Google Algorithm Updates - 2024 Ongoing Discussion

[Ryuzaki]

I swear SEO is just a hamster wheel in a temporal sense. I think our current SEO timeline is an infinite loop that manifested when the large hadron collider fired up pre panda/penguin and opened a hole in the fabric of SEO space-time

It's the nature of algorithms with weighted variables. One variable will always be the most exploitable. The algorithm creators at best can simply move that target around, and perhaps set traps for people who try to exploit it, besides making it convoluted and setting in time-delays and such. Then they can only repeat the cycle, moving the target around.

This is the plot of The Matrix, by the way. "You're the 9th iteration of The One, Neo. We allow you to exist. We've caught you every time and will again in the next cycle." They get a little slicker each time around but so do the "users".

As the window moves and people's attention moves away from old exploitable variables (ones that were actually leading to higher quality results), those old tricks become useful again while the majority are off in search of new tricks. It's always worth while to circle back around to basic on-page SEO tactics, at a minimum, and see what's working again.

 

[jgw899]

As the window moves and people's attention moves away from old exploitable variables (ones that were actually leading to higher quality results), those old tricks become useful again while the majority are off in search of new tricks.

On that note, I’m back to meta keywords tab and 5-10% keyword density!!!!

But in all seriousness, you are 100% correct and through testing I’ve seen old seo tricks start working again and those tactics no longer being on most people’s radar. Developers from google retire/leave or whatever and new ones come to take their places. Sometimes things that past employees did get thrown to the curb. But the memory of getting slapped by those SEO tactics remain with us like a dog that got beat by their owner for something.

***no dogs were harmed by this post***

 

[Smith]

through testing I’ve seen old seo tricks start working again and those tactics no longer being on most people’s radar

Are you running single-variable tests across test sites or are you referring to successes that you're seeing anecdotally across live projects?

Also, can you drop us any nuggets? What kind of old SEO tricks are you seeing that are starting to work again?

 

[BakerStreet]

Are you running single-variable tests across test sites or are you referring to successes that you're seeing anecdotally across live projects?

Also, can you drop us any nuggets? What kind of old SEO tricks are you seeing that are starting to work again?

I'm speaking out of my ass here but it seems like PageRank is still being calcualted as normal in google's algorithm. They just negate it for websites with bad UX. UX has always been a ranking factor, pre-Penguin and even more post-penguin and the most so far right now. They also are using UX to place site-wide ranking deductions on sites if their UX scores fall below a certain threshold. It also seems to me that they're relying less on anchor text to figure out the topic of a webpage and website, since they can use LLMs to figure out the topic of a page. Therefore they can figure out relevancy with LLMs.

To me, if you have good UX and write a good article, you'll be relevant for the query. Then it is all up to PageRank to rank you as well as your UX score. Google only uses three data sources: 1.) what other webmasters say about you (pagerank) 2.) what you say about yourself (on-page seo) and 3.) How your readers respond to your content (ux).

From that, I'm guessing these things are still working or will work:

