17 CRAZY SEO Tactics Working Right Now (How These Brands DOMINATE Google)

Here is a brief summary of the key points from the transcript: - Nextdoor is using AI to generate local business profile pages and gaining a lot of search traffic. However, the pages are quite thin and may get penalized in the future. - Catster acquired two niche sites, redirected them, and moved all the content over to their own site. This is an example of effective 301 redirects when done properly. - Programmatic SEO from tools that automatically generate pages with tools and calculators is working well for sites like Payscale and Wise. - Niche down sites like prompting.guide can rank well against bigger authority sites by being hyper-focused. - AP News is hosting 3rd party content on subdomains, an example of parasite SEO and site reputation abuse. - Many content sites are seeing declines in organic traffic, so affiliate sites are risky now. - Traffic diversification beyond Google is key - social, email lists, paid ads. - Unique web design can help with branding, dwell time, etc. - Focus on high quality evergreen content resistant to churn, not viral hits. - Quora and Reddit are ranking well for product reviews, but may get clamped down on. - The travel niche is challenged with Google's own travel section. - Big brands do things like consolidate to www that are risky for small sites.

Hello, ladies and gentlemen. Today we're going to be going over 17 tactics that large brands are using to completely dominate Google search results right now. And there's a lot of crazy stuff here, so be sure to watch to the end because I'm going to be going really in depth on how to do these kind of tactics yourself, how to really practically apply them. There's also just some really strange stuff in here that's good to be aware of that these brands are doing. All right, let's get into it. So I'm Chris Jejus and you may know me from my link building agency over at Serlingsalot Co. Or our other YouTube channel or Facebook group. Or maybe you've seen me around at some SEO conferences or on some podcasts, but you can go to my website for more info on me. And what I'm going to be doing is going over this article by Glenn Alsop over on detail. Glen's awesome, highly recommend reading his articles whenever they come out. It's got a bunch of useful information, but I'm going to be going a lot more in depth in this and really being as practical as possible, showing you some stuff in ahrefs and showing you the exact tactics and how they're working. So if you like this kind of content, go ahead and give the video a, like, give my channel a sub and let me know. Number one on the list is we have Nextdoor's AI generated pages hitting record search traffic numbers. He didn't search the exact URL for this, but I went ahead and I found it took a little while and they're actually using this on a subdomain, which is us dot next comm. You can see they've grown to almost a million traffic on this subdomain now. And you can see what they're doing is they're using AI to create a ton of pages for businesses as well as locations. So let's go ahead and open up some of these. So you can see these pages are quite simple. They have the name of the business. They've got a little map up here, some information about the business. They include an our story section here, and then some similar businesses and nearby neighborhoods. So really they say AI content, but this feels a lot like programmatic SEO to me. See here, this one has a little more information on it, but they all look pretty much the same. All these pages are what you would consider very thin content and it looks like these businesses can maybe claim their profile on here to fill out more information. Maybe they just do this first, and then the business can apply and put in like their description and more info about the business. So this is probably what they look like when they're fresh, which is what you consider pretty thin content, right? So remember, yes, this is on a subdomain. It's not on the root domain, and subdomains are treated separately from the root domain. So their normal domain actually has more traffic than this. This subdomain has about 4 million indexed pages on Google right now, which is pretty insane. And yeah, like I showed you, not really a typical AI pages, right. But if I had to guess, I would say they're probably doing it on the subdomain just to try to keep themselves a little safe just in case Google decides to clap the site. Because a lot of these pages are really thin and it looks like they're kind of doing a bit of an experiment here. Right. So if Google decided to penalize them or they got hit by a helpful content update or whatever, then their root domain would not be affected by this. So yeah, not exactly what we think of when we think about AI content, but this is an example of AI content doing quite well. Some things to keep in mind if you're going to use Aih AI content yourself, is that big sites versus small sites. You know, small sites tend to have a lot more trouble with this. Big sites can get away with breaking a lot more rules when they have that strong backlink authority like we see over here. This subdomain has a doctor of 90, which is insanely high. Another thing to keep in mind if you're using AI content is monetization methods. It seems for monetized with affiliates or ads, and there's a lot higher chance that you get hit. Nextdoor, of course, is not an affiliate or an ads based site. They have their own business model. It's also important to note