Can You Hang Yourself With An SEO Loophole?
I am fond of telling people to avoid the latest “shiny objects” and stop chasing this or that “loophole” that will give you short term ranking benefits and long term heartbreak.
Yep, you should focus on a market and build some tiny little businesses and along the way “affinity” with your visitors and list.
Except sometimes. Sometimes chasing the money is an OK thing. Sometimes it can give you cash flow to fund more long term efforts. And sometimes – heck, most of the time – it is a soul sucking rathole that leads to zero profits, lots of debt, and a mentality that if you just double down on the next loophole you’ll make it up.
So how do you pick which loopholes – especially the SEO loopholes internet marketers are fond of – to spend some time with and which to jetison?
Honestly, I don’t have a good answer. Most of it is by feel and something that aligns with skills.
But I do know one word you need to embrace – “containment”.
There’s only a few marketers I know that chase loopholes successfully. Keith Baxter, Howie Schwartz, and Jeff Johnson come to mind. There are of course others – thousands of others. But you don’t know them. They are always underground to the IM community, and a lot of them are focused not on SEO but on various paid traffic loopholes.
Now chasing loopholes isn’t just for the blackhat, gaming nerd living in their mother’s basement. Nope, not by a long shot. You have the corporate cloaking community – which extends way past JC Penney, BMW, and other name brands that got caught. And you even have the hosting and domain registration companies like GoDaddy’s spammy link building techniques that Yoast reported on.
But the thing with all these examples is that they are well contained. What I mean is that it’s a (small) part of their business and not the dominant part. These corporations that play with the same cloaking and SEO loopholes you see in popular IM products aren’t built on a bed of sand. They have a solid foundation and can bounce back when the occasional scandal hits.
And that’s what you should do. Treat these loopholes as “cashflow opportunities” and only let them take up 10-20% of your total online marketing time.
OK, so here’s a simple example. Say you start seeing Facebook Notes pages popping up in the search engines for lots of various product make/model number terms. Maybe you missed the Warrior Forum discussion on that one, or you were focused on building out your marketing funnels or you just figured that since Facebook “only” lets you use iFrames there’s no ranking value.
Whatever, the bottom line is that you see these start to pop up or you hear about it somewhere… what should you do?
First, think “cashflow” – this is likely a short term loophole. Now, short term can be a month or a year. Before Facebook there was Squidoo, Hubpages, and a whole host of other sites that came into Google’s love and favor. usually after a time they get knocked down a peg or two. Or in the case of ezinearticles, they get wiped and struggle to return.
Next, you at your resources. Look at how you’d exploit this and put a system in place to execute. This step is crucial. You cannot go off half-cocked and just start spending money and hacking away. It likely won’t work.
Now, the system doesn’t have to be complex. It can just be an outline of steps. Here you’d look at how to build these Notes pages, whether you need backlinks or whether Facebook’s domain authority is enough for these terms to rank. You’d probably use something like Open Site Explorer or Market Samurai to see what the competition is for this keyword and study why they rank.
Test and scale are the final two steps. You want to test out the system, make sure you have the steps down correctly and ideally record videos of yourself executing the system step-by-step. Then you want to scale. The simplest way to do this is to hire someone (I like local college kids best but feel free to grab someone on the freelance boards, in the Philippenes, or wherever) and have them start cranking things out.
A better way is to make this an assembly line system, hire a team, and let them execute. For online marketing you pretty much can define a simple team using the roles:
- opportunity identifier (niches and keywords)
- content developer (articles, snippets, and curated content)
- web developer (pages, themes, and assembler of the finished product)
- seo (linkbuilder, tweaker of on-page things)
Each of these roles can be outsourced to a person or a service. The point being is that this lets you have scale and the ability to develop a production flow – the internet marketing version of a little personal kanban system – that will give you more sites/pages than if one person is trying to do it all.
The final thing here is expect the bottom to drop out eventually. That’s just the nature of the beast. Feel free to go out and buy a fancy car, fulfill our lifelong dream of owning a Chinese restaurant, or buy a beach house. But pay cash. Don’t get a mortgage based on these kind of earnings. It’ll hurt. The best thing you can do is plow the profits into your real business, give some money to charity, and enjoy a little extra fun along the way.
NB: If you caught my recommendation at the beginning of this article you’ll remember that I said to only spend 10-20% of your time on these loophole businesses. That’s the maximum time. Less is better and that’s why outsourcing this kind of stuff is good because it lets you stay focused. But if you’re going it alone then remember that you likely can’t do more of these at a time. So even with SEO loopholes you have to have discipline and focus. 