E364: Satellite Networks are one of the most effort-intensive black hat strategies in SEO.
But are they worth it?
In this episode, I explain what Satellite Networks in SEO are, what they require, whether they’re worthwhile, and alternatives to them.
If you’re interested in black hat digital marketing, this episode is for you.
00:00 Kyiv 01:06 Black Hat Katya 02:41 Discovering Satellite Networks 03:15 The Complexities of Satellite Networks 05:29 Viability of Satellite Networks 08:57 Alternative Strategies to Satellite Networks 12:57 Building Brand Equity
#blackhat #digitalmarketing #seo #linkbuilding
It's 2019 and key of Ukraine, I am going to a Georgian restaurant named Radio Balisi. Whenever I go to a new city, I see who I can meet with and this was my first time in Kia. Typically, what I'll do is I'll message first and second-degree connections on LinkedIn. I'll say, "Hey, we know each other or we know some of the same people, it would be great to get coffee." But in this instance, I was connected to this person who I met from somebody in my time in crypto. This was a year and a half after we released the first play-to-earn game in crypto. We pretty much invented video games in crypto. I ran the biggest blockchain meetup in the world and my friends and I made this crypto game called World of Ether, which was very successful. You can Google World of Ether press release if you would like to see. Almost a year and a half after we released that game, I started traveling and this was my first time in Kia. It was the furthest east that I had been. And something that I wanted to do when I started traveling is I wanted to meet other marketers who knew crazy marketing stuff, crazy digital marketing stuff that I didn't know, that was crazy, that was out there, there were things that other people weren't doing, stuff I wasn't familiar with. And I was connected to this woman, Kacha, through my friend Demetri, who I met in crypto. I met Demetri at a Bitcoin meetup next to Madison Square Park in New York. In 2017, Demetri and I became friends. We talked often and when I went to Kia, I said, "Do you know anybody here that I should meet?" And Demetri said, "You should meet Kacha." And Kacha said, "We should go to this Georgian restaurant, Radio Bleecey." And so it's 2019, it's the summer. I've just gotten to Kia and I'm going to Radio Bleecey with Kacha. And this turned out to be a crazy lunch. Not because of the food, which was amazing, Radio Bleecey and Kia is legit. But because Kacha had worked at Isobar, which is a sister marketing agency to iProspect, which I was at, I was at iProspect doing SEO for some of the biggest companies in the world. Companies like Procter & Gamble or ADP or Microsoft or Nintendo, huge companies. And iProspect is owned by Densu Aegis Network. And isobar is a sister agency in iProspect under Densu Aegis Network. But I didn't know that when I met Kacha and it turned out she was an executive at Isobar. So we're sitting there over Kacha Puri and dumplings and I say to Kacha, "Kacha, what do you got for me? I want to learn some crazy stuff. What are you working on?" And the thing about me is I'm a very non-judgmental person. I'm a very positive person, very non-judgmental and I like to listen. I'm the show you would never know because it's just me talking. But when I'm with other people, usually I shut the F up. And that was what I did with Kacha. I said, "Kacha, I want to learn from you." And Kacha told me about something that I hadn't heard before. These are called satellite networks. This was a comment that I got on YouTube three days ago. Somebody said, "So if you build 10 to 50 domains with keywords, articles and cross-link them on separate IP addresses, that would be one hell of a thing, right? Feeding a money site." And that's what Kacha was doing. Kacha had developed a satellite network that she was using for gambling sites, all sorts of other sites. A satellite network is a way more sophisticated version of a private blog network, a PBN. And satellite networks are hard. Not only do they require a good amount of technical expertise, they require a lot of work and maintenance. You need to have different hosting environments, different designs, lots of different content, different branding, different CMSs, separate registrars. Each site has to have its own backlink profile. You want to use different IP addresses. You don't want any of the sites connected to each other on Google Search Console. You have to audit these sites all the time to make sure that there's no footprints. Basically, satellite networks have to maintain the appearance of independent legitimate sites. You don't want any footprints that can be detected by the big search engines. And then you have these legitimate sites at your disposal, and you can link to different other sites to these money sites, the sites that you really care about. Give them some keyword-rich anchor text. So say your search term in the link to whichever site you're linking to, like red shoes. You link, you use one of your satellite networks and you link to a page on your money site, and the link says red shoes. And that tells Google this page is about red shoes. Red shoes is a keyword. And Kacha had a big satellite network. This is what I wrote about Kacha, actually. And this is from my marketing journal. I believe every legit marketer keeps a marketing journal, you should totally keep a marketing journal. The reason I remember that we went to Radio Bleece