From my recent podcast with Edward Strum!
Key Points
- SEO for Established vs. New Brands: An established brand with existing website authority can expand into new topics or niches and see results much faster, potentially ranking hundreds of new pages within 7-8 months by leveraging its existing brand signals and internal linking structure. Smaller or newer websites lack this authority, so similar aggressive content strategies are not feasible and won’t yield the same quick results.
- Black Hat Tactic with Government Domains: A notable black hat SEO tactic involves purchasing expired domains previously owned by government entities for specific events (e.g., marathons, public initiatives). How the Tactic Works these domains retain powerful backlinks from other official government websites. By publishing a large volume of new, often unrelated, content on these acquired domains, SEOs can leverage the high authority to rank quickly and generate significant traffic, particularly from Google Discover.
- High Risk and Eventual Penalties: This is a short-term strategy. Google eventually identifies the change in ownership and content relevancy, leading to a manual spam penalty that is extremely difficult to remove. This “burn” process typically takes about 7 to 8 months.
We discussed this from 01:02:49 – 01:10:11 in the video below!
Here is the full transcript of what we discussed from 01:02:49 – 01:10:11!
Gagan Ghotra – Of course. I think it also comes down to this: if you’re an SEO Consultant looking at a website that’s already an established brand and they want to grow into a new topic or a new niche, you already have existing authority.
The website is already set up, so you can publish maybe 500 new pages in the next five months, do proper internal linking, and everything else.
Those brand signals help the new pages, and you can rank them within seven to eight months. However, doing that on a small website isn’t possible because you don’t have that level of authority already. So, the expectations are that as you go from SMBs to enterprise, you can deliver quickly. That is just how SEO and site-wide signals work. But many people think of it as if they can put something in today and get an output tomorrow.
Edward Sturm – This is always a fun question to end with. Are there any interesting black hat tactics that are just really interesting, maybe not even smart, but where you think, ‘I can’t believe that this is working’?
Gagan Ghotra – Yeah. So, in Australia, Malaysia, Singapore, and India, many government bodies just buy a specific domain for an event.
Let’s say the Singapore government is doing an event next month; they’re going to buy a domain like ‘Gaganevent.sg’.
This new domain gets linked from all the other domains that the Singapore government owns. But once the event is done, they just let the domain go. There are hundreds of these kinds of domains everywhere. I’m not telling you to go and buy them, but they are everywhere: in Australia, Singapore, India, certain countries in Europe, the UK, and the US to a lesser extent. So, you can get a domain that already has such strong links from all these government websites, publish content on it, and burn it to the ground in about eight to nine months.
Edward Sturm – That can work. Man, I should have started with that question. That is crazy. That’s very interesting. So, people are buying these sites and then putting up completely unrelated content on them from what they were originally ranking for?
Gagan Ghotra – Yes, completely unrelated content, published at scale. Then you can get a really good amount of traffic from Google Discover. So, let’s say there’s a domain that a government let go, which was for something like a marathon event to promote fitness.
Edward Sturm – So let’s say, give me a name for it. It would be like, I don’t know, the “City Name 5K” or something?
Gagan Ghotra – Yes, something like that, to promote fitness among citizens. You can just take that domain and publish whatever you want. It’s not like it has to be related to fitness. You can just go and publish accounting-related content, and it will start to rank. Then you can go to these accounting businesses and say, “These many people are coming to my site, do you want to do a partnership with me where I do lead generation for you with this one?” Because you can rank for anything.
Edward Sturm – Because there are so many government links pointing to it that even though… man, that’s crazy. So, for people who don’t know, government backlinks are really valuable and pass a lot of authority. And so, people are buying these domains, putting up content on them that wasn’t related at all to what was on the original site. But because these sites have so many .gov backlinks, they can get away with anything. And they do this basically until they get penalized, and then they move on.
Gagan Ghotra – I think they move on. Right now, it’s almost a seven to eight-month time period where Google says, “Yeah, we got you. There was a change of ownership from the domain.” I think it is easier to figure it out, but I’m not sure why Google is not able to figure it out quickly. I mean, right now if there is a lot of content around a government program on a domain, and suddenly someone is publishing content about fitness affiliate products and everything else, you can see the change as a human. You can say that last week it was this, and right now it is that. There is a big difference.
Edward Sturm – Here’s what I want to ask. What if you took one of these domains and just said, “I want to make a business in the same niche that the site was originally published in.” You actually kept the branding from the original site, you kept the niche from the original site, and you just started selling your own products with it. Would you still get penalized?
Gagan Ghotra – Yes, you would still get penalized.
Edward Sturm – Because the ownership changes?
Gagan Ghotra – I will give you an example from last year. Someone bought a domain for around 800k USD, and that domain had really good backlinks from government domains in the USA, UK, and everywhere else. It worked for almost seven months, but just in February of this year, they got a major spam problem manual action.
They have gone to 12 or 13 different SEOs, all the known names, and they have tried to get that manual action lifted, but Google is not lifting it. With each request, they are saying there are major spam problems.
Edward Sturm – You know what, it makes a lot of sense. Because if you suddenly stop getting these valuable backlinks because the ownership changes, and you’re not getting good backlinks anymore, over time the site is naturally just going to stop being as valuable. It’s a pattern problem. The pattern of valuable backlinks changes.
Gagan Ghotra – Yes, of course. I think if they wanted to control this, they could control it. It’s just about the resources that they are allocating to this problem. The same is true with site reputation abuse problems. Even though we discussed renting the subfolder, which is technically against Google’s policies right now, you cannot do that. That is called the site reputation abuse spam policy, and there is a manual action for that as well.
That’s what happened with the Forbes Advisor subfolder last year. But right now, they don’t want to focus their resources on these things; they are just letting it happen. So, you can do the renting of the subfolder, you can buy the expired domains, and everything else, until Google gets to a point where they are like, “Okay, right now AI mode and AI Overviews is…”
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