1. Social profiles on social networking sites. If you can find ones that are dofollow and niche relevant and you make the profile relevant to your site, I am betting that this will only pass good link juice. This is totally a hack for authority in the algorithm but I bet you this is working well right now. It'll pass as a relevant hyperlink on a relevant site on a relevant page in the LLM.
2. Writing content so that people scroll more or stay on the site longer. As long as people scroll or don't press the back button right away, it'll give you good UX.
3. Scraped content - Google officially endorses AI content and scraped content as long as UX metrics are good. You just gotta make sure all pages are good. If bad pages pass a threshold, then the site wide ranking deduction is applied. I actually copied and pasted another guy's content and added a few extra meta-data stuff to it and now I rank #1 for a keyword where Google doesn't even show the other guy. I think my UX was so good, Google concluded the other guy's version of the scraped content must be the duplicate (lol)
4. Adding long tail keywords to the article - LLMs require the text to appear on the page to deem that the page is relevant to that text. LLMs are basically very close readers and are trained not to hallucinate. If you go through GSC and see keywords that you're ranking for but that subtopic is not covered in the article, do a content update and add that subtopic. The blackhat way would be to keyword stuff. The whitehat way would be to update the content. I'm going to test this later on but, again, I'm sure this is valuable now even more so than before.
5. ultra long tail keywords - LLMs require that there's content about a topic. If you found a keyword that people aren't covering and write about it, by definition, you'll rank for it since there's no competition. The good old strategy of writing keywords that appear on Google Suggestion that have 0 volume still works to this day.
6. UGC - if you can get your readers to interact with your post, that'll increase your UX metrics and therefore rankings. Plus it'll give you social proof and all that jazz. Google really wants to rank sites where people would already go to it, according to their own Core Update Guidelines.
7. Branding - just create a brand! Don't create an EMD domain like it was 2007.
8. Use the other channels not just search - get people to go to your site from other channels to boost UX and traffic to the domain. I bet you this will help your rankings. Google has user data from Chrome, Android, etc. They know where people go.

What I'm seeing that doesn't matter as much anymore:

1. Exact match keyword in title - LLMs can understand the meaning of the meta title tag very well. I'd rather write for the reader and optimize for CTR than to have exact keyword in title. I see sites ranking that do not have keyword in title, but the LLM figured out its relevant. Quite cool!
2. Like #7 in the last list, exact match keywords in domain name.

Finally, with the emphasis on spam lately, I'm sure digital PR will be valued more. Especially since Google can figure out what a brand mention is. Since brand mentions count as hyperlinks, Digital PR's value is skyrocketing. I strongly suggest everyone here do digital PR for their online brands. A mention or link about your company on the right section of an online newspaper is gold.

Of course, there are only my opinions. I haven't test this but they are the ideas I got from reading the updates so far.

 

[jgw899]

Are you running single-variable tests across test sites or are you referring to successes that you're seeing anecdotally across live projects?

Also, can you drop us any nuggets? What kind of old SEO tricks are you seeing that are starting to work again?

Anecdotal, non scientific studies across tons of live projects. Maybe I'm not smart enough or have enough patience to do better testing, so prefer to pay SEO consultants to do their own (good) testing and then make decisions how to apply their findings.

Nothing groundbreaking here but probably something most don't think about doing anymore, I've had success with keyword stuffing through hidden divs over the last year or so. Not the good old days of using white text on white background. Used this to rank tons of long tail keywords, where those keywords weren't even on the page. Applied hidden divs and bam - bunch of keywords start ranking and pages are now generating a solid stream of leads.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Yesterday the SEO industry was rife with examples of Google returning to it's old self, now slinging out massive amounts of MANUAL penalties in Search Console. You can't trust everything you read and a lot of people were saying it was unfair, inaccurate, they had 100% human writing, etc. I'm assuming their sites were top-tier dookie.

But what it boiled down to was, as has been noticed here for probably two years or more, is that while Google is saying "AI content is okay" with little detail, that they're turning around and not only giving penalties but completely deindexing sites. At least now you get a notice about it.

This is coming under the monikers of the three new spam policies, which basically boil down to "we don't like that you published tens of thousands of posts in a month's time even though we said it was okay, and especially not on a nice domain you bought."

As usual, SERoundTable curated a bunch of examples you can look at, mainly from Twitter. Here's a couple examples:

 

[bernard]

I mean, most of the sites people shared that got hit were obvious trash.

I am always surprised at how people overestimate their own sites.

 

[contract]

These updates make me happy I sold back when I did.. It's not even a matter of following guidelines anymore... It's just pure chaos and waiting forever on a 3rd party that's totally unpredictable. Still in the game however, but only because I have brands.

 

[CCarter]

Charles Floate is running a competition for A.I. generated content sites ATM. Ironically he's been posting a lot of success stories on his YouTube and if you follow him he's heavily involved in A.I. generated content with his (I assume), tool Cuppa.sh.