that when you're adding a content, if you're adding some kind of value, then, you know, it's a lot different than if you're just regurgitating like these AI articles that are just these walls of text, right? So, you know, yeah, these pages, a lot of them are very thin, but they actually provide some kind of like value that other websites just don't have. For number two, we have some examples of 301 redirects working very well. So let's go ahead and check that out. So the site that's doing this is called catster.com dot. We can go ahead and pull that up in Ahrefs as well. Looks like they have a doctor 74 and you can see their traffic just really took off. Right. And is doing quite well, even though it is fading a little bit. But they are doing very well. Over a million traffic right now. And, yeah, just happened very quickly. Right. Which is kind of what happens when you do 301 redirects. So they acquired and redirected two domains which were excited cats and the conscious cat. You may have seen me talking about this with 301 redux before, but they did something kind of interesting, which is they built these acquisition pages here on their website. So they're saying excited cats is now a part of Catster, and they're talking about how they acquired this business and what to expect and what's going on with the content and all that. And then here's the same thing over here with the conscious cat. If you don't know a 301 redirect is when you get a domain and you basically point the entire domain at the new domain. So all of the backlinks from the old domain are going to the new domain. And as we know, Backlink authority is just insanely important for ranking on Google and can just help you just dominate everyone. You can see when we try to visit these websites, it's just going to redirect us to those acquisition pages. So here are the two acquisition pages that we just got redirected to, but they did not just redirect the entire domain and all the backlinks just to those acquisition pages on the website. They actually redirected the homepage to the acquisition pages. And then they went page by page and moved all of the content from the old sites onto the new site and just redirected every single URL to the new URL. So let me go ahead and show you what I mean by that. So we'll do a site search and search for conscious cat.net. we'll see a bunch of their old pages here that are still indexed, and then we'll go ahead and just open up some of these for you guys to look at. So of course, we were clicking on links for consciouscat.net. dot. The first one was pancreatis in cats. Then when we open up over here, we're on Catster and it's the same article, pancreatis on cats. Here's the next one. Lymphoma in cats. Here's the next one. Can cats have asthma? And this one and this one. So a lot of people, when they do 301 redirects, they'll just redirect the entire domain over, or maybe only redirect a few pages and the rest will go to the home page. But this is an example of very, very natural 301 redirects, right? Because they're just redirecting the homepage to the acquisition page, not to the Catster homepage. And then every single article has been moved over onto the main site and it's getting its own 301 redirect. So with the acquisition pages and with 301 ing every single URL over like this, this is pretty much the most natural way you can do 301 redirects. And it looks like it's working out quite well for them. So if you wanted to do this, of course, first you need to buy a domain or domains. I would just start with one. Don't go fast. I'll try to do a bunch at one time. Try to find something as niche relevant to you as possible, as close as possible. Like in these cases, they're literally moving all of the content from the old site to the new site. So you'd have to be comfortable with putting all the content from the old site onto your new site. You don't necessarily have to do this with 301 redirects, but yeah, we're just talking about this very natural way to do them right now. Like I said before, try one at a time. Don't go crazy. Be patient. Give it some time to work. 301 directs can be kind of finicky. Next up for number three, we have some examples of programmatic SEO being alive and very well. You can see this company raised about $3.8 million to help companies generate these programmatic SEO strategies. The first site we'll check out is called payscale.com. and you can see they're doing a bunch of like, calculators, cost of living calculators, job salary comparisons, things like that. Here's an example of one of those pages here just gives you a bunch of information about the salary bonus, total pay, and you can use a tool to add in your location how many years in the field you have and try to find out how much you can get paid in that city. So of course, these pages were not created manually. They are created programmatically, automatically. But they are very useful. Right? Creating tools like this can be a great way to generate additional organic traffic because people like using these free tools. Another programmatic SEO success story that people are talking about a lot right now is wise.com. over here you can see their traffic is almost, what is that, 60 million right now? And coming into their top pages, you can see pretty much all of their top pages really where they're getting all of their traffic are from these different currency converters. So let's go ahead and open up a couple of those for you. It's really the same kind of idea, right? It's a page with pretty thin content, but