Managing Risk and Building for the Long Term

I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge , hints and tips I've built up over the years 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 .

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 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 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 who seo influencers say , who tell people their audience don't 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 the 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 how risky it is , what the likelihood of being caught is and , 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 .

If you've been around an SEO long enough , you will remember things like link exchange pages and link wheels , which is where 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 .

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 penalized .

We lost 99 of our google traffic and you know we could have gone under on broadband at code uk . 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 how long did I mean ? I can't remember now because I don't even have , because we sold robin at kuk .

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 you're , if you're an e-commerce site , if you lose all your traffic , you lose all your custom . You know how long can you survive for ?

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 yet 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 are .

If they aren't automating it already and you know they're a multi-billion dollar company , if not trillion dollar company , with thousands and thousands of incredibly talented engineers working on these problems they they will solve them in the end . It's just inevitable .

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 . 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 . You know we have to play by their rules . We can not in 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 .

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 , 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 , 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 .

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 want to see .

Familiarise yourselves with the 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 penalise . Appreciate that risk when you do something .

If you decide to do it , that's fine , that's up to you and 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 .

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 this and you're polluting the SERPs , I don't mind , you know you do what you want . The only thing I would say don't do . Don't do anything illegal .

Don't hack sites , don't do anything that 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 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 are 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 what you know that something is fine , then that's dodgy .

I mean , if you , 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 you , 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 . And when it comes to the long term , you know I that I 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 . We've done . 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 . When we sold broadband code 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 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 . So , black Hat , 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 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 , 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 .

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