I don’t know how much more abundantly clear we can make things on our sites when we say, for instance, at Lucire: ‘We receive multiple enquiries from SEO or “outreach” companies about paid or guest posts each day, and if you fall into this category, please do not contact us: it’s going to be no.’ This website has ‘Please note that there are no paid or guest posts on this site, or link sales.’
It’s actually nice to be posting about this rather than daily Semrush-inspired disinformation, and I think we’ve shown their processes to be disingenuous over the last year. It probably won’t change a thing, because two of the big names in search engine media don’t want to know, and the “SEO” industry is largely bogus with only a tiny sliver of ethical players who have a conscience. It is in the interests of the unethical to keep the system going, just as oil companies have their system.
Similarly, it took over 15 years since my first warnings for the penny to drop about Google among the mainstream, and many years about Facebook and Twitter.
But today, let’s talk about this other system of paid posts (again) and why we’re so strict about them. Perhaps not surprisingly, many of these players are also tied to the bogus end of the “SEO” industry.
1. We do run legitimate advertorial from legitimate agencies. But if your primary aim is “SEO”—often evidenced by people approaching us from Gmail or Outlook addresses—then please don’t think you fall into this group of legitimate players. You don’t. You’re millions of dollars away from playing in that field.
We do know when: you’re writing from a newly registered domain expressly set up for outreach activity. We know it when you’ve used a fake profile photo to look like a pretty young female. We also know your ‘California, USA’ or other addresses are bogus. And if you need to resort to any of these techniques, then, let’s face it, you’re not legitimate.
I still remember one case where the outreach person linked to a post on a friend’s site in her email. She didn’t know I had this connection. Out of curiosity, I visited the page—if anything to warn my friend she had been hoodwinked. And sure enough, there was the alleged author’s name, next to her photo—which was of a completely different person to the one in the email footer.
2. If we run these advertorials, we are properly compensated. My partner forwarded me one today where the outreach rep was offering us US$25. This is laughable. Even US$100, the other offer, is laughable. I’ll explain why a little later, but if you’re figuring that this compensates us properly, then you are delusional.
Assuming you are legitimate, you wouldn’t be offering such pathetic rates. Because you would know that there is a whole lot of work involved to get a post on to the web, including designing and uploading. And we’re going to spend that time on legitimate work, thank you, whether it’s from our own real journalists and editors, or from real clients prepared to pay to be seen with top brands.
3. We write the advertorials. Again, this is something legitimate companies understand and the “SEO” people don’t. We write them. We can have keywords and links in there, but we write them, so whatever comes out is unique to us. And writing these takes time.
So many of you say you offer ‘high-quality articles’. One look at your offerings, for those who propose topics, tells me that you have never even visited our publications. Your program, or whatever automated your spam, might have detected a couple of relevant keywords that we hit and that’s what you want. We know this.
A lot of you also make reference to Lucire’s ‘blog’. There is no blog there. Just because the news section is driven by Wordpress, which was created for blogging, doesn’t mean it’s a blog. Libriz is run off Wordpress: there’s no blog there. One of you even linked to one of our HTML articles as an example of what you wanted to see. We laid that page out manually. A traditional web page is not part of a blog. But to so many of you, every web page is a blog—because so many of you are rank amateurs.
Beyond Branding still gets these requests even though the blog has been closed since 2006 (and this fact is made very clear). Medinge Group receives them. Even Jack Yan & Associates gets them. Despite none of these sites ever running a single item that was not about each organization.
And why do we write our own advertorials? Do you know what Google would do if it detected that we were one of a dozen sites running the same links with the same copy to your client? We would be branded a content mill and 28 years of hard work to achieve any sort of ranking would go down the toilet. I personally might not like Google, but I also live in the real world. You don’t care if you lay waste to the publications your posts get put on. We, however, are looking at the long term. Is US$25 going to cover the reputational damage where our Google ranking goes down? I’m not sure if US$250,000 would even cover it.
4. We comply with the law. This is from experience, when I actually used to reply to some of these people, even the ones who failed the first test. (I used to be a lot nicer about replying to the more intriguing ones, even though we are bombarded daily.) Assuming we get past points 1 through 3 above, it falls over here, because most of these “SEO” people want us to break the law.
