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Update: I have greatly edited this post to blur out those involved. A few people who were mentioned are actually readers of this site and kindly emailed to ask to be removed. My theory has been that I have to show at least one example to verify what I’m saying, but I think I’ve probably went far enough on this topic.
These last few posts have went pretty viral around the web and while I appreciate the attention, I also understand that fellow marketers do deserve to stay under the radar. I’ve been ‘outed’ counltess times myself but that doesn’t mean I have to do the same to others. Hopefully the original readers got something out of the post, and I just want to thank you all again for your feedback and wisdom. I appreciate the audience here more than you could ever know.
To say the last few days around here have been crazy would be an understatement. I’ve replied to hundreds of comments, received hundreds of tweets for my content and basically been amazed at all of the sites that linked to me. It was hard to look far away from my analytics. They’re all referring to my recent blog post, The New SEO, which has had tens of thousands of visitors in just one week.
I wanted to use this blog post to keep discussion on this issue going while the topic is still hot. There were a lot of comments received 150, 200 and 250 comments down which will never really see the light of day. My aim is to change that and share the issues that real webmasters are having, and how Google is in its worst state that I’ve ever seen in years.
Thank you for Sharing!
First of all, I just wanted to thank people who commented, shared and linked to my post. Things went a little viral, as you can see here from Alexa:
I also did pretty well on Inbound.org where the post is sitting at 68 votes. If you’re not a member there, most articles tend to get less than 10 (even those that make the homepage) so it definitely caused a bit of a stir. Inbound is like Reddit for internet marketers and I’m pretty sure I’m usually disliked over there, so it was nice to see some positive feedback:
This little request on Black Hat World actually sent me quite a lot of traffic. They need to update their anonym.to linking script because it’s still easy to find them talking about me in my traffic logs (they try to make external links go through a redirect so people can’t see when they’re illegally sharing content). I have to admit this did make me laugh.
The guy in question is offering $150 per article. Damn, if only I had known earlier 
There have also been multiple threads on Reddit talking about the blog post and people asking about SERP spoofing in general. I was pretty surprised at how much traffic Reddit can send to marketing / SEO related sites. Then again, once there I saw some big IM names commenting in a marketing sub-Reddit, so I must be late to the party. Appreciate the link, Thesolid85, if you’re reading.
I was mentioned on dozens of forums, had tweets from some of the biggest names in SEO and generally had more emails to respond to than I have in a really long time. Some from those of you who thanked me for ‘having balls’ to talk about it and others freaking out say “oh so this is what I have to do now”.
Things were definitely out of the ordinary; almost like having a tornado of sharks hitting your small island down. But this is not Sharknado…
Serpnado: The Great Google Shitstorm of Our Time
For those unaware, the two founders are Google are in that picture above. Don’t ask where I get the (very real) hot tub photo from though.
The main point of that previous article was that Google is giving too much weight to fresh content and sites with quality content and hundreds or thousands of quality links are getting outranked by brand new sites with no authority. From the vast majority of feedback, people agreed with me. Even on Inbound.org, where I thought the post would have got ‘torn a new one’. There were only 3 negative comments that I found at all, and that’s out of at least 500 replies I’ve seen.
The 3 negative comments all basically nit-picked my examples. “Maybe they still ranked before they changed the date”. “How to grow taller” is not a proper medical search term. “I don’t see this, you’re getting personalised results”.
I’ve answered them in the comments here and the one on Inbound.org so I’m not going to go over it again. I do want to say though that I use a Private Tunnel proxy, sign out of Google, and check the search results from Asia, Canada and America. Dozens of people in the comments reported seeing the same search results as me.
My good friend Pat Flynn was one of the people who tweeted the article and helped to spread the word, so I want to use him as part of my example. Not because he is ranking thanks to freshness – though I’m sure it helps him somewhat – but because his income reports allow us to see a hugely profitable industry: Web hosting commissions.
Here are his stats for the last 6 months:
- June 2013: $31,950 promoting Bluehost
- May 2013: $30,050 promoting Bluehost
- April 2013: $30,450 promoting Bluehost
- March 2013: $30,900 promoting Bluehost
- February 2013: $31,050 promting Bluehost
- January 2013: $31,200 promoting Bluehost
I’ll do the maths because I’m such a nice guy; that’s $185,600 in the first few months of this year promoting Bluehost. Pat deserves every penny by the way, his blog is excellent and one of the few that I read.
If you’ve been in internet marketing for even just a short amount of time, you’ll know that some of the most popular search terms for industries like this are things like “Bluehost review”, “Bluehost coupon code” and so on. This happens for Hostgator, Hostmonster and any other popular hosting company you can think of. By the way, I learned the other week that Bluehost and Hostgator are actually owned by the same company. So much for those arguments about one being far better than the other (from myself included).
Let’s get into it, shall we?
Please note I did remove the ads from this screenshot for cleanliness
Now I’ll just wait for someone commenting to say “This is bullshit, Pat doesn’t even make his commissions from search”. Heh.
Result #2: Must be Some High-Quality Content to Rank So Fast
Let’s see what’s behind this epic review I’ve just searched for because I’m very interested in how customers feel about the service of Bluehost.
If this is the kind of content Google wants us creating then sign me up.
Okay, maybe I’m being harsh. They do have a comment section after all. Maybe that’s where the awesome reviews are kept?
Sorry, my screenshot is slightly wrong. The Google snippet says July 29th but the post is actually much older than that. Google is taking the date of the latest comment and using that as the date for when the post was updated. Obviously the webmaster caught on to this, as there’s no other explanation for why comments are getting replies a month or two later. Sneaky or clever, you decide?
Some of the comments are actually from as far back as January 2012. Either way, that’s surely not what people are hoping to find when they perform the Google search, which is Google’s job after all. The owner of the site commented on this, here.
Result #3: Figure This Out With Me
At first glance, this is the most confusing website result to me. Why? Because Whois registration shows that the domain was registered in June 2013 yet the Google snippet preview is showing December 2012. I know Whois isn’t everything, but Moz doesn’t even show backlinks to the website – suggesting how new it is – and other tools show links only very recently as well. There is nothing to suggest the website actually did exist back in December 2012.
Could this be the first case of someone faking the date the wrong way?
I’m literally typing this as I’m figuring it out so please forgive the weird thought process my mind goes through. Now at this point, all I can think of is that the Whois isn’t wrong, but the domain moved to another registrar and thus the data is old. Especially since the copyright in the footer of the website suggests 2007 – 2013.
My next step was to check two more Whois tools (which give you information about the owner of a domain) and see if they had more recent date. Nope. They both show records just from June 2013.
Again, the reason I’m so curious about this is because this is the only time backlinks were registered in the certain search tools as well, and Moz’s Open Site Explorer doesn’t show a single one.
