9 Lies SEO’s Are Still Telling Themselves
Joshua McCoy is our company COO and our all-around developer and web guru. Read more on the About page.
Did you hear about this story yet?
Chances are, if you’ve made any kind of rounds on the internet, you already have.
After years of being a massively successful link builder who made upwards of $50,000 each month by spamming Google, marketer Jeff Deutsch realized that he was building homes on the dark side of the moon.
I started out in SEO around 2010, and although many marketers around me did, I never followed suit and went the black hat way. I stayed white hat and inbound marketing friendly ever since I started out (which is why my role at our content agency, Express Writers, fits me perfectly). Yet, I know enough of the “dark” realms to have major respect for someone like Jeff telling his past as a black hat this transparently.
The iconic image below was all too perfect for the crazy tale that subsequently fetched 150,000 views and over 94,000 shares alone on Facebook.
He didn’t quit black hat SEO because the income wasn’t good or the lifestyle pleasant (quite the opposite, as Jeff details).
It was because the SEO model he had created was impossible to maintain in the face of increased awareness about link builders and aggressive Google programs like Panda and Penguin.
In Deutsch’s powerful confession piece, “Confessions of a Google Spammer,” the author chronicles his rise and subsequent downfall as a black hat link-builder. He transparently allows readers see the ugly truth of how the life of a professional, black hat SEO can quickly spiral out of control, becoming a merciless and often empty money-machine that leaves the spammer devoid of real skills or knowledge of white hat tactics.
When his link-building business begins to fail, Deutsch becomes anxious and addicted and realizes that he is ill suited to survive in the post-de-indexing world.
After a hellish 18 months, he finally realizes that to be truly white hat, he needs to cross over into the world of inbound marketing and high-quality content instead of continuing to run on the “anxiety-inducing treadmill of using black hat SEO to get traffic.”
Although this story may seem anecdotal, it is more than just a come-to-SEO-Jesus moment.
9 Lies SEO Marketers Like To Tell Themselves (And Stay Comforted In Their Sleep)
This story is a perfect example of how SEO’s often tell themselves things that involve the following nine lies, which lead not only to their personal downfalls, but also to the mucking-up of the entire SEO industry.
1) My latest hack will fall below Google’s radar yet again
Although there are loopholes in every system, Google is a particularly good one and with developments in de-indexing as well as programs like Panda and Penguin, it’s highly unlikely that a hack will evade Google’s radar for long.
What’s more, once Google catches on, there is a solid chance that the hacker is in for a rapid de-escalation of lifestyle like the one Detusch experienced after his $100,000 per month business was lost to de-indexing.
2) Those tiered links won’t get figured out anytime soon
Since tiered link building is a decidedly black hat technique and search engines are on a mission to destroy black hat techniques, it’s a safe bet that tiered links won’t work the way SEO’s want them to.
Google’s algorithm relies on at least 200 ranking factors arranged in order of their impact on total rank with contextual links being the crème de la crème of the linking world. Not only does tiered linking not work but it is likely to be found out due to the fact that a large number of low-quality links throws out a huge number of negative metrics, which acts as a footprint for Google’s spam filters, which are now built specifically to obliterate spam-filled tiered links.
3) My pyramid linking scheme still works
Pyramid linking is a risky business and since it is so intrinsically reliant upon wobbly pillars like tiered links and ongoing hacks, it is liable to crumble and, when it does, the SEO is in deep trouble.
Once again, one needs only to turn to Deutsch’s article for an example of this. After the Authority Link Network began to crumble, Deutsch found himself in the position of watching his clients loose their clients and so on and so forth. Although a pyramid seems like it might touch the sky, there is no way for the top to stay intact when the bottom begins to crumble.
4) I can post crappy content that a $5 Fiverr gig author wrote
Content is king, as it turns out, and there’s really no way to get around this fact. Nowadays, crappy content sticks out like a sore thumb and Google doesn’t appreciate spammers who add millions of words of spam to its index.
As a result, there have been several updates to the system that are designed specifically to target cheap, spammy content. With increasing focus on high-quality content and strong, white-hat links, it’s gotten harder and harder for crappy content to rise through the ranks.
5) I still think I can succeed with .gov links
Links are an important topic to white- and black-hat SEO’s alike but the essential difference lies in the type of link being used. Links can either help or hurt SEO or simply be ignored altogether by search engines. .Gov links happen to fall into the latter camp.
White certain types of .gov links can be beneficial to SEO ranking, they do not often rank as high as other types of links. The reason for this is that, historically, black hat SEO’s have used .gov and .edu links to lend false authority to their spammy content and, like it always does, Google caught on.
6) My article spinner isn’t broken
Simply put, article spinning is poor form for any SEO and, as search engines continue to evolve, the use of article spinning software continues to become a worse idea. One of the main reasons for this is that article spinners produce amazingly awful content, often resulting in unreadable or garbled articles that negatively affect SEO ranking.
As article spinning became more and more popular, Google responded by creating Panda, a software that is designed specifically to de-index sites that feature low-quality content and spun articles so, in addition to being ill advised and unethical, there’s a solid chance that today’s spun articles won’t even get past Google’s spam filters.
7) ScrapeBox is still my BFF
Although ScrapeBox can very occasionally be helpful in legitimate link building, it is primarily a spam services that allows black hat SEO’s to scrape links, mine Wordpress, leave keyword-laden anchor text comments on blogs and drive traffic to low-quality money sites.
Like many other black hat SEO techniques, Google and other search engines are on the lookout for ScrapeBox spam tactics and as the digital world continues to evolve, it is becoming more and more likely that ScrapeBox content will not make it through spam filters.
8) I don’t need to conform to all of Google’s latest changes
Yes, you do. Google’s latest changes have been instated for the sole purpose of raising the content bar and ensuring that the links, websites and pages that show up in search results are high-quality and authoritative. Failing to adhere to these changes means that your content will consistently rank low or be flagged as spam.
9) MozBar’s DA is the greatest authority metric there is
While MozBar’s DA can be a helpful authority metric, it is by no means the golden standard. A great example of this truth is the fact that Moz’s last index accidentally included 24 billion Chinese spam domains, which served to artificially inflate DA rakings across the board.
Although Moz is a company that certainly attempts to do its best to provide a reputable DA source to writers and SEO, DA scales with spam and Moz, like many other software platforms, is not immune to spam.
Throughout the course of digital history, many SEO’s have been tempted to cross over to the dark side. By telling themselves lies about why and how they spam as well as who is truly benefiting or suffering at the hands of the spam, black hat SEO’s have managed to get by for a number of years, contributing crappy content to Google’s indexes and mucking up the waters for the white hat SEO’s among us.
Fortunately, those days are slowly coming to an end. As Detusch’s article points out, black hat SEO techniques and the lies that go along with them are ultimately not sustainable and, in this current “content is king” era, they are being obliterated by enhanced search engines and spam filters on a daily basis. The Internet has spoken and the cries for high-quality content, inbound linking strategies and authoritative domain links have been heard, loud and clear.
Because of this, we’ve reached an era in which SEO lies no longer hold up under the pressure of the actual market and black hat SEO’s will ultimately find that, in order to build a successful business model, the focus needs to be on content and ethical linking practices.
Fortunately, the SEO community gets a bit closer to this reality every day and internet users, writers, SEO’s and content marketers will soon be able to reside in an internet world that is (largely) free of content spam and the SEO lies that fuel it.
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