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I could name names. I could tell you exactly which SEO bloggers and teachers are perpetuating this nonsense (but I won't spread the poison. If you know, you know.). I can tell you why they're doing it, too.
It fluffs up their case study reports. It decreases the frustration of their students and increases their lifetime customer value. And the failures that arise from it can be blamed on something else. Some of it is flat out vanity. And some of it is simply inexperience and stupidity.
I don't think it's all malicious, either. But I do feel the need to at least point these things out because I'm seeing the "next generation" of BuSo users arriving with these myths and ideas in their heads and it's hurting them. I see a lot of websites, too, from my work with links. This is way more prevalent than you'd think.
Lemme break it down.
I'm seeing way too many people around the net and even on this beautiful forum writing up their case study reports for the month and having tables like this:
I hope you guys aren't paying your taxes like this or you're giving the government way more of your money than they're asking for.
I'm sure you've spotted the issue, which is pretending that since content is an investment into your site that somehow it's not an expense, and thus it doesn't get included in the Revenue minus Expenses equals Profit calculation.
Newbie Thoughts:
Blogger Thoughts:
I'm sure their courses and ebooks get more sales when their post thumbnails have $37,000 in huge bold numbers instead of $12,000. I just wouldn't want to take fundamental advice from someone not being honest at the top of the funnel. Makes me question everything else, and rightfully so.
At the end of the day this is really stupid. Content is a marketing expense. For us it's more than that. It's like being a Brick Wall Builder and pretending bricks aren't an expense. Or a grocery store that pretends food isn't an expense. You don't have to knock-it-off, but I wish you would. At least the newbies, who aren't trying to lie to us but to themselves, and are innocently following some blogger's dishonest ideas.
See #5 below for more reasons this is stupid.
I don't want to say too much here because a lot of this argument also belongs in #5 below. But let me explain the core issue here.
The Past:
The Present:
Here's the thinking: "I'll order 300 pieces of cheap content for a penny a word at 1000 words each, and when it gets delivered I'll copy and paste whatever is in the Word file and publish it. Or I'll use my 300 credits for AI content. Google will index that garbage and it'll start aging, which is the most important part. Then I'll circle back around and improve it all."
But the person never circles back around to improve the content, because they're lazy and this whole pre-publishing and aging idea was just a cover for laziness. "But I'll see which pieces of content perform the best and work on those the most!"
Here's the issue. None of them will perform and you'll never improve them. They'll sit there with zero on-page optimization, zero images, and zero headers, and they'll never get traffic, and you'll give up on the project and either move on to the next or quit SEO altogether.
Quit being lazy. Here's my philosophy on how to deal with content: I ONLY press publish when a piece of content is perfect and ready to go. Then I never look at it again. That line on the to-do list is crossed off and never seen again. But over in your universe you now have 300 items on your to-do list. No wonder you get overwhelmed and give up.
Pre-publishing is the leading cause of most stupid questions on Builder Society because the pre-publisher fails and realizes they not only have to care about the basics if they want to win, but they realize they don't know the basics because they thought they could ignore it.
The questions are always asked in such a way to validate more laziness, too. "How many images does my content have to have? Do headers really matter? How many posts do I have to interlink to? How many words should a post have? How short can they be?" This is where laziness gets you, right back to square one.
The worst set of questions I'm sure all of us are sick of answering on BuSo (that arises out of pre-publishing and #5 below) are:
Some people are in such a tizzy to find a magic bean that they can embed in a silver bullet to shoot at the push-button solution that they never stop to wonder... How is it that they expect to make money by publishing content and simultaneously make money by deleting it? They just saw some random thread about content pruning and how some of us have had success with it, but they don't understand why. They just want that shortcut.
Anyways, back to the core issue. No, you should not delete content that doesn't get traffic, just because it doesn't get traffic.
