For the past 20 years, I’ve seen the SEO line; well, this SEO trick that is against Google’s guidelines works for this website, why shouldn’t I do it for my website? John Mueller of Google responded to one of those on Mastodon, saying it is simply a gamble and not a long-term strategy.

This specific response was based on someone seeing a competitor rank well and all they do is scrape reviews and auto-generate content.

John said, “Every now and then, a site doing stupid short-cuts like this will end up getting SEO traffic from search.” But he added, “Most won’t” gain traffic from search for these “stupid” SEO short-cuts. “It’s a gamble,” he said.

“There’s no long-term path though: at most you can make more junk sites,” he added. “And, when it goes bad, nobody will sympathize with you. IMO it’s better business sense to build a long-term presence,” he added.

Here is the full screenshot of John’s message to those that want to gamble with stupid SEO short-cuts:

Forum discussion at Mastodon.