times or somewhere similar, but after the fact it just gets left to rot.

There is a huge opportunity if you can continually improve the power, relevancy and additional signals surrounding those links.

Over the course of 12 or 18 months, if you can build supporting links, send social signals and traffic through to that backlink, it should become significantly more effective than simply leaving it alone.

There are two factors though.

Traditional tier two link building today often gets neutralised.

A lot of people spam web 2.0s and low-quality links at a backlink. Google sees a thousand web 2.0 links appear in a week and simply neutralises them.

If you are coordinated and do multiple things at the same time, such as traffic signals, social signals, supporting links and internal signals, then all of those overlapping factors can create a much larger impact than simply building links alone.

James Dooley: So if you're looking to power up links, would you only focus on dofollow backlinks or would you also send activation signals to nofollow links as well?

Charles Floate: One hundred percent.

You can activate nofollow links and they can still pass value.

Back in 2018, Google changed nofollow into a hint directive.

Before that, nofollow meant no value could pass through the link at all.

After the change, Google could choose to allow value through that link if there were enough supporting reasons.

Those reasons are things like links pointing to the page, social signals, internal links and traffic.

If you can send all of those overlapping signals to the nofollow link, then Google has reasons to treat it as valuable.

James Dooley: So when it comes to powering up links, if you have tier one backlinks pointing at your money site and then tier two links pointing at the tier one links, how important is relevance at tier two?

Are you only looking for power or are you still looking for contextual relevance?

Charles Floate: We are mostly concerned with contextual relevance.

That means the surrounding text around the anchor text linking to the tier one page needs to be relevant.

You cannot have a blog post about car washes linking to a pet guide.

At minimum, the surrounding context needs to make sense.

In Google's patents, they mention roughly 25 words either side of the anchor text helping determine the context and relevance of the link.

That surrounding relevance helps pass both topical context and link equity onwards.

James Dooley: Charles Floate, it has been an absolute pleasure.

We hope you enjoyed this podcast discussing how to power up your backlinks and activate the true power of your backlink profile.

We have a lot of other podcast episodes covering ranking in LLMs, AI visibility and modern SEO strategies.

Today’s episode focused on backlink power, tier two backlinks and activation signals.

Charles Floate, it has been an absolute pleasure.