Hello and welcome to SEO is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organise the questions people ask online. I'm an SEO developer, affiliate marketer and entrepreneur. I've been building and monetising websites for over 20 years and I've bought and sold a few along the way. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. With you, the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. Hello, welcome back to SEO is not that hard. It's me here, ed Dawson, as usual, and today I'm going to talk about, well, how my case study has changed.

Regular listeners you'll know that I used to own the website broadbandcouk and I, you know, founded that many, many years ago, back 2004, and owned it all the way up till August 2021. So just over three years ago is when we sold that, and we sold it to one of our competitors, genie Ventures, who owned the other broadband comparison website in the UK called broadbandgeniecouk, another well-known broadband comparison site. If you're based in the uk, you probably would have seen it if you'd search for broadband over the years. It was one of our editors and, um, yeah, it was a very friendly takeover. You know they approached us, um, made us an offer and you know we accepted, we decided, yeah, good offer, we'll take that. And you know we've got plenty of other things we're doing and it was just a chance to take some money off the table, especially after doing it for so many years. You know, with any project after a while especially, I think, what 2004 to, so that's the best part of 17, 18 years. Yeah, it was time for a change and it was great because I could use it as a case study, obviously because it'd become such a big site and had become so well known as being associated with it.

It was one where I couldn't but admit that it was my site because, quite rightly, I understand why people don't necessarily publicize their sites, especially in the affiliate and content sort of display, ad type, monetized sites, because in some cases the barrier to entry can be low and because if they monetize well and broadband at KDK did monetize very well then you know there's obviously this the scope for people to try and compete with you. So you don't want to create your own competition by necessarily talking about what exactly what your sites are, which can be a problem if you're trying to demonstrate to anybody that you actually know what you're talking about, and if you can't talk about exact case studies, but I do understand why people don't mention them. For me it was great because I could say hey, go, look at broadmancouk. There's an example of a site that I basically can lay claim to how it looks, to the structure, to the content, to pretty much everything there. I had a very, very, very big hand in all of it. So, yeah, the strategy, the structure, all that was down to me. So I can say go there. This is an example of a site that works, monetizes well, has got great traction and great longevity. And, yeah, I'm sure many of you who listen to podcasts have definitely probably gone there and looked at it. I know that many people I've spoken to have been listeners, have been and looked at the site and used it as a case study, an example of how to set up a site to perform well.

Now, ever since we sold, I've kept an eye on the site. I have no involvement with any more. No financial involvement, no involvement with anymore. No financial involvement, no involvement with the people who are running it. You know I've helped them out occasionally over the past three years when they might have hit a small technical problem or something that a bit of knowledge had been lost in the transfer. Only that's only happened like two or three times. I've always been happy to help them. They're very minor things, very sort of technical back-end things, so, but I've kept an eye on the website.

You know I still keep an eye on the broadband rankings and see how it's performing. You know, only a very top level. I'm not not done any in-depth, I don't monitor on hs or anything like that, just I see how it's ranking in a few keywords that I always used to keep an eye on for the past 20 years and you just keep, you can't help but keep looking at them. Um, because it's also I've used it as a is google fluxing the search results and I keep an eye on those. Those, um, yeah, those rankings. I've known that it's ranked well on for years. Anyway, a couple weeks ago I just had a look and I just noticed that the page titles had changed to say broadband genie. So I thought I thought, oh, that's strange, and I clicked on the link and they've changed it. It's changed quite a bit.

So essentially, what they've done is they've decided instead of running broadbandgeniecouk and broadbandcouk as two separate sister sites. As such, they've decided to sort of mash them together. Really, they haven't done a simple redirect one site completely to the other. What they've done is they've redirected broadbandgeniecouk to broadbandcouk. So if you went to broadbandgeniecouk now it would redirect to broadbandcouk url. So the domain they've kept the broadbandcouk domain. I can understand that. It's very brandable, it's a premium domain and it has got a fantastic link profile all natural link profile as well, obviously, since the problems that we had with penguin back in the. A fantastic link profile, all natural link profile as well, obviously since the problems that we had with penguin back in the day and we went all natural links, all all organic.