was because I have it in my marketing journal. And I said, all in all, from my conversation, it sounds like Kacha is a rare marketer who's on my level. I'm very impressed. That was summer. In key of 2019, it was 93 degrees Fahrenheit. It was so hot. I remember getting into Radio Bleece and the air conditioner was on. I was happy. And I looked into satellite networks after. When I hear about something that blows my mind that's so crazy, I do a ton of research into it. I talk to other people. Sometimes I do certain things, I won't admit to anything, but on my quest to be the best I got to learn non-stop learning. I'm all about non-stop learning. And I met other people who did satellite networks, who have satellite networks. And the reason that I am making this episode is because I want to answer this question. Since 2024, the Google leak just happened, Google's grown a lot in the last five years become way more sophisticated in the last five years. Are satellite networks still a good idea? Should you put your time and energy and resources into satellite networks? So again, the comment that I got on YouTube is, if you build 10 to 50 domains with keyword articles and cross link them on separate IP addresses, that would be one hell of a thing to do, right? Feeding a money site. And I actually responded to this person. I said, in my humble opinion, the highest return on investment thing to do is using the time and effort spent on building a satellite network, using that instead to build a brand which can be leveraged or doing bottom of funnel search engine optimization or making linkable assets. You could use bubble.io to do a micro sass, a micro software as a service. You could announce some crazy viral stunt, the announcement itself goes viral and you get all these backlinks. The thing about satellite networks is they take so much time and effort. So if you want to mess around with satellite networks, hopefully I've done a good job of describing the pros and cons of satellite networks. Here's a simple thing that you could do. Like I said, I have a marketing journal. I run tons of different marketing experiments all the time and I track my data. I don't just write stories of the people that I meet and the things that I learned from meeting these people, I write data points from doing marketing experiments. And if you are unsure whether or not a marketing channel is right for you and you don't want to test it on your own profiles or your own websites, find another website and test on that website. So what you could do, if you wanted to test this, you could go on Fiverr, you could go on Upwork, you could search satellite networks, run some tests on different websites that you don't own and track the data. Check what you see, look at the movement of these sites all the time on a browser that isn't Chrome, do it on incognito on Firefox with a VPN and constantly look at the movement. Do this every day, see what happens and then once you see results that you like, try to recreate them. It is not smart to run this stuff without any experiments, do lots of tests. So that is how you would dip your foot in the pool. But the question is, should you even develop a satellite network? Should you use time and energy and resources to develop a satellite network? And I'm going to say no. From what I know about satellite networks, and I know a good amount, you are better off using your time to do white hat stuff. Satellite networks are black hats. Satellite networks are against the rules of Google and other search engines. They are designed to manipulate these search engines. And the thing about them, especially Google, is Google pays top dollar to the best minds in the world to make algorithms that catch satellite networks using tons of different pieces of technology to catch satellite networks, a lot of which is not revealed. And that was something that the Google leak showed that Google could measure a lot more than they said they could. The reason they didn't want to tell people that they could measure these things is because it's never a good idea to reveal all the weapons that you have at your disposal. That's art of war 101. Sun Tzu, I'm going to say it's not a good use of time and effort to develop your own satellite network. So here are a few things that you can do instead. I want to explain linkable assets more because it's something that I'm really bullish on. I made another episode about how this guy created this tool called audio pin. Audio pin lets you record voice notes and then it summarizes those voice notes using Chachi BT. Audio pin was built with the no code tool bubble.io. The guy who built it, the guy Lewis, he is not a programmer. He made audio pin in 12 hours and it now makes $15,000 a month and gets tons of backlinks. He made that in 12 hours. So instead of trying to spin up a bunch of different satellite networks, copy some other tool that is popular, some SaaS tool that is popular and unbundled one of the features. Make a feature, make that a standalone SaaS. Find the most simple features that you can. Use bubble.io to build it, put it on a sub domain on your main domain, have lots of links to it from your main domain and now you have a micro SaaS that is useful to people and that can get links. Launch it on product, launch it on beta list, put in a bunch of different app directories. You can use boostbenchmark.com which gives you a list of the best directories. You could do this with a bunch of different tools. You