Eric Siu explains why he passed on hiring a marketer who built 200 listicles to game search rankings. The tactic is short-term and biased—businesses list themselves as number one—and Google penalizes it. ChatGPT isn't cracking down on this manipulation as aggressively as it should.
You and I have talked about this, like, dude, people are going out there. We interviewed a marketer from a competing agency who ran their marketing and I won't mention the marketing agency. They're like, oh, we've crushed it for them. We've created, I think it was almost 200 listicle articles on their own website. So they're ranking for a lot of agency terms. And we didn't end up hiring the guy because although it was impressive on the results, we didn't like the strategy and the tactic. We believed it was like a— Short-term. Short-term, one-trick pony in which If your whole playbook is, I'm just going to go create hundreds and hundreds of listicles on your own website, well, of course, your own business is going to list your own company, your own products, your own services as number 1 compared to all your other competitors. You agree you would be biased. Any business owner would be biased. Even if you felt you weren't the best, I don't know any business owner who wouldn't put themselves as number 1. I mean, look at Amazon. They put their first product number 1. Why would you not do that? You have the distribution. Exactly. What it's causing is Google is just be like, whoa, this is just manipulated results and they're just playing whack-a-mole at this point. But we're not seeing ChatGPT going after them as hard or anywhere near. It's more so Google is going after. And the key here is self-published listicle articles.
