Black Hat SEO with Craig Campbell

MICHAEL:
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INTRO: It's time for The SEO Show, where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now here's your hosts, Michael and Arthur.

MICHAEL: Hello and welcome to The SEO Show. I'm Michael Costin and this week we're talking about the dark and mysterious world of Black Hat SEO. Now Black Hat SEO is not something that I recommend people get into. In fact, most of the time you want to stay away from it. But it doesn't mean that it doesn't exist and that it's not an interesting part of SEO. So I thought it would be great to have someone come on the show today and talk about their experiences with Black Hat SEO and even just to define what Black Hat SEO is because you could ask 10 SEOs what their definition of Black Hat SEO is and you're going to get 10 different answers. So today I've had Craig Campbell come on the show to talk about, well, his take on that and his experience in the world of Black Hat SEO. It was a great chat. We went all over the place. We spoke about different tactics. Different strategies old tools new tools and we went all over the place, but the general premise was black hat SEO So without further ado, let's jump into this week's chat with Craig Campbell Hi Craig, welcome to the SEO show for people who may not have heard of you If you could just let us know a little bit about yourself and what you do, that'd be great. So

CRAIG: Thanks, Michael. So my name's Craig Campbell. I'm based in Glasgow, Scotland. I've been in the industry for 20 plus years. I've been everything from the freelancer working in the bedroom having no clue what I was doing. I have went on to build up a successful digital marketing agency. Don't ask me why I chose to go down that route. I had 17 staff at one point. dealing with loads of clients and I've done that for probably about nine years until I decided enough was enough, you know, it was really hard to scale that any further than I did and for probably the last six or seven years. In fact, in 2015, I gave up the agency and started to focus more on affiliate marketing, building a personal brand, buying and selling digital assets. I felt at the 2015 time, I'd done my apprenticeship, I'd done all the hard work and decided to try and make the money that I had earned work for me, rather than me begging and singing for money from clients. So that's a brief background of what I've done. And yeah, there's lots of stories in between.

MICHAEL: Yeah, well, that's interesting. I've brought you on because we wanted to chat about Blackhat SEO. The fact that you've built an agency there and grew it to 17 people and then sold it, I found that interesting. You mentioned scaling problems. Was that because you were just sort of in the trenches doing SEO and you found it tough to remove yourself from that or what sort of went on there that you sort of hit a ceiling?

CRAIG: You know, that was certainly part of the problem, trying to remove myself. You know, I'd built myself into the business rather than working on the business and you know I think that's problematic for many SEOs who get into this game you know I started out you know early 2000s and it wasn't as prominent as it is now, SEO, the learning curve was a lot harder, there was no YouTube, there was no Facebook people, none of these things were alive, so my learning curve was a forum and it was called the SEO chat forum, which is still there, it's owned by internet market ninjas now, But, you know, when you're sitting at home and you're this kind of shady freelancer who's making it up as he's going along, you're not thinking of, you know, being a businessman or anything. So, you know, as it goes and you're making a few quid and you're getting a bit stressed, you know, you hire a sales guy or whatever. You know, my first hire was a sales dude. just because I hated talking to clients and that whole rigmarole of talking crap all the time to try and get the money and I wasn't very good at it you know I was undercharging myself and all that stuff so I thought sales guy then it was a content writer then it was a web person because we were doing everything you know it was a full agency giving them a website and then nailing the SEO and before I knew it That's when I got an office, hired the sales guy, started getting these people. Before I knew it, I had all these people doing bits of stuff, but I wasn't the guy in the middle. That's where I really struggled. I struggled to delegate. I wasn't a businessman. I wasn't thinking like a businessman. Even things like not trusting people to do the job I was doing, you know, I thought I was the only guy in the world that could do this and, you know, you have all these kind of weird thoughts and stuff, you know, a young guy earning money, you know, there's a bit of ego in there as well, you're hiring people for the sheer hell of hiring people, you know, I'll never know for the life of me how or why I had 17 staff, it was just insanity, you know, it's, I think I went through this stage of thinking I'm going to have the biggest agency in the world and all this kind of stuff. And a lot of it was kind of ego and madness. And yeah, I really don't know what was going through my head until it came to a point where you're like, jeez, I'm in the middle of all this and I'm not getting time to do anything. I felt as if I couldn't breathe and stuff like that. So yeah, I built myself into a really stressful situation.

