“Bad SEO Advice” (Rant)

[Encrypted]

I’m trying hard not to use hate and cuss words here but the twitter XEO community is the absolute worst place with all sorts of clowns parading themselves as XEOs.

I came across this tweet attributing a website drop to “bad SEO advice” and I thought in my head…hmmm, this is interesting. I’ll like to learn what the “bad advice” is/was.

Lo and behold, the entire 100+ engagements (comments , reposts, e.t.c) contained ZERO MENTIONS of what the “bad SEO advice” was despite several people asking for this information.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1780630475528396925

So, this Joker concluded that the business got wiped due to bad SEO advice but went ghost when pressed for more info…Then you have Lily Ray and Co quote it and try to act like “good XEOS”, with ZERO comments on the bad advice. What a circus!

If you’re bold enough to publicly slam someone’s work, then you should also be bold to defend your comments/show proof!

Honestly, I’m ranting because this has continued to be a trend in the XEO community where some sets of people (especially Marie Haynes, Lily Ray and their circus) hide behind vague statements like “unhelpful content” yet none of these people can tell you what “helpful content” is.

If they’re so confident a website is spam/unhelpful, like Google says, then why don’t they publicly share 10 examples of “helpful content”?

No they won’t! It’s much easier to talk/criticize others than to show workings.

They hide behind their DR 90s and force you to sign NDA contracts to hide their bullshit work. Then, come on twitter to portray themselves as angels while slamming everyone else.

What a circus!

[Rant End]

 

[BakerStreet]

Yeah and if you created a DR90 domain and signed a NDA with her, I bet you she’ll use your domain as a case study even though it was DA90 before you contracted her. She’ll claim all the SEO on that domain was hers and all the traffic was attributed to her work when only a fraction of it was.

If I ever hire an agency, I’ll have it so they can’t use the site in marketing materials. Fucking stealing peoples work!

 

[Ryuzaki]

No they won’t! It’s much easier to talk/criticize others than to show workings.

This is level 1 of the grift. It always comes from people with agencies or consulting to sell, where some portion of blame can always be shifted onto the site owner. These people never have their own successful projects. So reputation is everything.

Level 2 of the grift is people saying things that are so absurdly wrong, but saying them with such confidence, and since they already have a reputation nobody wants to speak up against them. They'll reinforce each other too to create one big pie they can then split instead of competing for smaller pies.

It happens on X, Facebook groups, happened on Wickedfire, happens on Black Hat World, happens on Builder Society, and the problem is that even marketers confuse excitement and hope with results. It's simply more interesting, exciting, and hopeful to spin your wheels on nonsense than it is to face reality. But eventually there's no choice, and it's better to face the facts now, lest you be preyed upon.

I'll say it again to all the people scrambling now instead of a year ago when the rest of us were scrambling... there's no silver bullet. There's no combination of two silver bullets that will fix this. It's not an interlinking issue, it's not an anchor text issue, it's not a disavow issue. It's not even an "all of it / kitchen sink" issue, although that's certainly best practice. It's not simple, and it's not a re-hash of old simple problems Google already has a handle on.

We're in a new age of AI trying to wrap its virtual head around sites. And it's not like this HCU AI classifier is one of 500 variables. It's a variable that sits on top of all the other ones like Panda used to. It's a "quality score multiplier". You can score a perfect grade on the other 500 variables and get a score of 100 out of 100, but if your HCU score is a 40%, then 100 multiplied by 0.40 = 40 out of 100. And the HCU has nothing to do with "helpful content" no matter what name they give it. It's functioning more like a whitelist of a handful of companies. Diversity of domains in the SERPs is at a record-breaking, all-time low.

The difference here is that there have been zero recoveries from the HCU and it's predecessor YMYL/EEAT crap. And the reason is because you're not meant to recover because this isn't about quality results. It's about fighting off AI, restricting who can rank to not have to even deal with YMYL/EEAT concerns, and weaning people off "Search Engine" so they're more willing to adopt the incoming LLM-based "Answer Engine". It's agenda-based, not quality-based.

We all are good at reverse engineering algorithms and using our rational minds to find the solution. Taking that approach and generalizing it over to the human side of Google doesn't work. Because you're expecting a rational answer to seemingly irrational people.

And while in some ways they're irrational, it's really just that the human side has agendas that aren't related to quality. It's about training and transitioning users over to future products. It's about satisfying their political allegiances. It's about controlling the flow of information.

And ultimately, it's about waging asymmetrical warfare on SEO's. "We get to scrape you, but you can't scrape us. We get to use AI, but you don't. We get to use your content for our answer engine, but your content doesn't get to rank. We can have 100 ads on our search results, but you have too many on your page."

Everyone is dissatisfied with Google. Not just SEO's. That's on purpose. When all you can find is Dotdash Meredith sites and like 4 forums, you're going to crave something else. And guess who's going to provide that something else? Google (the very same people that purposefully created the dissatisfaction) in the form of AI chat bots. It's the classic Problem-Reaction-Solution game where the same entity creates and controls all three aspects.

The search engine will persist because it provides a lot of ad revenue. There will be a classification for things like "Query Deserves Search Results" and "Query Deserves Ads". Will the masses of SEO's be included in those results? Well, what direction is it trending right now? Google isn't simply thinking of the present, they're thinking of the next evolution, and if you don't think what's going on now is related to the evolution that we're on the cusp of, I don't know what to tell you other than to keep drinking some rando's kool-aide and pay that consultation fee. Just know that you're paying for hope, not a solution. And it's costing you more than money, it's costing you time.