I am aware that Moz has a tab right at the end which does show backlinks to the domain, but that is only for links found very recently. Side note to Moz staff: Unless I’m missing some obvious reason, put those links in the main search results. Otherwise people are just going to miss that tab and think your data is really old, and move to tools like Ahrefs or Majestic.
My next step is to check the Google cache of the search result to see how old it is. Sadly it’s from July 25th, so that doesn’t help me very much.
After this, I went to check out the Way back machine. Keep in mind that I’m typing this as I’m figuring it out. As of the second I’m writing this sentence I have no idea about the date on that page. I assumed the Way back machine, a tool that shows how websites used to be in the past, would solve this mystery:
Nope. I’m still confused.
Does it make a big difference? Not really. But since we’re so focused on freshness and Google is ranking something slightly older than the other results, I would like to know why that date doesn’t appear to be correct. Manually changed? Error with the WordPress database? The site flew under the radar and every tracking tool I have missed it?
Here’s your chance to shine: Figure it out for me in the comments and I’ll post your answer here. Just like in my last post, I hate the idea of ‘outing’ websites, but the extremes at which Google are ranking sites these days needs a few examples to showcase what we’re referring too.
Scrap that, I think I’ve just figured it out. The domain [removed, see update in the start].com (notice the lack of ‘s’ at the end) now redirects to the [removed]s website. The original site – without the s – appeared to host the content back in December 2012, which would explain the publication date.
Okay, now this is getting really interesting…
First of all, let’s look at the backlink profile for [removed]S.com in Ahrefs.
Your first thought may be – at least mine was – that it’s simply picking up old links from the billboard.com extension and that’s why it looks like they built links so fast. Looking into it deeper though, that doesn’t seem to be the case at all. All of the links from other sites are actually linking to the s.com extension, suggesting that they were actually built recently. I’m also thinking that they’re all been paid for via some network, since there’s the possibility that they’ve just been updated to include the new URL, but were previously linking to the old.
It’s not easy to get so many webmasters to change your link so quickly, trust me, without some kind of automated or paid solution.
I’m so interested – sorry if you aren’t – because these search results are probably bringing this website 6-figures per month in income on the low end. I don’t think that’s an exaggeration either. Think about what Pat is making just with Bluehost and how many hundreds of hosting providers this guy is promoting. I do not actually think their website pages are bad, and I’ve gone off the tangent of freshness a little, but damn do I love this stuff.
After a bit of digging, here’s what I got:
Results #5, #7 and #8
I’m not going to go into as much analysis for each of these results because this blog post would be ridiculously long and I’ve already used too many images.
Result #5, Say Web Hosting
Not much to say on this other than their domain was only registered in May 2013 and all of their backlinks were built very quickly over the last month or two. You’re welcome to go ahead and analyse for yourself where they’re getting those links from.
Result #7, Bluehost-Review.com
A really unoriginal website simply using the default WordPress theme. There are just a few pages of content as well. It seems like the site was registered a long time ago, left to die and then it came back in the last month judging by the Whois data. There’s nothing of real value here at all to any kind of searcher.
I’m sure the domain is helping them quite a bit here.
Result #8, Best Hosting Search
I would say this is actually a pretty good result. There are hundreds of reviews on the site that appear to be at least moderately genuine. I say moderately because they is an odd similarity and a consistency in typo’s in the comments. I found numerous comments around phrases like “worth my every penny” “values my penny” and even “penny my values” which just seems a little fishy. Then again, I’m probably being picky here.
The reason they’re ranking based on date-based freshness is because Google are using the date of the comments that are left. It’s interesting that Google isn’t doing this for bloggers and their blog posts. My WordPress SEO blog post gets comments every other day (500+ now) and yet my search snippet shows 2010 when the piece was published.
I Caught Someone Faking Their Date, Again
If you’re thinking search term variations are much better around the Bluehost brand then you haven’t been using Google a lot lately. Let’s try “Bluehost coupon code”. This is not just some arbitrary term. It might only get a few hundred searches per month but there’s a reason people are competing to rank for it.
Put simply, the buyers are already in purchase mode and they’re just looking to cheapen their purchase before going through with the deal. Bluehost allow you to create your own Coupon codes – as do Hostgator – so you get a commission when someone uses that particular code. This means that conversion rates are high, and affiliates can make some easy money.
I guarantee that tomorrow it will be changed again. I assume the change is manual, purely because of the two-day skip in the footer part of the post. Also the guy just couldn’t be bothered to change the minutes option on the post date and changed the hour instead. I understand there is a time and a place for freshness and changing the date on your content, but let’s not pretend he / she isn’t having fun with the system.
Don’t get too caught up on the specific terms and phrases I’m using here. As I mentioned on the last post, there are industries and phrases where you cannot take advantage of this. I’m not going to rank for ‘Compare credit cards’ – said to be worth $10,000 per day – overnight. There’s still millions of dollars on the table every single day though in more industries than you could think possible.
Don’t Just Take My Word for It
I’m lucky that I’ve been blogging about SEO here for such a number of years that I have a large audience of very smart people who are following this industry at every turn. Just because it’s easy to make an argument look one-sided when you’re the ‘host’ of a blog, I wanted to highlight the comments from other people.
There’s quite a few images coming up, but their content does paint an accurate picture of the search landscape I’m seeing on a daily basis…
I also reached out to Yoast on Twitter to see what he thought of owning the top 5 search results for the term ‘WordPress SEO’ which I highlighted in my blog post. I have to admit, I respect his reply:
STFU ViperChill, We Know You’re Benefiting from This
Caught me!
On a more serious note, I have taken some flack via email for admitting I am involved in this kind of thing. It really does not bother me in the slightest. When you discover legal (yes, buying links is legal, even if Google don’t like it) loopholes in a multi-billion dollar industry it’s hard not to be looking at how you can take advantage of it. I like to think I’m one of the “better guys” (don’t worry, you can disagree) for at least being willing to share some of my findings.
My position is this: I’ve built quality websites with quality articles and 100% legitimate links and been penalised in a number of industries. Then I see brand new websites with a page or two of content at most either buying their way to the top, or more likely spamming their way to the top very quickly. I see nothing bad in building new websites in my same industry and trying to get back some of the traffic I lost to my quality website.
If Google ‘fixes’ things, which I don’t see happening anytime soon – don’t forget freshness is there for a reason – then I have sites in both positions: Old with quality links and young with links that should just not be working. If you’re not taking advantage of this time, that’s totally your prerogative and I understand your patience. I, on the other hand, don’t want to lose traffic after the years of work I’ve put in.