AND he's been a massive voice on parasite websites working in the last 1-3 years to the point him and Grind were going back and forth on Twitter.

And then I see several other people experimenting with A.I. generating content and creating NEW tools, not yet on the market, and none of them have had any of their website de-indexed or hit.

I'm going to lean with @bernard on this one - the website posted in that thread, I visited quite a few of them, they were trash. And if anyone doesn't think thing they were trash then you guys are on the same path those guys are on.

This tweet was interesting:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1765455096438030339

I visited most of those site - their social media were weak and non-existent at best.

Go down that list of sites posted - they were all de-index and I can't blame Google for it.

If they were using A.I. it was one of the weaker models if anything. Also some of these celebrity sites, their "age" does update with the current date, a simple php script should be able to do that - so the content is literally "old".

These sites have more holes than swiss cheese.

So I don't know - I think the people complaining need to do a deep dive or get outside eyes on what their issues are.

 

[Darth]

The dude above who posted

My site has 32000 post and I don't know how to find spammy article

His site is https://bioofy.com/ (he posted it in replies).

I never lol'ed so hard.

 

[Smith]

I decided to look at equityatlas .org referenced in the Twitter thread @CCarter shared above.

It looks like they started in October '23... only six months ago.

In that time they scaled to 53k pages, which is insane. Yes, I know they probably programmatically 'printed' the entire site in one day, but it's still an insane amount of content.

At their peak, according to SEM Rush, they were bringing in 3.2m in organic, which again means they were probably bringing in considerably more.

But what I found really interesting is that they crossed 1mm in organic traffic after 14 days of launching... and stayed above that number for 5.5 months... often by a couple of million.

Say what you will about these spam websites... these guys exploited the shit out of AI content and Google for 5 months.

Now I'm not advocating for flooding the internet with crap content... on the contrary, I think Google taking a hammer to these sites will be better for everyone, including most of us.

But if you're sitting in Bangladesh and you're worried about putting food on the table, you're just looking to get paid...

And these guys probably did alright in terms of ad rev during the 5.5 months that they were sucking up traffic, especially considering how aggressive the ad placements are on this site.

Maybe this team of extremely diverse writers (see below) deserves praise for beating the giant at its own game, even if it was only for a moment...

Yes, this is the actual image from their "About Page"... Google Gemini?

*Please note: They were inclusive across gender, race, and age. No doubt they even have Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, and Jews on their team. Plus an argument could be made that the gentleman sitting down in the front uses a wheelchair... Blackrock DE&I managers would be so proud.

It's crazy to me that two days ago this site had over 50k pages indexed on Google. And today...

Again, I'm definitely not advocating for this kind of crap content to flood the web. But, I do think it's interesting that this site was able to last for as long as it did.

And it will be even more interesting to see what happens in the coming days/weeks... will there be more manual penalties handed out?

Hopefully, if there are more penalties, they'll skip over the legit sites we're all working on... and if they don't, well then fuck it... just another reason to push harder on other platforms and mediums.

 

[CCarter]

But, I do think it's interesting that this site was able to last for as long as it did.

And it's in the YMYL niche, personal finance.

When you start digging deep you start noticing these sites were "breaking" rules that people assumed were true.

These are some of the most extreme cases I've seen in awhile, but it makes you wonder how they escaped the "sandbox" and other mythical barriers in 14 days, using pure brute force?

Remember study the SERPs, especially the extreme stuff. As @Grind would say Google has to show their cards every single day in the search results.

 

[bernard]

When I say trash I mean it in the objective sense, that most people would consider those sites spam and trash that they got no value from.

I don't mean trash in the sense that they were trash at making money or whatever.

It's simply that if you create something that most people think is trash, don't be surprised when Google removes it.

That said, playing it safe seems to be a very slow and not very profitable move the last year. I am beginning to doubt if it is even worth it.

 

[Smith]

When I say trash I mean it in the objective sense, that most people would consider those sites spam and trash that they got no value from.

I completely agree. This site was 100% trash. Without a doubt. Pure garbage.

