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10 Websites That Tried to Fool Google (And Failed)

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10 Websites That Tried to Fool Google (And Failed)

SEOs have been trying to outsmart Google for as long as it has existed. Sometimes, they win; other times, their attempts fail.

Here are 10 extraordinary examples of websites that failed to fool Google. 

Overview of Conch House, via Ahrefs' Site Explorer
At its peak, on August 19, 2022, Ahrefs reported that Conch House received an estimated 6.7M organic traffic.

Key stats 

  • 2,794,551 keywords ranking, August 2022
  • 255,527 pages, August 2022
  • Estimated traffic: 3.6M, August 2022

Conch House is a review site that ranked for over 250,000 “best+[product]” keywords and acquired 14,000 number #1 rankings. 

This huge rise in organic traffic meant the website became notorious in certain SEO circles.

Value of pages, via Ahrefs' Site Explorer

We can see there is some serious money at play here, and this didn’t go unnoticed on SEO Twitter.

How did it fool Google?

It used an authoritative expired domain and created content targeting “best +[product]” keywords. 

It also used dynamically created pricing tables on its landing pages to encourage visitors to click through to Amazon and maximize its income. If a user bought a product, it would earn an affiliate commission.

Shockingly, for a few months, this setup was good enough to fool Google.

Let’s take a closer look at what happened.

Content

There was speculation that the site used AI to create its content, but it might have been much simpler than that. 

It might have used concatenation to stitch sentences together and insert product titles to slightly differentiate each post.

Take a look at some of its posts:

Content built at scale, via CH blog

From the website, you can see several stock phrases it used to build content at scale quickly. 

Examples:

  • Are you looking for the most reliable and efficient [product title]?”
  • If so, congratulations!”
  • What is the importance of [product title] to you?”
  • The service we provide will save you time from reading thousands of reviews.”

It also used dynamic pricing tables like the one below to supplement the content.

AAWP pricing table

If we jump into the code, we can see this is a popular table plugin called AAWP.

AAWP pricing table, via inspector

This plugin allowed the site owners to: 

  • Create best-selling product lists at scale for all of their posts dynamically.
  • Geo-target multiple locations.
  • Get automatic updates of product information via Amazon’s Product Advertising API. 

Links 

I mentioned earlier that this site used an expired domain—let’s look at it.

Let’s go to the Top pages report in Site Explorer:

View on Archive.org, via Ahrefs' Site Explorer
  • Click on the downward facing caret ▼ next to the homepage URL 
  • Click View on Archive.org

We can see the site’s history:

Wayback internet archive, via Wayback Machine

Surprisingly, the domain has a continuous history back to 1996, one of the things the new owners might have been interested in. With history also came links and a degree of trust from Google.

Conch House Marina Resort 1996, via Wayback Machine
How the website appeared in 1996. 

Sidenote.

Having a continuous history this far back in the Wayback Machine is not that common. Most domain names and websites have changed digital hands many times. (1996 was two years before Google was released—making this website older than Google.)

How did it fail?

The site got serious traction for about three months. But then the traffic suddenly plummeted, and the domain was auctioned off.

The site has had three significant dips in organic traffic in its lifespan:

In a further twist, Glen Gabe, who was following the site, tweeted that he believed it was not impacted by the HCU.

What do you think happened?

Did it really fail to fool Google?

In terms of organic traffic, it’s much lower than it was previously, with no hope of returning to those previous levels. 

However, you could argue that the site owners successfully exploited a gap in Google’s algorithm at the right time to make money. If that was their only objective, then they achieved it.

Overview of Find This Best, via Ahrefs' Site Explorer
On August 27, 2022, Ahrefs reported that Find This Best received an estimated 1,951,727 organic traffic at its peak.

Key stats

  • 2,794,551 keywords ranking, August 2022
  • 255,527 pages, August 2022
  • Estimated organic traffic: 3.6M, August 2022

Just going by its homepage, this is a website that, in all honesty, doesn’t look that bad. 

Find This Best homepage

But this website may remind you not to judge a book by its cover.

How did it fool Google?

This site scraped content word for word from Amazon product listings and targeted “best +[product]” queries. It also likely used some dodgy-looking high Domain Rating (DR) links to try and fool Google. 

Let’s take a closer look at what happened.

Content

When it came to great content, this site didn’t disappoint. Somehow, Google didn’t seem to pick up on this site, but it didn’t go unnoticed by SEOs on Twitter.

Let’s look at the site.

Looking at one of the highest traffic pages from the Top pages report in August, we see the formatting of the page looks like an Amazon product page.

FTB product page
High-traffic product page on the site.

Let’s see how it compares.

If we copy and paste part of the product description into Google, it immediately brings up the equivalent Amazon product page for the same product in the search results. 

Amazon product page
Equivalent Amazon product page.

If I paste the content from the Amazon product listing and the equivalent from this website into Diffchecker, we can see that the two files are identical.

Comparing the text, via Diffchecker

Using Ahrefs, we can get an idea of how many of these types of pages exist. 

Let’s go into Site Explorer’s Top pages report and add a URL filter containing “best-” to filter for any “best-” keywords. 

Ahrefs' Top pages report

We can see that this site was targeting ~77,809 “best” keywords at its peak.

If we add a “Position” filter to filter out only the number #1 ranking positions, we can see that this site had ~4,583 number #1 ranking pages at its peak.

This is what it looks like in Ahrefs’ Top pages report.