I’m not sure how much this goes into conspiracy theory territory, but I was interested by how many comments and emails suggested that search results are so bad because Google want more people buying ads on Adwords where results are more stable. Remember that Google are making billions of dollars every single quarter and seem to violate their original “Don’t be evil” slogan at every turn. It’s easy to forget their aim is to make their shareholders a lot of money.
I share a lot of things online, but it doesn’t make sense to publicly share everything. Just like I didn’t tell you the exact PPC campaigns I promoted, I don’t tell you exactly what I’m doing in Google in public. Some things have to stay private-ish, in courses like XXX (please forgive the landing pages, still split-testing for cold traffic experiments) and so on. If you’re interested in hearing what myself and Diggy can potentially do for you in private – I’m not looking for more than 15 people to start with – please send me an email at hq@viperchill.com. A lot of people are stressing about rankings right now, but myself and my “private circle” are certainly not among them.
Thank you for reading!
RSS Subscribers: 
Hope I’m the first. Anyway Glen, thanks for this great post! Have been following Google’s erratic algorithm for quite a while and I highly doubt it’s just some fluke. Might be some big reason behind it. But it’s a shame if we don’t put this opportunity to good use.
“But it’s a shame if we don’t put this opportunity to good use.”
Can’t disagree with you there. There were a lot of people in the last post saying they’re waiting for Google to ‘fix’ themselves. You don’t have to change your current site, but it doesn’t take long to make something new…
Though for this particular keyword I’ve been trying to rank for, the top SERPs are still taken by old/aged sites/domain, meaning it seems like Google still favors aged websites in this case.
Thankfully yes. Even as a marketer, the last thing I want is terms like ‘signs of a heart attack’ pushing Clickbank products.
Awesome that this is addressed at the top of the comments…the question I wanted to ask is WHAT to do to take advantage of this opportunity. Glen, I know you said you wouldn’t be telling us what you do, and perhaps it’s tucked away in your product (XXX? sorry if I’m missing something – I’m pregnant and brain is a little fuzzy), but I’d love to know maybe 4 things I can do *right now* to re-gain my rankings. Make a vid? Set up a newer site? Use pages w/comments instead of blog post pages in WP? What does anyone (Glen, others) think would be the 4 things a person could do right now to take advantage of this crappy serp time?
Abuse Freshness…
“Abuse Freshness…”
Okay – I use WordPress – I’m assuming abusing freshness with Posts is the most obvious move. Most of my pages are ‘Pages’ tho…perhaps I shall adjust the “published on” dates on everything…pages and posts.
If you search for hostgator coupon related term, you may see me
Like I said on Facebook, when you leave these testimonials you have to add you’re a Backlinks XXX member
Haha. Just got your email, loving your results!
Excellent work, Glen. You have been sharing a lot of awesome stuff, lately. I’d love to become a part of your inner circle, just sent you an email :).
-Dev
Glad you like it!
Got your email. Actually hit 10 already in the last few minutes.
Will get back to you later today
Ahh Great :).
Looking forward to your email.
Just opened up your email Im guessing i am too late for the SEO package?
Im a xxx member. If not I want to throw my hat into the ring
Great insights glen…How you think Wpbeginner.com faking their date ? andy WordPress Plugin for that ?
Replied to you on Facebook.
The first part is removing the date from the actual post / page. The second part is getting them to focus on the dates in the comments.
I couldn’t figure out why at first but seems pretty obvious now. Did a test on this yesterday and already back to 2nd in Google for my search term. Will reveal it next week if the ranking stays
Hi,
I see the latest comment was on july 29th. Why is the Google snippet still showing July 27th.
Btw, are you sure Google is using date on comments? So, should I remove date from the post and just keep date on comments? That could be better as my content will always be fresh.
I’m not sure if you’re referring to the mess-up in my screenshot?
Might take a little bit to update…
Btw, I just read that you worked in Hanoi before. It will be great to meet you back here some day.
Hopefully will be back before the end of the year. Cutest girls on the planet
If you don’t have a lot of posts, you can just repost your posts. I tried that, but it didn’t help me at all :p
I think I’ll buy Backlink xxx
Google just make me cry…
Great Post!
EN: I’m from Brazil. Very bad sites here come the # 1 incorrectly. I am new to SEO and see what courses they preach high construction quality and page content, but in reality is not what we see in the SERPS. I would love to know how the algorithm can handle so easily.
BR: Eu sou do Brasil. Aqui sites muito ruins chegam ao #1 de forma errada. Sou iniciante em SEO e vejo que cursos pregam a alta qualidade na construção de página e conteúdo mas na realidade não é isso que vemos nas SERPS. Gostaria muito de saber como conseguem manipular o algorítimo de forma tão fácil.
Sorry my english!
No problem,
I applaud you for trying and welcome you to the site!
Always love your articles. I benefitted tremendously from your XXX. I’m riding the “Screwed-up Google’ Wave with you! I have used your XXX strategies to beat sties that pay SEO companies to do work for them :P. Yes, like what Ying Hang says, we have to put this opportunity to good use!
*Just wondering what your private 15-people circle would be about
Awesome to hear that you’re getting great results. Love when we get that kind of feedback.
You’re welcome to email me if you want to know more
I’ve considered condensing a few of my existing projects and just creating extremely simple “walkthrough”-types using my data, well-recieved posts, and shares. Rework the content, push it out fast, build some links, keep it fresh.
Such a pain in the ass to put so many years of work into a site just to have to see it outranked by some thin news article or Facebook page.
Definitely feel you on that last sentence. Sorry if they’re mine
We’re all good, we’re all good.
These are in some areas that are completely off the radar in terms of normal coverage here and on my site.
I wonder how well a one page site would work these days if you just kept refreshing the date on a regular cycle?
Seems quite obvious why Google is doing this. Instability sends more people to adwords.
I say game it every opportunity possible.
I did mention that in the post (big bold sentence near the end) but it just isn’t that clear cut in my opinion. They could only risk it for so long before everyone heads elsewhere, surely?
There is no way this is true IMHO.
1. Google has share holders to answer to.
2. The legal consequences of an anti-trust campaign like that would be incredibly disasterous. They got slammed by the FTC for having too many YouTube videos in their search because it was anti-competitive.
3. Google prides itself on quality. A decrease in search use would also equate to a downturn in ad revenue.
I think it’s just part of search evolution. Five years ago it was paid posts. Now they’re trying to battle twitter and FB for freshness.
Well, it depends what you’re replying to.
There’s nothing illegal about having unstable search results which are constantly changing.
3. That just isn’t happening though, so where is the pride really?
2. When was the last time you saw Vimeo, Wistia or Daily Motion in the search results? It doesn’t seem like that has had much of an affect.
1. Who buy shares for one reason…
I have been following this blog since i launched my site, nice to see informative posts..
Another great post Glen.