Imagine this scenario:
If your entire site is ESL / AI nonsense, you might as well start over on a new domain and not deal with any of this. But if you have 800 posts and 200 of them were short and low-quality, designed for quick social media promotions, you can proceed as follows:
A news site might publish 100 high quality articles a day that never get traffic after a week due to relevancy and freshness decays. They should KEEP those posts because it's high-quality indexation.
Stop indiscriminately deleting content because it hasn't gotten traffic in 3 months or whatever it is you're thinking. You need more experience before you start making these kinds of decisions, otherwise you're literally un-doing progress and moving backwards.
I'm not going to go on a big spiel here. If you don't know that the entire Google algorithm is built on Page Rank flow, which flows through backlinks, then I don't know what to tell you. You've been immunized against reality by your favorite bloggers.
I'd venture to say that, in very simplistic terms, the algorithm looks like this:
I wonder what's left? Where is it that they're beating you? What's the tie breaker? I'll give you a hint. It starts with an L and ends with an inks. But the reality is if you think links don't matter you'll never compete for a million volume search term. And these are the people that did this to you...
Offender #1:
Offender #2:
The REASON people are eager to believe links don't matter is because it's hard to earn them, it's expensive to buy them, it's tough to build them, it takes even more links to get the other ones indexed, etc. It's easier to pretend they don't matter. It's the lazy man's solution.
And it's what you should teach your students if you don't want them crying about it and need to keep them excited. It's also why you'll see (and this leads into point #5 finally) people on this forum who've posted 10x the content as others and earn 1/10th the amount of money. That's a 100-fold difference, and a LOT of it boils down to links. That's a lot of money being left on the table.
I'm being broad in the title but what I'm specifically referring to is the trend of people who care more about what their public case study (under an anonymous username) looks like than they do about the key performance indicator that actually matters. Wrapped up in this is the bloggers above, the newbies, the course creators, and anyone else worried about "what it looks like" rather than "what it is".
I'm specifically talking about people pumping up their "published posts" numbers while the other metrics go nowhere.
Story Time with Uncle Ryu:
The girl was hood rich and had everyone at school completely fooled, including her best friends who would kick her out of the group if they found out the truth. It's not that any of the rest of us cared. It's that SHE cared and her family cared about appearances more than reality.
And that's what a lot of you look like to me lately in your case studies, whether on Builder Society, blogs, wherever. Pretending content isn't an expense and so forth. But this section is specifically about another sin.
This section is about people who are more caught up with "How many posts did I publish this month" than "How much money did I make this month". And the reason is clear. They didn't make much money if any at all, and certainly no profit. So instead they're faking the funk to be in the Cool Kid's Club by emphasizing a metric that doesn't do anything for their wallets.
I told a friend about this observation and he summed it up perfectly: "Which god do you serve?"
The digits in my bank accounts are the metrics that matter. Not "how many posts did I publish". Because, like I said, you'll see people publish 10x the number of posts and make 1/10th the revenue. VANITY METRICS don't mean shit.
And this is how it all circles back around:
I'm lucky. I know all the ancients. I know the guys time has forgotten and I know the new breed. I've been around forever. I'm acquainted with most of the guys I'm trashing in this post and they don't know it's me. I've seen everyone's sites because I've worked on them or helped them with links or just had my ears to the digital streets for over a decade and a half.
I'm telling you now. It's all an illusion. Everything you think and everything you imagine. The guys with big ass sites with 5,000 posts... they did that over a decade of time. Yes, they have links. Their sites are DR70+. Their posts aren't 500 words but 2,500 words each. Their posts have a bunch of images, not one. They have lots and lots of age and topical authority.
These are things you can't replicate by taking shortcuts and racing to the end while being focused on vanity metrics.
But let me also tell you another truth. These guys aren't geniuses or amazing talents. Their sites are butt-fucking-ugly. Some of them still have "Theme By GeneratePress for Wordpress" links in their footers. I mean, to be fair, some of these guys a real idiots too. Couldn't tell you what HTML or CSS is.
So why them? Why are they the guys knocking down half a milly a year on one site without growing some salaried team?