MICHAEL: Okay, well, yeah, I can certainly empathize with a lot of what you've said there from running our own agency here in Australia, but I find it really cool that you took a step back from that and have focused more on, I guess, your passion, SEO and building your brand in the space and sort of getting your name out there more as, I guess, an educator and I guess a freelance consultant, affiliate person. Where I think I came across you originally is A little, what do you want to call it? A prank that you might have played on Nigel Farage, who for Australian listeners, you may or may not have heard of him. He's a UK politician, I guess, or political figure. But maybe you could tell us a bit more about what you did there, because it's pretty interesting and cheeky.

CRAIG: Back then when I'd done this, Nigel Farage was the guy that was leading the Brexit campaign. So for anyone who doesn't know what that is in Australia, the UK have since left the European Union, so we're no longer part of Europe. And Europe, collectively, there's all these countries, tons of them, all together. You can fly in and out without visas. There's a whole bunch of reasons why you would be in the European Union. But also, part of that is the countries have to pay an X amount of money into European Union, and it gets spent across Europe rather than on your own country. for one reason or another decided to leave and he was the kind of main guy behind all of that so it was big news you know leaving the European Union was massive and he was one of the kind of ringleaders in all of that so he was a very very prominent figure in the political world And, you know, I like to talk about Black Hat SEO and, you know, expired domains and all this kind of stuff. And people often ask me, no, do good domains really expire? And yes, they do. You know, people take their eye off the ball. People are not smart. And Nigel Fradge, somehow took his eye off the ball and his domain was expiring. And for you guys in Australia, there's a certain process, I don't know what it's like in Australia, but in the UK, when the domain expires, it goes into suspended space, which gives it around about 60 odd days before it's then released to the public market. So Nigel could have grabbed that domain name, in that 60 day you're you're warned your domain's expired you know renew you're constantly warned and you know for me looking at it um it was a prank but The amount of backlinks that NigelFarage.co.uk had from websites that I could never get, the BBC, and all these kind of national, international newspapers, the coverage that that guy's got would literally cost you millions and millions of pounds in PR. And this domain was expiring. So boom, got it when it expired. It was difficult to do anything with it, you know, from an affiliate perspective because it's a bloody politician's branded domain name. So what I'd done was just put up his website from the Wayback Machine, just recreated all the old URLs, let all the link just kick back in and and it's still like that to this day but I used to tell people about it at conferences and all that kind of stuff and people are like how are you going to monetize that and I'm like I've only done it for a kind of joke but I thought how else can I leverage it so I started to release it to the newspapers so that I could get my own PR from having the Nigel Farage domain name him, but I wanted to basically just show the world that high-profile companies, high-profile individuals do let their domains expire. You know, people die, people go bust, you know, there's a number of reasons why a domain name may expire and, you know, in terms of Black Hat SEO, what can you do with that power? is entirely up to yourself. Now, obviously, with a brand, a personal brand, and the high profile that he is, I had to be very, very careful legally in terms of what I was able to do with that domain name, but I think it made for a great story, but it also got me a lot of press. I also had Nigel trying to get his domain name back, which he still never got back. It's more beneficial for me to tell the story and have the domain name than give him it back. But, yeah, he stupidly took his eye off the ball. He lost out on millions and millions of pounds worth of press. Link juice, if you want to call it that. And I do have some other high-profile individuals. There's a couple of others that I have. And there came a time, maybe four or five years ago, when the .music domain came out. And two high-profile individuals, one called Craig David, and another band called The Killers, basically just dropped their domain name, their .co.uk domain names, and went straight over to .music. So I also own craigdavid.co.uk and thekillers.co.uk, both of which were their official websites for 10 plus years, again, wild press coverage. And yeah, so high profile domain names expire all the time. And that was the message I was trying to get across. And also to educate, you know, the public, be careful with your domain names as well, because there'll always be some shark waiting in the background, waiting to pounce upon the work that you've done.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And once they're gone, they're gone or they're very difficult and expensive to get back.

CRAIG: Exactly.

