Whats Your Worst SEO Moment... SEO Spitball

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 am Michael Costin, and I am sitting almost directly opposite. What about now? Directly opposite Arthur Fabik. How are you going?

ARTHUR: I'm doing good. I'm doing very good. Yeah? I screwed up my microphone moving directly in front of you, but it seems to be all right now.

MICHAEL: So we're going to try a little something today. Arthur had a stroke of genius. Because I don't know if you know, we don't, we don't just come in this, Arthur had a stroke of genius. Yes. We don't just come in here and start talking. Often we sit here and talk about what we're going to talk about.

ARTHUR: Yeah.

MICHAEL: Among other things. Yeah. And like the stuff we, when we just talk about what we're going to talk about can sometimes be better than what we end up recording.

ARTHUR: Sometimes I feel that personally, because I think it's less scripted, more real.

MICHAEL: And I don't know, just more- We don't never script anything. Not scripted, but just not- There's no framework.

ARTHUR: Not as raw, you know what I mean? Yeah, not as like, we'll talk about, you know, specific issues and stuff like that, which sometimes I think could make a good podcast episode. And it struck, I was in the bathroom and I was thinking about frustrating SEO things that had happened over my career, like over the last however many years. And I thought, wouldn't it be interesting just to have a chat about, you know, stuff that we've done over the last 10 years where SEO might not have been, you know, it hasn't worked as well as we would have liked it to have worked or. SEO war stories. Yeah. Or like, you know, frustrating clients that you had to work on where you've, you feel like you've done everything you can, but you just didn't see the results that you expected and yeah. How you overcame it and just stuff like that. So.

MICHAEL: Without any prep. Without any prep. Just SEO spitball. I guess so. Well, we'll come up with a name. Yeah.

ARTHUR: I like that. Probably going to end up being that. Yeah. And we might not even air this because it might be absolute trash, but time will tell.

MICHAEL: Time will tell. If you like SEO spitball and what this episode becomes, if we release it, let us know. SEOshow.co. But, um, all right. So we're going to talk war stories. Well, if you were in there in the toilet thinking deeply about this, what was the first, what, what, what instigated this? What came to mind?

ARTHUR: I was thinking about, I guess, a client from the past where we basically, it felt like we've threw everything we could at it and we just weren't seeing the results that we would have liked to see. And having to deal with like certain bottlenecks and politics and things like that, where there was a lot of trust in their developer that they've been working with for a very, very long time. And we were thrown into the mix and it was just like an uphill battle trying to get stuff done. And I was just thinking how frustrating that was, doing everything we could to get it to work, but it just didn't work. I guess the challenges that come with SEO. We talk about all these cool tips and tricks and how to do this and niche navigators, but the reality is sometimes it can take a very long time to get the needle moving.

MICHAEL: The reality is we are relying on Google responding to the stuff we do, the same way that it tends to on other sites. But you never know 100% that it's going to. And that can be painful when you sort of do all the big stuff and then get down into the mid-tier stuff and then the low-ticket stuff and it's just not budging. And like, sometimes Google will do an update and a site will fly. Then it does another update, the site crashes. Then it does another update and the site flies again. And that's just Google changing its mind. So there's so many random variables going on.

ARTHUR: Well, that's why we always say like, keep calm just because there's been an algorithm update and your site has, you know, dropped off a little bit. you don't have to hit panic button straight away because chances are it's going to bounce back. You know, it could be a week, it could be a month, could be until the next update. I guess you probably don't want to wait that long before you start trying to fix it. But yeah, a lot of the time we find that sites that have been hit often bounce back. But yeah, I was just thinking, I guess in that scenario, one thing that was frustrating was working with a developer because they often feel like they know better. So you're basically in an arm wrestle trying to get something across the line and trying to fix something. I think in this scenario was page load speed, super slow time to interactive. a very complex way of getting stuff pushed out through like GitHub and like a repo and not being able just to do stuff in a live site. Typically we like to, you know, work in a dev, sorry, a staging environment, publish it live, but in this scenario we couldn't. So everything took like, it was like a marathon just to get like the smallest thing done. And it's just deflating sometimes because you want to do good for your client. You feel confident in what you know, like, sorry, let me reword that. You feel confident that your strategy is going to work, but sometimes you can't implement your strategy. That's what I'm trying to say.

MICHAEL: That happens in all sorts of different ways. Yes. Not just with developers, but like you can finish all this work and the client's putting it on the site and then they don't. Then they want their rankings, their results. Yeah. They're sort of being a hindrance to it.