I’ve always said to both my clients and students that Google is just one big game. As long as you implement (legal) strategies to exploit it – I don’t see anything wrong. We’re all trying to make money (including Google).
Google will always steer you towards Adwords and YouTube ahead of it’s competitors and I don’t see that changing.
Sanj.
I actually created a one page site with a coupon code for a client to add more listing to the brand term in Google. It got picked up by one or two reputable sites with backlinks and now is ranking on the 2nd page for some of the most competitive keywords in the industry worth. Sites as old as 16 years have worked hard to be on those pages and this one page flies and swoops the nest. In hindsight I should be pleased, but now disappointed; not really fair. But I ain’t complaining of this is the way to go. I will keep my humanitarian efforts for charities
Replying to above:
There is something illegal about deliberately doing it in order to make more ad revenue though.
Other videos – all the time. Huge mix now when you click “videos”.
In terms of pride/quality – I think that’s aspirational.
SEO does my head in sometimes especially when Google invest so much money trying to improve the search rankings.
I can just see if now
Matt Cutts ” We need to make our search results, relevant and of a high quality. Of course this means we have to use a really complex algorithm otherwise people will just mess with us”
Google analyst ” Hmm, you are right” “I have got a great idea, why not make the freshest content have greater authority in the search results. After all new is better right?”
Matt Cutts “Gadzooks, you have got it”
Hi Glen, another great post – I’m really loving your work at the moment.
If you check out the sitemaps of the Bluehost review sites – most of them have a good number of posts and content overall. Interestingly I cannot locate the content that appeared in search results
I’ve two theories – one they have just 3-4 money posts and to game the system all they’re doing is altering the publish date on each post manually (which anybody could do) and it would only take 5 minutes per day. Then just make sure you have Webmaster tools checking daily or even more frequently on your site for new content. Surely that would work?
Second theory is they’re using one of several plugins designed to unpublish your content meanwhile they schedule the same content to go live again a minute or two after one was taken down. Lots of plugins can do that and I think they’d get away with it too.
I’m going to test these two theories myself as both appear to work on a WordPress level.
Be interested to know what you think. Just when I had figured out a PPC strategy to try – along comes this
One of the most interesting articles I have read on ViperChill ! Seriously, I hope you will publish something next week regarding this issue? So basically, this works for any search term I focus?
Definitely not everything. I did mention this in the post – for example, compare credit cards.
But for a lot of phrases? Yes.
I have observed everything that you have stated in this post and I’m getting increasingly fed up with using Google as a search engine. I used to be Google’s number one fan because it always allowed me to find exactly what I wanted; but lately about 80% of my searches don’t reveal what I needed and I now need to try several variations of keyphrases until I FINALLY get what I want. That is a seriously messed up algorithm.
Now my question is, what alternative is the best? I’d like to vote with my feet on that new Google update (which doesn’t mean I won’t utilise it for my means :D) but don’t really know what other search engine could be better.
By the way, some of these comments intigued me to go check out your Backlinks XXX landing page (again), but I’ve felt put off immediately by the fact that I couldn’t see the price anywhere without clicking on “Add to Cart”.
Maybe I’ll still check it out because I am an avid reader of yours but you might want to make the price more visible for people who share the same pet peeve and aren’t fans yet.
another kick-ass post!
I found very mind opening the conspiracy theory. Never thought of it but… could be. Actualy if you see the stockprice lately it certainly is working!
I sent an email to see if i can get into those 15-happy-people… fingers crossed.
Got your email
Hi Glen!
Fantastic Post! I have been reading your posts for a while but so glad I finally remembered to sign up on your list! This is a crazy time online for everyone. I wanted to tell you I think your examples and the way you present them are all top notch! I have done some tests with different sites and the results are varied. Still trying to figure a few things out!
FYI I actually read a LOT of comments on the post you mentioned earlier with 250+ comments as I like to hear/read people’s different opinions.
I have a pretty new domain which I think I purchased in April or May and left sitting for a few weeks, then threw up a smaller site (5-6pgs) but done very well, original content, graphics, I even DID NOT complete on page SEO –because I had an idea of my own (social media related) and very basic, it took me about 30 minutes to do, super easy and it must have been about 24-48 hrs later site was on page 1 spot 10 All I remember is laughing out loud to myself I really did not expect my silly trial and error stunt to work but it was all WH & just a bit “out of the box”.
Sorry for not being specific, but still testing …….a few days later site was #1 on page 2.
No complaints here
Thanks for providing such a great resource!
You could of left the URLs out of the study. I know its interesting but you are indirectly losing someone a lot of money by outing them.
Do you think it will really make a difference?
Doesn’t seem to have affected anything from last week. I think the URL’s kind of show the point I’m making. The case study wouldn’t be useful without the links.
Even if I just showed titles – and I presume it’s a Googler you’re afraid of seeing this – they would be able to figure it out from the title?
Then blur the titles and keyword as well. Doesn’t need to be revealed to get the point across. Or show your own sites then. Why hide those in the ebook but out others instead?
Not sure what eBook you’re referring too, but I’ll blue out the URL’s as requested
Already started. Please let me know if there’s any I miss.
Great post Glen. The SERPs have been quite comical lately and I’ve noticed the trend in Serpfox where some of my sites are bouncing up 200 spots one day and then back down 200 the next. It’s one of those things that makes you shake your head because on the one hand it’s apparent that they are trying to weight towards fresh content, but on the other hand you see the quality of a lot of stuff that’s getting ranked is very sub-par.
Like you said though, as the game evolves you have to evolve with it.
I think that the reason behind this is to make more money via Adsense. I think benefitting established big brands in search rather than niched independent bloggers make business sense. If you have big brands fighting it out in the organic SERPs they are more likely to pay for Adsense. But that’s just my 2 cents.
What I really want to say is this is another really interesting and well-researched study into Google’s increasingly poor results. I’m sure Bing and even Facebook are benefitting from this at the moment.
hey Glen,
awesome posts you cranked out for this past week!
I think that Google’s shareholders or whomever is working there at the top, want to get far more publicity than ever, and release all kinds of updates and provoke stir to turn the industry upside down – the more word of mouth they get, the more people sign-up with AdWords, AdSense, Gmail, etc…
This could be their game plan, or part of it, and I think we’re just touching the surface…
What do you guys think?
Due to toughest competition, some black hat people use automated tools or unethical ways to build links quickly to rank high these days, .this seems SEO is not with 200+ signals, think Google has changed its algorithm to penalize authority site, not to mini and micro niche sites. You’ve written wonderful article explained these things.
Thanks
I loved fell in love with the kind of stuff written in this site, and this post is nice regarding bluehost
Question:
“There’s nothing of real value here at all to any kind of searcher.” and “probably bringing this website 6-figures per month” – don’t seem to go together to me. Are you saying that even though their site sucks hard, the simple fact that they are high in the SERP that people consistently click through to the site and then click through the the affiliate link?
