SEOs have been trying to outsmart Google for as long as it has existed. Sometimes, they win; other times, their attempts fail.
Here are 10 extraordinary examples of websites that failed to fool Google.
Key stats
- 2,794,551 keywords ranking, August 2022
- 255,527 pages, August 2022
- Estimated traffic: 3.6M, August 2022
Conch House is a review site that ranked for over 250,000 “best+[product]” keywords and acquired 14,000 number #1 rankings.
This huge rise in organic traffic meant the website became notorious in certain SEO circles.
How did it fail?
Looking at Overview 2.0, this site was probably hit by the May 2022 Core Update.
What do you think happened?
Did it really fail to fool Google?
Yes. Looking at the organic traffic, it’s nowhere near the levels it used to be. The site isn’t completely dead, but it’s fair to say that it won’t fool anyone in the future that it’s the “world’s best news site.”
How did you find these sites?
Here’s how we did it: Internally, we call this the “Content Explorer Hack.”
- Go to Ahrefs’ Content Explorer and start an empty search
- Go to the Websites tab
- Filter for high traffic and low DR
And that’s it!
Final thoughts
As we have seen, what Google can giveth, it can also taketh away.
The methods used by these sites to rank in Google are obviously not replicable for businesses, and I don’t suggest you try any of the methods above.
Many SEOs like to think that the days of paid links, trashy content, and shortcuts to ranking are long gone. But clearly, from these examples, it’s still possible to get significant organic traffic by breaking the rules—but only if you are willing to risk everything.
Got more questions? Ping me on Twitter. 🙂
