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> It is better to try to buy domains of local companies in your area that went out of business. These are much stronger.

In your opinion, is this ethical?

In my opinion: It's neither ethical nor necessary!

There are easier ways to get a website ranked. Publishing good and useful content, creating a valuable product, optimizing your site (for crawlers and users), and following a sane marketing strategy is much more important than backlinks and page rank. I never had any problems outranking poorly made sites that had a much "stronger" link-profile than my sites.

Needless to say: You will also build a better product/business if you do not waste your focus on cheap SEO-tricks ...

But I do not judge people using these tactics: SEO is daunting-game and - as long as Google acts as intransparent and unpredictable as it has in the past - people will focus on "esoteric" tactics.

> Publishing good and useful content, creating a valuable product

I follow a lot of indie game development forums, and one of the most striking things to me is how many people want to hit success with garbage casual mobile games by focusing heavily on app store tips and tricks.

This sounds like a diplomatic answer so you don't get downvoted. You say you are "technical-SEO consultant" then you say SEO tricks are useless and one should only create good contents and SEO will take care of itself. What are you useful for then (as a consultant)?

you say SEO tricks are useless

SEO tricks are useless, but that's not the same as saying SEO is useless:

> optimizing your site (for crawlers and users), and following a sane marketing strategy

That's a lot of what (non-jerky) SEO is these days.

One can argue that it's not something worth hiring an SEO consultant for, as there's enough info floating around out there to do this yourself if you're moderately savvy. But there are folks who aren't savvy about that sort of thing, as well as folks who think it's just worth paying someone else to worry about it.

Because people need to be told this. Over and over again.

A highly-paid medical doctor saying "You need to eat less and exercise more to lose weight" is not unexpected. The problem is that people really want to eat crap and not exercise and still be healthy.

I (an industrial controls engineer) worked on a website for my employer's small business some years ago. I was given about 40 hours to design and implement the website to describe some 200 products that we've built over the years. Some had pictures, and some even had manuals. Most had some kind of a spreadsheet entry, but between Google (now Open) Refine and some intern hours we had a product page for each. "Magic algorithmic keyword SEO juice" was the desired strategy, such that each product page ought to zoom to the top of Google results for its search term, and I (not being a technical SEO consultant) was unable to effectively convince my boss that hiding 100 copies of the title and thesaurus-generated synonyms in white-on-white text at 0 point at the bottom of the page was not the way to do it, and that linking to it from a useful and therefore popular page would work better.

A lot of small businesses view documentation as pure overhead, to be minimized at all costs. The idea that you'd have a project manager or engineer write up the email you sent (or phone call you narrated) describing how to calibrate an XYZ blagometer, copy edit it, add some diagrams, and post it as an article or whitepaper to improve future sales is viewed as wasteful and not worth the effort.

The SEO industry is like the weight loss industry. When you hear an SEO consultant advocate creating good content, that means they're one of the good ones. If you hear them describe miracle cures, they're a hack.

Hello - good question!

Technical SEO - as I use the term - describes tasks like the following:

1) Performance optimization (One of the most important tasks)

It's basically me telling my clients that their Devs were right all along and that they have to improve their site's speed

2) UX feedback (Help in terms of usability and user experience because unusable sites will rank much worse on Google)

This is basically me telling my clients that their "fancy" 200.000 $ redesign will never rank in Google and that they have to use a "boring" design. (Their Devs were right again ...)

3) Improve internal linking (Prioritize important pages with high search volume, deprioritize less important pages)

More complicated, but this is one of the most important tasks for "big" websites (e-commerce, news, travel, ...) and one of the biggest levers to improve rankings

4) manage URL-corpus

One of my clients' had every single article of his indexed on more than 5 different URLs (eg. https://www.website.com/correct-url, https://www.website.com/correct-url/, https://www.website.com/correct-url?preview, https://www.website.com/correct-url/?preview,https://www.web..., https://www.website.com/?1234). Each URL hat internal links pointing to it, so the domain's "power" was split through hundreds of thousands of URLs. Google hates this and traffic exploded after fixing this.

...

A lot of other related tasks are not that easy to explain for me in text (I am a non-native English speaker and this comment already took me 20 minutes up until here ...) and my guidelines vary from website to website.