a very useful tool on it. Scrolling down from the tool, we also have some additional information, some more information. So these pages are definitely a little bit more fleshed out than some of the ones on the other website. Right. But still the other website was very useful as well. Just kind of different here. Of course, being able to do something like this takes a little bit of know how, so you would need to partner with a developer and know how to do this stuff yourself. But essentially what you're doing is creating an automation template and then each of these pages is created automatically based on the automation template. It's just pulling in different data. So for this page, for example, the code is all the same from all of their other currency conversion pages. It's just bringing in data for Mexico and the US on this one. The history graph here from the specific currencies and so on. If you want to learn more about programmatic SEO, I recommend following this dude over here on Twitter. Ian Nuttall, good guy, posts a bunch of good content and yeah, seems highly educated on this topic. Next up, we have an example of a small niche down website working very well, which if you aren't aware, just means instead of your website being a very big general website about like tech or computers or whatever, just drilling in and making a much smaller, a much smaller focus, and you have a higher chance of ranking when you do that because Google sees your website as more specific for those exact things. So in this example, the website that he brings up is called Monday movie mystery. They just talk about these movies being shown on Monday. It's a mystery. You don't know what it's gonna be. You pay $5 and you get to see the movie. I don't think that's exactly the best example. So I wanted to show you guys another example here. If you Google chat GPT prompt guide, we'll see here on page one are extremely high authority websites ranking Coursera Doctor 91 Medium Dr. 94 OpenAI of course, Dr. 92. Then you have this website here, prompting guide. You see this website is just completely about chat GBT prompting. This one of course only has a Doctor 73 which is much lower than these other ones that are Doctor nineties. Right? Then scrolling down again, we get back to these really high authority sites. Doctor 91, Doctor 92, you can see this lower authority site has managed to sneak in here with a lower doctor just by being more specific to the search query. The one downside to this, of course, is that you can't really expand a lot from there. You're confining yourself. So this website is just about prompting. They can't really expand to other things, like other tech related things or maybe other AI software and stuff like that. They're going to have to stick to just prompting, but can be highly beneficial to helping you rank, especially as things get more competitive. And Google really prefers this high backlink authority. Next up for number five, we have an example of parasite SEO working very well for a very established website, a very credible website. And that is, of course apnews.com, which might be like the most trustworthy news website that there is a. And what they've started doing is hosting third party content on their website, meaning content that is not written by them, that is just generating additional SEO traffic and trying to make additional money. I would say this is a little ballsy from them considering Google rolled out this site reputation abuse update here, where they're trying to actually target this stuff and penalize these subdirectories or subdomains or just entire websites if they're doing this kind of thing, because they're essentially writing about content that they don't have any business in writing about just to manipulate SEO and make additional money. So here we're going to do a search for AP byliness. You can see they have a couple different sections here. They have AP byline, personal finance, and an AP byline shopping. Let's go ahead and open up the finance. One even says here right at the top line, it says AP Bylines content is created independently of the Associated Press newsroom. So they're telling you straight up, we didn't write this content. Someone else is writing this content, putting on our website. We have a partnership with them and we're all making money. Right? Let's go ahead and pop this into Ahrefs. And you can see they're doing quite well right now, up to about 320,000 traffic. And yeah, just look at this stuff. The best American Express credit cards in 2024 CIT Bank Review 2024 best credit cards for instant approval in July 2024 average car loan interest rates by credit score. I mean, this is stuff you'd see on an average affiliate website, right? But this is the Associated Press, so they're getting away with it and you're not because they have massive backlink authority and maybe they just haven't been penalized from Google yet. I would say it's smart of them because they are putting this on a subdirectory. So Google, if they did penalize it, they would probably just slap down that subdirectory instead of the entire domain, which is very good. And how you can do this same strategy is basically approaching websites with a high authority and trying to negotiate a partnership with them, saying, hey, I want to write content on your website, we'll put it in a subdirectory and let's say any money that's made out of this subdirectory with affiliate links and these articles in it, we'll just split it 50 50 or whatever you negotiate. And the other thing