Episode #011 – The Ten Year Rule: How to avoid google "slaps" and build a business that lasts

You're listening to the REI Marketing Nerds podcast, the leading resource for real estate investors who want to dominate their market online. Dan Barrett is the founder of Ad Words Nerds, a high tech digital agency focusing exclusively on helping real estate investors like you get more leads and deals online, outsmart your competition and live a freer, more awesome life. And now, your host, Dan Barrett.

Dan: Okay, hello everybody, welcome to this week's episode of the REI Marketing Nerds podcast. As always, this is Daniel Barrett, here from AdWords Nerds. Hope you guys are having a lovely day today. Right here in Connecticut it is rainy and a little bit humid and a good day to maybe stay inside and think about some deep marketing topics, so let's dig into this. I think this week actually, this week if you can, listen to what I'm going to say and internalize it and really get the base concepts here. This episode could save you a lot, and I mean a lot of heartache and pain and lost revenue and lost deals. I mean that sincerely because this is a topic that has come up with clients of ours, both current and past. It has, if I'm going to just do with a conservative estimate, probably cost some people, some investors that we really like and know really well and I know are good people, it has cost those investors hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars in deals. That's a serious, serious issue. So I'm going to get into this week and really focus on prevention and saving you from having to go through that kind of experience. This is preventative, and like a lot of preventive things, like when people say you don't smoke, it's bad for your health and you got to exercise and all that stuff, people are less attracted to that kind of advice. Right? We all are. We all want the cool tips, tricks that are going to give me five more leads, you know, whatever it is. The more "boring stuff", which is how to avoid being literally brought low and how to avoid having your lead flow go from a roaring river to just a trickle literally overnight, this is really critical important stuff. It might not be as sexy, it might not be as hot a topic right now, which is why really nobody talks about it, but we're going to get into it, because again, I've told you this before, the whole point of this podcast is for me to make something that is going to massively improve your lifetime ROI from your business, massively improve your quality of life and it's going to be as relevant today as it is ten years from now. So let's get into this.

This week we're talking about the Ten Year Rule. How to avoid to Google slaps and build a business that lasts. First things first, let's get into organic marketing. If you're not familiar with the term organic marketing, we're talking about anything that brings you leads online for free. Stuff you are not paying for. So you think about organic is the opposite of pay per click, pay per click like AdWords or Facebook Ads, you are paying every time someone clicks to come through to your website. Organic, for all intents and purposes here, when we say organic what we're talking about is things that rank you in Google. If someone goes on to Google and they type in "sell my house" you show up in the first non-paid spot. That's organic marketing, sometimes it's called SEO or search engine optimization. Now if you are not actively doing organic marketing to get motivated sellers, you really need to. You really absolutely need to start doing this process right now pretty much no matter where you are in your investing journey, if you're new, if you're experienced, whenever. You really need to be doing some form of organic marketing because the channel, for one, is absolutely massive. You're talking about something that's four times easily in pretty much any market, four times the size of the entire paid traffic market, and has the best ROI of any marketing you will ever do because if you spend some time and money and effort or whatever ranking your website for a certain keyword, everybody that comes to your website from that keyword, from that point on is free. You are not paying every time someone comes in, and so just ranking a single keyword can be worth one to five to tens to dozens of deal, and that's an incredible, incredible ROI, especially over time. Organic is really amazing as a channel. Really, really, really incredible, really powerful. There's actually less competition than you might think.

Now that said, let's say you agree with me, you're like cool, organic marketing to where it's at. There are couple things you really have to understand in order to do this well and to avoid disaster. And the first thing you need to understand is the relationship of Google, the company, to organic marketing. The fact is that Google does not want you to do organic marketing at all. They do not want you to do search engine optimization, they do not want you to try to get your site to rank more highly. You have to understand that Google, the power for Google lies in they're being the decider. They're being the arbiter, they are the judge that ranks everybody's website and they do not want you to try to reverse engineer that process and figure out how it gets done and make your website better. They don't want you to do that at all, Google will tell you pretty much any time you ask them, "Don't think about Google, don't think about us, just think about your client, just think about your customer and the rest will take care of itself. Just be the best you can be." I haven't had to date in a long time but this always reminds me of people who are like, "You'll find a girl or you'll find a guy, just be yourself." That's the idea. You just be yourself, Google's going to find out that you're super awesome and they're going to rank you all by themselves, you don't need to worry about it. The reason this is because if you remember that even though Google makes their money from advertisers, the searcher, the person that goes on Google and type something in, that's their real customer. Because if they don't have the searchers they don't have the people going on to use Google, they don't have the advertising inventory to sell to advertisers. If somebody goes into Google and they have a bad experience because they clicked on some website that was super spammy and used some kind of low down dirty trick to rank number one in Google, well a person's like a little less likely to use Google the next time. If that happens over and over again, they're going to stop using Google altogether. When searchers go away, again, there's less searches to sell to advertisers, and of course less money for Google overall. So Google's really core mission is to have the best possible experience for the person searching for stuff in Google. They're not worried about you as a business ranking your website, they don't care about that at all, what they care about is did that person who went on Google type something into, did that person have a good experience.