I don’t want to give “people” TOO much credit, but I know if I don’t trust a site I bounce and try to find a better result. Like an ACTUAL review of the hosts I’m comparing.
You still think simply being that high in the serp = 6 figures? Not being a jerk, I’m seriously curious as to your reasoning on this.
Would you have believed the credit card term income if it wasn’t from another source?
Yes, I genuinely believe that. I’ve been involved in this industry for three of the biggest hosting companies. A long time ago when I was ‘outed’ by a blogger, they actually mentioned the domains of mine they found. Some relating to Hostgator, Bluehost and the third one was Dreamhost.
Yes and infact; this is something I tested last year. The crappier your site looks, the higher the CTR on adsense ads and affiliate links.
At least that’s how my tests went. I had adsense CTRs of up to 30%, but decided that was too risky because it could be considered tricking someone into clicking.
As I went to visit inbound.org I see the following on the very top
“The Great Google Sh*tstorm of Our Time viperchill.com”
Guess you did it twice in a rom
Awesome Glen!
If you think the SERP in Google US is messed up, imagine how it is in other countries, for example, in Brazil (where I live). I’m able to rank websites without any backlink for niches that are highly competitive in the US market.
I also see that freshness impact here. There are websites with a few crappy backlinks on top of authority websites for a wide range of niches, including, make money online, which is totally crazy.
kkkkk … Here in Brazil I classify my blogspot to the number one rank well for competitive keywords. When I realized that one year I was crazy!
Actually I do not know how to do it!
PS-Glen, thank you, most of what I know I learned from you!
Excellent input. I was wondering for a while how long that situation may stay stable, and with my very limited seo knowledge I would say that it’s getting close to google’s dream world, however they’d never admit it in public. All commercial searches (or majority of them) are ‘manipulateable’ in this or other way, ‘fresh’ content, affiliates, money sites etc. are ranking high everywhere, where people just think of spending money. Some respectable commentators before were surprised by what google does, but I think ‘if you don’t know what’s going on – follow the money’. Letting people to rank competitive sites relatively easy, g may enforce more ‘authorities’ in given niche to usr adwords to compensate losses and get back to the top… Just my 1p…
Hey Glen,
Not sure if I am late but would love to be one of the 15 guys. Already seeing some results following the tips you give in your posts.
Cheers,
Ameet
Another awesome post.
I’ve sent you an email but I fear I may be a little late for your SEO service. Guess we will see, could be a fun little experiment for me.
Any IM not trying to take advantage of Google right now would be insane. I am building more and more sites to take advantage and make as much money as possible while I can =]
-Stephen
Hey Glen, both this post and your last one have me captivated! Thanks for laying it out on the table like this mate!
I’m not sure how relevant my own recent experience is to all this, or if this is a whole different issue, but I’ve spent the last few years building a strong authority niche site that actually contributes quite positively to our industry in a number of ways. We publish quality content that always ranked really well, even though we were publishing much less frequently than our competitors. However, I was battling to make enough money from the site, so I was forced to focus my attention on my other businesses this year.
The result is, like the comment you highlighted in this post said, my traffic hasn’t switched off, but it’s slowly trickled away… I can understand if another site publishes a better “Beginners Guide to…” than my one, they should outrank my 2 year old guide that has lots of links and social signals, and still receives comments and helps people every day. But this isn’t the case. It’s low quality, thin content, and republished / duplicate content news type sites that are pushing me down… I presume primarily because they’re publishing 3-5 posts a day… mostly YouTube videos from other people…
If the only way to keep a quality resource site alive and kicking is to keep throwing content at it on a daily basis, then I give up on the web!
Sorry, just had to get that off my chest. I’ve had it with content websites… I’m now focusing on my e-Commerce business instead…
I think it’s high time I stopped trying to follow Google’s rules. I’ve been recently beaten by a spam site that just copied my homepage article and published it. My site slid down gradually as a consequence until I was no longer on the first page. Google literally punished my site for duplicate content regardless of the fact that I’m the author of the original piece. So now you can copy someone’s article, rank above them, and simultaneously get them penalized…much to wonder about.
Google’s results are “middling” now, and that is just being fair to them, otherwise I’d have used the word “trashy”. I’m definitely taking advantage of this freshness boost/loophole, lol. Thanks Glen for this engrossing article.
Glen!
Great post. Love reading about this stuff, thanks so much for sharing!
Btw, you’re backlinks.xxx course helped me to get a job at a digital marketing company where i get to experiment and practice SEO all day.
…so you can say I’m a fan of your work!
Also, i hope you received my email, i sent it fairly soon after this was posted!
I’m not sure if it’s a good idea to drop a link here, as some time back I have done a quick test on effect of hiding date from SERP’s..and it worked out really well..
I re-added the date back (For a 3 year old blog), and traffic dropped drastically, and removing date showed the positive effect. This is perfect for any blog, which is affected by Panda, Here is complete case study : http://www.shoutmeloud.com/effect-of-showing-date-stamp-on-blog-traffic-case-study.html
Regarding your case study, no doubt this is definitely gaming the system.. I’m sure for WordPress we can easily find any such plugin, which auto update post date to make it more recent..and I wonder what method Google will implement to crackdown this..or will they be able to??
Now I’m totally confused. I thought Glen said the dates on blogs aren’t treated the same – so no benefit from new comments on old posts etc.
Glen – please correct me, but I believe your posts never show dates, and you said ranking of your older posts suffered because they were OLD. So if Google would drop ranking of Glen’s older, albeit undated posts, how does it get fooled by Agrawal’s removal of post dates??
The theory that Google is influencing search results to increase Adwords sales are very likely. As you said they’re on the stock exchange and have share holders who are only interested in one thing and that’s NOT the “don’t be evil” slogan.
Of Google’s 50 billion revenue in 2012 is 42.5 billion out of Adwords sales. Nuff said.
Google doesn’t like SEO, in a way it’s their competitors.
What Google should be worried about is that other search engines are going to release similar post like yours, showing why they provide better results for searchers. Interesting to see if it ever comes to that in the future. As of now I think they’re still giving the best results, maybe not as good as they used to be but still better than the competition.
Yoast got penalized, now he has 4 results instead of 5 for WordPress SEO
Now being serious. The word review is basically irrelevant. All the results for whatever product people are researching are spammed. Maybe creating a website with real reviews can be a billion dollar idea.
Anyway, the results these days are horrible, but let’s hope if they change we still can rank as easy as it is right now.