That said, playing it safe seems to be a very slow and not very profitable move the last year. I am beginning to doubt if it is even worth it.

If you're only driving traffic (read revenue) through SEO and your goal is to make enough money to quit the game, I completely agree.

It seems like our Bangladeshi friends over at equityatlas figured this out and spammed the shit out of Google while burning and churning sites with zero fucks.

Yes, the content was trash... BUT they weren't aiming for a Pulitzer. They probably just wanted to take their kids to McDonalds to get Happy Meals.

It will be interesting to see how or if this changes over the next year...

I think (and hope) that @Ryuzaki's comment about Google's AI statements vs their recent action is the path forward...

...while Google is saying "AI content is okay" with little detail, that they're turning around and not only giving penalties but completely deindexing sites.

... not because I care about the quality of the SERPs, but because it will result in less competition and it will be more difficult to compete with me when people can't rely on programmatic + AI shit content at scale.

 

[bernard]

If you're only driving traffic (read revenue) through SEO and your goal is to make enough money to quit the game, I completely agree.

Personally I just don't want to wake up post-penguin and see I've lost $10k /month overnight, that stress isn't worth, but then again, at some point, do you even make $10K /month now with slow and steady?

 

[CCarter]

I agree the websites were trash. I'm more curious how they made it through Google and were banking for so long until this update.

I setup websites - blackhat, greyhat, bluehat, and even dabbled in white and have gotten traffic immediately- but never 1 million visitors in 14 days... off just SEO.

I will also note most of the website above had some social media profiles and are active. The one @Darth pointed out had a YouTube with 140+ videos. The content of those videos were a bit dubious: https://www.youtube.com/@waqasmushtaqofficial

The guy is clearly a black/gray hat SEO.

There was something I was reading in one of the above articles about how Google doesn't consider rel=authorship entity stuff anymore that SEOs went through the trouble of implementing. They just use the outbound links to certain types of profiles to figure out if you are the author.

For the life of my I couldn't figure out why the bioofy guy was link to his youtube - until it clicked. If Google is indeed using profiles for authorship, and there is weight to an author - with the #1 site that has a certainty of author and verification of identity which they, Google, controls would be YouTube.

So perhaps there is a related ranking factor in connecting your YouTube to a website. An added Google+ bonus if you will. They can verify you to a crazy degree by that linkage.

That equityatlas.org site was a dropped domain which less than 1 year ago (Mar 14, 2023) looked like this:

So they bought a dropped domain with a Ahrefs DR of 33 and went HAM with A.I. content. Smart move and they most likely got a decent return.

I would love to go through these sites and do a breakdown of everything I notice that seems to indicate these spammers knew a lot of advanced tactics. They sprinkled in entities and best practice SEO through out too.

Also the topics they are going for seem to be "Instagram model" level celebrities. Someone on IG with 10K or 400K followers might be Instagram famous but when it comes to search there are little articles or topics about them. So a website that's got a 33 DR comes and gives information about them it will be able to skyrocket since there are most likely people searching this individual with 450K followers but is really a local Instagram celebrity no one outside of IG knows.

And since everyone is trying to get famous these IG celebrities are endless content creation opportunities. There is a new IG star every 5 mins. Yet Google doesn't have content on them. Then comes A.I. which can build harvesting bots and that's a wrap.

Actually, back in SERPWoo days when we launch a new country for search, I would create a project with that country, to start getting traction for volatility and other data, then find "celebrities born in XYZ country" and get the top 50-100 celebrities and famous people from that area and put them into the rank tracker. That way we were able to quickly see what websites were the top dogs in that country, could be some obscure stuff like CNN.co.mx (i'm making it up), but we were able to see parasite and web 2.0s that were ranking fairly high in that area.

It's how we know what web 2.0, social media, and other platforms worked best in a region/country - by monitoring the celebrities. I would just google the celebrities and scraper their names.

Some of these local celebrities didn't have a lot of sites on the internet talking about them. So if actors/actress celebrities didn't have tons of sites talking about them - obviously Instagram Models aren't going to ANY sites talking about them outsite IG.