don't just have one 12 hour micro SaaS, you have a few and like I said, these things don't take long to build. That's one option. Another option, announce some crazy stunts. Stunts that are super relevant to your niche, announce the stunts, send them to journalists, journalists need stories, they will report on them. Neon Money Club, a personal finance company, announced that they were making this thing called score. It's a dating app for people of credit scores of over 675. All the journalists who reported on it didn't use it. They just reported on how crazy the news was and if you go to scores website, you can just Google score Neon Money Club, they show all the articles that they've gotten, all the backlinks that they've gotten and they are backlinks from some of the top publications. You get more links and now your website is able to rank for more search terms. Bottom of funnel search engine optimization, I'm making a program on how to do bottom of funnel search engine optimization with my Excel spreadsheets, all my strategies. Now very quickly, see what competitors are ranking for, bottom of funnel keywords that competitors are ranking for if you want to see an explanation on bottom of funnel keywords. I have an article on my site, just in my article section. The article is called down the funnel. You can probably just Google down the funnel, Edward Sturm if you want to find it and the thing about bottom of funnel keywords, they require less effort to rank for, less tax, less domain authority, but they have way higher conversion rates because they're at the bottom of the funnel and they're less competitive because the search terms are less. Even though not that many people search for them, they convert super well like crazy and they're so much easier to rank for than competitive keywords with a lot of search volume that are top of funnel and that's what most people go after. Most people think you got to go after the top of funnel keywords and that's because most people are bad marketers and bad SEOs. You go after bottom of funnel keywords, here's a quick way to do it, see what competitors are ranking for, look for transactional keywords, demand generation keywords, keywords where a searcher is searching for a solution to a problem, find all of those keywords that could even just possibly remotely pertain to what your brand does and then make pages going after all of them and your pages only need to be around 415 to 450 words doesn't have to be a lot and you can even reuse sections and templates between these pages. Bottom of funnel SEO is the best and when I think about people spending their time developing satellite networks, instead of announcing stunts or building microsas and microsasses are evergreen because then you get links to them for a long time, people use them for a long time, you don't have to maintain them, you barely have to do any maintenance on them or doing bottom of funnel SEO when I hear about people spending their time doing things like satellite networks, it's cool when someone has it done but again, it takes tons of maintenance and I personally believe it is not a good use of time, time and effort and I am recording this episode because when I answered this person on YouTube, I said this is a great question, this is something that lots of other people have asked me and it's a topic that I feel strongly about, build brand equity, build a brand that can be leveraged for years, doing the black hat stuff, I know all about the black hat stuff and most of it cannot be leveraged for years. Again, don't get me wrong, I'm sure people in the comments will say well if done correctly, satellite networks are extremely lucrative, I'm sure that's true but I don't believe that it would be more lucrative than doing the white hat stuff that I just described. But to recap, if you want to mess with satellite networks, try Fiverr, try Upwork, don't do it on your own stuff, if there's any crazy marketing things that you want to try and they're a little bit against the rules, don't do them on your own properties, keep a marketing journal, record lots of data but the highest ROI thing to do is to build brand equity. The things that I described really build brand equity. Another reason that I'm making this episode is I got a message on Instagram today, someone said he likes the podcasts that are especially about the black hat stuff, the against the rules and marketing and so I'm like, you know, I could answer this person's question on YouTube, answer this question that I get from so many other people and make an episode about the black hat stuff, killing a bunch of birds with one stone. It's also a fun topic, I think it's a fun topic. So that's what I wanted to share on this episode of this show, satellite networks. Should you use them? Should you build them? Use them? I mean, I'm not going to give any recommendations there but if you try it, again, don't try it on your stuff. Should you build them? My answer is build brand equity instead. This is episode 364 of the Edward Show. This is my daily digital marketing podcast I do this thing every day, seven days a week and I've done it for 364 days in a row now. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you so much for listening, hope you learned some crazy stuff on this show. Feel free to look into any of the stuff that I say. You have my recommendations. A lot of people don't even know satellite networks exist and I will talk to you again tomorrow.
