@tjrobertson52

There are all these new tactics for being recommended by large language models. Now some of them feel a little silly or even spammy, and I hear a lot of people asking, sure, these work right now, but are they really gonna continue working? And so I just wanna talk about why I think a lot of these tactics are going to continue working for the foreseeable future, and which ones you might want to avoid.

The tactics that are especially effective right now, that are different from just traditional SEO, could collectively be summarized as recommendation spam. You essentially want to spam recommendations for your brand all over the websites that these large language models trust. The most common form of this is probably spamming Reddit comments.

I think the most effective form is spamming listicles. This is where you create like top 10 best lists and put yourself at the top. Incredibly effective even when it's on your own website.

It can be done effectively using press releases or on any sites where users can post their own content, like YouTube, LinkedIn articles, or Medium. Yesterday I was watching a webinar with several SEOs, one of them being Ethan Smith, who I regard as one of the smartest people in GEO right now. Ethan was asked when he thinks these tactics will stop working, and his response was never, they're never going to stop working.

He said the most egregious versions of them might get penalized, anything that's truly preventing the models from giving good recommendations, but by and large it would just be too difficult or too expensive to fix entirely. And I tend to agree with them. Most of the pushback I've seen on this take is it's from other SEOs.

SEOs that would prefer to just keep doing what they've always been doing and who really hate this idea that they h

this take is it's from other SEOs. SEOs that would prefer to just keep doing what they've always been doing and who really hate this idea that they have to change their methods. It's a really good excuse to not have to learn something new.

And honestly, I've fallen into this trap myself in the past. I've been doing SEO for about 16 years, and maybe about 10 years ago I got it into my head that Google's getting a lot smarter and therefore these spammy tactics aren't gonna keep working. One example of a tactic I stopped using temporarily was service area pages.

If you're, say, a plumber in Houston, it doesn't necessarily make sense that you would have a page about your plumbing in every city around Houston and every neighborhood within Houston. You can just have one page that says you serve the greater Houston area. However, if you want to rank in those neighborhoods and cities, this is incredibly effective.

And 10 years ago I thought, you know what? Google's gonna figure this out. Google doesn't want this to be effective.

It's super spammy. But after a few years went by and these pages just became more and more effective. I eventually gave in, and guess what?

They're still very effective today. The truth is, service area pages aren't causing a big issue for Google, and Google is incentivized to spend as little money as possible. It just simply wouldn't be worth the cost.

The reality is, when someone goes to a large language model and they ask for a recommendation about which brand they should hire or which product they should buy, that large language model is going to look all over the internet for recommendations. That's really all they can do. Now, you might think well, eventually these models are gonna be smart enough to realize that the recommendation came from the

really all they can do. Now, you might think well, eventually these models are gonna be smart enough to realize that the recommendation came from the brand's website or was probably placed by the brand themselves, but the truth is that would be way more expensive than just a simple search tool. It would have to be causing a serious issue for the large search engines to be forced into doing that.

It's much more likely they'll handle it the same way Google has. They'll penalize the biggest offenders with manual actions. Instead of spending money having the models automatically vet every single web page on the internet, they can just manually identify the biggest troublemakers, brands that are spamming thousands of recommendations every week.

So my advice: don't try to automate this. Don't do this at scale. Even if they never give out manual penalties for this, do you really want a bunch of spam about your brand out there on the Internet?

However, I think it's equally as dangerous to ignore this tactic. In terms of the amount of effort required, I think it's the most effective form of digital marketing. Right now this video is getting too long, but tomorrow I'll do a video on how to do this in a smart way.