And when Google needs content about this IG model they get desparate and here comes a DR 33 site with info.

Easy Peasy lemon squeezy.

You know what, I just might...

 

[BakerStreet]

Personally I just don't want to wake up post-penguin and see I've lost $10k /month overnight, that stress isn't worth, but then again, at some point, do you even make $10K /month now with slow and steady?

I disagree. In the accounting equation, your wealth is your assets minus your liabilities. What are your assets in a digital business? It's the people you hire and your training of them, the domain name, any technical intellectual property you might have (most likely none for Wordpress sites), and your content. So, basically, your assets are your team and your content.

Writing shit content is building a house on sand and, as we've seen with these guys, the house can sink fast. If you go slow and steady and build a good team and write quality content, you'll build a foundation on rock. Same thing with your team. If you train them well, educate them, give them a structured environment, and enable them to work, they'll take care of your company and you.

As for slow and steady taking a long time, which seems to be stated in a negative connotation, in the investment world, you'd rather have steady growth than inconsistent and wild growth. It's actually quite reassuring with consistent, predictable growth. This is the basis of a budget. You know how much each department will cost to run in a year, have set that money aside, and you also know how much return you'll get from that budgeted expense too. This makes things so much easier.

Finally, with managers and workers working for you, you're free to do something else when they run the enterprise for you That's what investing is, letting your money do the work and grow, while you can do something else

 

[Smith]

There are different ways to make money.

Yes, slow and steady is great. But short-term cash grabs aren't bad either. I would argue there is a time and place for both.

Best case scenario, leverage short-term cash grabs early on to financially seed a long-term (slow and steady) business... self-fund or bootstrap the initial stages and then grow from there.

As for the assets in a digital business, I agree with @BakerStreet's assessment in theory...

But, when one of your main assets (content) can easily be devalued by a third party (Google), resulting in a material impact on your business (massive drops in traffic), and you have little recourse, it's difficult for business owners to sit back and think long-term.

We've seen this play out over and over in the most recent updates. Niche site owners who are legitimate experts in their field are getting hammered in the SERPs and replaced by shit publishers who are aggregating farmed content.

The article @bernard shared from HouseFresh is a perfect summary of exactly this...

https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/

The point is, unless this recent sweep by Google cleans up the SERPs and rebalances weightings between massive sites and niche experts, SEO assets aren't going to be anywhere near as valuable as they used to be... hell, that's where we're at already.

If you want to see what the future of content looks like, you should follow me on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, and...

 

[bernard]

Yeah, the issue isn't so much slow and steady vs quick and risky, but that slow and steady isn't really that safe either.

 

[BakerStreet]

I agree the websites were trash. I'm more curious how they made it through Google and were banking for so long until this update.

I setup websites - blackhat, greyhat, bluehat, and even dabbled in white and have gotten traffic immediately- but never 1 million visitors in 14 days... off just SEO.

I will also note most of the website above had some social media profiles and are active. The one @Darth pointed out had a YouTube with 140+ videos. The content of those videos were a bit dubious: https://www.youtube.com/@waqasmushtaqofficial

The guy is clearly a black/gray hat SEO.

There was something I was reading in one of the above articles about how Google doesn't consider rel=authorship entity stuff anymore that SEOs went through the trouble of implementing. They just use the outbound links to certain types of profiles to figure out if you are the author.

For the life of my I couldn't figure out why the bioofy guy was link to his youtube - until it clicked. If Google is indeed using profiles for authorship, and there is weight to an author - with the #1 site that has a certainty of author and verification of identity which they, Google, controls would be YouTube.

So perhaps there is a related ranking factor in connecting your YouTube to a website. An added Google+ bonus if you will. They can verify you to a crazy degree by that linkage.

That equityatlas.org site was a dropped domain which less than 1 year ago (Mar 14, 2023) looked like this:

So they bought a dropped domain with a Ahrefs DR of 33 and went HAM with A.I. content. Smart move and they most likely got a decent return.

