🧙‍♂️70k MRR Using Blackhat...

Let's discuss Vidby.

I was conducting paid content research for someone who had ordered my service when I came across Vidby and decided to share.

Because, of course, I do this (sharing market gaps) every Sunday on Dreamerbro.

The overview...

Vidby is a site that has its roots traced back to 2011. Yes, that far back.

What it looked like back in the days...

It had, however, gone out of business for more than a decade before it was rejuvenated in 2022.

Something tells me (I believe) this is a situation of an expired domain being reused — a domain that had been used and ignored for years, which people eventually buy to transfer SEO juice (a complicated term that is simply analogous to transferring PR).

This is one common black hat SEO strategy that most likely gave them the leverage to see such success without putting as much effort into content creation.

This also tells me something...

This is yet another successful startup that wasn't built around a possible passion or industry they're veterans at — but most likely a project from an existing demand.

For Vidby, the market gap revolves around video translation. I shared a more underserved version of this in our previous Gap newsletter.

Vidby currently does over 62k in monthly traffic with a total of 125.9k visitors reported in March.

Semrush reports that 1.64% of this traffic ends up on Stripe. That’s over $70k in the past month, assuming each of these translates to a subscription of the minimum pricing tier ($35 per month).

The magic sauce...

Vidby had started as a tool site, or the trendy term, SaaS.

Launched with video translation in mind, the platform offers everything from video to document and audio translation. They're, however, geared towards video-related translation, offering other perks like subtitling, lip-syncing, and dubbing.

Their SEO success has been commendable.

How did they achieve this?

1. Programmatic SEO

2. Expired domain

Mostly SEO black hat strategies, with these two being prominent.

Thanks to the Helpful Content algorithm update (HCU) as well. It was the change they needed.

The moment Vidby saw a spike in traffic in September 2023 (when HCU was launched)...

\[I'll talk more about the Helpful Content update in an upcoming article.\]

Programmatic SEO

Programmatic SEO is not as complex a term as people make it sound, especially when you only want to understand it.

It's basically someone mass-publishing "related" articles based on a preset data source. The advent of AI chatbots has made this even easier.

For instance, at Vidby, the founder had gone to mass-publish articles around a set of related queries, such as:

1. https://vidby.com/video-translation/romanian-english

2. https://vidby.com/video-translation/hebrew-english

3. https://vidby.com/video-translation/gujarati-english

4. https://vidby.com/video-translation/spanish-english

5. https://vidby.com/video-translation/tamil-english

6. https://vidby.com/video-translation/persian-english

You can see the relationship only from these 6 links. Well, they're over 100 of them. All mass-produced.

What makes this approach "programmatic" is how they're geared towards a user performing a single action while being on different pages.

For Vidby, this is clicking on the "start now"

“Romanian Video to English” pSEO page...

…so they make thousands of ways to achieve that.

“Persian Video to English” pSEO page...

This increases the odds of higher traffic keeping the risk widespread.

Shocker: Other than the “start now” button, every other thing on each of these pages is gibberish. That’s one issue with programmatic SEO not being fine-tuned properly, usually the case.

It’s worth noting that while doing programmatic SEO, you’re not publishing any article that comes to mind because it’s relatively cheap.

…you’ll be barking up the wrong tree this way.

You should have a list of actual search queries with the search volume you’re pursuing.

Expired domains

Domains are quite important for SEO, especially when you're just starting out and probably don't have enough resources to spend on backlinks (if you're obsessed with backlinks) — they could also be expensive <3.

It's evident Vidby had invested in an expired domain, 13 years old at the time of writing.

If you're new to SEO, you may wonder why.

But here's the deal: expired domains are subjective in the SEO world and come with their benefits and risks.

A few of those benefits are...

1. Age domain trust — Google tends to have little trust issues with new domains until proven otherwise — one reason "SEO takes time." With an expired domain from as far back as 2011, you should bridge that gap really fast.

2. SEO juice — Google is built on the premises of link juice (simply, backlinks). Reusing an old domain that had built authority and backlinks simply means you'd be keeping all of that to yourself now.

3. Faster — with age trust and SEO juice, you could easily get out of the SEO sandbox (a fancy word for the period when a new website doesn't rank well in search engines).

On the flip side, the risks are also not negligible.

1. Google penalty — The giant tech company would always be against practices that attempt to game their system. Apparently, using expired domains is one of them, and it could have you penalized when not implemented properly. For instance, imagine using an expired domain that has been in the pet niche to start a finance site. What about a domain abused by casino gamers? There are hundreds of them.

For Vidby, the domain was perfect.

Link Strategy

Expired domain wasn’t just the backlinks strategy under Vidby’s belt. It’s just the most prominent.

On further research, I discovered that the founder of Vidby is a Forbes Council member and has a few links to his site from Forbes. Non-negligible are also his press releases on a few notable media publishing sites.

However, thousands of other links on the site could be regarded as internet spam — comments from directories, forums, non-English links, etc.

It’s evident that the site was founded on the premises of Blackhat.

This begs the question, do you think Blackhat is actually bad?

Until next time,

This article is a repost from Dreamerbro's newsletter 30th of May, 2024.