Now of course, that's not the way things actually happen because there is a lot of money to be made by ranking well in Google, and whenever there's a lot of money to be made, people are going to try to find a way to make that money. It's just human nature. Right? If I tell you there's a million dollars hidden in my walls, sooner or later someone's going to break into my house and put a hole in the wall. It's just what's going to happen. When you have a lot of money to be made by ranking well in Google, people are going to try to reverse engineer that process, try to rank their website first. Okay? And so Google has to constantly reorient and constantly change what they say is okay and what isn't. It used to be back in the day, let's say this like 15 years ago now. It used to be back in the day that the primary thing that determined where you ranked in Google was how many times you had a keyword on your website. If I sell mittens and somebody is going to Google to type in mittens, they want to buy some mittens, well if my website says "mittens" 100 times and your website says "mittens" 50 times, well my website ranks first because I say "mittens" more, therefore it's really about "mittens". This was like the old model. Very simplified, but that was the old model. Well what happens? Well of course people realize that this is how it works and I'm like, "Well that guy's ranking better than me, he's making all that sweet, sweet mitten money so I'm going to type in 'mittens' on my website 150 times." And maybe I'll start to do that by blogging about mittens and writing articles about mittens, but pretty soon I get lazy and what I do is I go to the bottom of the website and just type the word "mittens" in a million times. You may remember this if you're old like me and you remember using the internet back in the day, you would scroll down and like at the bottom of website they would have the word "mittens" a million times and that's just for Google.

What is Google have to do? Well they realize that once people understand how to game that system they've got to change the system, and so Google added over optimization penalty. What does that mean? Well means like well now you need to have the word "mittens" a lot, but if you have the word "mittens" too much, that's actually negative. So now the system gets more complicated. What was okay was back in the day having the word "mittens" a million times, it was okay. What was okay is now no longer okay. If you had that stuff on your website you got penalized. This is what's called a Google slap, it's Google changes the rules and then they penalize you for it. In real life if something wasn't illegal when you do it, they can't punish you for it after the fact. I'm pretty sure this is true, if you're a lawyer you can tell me if I'm right or wrong. I'm pretty sure it's like if we say like, "Painting your goat blue is now illegal." Well if I painted my goat blue last year before that law was created, you can't put me in jail for it now. With Google it does not work that way. With Google, if they decide that like hey what you're doing is spammy and it's bad and it wasn't technically against the rules but now it is, they can and absolutely will penalize you for it. When Google penalizes you, how do they do that? Will they can knock your website down a bunch of pegs so you can go from rank number one or two to all the way down at the bottom of page number one, or they can just delist you all together. So magically your website, poof, disappears, you can't find in Google anymore. This is happened to major companies, really big websites, it's happened to people big and small and it is a real issue. It wouldn't be that big a deal if Google was not essentially a monopoly on search traffic on the internet. I mean it really is.

Maybe some of you listening to this, you use Bing. More power to you, but the vast majority of everybody is using Google to google stuff. Google is a verb, just like it's a noun. And so we don't you disappear or are not just delisted but you're knocked down a bunch of pegs that is like a massive, massive change in how easy it is for people to find your business. It would be like you open up a big store on Main Street and then the mayor decides that he doesn't like you and so he just moves your store from Main Street like five streets down on some off street residential area. That would be a huge deal if you could actually do that, if you could move a building that way. Well Google can do that by delisting you or knocking you down a bunch of pegs. That's a huge risk. If you are investing at all in your website, not even like doing organic but you spent any amount of time on your website, you have any plans for people to find you via your website, you have any plans to do paid traffic, you have any idea at all that you're going to send anyone for any reason to your website, the idea that that website could be so fundamentally devalued completely without reproach, there's no way to apply for leniency, there is no way to appeal that decision, it could just happen overnight. That is a huge risk. It's a huge risk that I think very, very few people understand, and definitely very few investors understand.