ARTHUR: Yeah. So in this scenario, so let's fix this certain thing about the site speed. Oh, there's nothing wrong with it. That's fine. Then you're back and forth, back and forth. Client doesn't want to spend money to get it fixed. You feel pretty confident that this is a big part of the reason why your rankings aren't improving because the site's slow as shit. Like, what do you do? You're kind of caught between a rock and a hard place.

MICHAEL: So that's one of your bad, that's one of your down times in SEO.

ARTHUR: It's not the worst time. What's your worst? I know mine. My worst experience with SEO?

MICHAEL: Yeah.

ARTHUR: Well, I've never gotten a site penalized.

MICHAEL: So you need to. Not a client site, but you need to get a site penalized. Well, true.

ARTHUR: I'm just trying to think the worst. Well, do you mean worst experience with a site in terms of like performance or just worst? I'll tell you my very worst.

MICHAEL: Okay, you go first and I'll think about mine. Okay. I had, as you know, affiliate websites. Yes. And my affiliate websites used to promote VPNs. And my angle was, it was back before Netflix was ever in Australia. So I had a website that taught people how to get Netflix in Australia by using a VPN to pretend they're in America. They clicked on the link to sign up to a VPN. I made money whenever that happened. And when Netflix launched in Australia, They sent me a cease and desist. So I had my site. It was making good money every month. I think I'd even had quit working at the agency and was like starting local digital. So is that like you are not taking a salary, had a little baby at home. Like this is a, it's a big story here, like a story of struggle because Netflix, when they launched in Australia, sent me a cease and desist saying you can't use our brand in the domain name. So I had then Netflix something or other in the domain. At the same time, my site got manually blasted out of the search results by Google. So it's like Netflix and Google were in cahoots. They were in cahoots to take this poor little old battler in Australia and his Netflix site down. So overnight, website gone, traffic gone, Netflix threatening to sue me. That's a pretty bad day in SEO. Very bad.

ARTHUR: That is, that is sad. Is that because I know that you can flag stuff on Google or flag results. And if I'm pretty sure there is an option, if it's like breaching some sort of like copyright violations and stuff that they manually do review it. This, this happened.

MICHAEL: Bang. Like this was a long time ago too.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Well it was like 10 years ago. Right. Close to a bit less.

MICHAEL: Yeah. But, um, I got the letter from Netflix at the exact same time as the Google thing happened. Right. And the Google thing just happened. I don't remember even getting like a manual notification, but it was just gone. Not even indexed. The whole site.

ARTHUR: Gone.

MICHAEL: Right. So I was like, had a loss. Yeah. So then I just registered a new domain without Netflix in it. And it was teaching people how to get American Netflix. So you roll with the punches, move on, made a new site. It was much easier to rank back then. And all was OK in a couple of months. But that was a bad time. Bad time in SEO. I remember that.

ARTHUR: I remember that. I think you were still at the old place. Cause I was there. You, you were, I remember, but maybe, maybe you came in and you weren't happy and you had the letter with you. I'm pretty sure. Right. Maybe not the letter with you, but you were telling us about the letter.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Yeah. That's sad. That's a bad one.

ARTHUR: Yeah.

MICHAEL: I've had a few penalties in my time. Yeah. I had my first ever website. Not my first ever website, but my one that was making money. That was way back in the day. This one was called Men's Hairstyle Guide. It's actually still around.

ARTHUR: Someone bought it. So is Batchat.

MICHAEL: Yeah, we don't need to talk about that.

ARTHUR: For the hardcore fans that want to find Michael's very first website.

MICHAEL: No, don't do that. No more talking about that. I, um, yeah, I had a men's hairstyle website. I got penalized because when you're testing SEO on your own stuff, you just pump bad links, try random packages you find in black hat world, random stuff off Fiverr. You don't know any better when you're early on in your SEO adventures.

ARTHUR: Did you get good links from black hat world ever?

MICHAEL: Never. So never. I got links that worked. Like I got rankings on the back of it, but then they ultimately get

ARTHUR: Yeah. Yep. You get slapped. So never any sort of like long-term gain?

MICHAEL: No. Right. Because you go on Black Hat World and they name all their links like… Phantom Package.

ARTHUR: Phantom, yeah. It's got like ghouls and stuff all over it. Epic photoshopped artwork. Yeah.

MICHAEL: And like power up these links with like tier one blah, blah, blah, just junk, like trash.

ARTHUR: So like, who's buying these? People that just like burn and churn sites or? Yeah. Like, because if it doesn't work long-term, Yeah.