MICHAEL: I really love the approach you've taken there of leveraging the fact that you have those domains to get more links and PR for your own website. I think that's really clever on a much smaller scale than Craig David and the killers. I actually owned the domain name killingheidi.com.au at one point, which was an Australian band back in the day that broke up and it had a whole bunch of links, but I never did anything with it. And I'm sure if you looked it up now, it'd probably be a PBN site, but yeah, definitely a lot of domains dropping every day. And I think it'd be cool to talk about that in a minute, but, um, I guess it would be good to introduce why you've come on the show today, which is to talk about Black Hat SEO, which sort of ties in with this world. You know, there's, there's all sorts of things you can do in Black Hat SEO, but, um, maybe to kick things off, let's define, you know, what is Black Hat SEO? What is White Hat SEO? And then we'll go into maybe some of the other things like expired domains that you've gotten involved in over the years.

CRAIG: So, there is obviously, as you say, the term Black Hat SEO, White Hat SEO that's thrown around and then you've got something in the middle where people call it Grey Hat SEO or whatever. As far as I'm concerned, I don't really like terming it one or the other. Now, I 100% get someone like yourself, as an agency, you can't talk about PBNs, buying links, doing this, that, or the next thing to your clients. You're working in the corporate world. There's a certain language and a certain way to conduct yourself, which I believe is White Hat SEO. Now, when you talk to clients, if you're under that agency, White Hat SEO or whatever, Your job is not to scare the client. You know, your job is not to to use that kind of language and You know, there's a certain element of things that I would do that. Maybe you wouldn't do from a client perspective and you know, we are you know, I will do, I'll use link building automation to power up a guest post, I will buy niche edits, I'll do this, that, and the next thing. Now, as far as I'm concerned, SEO is an art of manipulation. You're manipulating the search engines. And whether you admit to that or not, or the language that you use would determine whether you're white hat or whatever. You know the job though is to rank well and make money online and because I do certain things people term that as black hat. Now of course I don't go out and Use link building automation and point it direct to my website that's making me a ton of money. Why would I ever set out to get slapped by Google? That's not the job. My job is to be here for as long as you are to make money online and compete at the upper end of the search engines. And yes, I will talk about, I will buy a guest post, I will use a niche edit to power that up, I will use a PBN, I will use expired domain names, I will do this, that and the next thing. And for me, that's all about making money and doing the job properly. You can't have that conversation with a client, and I think that's the, you know, with a client, because they don't know it, and it will scare the shit out of them, first and foremost. And secondly, they don't really want to be seen. You know, you've got Google saying, oh, don't buy links and all that stuff. You know, people are like sheep. You know, when Google says something, people follow it. You know, 80% of people follow that to the exact word. Google, as a company, do not want us manipulating what they do. They can't cope with it. But for me, the 20% of people who don't follow Google like little sheep are the ones that make the most money online. And as I say, I'm not suggesting that you go out and hack websites and do all this kind of bad, bad stuff. You can do what I give the term black hat thrown at me all the time. You know, when I'm ranking a website, yes, I do digital PR. Yes, I will go to the press and do traditional PR. Yes, I will do everything I can, as clean as I possibly can, before I would do any of the funny stuff. you know because I think you've got to build a good solid foundation so I'm not doing SEO any differently from anyone else you know you still do on page you still do technical you're still doing all your your kind of good stuff you would just push yourself up to the the if there's a line in terms of a boundary I would push that probably higher than maybe someone in an agency. But that's what the agency's saying. Whether the agency's actually playing that game is often very different. So I think we'll find the SEO is SEO and there is no real hats. It would come down to sheer stupidity if you were going to start doing spam on your own website or whatever. I think that would be called the stupid hat or whatever. No one's doing that. So that's a kind of brief way of how I see it. And as I say, I fully respect people and agencies because I've done it myself, worked with corporate clients. And there's just a different type of language and a different way that you have to kind of sell it and suggest what you're doing and offer more deliverables and all that kind of bollocks is what goes on.

