SEO Is Not That Hard

Best of : Managing Risk and Building for the Long Term

• Edd Dawson • Season 1 • Episode 305

Share episode

Send us a text

Managing SEO risk isn't just about playing it safe—it's about building something that lasts. After two decades in the industry, I've watched countless "guaranteed" tactics rise and fall, leaving digital casualties in their wake.

The March 2024 Google core update highlights a fundamental truth: while both white hat and black hat tactics can work, understanding the associated risks is crucial. When my team at BroadbandCoUK lost 99% of our Google traffic after the Penguin update, we narrowly avoided collapse. Recovery took well over a year—a timeline that would bankrupt many businesses dependent on organic traffic.

Today's controversial tactics, particularly AI content generation without significant human oversight, mirror previous patterns. Google has signalled its intentions clearly, and with thousands of brilliant engineers working on detection, it's only a matter of time before automated penalties become more sophisticated. The short-term gains simply aren't worth the long-term vulnerability for those building lasting digital assets.

What many SEO influencers won't tell you is that black hat techniques create significant complications for future business opportunities. During the sale of BroadbandCoUK, I had to provide warranties about our past SEO practices—had we engaged in manipulative tactics, the entire transaction would have been jeopardized. This rarely discussed reality affects your ability to build genuine brand value or exit your business successfully.

Want to ensure your content strategy stands the test of time? Book a free demo at keywordspeopleuse.com/demo where I'll show you how to discover and answer the questions your audience is actually asking. Let's build something sustainable together that won't collapse with the next algorithm update.

SEO Is Not That Hard is hosted by Edd Dawson and brought to you by KeywordsPeopleUse.com

Help feed the algorithm and leave a review at ratethispodcast.com/seo

You can get your free copy of my 101 Quick SEO Tips at: https://seotips.edddawson.com/101-quick-seo-tips

To get a personal no-obligation demo of how KeywordsPeopleUse could help you boost your SEO and get a 7 day FREE trial of our Standard Plan book a demo with me now

See Edd's personal site at edddawson.com

Ask me a question and get on the show Click here to record a question

Find Edd on Linkedin, Bluesky & Twitter

Find KeywordsPeopleUse on Twitter @kwds_ppl_use

"Werq" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Speaker 1:

Hi, ed Dawson here, and, as I'm a bit busy at the moment and need a break, welcome to another one of my best of SEO is not that hard podcasts. These are the episodes from the back catalog that I think have the greatest hits and ones that are still relevant and provide great value for you. So, without further ado, let's get into the episode. Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of KeywordsPeopleUsecom, the place to find and organise the questions people ask online. I'm an SEO developer, affiliate marketer and entrepreneur. I've been building and monetising websites for over 20 years and I've bought and sold a few along the way. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. Hello, this is episode 90 of SEO is not that hard, and today I'm going to be talking about managing risk and building for the long term with SEO.

Speaker 1:

Now, the reason this is coming up is because, obviously, it's March 2024 Google core update that's running at the moment. We're actually just into April, so it's probably now the tail end of the update. It's been just about almost a month now. At the moment, we're actually just into April, so it's probably now the tail end of the update. It's been just about almost a month now. Google said it might take a month, might take a bit more so, but we should be seeing towards the end of it now and obviously there is lots of conflict, I would say, between the two sides of SEO, and those two sides are really people who play white hat and people who play black hat. Now, I don't want to take sides here, and I'm not taking sides because I don't think there's an issue with anybody doing whatever they want, as long as they understand the risks, and that's fine. We're all grown-ups. You understand the risks, you take your chances, you make your choices and then you live or die by that. The issue I have got is some people SEO influencers say who tell people their audience, tell their audience what the risks are of some of the tactics that they are proponents of. Now it's fine for someone to say I do this, I do black hat stuff and these are results I get, but the risks are it's against the terms of service. So if you get caught, this is what will happen, or the risk of what will happen, so that people they decide to follow their advice know what they're playing with. They know whether, how risky it is, what the likelihood of being caught is and what if they do get caught, what the results of being caught will be, and I just feel there's too many people out there who are pushing tactics that undoubtedly do work. I know they work, I'm not saying that they don't work but will they work forever? And it's probably a case of no, they won't.

