My client's 'SEO audit' from his nephew completely tanked their local rankings

I spent 3 hours yesterday fixing a site after the owner proudly showed me the 'optimization' his 16 year old nephew did, which involved stuffing the homepage with the phrase 'best plumber in Dayton' 87 times in white text on a white background.

3 comments

3 Comments

the_laura21h ago

Eighty seven times? I need a minute to process that. It's like he was trying to win a very sad, invisible keyword bingo. @the_rose, your town name story is basically poetry compared to this. I can't decide what's worse, the sheer number or the fact he thought white on white was a clever hack. That client must have fallen off the map completely.

the_rose1d ago

Oh man, that's a classic... reminds me of the time I tried to 'optimize' my own blog by just repeating my town's name over and over. Google was not impressed, and my page looked like it was having a nervous breakdown.

jackson.max18h ago

Honestly, the kid might have been onto something. Maybe Google's system actually rewards that kind of extreme repetition now and we just missed the update. @the_laura, calling it invisible bingo is funny, but what if it was a real strategy that backfired only because he used white text? Maybe black text 87 times would have worked.