Top pages report filtered by position and URL, via Ahrefs' Site Explorer

Using this level of low-quality scraped content, it was able to reach huge levels of traffic, even in 2022—albeit briefly.

Links

Let’s plug this site into the Wayback Machine to see its history.

FTB history, via Wayback Machine

As it’s a relatively new domain from 2020, we can probably assume to get these traffic levels, it’ll need some high DR links. 

We can look at the domains by going to the Referring domains report in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer. We can see that this site has some dubious-looking high DR URLs pointing to it. 

Referring domains report, via Ahrefs' Site Explorer

Here’s an example of an unconventional-looking DR 81 site.

DR 81 website

We can see the link if we open the inspector and search for the domain name. 

DR 81 website with inspector

How did it fail?

The site had two sharp drops—one in mid-June and the other steeper one in September. 

The organic traffic drop rebounds slightly in early 2023, potentially suggesting that this is not a manual penalty. 

FTB's Performance chart, via Ahrefs' Site Explorer

It’s impossible to confirm what exactly happened here. But based on the timing of the second drop, we can speculate that this site was hit at least by the HCU. 

What do you think happened?

Did it really fail to fool Google?

For the most part, yes. But judging by the most recent organic traffic graph, the site appears to be trying to resuscitate itself.

Overview of For Noob, via Ahrefs' Site Explorer
At its peak, on March 15, 2022, Ahrefs reported that For Noob received an estimated 1,706,557 organic traffic.

Key stats 

  • 604,926 keywords, March 2022 
  • 82,611 pages, March 2022
  • Total traffic: 1.3M, March 2022

This next site is a basic-looking blog loaded with lots of display ads.

Can you spot the content?

For Noob homepage

The site had quite a good run compared to other sites mentioned here but experienced a slow death for almost a year.

How did it fool Google?

One of the problems this site may have had (apart from its low-quality content) is the sharp increase in unnatural-looking links.

Let’s take a closer look at what happened.

Content

The website describes itself as: “The place to answer many questions in life, study, and work.” If we head to the About page, we don’t get much more information—just four lines of content surrounded by ads. 

Not a good start.

For Noob's About page

The content appears to be a mix of People Also Ask (PAA) spam, forum comments, lists, and reviews. Most pages are no longer live. But if we look at the Wayback Machine, we can see how it used to look.

For Noob pages, via Wayback Machine

If we look at one of the articles, we see it isn’t helpful or high-quality content.

For Noob low-quality content, via Wayback Machine

This content could have been scraped from a forum or somewhere like Quora.

And here’s another example:

For Noob low-quality content, via Wayback Machine

These examples indicate that the content standard, on the whole, is very low.

Links

Looking at the Referring Domains report, we can see some potentially dubious-looking links. 

For Noob's Referring domains report, via Ahrefs' Site Explorer

The same DR 81 site we saw linking to our second site also links to this website.

DR 81 site, via Ahrefs' Site Explorer

At least two other sites in this list also seem suspicious. We will come back to these later.

How did it fail?

If we go back to Overview 2.0 and switch to the “Referring domains” graph, we can see a significant increase in referring domains in December. This looks suspicious to me.

Referring domains and organic traffic graph, via Ahrefs' Site Explorer

The huge spike is probably a red flag for Google’s algorithm.

As soon as the sharp increase in the graph starts to fall, we see a much more dramatic plunge in organic traffic. 

Performance report organic traffic drop, via Ahrefs' Site Explorer

These updates appear to have killed the site completely, and now the organic traffic is flat-lining.

Did it really fail to fool Google?

Yes. Undoubtedly.

Bike Hike overview, via Ahrefs' Site Explorer
At its peak, on May 1, 2022, Ahrefs reported that Bike Hike received an estimated 1.3M organic traffic.

Key stats 

  • 4,047,559 keywords, April 2022 
  • 523,455 pages, April 2022 
  • Total traffic: 1.3M, April 2022

When you come across a website called Bike Hike, you’ll probably assume that it has something to do with bikes, cycling, or even hiking. 

However, in this case—you’d be mistaken. 

At its organic traffic peak, this site’s top keyword was “slurp fish.” Make of that what you will.

And here’s a Twitter reaction to the site:

Tweet on website

How did it fool Google?

This site used an expired domain and created People Also Ask (PAA) spam content. It also 301 redirected several expired domains with high DR to its domain. 

Let’s take a closer look at what happened.

Content

Let’s start by going to the Organic keywords report in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and see what terms this site was ranking for at its peak.

Organic keywords report, via Ahrefs' Site Explorer

Looking at the URL column, we can see that this is probably a People Also Ask (PAA) spam site—as all ranking keywords appear to target these low Keyword Difficulty (KD) and unrelated PAA questions. 

Let’s go further and filter the domains to include only those in position #1.

Organic keywords report filtered for domains in position #1, via Ahrefs' Site Explorer

We can see that many PAA-style keywords held the top spot in Google in April 2022, near this site’s peak. 

It’s safe to say that none of these landing pages are on a consistent topic. And it seems they were designed to exploit Google’s algorithm.

Looking at one of the pages, we can see that the content is never longer than four lines and is followed by a heading.

Potential no context scraped content

Once we put a few lines of this content into Google search, we can see this content is likely scraped from multiple websites.

Scraped content check, via Google.com

Looking through some of the other top-performing pages, we can also find they follow the same content format. I believe this site scraped PAA questions and answers from multiple websites for content and turned them into articles.