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So that brings us to the rule that we use, we personally at AdWords Nerds behind the scenes with my clients, with my coaching students, we use to mitigate that risk. And understanding this rule is by itself pretty much going to solve this problem for you, if you can really internalize it, really use it. That rule is the Ten Year Rule, I mentioned at the top of the episode, and here it is in its entirety. When you are marketing your website online only do things that you think Google will be okay with ten years from now. I'm going to say that again. Only do things when you're marketing online, only do things that you think Google will be okay with ten years from now. And if it's on the borderline, meaning it's like it's probably okay, but something feels weird about it, you scrap it. You stop doing it, you get rid of it.

Now this is absolutely huge. I will be the first tell you, I did paid as SEO for maybe five or six years before we started getting into paid traffic and I will tell you as someone who's been in this industry for a long time, this rule is not the norm. It is not the norm. If you are an online marketer and someone hires you to promote their website, you know that if that person doesn't start to see movement on their website, they won't hire you back, they won't pay you next month, they may not pay this month. As a search engine optimizer, as a marketer, there's a ton of pressure to get results really, really fast, and that drives the vast majority of people in this industry to do borderline sketchy things. There's even a term for it, which is "gray hat". There's white hat SEO, which is only stuff that everybody agrees is okay, there is black hat SEO which is things that people know is spammy, things that we know are bad, and then there's gray hat SEO which is it's kind of the borderline. It's not cheating, but... It's probably not okay either. Tons of pressure as a marketer to engage in that kind of marketing. I'm going to give you a good example, and this is something that is current inside the investing world today, that is I know for a fact that investors are doing this right now. This is a really good example of a gray hat technique, and this is something called PBNs, or private blog networks, personal blog networks, whatever it is.

Private blog networks, essentially the idea is that your web site is going to rank better if it has links. I think most people understand that. If more websites link to your website that's good for you. Google likes that, they'll give you a higher rank. It's also the case that if the people that link to you also have a lot of links, then the links that they send you are more valuable. So if you think about this, it's kind of like you imagine your high school, high schools a big popularity contest. Well if you have a lot of friends that's good for you, that makes more popular, but if all your friends are also super popular, meaning you popular with the most popular people, well that makes you king popular. I'm going to assume the kids say things like king popular, sure, that's fine. So you get it anyway. If I'm linking to your website, my link is more valuable if a lot of websites also link to me. So would a private blog network does is try to set up an artificial way to make that happen. I do that by getting a whole bunch of different websites, whole bunch of different blogs, these are all websites that I'm creating, I'm stocking typically with fake articles or just information that I made purely to make these things. Let's say I have ten websites. I just set up ten blogs all over the internet, whatever. I put some kind of like 100 or 200 word articles on them. Fine. Then what I do is I link all those websites together. So website A links to website B, website B links to website C, and then C links back to A and A links to G and G links to D and whatever. They're all kind of linking to each other. So out of nowhere I've created, let's say, ten websites, each of which has a bunch of links to other websites. I created every single piece of this. Then I link to your website from that network. Now I've created ten websites, each of which has ten other websites linking to them, and then from each of those ten websites typically I will link to you. So it's like basically you roll into high school with a big group of friends and no one's ever seen before and you say like, "Oh yeah, totally, don't worry about it. These are my friends from band camp and they're all super popular in Canada where they go to high school." No one's ever seen them and no one's seen their friends and they all seem to be friends with each, and whatever else, seems a little weird. So that's a private blog network.

For a long time this was not technically against Google's terms, but it's very, very clearly artificial. It's very clearly not something that is really about cool websites linking to you, it's obviously not really for the benefit of the person that's searching, it's purely for Google's benefit. Just like in Home Alone where he sets up all like the paper cutouts of people to pretend like he's having a big party so that the Wet Bandits don't break into his house. It's like that. It looks like there's a party there, but there's no one at home. So Google knows this is artificial, and over time they've become better and better and better at detecting it. And then last year what did they start doing? They started to penalize people that were using these networks. So people that were getting benefit from them, all the sudden, because... And I want to be clear, this did help them in the short term. It's why people were doing it. It helped them in the short term, they saw links coming in, they saw their rank improve, but when Google figured out what was going on and they figured out a way to detect it, those people, not only saw their advantages disappear, a lot of times they were penalized past that point.

Now what does that do? Well that sort of drives marketing people to find sneakier and sneakier ways of doing it. So they'll say like, "Well this is a high quality blog network. Before it was just because we had low quality content, now we have really high quality content." It's all the same stuff. It's "I got caught breaking into houses, therefore the answer is not to stop breaking into houses, it's to be sneakier so I don't get caught." And people play this game right now. I guarantee you right now if you were an investor and you've been approached about a SEO or you've thought about working with an SEO company, I guarantee you that company has either used private blog networks in the past or is using them right now. They may call them something different, they may say it's a totally different time, "This time it's different, this time it's different." It ain't, it's the same stuff over and over and over again. Again, this is not a problem if you don't care if your website is around next year.