It's them because they showed up to the job and did the work every day for a decade and they didn't CHEAT. They didn't take shortcuts. They acquired the knowledge that mattered (and ignored what didn't) and put in the work. They used that knowledge instead of ignoring it because it's inconvenient.
They did the on-page optimization for each and every post. They slowed down and interlinked out from each new post and then went back to old posts to interlink to the new ones. They hired the guys to find and add plenty of images. They built or had links built. They did audits along the way, speed optimizations, and so forth.
They sucked every penny of value out of each piece of content.
And they did this over 10 years, not 1 year. Because doing it right takes time. And doing it right brings stability and dependable income. And liquidating dependable, stable sites brings a much different multiple.
Do you think your lazy ass 5,000 posts will earn the same amount as 5,000 meticulously optimized posts will? You know what the answer is.
Nobody cares about your vanity metrics, and the lie won't last long, which is why the team I mentioned above is falling apart. How long can the facade really last? How many months in a row can you brag about publishing 200 posts before people start wondering why your traffic and revenue aren't increasing?
To the real kings posting 200 high-effort posts a month, we salute you.
To the dipshits, please stop acting surprised when your laziness doesn't pan out.
To everyone else... Thanks for reading,
I hope it was fun,
Ryu
It fluffs up their case study reports. It decreases the frustration of their students and increases their lifetime customer value. And the failures that arise from it can be blamed on something else. Some of it is flat out vanity. And some of it is simply inexperience and stupidity.
I don't think it's all malicious, either. But I do feel the need to at least point these things out because I'm seeing the "next generation" of BuSo users arriving with these myths and ideas in their heads and it's hurting them. I see a lot of websites, too, from my work with links. This is way more prevalent than you'd think.
Lemme break it down.
1) Content Isn't an Expense
I'm seeing way too many people around the net and even on this beautiful forum writing up their case study reports for the month and having tables like this:
| Post Published | Pageviews | Revenue | Expenses | Content Investment | Profit | |
| December 2021 | 17 | 3,387 | $10.00 | $20.00 | $1,500 | -$10.00 |
| January 2022 | 16 | 3,221 | $15.00 | $20.00 | $1,500 | -$5.00 |
I hope you guys aren't paying your taxes like this or you're giving the government way more of your money than they're asking for.
I'm sure you've spotted the issue, which is pretending that since content is an investment into your site that somehow it's not an expense, and thus it doesn't get included in the Revenue minus Expenses equals Profit calculation.
Newbie Thoughts:
"Hey, look, I'm not doing so bad after all. I'm only $15 in the hole, and not $3,015 in the hole!" is what the newbies are thinking. All of this spinning and twisting feels good psychologically but it's a flat out self-lie.
Blogger Thoughts:
But what the bloggers are wanting the newbies to think is "The site brought in $40,000 this month. I spent $3,000 in VA's and software and hosting. I invested $25,000 in content. My profit is $37,000." They want newbies to be fooled by this misdirection.
I'm sure their courses and ebooks get more sales when their post thumbnails have $37,000 in huge bold numbers instead of $12,000. I just wouldn't want to take fundamental advice from someone not being honest at the top of the funnel. Makes me question everything else, and rightfully so.
At the end of the day this is really stupid. Content is a marketing expense. For us it's more than that. It's like being a Brick Wall Builder and pretending bricks aren't an expense. Or a grocery store that pretends food isn't an expense. You don't have to knock-it-off, but I wish you would. At least the newbies, who aren't trying to lie to us but to themselves, and are innocently following some blogger's dishonest ideas.
See #5 below for more reasons this is stupid.
2) You Should Pre-Publish Lots of Content
I don't want to say too much here because a lot of this argument also belongs in #5 below. But let me explain the core issue here.
The Past:
Back in the day people would buy a domain for every harebrained idea they had and would add it to their $3 a month shared server so Google would index it with nothing on it (and they would) but a blank Wordpress installation so it would be aging and providing a "benefit".
