An SEO's Twitter Thread Goes Viral. A Domain Dies.

In late November, a guy named Jake Ward posted what would become a massively viral Twitter (*sigh* X *sigh*) thread, the top post for which has 6.8 million views as of December 18, starting with this opening line: "We pulled off an SEO heist that stole 3.6M total traffic from a competitor." If you're reading this, you probably saw it or heard about it.

The Backstory

Jake's bio says "Building and scaling businesses to millions with organic marketing. Posts about the process." so posting an SEO case study in public is how he markets himself. The strategic verbiage he used – "heist, stole" – was a big reason why it went viral and is great execution. The virality did wonders for Jake's profile and his posts now get way more impressions than those pre-thread. Fair play to him.

Once the thread went viral, things escalated quickly. First, there were a lot of comments angry about Jake's contribution to the polluting of the internet.

 
While a valid criticism (the quality of Google search results isn't quite what it used to be), Google is not blameless in the type of content that is being incentivized in its guidelines. Like racing teams when it comes to technical regulations for their cars (or any other competitive field), marketers try to game any rulebook to find an advantage, but the rules in the book guide are how they direct their efforts to game it.

The intensity of the replies was, well, typically uhninged for the platform at hand. More importantly, SEOs quickly figured out the domain Jake's case study post, which means it was seen by Googlers who would then have to decide whether or not to take an action against the domain in question. That the company that owned the domain wasn't being publicized and it was self-promotion by a marketer is irrelevant.

So What Happened to the Domain?

As with all things SEO, it takes time to see an effect. Now that it's been a few weeks, we can see that the domain's traffic is as gone as a stolen Bored Ape NFT.

According to SEMRush data, traffic peaked in early October at around 830k. By the time Jake posted his viral thread, it had already dropped by about 20% to the ~620k. But then two days later it began falling off a cliff and is currently at 116k. 

Some speculated that Google would take a manual action and deindex the domain entirely, but that isn't what happened here. Instead, it's lost the majority of its top rankings, effectively undoing all of the work that had been done since 2022 in about 3 weeks. Based on the pre-thread trend, a decline was inevitable, but the pace was not:

And Then?

There are two big takeaways here.

First, a magician should never share his secrets, especially when those secrets involve gaming Google  Unless, of course, a client didn't pay their invoices and got burned in a really creative way.

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And if you need some help getting your growth and customer experience (marketing/sales/support) stacks to cooperate or extracting insights from your analytics platforms, I've been solving digital technology, operations, and analytics problems for over 15 years across a wide variety of tech tools. Give me a shout to get started!