Links

When it comes to links, one of the tactics used was to 301 redirect expired domains with bbc.co.uk (DR 93) links to its website. 

We can see this in Ahrefs using the Backlinks report and adding a “Referring page domain” filter: bbc.co.uk.

High DR BBC domains redirected to Bike Hike, via Ahrefs' Site Explorer

Looking at the Anchor and target URL column, we can see that the ultimate destination for all these links is Bike Hike. This looks like an unnatural and unlikely pattern. 

Adding to this, the site was built on an expired domain. We can see this using the Wayback Machine.

Bike Hike history, via Wayback Machine

The site doesn’t have a continuous history, and the most recent owners likely bought the site in 2021.

Let’s go back in time and see what it used to look like.

Bike Hike homepage, via Wayback Machine

Bike Hike 2018 looks like it had something to do with cycling. From what I can see, it used to be a legitimate site. So it seems that the recent owners of the domain revived it to exploit this site’s past authority and links.

How did it fail?

The sharp fall of this site’s organic traffic graph looks like a site hit with a manual action

Sidenote.

The only way to confirm if there is a manual action is to check the site’s Google Search Console. As we don’t have access to this, we can only speculate that this happened based on the sharp drop in the organic traffic graph.

What do you think happened?

Did it really fail to fool Google?

Yes. (Once a site receives a manual action, it’s usually game over.)

Overview of Asia Work, via Ahrefs' Site Explorer
At its peak, on March 29, 2022, Ahrefs reported that Asia Work received an estimated 720K organic traffic.

Key stats 

  • 1,397 keywords, March 2022
  • 957 pages, March 2022
  • Total traffic: 664.6K, March 2022

From the domain name alone, it feels like this site could be a legitimate business. But as you’ll see, when we look at the content and the links on the site, it becomes clear that this website has changed from its original intended purpose. 

How did it fool Google?

There are examples of paid link placements on the blog, and it looks like the site is trying to rank for betting login pages. 

When it comes to links, there are also a few suspicious ones there. When it comes to content, it appears to not be the best either.

So what happened?

Content

Let’s start by looking at the history of this domain through the Wayback Machine.

Asia Work history, via Wayback Machine

The history of this website looks continuous back to 2008–2009, but the domain expired around August 17, 2019.

Domain expiration, via Wayback Machine

This is how the site used to look in 2009. Even though the design is old-fashioned, it still looks much more legitimate than the present site.

Asia Work homepage 2009, via Wayback Machine

We can see the difference if we compare that with the current site version.

Asia Work homepage 2022, via Wayback Machine

Even though the images aren’t rendered properly, we can see how the text content has changed for the worse. 

With the focus of the content changing to topics like “casino,” “gambling,” and “loans,” this immediately looks like a red flag. 

Let’s take a closer look at some of the articles on the site to see what we can find.

Potential paid link example

Selling links is against Google’s terms of service. But the above is an example of a link that was probably paid for, with no attempt to hide it.

Here’s another example—this time for a different type of service.

Potential paid link example

You can see the pattern that is emerging. 

It turns out that almost every article in the blog has a single exact-match keyword anchor text link within a body of text, which leads me to believe that links were likely being sold here.

The final nail in the coffin is the website categories—when you see dating, loan, and casino in the same category as SEO, you know that it’s likely links were sold here.

List of categories

If we turn our attention to the Top pages report in Site Explorer, we can see that one of the primary purposes of the site was to rank for login pages of betting and cockfighting sites.

Asia Work's Top pages report, via Ahrefs' Site Explorer

This shows the website’s intent and doesn’t look like a typical website’s top pages.

Links

As we have seen above, the site is an expired domain that has been revived, so it has gained a decent amount of links and authority in that period.

If we look at the Referring domains report, we can see the type of high DR links that this site once had.

Referring domains report, via Ahrefs' Site Explorer

Here’s an example of a directory link (DR 72) from a website called the Link Centre. 

Example of a DR 72 directory link

Here’s another example of a DR 72 website with a non-related link to our website on the profile page.

DR 72 link with non-related link

With two university links in the top Referring domains report, you wonder whether these were compromised sites as well.

How did it fail?

Taking a look at Overview 2.0, we can see that there were two critical Google updates in this period. 

Close-up of Performance graph, via Ahrefs' Site Explorer
  • The first is the Product Reviews Update, which occurred on March 23, 2022. The second is the May 2022 Core Update. Although there isn’t an exact correlation here, these updates could have impacted the site.
  • As I suspect they were selling paid links, this could have been another factor. But the gradual fall of the organic traffic chart doesn’t align with the typical look of a manual penalty.

What do you think happened?

Did it really fail to fool Google?

The website didn’t reach the heights of some of our other sites mentioned here, but it did manage to fool Google for around a month. 

The site hasn’t been resurrected since, so it’s fair to say that it didn’t fool Google.

Fmsppl overview, via Ahrefs' Site Explorer
At its peak, on August 22, 2022, Ahrefs reported that Fmsppl received an estimated 63,880 organic traffic.

Key stats 

  • 33,679 keywords, August 2022
  • 26,844 pages, August 2022 
  • Total traffic: 59.1K, August 2022

This next website was created by someone who hated vowels in their domain names. 

The main idea behind the site seems to have been to create a database-driven site targeting “people named [insert name]” searches.