MICHAEL: Yeah, look, and I completely agree. Like if you're doing SEO for yourself on your own website, like in my opinion, Black Hat is really illegal. Like, you know, hacking someone, doing something totally shady is Black Hat, whereas everything else is just varying degrees of testing and optimizing and seeing what works and trying to get results. Right. Yeah. So, um, Look, I guess trying to put on this black hat, gray hat lens or hat, just so people listening can get an idea for what's possible. Do you have any, you know, major wins or traffic or revenue results or something that you can share from black hat tactics, like maybe an old site that you no longer have where you really were able to do well on the back of what would be considered, you know, black hat and inverted commas.

CRAIG: Yeah, I mean, there's certain things that I've done back in the day that you'd probably say, Craig, you know, that is a bit suspect. So back in the day, one of my biggest revenue makers was a website that ranked well for customer service numbers. Now, when I say that, I mean like Vodafone customer service, All the kind of local banks and customer service number, Sky TV customer service number, literally hundreds of them. Anyone who would phone up and complain or have a problem, I ranked for the brand name plus customer service. Now, what I used to do there was, all I was competing with was people's contact pages. So there wasn't anything that was outrageously difficult. What I'd done was rank for all these customer service numbers and then I would have a premium number which I got through a company called talknumbers.co.uk here in the UK and basically I was getting paid 7p a minute for ranking well for the bank and customer service number. So people would phone up the bank, talk to them. They would still get through to the bank. They would still get themselves resolved. But I had positioned myself in the middle as a middleman through a premium number. And I'd done that with thousands and thousands of different companies and made a lot of money, a lot of money. around about 2018 Ofcom caught on to this and it is now illegal to do that. So that type of business model has failed, it no longer makes the money that it did, and you had to put on the website underneath the number, this is actually a premium number you're calling, so it kind of killed the conversions, but other things, that I've potentially done to get quick traffic and quick money would be around about Google My Business listings. And even to this day, you can still hijack an unverified GMB listing. You can even hijack a verified one. So it's very, very easy to do. And they do bring in a lot of traffic. So normally, if you look out there, you'll see a lot of people who maybe have 10, 20, 30 listings all in the one city. How do they do that? What's going on there? They're likely to be hijacking old GMBs that are no longer properly managed. And this is beggars belief, by the way. Absolute beggars belief how Google have such a flaw in their system. But if I was to claim your GMB right now, If you don't respond to say that that's your GMB within seven days, that GMB becomes mine. It's crazy. It's Becker's belief. It is insane that there's such a flaw, and that flaw still exists to this day. So people are still hijacking GMBs at a massive scale and doing lead gen. So, for example, you could be in Sydney, and you could be a plumber, and you could basically go and grab all the kind of old plumbers who are dumb as shit, and don't look after their GMBs, and own them all, go in, claim them, edit them, put your phone number on there. These guys are then none the wiser. I mean, it honestly beggars belief. You know, there was also a flaw within Google My Business this has been fixed where if you went in and suggested an edit on a Google My Business listing and put their opening date to a date in the future so I come into yours and I suggest that you're not opened until October 2023 it would make your GMB disappear. So you could also go around shutting people's GMBs down. Now that, of course, is black hat. Have I played, have I done that stuff, have I educated on all that stuff? Yes. More so to tell people to bloody be careful that that's not happening. But a lot of people out there are still making a lot of money Simply, not through traditional SEO, but just Google my business listings and doing that stuff in such a massive scale and selling the leads on. So they do a lot of paper leads, lead generation, whatever you call it over there. And these are things that I have done in the past. Yeah, I'm not going to lie. So you can make money from it, but taking food from another man's or woman's table, it's not for me. So I try and educate people to avoid doing that, but also to protect yourself.

MICHAEL: Yeah, yeah. Well, I guess it is a way to make a living, but I guess at the end of the day, you've got to look at yourself in the mirror. And if you're just ripping off people's GMBs and Businesses, while they're none the wiser, there's other ways of SEO that you can use that would sit better with most people, you would hope. But look, that's all very interesting. I think I heard you talk there about sort of just taking over. like someone's listing. I've seen you talk about in the past, um, doing a bit of an outbound campaign, demanding credit for images that are used in posts, which I find interesting. Cause I have like to build links in the past, I would go and get images created around themes and then put them up on, you know, uh, free image websites where journalists would find them. And I just asked that I'd be credited with a link in it. And maybe 50% of the time they would give you the credit, the other 50% they don't. What your approach is, is sort of taking this to the next level, sort of removing a big chunk of work from it, which I thought was really cool. Could you tell us a bit more about what you've done in that space?