The Present:
Somewhere along the lines people got convinced that they could do the same with content (even though it never worked for domains). I'll explore WHY I think people are doing this in #5, but for now let's just say that the logic isn't that dumb on the surface, but if you stop to think about it for even a moment you'll see how disastrous this is.
Here's the thinking: "I'll order 300 pieces of cheap content for a penny a word at 1000 words each, and when it gets delivered I'll copy and paste whatever is in the Word file and publish it. Or I'll use my 300 credits for AI content. Google will index that garbage and it'll start aging, which is the most important part. Then I'll circle back around and improve it all."
But the person never circles back around to improve the content, because they're lazy and this whole pre-publishing and aging idea was just a cover for laziness. "But I'll see which pieces of content perform the best and work on those the most!"
Here's the issue. None of them will perform and you'll never improve them. They'll sit there with zero on-page optimization, zero images, and zero headers, and they'll never get traffic, and you'll give up on the project and either move on to the next or quit SEO altogether.
Congratulations! Google's systems now think 300 posts on your site are low quality, low effort trash. Your Panda quality score is in the gutter, and to fix it you'll have to improve all 300 posts quickly and wait 6 to 12 months. You'll probably need to Kitchen Sink the whole site, because you know your lazy ass did a lot more wrong in the process.
Quit being lazy. Here's my philosophy on how to deal with content: I ONLY press publish when a piece of content is perfect and ready to go. Then I never look at it again. That line on the to-do list is crossed off and never seen again. But over in your universe you now have 300 items on your to-do list. No wonder you get overwhelmed and give up.
Pre-publishing is the leading cause of most stupid questions on Builder Society because the pre-publisher fails and realizes they not only have to care about the basics if they want to win, but they realize they don't know the basics because they thought they could ignore it.
The questions are always asked in such a way to validate more laziness, too. "How many images does my content have to have? Do headers really matter? How many posts do I have to interlink to? How many words should a post have? How short can they be?" This is where laziness gets you, right back to square one.
3) Delete Content That Doesn't Get Traffic
The worst set of questions I'm sure all of us are sick of answering on BuSo (that arises out of pre-publishing and #5 below) are:
- How much of a boost will I get if I delete content? (wat lmao)
- How do I know which posts to delete?
- Should I delete a post if it gets no traffic?
- Should I delete a post if it has no links?
- How long should I wait before I delete a perfectly fine, high quality post?
- How do I know if a post is high quality or not?
- Should I 404, 301, 302, 808 kick drum redirect or what?
Some people are in such a tizzy to find a magic bean that they can embed in a silver bullet to shoot at the push-button solution that they never stop to wonder... How is it that they expect to make money by publishing content and simultaneously make money by deleting it? They just saw some random thread about content pruning and how some of us have had success with it, but they don't understand why. They just want that shortcut.
Anyways, back to the core issue. No, you should not delete content that doesn't get traffic, just because it doesn't get traffic.
Imagine this scenario:
You create a link bait post for no keyword in particular. You gather data for your niche, you invent a brand new surprising (barely supported) conclusion from it and present it in interactive graphs, charts, jargon, have references, etc. You email it to 1,000 journalists since you just did their job for them. You put it on Facebook and pay 5 big pages to promote it. You get in on Reddit and it goes to the front page. After three weeks, 2,000,000 pageviews, and 500 new referring link domains, it no longer gets traffic. "Hurrrr, should I delete this post?"
I don't need to be long-winded here. There are times to delete content, but it has nothing to do with traffic. It has to do with it being low-quality, creating algorithmic drag, and tanking your Panda quality score, which is causing your entire site to suffer.If your entire site is ESL / AI nonsense, you might as well start over on a new domain and not deal with any of this. But if you have 800 posts and 200 of them were short and low-quality, designed for quick social media promotions, you can proceed as follows:
- IF the page is obviously low-quality content, THEN
- IF the page gets good traffic and/or has good links, keep it & improve it
- IF the page gets neither traffic or good links, 404/410 or 301 it
- Traffic is not an indicator of quality.