MICHAEL: Well, what's the strategy? Well, if you can rank briefly for some keywords, you can make massive bank or if you, if you publish like a parasite post on a strong domain and it starts to rank and then you pump some of this trashy links at it where that domain is so strong that it can absorb it. And they're sort of give it a short term boost if you're ranking for like best online casino or something.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Okay, it makes sense. Like you would never build them to like one of your money sites that you actually give a shit about.

MICHAEL: No, because I've done that to sites and they just get blasted.

ARTHUR: Do you reckon they'll get blasted now? Yep. Really? Yeah, I think so. Do you think blasted or just like they wouldn't value those links?

MICHAEL: Yeah, well, it's the same net result at the end of the day. Like if they were working, and then they get uncovered and just blasted, like devalued, but that's what was pairing your rankings, you lose all your rankings.

ARTHUR: Yeah. But what if it's, say, something you're ranking already, you're ranking well already, but you still want to get to position one. You buy these links, you build these links. Do you reckon once Google finds out it's going to penalize you, that you go below your benchmark, what you were before? Do you get what I'm trying to say? Yeah. Or do you just, are those links just devalued and you're just back to where you were without any sort of like, I guess, penalty or repercussion for being naughty?

MICHAEL: Well, this is one of those things that's spoken about all the time. Like, um, links are devalued now, bad links. You don't get penalized. Well, I think that's true, right? Well, maybe, but you need to test, we need to put our Kyle Roof hats on. Well, I guess we have, I have tested it. How have you tested it?

ARTHUR: God, I don't know if I can say.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Well, yeah. SEO spit balling doesn't mean giving away things you've got going on. So you don't have to, if you don't want to.

ARTHUR: So I, we did, I did it on a site. We did it on a site that was like a fresh domain and it didn't work because like you said, it pumped up the rankings. And then the second that like Google devalued them, the site wiped. So it definitely didn't work. And I feel because of the domain, the site should have still ranked a lot higher. Yep. than it did, and this was like completely white. So I feel like it was punished. Not just back to where it was, but punished.

MICHAEL: So- A lot of these core updates is when that stuff happens and they don't- They don't even tell you, right? They don't tell you. You don't know what's going on and it's like- You're enjoying this, aren't you? It's okay. I'm like moving my mic around. You're like leaning back. I need to have a cigar and like whiskey. We need sound effects. Yeah, it's good. Have you thought of your worst SEO moment?

ARTHUR: No, I got sucked into your story.

MICHAEL: What about at the old agency when a man got… You can't name him. Oh, you have to blur. No, a man got something penalized. Who was it?

ARTHUR: We got some client. A client. He got a client. We can't say who, but he got them penalized.

MICHAEL: But this was in 20, like early days of Penguin.

ARTHUR: We can't name the client.

MICHAEL: No, we can't name the client.

ARTHUR: Yeah.

MICHAEL: But that was a pretty bad moment in SEO.

ARTHUR: Well, that was a bad moment for someone that's working at an agency that's working on a client. Because it's one thing to get your site penalized, but for a paying client, that's just horrific. I can't imagine how much his heart sang to his stomach once he saw that manual action. And how long was he like? Months. Six months? Months. Every SEO update, I was still working on that manual action penalty.

MICHAEL: Yeah, disavowing, submitting requests, being rejected. That is bad.

ARTHUR: Yeah.

MICHAEL: That stuff just doesn't seem to happen so much anymore. Manual action.

ARTHUR: That's what I'm trying to say. Like there is no manual action penalties. There are. Well, not, well, there probably are, but not that we never get them because we're good.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Yes. We don't get clients penalized, but the manual actions used to be much more of a thing. They do them now like with the site reputation abuse update, which is basically just saying we're going after Parasite SEO. Remember Google made a big song and dance earlier in the year about it. And they said they were going to… I think he made an episode or a prediction or something about it. Well, cracking down on Parasite SEO has been my prediction the last couple of years. We've got to do our recap soon. So we'll see. We'll see if we did well with our predictions. Anyway, they made a big song and dance and told everyone with months notice that they're going to change things and go after Parasite SEO. And then it rolled around and all they did was a bunch of manual stuff, nothing algorithmic, because it seems like they're incapable of doing it algorithmically. And so then it's like, Yeah, but they were manual. Because then you'd wipe out legitimate sites and then it would be… But they wipe out legitimate sites with their helpful content update, you know.

ARTHUR: But didn't they selectively, yeah, but didn't they selectively choose sites to wipe out? Because wasn't it something to do with like a lot of revenue coming from AdSense and a lot of these sites have AdSense. So basically they didn't want to wipe it out. Potentially. I can't remember there was some sort of Not really conspiracy, but just some sort of like talk about it.