 

[bernard]

I agree, unless you have venture capital backing, i.e. know people who know people in Google and spend tons of money with Google, I don't think there is any sure path forward.

SEO is back to its black hat days of exploiting google, not trying to work with Google.

 

[Darth]

@Ryuzaki absolutely nailed my sentiments exactly. Well said!

 

[DoItNow]

This is level 1 of the grift. It always comes from people with agencies or consulting to sell, where some portion of blame can always be shifted onto the site owner. These people never have their own successful projects. So reputation is everything.

Level 2 of the grift is people saying things that are so absurdly wrong, but saying them with such confidence, and since they already have a reputation nobody wants to speak up against them. They'll reinforce each other too to create one big pie they can then split instead of competing for smaller pies.

It happens on X, Facebook groups, happened on Wickedfire, happens on Black Hat World, happens on Builder Society, and the problem is that even marketers confuse excitement and hope with results. It's simply more interesting, exciting, and hopeful to spin your wheels on nonsense than it is to face reality. But eventually there's no choice, and it's better to face the facts now, lest you be preyed upon.

I'll say it again to all the people scrambling now instead of a year ago when the rest of us were scrambling... there's no silver bullet. There's no combination of two silver bullets that will fix this. It's not an interlinking issue, it's not an anchor text issue, it's not a disavow issue. It's not even an "all of it / kitchen sink" issue, although that's certainly best practice. It's not simple, and it's not a re-hash of old simple problems Google already has a handle on.

We're in a new age of AI trying to wrap its virtual head around sites. And it's not like this HCU AI classifier is one of 500 variables. It's a variable that sits on top of all the other ones like Panda used to. It's a "quality score multiplier". You can score a perfect grade on the other 500 variables and get a score of 100 out of 100, but if your HCU score is a 40%, then 100 multiplied by 0.40 = 40 out of 100. And the HCU has nothing to do with "helpful content" no matter what name they give it. It's functioning more like a whitelist of a handful of companies. Diversity of domains in the SERPs is at a record-breaking, all-time low.

The difference here is that there have been zero recoveries from the HCU and it's predecessor YMYL/EEAT crap. And the reason is because you're not meant to recover because this isn't about quality results. It's about fighting off AI, restricting who can rank to not have to even deal with YMYL/EEAT concerns, and weaning people off "Search Engine" so they're more willing to adopt the incoming LLM-based "Answer Engine". It's agenda-based, not quality-based.

We all are good at reverse engineering algorithms and using our rational minds to find the solution. Taking that approach and generalizing it over to the human side of Google doesn't work. Because you're expecting a rational answer to seemingly irrational people.

And while in some ways they're irrational, it's really just that the human side has agendas that aren't related to quality. It's about training and transitioning users over to future products. It's about satisfying their political allegiances. It's about controlling the flow of information.

And ultimately, it's about waging asymmetrical warfare on SEO's. "We get to scrape you, but you can't scrape us. We get to use AI, but you don't. We get to use your content for our answer engine, but your content doesn't get to rank. We can have 100 ads on our search results, but you have too many on your page."

Everyone is dissatisfied with Google. Not just SEO's. That's on purpose. When all you can find is Dotdash Meredith sites and like 4 forums, you're going to crave something else. And guess who's going to provide that something else? Google (the very same people that purposefully created the dissatisfaction) in the form of AI chat bots. It's the classic Problem-Reaction-Solution game where the same entity creates and controls all three aspects.

The search engine will persist because it provides a lot of ad revenue. There will be a classification for things like "Query Deserves Search Results" and "Query Deserves Ads". Will the masses of SEO's be included in those results? Well, what direction is it trending right now? Google isn't simply thinking of the present, they're thinking of the next evolution, and if you don't think what's going on now is related to the evolution that we're on the cusp of, I don't know what to tell you other than to keep drinking some rando's kool-aide and pay that consultation fee. Just know that you're paying for hope, not a solution. And it's costing you more than money, it's costing you time.

This: "It's agenda-based, not quality-based."

 

[secretagentdad]

Is it non productive trolling to point out you can just not use twitter?

Why would you wanna read a bunch of grifter hot take clout building attempts.....

 

[Steve Brownlie]

Is it non productive trolling to point out you can just not use twitter?

Why would you wanna read a bunch of grifter hot take clout building attempts.....

Yeah I've had to basically stop going on there these days. It had got to the point it wasn't sending me much work/I wasn't meeting cool people anymore (back in the old days I found out about this place thanks to Twitter etc... that kind of thing doesn't happen anymore).

LinkedIn is the same awful though but it still sends lots of work... but I think it's in some kind of algorithm collapse thanks to pods and AI at the moment too so that might not last either lol.

Private Discords, Slacks and forums seem like the future of any kind of interaction with people you might actually want to do business with these days.

Level 2 of the grift is people saying things that are so absurdly wrong, but saying them with such confidence, and since they already have a reputation nobody wants to speak up against them. They'll reinforce each other too to create one big pie they can then split instead of competing for smaller pies.

This stuff is madness yeah. It wears you down though - the good people stop resisting because it's just like I can't read any more of this awful garbage. People who've interviewed like 2 terrible SEOs on their podcast suddenly are experts commenting on loads of people's posts on LinkedIn about SEO etc...