- High-quality content is a positive, not a neutral.
- Relevant content increases topical authority.
- If content gets no traffic but has links, it's been voted to be high-quality.
A news site might publish 100 high quality articles a day that never get traffic after a week due to relevancy and freshness decays. They should KEEP those posts because it's high-quality indexation.
Stop indiscriminately deleting content because it hasn't gotten traffic in 3 months or whatever it is you're thinking. You need more experience before you start making these kinds of decisions, otherwise you're literally un-doing progress and moving backwards.
4) You Don't Need Links
I'm not going to go on a big spiel here. If you don't know that the entire Google algorithm is built on Page Rank flow, which flows through backlinks, then I don't know what to tell you. You've been immunized against reality by your favorite bloggers.
I'd venture to say that, in very simplistic terms, the algorithm looks like this:
- Links = 40% (contextual, relevance, anchor text, authority)
- On-Page = 40% (topical & keyword, relevance, intent)
- Technical = 20% (speed, core web vitals, indexation, etc.)
I wonder what's left? Where is it that they're beating you? What's the tie breaker? I'll give you a hint. It starts with an L and ends with an inks. But the reality is if you think links don't matter you'll never compete for a million volume search term. And these are the people that did this to you...
Offender #1:
Let me just be frank. The main guy telling you that links don't matter, his main earner is a ~DR75 site. Of course he can publish for low competition keywords and rank for them. "I never cared about links or tried to get them." He did massive promotions early on. I'm not saying this guy is lying. He's very open about all this. It's simply misleading to emphasize how little he cares about links now that he has them all and gets algorithmic credit for them.
Offender #2:
Meanwhile you've got a course telling students they don't need links on their brand new sites. The excitement around this course is all based on a big site that was built well before the course was designed. This site is ~DR70. Let me get this straight... To replicate the success of that DR70 site, you're telling me I don't need links? Funny there hasn't been a single success after that site and the group is literally falling apart.
The REASON people are eager to believe links don't matter is because it's hard to earn them, it's expensive to buy them, it's tough to build them, it takes even more links to get the other ones indexed, etc. It's easier to pretend they don't matter. It's the lazy man's solution.
And it's what you should teach your students if you don't want them crying about it and need to keep them excited. It's also why you'll see (and this leads into point #5 finally) people on this forum who've posted 10x the content as others and earn 1/10th the amount of money. That's a 100-fold difference, and a LOT of it boils down to links. That's a lot of money being left on the table.
5) Focusing on the Wrong KPI's
I'm being broad in the title but what I'm specifically referring to is the trend of people who care more about what their public case study (under an anonymous username) looks like than they do about the key performance indicator that actually matters. Wrapped up in this is the bloggers above, the newbies, the course creators, and anyone else worried about "what it looks like" rather than "what it is".
I'm specifically talking about people pumping up their "published posts" numbers while the other metrics go nowhere.
Story Time with Uncle Ryu:
I always tell the story from when I was in elementary school and high school. This one girl was part of the "Cool Kid's Club" and always had nice clothes, purses, backpacks, whatever. But one day a bus driver was sick so my bus had to do two routes. I had to get up early for my route and then we went on the other route after. I remember we rolled up to this single-wide trailer with barely any grass growing in the yard. Everything was dull and drab, colorless, lifeless, falling apart. But this run-down, dying home had three extremely nice cars out front, all neatly washed and waxed. And out comes the girl from the "Cool Kid's Club" trotting down the rickety staircase out the front door, in her expensive, brightly colored clothes.
The girl was hood rich and had everyone at school completely fooled, including her best friends who would kick her out of the group if they found out the truth. It's not that any of the rest of us cared. It's that SHE cared and her family cared about appearances more than reality.
And that's what a lot of you look like to me lately in your case studies, whether on Builder Society, blogs, wherever. Pretending content isn't an expense and so forth. But this section is specifically about another sin.