you could do is just old fashioned parasite SEO, which is definitely being cracked down on as well. I feel like partnerships are a little bit safer, especially if you don't tell them you're doing a partnership. Be a lot harder to detect. Yeah, apnews. Just telling you straight up, we're doing a partnership here and this is just, you know, blatant site reputation abuse. If you want more information on doing partnerships or this parasite SEO kind of stuff, you go to Jackie Cho's channel over here. He talks about it a lot, maybe not so much these days, but you can definitely find some videos in there about how to do this. Next up for number six, we have 209 of the 522 content sites we track had a decline in traffic in the past two months. So definitely not a good time for content sites. Content sites are of course, websites that are monetized with ads or affiliate content. A lot of these websites, of course, just being wiped off of Google, losing all of the traffic. Not going to go super in depth in this one because I feel like this has been covered pretty extensively by me on my own channel as well as others. But in general, that's just smart to not be monetized with affiliate ads right now, having a content site and being monetized in other ways, for example, e commerce, SaaS service, local SEO rank and rent, all these other things are a lot safer way to make money with SEO right now than having these traditional content sites. Next up for number twelve, we are going to be talking about traffic diversification. Traffic diversification, of course, is when you're getting traffic from things other. Other than just Google. A lot of big brands are starting to do this if they weren't already. Site he was talking about is called Puck news over here. You can see it looks like a pretty interesting site actually. And here's one of their articles here. But the interesting thing is first, if we pull it up in Ahrefs, you will see that they're actually not getting that much traffic from Google. Looks like they're only about 25,000 traffic from Google right now. But when you go over to similar web and type them in, we'll see a very different story. And you can see they're estimating about half a million monthly traffic here. Like I talked about in this video on my channel a little while back, traffic diversification is just an insanely smart thing to do, and it's something I've been doing for a while now because you never know what's going to happen with these Google updates. So if you really have a business that you care about, you're going to want to do this at some point. You don't want to have all your eggs in one basket. And of course you can do that by branching out to social media and driving people to your website from social media. Which social media you use will depend on what your website is like, what your audience is. It could be Facebook or Instagram, Pinterest, whatever. Next up, you can create videos and drive them to your website from your YouTube channel. Next up, you can create an email list, and in your email list you then drive them back to your website. So you're getting traffic from something other than Google because you're driving them from that list. And lastly, we got paid ads. Of course, a lot of people are pivoting to paid ads instead of SEO right now just because it's seen as a safer bet. You put money in, you're going to get traffic pretty much immediately. So you can see these guys at puck. We're doing 10 million plus in revenue with just 33,000 monthly visitors from Google. So yes, SEO is good, but other stuff is pretty good as well. And it's good to have this well rounded approach to your marketing. Next up, we have Vox talking about their shift towards more paid newsletters, which as we were just talking about, it's a very smart thing to do. As far as traffic diversification, some other benefits are you own your audience. Basically, it doesn't matter if you get hit by an algorithm update, because you have this email list and you can message them anytime you want. You can sell in your email, so you can say, oh, click here to buy this with an affiliate link if you wanted to, or if you have some other kind of service or offer you could provide in the email themselves, or you could drive them back to your website. And this is also showing Google that you're getting traffic somewhere other than just search. Right. They're going to see all of this traffic coming in from links that are not from their search, showing them that you have more of a brand presence, that you are more trustworthy than someone just trying to game SEO. Of course, to get people to sign up for your newsletter, you will need to offer them something. You don't have to do a paid newsletter, but for a paid newsletter you would have to offer some pretty compelling information pretty often. Pretty regularly. Or you could just get them to join your email list by offering them some kind of free value. For example, on we offer them a full 50 page case study for their name and their email. Not really the same thing, but yeah, it's an email list kind of operates in the same thing. It's just they're paying for a monthly subscription versus you're getting something free to sign up and then they don't have to pay anything. But then you could continue to sell to them and drive them back to your website with other offers. Next up, we have this website, Sharewood, which has a kind of unique website design who is made by Robinhood. Robinhood. If you're into investing, you probably know who Robinhood is. So you can see