And to be clear, maybe Google never figures it out. Maybe the marketers have figured it out this time, it's totally going to be fine, you're never going to be caught, it's not that big a deal, it's fine, this time it's different. I know if I'm looking at a contest between your marketing guy who you hired from who knows where and Google who's has an army of hundreds of engineers, I know who I'd bet on most of the time. I'd bet on Google figuring it out. This is why vetting is so important because if you hire someone to do this kind of stuff, even if you don't know this or what they're doing, you run the risk of getting your website completely demolished, and it might get demolished a year after you fired these people because the work that they do, it sticks around. So you might think it's fine, you might have hired this person five years ago, and then all of a sudden it turns out like, "Oh hey, Google changed the rules and now something that person did is no longer okay." Poof, there goes your website. This is one of those things that I get very fired up about because I think essentially marketers take advantage of the lack of technical know-how that investors have. I think most investors, even if you're very technically savvy, don't spend their whole day thinking about this stuff. So it's very easy to do something kind of, you know, wave your hand and do something underneath the hood that that client doesn't know about that's going to actually come back and really hurt them down the line.

So to review, understanding Google's relationship to SEO, meaning they don't want you to do it. Understand that they're constantly shifting what is okay and what isn't, and then they can punish you for doing something that used to be fine, understanding that there is a lot of pressure on marketing experts to produce results very quickly and then that often pushes them to do shady or borderline shady stuff, and understanding that there's essentially an arms race between marketers and Google, and that Google is probably going to win the arms race 99% of the time, and that when they do you are risking your website's standing. All those things considered. Am I saying you shouldn't do SEO? No. You should do SEO, I said that at the top of the episode. Everybody needs to do it. But the key here is using that Ten Year Rule.

Acting as if Google is looking over your shoulder and acting as if everything you have to do, everything you're going to do to market your website has to be okay ten years from now; really changes your behavior. This is the rule we use at AdWords Nerds when we take on a SEO clients, everybody here knows the Ten Year Rule and we talk about it all the time. It's the reason that we don't use PBNs. It's not because they're not helpful, it's not because it would make our job a lot easier, it actually would. It's because we think it's unethical and dangerous to the client. So going into any potential relationship or going into any marketing strategy that you're doing with the Ten Year Rule in mind is really going to help you long term. This is why vetting the people he work with is so important. Okay? I've got some other general rules to give you when you're thinking about doing SEO, when you're thinking about hiring someone, these are things you can look out for, that are going to be really helpful.

One, if they are building you dozens and dozens of links every month, like if you get into a thing where they're like, "Hey, we build you ten links every month." Chances are that's low quality, it's going to hurt you more than it helps. If they're promising fast or easy results, chances are they're going to hurt you more than they help. The same thing for, by the way, if you hire a personal trainer or diet person, if they say, "No problem. You'll be 10 lbs down by next week." Chances are you're going to end up in the hospital. If they keep their process secretive, meaning that they don't want to tell you what they're doing or they don't want to explain it, that's a warning sign. And then finally if they say like, "Hey, we have a one size fits all approach, this is one thing that works for everybody, every time.", that's a huge red flag. So you understand those things, but more than anything else you understand that Ten Year Rule, that's going to allow you to really design a marketing program for your website that one, not only taps into that huge organic channel, which is absolutely massive, and has a lot of really high quality leads in it, but two, is going to make sure that your website's actually still around in a year. Much less two years, much less five years, much less ten years. And if you've got nothing else out of this podcast other than that, it's very possible that I just saved a lot of time and a lot of heartache and a lot of money.

So hopefully that makes sense, let me guys know if you have any questions, obviously you can follow up with me. We've got the REI Marketing Nerd group on Facebook, it's at oldsite.adwordsnerds.com/group, that will forward you straight there, we' love to see there, I post every week tons of free content. And then, of course, if you have any questions about anything in this episode or you want to check out our past episodes, oldsite.adwordsnerds.com/podcast, we've got all the episodes up there with show notes, links all that fun stuff. So oldsite.adwordsnerds.com/group, come and hang out with us on Facebook, oldsite.adwordsnerds.com/podcast, check out our past episodes. And seriously, let me know what you think. I'd love to hear from you. Hope all's well, talk to you soon.