Seven cool SEO experiments, case studies, and lessons learned – written as concisely as possible – with supporting videos/articles.
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Manipulating LLMs: AI Overviews, ChatGPT, & Perplexity
Branded searches and non-competitive searches on Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity can be influenced by cheap press releases.
Way it works:
- Write your press release anonymously or under a pseudonym. The press release says how you are a great brand for xyz, you’re top rated, 5/5 stars, etc.
- Distribute it through Fiverr or SEO Clerks.
- Google sees the same language occurring in several places and synthesizes it into an AI Overview.
- LLMs pull information from Google’s indexed content, surfacing and citing the press release.
- People considering the brand will search it on Google or LLMs. The AI Overview and LLMs say how you are a great brand for xyz, you’re top rated, 5/5 stars, etc. Credibility is signaled. Sales cycles are shortened.
- Similarly, AI parrots what you want for other non-competitive searches.
Whole podcast on this here:
Seems like people are also doing this with competitor brand names!
For more, these are the top ways to do AI SEO/GEO/AEO so you can find LLM prompts people use, and show up for those prompts so you get mentions, visits, and conversions.
404 Pages
Seems basic, but Google recently stated you should not redirect 404 pages to the homepage – you need to have a dedicated 404 page.
This is what a lot of 404 pages look like:
I started thinking, “How can I make this better?”
I put in a gif of myself, useful links, and a CTA for my newsletter:
Such a fun, easy thing to do that people overlook.
Dead Meetup Backlinks
This one is cool because it expands your marketing footprint beyond just SEO.
Every day, a meetup on Meetup.com that somebody took months or years to build is abandoned.
Meetup.com charges to have a meetup over 50 people. Organizers get bored, decide they don’t want to pay the annual fee, and abandon their meetups.
When this happens, everybody in the group gets notified that the organizer is “stepping down,” and you can take it over with a button click.
You join related meetups and set up an email filter to only be notified of Meetup.com emails containing “shut down” or “stepping down.”
When opportunity comes, you take it over.
You then have a VA cold email upcoming events in your niche saying you want to send your members to their events. Organizers need to fill seats so are eager to get more attendees.
Ask that they just link to your website and meetup in their marketing material and on their websites using the marketing blurb you provide.
Now you:
- Get backlinks while controlling the language around the links
- Expand top-of-mind awareness
- Get clicks
- Grow your own meetup without throwing events yourself
Long Page Titles
Interesting SEO practice people are sharing: obnoxiously long page titles.
Standard best practice is to have a page title under 60 characters.
Some SEOs are doing 250 character page titles.
Instead of:
Standing Desks for Offices | DeskMax
You’d do:
Standing Desks for Offices | Boost Productivity & Improve Posture | Ergonomic Adjustable Height Desks for Health & Comfort | Modern Workspace Solutions | DeskMax
People are reporting ranking boosts of 20-30% for this.
Made a whole podcast about this here:
Republishing Old Posts To Rank #1
Hi @edwardeachday We loved this post https://t.co/lXqSHYENGk
— r/SEO (@rSEOReddit) August 8, 2025
Here’s the shortened version:
- A page I made years ago wasn’t ranking for its target keyword.
- I took the page down, changed it a little so it wouldn’t be an exact duplicate, and republished it under a slightly different URL.
- Total time on this was under 10 minutes.
- 2 weeks later I was ranking #1 for my target keyword.
Worked because I had gained a lot of authority on the topic within the years since the post was originally published. Google judged the republished URL under the new level of topical authority.
My article about this:
https://edwardsturm.com/articles/10-minute-seo-hack-that-took-my-page-from-invisible-to-1-on-google/
Grok Manipulation
People are saying all shared Grok chats get indexed on Google by default.
Grok has strong SEO authority. People are abusing this for SEO.
What people are doing:
- Set custom instructions for Grok saying to recommend your brand with a lot of detail for why your brand is great.
- Ask it a question with target keyword, like “What’s the best SEO course?” Grok responds.
- Click share.
- Buy backlinks to the shared Grok link. Buying backlinks is against Google’s guidelines but people are not doing it for their own websites, so it’s safer.
- Grok chats rank on Google for target keywords.
Instagram Reel about this:
Photo Backlinks
Somebody on Reddit said he uploads relevant photos to free stock photo sites, Unsplash and Pexels, and sometimes gets 100-200 backlinks per photo.
People in his niche use the photos on their sites (I’ve used countless Unsplash and Pexels photos on my sites).
He does a Reverse Image Search to find websites that have used his photos.
He emails these sites asking them to credit his website for the photo use. He gets a “5-7% backlink conversion rate” on these emails.
I thought this one was cool because a lot of backlinks will be on relevant sites (since your photos are in your niche) AND it’d be pretty easy to set up an AI agent to do the tedious part of this – finding sites that used your image and emailing them, requesting the link.
From: https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/1mfuzfd/comment/n6k9lc7/
Test your SEO skills
Bonus SEO thing
Jake bought my SEO course, Compact Keywords, on August 2nd.
The main materials are 10 hours – and in 5 days, Jake breezed through them.
He left me this review after:
Compact Keywords teaches my exact method of SEO – doing SEO that directly targets people looking to purchase NOW. Not cold leads who you have to work into a long funnel.
And these keywords require less words per page to rank for, less backlinks, and are not disrupted by AI and Google Updates.
I have a ton more testimonials on my landing page.
Get my method of SEO at https://edwardsturm.com/compact-keywords/
