Powering Up Your Backlinks | Tier 2s or Virality Traffic (James Dooley Interviews Charles Floate)

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 PressWhizz doing a lot of different guest posting, different types of links, entity stacking and stuff like that. Charles Floate, how important is powering up backlinks? Charles Floate: Number one, I think there is a massive amount of money being left on the table by link building agencies and clients that build links and then do absolutely nothing after the fact. You might go and build a guest post on Forbes or even get featured in The New York Times. It costs a lot of money to acquire that link initially and then afterwards it is just left to rot. There is a massive opportunity if you can continually improve the power, relevance and supporting signals around those backlinks. Over 12 or 18 months, if you can build additional links, send social signals and send traffic through to that backlink, it should become far more effective than just leaving it alone. There are two sides to this though. Traditional tier two link building where people spam web 2.0 links at a backlink is mostly going to get neutralised now. If Google suddenly sees a thousand web 2.0 links appearing in a week, it is just going to neutralise them. However, if you are coordinated and you overlap different signals such as traffic, social signals, links and internal links pointing towards that backlink, then all of those combined can have a much larger impact. James Dooley: So if you're looking to power up your backlinks, would you only focus on dofollow backlinks or would you also activate 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 from being a strict directive to becoming a hint directive. Before that, nofollow meant absolutely no link equity could pass through. Now it can pass value, but there needs to be a reason for Google to trust that link. Does the page itself have backlinks? Does it have traffic? Does it have social signals? Does it have internal links? All of those things can help activate the nofollow link and allow value to flow through it. James Dooley: With regards to powering up links, if you've got tier one backlinks pointing at your money site and then tier two links pointing at those tier one links, are you focused more on relevance or raw power at tier two? Charles Floate: We are mostly concerned with contextual relevance. That means the surrounding text around the anchor text linking to the tier one backlink needs to make sense. You cannot have a blog post about car washes linking to a pet guide. At minimum, the surrounding context needs to be relevant. Google patents mention around 25 words either side of the anchor text needing to make contextual sense for the link to properly pass relevance and value onwards. James Dooley: Charles Floate, it has been an absolute pleasure. We hope everyone enjoys the podcast series because we are covering a lot of different SEO topics including ranking in LLMs, AI visibility and the best SEO strategies working today. This episode was all about powering up your backlinks and activating the real power of your backlink profile.