Speaker 1:

If you've been around an seo long enough, you will remember things like link exchange pages and link wheels, which is where I mean. There were tactics that people used to use 15 years ago and they worked where you'd have literally have a link page on your site and you would link to other sites and you would agree to do reciprocal links, and you know these things worked. I can't remember if they ever. They were always against google's terms of service. They might not have been around in the early days, but google caught on to it and said this is against the terms of service. People carried on doing it and eventually google penalized all these links and things like penguin, and because it stopped working, everyone got hit. People stopped using it. So these tactics they come, they rise, google catches on to it, says don't do it anymore, then eventually starts penalizing people and not everybody comes back from these penalizations.

Speaker 1:

I had some very close calls myself back in the penguin and panda times, especially around penguin, where we were buying links. We were having all sorts of crappy links that we used to go for because we were building links from 2004 when you'd literally just any link anywhere would work, and that came back to bite us several years later and we got completely penalized. We lost 99% of our Google traffic and we could have gone under on broadbandcouk. Luckily we had some reserves of cash, we sat down, we got some good advice, we worked out how to fix it and we came back. But it took.

Speaker 1:

How long did it? I mean, I can't even remember now because I don't even have, because we sold broadbandcouk, I don't have access to the analytics anymore to go back and look and say how long it took to recover. But we're talking, you know, months and months and months and probably more than a year to fully recover it and that's a long time to go without your Google traffic. If you know you're a site like an affiliate site, like that or any site, even if you're an e-commerce site, if you lose all your traffic, you lose all your custom. How long can you survive for?

Speaker 1:

So that's why I have the issue that people who are pushing tactics now and like AI content and saying AI content works look here's all these examples of AI content still working. And yeah, it may still work at the moment, but Google's clearly sending a message that they don't want to index AI content and they've hit plenty of examples. And maybe those examples are just ones they are finding manually at the moment, but it doesn't mean that they're not going to be working on ways of automating it. If they aren't automating it already and they're a multi-billion-dollar company, if not trillion-dollar company, with thousands and thousands and thousands of incredibly talented engineers working on these problems they will solve them in the end. It's just inevitable.

Speaker 1:

So you can go with tactics that are short-term. And if you're going for a short-term tactic and you've got a short-term goal and you appreciate that at any moment you can lose that traffic and get your site penalized and lose sites, then fine. If you're doing churning bird and you know that's what you're doing and that's what some very talented black cats do and you know kudos to them. It's their business model and I don't knock it that's fine, but if you are someone who wants to build for the long term, then it's not a sustainable tactic because it only works for so long, and I'd much rather have a site that takes a long time to build up but will last for a long time and will pay off, and I can sleep at night knowing that that site has got a much greater chance of surviving than if I'm doing dodgy tactics.

Speaker 1:

Now. That's not to say that you can be completely clean and never get hit with anything because Google can change the goalposts, the helpful content update. I think there are plenty of people out there who are claiming to be clean and I've seen no examples of them not being clean, but Google has decided they're working on a different metric now, and that's fine. They can do that. It's their sandpit. They're, you know we have to play by their rules. We can not like playing by their rules and we can. You know, not saying it's fair, but it's just a fact of life. You can either get wound up about it or you can get on with it.

Speaker 1:

So what I'm really trying to say is that I think if you are trying to sell or recommend or teach someone a service where you know you're going to gain from it, it, then if there is risk around it, I think you need to be honest with what that risk around it is, with your clients or the people you're trying to influence. I mean, if you buy a packet of cigarettes, it comes with a warning. You know they. I mean I'm an ex-smoker, so I, you know, I understand the act of smoking is quite pleasurable, so I, you know, I understand the act of smoking is quite pleasurable, but in the long term they kill you, right, and they come with that warning. And I think it's the same with a lot of SEO tactics that some people, proponents of you know they can work in the short term, but in the long term you're probably going to get hit.