This section is about people who are more caught up with "How many posts did I publish this month" than "How much money did I make this month". And the reason is clear. They didn't make much money if any at all, and certainly no profit. So instead they're faking the funk to be in the Cool Kid's Club by emphasizing a metric that doesn't do anything for their wallets.
I told a friend about this observation and he summed it up perfectly: "Which god do you serve?"
I've said it on the forum (even yesterday) and I'll say it again here. I'm here for the money. I build sites for the money. I push advertisements on them aggressively. Everything I do is for the money, so that it materializes into my bank account where it can do physical things in my actual life. It doesn't require lying and faking the funk. Just hard work and paying attention to the metrics that matter.
The digits in my bank accounts are the metrics that matter. Not "how many posts did I publish". Because, like I said, you'll see people publish 10x the number of posts and make 1/10th the revenue. VANITY METRICS don't mean shit.
And this is how it all circles back around:
- People who post a lot of content earn a lot of money.
- People who post a lot of content get a lot of attention.
- I like money and attention.
- I will post a lot of content.
- I don't have the means to post a lot of content.
- I will take shortcuts.
- My posts will be 500 words long and only have 1 image (if that), and I won't stop to interlink to other posts or add external links either, and I'll use headers if they already exist thanks to the writers, but otherwise the title tag is good enough, and I won't stop to build links.
- I'm going to use AI content spinners and worse writers to double my content output and let the writers post the articles for me.
- I'm going to start "pre-publishing" posts.
- I now have 5,000 posts on my site and I only get 5,000 views a month. Time to ask a bunch of stupid questions on BuSo!
I'm lucky. I know all the ancients. I know the guys time has forgotten and I know the new breed. I've been around forever. I'm acquainted with most of the guys I'm trashing in this post and they don't know it's me. I've seen everyone's sites because I've worked on them or helped them with links or just had my ears to the digital streets for over a decade and a half.
I'm telling you now. It's all an illusion. Everything you think and everything you imagine. The guys with big ass sites with 5,000 posts... they did that over a decade of time. Yes, they have links. Their sites are DR70+. Their posts aren't 500 words but 2,500 words each. Their posts have a bunch of images, not one. They have lots and lots of age and topical authority.
These are things you can't replicate by taking shortcuts and racing to the end while being focused on vanity metrics.
But let me also tell you another truth. These guys aren't geniuses or amazing talents. Their sites are butt-fucking-ugly. Some of them still have "Theme By GeneratePress for Wordpress" links in their footers. I mean, to be fair, some of these guys a real idiots too. Couldn't tell you what HTML or CSS is.
So why them? Why are they the guys knocking down half a milly a year on one site without growing some salaried team?
It's them because they showed up to the job and did the work every day for a decade and they didn't CHEAT. They didn't take shortcuts. They acquired the knowledge that mattered (and ignored what didn't) and put in the work. They used that knowledge instead of ignoring it because it's inconvenient.
They did the on-page optimization for each and every post. They slowed down and interlinked out from each new post and then went back to old posts to interlink to the new ones. They hired the guys to find and add plenty of images. They built or had links built. They did audits along the way, speed optimizations, and so forth.
They sucked every penny of value out of each piece of content.
And they did this over 10 years, not 1 year. Because doing it right takes time. And doing it right brings stability and dependable income. And liquidating dependable, stable sites brings a much different multiple.
Do you think your lazy ass 5,000 posts will earn the same amount as 5,000 meticulously optimized posts will? You know what the answer is.
Nobody cares about your vanity metrics, and the lie won't last long, which is why the team I mentioned above is falling apart. How long can the facade really last? How many months in a row can you brag about publishing 200 posts before people start wondering why your traffic and revenue aren't increasing?
To the real kings posting 200 high-effort posts a month, we salute you.
To the dipshits, please stop acting surprised when your laziness doesn't pan out.
To everyone else... Thanks for reading,
I hope it was fun,
Ryu
