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Reputation abuse spam and expired domain SEO
19 Plays8 months ago
In this podcast episode, I will attempt to explain in simple terms what reputation abuse spam is, why it should be avoided, and why it’s generally confusing. As part of this discussion, I will also explore the relationship with expired domains.
There are plenty of good reasons why anyone listening to this podcast should not consider engaging in either reputation spam or expired domain SEO spam.
Explain it like I’m five years old
Reputation abuse spam is when someone uses tricky methods to make themselves or their website look better than they really are. Google doesn’t like this because it makes it harder for everyone to find the good stuff online. Expired domains are old website addresses that someone else used before, and sometimes people use them to try to trick Google too. We’re talking about why these tricks are bad and why you shouldn’t use them.
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Transcript
Introduction from Liverpool
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello, welcome back to the Untitled SEO Podcast, SEO Daily. This is part of our broadcast series. Right, I apologise in advance for people watching on video because the picture isn't great. Now, I'm in Liverpool for a conference and I thought it was more interesting to show the view of that ferris wheel than it was just to sit against a blank wall.
Understanding Reputation Spam
00:00:24
Speaker
but that is not what i'm going to talk about today what i'm talking about today is google making it very clear they're going to crap crack down on reputation spam now i'm not going to go into a great deal of depth about what reputation spam is because if i'm truly honest i'm a little hazy on some of the finer details but i'm going to talk about it because it's quite a good example of
00:00:51
Speaker
looking at something that Google's going to do and it helping you understand how they view the world and what they consider good SEO that will be rewarded by ranking increases and what they see as negative SEO or spammy SEO that will be not so much punished but
00:01:08
Speaker
not rewarded.
Google's Penalties for Spam
00:01:09
Speaker
Although actually with reputation spam, they have said they will be handing out manual penalties. So human beings are going to look at websites and decide if they're using reputational spam, but also algorithmic penalties. That just means the algorithm hasn't looked good. You're doing something that sucks. I don't like it. So what is reputational spam? It's
00:01:34
Speaker
imagine if you have the North Star, and quite often on these podcasts I talk about NASA as being like a North Star, like the most authoritative, most important website in a niche, or the most important website about, focused on a topic or a brand actually. Reputational spam is a method of getting websites to rank by kind of referring to a bigger brand a lot,
00:02:03
Speaker
but not actually really providing any new information. I mean, this gets pretty nuanced, if I'm honest, because theoretically, Google themselves are always sharing information from other people's websites, but then you might argue that they are in fact adding value. See what I mean? It gets complicated.
Exploring Expired Domains in SEO
00:02:24
Speaker
But one thing that did come up when I was reading the coverage of this is its relationship to expired domain SEO.
00:02:32
Speaker
That's also worth a mention because you can theoretically buy an expired domain and just point it at your website. I heartily recommend you don't do that for many reasons, but let's just look at it on a practical level. Let's ignore the spammy level a bit at the moment. The idea here is if you
00:02:55
Speaker
Billy Bob's rocket ships and the NASA domain expired, you'd buy it and just 301, you just redirect it to your Billy Bob's rockets website and Google would go, wow, look how important that website is now. Let's look at the practical reasons it's not worth bothering with. Number one, Google's not an idiot and Google looks at a domain, knows its history and then suddenly realizes it's now all moved over there without the content all moving over there. Doesn't look right.
00:03:23
Speaker
And just on an even more practical level, if you're going to buy an expired domain and use it for SEO, you're going to have to want to make sure that that website has good backlinks that are healthy. You're going to want to check the reputation of the website in many other ways. Look at what sites are linking to it. There's a good chance it won't be niche-relevant linking.
Personal Experiments and Conclusion
00:03:45
Speaker
So this is a bit of a mixed bag. It's a bit of a short episode as well because I've been travelling all day today, but I just wanted to mention
00:03:52
Speaker
That bit about reputational spam, as confusing as that might be, but also the expired domain SEO method, which I don't recommend. I've experimented with myself in the past for my own websites. A lot of people in SEO have a bunch of websites of their own.
00:04:10
Speaker
but I didn't just 301, I actually built a site with tons of content. And then it was an experiment I lost interest in. Such is the mind of an SEO person. So there you go. Goodbye from Liverpool. I hope to speak to you tomorrow, but they're going to be quite busy at this conference. And hopefully that Ferris wheel in the background, if you're watching the video has been moving and is interesting.
00:04:33
Speaker
Thanks for listening, thanks for watching. Please comment, let us know what you think of these daily episodes, and I will speak to you again tomorrow. I hope.