Speaker 1:

If you are on the other side of it and you're learning SEO or any kind of SEO, I think you need to familiarize yourselves with the actual Google's terms of service, their recommendations, the things they say they do and don't want to see. Familiarize yourselves with the um rater guidelines. Just understand the things that Google does and doesn't like. And if you are doing anything that Google doesn't like or suggests you don't do or says, these are the things that we will actively aim to penalize. Appreciate that risk when you do something. If you decide to do it, that's fine, that's up to you. I don't knock people for doing that, but just be sure that you understand the risk and you factor that into what the your long-term plan is. So if you're doing churn and burn sites and you're completely happy with that, then great, great, knock yourself out.

Speaker 1:

You know I don't sit there and moralize and say you shouldn't do this and you're polluting the serps, I don't mind, you know you do what you want. Anything I would say don't do. Don't do anything illegal, don't hack sites, don't do anything actually breaks the law, okay. But other than that, fair game as far as I'm concerned, as long as you understand the risks you are putting yourself under and if you're giving people advice to do the same things, just make sure to tell them what those risks are so they can understand, point them in the direction so they can educate themselves. But don't go around telling people things are white hat when they're not. Don't go around telling people there's no risk when there is risk. That is where you're crossing a moral boundary, I think, really, because you know. If you're making decisions for yourself with full awareness, that's fine. But if you're telling other people that you know that something is fine, then that's dodgy. I mean, if you saw someone going around talking to your kids and saying, here, smoking's fine, it's good for you, it's not going to hurt you, there's no risk to smoking, you'd be upset because you know they're putting something on people without making them aware of the risks. Okay, so I think this is an important thing with SEO is that people need to understand those risks.

Speaker 1:

And when it comes to the long term, you know I can't think of a single example of pure black cat that has lasted for, you know, 20 years. You know they may have churn and burn, they may repeat things over and over again, but they have to change the tactics all the time. Very few things work long, long, long term. You know sites get caught, moved on. No one builds a brand on black cat. I can't, I can't think of a single example of a brand that's been built on black cat people. I don't know if they can sell sites which are black cat for for significant sums.

Speaker 1:

When we sold broadband credit uk, I had to sign documents about all the tactics we'd used over the years and I had to completely cover the fact of what we'd done. That happened at the time of penguin. And I had to completely cover the fact of what we'd done. That happened at the time of penguin and I had to warranty that we hadn't bought any links and we hadn't done certain things, otherwise our sale never would have gone through and that would have cost us a huge amount of money.

Speaker 1:

So, black cat, can you build long term? Can you build a brand? Can you build something you can exit from? With Black Cat, it's very difficult, very difficult, because obviously, if someone's going to buy something off you, they are not going to want to buy something that could potentially be penalized to death the next day. So that's why, if you're in it for the long term, you're trying to build something, an asset, that can look after you and pay you for a long time and also is something you can sell and cash out at the end. Then you know you've got to manage risk well and understand what you're doing. So yeah, that's just my little rant today. Um, so I just hope it gives people something to think about when they're deciding who to listen to and what tactics to try and what their long-term strategy is going to be.

Speaker 1:

Before I go, I just wanted to let you know that if you'd like a personal demo of our tools at Keywords People Use that you can book a free, no obligation one-on-one video call with me where I show you how we can help you level up your content by finding and answering the questions your audience actually have. You can also ask me any SEO questions you have. You just need to go to keywordspeopleusecom slash demo where you can pick a time and date that suits you for us to catch up Once again. That's keywordspeopleusecom slash demo and you can also find that link in the show notes of today's episode. Hope to chat with you soon. Thanks for being a listener. I really appreciate it. Please subscribe and share. It really helps.

Speaker 1:

Seo is not that hard. It's brought to you by KeywordsPeopleUsecom, the place to find and organize the questions people ask online. See why thousands of people use us every day. Try it today for free at KeywordsPeopleUsecom To get an instant hit of more SEO tips. Then find the link to download a free copy of my 101 quick seo tips in the show notes of today's episode. If you want to get in touch, have any questions, I'd love to hear from you. I'm at channel 5. On twitter you can email me at podcast at keywords people usecom. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of seo. Is not that hard?

People on this episode

Head Shot

Edd Dawson

Host