Drew Madore ventured out from his lock down to meet with me at a nearby baseball stadium. I selected the area because it let us have several football fields of space for socially distancing. Looking at it now, it does look a bit too much but hey, trying to be super safe during these times.
Drew Madore is the CEO and founder of Synergist Digital Media and The Primer Group. He has been in the SEO space for over 15 years but it not super active in the community or on social media. He tries to lay low a bit professionally but he does understand the power of social media for his customers.
We then spent a nice amount of time talking about black hat SEO, what has changed over the years and what has not. He said doing black hat SEO does help you know “how far out of the lane” you can go with your clients, but never deploy it for clients, test it on your test sites. He said spammy links do still work to some degree, but it is not recommended for clients or money sites. But testing it can give you some information on how far you can go. Back in the old days it was much easier, you can blast links and get rankings super quick, it is not that easy anymore he said.
He shared there are white hat techniques you can use to achieve some of what you were trying to achieve in black hat. The idea of building sites to burn down with spammy techniques is no longer a good idea but for testing purposes, it helps him see how far he can push the limits of SEO.
I then pressured him to share some black hat SEO techniques. He said PBNs no longer really work but you can now build a legitimate web site, boost it up over years and years and then you can use that legitimate web site as you would a PBN to help your other web sites rank better with links. He said it is a much safer way to do this. I then diverted to how the practice of link building is now looked at as a black hat SEO technique, for some reason.
But to sum up, it is easier for a big established brand to build out new brands once their original brand has been established. So that is the tactic, build a great site the real way and use the leverage of that site to help your other brands or sites, he said.
More to come in part two...
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