here on Sharewood news, they definitely have a little bit of a unique thing going on. It does not look like a normal website you would land on. Go ahead and click on one of these articles. You can see the article here. Doesn't look like too crazy, but yeah, just kind of a strange design, right? Kind of grabs your eyes. You realize it's something different. It's not the same thing as everything else that you're clicking on and just gets you a little bit more interested in reading what they've got going on because they just have this kind of cool design going on. So what I have written here is that people are tired of being overly marketed to. Fresh takes can be nice for branding and returning users, page dwell time, etcetera. Focusing on user experience. Because as we learned on the Google leaks, they are paying more attention to clicks and user experience than we thought before. So just trying to stand out can definitely be a good thing to help try to improve that. For number 20, we have a lot of people, you know, being very negative in the industry right now. A lot of people saying SEO or it's dead or whatever, but then we have Wall Street Journal saying that SEO is pretty much better than ever right now. I have this quote here. When I started back in 2015, social media was the big thing, some publishers were even cut their SEO teams at the time so they could hire more social media folks. But as we've been hit by different changes to platforms like Facebook and X, I think SEO has really found its feet again. Just keep in mind, you know, just like Google, Facebook and X have their own algorithms as well. And lately they've been trying to keep people on their platforms and not send them to your website. So, you know, every way of getting traffic has its own problems. What makes SEO so valuable to publishers that we are really focused on engaged, interested audiences. We're not going for viral hits. We don't want random clicks from somebody who fell upon the story. It really means doubling down on that high quality content that is resistant to being combined. So the big tip here is with SEO, if you go after the super high quality content approach, things that people genuinely love, then you can get insanely targeted traffic and insanely good traffic that's ready to complete whatever the goal is that you want them to do on your website. Right? So is SEO dead? Absolutely not. But there might have to be a little bit of a shift on focus on our parts towards trying to create this high quality content, a unique experience and really trying to get people engaged with us and our brands and our content. So yeah, focusing on quality could be a very good idea for the future of your website and your business. For number 23, we have a pretty interesting one, which is this website, chegg.com comma. And they use AI. So basically people can ask questions and then the AI answers them, but then it indexes and publishes this onto a webpage on their site. So yeah, it's like they're creating free content by people asking questions. Here we are on chegg.com and actually you have to pay to see the answers. But we'll go ahead and try to find one of the pages real quick. Go ahead and do a site search. Then in lore, let's go to Ahrefs and look them up real quick. Top pages. So here's an example page here. Question which of the following correctly describes Nims, a static system used or. Okay, so yeah, I don't understand what's going on here, but it's a kind of scientific question or a math question or something you can see scrolling down here. You have to subscribe to see the answer. But anyway, it's cool because, yeah, you just ask a question and then they automatically create a page on the website for this question and it's indexed. So if people are searching for this question, this could come up in Google search so they could drive people to their website, try to get them to sign up for their business, but also just creating all this free content on their website. Right. So again, not super easy to implement, but you can consider doing something like this where you hook AI up to your website, let people ask questions and then have it automatically create these pages on your website from those questions. Cool way to get free content and kind of like UGC as well. I will say though, that I'm not sure how good of a user experience a lot of these pages have since they're blocked out and people can't see the answers. So I wonder how long this will last for that they're ranking for really well, even though it's kind of like paywalled. Right. Next up, we have some data on how well Reddit and Quora are searching for traditionally affiliate keywords. Right now. The Quora is now one of the top ranking product review domains on the Internet and unsurprisingly, it's being abused. Here are the most prominent sites across ten best product search results. Here are some great ideas for you of places that you can put content on the Internet instead of your own website because your own website might get penalized just because you're monetized with affiliate links, right. Reddit number one, you could definitely get on there. Amazon, you'd actually have to set up a store on. Then you have Quora. You can make posts on Quora or answer questions on Quora. YouTube, you can make videos there as well. And the rest of these ones you don't really have access to. Of course, Reddit is doing very well right now. About 600 million traffic and Quora doing also very well. About 240 million traffic actually didn't know they were doing so well. But