CRAIG: You cut off there, Michael, halfway through that.

MICHAEL: So I was saying, with that approach where I would go and create images and then have journalists give me credit, there's quite a bit of front end work there actually creating the images. But your approach, which is really interesting, gets rid of the need to do that work. So if you could tell us a bit more about that, I thought it was a pretty interesting angle that you had there.

CRAIG: So again, preying on the dumb people of the internet. So for example, I always use the Liverpool Echo in this example. So if you Google something like the Liverpool Echo, which is a UK newspaper, and then copyright unknown, you will literally see a million images on that particular newspaper where they don't know who that picture belongs to. Now as far as I'm concerned that's the you know that's an opportunity and you know when you see this uh you know these newspaper articles and a lot of the the the national press, they show you the journalist details, it gives you their email, it gives you their Twitter, it gives you their Facebook, the whole works. So reaching out to that person and saying, hey, you've published this article on such and such a date, that's my image you used. and, you know, 8 out of 10 times that will work or has worked for me in the past because, you know, they're just a journalist, they don't know what SU is, they don't know what a link is or the value of it or anything. Now, obviously, since I start talking about these things, things become a lot more Difficult because when you release something like that everyone then starts trying that trick and so it does become a little bit more difficult and What I have also done is set up a fake lawyer website a copyright lawyer website and And I do the reach out to the journalist from that, saying, listen, you've used my client's image. They don't want any trouble. They're just looking for a link to be credited for the image that you've used. If you can place the link to here, everyone will be happy. Normally, now, you have to step up the game. Because it's now, I've been speaking about that trick for the last four or five years. So in the last four or five years, journalists would normally turn around now and say, piss off, because everyone's trying that trick. But if they see it from a copyright lawyer, again, it scares them. They don't want trouble. So how that trick would work in 2022, I think you'd have to be slightly more aggressive with it, because no one wants any kind of copyright problems or potentially be taken to court. And for me, that's how low I've had to stoop for that trick to still work in 2022. But back then, just merely suggesting it, you know, was probably nine out of 10 would go for it. No problem at all, as long as you weren't being a douchebag. You know, it was all about the way that you reached out to them. If you're going to go all out aggressive, you know, you're going to get someone's backup. So always just coming in softly, gently, you know, you've used my image, you know. Please, could I get a link? You know, just, just act dumb. And, and yeah, that that image trick worked very, very well. And like you see, you could go and do all this front end work. which is a lot more money, time, expense. Why do all of that when you can just reach out to a guy saying, you know, that's my image, is the way that I think, you know, because SEOs are lazy and they want the quickest, easiest way of getting that link. So why go to the cost of getting that image made up and all that kind of stuff before you do it? That's the way I was thinking. However, When I've spoken about that trick at conferences and stuff, I'll never forget. I'd done it at a very small, maybe 50-person conference. It was like a local meet-up, call it that. And a journalist came up to me and she went, Craig, I want to shake your hand. She said, but I also want to punch you right in the face. And I'm like, what? She went, it's genius, the trick that you've done. She says, but I'm a journalist. And she says, I'm infuriated that someone like you would come along. and try and hijack all of my good writing and all my good work and suggest that an image is yours. So I can get it from that point of view as well. It can rub people up the wrong way. But the woman was only half joking when she said, I want to punch you in the face, but you need to be careful because it can be infuriating if you are hijacking other people's stuff as well.

MICHAEL: Yeah, yeah, I get it. Well, speaking of hijacking and newspaper sites, Do you have much experience with parasite SEO and ranking, let's say, an article on a strong news domain with maybe a sponsored post that you've purchased and then using that to make affiliate commission or any other forms of parasite SEO there?