Hey Glenn! Sent you an email. Hopefully i’m not too late =P
Very interesting as usual. I’m not a pro so I’m confused. So all this slight of hand at getting fresh dates are only for review sites and not blog sites? What’s the logic for the different treatments?
You sure have a style of writing which makes one feel like you are reading a crime thriller. This kind of writing revokes my passion for SEO and online marketing.
Something definitely fishy is going on re: freshness. I’ve seen a huge correlation with my sites’ rankings and the frequency with which I put out fresh posts.
I’ve always published my content without dates, because I didn’t want my readers to think it was old. Now I’m wondering if I should add a freshness plugin and see if I get better rankings.
I also know of many bloggers who push old posts back up to the front page, under recent posts. Some change the dates, some don’t.
Glen, you’re one of the only two guys who post enormous texts that get read by me. Congrats on your great work. I like your straightforward way.
Thanks Victor!
I’m curious if anyone else has run out to duplicate this kind of case study on other big money keyword groups. I used the same methodology to check out results for a bunch of MMO niches and have seen VERY similar results. (Not that I wouldn’t take your word for it – but everyone should do the work.)
… and even for the exact phrase “make money online”, you see lots of unqualified results.
For everyone reading this, there are a ton of free tools (and paid) that allow you to logically investigate everything Glen is saying here. Do your own due diligence and check out these results, reverse engineer them, and come to your own conclusions. It’s truly amazing how search quality has hit the skids.
Another great article, Glen.
Hey Glen,
Great post.
1) I think this will be a quick fix on Google’s end. They can easily see how old the post is based on their cache, not sure why the even look at the dates. I think many people are going to even be penalized from this.
2) The open site explorer from MOZ is terrible for seeing new backlinks. They don’t update their database/index often, and can sometimes take up to 3 months before seeing links show up. Google, however, can obviously detect and rank you for the backlinks. Most likely those scammy rankers just blasted their new site to make it look viral or something.
3) I don’t think those scammy sites will make so much because a) Pat Flynn actually gives value and reviews the host. People go out of their way to buy from him. b) When the visitor sees there is no review, they will go back to the SERP to find one, refreshing their affiliate cookie and the second site getting the sale.
4) Why don’t I receive an email notification when someone replies to my viperchill comments!
Great post Glen!
Ever checked out BIG keywords like ‘louis vuitton handbags’? Chinese folks make their way to the top by hacking authority sites and referring traffic to their shops. Take a look at vintagelouisvuitton.dbframework.com
I’ve been having this argument with my brother for a while now about how “gaming the system” is necessary in Google’s messed up world. Unfortunately, writing the best article simple won’t rank you.
Great work, Glen.
Mike 1: Brother: 0
Hi Glen,
Did you already found out which links network that website used? I am trying to figure it out for a couple of weeks now, as I see a lot of these types of links in some niches I am in (and they are ranking great because of these)…
PS. I am also an Backlinks.XXX member and because I just implemented one strategy in your course I am ranking for a lot of terms on the first page… Thanks. Signed up now on Stack That Money to do some PPC stuff!
Another great article. I too respect joost response.
Thanks Edgar!
Hey
“Thanks” for placing screenshot of my offer ($150/article) in your post. Now I have 100s of newbies asking me to write for me
Great article as always
That thread made me laugh so much.
Especially the cam girl comments
This post is so true. I’m ranking for several niche keywords in the Netherlands (were the algorithm is also messed up). I think having your own PR websites is the best thing to do, so it’s easy to get fast strong backlinks. The following weeks i will test a creditcard niche site en show you the results!
Glen,
Spot on dude. I bought the backlinksxxx (worth the money at 10x the price) and starting ranking a garbage site for keywords related to pet grooming products, specifically those that stop dog shedding. I only implemented half the techniques you shared so far (family is in town visiting) and have only been at it for 2 weeks. My site is on the 2nd page of google for one of the keywords. Granted, it’s an exact domain match (showing that isn’t dead either) but the citation and trust flow I have on majestic is already way higher than I ever got on a site that I legitimately tried to rank through content.
My point is this absolutely works. I have articles planned so that I actually provide value and receive affiliate link conversions. I will build this site into a great resource on my chosen topic. But it is amazing to see that content is only king when it comes to providing value and building a great resource, not necessarily when you are trying to rank.
Great stuff man. Keep it coming.
Mike
Glenn, do you share everything on your backlinksXXX course? (how do you share them? the main course? webinars?)
There’s no pricing information on the page for any continuity. I don’t want to be up selled or down selled without knowing where i can get the complete information.
No upsell no downsell.
is this the course to buy (backlinksxxx) if i want to know everything you know about SEO?
Not everything, but enough to get you some good results
Hey Glen (aka SEO VIPER)
After using a plugin called WP random post dater and pinging the links on some of my practically dead blogs i keep around for testing i have seen a spike in traffic its crazy cause all i did was change the post date.
One of my experiments involved a old tech blog i ran for which after checking again i realized i haven’t written a post for in 3 years. All of the post on that blog was outdated hence it receive a max of 5 hits a day with a 100 percent bounce rate. After changing the date and waiting a week im up to +- 50 hits a day.
This is awesome for people who love providing real value to my readers as i will use this to game the system to get some of my older sites ranking again the highly relevant ones of course.
and all the above came from putting into action your tips outlined in your last post now its time to put to test what i just learnt here.
ill be back with more results
thanks again
Hello Glen! I think you are right, not a week ago what I have labeled a video on YouTube for the first page! I never see anything Wistia staff rank in Google and their work is one of the best I know.
PS-Brazil
Ok, so how exactly are we supposed to use this information in this post to rank higher? Just keep updating the post date? Build a new site and hope Google ranks it because it’s new, or what? Some specifics would be awesome.
Great Article Glenn
I am amazed at some of the results you are finding but not surprised. You have identified through some research, a flaw in the Google machine! That said, don’t let anyone say that you are taking advantage of the system. EVERYONE is out to improve listings. It started years ago with hidden keywords. Its called survival of the fittest.
As a side note, I love the layout of your posts and appreciate the images coupled with the text. I am a visual person and like to see examples.
Keep up the posts, I think its safe to say that many thousands of people are interested in this stuff. And conspiracy theory or not, its great read and entertaining to say the least.
Cheers from Northern British Columbia, Canada!
Gordo
Hi Glen,
Awesome, awesome, awesome! THIS is the sort of stuff I really need to know about.
I’ve been following your mail outs and posts for a while now, but this one is easily the best.
I just sent you an email, and hope to be a member of your happy-15.
Thanks and regards from sunny Tokyo,
Robert
Glen:
I really like your strategy of building quality sites for the long-term and also building thin sites with paid links so take advantage of these loopholes in Google’s algo. Covering all bases is never a bad idea.