If we add an “Include” filter into Keywords Explorer, we can see a lot of low-competition searches for this type of query, almost 22,000. This is probably why they decided to create a site around this particular topic.

Include filter for "people named," via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

How did it fool Google?

One of the problems with this site is that most of the content was scraped, and it had several dodgy high DR links pointing to it that didn’t look natural.

Let’s take a closer look at what happened.

Content

If we go to the Top pages report on August 19, we can see that the top page is “People named Dick.”

Top pages report, via Ahrefs' Site Explorer

Let’s look at what this page looks like on the site.

Famous people named Dick

You can see there isn’t that much information here, and most of the content is ads.

Even when we scroll down the page, we can see that it’s a list of people with some key facts about them and nothing more.

Dick Cheney profile

I’ve decided to click on the profile of the number #1 Dick—Dick Cheney.

Pasting the text of his detailed profile in Google brings up a match for Wikipedia.

Quick copy check in Google search, via Google.com

Checking a few other profiles on the site using this method also brings up Wikipedia, so it seems reasonable to conclude that this site was scraping at least some of its content directly from Wikipedia.

Returning to the homepage, you can see the general strategy of the site is quite basic. This is what the site owners did for country selectors:

Country selectors homepage

And when it came to birth years, they did something similar.

Famous people by birth years

Overall, the content standard is low, and we see a lot of scraped content on this site.

Links

Looking at the Wayback Machine, we can see this is a relatively new site that was started around 2021.

Fmsppl history, via Wayback Machine

We can assume that it needs some powerful links to get this site off the ground. 

There are several suspicious high DR links linking to this site. 

To look at them, we can jump into the Referring domains report. I’ve chosen to take a quick look at the DR 82 link, but there are many examples of high DR links with spammy content here.

DR 82 link in Referring domains report, via Ahrefs' Site Explorer

Here’s an example of a DR 82 website linking to this website, and this is what one of the links looks like.

DR 82 link
“OK, Google, is this great content?”

We have just scratched the surface here, but it’s likely that this is not an isolated case. It’s probably fair to say that this looks like a website designed to exploit search engines rather than inform people.

How did it fail?

The website appears to have been hit by two Google updates. With neither the content nor the links being that great, I can’t say I am surprised. 

I believe that this site was hit by the following:

Sidenote.

Even after the October Spam Update appears to have crushed the site, it seems there was an attempt to build more links to the site.

Fmsppl organic traffic and referring domains details, via Ahrefs' Site Explorer

What do you think happened?

Did it really fail to fool Google?

Yes. I imagine this site’s traffic will be flat-lining shortly.

YT5S overview, via Ahrefs' Site Explorer
On October 21, 2021, Ahrefs reported that YT5S received an estimated 20,018,059 organic traffic at its peak.

Key stats 

  • 22,852 keywords, October 2021
  • 195 pages, October 2021
  • Total traffic: 8.3M, October 2021

This website allows users to download YouTube videos by simply entering a URL and then hitting the download button—you can see why this type of website would be popular.

How did it fool Google?

The website used an interesting tactic to stay at the top of the search results and try to fool Google repeatedly. 

Let’s take a closer look at what happened.

Content

The murky world of YouTube download sites is often filled with ads, surveys, and random floating buttons. 

YT5S is, by contrast, a fairly minimal site, which may be how it became popular early on.

YT5S homepage

When it comes to content for a YouTube download site, there usually isn’t much on the page—this site doesn’t have a blog, for example. 

So its main focus is on content to assist people in downloading YouTube videos. Ahrefs’ SEO Toolbar shows us it has just 818 words on the page. Not a lot. 

YT5S content, via Ahrefs' SEO Toolbar

If we look at its Site structure report, we can see that there are many subfolders with numbers at the end. 

Site structure; subfolders list, via Ahrefs' Site Explorer

Clicking on the en variations often results in pages that are 301 redirected to the latest version. 

As this is such a competitive industry, certain subdomains will get penalized for various reasons. When a subdomain loses traffic, it will be redirected to a new number subfolder. 

We see a pattern emerging if we overlap the organic traffic charts for each subfolder.

Average organic traffic of YT5S subdomains
The above shows the diminishing success rate of redirects to different subfolders over time.

The site’s owners appear to be 301 redirecting the entire website to a new subfolder once the old subfolder has lost traffic.

This site is not alone in this tactic. Looking at the Position history in Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer, we can see that some of the other websites in this category have cottoned on to this strategy and are doing a similar thing, judging by some of the names of the subfolders.

Position history, via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

Links

With a site on this topic, it will be shared widely and linked to naturally. Most of the links appear to be relatively natural.

How did it fail?

The cut-throat nature of this SERP means that it’s highly competitive. The site owners thought they had found a way to get around the loss in traffic by redirecting the website into a new subfolder. It worked for a while. But over time, the impact diminished.

Did it really fail to fool Google?

Yes, for now. But this method will continue being used to try and fool Google in the short term.

Board Games Tips overview, via Ahrefs' Site Explorer
At its peak, on January 16, 2022, Ahrefs reported that Board Game Tips received an estimated 3,934,996 organic traffic.

Key stats

  • 6,347,025 keywords
  • 698,643 pages 
  • Total traffic: 3.8M 

In case you were wondering, this site didn’t have much to do with board game tips. 

Despite this, it reached 3.9 million organic traffic during its peak through low-quality content and some dubious-looking high DR links.

How did it fool Google?