CRAIG: Yes, I have done that. Yes, I have done it to make affiliate commission. But in a lot of cases, I would do that for what is called reputation management. So I do a lot of work for people who would approach me saying, Craig, if you Google my name, there's stuff here that I don't want to be seen. Whether they've hit someone or assaulted someone, You know, there's a number of different things that, you know, people want to shove further down the Google rankings. And, you know, one of the quickest and easiest ways for me to dominate, say, the top five results would be to go and get articles placed on you know, higher authority PR placements or, you know, even using things like Crunchbase, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all of these kind of ones you would want to be using and you're leveraging the power of the domain name. Now, obviously, I mainly do that for reputation management, but of course, you can do that from an affiliate perspective. And normally, the reason that I have to go for the kind of higher profile stuff is because these people have already been in a kind of local newspaper, and it's been reported on, but it's just not been well optimized. So I've got to basically manipulate the whole of the top 10 search results to shove that stuff down onto page two, sometimes even onto page three, people want to put it. And yeah, you've just got to use a combination of different Sites to do that and obviously social media is one of the ones that that are quite prominent So if you Google your name, you probably find that your LinkedIn's up there, you know You'll be able to see when you do a person's name what what kind of works and what doesn't and these are the ones that you would want to to leverage. Medium, not so much now. But certainly the top social medias, Crunchbase and various other bits and bobs are great for that. And then from there, getting a guest post on one of these bigger, higher profile news websites works a treat.

MICHAEL: And then do you go as far as building links to these profiles as well, like perhaps using like back in the day, SAIP or other types of, you know, high volume, high authority, cheap links to try and… You've got to.

CRAIG: And whether this is for reputation management or whether this is simply building a guest post to an affiliate website, Everyone in the industry still uses SAIP. It's now called SERPzilla, is the new branded name, because SAIP just sounds bad, if you ask me. But, yeah, you know, niche edits work very, very well. The same as automated link building, you know, building web 2.0s and a whole bunch of garbage like that. Do people do that to their guest posts? Yes, because you can't… that for me, you can build a guest post, which of course powers up a website, but you can't build a guest post to a guest post to power up a website because the cost becomes ridiculous. So that is where people will utilize blacker hat ways, such as SAIP, where you can get a link for, you know, 20 pence, whatever, you know, it's really that cheap, you know, to get a DR54, it's outrageously cheap. So again, Yes, these are hacked links, essentially, but who cares? It's cheap, and it's powering up a website. And that's where this stuff fits into the industry. I think it's where you utilize these tactics is how it works, basically. Because if you're competing with someone, and they're using SAIP, and they're using this, that, and the next thing, You just have to either accept defeat or join them. It's as far as I'm concerned, in competitive markets where there's potentially millions, if not hundreds of millions on the table, then you're going to have to resort to fighting fire with fire if you want to compete at the top end of the table. So yes, powering up guest posts is very much something that I would do. regardless of whether it was for reputation management or whether it was for any other form of link building activity.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Awesome. Yep. Totally hear what you're saying there. You know, if you were to believe Google, you could go into like a space like VPNs or something and just publish good content and expect to get some traffic in time if you did everything right. But in the real world, that's not happening. You know, you need to, like everything in SEO, you have to look at what the state of the SERPs are and what people are up to. give Google what it's already telling us it wants to see by the sites that are ranking well. So, yep, that all makes a lot of sense. And on that note, I guess at the moment, you know, the big thing, it's not really from what I've seen very big, but for a little brief moment there over the last couple of weeks, the helpful content update and this crackdown on AI was going to be the big thing that Google was up to. And now there's all these people building, you know, People also ask generated AI spun sites and making huge amounts of money off them. Do you have anything that you can sort of throw in the mix in that world when it comes to, you know, using AI or spinning up mass generated content on sites? And do you think Google's even capable of detecting this stuff properly?