MICHAEL: Well, in this case, they wiped out like really bad coupon sites. We're just like programmatic coupon code pages and they got manually penalized, but there's heaps of parasite SEO things out there, but they used manual penalties because that was what we're talking about. Like manual penalties. You don't see them. It's so rare that you see them these days.

ARTHUR: Yeah. It's just funny to think like how much time and effort went into getting that penalty removed.

MICHAEL: Months. I can't even remember who the client was, but after this, we'll have a little look at them. I'm interested. Okay. Yes. Yes. He's just told me how it was.

ARTHUR: I'm going to look into it. Yeah. But I just remember it was probably six months of SEO meetings where he just came in deflated saying that's still working on it. And I'm just trying to think how many backlinks were there. And this all happened because he bought backlinks from a very once reputable backlink vendor that had a PBN from memory that was just wiped out.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Around Penguin. Yeah. It was all around Penguin. So to be fair to like the SEO strategy, it was stuff that had worked.

ARTHUR: Yes. For years.

MICHAEL: This is going back to more than 10 years. 2012. Yeah. And, um, that's the other thing those, those link vendors, those using when they want to make more profit, they just run the websites themselves and sell links for a huge markup as opposed to working with real sites.

SPEAKER_04: Mm.

MICHAEL: What's your worst? Come on, what's your worst?

ARTHUR: My worst? I really don't know. I really, I can't, I really don't know. Like, I don't, there's never been any scenario where something horrific has happened.

MICHAEL: Bad ones are when you get great results, good results. but then you lose clients.

ARTHUR: Yeah, that's a good one. That's what was coming to the top of my mind.

MICHAEL: They hurt you in the feelings.

ARTHUR: Where you feel like you've got a really good relationship with a client and you've helped their business grow and grow and grow for years. And then one day they decide to leave because they feel like they've reached a ceiling with you or something along those lines. We're talking about the same client, potentially.

MICHAEL: Oh, well, there's that, there's like, they feel like they've hit a ceiling. Some of them say, look, every two years I change people just because it's a good thing to do. Like there's all sorts of reasons that people have.

ARTHUR: Or sometimes when you try to give them ideas, like you need to do this, you know, you need to implement this or you need to add this to your site. No, it's too hard or too expensive. I just don't want to do it. Yeah. It's just like, do what you can within your like means now. But sometimes you need more, you know what I mean? And I think maybe the scenario I'm thinking of is just going in there, meeting consistently, presenting ideas, nothing implemented, just expectations of more. Yeah, improve things but don't change anything. Yeah. You can't add anything, like nothing can change, you just need to make it better. That's probably it. That's probably, that scenario, I'm not gonna name which client, is probably the one that was the most hurtful.

MICHAEL: Right. Your feelings. I think so. Makes you, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Well, true.

ARTHUR: In the world of SEO. Well, it did make us stronger, but I just think. You developed a thick skin. Yeah. That's probably it, I'd say.

MICHAEL: Well, you know, I reckon on that somber note, it's time for some reflection. We can wrap this episode up of SEO spitball. Spitball? Was that it? Yeah. Yeah. SEO spitball. Don't know if we'll do another one of these. Maybe we will. Maybe we won't.

ARTHUR: I don't know. You seem to enjoy it.

MICHAEL: I'll tell you one thing. We need a cigar or like some sort of whiskey, you know, the clinking ice, like the cool podcast. Well, next time you're here, we can do it. Done. Well, I know you've always wanted to do a podcast with drinks.

ARTHUR: I did. We did one in Thailand. A hundred plus episodes and we've never done one.

MICHAEL: No, we did one in Thailand. That doesn't count though. We were already drinking. We just had a drink.

ARTHUR: Yeah. But I mean like just a proper, like planned, let's sit down, let's talk SEO, let's have a drink.

MICHAEL: We'll have to bring in someone else for that.

ARTHUR: We can bring in someone from the SEO team.

MICHAEL: Maybe another SEO person we know.

ARTHUR: Or maybe we can bring in someone from a different channel.

MICHAEL: What about Dominic? A battle royale. Dom's never been on the show.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Maybe it's time. He loves SEO. I think he loves SEO more than he loves Google Ads. I reckon he'd be, I reckon once he puts the headphones on and he starts talking.

MICHAEL: It'd be his moment to shine. Yeah. Well, it's confirmed. We'll get that sorted for the next episode of SEO spit ball. I keep forgetting the name. If you liked that, if you hated it, let us know at the SEO show.co check us out on YouTube, pushing YouTube at the moment. We're at watch the SEO show over on YouTube. That's about it for now. So we hope you enjoyed that. And until next time. Happy spitballing. Happy SEOing.

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