It seems to have taken PAA scraping to the extreme, sometimes veering way off topic in the process on some of the posts. 

From my research, it also had some suspicious-looking links from some unlikely sources.

Let’s take a closer look at what happened.

Content

Using the Top pages report, we can look at some of the articles.

Let’s highlight a section of the “Organic traffic” graph to select the top pages between two dates.

Board Game Tips's Top pages report, via Ahrefs' Site Explorer

Let’s click through to the Wayback Machine again and take a look at one of the URLs. (I’ve picked a random URL with Wayback history.)

Board Game Tips's table of contents, via Wayback Machine

Even from the table of contents, we can see that this is PAA spam. The subheadings wildly switch from deploying parachutes to shotguns, tasers, and guns.

Scrolling down the page further, we get the familiar three or four lines of text followed by a heading.

PAA-style content, via Wayback Machine

If we paste the content into Google, we can understand whether it’s scraped.

Pasting the content into Google to see if it is copied, via Google.com

It looks to me like this answer came from this site.

Turning to Twitter, we can see that we are not the only people to have discovered this.

We can conclude then that the content standard for this site is again incredibly low. But it was enough to fool Google at one point.

Links

There is a horror show of links from this site.

Our old friend, Grid Server (DR 82), is linking to the site again.

DR 82 link in Referring domains report, via Ahrefs' Site Explorer

Here’s another reference to a broken link to this DR 81 domain, which you may remember from earlier on.

Board Games Tips's Referring domains report, via Ahrefs' Site Explorer

Finally, here’s a dubious-looking link from an unlikely source—Swansea University (UK) (DR74). It’s one of the domains we saw also linking to our third website.

DR 74 link, via Swansea University

Should these other academic sites be concerned?

.ac. domains filtered, via Ahrefs' Site Explorer
Referring domains filtered for domain name containing “.ac.”

How did it fail?

This site has it all—bad links and scraped content. As the organic traffic drop doesn’t tie in with any specific Google algorithm updates, the website may have received a manual penalty.

What do you think happened?

Did it really fail to fool Google?

Yes. The site owners tried to 301 redirect their old domain to a new domain. Looking at the new domain in Overview 2.0, we see that the new website worked for a while and likely got hit again by a few other updates.

Your Games Tips overview, via Ahrefs' Site Explorer
Answer To All overview, via Ahrefs' Site Explorer
At its peak, on March 13, 2022, Ahrefs reported that Answers To All received an estimated 2,214,447 organic traffic.

Key stats 

  • 4,046,226 keywords, April 2022
  • 911,725 pages, April 2022
  • Total traffic: 1.9M, April 2022

This next website only lasted for a few months, but it did fairly well considering the standard of content and the type of links it had. 

How did it fool Google?

As the name suggests, this was a low-quality PAA spam site. It also had some dubious links pointing to it. When the site tanked, the site owners tried to 301 redirect it to a new name, but that site also had issues.

Let’s take a closer look at what happened.

Content

You can probably guess what type of content this will be with a name like this. Let’s look at one of the pages to see how bad it is.

Answers To All content, via Wayback Machine

We’ve seen quite a few of these examples. But if I paste the first two lines of content into Google, we can see that this is likely scraped from Quora. 

Scraped content check, via Google.com

The flow of the content on the page follows the familiar pattern of two or three lines of text followed by a subheading. Scrolling down the page, we see the topics become less related.

PAA spam content example, via Wayback Machine

Checking a few other pages, I see the content has also been lifted from other sites. It’s relatively safe to assume that this is another PAA spam site.

Links

When we look at links, we see a few of the same culprits again. 

Swansea University’s website is back, along with 38 other academic domains. 

Suspect link, via Swansea University

I didn’t check them all, but they could likely be spam. Some more familiar faces in the links department include our favorite DR 81 website.

Potential spam link

As well as Grid Server’s DR 82 links.

Potential spam link

It seems reasonably clear that this activity is not normal and may be designed to manipulate rankings.

How did it fail?

Looking at the Overview 2.0’s “Performance” graph, we see that the drop in organic traffic occurred before the May 2022 Core Update

Performance overview zoomed in, via Ahrefs' Site Explorer

This update may have contributed to the drop, but it doesn’t appear as though it is the main reason. 

It’s clear from this quick analysis that bad links and poor content are present. It may be likely that this site received a manual action for its links, although it’s impossible to confirm this.

What do you think happened?

Did it really fail to fool Google?

Yes. I can’t see any way back for this site.

MCE Zone overview, via Ahrefs' Site Explorer
On April 25, 2022, Ahrefs reported that MCE Zone received an estimated 10,838,951 organic traffic at its peak.

Key stats 

  • 79,543 keywords, April 2022
  • 1,204 pages, April 2022 
  • Total traffic: 5.2M, April 2022

This website describes itself as the “world’s best news site”—a bold claim. 

Sadly though, it doesn’t appear to have the content or the links to back up this claim.

How did it fool Google?

It mainly focused on providing information to the Indian market about popular movie torrent sites. 

When it came to fooling Google, it used suspicious-looking links combined with fairly low-quality content that was just about good enough to fool Google for a short period.

Let’s take a closer look at what happened.

Content

Going to the Top pages report in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, we can see everything’s not right here. 

Rather than providing news content, this site seems to contain content about movie torrent sites for the Indian market.

Let’s look at the top-performing landing page that got an estimated 4,276,681 organic traffic on April 25.