CRAIG: I think we are capable of detecting it. However, you know, when they'd release things like the helpful content update, and people are all kicking off, you know, the Google's done another update. They have always been looking for helpful content. Your content is supposed to be helpful for the user. So, you know, it's again beggars belief that SEOs kick off, that Google are now looking for helpful content. It's not changed, you know, for years they've been looking for helpful content. Now, When it comes to AI content, I have tried time and time again. I'd love to push a button and for something to write my content and throw it out there and it ranks and sticks and all that. As far as I'm concerned, it doesn't stick. Now, some people will argue, oh yes, you know, look at mine, mine works. It's these guys that are getting slapped at every other update. You know, I've seen people doing it aggressively and then getting slapped into oblivion. Now, that doesn't mean I'm saying that AI assisted content doesn't work. So, just straight out the box AI content does not work as far as I'm concerned. Through my own testing, yes some of it will index, some of it will get slapped, it's just not good enough and Google can detect that. You can use a website like Hugging Face to check for AI content. There's tools out there that can tell you whether it's AI content. So can Google tell if a tool can tell? 100% they can. However, that doesn't mean that AI content doesn't have to be completely ignored. As I say, it can be used it can be paraphrased, it can be spun, whatever you want to do with it, it can be edited so that you're getting chunks of content using AI, but there's other parts of the process where it can then become completely unique. But I still think, one, you need a bit of human editing. And two, the best tool in the world that I have ever, ever bought is a tool called quillbot.com. It's not a spinner. It's a paraphraser. So if you use AI, so I've got, here's my process. I've got a tool called Writer, R-Y-T-R, that I got from AppSumo, which basically scrapes the top 10 search results for your keyword and gives you headers to use, headers and subheaders. So I will use that. I will then grab one of the headers or subheaders and I will run it through Jasper to pull a paragraph. So I'm putting all of this onto a document. I will then go to Quellbot and paraphrase the whole fucking lot of it. And then I will go into Grammarly, obviously sort out the grammar, and then check the plagiarism. And chances of that, after going through that whole process, or being plagiarized in any way. or triggering any of the AI content writers are slim to none. So it's a kind of four-step process for me that can work, but you would still need a human being to edit and tweak and do parts on it and, you know, add their little spin on it as well. It just does mean, though, that you can get scalability in terms of speed and stuff like that on content. The problem I think we've got in the world just now is you could go and hire a content writer from anywhere in the world, you don't know what you're getting thrown at you. Is it AI assisted? Is it all AI? It's bloody difficult. And these writers are clever enough to be able to make it pass these kind of plagiarism checkers or AI detectors and they're getting away with charging for shit content. That's why I still believe you need a human being to oversee it and tweak it and all that kind of stuff.

MICHAEL: Yeah, you see these people on Twitter and YouTube teaching people how to make money selling content on Fiverr just using AI tools. people think they're getting one thing and they're getting something totally different altogether. So again, it's like everything, quality control, and you've got to be on top of what's actually ending up on your site at the end of the day. Exactly. Well, look, Craig, this has been awesome. I could talk to you all day about this stuff, but you know, I'm conscious of time and keeping this sort of short and sweet. So I think I'll wrap things up, but I like to finish by asking the same three questions of everyone that comes on the show, just to see how they think about things. So I'll jump into them, they're pretty simple. The first one is, what do you think is the biggest myth in SEO?

CRAIG: The biggest myth? The biggest myth? The biggest myth, you've already said it actually, that writing good content will be rewarded by these kind of natural backlinks. That would work for someone like maybe Coca-Cola or something similar where people may link to something naturally because it's funny, witty, you know, whatever. The chances of that happening for a window tinting company in Sydney or a plumber or any other, you know, 99% of the niches that are out there are slim to none. So Google rewarding good content with natural backlinks is by far the worst thing. And I know that comment is not going to surprise you, but it has to be the biggest load of crap that I've ever heard from an SEO perspective.

MICHAEL: Totally agree with you on that one. Well, on the alternative end of the spectrum, what would you say is, I guess, the most underrated thing in SEO or like most effective thing that people aren't doing?

CRAIG: People are not doing, I can't see any one thing as such, because it would be an unfair answer, but I'll be honest, I audit a lot of websites. I speak to a lot of people who are struggling in the SEO industry. People come to me, Craig, can you have a look at this? Can you have a look at that? Can you audit my website? Whatever. People are just not doing the basics properly. Again, I'm not going to give you some magical tip because there is no magic bullet here. And I think for me, what people are looking for is some kind of magic trick to work. SEO is a combination of doing the basics properly and putting in a bit of hard work and effort, that is it. There is no magical trick that I know or special shop that I shop in to get better content or better links or whatever it might be. I think many people are just not doing the basics right and they don't understand the basics of SEO. Whether that be keyword research is also done 99% of the time very badly. topical clustering, page structure, internal linking, even, you know, doing basic link building is done so badly. It's unreal. And, you know, people are building citation after citation after citation to their website, and it's just not helpful. And citations, of course, will help your GMB and other bits and bobs. but I think just the basics of SEO are just still, you know, 20 years into the game, I still pinch myself at how basic, you know, this industry still is at this point. I'm not saying industry Leaders are people that are doing it. I'm just talking about purely from a customer perspective. Customers still have no clue. Businesses are still not doing great SEO. They're not spending enough money on it and just not doing the basics properly. So that is something I feel is not being done enough.

