- You guys wanna hear something interesting?
Well today I'm gonna share with you all of my war stories
about getting banned by Google.
Hey everyone, I'm Neil Patel,
and today I'm gonna share with you
SEO mistakes that you should avoid
and if you don't, you're gonna get banned.
So the first one I have for you
is building links through WordPress themes.
Some people are still doing them,
and they're like oh my god, this works.
Whether it's through WordPress themes,
it's through widgets, it's through like those little
stack counter badges.
Or anything like that.
See, back in the day, I had a web hosting website.
I never provided web hosting,
but, I ranked number one on Google for the term web hosting.
That's one of the most competitive terms.
Everyone's going after it because they want affiliate
commissions for HotGator, bluehost, GoDaddy.
You name it.
And the way I ranked really high was,
I bought a domain that had hosting in it,
or the term web hosting,
and then I bought a ton of WordPress themes.
Instead of creating my own themes
and putting the link at the bottom,
I just found all the popular WordPress themes
that are already out there and that existed,
and I bought the themes, right not just from the person
for like $50.
I'm talking about these free themes that cost no money.
So let's say the creator of one of the themes
would be David Zayne.
I would hit up David and be like hey you created
an awesome theme,
I'm just gonna buy the whole theme from you
for $10,000 and the whole business and the site.
And I'm gonna switch the bottom to say
theme created by David Zayne
to team created by, let's say,
Neil Patel's web hosting site.
And I'm not gonna give up the URL
but it was web hosting something, right?
You can fill in the blank.
And by doing that, I was building hundreds
and thousands of links right away
cause I was buying all the most popular WordPress themes
out there and sites.
Within six months I shot off to the page of Google
for the term web hosting.
Within another three months,
I shot up to the first spot.
And you know what happened?
Google eventually banned by website.
When I was ranking number one,
I was generating over a $100,000 a month
in affiliate income.
That was great.
I didn't even spend more than $50,000
buying a ton of theme sites
and I did that over a period of six months.
So the income that I was generating was huge
compared to my investment.
But I got banned.
And they only banned me, and funny enough,
number two and number three were using the same tactic
but Google didn't ban them.
And I think it was because people eventually found out
it was my site and they wanna make an example,
nonetheless, I learned,
don't do shady link affiliate tactics.
The second strategy I have for you is expired domain names.
There was a domain name that was named after a park one day.
It was battlefield something, maybe battlefield bypass
or whatever it is.
And I bought this expired domain name,
cause it was about like the civil war in America
and it had all these edu links.
And I did something really creative and interesting.
And I'm no longer in this space,
so I'll tell you all about it.
So with this battlefield bypass site,
what I ended up doing is I took the expired domain name,
put up casino related content,
and then I built a few links here and there,
but all I did was just a take really old domain name
that had a ton of authority.
You're talking about a domain name that costs
over $10,000 that was expired
and people were like, oh my god,
this thing has a high Google paid rank,
and back then that mattered, now it doesn't.
I switched it all to casino related stuff,
and then boom, I popped up in the top three spots
for the key term online casino and casino.
That's crazy, right?
Eventually Google figure it out,
got banned, lost all my money,
but when I was at the top, I was making, again,
six figures in affiliate income each and every single month.
If you notice a trend I used to do a lot of this stuff
back in the day when I was a kid.
I stopped really doing this kind of stuff now
because it's not long run.
And if you're not sure if you're SEO strategy
that you're using is gonna get you banned
or if it's for the long run, leave a comment,
and I'll tell you if you be doing more of it,
or less of it.
Cause the last thing you wanna do
is put all this time and energy like I did
and then get banned.
Think long term.
The last strategy I have for you
that eventually will end up getting you banned
or penalized, or just crush your rankings,
is writing the same content over and over again.
See, a lot of you guys have blogs.
And what you're doing with your blogs,
and this will really get you banned,
but more so just drastically reduce your traffic,
you can be like, what is all these Google updates happening?
Why is my traffic keep going down?
And I used to be a victim of it myself.
After awhile, you run out of topics to produce.
So you just regurgitate the same stuff over and over again.
And I'll write articles like the top ten marketing tools
for an SEO.
The top ten free Google tools that every SEO
should be using.
The top ten SEO tools for 2018.
And then I would even have older ones,
the top ten marketing tools for 2017.
And then 2016.
And I did this to each and every single year,
and I just regurgitated this information
over and over again.
Did it for SEO tools, marketing tools, social media tools,
and there was so much overlap in the content.
What ends up happening when you have two articles
or three articles that are on the same exact topic?
How does Google know which one to rank?
They don't.
Instead, what you should be doing
is updating your old content and changing it to 2017
to 2018 and making the tools more thorough.
Delete the old ones that no one uses anymore.
And by doing that, Google's like,
oh cool, you're updating your old content.
We should keep ranking it higher and higher
cause it's fresh.
They don't wanna rank old content that's outdated.
I just recently bought a blog
for half a million bucks.
And this blog was like,
oh some months we get 1.2 million unique visitors,
some months we get 800,000 new visitors.
And like it's all seasonality.
It's not seasonality.
It's because they have the same content
that's regurgitated over and over again
and they have a lot of outdated content
that talks about tools like FeedBurner,
which no marketers use anymore.
You delete all of that stuff,
and you prune the content,
and you update the old stuff.
What you'll find it, your traffic won't just go up,
but it will be way more consistent.
So in your blog you probably already have regurgitated
content, combined, the less powerful one,
so go into your Google Analytics,
look at the one that gets the least amount of search topic,
and redirect it to the other one.
Combine the content, make it more thorough,
you have less duplicate content,
and take all your old content
that just sucks and no one's reading anymore
and no one likes, and delete it.
And redirect it to the most relevant post.
When you do that, you're gonna get way more traffic,
you're not gonna get penalized,
and it's gonna continually grow quarter over quarter.
Sure if you avoid these three things,
there's no guarantee that your Google traffic
won't go down.
But in the long run when you measure it,
year over year,
you should still be going up.
Think long term, and don't do short term tricks
and tactics like I was doing.
Be like, oh, yeah, what kind of widget can I end up
buying and put my name all over it?
It's not about that.
It's about longevity.
And follow these tips and you will have longevity.