I would love to go through these sites and do a breakdown of everything I notice that seems to indicate these spammers knew a lot of advanced tactics. They sprinkled in entities and best practice SEO through out too.

Also the topics they are going for seem to be "Instagram model" level celebrities. Someone on IG with 10K or 400K followers might be Instagram famous but when it comes to search there are little articles or topics about them. So a website that's got a 33 DR comes and gives information about them it will be able to skyrocket since there are most likely people searching this individual with 450K followers but is really a local Instagram celebrity no one outside of IG knows.

And since everyone is trying to get famous these IG celebrities are endless content creation opportunities. There is a new IG star every 5 mins. Yet Google doesn't have content on them. Then comes A.I. which can build harvesting bots and that's a wrap.

Actually, back in SERPWoo days when we launch a new country for search, I would create a project with that country, to start getting traction for volatility and other data, then find "celebrities born in XYZ country" and get the top 50-100 celebrities and famous people from that area and put them into the rank tracker. That way we were able to quickly see what websites were the top dogs in that country, could be some obscure stuff like CNN.co.mx (i'm making it up), but we were able to see parasite and web 2.0s that were ranking fairly high in that area.

It's how we know what web 2.0, social media, and other platforms worked best in a region/country - by monitoring the celebrities. I would just google the celebrities and scraper their names.

Some of these local celebrities didn't have a lot of sites on the internet talking about them. So if actors/actress celebrities didn't have tons of sites talking about them - obviously Instagram Models aren't going to ANY sites talking about them outsite IG.

And when Google needs content about this IG model they get desparate and here comes a DR 33 site with info.

Easy Peasy lemon squeezy.

You know what, I just might...

I'm on the same boat as you. They straight up outed that there is a low competition niche where AI content can bring in millions of clicks per month with only a DA33 domain. Their traffic was due to expired domain not having the sandbox and influencers having demand but a lack of content.

Your theory that YouTube authorship attribution passes massive trust is *fucking interesting*. With Text to AI Video tools like https://www.synthesia.io/, you can just write a paragraph, the AI will read it and make an AI person in the video say the words. If you want to fix your script, just fix the text and regenerate. The issue right now is that the videos are not entertaining and the plan only allows 3 hours of videos/year, which is way too low. Once this technology improves, anyone can enter the YouTube space for niche AF content.

From having visited their site, I'd do it differently in this way:

1. Instead of making tons of spam sites, stick to one site.
2. Instead of writing BS content for max keyword reach, I'd write better content so that it actually fulfils search intent and not be deindexed. A lot of the content was like "Person's X's birth: to be edited later" which doesn't fulfil search intent at all.
3. If they did get the database of influencers from IG, I'd run another function to go through all of that influencer's posts and find data points like DOB, relationship status, and other stuff that they used in #2. Then I'd create an AI sentence about it but also have a citation to which post of their said it. So something like "Person X was born on 1/1/1991 as stated on this 1 june 2022 IG post." This way, the content is factual, fulfils search intent, and is useful.
4. I'd brand the name to something like "Social media database" (SMDB) and then have a function to crawl social media, discover people who pass a threshold of followers, and add them to the DB when they do w/ new data about them.
5. I'd then put schema markups for DB data points and make an API. IMDB and TMDB does this and I bet you this API would be useful later on. Plus, if you make an AP integration, you can get backlinks to the site this way too. Not sure what the use of the API is at the moment however.
6. I'd also make it so that it inflates the influencer's ego. I bet you they'd share their ranking on SMDB if it was created in this way.

There you go. The person/team who can execute in this niche well, in a way that is within Google guidelines, will be rich. It just needs to stick around for 10-20 years.

There are different ways to make money.

Yes, slow and steady is great. But short-term cash grabs aren't bad either. I would argue there is a time and place for both.

Best case scenario, leverage short-term cash grabs early on to financially seed a long-term (slow and steady) business... self-fund or bootstrap the initial stages and then grow from there.