But, essentially, I help clients to adhere to web standards and optimize their websites for their users. The last "spammy" backlink I build for a project other than my side-projects (experiments) was probably more than 5 years ago ...

Do you have a website or contact info for hiring? I'm interested. You can reach me at the email in my profile if you prefer.

That makes sense. Thanks for clearing up the confusion.

Nothing about SEO is ethical. It’s about appearing on google when you wouldn’t under natural circumstances.

It depends on the type of SEO. SEO includes, for instance, making sure that your page loads quickly when otherwise you wouldn’t have prioritized that. A lot of it is unethical though.

What, precisely, is "natural" about Google?

The progression towards evil as it became more of a monopoly.

What Google has done over the years is thwart some of the scummy SEO practices by penalizing websites that do it; a big part of current-day SEO practices are to make your website conform to web and content standards. Basically, turn it into a decent site.

There's still the black market SEO where people hire spambots to send links, but that's been thwarted / voided by just adding a nofollow to links in user generated content like comments.

but then you wouldn't do "search engine optimization", but rather proper web engineering.

SEO has become an ambigous, all encompassing term. "Proper web engineer" is now a subcategory of SEO.

Also "proper web engineering" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.

PWE -- peewee.

The point is there's a Venn diagram where these two standards overlap.

In your opinion, is it not ethical? Should people not buy the real-estate either because a company went out of business there?

If you buy the storefront of a company that went out of business, keep the signage so their old customers will come in looking for them, and install a conveyor belt that whisks them directly to your store instead, yeah, that's unethical.

There's honestly not a great meatspace analogy to the situation, no matter how you look at it. But it's clearly not the same as just buying foreclosed real estate.

Buying a doctor’s practice feels a lot like this to me.

My local convience store is called Tom's.. It has been around for many years. The current chinese owners never changed the name nor the owners before. Same sign, same products.. nothing unethical.

Kind of like when a big company buys a smaller company and keeps the brand name.

> Same sign, same products.. nothing unethical.

Exactly. If it's basically the same business under new management, there's nothing wrong with keeping the name. If it's a new business with no relationship to the old, trading on the name to grant false credibility and bring confused customers into their own shop, that's unethical.

And kinda stupid if you're trying to game the reputation of a business that went bust.

I can imagine circumstances where I’d find it ethical, for example when the expired domain name in itself is useful to you (say, you want to move your own site to wisconsincarpetcleaners.com instead of .info or whatever)

If you do it only to freeload off someone else’s reputation, that doesn’t seem great to me. For the comparison to real-estate, I have nothing to add beyond what PhasmaFelis wrote.

> Therefore, in the case of PageRank and SEO-potential: It is better to try to buy domains of local companies in your area that went out of business. These are much stronger.

I never understood how this works. What do you do with these domains? Do you just redirect them to the main business site or do you create a supporting site on them that heavily links to the business site?

Anyway the old domains won't get any new attention if you don't work on that and then you can just can work on your main domain.

> Anyway the old domains won't get any new attention if you don't work on that and then you can just can work on your main domain.

It doesn't have to get any attention. Links (or a redirect, or other things) from it will still (massively, depending on the quality of the domain) improve your ranking.

You could also throw some unrelated content on it, and will likely rank for quite a while until somebody complains loud enough that Google manually sets up a -100 on your domain.

Is this domain-name-is-everything.nonsense still a thing? Not in SEO myself, but even a few years back, the ranking was heavily shifted towards actual content, never mind the domain name.

For someone who wanted to learn cutting-edge SEO (for Google mainly) what are some good resources ?

Ahrefs and moz have large amounts of tutorial content and posts that dig into current issues.

I'd start with "The Godfather" and if you still have any questions follow it up with parts II and III.

>And in general: Buying old domains for backlinks is a waste of time. Getting high-quality backlinks from legit sites and improving your own domain in regards to technical optimization and usability is much more effective - and scalable.

Yeah no kidding. Like saying that a 5 star hostel is nicer than 1 star one. Obviously, it's much more epxnsive. If buying a $11 expired domain is good enough to help get the page indexed, then it may be worth it even if does not help your rankings.

>Therefore, in the case of PageRank and SEO-potential: It is better to try to buy domains of local companies in your area that went out of business. These are much stronger.

yea this is old method that is saturated. there are many of ppl with programs scanning for expired domains