MICHAEL: Cool. Awesome. OK. Well, the last question relates to tools because As you've already mentioned on the show, a few different tools there in the SEO world. We love our tools. We love finding new tools. We love shiny new things in that sense. But if you had to pick three, three tools to get the job done, what's your go-to arsenal?

CRAIG: Quillbot.com is by far the first and best tool you will ever use in your life. That's the paraphrasing tool that I mentioned earlier. Second would have to be SEMrush, purely because I just think it's a multifunctional tool. You can do audit, keyword research, competitor analysis. So I have to have SEMrush, no matter what. Third tool that I would have to use, I'm only allowed three, right? No more. No more. The third tool would probably have to be… What one did I use the most? I'm not going to lie. I'm still going to stick with an old school tool in GSA. as the third, if that's all I'm allowed. Because with GSA, again, you've got link building automation. Is that something I still use on a regular basis? Yes. Why to power up links? Why GSA? Because you can scrape your own lists. You do not have to use inventory that's been used time and time again. So GSA would have to be the third tool, not because I think it moves the needle that much. I just think it's one of the most frequently used in terms of powering up links. You know, of course, I can go and buy guest posts. But I think, you know, just in terms of powering stuff up, I still think GSA gives me the freedom to do what I like, whereas maybe other tools tie into their own crappy inventory that every Tom, Dick and Harry is placing links on. So that would probably, GSA is probably the third one. It's not the best one, but I think a combination of those three, if that's all I had, and you were going to stick me in an island and I had to make some money, I think I could do some damage with three of them. Of course, there's a million other tools out there that I love, but those three are the ones, if my back's pushed against the wall, I'm taking those three with me.

MICHAEL: Awesome. Okay. Well, two there have not been mentioned before, so that's good. I think that will be interesting for people to check out. GSC is something I haven't looked at since like, poor, I'd say 2012 or so, 2013. I was playing around with like, you know, like XRumor and GSC and that sort of stuff back in the day. So, yeah. Very interesting that you're using it. We didn't get to talk about it today, but maybe we'll have to have you back in the future to talk about that whole world of automated link building. Definitely.

CRAIG: I'm always up for it. So, yeah, as I said, there's tons of other tools out there that are used, but listen, I was going to throw Scrapebox in as well. because you use that to scrape your lists and stuff. So some of the old school tools, the point I'm trying to make, still work very, very well in their specific role. But what I would like to highlight is please do not use GSA direct to your money, people. Do not get excited, because we all do. We love tools and all that stuff, but do not send this stuff to your own website.

MICHAEL: Absolutely, that goes for a lot of the stuff we've spoken about today, a big sort of red alert warning sign on it. We're talking about it, but we're not recommending you go do it. Unless you're doing it on your own site, not on anything that is super important or a client or anything like that. But yeah, look, it's been awesome chatting to you, Craig. I'm sure people are going to want to go check you out after this show. So where can people go to connect with you?

CRAIG: You can go to my website, CraigCampbellSEO.com. You can add me pretty much on any social media platform out there, whether that be Instagram, Facebook, Twitter. I'm even on TikTok if you want to see some bad dancing. And I do have a YouTube channel which has 800 plus video tutorials on all things SEO, right down to CTR manipulation, you know, the videos are pretty much microscopic in terms of all the different tricks, tools, and everything that you need to do. So they're all segmented into different playlists. So if you're looking for more educational content, the YouTube is the place to go. And I also do two live weekly Q&A sessions where you can hit me with any questions that you like. Although, They're normally on around about 5 p.m. UK time, which is probably like 2 or 3 a.m. your time, but you can watch the replays. They're all on there anyway.

MICHAEL: That's it. And the YouTube channel I Can Vouch has a lot of great content on it. So definitely check it out. And Craig, it's been great chatting. Thanks for coming on the show.

CRAIG: Thank you, Michael. Been a pleasure.

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