Um, I don't blame them for keeping on the one domain, but they've changed the branding of the website to be the broadband genie brand. So if you go on there now it will say broadband genie. It'll have their um genie character and that sort of hero character is a genie with a piggy bank who's uh, which is a. It's a nice branding. I don't think you're right. I can kind of see whether it's a nice brand, but they've now got the broadband genie brand on the broadbandcouk domain. And when it comes to the content, they've changed some content to be the broadband genie content that's content was on the broadband genie domain. Other parts of the site they've kept the content that was on broadbandcouk but have just rebranded it so it's more in their, in their blue brand, the broadbandcouk brand when I had it was more of a white and green type color scheme and branding. They've changed it to match their broadband genie branding.

And some pages they've 301'd to new URLs on the existing domains, so domains. So, for example, the Broadband Beginner's Guide, which was a, a guide that I wrote many, many years ago. I've spoken about it a few times on the um podcasters but that guy's been ranking for you know, over 20 years, basically very, very highly. They've 301 that to a new url and they've rewritten the content and at this point, yeah, that is still ranking number one for the term broadband beginners guide. So there's been no problem with that.

But it's quite a convoluted migration to undertake because normally the migrations tend to be from one platform to another. You kind of usually keep the same domain name and as much of the URL structure together as you can. This one where they've kind of merged two domains onto one domain and kept some parts of the content and moved other parts of the content around onto different urls. And yeah, it's real, it's really complicated. So I mean, it's not to say it's going to be bad for them. I don't know, I I wouldn't necessarily have done it myself, but you know they've got their own seos. They've got, you know, they're hugely experienced people themselves. They're not amateurs here by any stretch of imagination. So, yeah, that they they may be what know something that I don't, or they've made some decisions and, um, you know this, this is what they've decided to do.

I do feel very sorry for in the fact that I think, literally probably a week it was a week after they did this that Google rolled out a core update. So they've got a situation where they've done a migration and a migration in itself will call slugs. You will see your rankings bounce up and down while google is getting its head around what's changed and where it needs to put you now and you're trying to. You know you're hoping for a reasonably quiet time. You know volatility wise in general while you're doing that. So they couldn't really have done it much worse time. But they weren't to know, they had no idea that a core update was going to come a week later. It's just a risky take, um. So at the moment their rankings are fluctuating quite a lot around areas and it's going to be. It's almost impossible to tell if that's core update related or whether that is related to, um, the changes they've made um. So it's going to be a real nightmare for them to work out what's going on. I'm sure they'll have some wins and some losses possibly, but yeah, that's not good timing for them. But hey, what could they do about it? So yeah, in terms of it being a case study, I can easily point people out now. Then it's different now because the rankings that it will now get.

I can't completely take the credit for that because they've made some of these big changes. However, I can still point people at archiveorg, because archiveorg has got, you know, broadbandcouk covered really really well. It was a big site and you know archiveorg has covered it really really well. There's lots of saved versions of all the pages there and it renders them quite nicely. So you can still go and look at how I set sites up, how I set broadband code uk up for success, by going and seeing the version that is on archiveorg. And so if I think I've got any specific examples in the future where I want to sort of show people what I had done, then that's where I need to need to point them. I mean, I'll still use broadband at uk as a case study because, you know, the track record is still there. The site still worked well. It worked well enough that someone wanted to purchase it from us, and so you know, I still something for me to be proud of.

You know, there's a slight bit of things. It's a shame that some of the content I wrote is no longer live on the site, but you know that's for the new owners. That's their, that's their prerogative. And you know, no content lasts forever. All content needs updating at some point, and I think they've. You know they've decided to redo it in their style and that's that's their prerogative. They own it now. They've had it long enough. I I can't, I can't get too upset about that. That's that's you know. That's all good anyway. So I just thought, you know, do an episode updating people on how that has changed. So until next time, I'll see you later.

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