In New Zealand, where we are HQed, and through private international law we have the most connecting factors, it is the law to mark what is an advertorial. We are not in the business of deceiving readers. The legitimate players know this, and in fact, some of them specify in the contract that we use very exact wording to make this identification. Usually we use ‘special promotion’ but sometimes we are more explicit with ‘sponsored video’ or ‘sponsored post’. Oh how you phonies hate this.
So no, we are not doing your work for you, and you do not leverage our reputation for your short-term gain. We know you made your client promises, yet they should know that their top positions will be fleeting. Because why should they last? Google and others will figure out a campaign is present, and everyone is duly penalized—not that you care, since you’ve moved on to other sites to plague.
If you want your posts up on a site that has been around for 28 years like Lucire, or in the case of JY&A, 30 years, then build a site and run it professionally for three decades. Then you can do whatever you like there. Come back to me in 2055 and tell me how long it took for your site to be detected as a content mill.
We also saw that this was the underlying motive to an audacious Indian firm that actually bought and sold sites. They approached us some time ago bragging about their US$10 million in sites, but they also told me how many sites they had. Each was worth very little. The sites were content-rich but perhaps neglected by their former owners. They would buy them, pump them full of “SEO” links, perhaps showing how much revenue the site generated, then flog them off to another buyer for a profit, claiming how much they made off it for a short period. This really is “pump and dump” but applied to entire websites. Who knew there would be a company buying websites with the aim of destroying them?!
They knew to sell because they knew that they had effectively destroyed the site as far as its link value was concerned. And that was another reason I knew that sites that acceded to these outreach requests would be committing seppuku.
To the outreach and “SEO” players, let me say this: we know your game. We’ve been on the internet since 1989. We have been here since before your profession existed. And we don’t really think much of your approach, pumping the web full of junk: it is unconscionable and does the medium a disservice. It might not be as bad as “AI”-authored disinformation, but it is cut from the same cloth, for the same ends.
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Back in 2012 to 2014, I had a finance blog that was doing well (I started it years before those time periods and ended way after). Then I got a traveling gig, and I realized that it was more tiring than I expected it to be (I was in my early to mid 50s), and since I had 3 other blogs at the time, I just couldn’t keep up with all of them.
So I started allowing “paid” guest posts, and didn’t take the credit for any of them. The only caveat I had was that the content had to be geared towards an American audience (they also had to answer any comments). I generated “okay” money, but ended up having to edit at least half of what I allowed. The money was never big compared to what I was earning, but the outside content allowed me to write occasional posts of my own without losing my audience.
It was a mixed bag to be truthful. When I had the time to edit some of the articles, the extra money was nice, but when I didn’t, I wasn’t happy with what I was allowing. But I didn’t charge close to what you mentioned, and maybe that was something I should have considered… or I should have just shut down that blog because I was spreading myself thin (I was writing 2 other blogs for other people). It was fun until it wasn’t; what a life it was! lol
Thank you for sharing your experience, Mitch. I’m glad you made a few bucks off these people—the least they can do given that they will never know your brand as well as you do. You are so right that their contributions need to be watched. We had one guy approach us, more professionally, with some finished articles, and he was the one person who slipped through over at Lucire a long time ago, even though I knew what his game ultimately was. (We subedit, and the links made it pretty clear.) That only ended when his last article was so far off the mark and when I pointed that out and asked him to rewrite, the result was still really poor. That was the end of that because he just couldn’t deliver at that last occasion. I then removed all his old stuff, maybe about four pieces in amongst thousands online. Thank goodness that Google didn’t punish you for selling anchor text back then.
It definitely pays not to spread yourself too thinly. I hope you were reasonably compensated for those other two blogs.
At that time I was up to 5 blogs, but that’s the only one I allowed paid posts from others. I was a royal mess, but learned a valuable lesson.
Really happy to know you’ve come out of that! I still remember spreading my stuff too thinly—I had this blog, but I also had one on Vox (for personal stuff) and Tumblr (mostly graphical). Eventually Vox died but briefly, something called Blogcozy came up, then NewTumbl, as de facto successors. They have both since died. After all those diversions, I am back to this one space for blogging. Nothing beats having your own space and full control.