As for the assets in a digital business, I agree with @BakerStreet's assessment in theory...

But, when one of your main assets (content) can easily be devalued by a third party (Google), resulting in a material impact on your business (massive drops in traffic), and you have little recourse, it's difficult for business owners to sit back and think long-term.

We've seen this play out over and over in the most recent updates. Niche site owners who are legitimate experts in their field are getting hammered in the SERPs and replaced by shit publishers who are aggregating farmed content.

The article @bernard shared from HouseFresh is a perfect summary of exactly this...



The point is, unless this recent sweep by Google cleans up the SERPs and rebalances weightings between massive sites and niche experts, SEO assets aren't going to be anywhere near as valuable as they used to be... hell, that's where we're at already.

If you want to see what the future of content looks like, you should follow me on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, and...

Yeah, the issue isn't so much slow and steady vs quick and risky, but that slow and steady isn't really that safe either.

It's not safe because you're relying on an algorithm that you don't control! I've been talking about diversification here if you want to read about other ideas https://www.buildersociety.com/threads/diversifying-from-google-diversifying-income-streams.7339/ .

Let's say you are doing a niche amazon affiliate review website. Here's ways you can diversify your income away from Google from the top of my head:

1. Have your content writing team take on external clients for B2B content writing deals.
2. Have your link building team take on external clients for B2B link building deals.
3. Have your digital PR take on external clients for B2B SEO deals.
4. Have your SEO team take on external clients for B2B SEO deals.
5. Move to a niche like iGaming where you get a recurring revenue stream per signup. Some SaaS affiliate programs give you recurring revenue per signup too.

If you can turn your company from one that runs amazon affiliate review websites to one that runs amazon affiliate review websites and does some B2B work, the B2B work will give you a ton of diversification and security. IMO the only change is that one of your team member becomes the account manager and that's all. You guys need to be more creative instead of repeating some cycle of rule breaking, punishment, and more rule breaking SMH.

 

[Smith]

You guys need to be more creative

IMO the only change is that one of your team member becomes the account manager and that's all.

You're talking about creating an entirely separate business... which is fine. But it's not as easy as you describe.

As someone who has owned a 20-person agency and used countless others over the last 20 years, an agency isn't as easy as just appointing an account manager. I can confidently say you are dramatically oversimplifying the business model.

 

[BakerStreet]

You're talking about creating an entirely separate business... which is fine. But it's not as easy as you describe.

As someone who has owned a 20-person agency and used countless others over the last 20 years, an agency isn't as easy as just appointing an account manager. I can confidently say you are dramatically oversimplifying the business model.

Well, do you feel like sharing what the problems were with running an agency for 20 years and what was required to run an agency and how adding an account manager to your writing team is overly simplified?

 

[Ryuzaki]

I can confidently say you are dramatically oversimplifying the business model.

Another thing to add on is that, while being overly-exposed to Google's algorithm is obviously bad, using your team to sell stuff to other's who are overly-exposed to Google's algorithm solves nothing. Trust me. People who were selling shovels to gold diggers got destroyed by the HCU as well. If the gold diggers are sent back east, you're sitting there with a pile of shovels and blue jeans and nobody to sell them to.

I watched my best internet friends, among the most successful in the industry, sell off their equity in or shutter their entire content selling business, rank tracking business, link selling business, etc. It got so bad that these businesses couldn't even be sold unless it was to an invested partner, and now that partner is trying to sell. They literally had to just cut off the light switch and go home. No liquidation.

There's a lot of talk (and I don't mean anyone in this thread, just out there in general) from a naive position from the sidelines or the dug out. "I'd pivot my business to this or that." It's easy to say when you're watching playing field get emptied of people who were in "this or that" business, and think that it's your time to shine. That void isn't ready to be filled and there's not zillions of high paying clients chomping at the bits, begging to spend their money with someone. The highest paying ones are happy with their agencies and are contracted in. Everyone else not only isn't happy with their agency, but they don't have the cashflow to hire another one. No amount of lofty "go gettem, tiger" talk from bright eyed youngsters is going to change this right now. Do try to position yourself for the next evolution of the game in advance, but don't think it's going to look like what it did 3 years ago or even 1 year ago.

