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I've been in web development and SEO for almost 20 years now. When I first started out all the veterans of SEO kept telling me not to do this, don't do that wi

I've been in web development and SEO for almost 20 years now. When I first started out all the veterans of SEO kept telling me not to do this, don't do that with things that could get your site buried in the SERP's. At the time Google's algorithm was really good at ferreting out affiliate links, link farms and other nefarious black hat techniques SEO's used to game Google. Now? Complete opposite. I have several freelance clients and I've used every dirty SEO trick in the book and all of them have worked like magic to get my clients sites ranked on page 1 or 2 of the SERP's. I have no idea what changed, but Google is super easy to manipulate now to get your site or specific pages ranking really high. I haven't heard or seen any of the horror stories I read and people blogged about constantly when I first started out for years - which tells me they're all probably doing the same thing I am and not seeing any repercussions. Maybe Google doesn't care because users have become so savvy, they can filter through a ton of garbage in minutes to find what they really want?

CharlieDigital 3y ago
Do you have any writing on this? Would love to learn more.
- technion 3y ago
  I recently googled "rubbish removal mysuburb" and found a pretty good looking website. Let's say it was myrubbishremoval.com/mysuburb. The page text repeatedly named the suburb. It turns out they appear to have a folder for basically every suburb in the country, thousands of subdirectories yielding the same looking page with that suburb name inserted into the text, making them look local no matter where you are. I can similarly find this with many other industries. This sort of thing twenty years ago was a huge no no. Google talked about detecting mostly duplicate text and would bury you for it. Like a very basic rule was that if two pages were mostly the same only one would really rank. Nowadays the "lead funnel" is an entire industry on websites following this pattern, and it clearly works.
  - CharlieDigital 3y ago
    Interesting because I've been under the assumption that this kind of "keyword stuffing" was cause issues with ranking so I've always wondered what some of these sites were doing "right"

CharlieDigital 3y ago

Do you have any writing on this? Would love to learn more.

technion 3y ago
I recently googled "rubbish removal mysuburb" and found a pretty good looking website. Let's say it was myrubbishremoval.com/mysuburb. The page text repeatedly named the suburb. It turns out they appear to have a folder for basically every suburb in the country, thousands of subdirectories yielding the same looking page with that suburb name inserted into the text, making them look local no matter where you are. I can similarly find this with many other industries. This sort of thing twenty years ago was a huge no no. Google talked about detecting mostly duplicate text and would bury you for it. Like a very basic rule was that if two pages were mostly the same only one would really rank. Nowadays the "lead funnel" is an entire industry on websites following this pattern, and it clearly works.
- CharlieDigital 3y ago
  Interesting because I've been under the assumption that this kind of "keyword stuffing" was cause issues with ranking so I've always wondered what some of these sites were doing "right"