How Black-Hat SEO Destroyed the IT Company I Worked For
The Death of Gray SEO: Why Your Content Needs Soul, Not Just Keywords
Exposing the fake reports and soulless tactics of IT agencies — and what actually ranks
Search engine algorithms change almost every day! How to keep up with all these changes? Rewrite the same article endlessly, adjusting it to standards? Or maybe the secret is not in this at all…
For me, all these manipulations with SEO are just cheating. And I will tell you why!
My experience with SEO in an IT company
I worked in an IT company for several years, and my position was such that I had to interact with all departments, including the SEO department, closely. The guys there were getting paid quite a lot, 3–5 times more than I. I thought, what kind of magic is going on there? Maybe they are incredibly smart? Or maybe they know some secret?
It turned out to be less mysterious and less honest…
How did SEO actually work?
The guys used this method: they took programs like Ahrefs and SEMrush. They took 5 competitors, or the client gave this list, but more often SEO managers looked at the site that had the highest indicators in the same niche.
Then they copied their keys. The same ones were deleted. This list was given to the client for verification, he chose the necessary ones. He also marked some keywords as stop words (words that should not be used either in the semantic core or in the texts).
Based on this list of keywords, I made a technical task for copywriters. I selected five articles from competitors, inserted them into the technical task as an example. The copywriter read these articles and did the copywriting.
Since there were a huge number of clients from the same niches, the copywriters were constantly burning out. It is quite difficult to write the same text using different words.
The texts were not useful, they were wooden. There was little benefit for clients, but for a while, the algorithm was happy. But the main thing was that all the keywords were inserted!
Fake activity and fake reports
Since it was unfair play, the site did not rise in search results.
The SEO department came up with the following: artificially inflate behavior. Several people have done this simple scenario:
Step 1 — We had to open a browser, or several, with VPN, and find this client site in the search results.
Step 2 — We had to walk around this site, simulating activity, visit the different pages: services, blogs, and the main page. After spending about 7 minutes on the site, exit.
Thus, the site rose a little for a short time. But it did not give real clients. And if several people came to the site, they were bored and they immediately closed it. Behavioral factors fell. This reflected badly on the site.
To prevent the company owner from scolding the head of the SEO department, she told the SEO managers to write “beautiful” reports for clients, so that they could see how the site was rising in search results.
Everything was an imitation:
- texts — soulless templates;
- behavioral factors — inflated;
- client's reports — an illusion;
- results — zero.
How it ended
Many SEO managers said that they felt like they were selling air. They weren’t bringing any real benefit. And they gradually started quitting.
The SEO that the team was doing was unprofessional and gray. No one knew how to do it right, and they learned from free YouTube tutorials, watched some weird training from everyone who claimed to be an SEO guru.
It worked for a while. But the clients’ business wasn’t growing. They started breaking contracts.
The result was that the company lost clients, went bankrupt, and closed.
How SEO should work
Algorithms have become smarter. Now it is not enough to throw keywords at an article. It should be useful. If users visit the article, spend time on it (read), leave comments, like, share, the algorithm will understand that it is USEFUL, or maybe just interesting.
And when you write a really good article, you need to select keywords from it, by which the article will be ranked.
And the way my company did it — these were soulless texts, empty, uninteresting. That is why I also do not like copywriting. They reprint articles a hundred times that they do not understand. And the author writes from the heart, because he has experience. But copywriters are not paid for this.
What works in SEO now
- Content should be useful, that is, when people come, like, and come back.
- Text should be natural, with a highlighted title and subtitles.
- Content should solve a problem for a person.
- Unique content, not copywriting.
- You need to answer specifically the requests of site visitors, and not stuff the article with keywords, like a chicken or a duck at Christmas.
Real SEO is what people love, what they are interested in, not what algorithms are interested in. It is not a magic pill, it is what helps your content to be found. But if there is no value in the content, then no SEO will help. Real SEO is what helps your content to be found. Maybe you’ll find something useful or beautiful here 🦝?
Have you ever worked in a company that wrote fake reports?
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