 

[Smith]

do you feel like sharing what the problems were with running an agency

The same problems every business faces. The only difference is that the rules of the game are changing at an increasing pace when it comes to digital marketing. And the team you have today isn't the team you need in 3 months, 6 months, 9 months....

Sure, you can pick a niche and stick to it. Link building is a good example. But if you're doing anything that has an expected outcome (e.g. position in the SERPs), you're fucked.

This is the reason why every SEO expert, YouTube guru, and marketing genius sells a course.

These guys aren't stupid. They sell the idea (the hope) that you can have similar outcomes if you just follow their formula, rather than selling you the actual outcome or implementation.

If they had to sell customers the actual outcome, their customers would complain every time they dropped in ranking. That's annoying. It's a hell of a lot easier to just package and sell hope through photoshopped GSC charts and customer testimonials from their friends course participants.

No amount of lofty "go gettem, tiger" talk from bright eyed youngsters is going to change this right now

100000%

No one with real money is buying services from an up-and-coming 20-year-old when there's so much uncertainty in the SERPs.

Sure, there are gullible people out there ready to pay... but how does Frankie from Wisconsin know what Google wants right now when none of the guys who have been in the game for 10+ years can tell you?

If anything, businesses with budgets are turning to guys with a decade-long track record who are respected in their respective industries or niches.

And even then, companies are cutting out other services in the meantime because they're all questioning what is working and what isn't.

They literally had to just cut off the light switch and go home. No liquidation.

I've seen this too. It's not pretty.

And it's why every agency owner I know is running a lean operation with low-cost overseas talent and is focusing a ton of attention on customer retention instead of growth.

And just to be clear, I'm not talking about the "big" agencies that are serving enterprise clients with long-term commitments that extend beyond the Google update cycle... those guys have reached scale and are insulated against a lot of the volatility.

But if you're going to build an agency, it isn't as easy as just throwing on an account manager and calling it a day...

 

[BakerStreet]

@Smith thanks for the reply. Maybe I am overly naive and getting in way too deep over my head, but then again, I did sold $10,000/month in content writing before and all i did was train a guy to do keyword research and then he'd just make a content order from a writing company. It costed us $15/article and we're charging the client $50/article. The client was well informed of the operation and, even though the contract could be changed within 30 days, he was on for a full year. It didn't end because of anything related to SEO or the content writing and it was very much hands off for me.

As for finding B2B clients, I'm doing that right now. This sounds so simple but I'm just making a profile on UpWork and looking for bids from people who clearly have money. Once I figure out how to get a contract there, it's up to me to maintain the business relationship and keep them as a client. As long as we give good value for money and good ROI, I'm sure they'd be sticking to us for years to come. I am seeing a lot of demand here none the less. Especially from SaaSes or local professionals like attorneys or financial consultants.

As for credibility, I can just tell them that we're the inhouse team at X company and our rankings are doing fine. We're just diversifying our income and taking on client work. I think any businessman would understand.

Do I have a B2B contract yet? No. Am I like 15% of the way there to get some side hustles for my content writing team? IMO Yes. This quarter might be the quarter where I experiment with finding freelancing clients. 5 quarters from now, we might have a solid system up. Like all things, it takes time.

So, yes, even right now it is more complicated than just an account manager. I take that back. We're still doing market research and trying to find product/market fit for our inhouse teams. However, if I don't diversify, then I would be 100% victimizable by a new google update. Even if clients are getting most of their sales from Google, it is still a different website, different backlink profile, and different industry. It's still more diversification than what I have now and I'm willing to work for it.

So, yes, I agree with everyone here that Google updates are terrible and there's much anxiety about how Google will be in the future. However I have decided to do something about it and diversify my earnings instead of not doing anything and carrying on with business as usual. I'm fucking scared and I think that's a good thing.