Mce Zone homepage

The top-performing page appears to be an instruction manual for downloading movies from this site.

Running the text through an AI detection tool—GLTR—it seems from my tests that this content may be partially AI content or just badly translated.

AI content test, via GLTR

Either way, you’ll probably agree it’s not the type of content you would expect from the “world’s best news site.” 

This is low-quality content by most people’s definition.

Links

When it comes to links, I noticed the website has many Blogspot links. 

If we go to the Anchors report and add the following settings, we can filter the Blogspot domain anchors. As they are all very specific, it seems likely that this was part of a low-quality link building campaign.

Blogspot domain in Anchors report, via Ahrefs' Site Explorer

If we click on the links to target for the second row and filter by Dofollow, we can see around 50 links with exactly the same, tediously long anchor text.

Exact match anchor text across many domains, via Ahrefs' Site Explorer

Again, this type of link building doesn’t look great.

If we head back to the Referring domains report, we can see Grid Server is mentioned again.

Grid Server mentioned in Referring domains report, via Ahrefs' Site Explorer

Finally, to top it off, it has a DR 67 link that redirected a domain into its domain from this site below.

DR 67 website, via Ahrefs' Site Explorer

And here’s what this site looks like.

DR 67 spam site

How did it fail?

Looking at Overview 2.0, this site was probably hit by the May 2022 Core Update

Performance report zoomed in, via Ahrefs' Site Explorer

What do you think happened?

Did it really fail to fool Google?

Yes. Looking at the organic traffic, it’s nowhere near the levels it used to be. The site isn’t completely dead, but it’s fair to say that it won’t fool anyone in the future that it’s the “world’s best news site.” 

How did you find these sites?

Here’s how we did it: Internally, we call this the “Content Explorer Hack.”

Content Explorer hack, via Ahrefs' Content Explorer
  1. Go to Ahrefs’ Content Explorer and start an empty search
  2. Go to the Websites tab
  3. Filter for high traffic and low DR

And that’s it!

Final thoughts

As we have seen, what Google can giveth, it can also taketh away. 

The methods used by these sites to rank in Google are obviously not replicable for businesses, and I don’t suggest you try any of the methods above.

Many SEOs like to think that the days of paid links, trashy content, and shortcuts to ranking are long gone. But clearly, from these examples, it’s still possible to get significant organic traffic by breaking the rules—but only if you are willing to risk everything.

Got more questions? Ping me on Twitter. 🙂



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GPT Store Set To Launch In 2024 After ‘Unexpected’ Delays

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GPT Store Set To Launch In 2024 After 'Unexpected' Delays

OpenAI shares its plans for the GPT Store, enhancements to GPT Builder tools, privacy improvements, and updates coming to ChatGPT.

  • OpenAI has scheduled the launch of the GPT Store for early next year, aligning with its ongoing commitment to developing advanced AI technologies.
  • The GPT Builder tools have received substantial updates, including a more intuitive configuration interface and improved file handling capabilities.
  • Anticipation builds for upcoming updates to ChatGPT, highlighting OpenAI’s responsiveness to community feedback and dedication to AI innovation.

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96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here’s How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023]

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96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here's How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023]

It’s no secret that the web is growing by millions, if not billions of pages per day.

Our Content Explorer tool discovers 10 million new pages every 24 hours while being very picky about the pages that qualify for inclusion. The “main” Ahrefs web crawler crawls that number of pages every two minutes. 

But how much of this content gets organic traffic from Google?

To find out, we took the entire database from our Content Explorer tool (around 14 billion pages) and studied how many pages get traffic from organic search and why.

How many web pages get organic search traffic?

96.55% of all pages in our index get zero traffic from Google, and 1.94% get between one and ten monthly visits.

Distribution of pages by traffic from Content Explorer

Before we move on to discussing why the vast majority of pages never get any search traffic from Google (and how to avoid being one of them), it’s important to address two discrepancies with the studied data:

  1. ~14 billion pages may seem like a huge number, but it’s not the most accurate representation of the entire web. Even compared to the size of Site Explorer’s index of 340.8 billion pages, our sample size for this study is quite small and somewhat biased towards the “quality side of the web.”
  2. Our search traffic numbers are estimates. Even though our database of ~651 million keywords in Site Explorer (where our estimates come from) is arguably the largest database of its kind, it doesn’t contain every possible thing people search for in Google. There’s a chance that some of these pages get search traffic from super long-tail keywords that are not popular enough to make it into our database.

That said, these two “inaccuracies” don’t change much in the grand scheme of things: the vast majority of published pages never rank in Google and never get any search traffic. 

But why is this, and how can you be a part of the minority that gets organic search traffic from Google?

Well, there are hundreds of SEO issues that may prevent your pages from ranking well in Google. But if we focus only on the most common scenarios, assuming the page is indexed, there are only three of them.

Reason 1: The topic has no search demand

If nobody is searching for your topic, you won’t get any search traffic—even if you rank #1.

For example, I recently Googled “pull sitemap into google sheets” and clicked the top-ranking page (which solved my problem in seconds, by the way). But if you plug that URL into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, you’ll see that it gets zero estimated organic search traffic:

The top-ranking page for this topic gets no traffic because there's no search demandThe top-ranking page for this topic gets no traffic because there's no search demand

This is because hardly anyone else is searching for this, as data from Keywords Explorer confirms:

Keyword data from Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer confirms that this topic has no search demandKeyword data from Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer confirms that this topic has no search demand

This is why it’s so important to do keyword research. You can’t just assume that people are searching for whatever you want to talk about. You need to check the data.

