The Summer Of Broken Things - Part 1
Originally sent to the GrindstoneSEO email list.
By Grind — Founder of GrindstoneSEO. Building links since 2006. @GrindstoneSEO
A more accurate Email subject line has never been written.
But I'm going to have to break it up into a series because 1) time is short, things are still breaking and 2) Beserker Mail only allows me to drop 3 links per email. Not sure I can explain all this with only 3 links and I hope that having to bang out smaller emails will allow me to get back into the writing vibe we had going earlier this year. Time will tell.
This is also the second time this email has been written as apparently it didn't auto-save and I didn't save it. One more broken thing to pile on...
So last we chatted on this fine communication system, the Google Leaks had just broken.
SEO midwits everywhere tried to convince you that they were smart by playing it cool.
"nothing new there"
"nothing I didn't already know"
and my personal favorite "how do we even know that's a live environment, might be fugazi"
Me, being the guy on the left and incapable of midwistic logic, decided to test all the things I didn't know about...and run some confirmation tests on what I did.
First up was TF-IDF.
I told you guys way back how I do on page SEO. You probably laughed at me. Why would I do that when {Surfer|POP|Cora} will do it all for me?
https://grindstoneseo.com/lets-pareto-that-bff/
Specifically the part at the end where I talk about fine tuning my page one ranks.
Then Google showed us this:
And me, being extra-drooly left side guy, went and took a bunch of my page 1 properties that I'd already previously tuned to perfect TF-IDF and fucked with them.
For science.
The newly over-optimized ones dropped hard.
The freshly under-optimized ones dropped less hard.
Interesting...almost like they're running very tight 'over-optimization' filters to combat all the optimization tools being used in this industry.
Almost...
Next test, I reversed course. Dialed them all back in.
They all climbed back to their previous lofty positions.
Well then, there's a lot to unpack there.
First test confirms some biases and more importantly, confirms that the Leaks are genuine data that can be applied to our attempts at circumventing the Algo for fun and profit.
I'll tell you about the next test in Part II as I'll need more links to get through it but before I go, let me add some context to the email subject.
Right around the Test Two was finishing up, my Tier 2's broke.
Not the first time, a few years ago Google noticed someone was abusing them at scale for link building and made a fix to strip the link juice out of the flow.
Took me about 20 minutes to find the work-around and about 3 hours to bulk edit (I love regex so much, thanks @guerilla for showing me that back in the day) and upload 4000+ html files and the juice was flowing again.
But this wasn't Google.
This was my shit ass server provider deciding to take down my server with no warning. Not entirely true. They sent one email that said if I didn't respond in 48 hours, they'd take down my server.
It went to spam. (Probably just like this email will.)
Suddenly my team is telling me they can't log in and create links.
I reach out, they say something dumb like 'didn't you see the email?'.
What email? I go look...now I'm legit mad. You just took one of the most powerful link building systems down because you wanted to prune boxes that aren't actually being used, despite the fact that they're being paid for? And mine is used daily, what in the actual fark?
I'll skip the ass reaming I handed out that day but safe to say, it's one of the most legit ones I've delivered in this industry.
Incompetent and unprofessional doesn't begin to cover the scope of their actions but eventually their new server tech and I hashed out that he'd recover everything they nuked and we'd have a new system going forward.
And minus 5 days of production and my consistently elevated stress hormones, nothing was really harmed in the making of this fuck up.
I'll leave it there, almost 700 words and we're just getting started.
Cheers,
Grind
P.S. Links are flowing over at https://clients.grindstoneseo.com, as always. The battle for finding legit T1 placements isn't getting any easier but the team is in the trenches every day, making it happen. Go order something and elevate their stress levels, cheers.
Or just reply to this email and let me know how you're doing, it's been a minute.
Want these in your inbox?
Subscribe to get new editions before they hit the blog.