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Note I've broken some URLs below.
There is a (relatively) recent well-known (award-winning) digital public relations (aka DPR / DigiPR ) case study. The agency behind it did research relating to what was the current value (in 2023) of a class of digital assets (an “asset” which boomed during Covid). You remember the 'good old days' with digital drawings of monkeys selling for many millions? That's the one – and the bubble has since popped. The agency in 2023 claimed the circulation of the research lead to the following (impressive) results including :
1K+ Links (of which around 2/3 were dofollow - 'dofollow' link building to enhance Google rankings is a major KPI of DPR campaigns ) . This reportedly lead to 30K+ Direct traffic (visits?) to the client's website
1.5K+ pieces of media coverage
400M+ impressions on Twitter
10M + Likes on YouTube & TikTok
1M+ Likes on Instagram
20K+ Upvotes & the content trending on the front page of Reddit
This campaign reached me too (via me reading the Guardian website) and if I recall correctly I shared the coverage of this research on both Twatter and Linkedin...
Out of interest in 2024 I recently looked at what were the current rankings of the "igaming" (a.k.a gambling to speakers of plain English) website which had been the focus of the digital PR campaign and to my surprise what I saw at that time was a website that was (for all intents and purposes) no longer visible on Google...
Before this campaign was launched the site in question had recently ranked on Google for as many as 3K phrases in the top 100 results on Google globally in June 2023 (semrush.com data).
However the time the PR campaign was launched (c. Sept 2023) there was already a downward trend in the number of phrases in the top 100 results on Google globally (semrush.com data)...
In July 2024 even with backlinks from 3.3K domains ( including 'dofollow' links from the likes of the Guardian, The Verge and Le Figaro) the site was only ranking for it's brand name globally on Google (semrush.com data)! See below for their USA Google rankings (semrush.com data) from 2024:
Why was that (*scratches head*)? What went wrong (even before the wildly successful Digital PR / SEO campaign was launched)?
It must be noted that some eminent SEO experts do not consider Digital PR-type links to be that powerful: https://ahrefs. com/blog/viral-seo/ . It appeared that Google may have taken some sort of action on the site: there may have been a manual penalty around February 2024 as their visibility swiftly declined around that time. The fact that the site in 2024 only ranked for it's brand name may have indicated some kind of formal penalty or algorithmic action. 300 pages from the site remained indexed by Google from a check in my browser in 2024. There were a number of possibilities:
It appeared that (what I am assuming was) the client's SEO agency had been buying backlinks (in a non-Google guideline compliant manner) to their website before and after the wildly successful Digital PR / SEO campaign. They had been doing this in an unsophisticated way that is algorthimically 'easy to detect' with "money keywords" in the anchor text of the links in question e.g.
There were not any "money keywords" in their top 10 anchor texts of their backlinks in 2024 (possibly because in part of the success of the DPR campaign), but as you can see above around at least 1/10 of the total number of linking domains have 2 example money keywords in the anchor text...
2. It is possible there were (multiple) issues with their content as they have a lot of casino reviews - the beginning of their decline in search visibility also correlates to Google's September 2023 helpful content update thus this a strong suggestion it was mainly a re-assessment of their content by Google that caused the drop in rankings. As an affiliate website in 2024 it was debatable whether they had beneficial purpose (Google says "high quality pages serve a beneficial purpose and achieve that purpose well") in the first place.
In July 2023 Google had updated their product ratings policies on automated AI content in reviews :https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/13791493?hl=en: but from my 'blink analysis' (including viewing historical content using https://web.archive.org/) there may be been issues with their content with reviews & author profiles (since updated) that may NOT have demonstrated that "reviewers are knowledgeable about what they are reviewing, nor show that reviewers are experts" very well . As of 2024 I couldn't find any 3rd party reviews about their service nor a business address on the Google Map which might affect Google's 'trust' rating of this website. The crypto and gambling markets are both "Your Money / Your Life" (YMYL) areas thus you might expect / hope / pray that Google's Quality Rater staff are paying close attention to this sector.
The above DPR work was a great brand building exercise and surely brought significant traffic (and the DPR agency continues to talk about this work to this day). But as of 2024 there appeared to be no long term SEO benefit to this work...
In my analysis the lack of a (long term) holistic strategy (including the lack of link building work's compliance with Google guidelines which looks to be a potential main reason for the ranking drop from my analysis) has made all their SEO effort a very limited success as the site no longer ranked at all (apart from for their brand name) globally on Google from the semrush.com data (as of July 2024).
2025 update: it appears that there is an improvement in their Google Search visibility (but since Jan 25 there is another downward trend). According to Dataforseo data, the site is ranking for only 1 search phrase in the top 10 results on Google US: "duobetz" . See global trend data from Semrush below:
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