Our Traffic Potential (TP) metric in Keywords Explorer can help with this. It estimates how much organic search traffic the current top-ranking page for a keyword gets from all the queries it ranks for. This is a good indicator of the total search demand for a topic.

You’ll see this metric for every keyword in Keywords Explorer, and you can even filter for keywords that meet your minimum criteria (e.g., 500+ monthly traffic potential): 

Filtering for keywords with Traffic Potential (TP) in Ahrefs' Keywords ExplorerFiltering for keywords with Traffic Potential (TP) in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

Reason 2: The page has no backlinks

Backlinks are one of Google’s top three ranking factors, so it probably comes as no surprise that there’s a clear correlation between the number of websites linking to a page and its traffic.

Pages with more referring domains get more trafficPages with more referring domains get more traffic
Pages with more referring domains get more traffic

Same goes for the correlation between a page’s traffic and keyword rankings:

Pages with more referring domains rank for more keywordsPages with more referring domains rank for more keywords
Pages with more referring domains rank for more keywords

Does any of this data prove that backlinks help you rank higher in Google?

No, because correlation does not imply causation. However, most SEO professionals will tell you that it’s almost impossible to rank on the first page for competitive keywords without backlinks—an observation that aligns with the data above.

The key word there is “competitive.” Plenty of pages get organic traffic while having no backlinks…

Pages with more referring domains get more trafficPages with more referring domains get more traffic
How much traffic pages with no backlinks get

… but from what I can tell, almost all of them are about low-competition topics.

For example, this lyrics page for a Neil Young song gets an estimated 162 monthly visits with no backlinks: 

Example of a page with traffic but no backlinks, via Ahrefs' Content ExplorerExample of a page with traffic but no backlinks, via Ahrefs' Content Explorer

But if we check the keywords it ranks for, they almost all have Keyword Difficulty (KD) scores in the single figures:

Some of the low-difficulty keywords a page without traffic ranks forSome of the low-difficulty keywords a page without traffic ranks for

It’s the same story for this page selling upholstered headboards:

Some of the low-difficulty keywords a page without traffic ranks forSome of the low-difficulty keywords a page without traffic ranks for

You might have noticed two other things about these pages:

  • Neither of them get that much traffic. This is pretty typical. Our index contains ~20 million pages with no referring domains, yet only 2,997 of them get more than 1K search visits per month. That’s roughly 1 in every 6,671 pages with no backlinks.
  • Both of the sites they’re on have high Domain Rating (DR) scores. This metric shows the relative strength of a website’s backlink profile. Stronger sites like these have more PageRank that they can pass to pages with internal links to help them rank. 

Bottom line? If you want your pages to get search traffic, you really only have two options:

  1. Target uncompetitive topics that you can rank for with few or no backlinks.
  2. Target competitive topics and build backlinks to rank.

If you want to find uncompetitive topics, try this:

  1. Enter a topic into Keywords Explorer
  2. Go to the Matching terms report
  3. Set the Keyword Difficulty (KD) filter to max. 20
  4. Set the Lowest DR filter to your site’s DR (this will show you keywords with at least one of the same or lower DR ranking in the top 5)
Filtering for low-competition keywords in Ahrefs' Keywords ExplorerFiltering for low-competition keywords in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

(Remember to keep an eye on the TP column to make sure they have traffic potential.)

To rank for more competitive topics, you’ll need to earn or build high-quality backlinks to your page. If you’re not sure how to do that, start with the guides below. Keep in mind that it’ll be practically impossible to get links unless your content adds something to the conversation. 

Reason 3. The page doesn’t match search intent

Google wants to give users the most relevant results for a query. That’s why the top organic results for “best yoga mat” are blog posts with recommendations, not product pages. 

It's obviously what searchers want when they search for "best yoga mats"It's obviously what searchers want when they search for "best yoga mats"

Basically, Google knows that searchers are in research mode, not buying mode.

It’s also why this page selling yoga mats doesn’t show up, despite it having backlinks from more than six times more websites than any of the top-ranking pages:

Page selling yoga mats that has lots of backlinksPage selling yoga mats that has lots of backlinks
Number of linking websites to the top-ranking pages for "best yoga mats"Number of linking websites to the top-ranking pages for "best yoga mats"

Luckily, the page ranks for thousands of other more relevant keywords and gets tens of thousands of monthly organic visits. So it’s not such a big deal that it doesn’t rank for “best yoga mats.”

Number of keyword rankings for the page selling yoga matsNumber of keyword rankings for the page selling yoga mats

However, if you have pages with lots of backlinks but no organic traffic—and they already target a keyword with traffic potential—another quick SEO win is to re-optimize them for search intent.

We did this in 2018 with our free backlink checker.

It was originally nothing but a boring landing page explaining the benefits of our product and offering a 7-day trial: 

Original landing page for our free backlink checkerOriginal landing page for our free backlink checker

After analyzing search intent, we soon realized the issue:

People weren’t looking for a landing page, but rather a free tool they could use right away. 

So, in September 2018, we created a free tool and published it under the same URL. It ranked #1 pretty much overnight, and has remained there ever since. 

Our rankings over time for the keyword "backlink checker." You can see when we changed the pageOur rankings over time for the keyword "backlink checker." You can see when we changed the page

Organic traffic went through the roof, too. From ~14K monthly organic visits pre-optimization to almost ~200K today. 