this kind of stuff could be a little bit of a short term play, right? Because how long is Google going to allow Reddit and Quora to rank for all of this stuff? Especially as people get better at gaming it, their user experience is going to go down because everything is going to get, quote, seoed. Everything is going to be like spammed affiliate links and stuff like that. People aren't going to trust it as much. So I don't know how long this stuff is going to last for, but for now you could use Reddit and Quora especially to try to get some affiliate cash or to drive traffic to your website. And then of course, YouTube as well. But YouTube's a little bit of a different game because to do well on YouTube, you actually have to create good content that people like, but could be a better long term approach. Right, next up we have the travel niche being a little bit of trouble. Of course, Google has its own subfolder, google.com travel. It's no surprise that Google's own subfolder for travel is ranking pretty well right now. About 8 million traffic. I wonder why. It looks like in general some big travel publishers are upset and I think they're even pursuing legal action, saying Google has become a less relevant and less appealing marketing channel for us. They continue to operate pretty much how they have in terms of looking for new ways to monetize and push SEO traffic down. So yeah, remember, Google is a business. They are trying to make money here. And just be aware if you're in the travel niche, you might want to kind of do some keyword research, search around and see how much traffic is actually available to you and it's not being dominated by Google itself. Next up, we have another example of what I would consider site reputation abuse. Of course, you all know Rolling Stone.com. they are a music website, but now they have opened.com culture rs gaming, which is a gaming subfolder on their site. Gaming doesn't really have much to do with music here, but they are starting to post content on their website and they are getting traffic from it quite quickly. So would I recommend you do something like this? Probably not. The thing about Rolling Stone is their authority is so high they can get away with this kind of thing. For the small guy, you know, if your website's all about one thing and you create another subfolder and you go into something completely different, it could end up confusing Google. So I'd actually stay away from this one. We'll see how this one plays out, really. And last up, we've got three things that are pretty interesting to me. We have this website or group of websites. It's owned by a kind of a larger company and they redirect all of their websites to the www version instead of just no www. So for this one they're doing thetakeout.com to www.thetakeout.com. that might be a small thing to focus on, but it's not a typical move. And it's not a typical move because it's kind of risky, right? You're doing this kind of big redirect and you just don't want to confuse Google by moving like all of your URL's around. Like this search traffic is higher than when the acquisition occurred, but their chart is so volatile. And third party tools that it's hard to make accurate conclusions, but all of their websites use WW. Not really sure why they're doing this, but it's kind of something that's just interesting and that it's good to pay attention to. Right? Why is this very large company, whenever they do an acquisition and buy a website, why do they always redirect it to www? So not telling you to do this yourself, you'll probably just end up creating problems, but definitely something to pay attention to. Number 34, no subdomains. So we have the UK's the Telegraph, which they took a bunch of domains and put them on subdomains on their website. They've decided to reverse this and not do it anymore. So for this one, theenglishgarden co dot UK comma. They moved it over to the Englishgarden, the Telegraph Co. Dot UK comma. But then they moved it back because it wasn't working out too well. They didn't get all the traffic back, so I'm not really sure why they wanted to do that in the first place. But yeah, not really good to just move around sites like this. And also, I'm just really not a fan of subdomains in general. The last up on our list, we have a bunch of domains that are moving away from their dot code extension to.com. why are they doing this? I'm not really sure. Maybe there's trying to appeal to more people in the world and not just the UK, but it's very interesting to note that you've got all of these huge websites essentially doing the same thing. So should you do the same thing? I think it would kind of depend on who you're trying to target. If you're just targeting the UK, I think I would sit tight and not worry about it. This is another one of those things. I'm not really telling you to do anything. I'm not saying this is a good tactic, but it's definitely something to pay attention to for now. See, that's about it for now. It took me a long time to dig around and do all this stuff, so let me know if you like it. Go ahead and like the video and give my channel a sub if you're enjoying this kind of content. And you can also go over here and read Glenn's full article. But yeah, I really tried to go a lot more in depth on the exact tactics they're using. You know, actually looking stuff up in ahgraphs and just try to give you guys a much more detailed point of view of what's going on here, so hopefully that helps. Give my channel a sub, and I'll see you next time. Bye.