There is one aspect regarding these crappy search results that has me a bit confused. I understand that Google makes their money from Adwords. But I also believe it is in Google’s best interest to show quality sites in their search results. After all, if the quality of their search results diminishes over time searchers will start moving to other search engines that offer better search results. I’m not sure what Google is up to, but I don’t believe it is a profitable long-term strategy to rank crap sites on page one — because in the end, they’ll lose market share.
Glen,
Here’s one more example of using dates to rank higher http://www.premiumwp.com/best-portfolio-photo-gallery-wordpress-themes/
Just after the opening paragraph of this post, a date has been inserted manually which is probably updated on daily basis.
This page ranks first for a competitive keyword.
This is how people are exploiting search results.
Hey Glen – great post
All I can say…whatever these guys are doing to rank, I want in too
Like you have mentioned previously, you’ve had quality sites tank and so have tens of thousands of other sites have tanked by following the rules.
My motto – screw Google because everyday they are screwing us IMer’s big time. They don’t like us and guess what – the feeling is mutual.
Yes Google does blow chunks!
Freshness is best for news sites .. i do not have any idea what the hell this thing is doing in general queries or evergreen content.
Hey Glen,
Thanks for this post. I always heard about writing good content, build good links and traffic will come. However, the past year I been struggling with it so it doesn’t seem to work that well.
I can also confirm this. Two months ago I did a few Youtube videos and currently they are receiving 100 views per day. They’re easily ranking in the SERP with only a few backlinks. This is something that didn’t happen to my videos 1 1/2 ago.
I also saw several websites during the past months ranking high on SERP’s in a very strange way.
I’m not much about cheating. But playing good just doesn’t do it. Also Google is doing a shit load of money and they’re cheating a lot of people. So I really don’t see any problem about repaying them in the same way.
Hey Glen:
I bought your Backlinks XXX some times ago and made money using the strategy. I wrote a short article about my case study here:
http://www.wahgeek.com/backlinks-xxx-results-i-made-money-but/
Your linking technique did make me some easy moolah but I have to take down the site because someone is not too happy with my rankings..
Your recent posts remind me that I must take more actions to capitalize the “loopholes”. I’ve seen many crappy sites in my niche sitting on page #1 for profitable keywords.
OK now back to work!
I’m not a lawyer but there’s no way a DMCA should be enforced in that way. That’s the total opposite of what it was created for.
As long as you have a privacy policy and a disclaimer, you shouldn’t have had an issue. Your host could have backed you up from your side of things.
Unless you were going to the extreme — I don’t know, I didn’t see the site.
On the other side, great to see that you’ve made some money!
Hi Glenn, I would like to talk to you about one of the spots, can you please send me an email? Thanks, hope to talk soon
Nate
Hey Glen,
Another great post…
I’m pretty new to all this SEO stuff and much I don’t understand but I’m fine with that because I know it will come in time.
One thing I can say is I’m happy Google is screwed up…
… To me it’s a God send because now I don’t have to go insane trying to rank the impossible.
Authority sites have held the internet hostage long enough don’t get me wrong they “WORKED” for it…
…but the “TRUTH” is they also got “PAID”
To me it’s great to finally see the little guy getting a chance to make his mark on the web.
Every other industry does whatever is necessary to earn money – Look at the massive “scandals” that companies have faced in the recent years in terms of food production (Tesco’s Horse meat scandal was a pretty big one in the UK but it was 50% cheaper than normal beef).
Why shouldn’t we be any less?
When it comes to money, ethics go out the f$%kin window!
*Also great Article glen, I’ve been trying to promote exactly what you’ve been saying on my blog for the past 2 months or so, just been to lazy to right up a big enough post on it.
Also Yes, I make quite a good bit of side money with Black hatting sites to #1, who wouldn’t want an extra couple $1,000 a month?
Here’s what I don’t understand: HOW do you make money from a Youtube video that ranks well?
Give people a link when talking in the video.
Add a link in your description…
Great post Glen. I’m pretty sure Google knows how they’ll end up in shambles if they troll around with the SERPs, so why on earth are they allowing this. I mean sure freshness is important but it shouldn’t be THAT important to the point where it can outrank old sites with robust link profile and on page SEO.
I have been noticing for quite a while now that whenever I search I am dished up crappy results and find that I have to either dig further or constantly change my key-phrase until I get what I want. Even just in my searcher mode I am getting more and more frustrated with Google, in my marketer mode Grrrr!
Hope you still have spots available in your new SEO service.
Cheers from Australia
Linda
Superb Post bro Actually I read Half and I didn’t had time so I will read Half afterwards but really its Awesome and this post had also gone viral on Social Networking Sites too
KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK BUDDY
I’ve been surprised at just how many of the big players out there are doing this since reading this article. One example:
http://www.techradar.com/news/phone-and-communications/mobile-phones/iphone-6-release-date-news-and-rumours-1099865
thank god,mostly bloggers and seo optimisers read this post, if pirated content bloggers read this. i amsure searches are flooded by spam results.
interesting none of the comments have date stamps…just that updated date
thank you thank you thank u for explaining google to me they have changed the key word search just as I felt that I was starting to understand it lol from now on I am a true follower of your posts its great to have some genuine help and not just more of the same old hype rehashed.
Glen,
This is brilliant!
And much appreciated too. I look forward to more great blog posts and podcasts from you.
your new fan,
Pete
Thanks Peter!
This was a very informative article, thank you for sharing, Glen!
Very interesting! I wonder if Google uses words as an indication of freshness as well. For example, “The Newest Way to Do Blah” or “How to Do Blank in 2013.”
Hi Glenn,
Thanks for sharing these info. In fact I’m one of the people benefiting for google. I don’t even need to have a domain to do it. Many of the sites are from blogger, which nicely mask my identity. Nevertheless, well written post.
Result #3 doesn’t show anymore in google search result.
Did the 4th September changes in the google algorithm banned the link network?
Or was it because of this article?
It’s possible you’re seeing personalised results, but nothing is permanent
This is really ridiculous as far as SEO is concerned. I lost almost 70% organic traffic without any reason ; no link penalty, black hat SEO workouts etc. I wonder what’s happening around. Even the PR update has not come for months. Does Google go wild?
Glen, glad you spoke up about this and in a very detailed manner at that. For those who’ve been working on SEO for a while now, we all know how tough it is working with Google algorithms especially lately. They keep changing things and we are all expected to keep up without question. Nevertheless, reading your post about these changes are very helpful for all of us to know what’s really going on. Thanks!
Hey Glen
I hope the Bog Guns in SEO are taking advantage of this unrelieved practice by the Big G.
This post has many insight which can really provide with enough data and idea to really go through it.
The big Guys are already doing it, Glad I googled this post.
Take care.