Estimated search traffic over time to our free backlink checkerEstimated search traffic over time to our free backlink checker

TLDR

96.55% of pages get no organic traffic. 

Keep your pages in the other 3.45% by building backlinks, choosing topics with organic traffic potential, and matching search intent.

Ping me on Twitter if you have any questions. 🙂



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Firefox URL Tracking Removal – Is This A Trend To Watch?

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Firefox URL Tracking Removal - Is This A Trend To Watch?

Firefox recently announced that they are offering users a choice on whether or not to include tracking information from copied URLs, which comes on the on the heels of iOS 17 blocking user tracking via URLs. The momentum of removing tracking information from URLs appears to be gaining speed. Where is this all going and should marketers be concerned?

Is it possible that blocking URL tracking parameters in the name of privacy will become a trend industrywide?

Firefox Announcement

Firefox recently announced that beginning in the Firefox Browser version 120.0, users will be able to select whether or not they want URLs that they copied to contain tracking parameters.

When users select a link to copy and click to raise the contextual menu for it, Firefox is now giving users a choice as to whether to copy the URL with or without the URL tracking parameters that might be attached to the URL.

Screenshot Of Firefox 120 Contextual Menu

Screenshot of Firefox functionality

According to the Firefox 120 announcement:

“Firefox supports a new “Copy Link Without Site Tracking” feature in the context menu which ensures that copied links no longer contain tracking information.”

Browser Trends For Privacy

All browsers, including Google’s Chrome and Chrome variants, are adding new features that make it harder for websites to track users online through referrer information embedded in a URL when a user clicks from one site and leaves through that click to visit another site.

This trend for privacy has been ongoing for many years but it became more noticeable in 2020 when Chrome made changes to how referrer information was sent when users click links to visit other sites. Firefox and Safari followed with similar referrer behavior.

Whether the current Firefox implementation would be disruptive or if the impact is overblown is kind of besides the point.

What is the point is whether or not what Firefox and Apple did to protect privacy is a trend and if that trend will extend to more blocking of URL parameters that are stronger than what Firefox recently implemented.

I asked Kenny Hyder, CEO of online marketing agency Pixel Main, what his thoughts are about the potential disruptive aspect of what Firefox is doing and whether it’s a trend.

Kenny answered:

“It’s not disruptive from Firefox alone, which only has a 3% market share. If other popular browsers follow suit it could begin to be disruptive to a limited degree, but easily solved from a marketers prospective.

If it became more intrusive and they blocked UTM tags, it would take awhile for them all to catch on if you were to circumvent UTM tags by simply tagging things in a series of sub-directories.. ie. site.com/landing/<tag1>/<tag2> etc.

Also, most savvy marketers are already integrating future proof workarounds for these exact scenarios.

A lot can be done with pixel based integrations rather than cookie based or UTM tracking. When set up properly they can actually provide better and more accurate tracking and attribution. Hence the name of my agency, Pixel Main.”

I think most marketers are aware that privacy is the trend. The good ones have already taken steps to keep it from becoming a problem while still respecting user privacy.”

Some URL Parameters Are Already Affected

For those who are on the periphery of what’s going on with browsers and privacy, it may come as a surprise that some tracking parameters are already affected by actions meant to protect user privacy.

Jonathan Cairo, Lead Solutions Engineer at Elevar shared that there is already a limited amount of tracking related information stripped from URLs.

But he also explained that there are limits to how much information can be stripped from URLs because the resulting negative effects would cause important web browsing functionality to fail.

Jonathan explained:

“So far, we’re seeing a selective trend where some URL parameters, like ‘fbclid’ in Safari’s private browsing, are disappearing, while others, such as TikTok’s ‘ttclid’, remain.

UTM parameters are expected to stay since they focus on user segmentation rather than individual tracking, provided they are used as intended.

The idea of completely removing all URL parameters seems improbable, as it would disrupt key functionalities on numerous websites, including banking services and search capabilities.

Such a drastic move could lead users to switch to alternative browsers.

On the other hand, if only some parameters are eliminated, there’s the possibility of marketers exploiting the remaining ones for tracking purposes.

This raises the question of whether companies like Apple will take it upon themselves to prevent such use.

Regardless, even in a scenario where all parameters are lost, there are still alternative ways to convey click IDs and UTM information to websites.”

Brad Redding of Elevar agreed about the disruptive effect from going too far with removing URL tracking information:

“There is still too much basic internet functionality that relies on query parameters, such as logging in, password resets, etc, which are effectively the same as URL parameters in a full URL path.

So we believe the privacy crackdown is going to continue on known trackers by blocking their tracking scripts, cookies generated from them, and their ability to monitor user’s activity through the browser.

As this grows, the reliance on brands to own their first party data collection and bring consent preferences down to a user-level (vs session based) will be critical so they can backfill gaps in conversion data to their advertising partners outside of the browser or device.”

The Future Of Tracking, Privacy And What Marketers Should Expect

Elevar raises good points about how far browsers can go in terms of how much blocking they can do. Their response that it’s down to brands to own their first party data collection and other strategies to accomplish analytics without compromising user privacy.

Given all the laws governing privacy and Internet tracking that have been enacted around the world it looks like privacy will continue to be a trend.

However, at this point it time, the advice is to keep monitoring how far browsers are going but there is no expectation that things will get out of hand.

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