TLD Experimentation & Authority Building with Publishing and SEO - Ep. 277 via @sejournal, @lorenbaker

Can a website or network of sites rank with little linking and multiple TLDs? What about a brand that’s been built over the past few years being indexed in Google News with a “.news” domain and hitting featured snippets in Google with a separate domain using a “.reviews” TLD?

How can this be done and what can we learn from it as SEOs?

In this episode, Jon Henshaw, SEO at Paramount+ and the founder of Raven Tools & CoyWolf, joined me to discuss his experience with building his personal publishing project, the Coywolf network.

Included in our discussion are insights into what this means for the future of content publishing and SEO.

It’s a place for me to test things around publishing and to get something to rank. So with that being said, I would say that one of the most interesting things that I’ve observed over the last year with what I’ve been doing is the ability to rank content really high without any outreach or link building.–Jon Henshaw, 18:47

I always write in a way that’s very that’s focused on disambiguation. When I write, I mention an entity that can confirm to Google that this is what this thing is about.–Jon Henshaw, 26:13

At SEJ, we don’t do any link building. Our link building tool is our publish button. –Loren Baker, 1:04:29

[00:00] – A little about Jon
[06:23] – Is the increase in videos and images in search results relevant?
[10:05] – How Coy Wolf started.
[17:29] – What signals are becoming stronger over the last year?
[18:50] – One interesting thing Jon has observed in the rankings.
[24:16] – Coy Wolf’s other experiments.
[37:30] – A tactic for reputation management.
[56:07] – Did search visibility for professional news & review sites increase?
[1:01:42] – Can dot-com quality help?
[1:07:00] – How Jon sets up his hosting.

Resources mentioned:
https://www.coywolf.news/
https://coywolf.app/
https://coywolf.pro/
https://coywolf.reviews/
https://coywolf.surf/

I think the latest algorithm update probably hit on things that may have to do with how much time people spend on the content before they actually click back to the search result.–Jon Henshaw, 26:38

I definitely do the experiment and do things that many people within our field would consider not best practices. Never seen that before, or I certainly wouldn’t advise doing that. But, I’ve learned from it that there are some things I now would suggest or recommend because it’s not as bad as you thought they might be.–Jon Henshaw. 54:14

It reminds me of the Japanese concept of Kaizen. Every mountain starts with a speck of dust, right, so Kaizen’s at the thousandth step. But you have to start with step one, and you just grow and grow slowly and slowly over time. –Loren Baker, 50:43

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Connect with Jon Henshaw:

Jon brings an unmatched combination of experience and expertise to the world of digital marketing and web technologies. He founded Raven Tools, which became widely used in the industry after selling it to TapClicks in 2017.

He’s also no stranger to the big screen, having worked with Fortune 500 companies throughout his career. Currently, he is the Principal SEO analyst at Paramount, where you can find him directing and overseeing streaming services of Paramount+, Pluto TV, Showtime, and CBS.

Also, as Editor-In-Chief of CoyWolf, he ensures that all stories are reported with rigorous journalistic integrity.

Connect with Jon on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonhenshaw/
Follow him on Twitter: https://twitter.com/henshaw

Connect with Loren Baker, Founder of Search Engine Journal:

Follow him on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/lorenbaker
Connect with him on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lorenbaker