I dare say it’s become even worse with the latest “Hummingbird” algorithm update these past few days. I’ve seen some sites shoot up to first SERP rank for some very long tail keywords I researched – and they neither had many backlinks NOR were they written in proper English. AND the post/articles/pages were short. Synthetic seems to be the new “natural” with Google now. I think their hundreds of variables, weightings and trying to serve up different content to different users depending on geo-location, previous searches and a host of other bla bla is simply beginning to backfire.
Excellent article, Glen. You’ve shared a lot of awesome tips lately. This post is not an exception. I’d love to become a part of your inner circle, however, I’m too late for it.
Just heard from one of my friends that the integrity of WPBeginner was being questioned here.
My name is Syed Balkhi, and I’m the founder of WPBeginner. Our goal at WPBeginner have always been to provide the best user experience.
I find that blaming us for Google’s mistake of picking up the comment date seems a bit unfair. The reason why the page is called Bluehost reviews is because that is where users leave their reviews (i.e comments). Each of those comments are dated (native WP functionality) and also good for usability so other users can see how old the review is. The top text is a description of bluehost…
On the other note, yes we do display last updated date on actual posts because we actually go back and update our articles when needed. That was also done to help deliver a better user experience, and we did a whole write up about it:
http://www.wpbeginner.com/opinion/why-you-should-not-remove-dates-from-your-wordpress-blog-posts/
A bit disappointed that someone reputable as yourself would take a cheap shot without even confirming the facts.
But I guess speculations sell…
-Syed
Hi Syed,
Thanks for the comment. I updated the post to link to it so that you can have your say.
I read that post you shared but it doesn’t really talk much about your updated date. Just about that initially you wanted to trick users about your content.
“Besides my thought was that removing the dates from blog posts would trick the users into thinking that my content is evergreen.”
Has the text on the pages actually changed besides comments, because in the code of the page I can see:
<meta name=”revised” content=”Thursday, June 13, 2013, 10:43 am”>
Yet a year previously, your review was exactly the same:
http://web.archive.org/web/20121012082253/http://www.wpbeginner.com/hosting/bluehost/
Also in the article you linked to you state that you now use ‘Last updated on’ but I couldn’t see that in the meta data. Only what I shared. I’m guessing that’s just for other blog posts though so no conspiracies from me
Where does the revised come from? Genuinely curious and I’m sure you have an explanation. I’m always willing to learn
I do have to stand by what I said about it seeming a little sneaky to reply to comments over a month later (multiple times). I would be very, very surprised if you hadn’t noticed yourself that the dates were being used in rankings and you were benefiting greatly from that.
I do appreciate you coming over here though, and as I said I did update the post to link directly to your comment.
Finally, don’t see this as an attack on you or your site (which is why I didn’t mention its name). I’ve known about it for years and actually think you’ve built a great resource for the most part. This was very much about highlighting the freshness flaws in Google and your site was a great example of this (as were many, many others).
Thanks for allowing me to have a voice here Glenn. I appreciate it.
The last updated date is something that WordPress stores for each post. Its part of how revisions are handled. It’s explained in my article that I linked to above, but here is the codex reference:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/the_modified_time
Basically when you update an article, WordPress keeps track of it. Also in the article I linked above it mentions that I did notice google was giving preference to fresh content which is why a lot of bloggers was removing dates… and I think the modified time is the perfect solution. So if you actually update the article, then you deserve the freshness credit. Now again this doesn’t mean just go and resave the post…. it means actually make updates…
As for the content of the bluehost review page, we occasionally test different copies for a short period of time to see if it makes a difference. Part of the reason for changing the copy of the description is because this same content is being pulled and displayed on our free setups page (a service that we offer). This allows us to centralize things and make it a bit easier…
As for the comments that are replied months after… that is because our comment queue was extremely backlogged for a while, and we try to reply to every single comment. So in reality that comment was not approved until a month later. But WordPress stores the date when the comment was submitted not when it was approved…
We added the meta revised tag because some of the articles that we updated would still show the old date on google. So I did a bit of research and it turns out that there is a meta revised tag that is available… so I added that in which also uses the same modified time code.
Theoretically you can use this same modified time technology to game the system by writing a function and auto-updating all of your posts…. but that’s not what we do at WPBeginner. Our #1 goal is to make the site as best as we can for our readers… this is the reason why it is the largest free unofficial WordPress resource site.
Also if you read that article about why I don’t recommend removing dates… it talks about when I first started in 2009, WPBeginner didn’t have any dates because I was delusional in thinking that WPBeginner is like wikipedia and it has evergreen content…. But the readers complained and said put dates on. So I did… then I noticed that people wouldn’t try the tutorial and instead leave a comment saying does this still work…
As the site has grown and our team is much larger, we make a conscious effort in going back and testing each and every article to the best of our ability and make sure that it works. Does it mean that there is no outdated articles on WPBeginner… absolutely not. But there is a good number of articles that we remove … or significantly update (sometimes even rewrite them) to make sure that it is accurate or have updated screenshots and so on.
I hope that clarifies everything.
Lastly as for your comment about not mentioning the name of the site, I noticed that you blurred out the link, but the name of the site is there in the screenshot several times. I wished that you had at least tweeted me or emailed me to confirm what we were doing and making your article a bit more accurate rather than making accusations.
Once again thanks for letting me have a voice and not censoring my comments.
Thanks for this informative post . Now a days every SEO person is confused and struggling around Google updates and search ranking of websites but no one knows exactly that what is going on and what the Google exactly wants. Every one is only speculating & now SEO is based upon speculations only. We need clear strategy to follow and which only Google itself can provide us. Now the time has come up when the Google will have to be transparent about it’s algorithm,updates or guidelines.
Google should launch a guide to show us real path about SEO strategies.
I read in another blog that Google is not using Page Rank anymore. Are you going to make a post on this?
Dude.
This stuff is incredible. First blog post in a long time that I’ve actually taken time to sit through and read the whole thing.
Amazing job – and thanks SO much for detailing us in on it.
One thing – could we possibly have an update on the 2013 scenario?
Regards (and thanks!)
JR John
Wow, your friend Pat has certainly done very well with Bluehost. If only I could have that sort of success!
Wonderful post but I was wondering if you could write a litte more on this subject?
I’d be very grateful if you could elaborate a little bit further.
Kudos!
Hey There. I found your weblog using msn. That is a really well written article.
I will be sure to bookmark it and return to read more of your useful information.
Thank you for the post. I’ll definitely return.
Someone had to bite the bullet, and I really appreciate that you did it. Will Google ever fix itself??
Let’s hope it does…sooner rather than later.
My brother suggested I might like this web site.
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Hey Glen,
Already seeing some results following the tips you give in your posts.
Thanks!
Excellent article, really like it.
thanks!