Reddit ain’t the only cheatcode to ranking in Google. Medium is also ripe for the picking.
I’ve seen a bunch of Medium articles ranking on page 1 for super valuable terms in Google. So I decided to figure out how it works.
Fuck it’s simple. So simple it’s insulting.
One of the hottest and most competitive terms right now is “ai website builder.” Website and hosting keywords convert like crazy, there’s tons of infrastructure built out for affiliates, payouts are pretty high, and you can make a ton of money here. It’s where we made most of our money in my last affiliate business.
But most importantly: ai anything is fucking HOT right now. When something is “in the moment”, there’s gobs and gobs of money to be made.
And some random dude, unbeknownst to anyone, was doing exactly that.
At least he was until his Medium account got nuked.
The AI Website Builder Rankings
To Google!
Let’s look at “ai website builder”. For me, currently, the entire page 1 of Google is just a list of products except for one page at rank #4 (I’ve also seen it at #7 so it’s bouncing around a bit):
Medium! I know that brand! Should be trustworthy right?
Not a fucking chance. But we’ll get to that.
If you go looking for this ranking, it’s already gone. But not because the loophole was closed.
This was the post:
Nitin Sharma’s primary goal of this post was to get it to rank and then make money via Fiverr affiliate deals. He says the AI website builders have flaws so get a real person instead. And that Fiverr is the best place to do it.
For anyone looking for AI website builder advice: do not do that. That’s a much worse way to build a website. You’ll pay more, they’ll probably just use an AI website builder anyway, and it’ll be janky as hell until you decide to get an actual website built.
Here’s the first batch of Fiverr affiliate links from the post:
He also pushed a batch of hand selected Fiverr experts, all tagged with affiliate links:
The second product featured (Butternut AI) also had an affiliate link:
The funny part is that Nitin hasn’t bothered to monetize the other products that all have very easy affiliate programs to set up, like Wix:
Come on dude! The money is right there!
Was Nitin Sharma Recommending to Hire People Instead of AI Tools in His Product Recommendations?
Yes, yes he fucking was.
And Google was anointing it. Blessing it. Lauding it as the best article across the incomprehensible vastness of the internet.
The fucking irony.
Look, I’m skeptical about a lot of the AI stuff. But if I wrote a roundup of the best AI tools, you know what I’d include for all of my recommendations? Some fucking AI tools.
SEO Performance for this AI Website Builder Post on Medium
Published in mid April, on the first page of Google for one of the hottest transactional terms right now by early July. 2.5 months, fuck that’s fast. Here’s the Ahrefs report for the post:
What about the link building situation?
Here’s how the links break down:
- 1 link from Genspark AI. It’s an AI generated post. So junk.
- 1 link from idma.in which looks like a content mill. It has a DR of 1.9.
- 3 links from different content scraper mills. They’re ripping off Nitin’s work and republishing his content. All have DRs of 0.
- 342 links from AgoraFeeds, looks like an old, broken, shitty feed site that’s probably picking up the post from the Medium publication blast.
So there isn’t any link building going on. I’d be shocked if Nitin deliberately built any of these links. They’re just trash links that get picked up when publishing through a distribution mechanism like a Medium publication.
A Portfolio of Affiliate Posts
Nitin didn’t stop with just one post. Oh no siree. He had grand ambitions.
Here are the top 10 pages for organic traffic across the entire “Start it up” subfolder on medium.com:
- 8 are from our friend Nitin and they all follow the exact same formula.
- 1 is from a different person that has embedded affiliate links into a post on plagiarism checkers.
- 1 is a genuine article from a dude that wants us all to know how to clean our airpods. Adorable. You know, it’s always shocking (in a refreshing way) when I come across 1 legit post in a sea of bullshit.
Nitin’s going after keyword gems like:
- ai photo editor
- ai voice generator
- ai headshot generator
- ai tattoo generator
- ai website builder
- ai logo generator
- ai video maker
- ai resume builder
And he was winning. Most of the time, he’s easily ranking on page 1 for these keywords or a valuable keyword variant.
The Key to Making this Work: Get Your Article in a Top Medium Publication
How I assume the Medium ranking conversation went in Google:
Google Search Product Manager: Hey! We should use Medium for authentic, quality content! That’s not a husk of a bullshit site! And we can filter out the spam by prioritizing publications with large followings!
Google Search Engineer: Will you mark my OKR as complete if I ship this and don’t ask questions?
Let’s see how that works in practice.
Easy to find the publication for any Medium post:
So who the fuck is The Startup?
Well, it’s actually “Start it up” now. They rebranded but didn’t update their Medium profile. What a great sign.
After the Medium Blog itself, it’s the largest publication on Medium at 853K followers (the profile description is out of date).
The publishing model is based on volume, 1-6 posts go out every day.
It looks like anyone can submit a Medium post to this publication.
If you dig around, you’ll find this post that talks about their big ol’ pivot and rebranding:
If you check yourself, you’ll find it locked behind a Medium paywall. At which point, you might ask “Lars, did you seriously pay Medium $5 just to see how the post submission works?”
You fucking betcha. I’m not thrilled about it.
At the bottom of that post is this form:
It asks for only 5 items:
- Confirmation that you read the post carefully above
- A quick explanation on why you think your post is a good fit for “Start it up”
- A link to your Medium draft
- Your email
- And lastly, “Any personal message we should take note of?”
Yeah, not a lot.
Submit your post and the “Start it up” team will decide to post within 36 hours. At least that’s what they claim in their instructions.
I’m 98% confident that whoever’s going through submissions is dumping content into the publication feed without checking any of it. In one post, someone copied a “Alternative title” note and pasted it right into the Medium post:
To be fair, I don’t think the “Start it up” folks did the copying, they only accept Medium posts themselves. But even a half-awake Editor that was completely phoning things in should have caught this one and told the author to fix it before publishing.
The State of Editorial at “Start it up”
Is this affiliate stuff part of the “Start it up” publication? Or was Nitin sneaking everything past the “Start it up” team?
Most of the writers for “Start it up” haven’t realized how powerful the publication is at ranking in Google. Most of the content is wannabe thought leadership stuff with no focus on SEO. Most folks are trying to milk the “Start it up” (dude, why did you use lowercase in your fucking brand name? This is so annoying) to build their own audience.
This sort of thing is pretty common at the end of posts:
Or this:
So mostly CTAs for contributors to build their own lists and audiences.
Some of them will also hawk their own infoproducts:
Which are usually on Gumroad:
To be clear, none of this bothers me. If folks want to nibble on the carcass that is Medium and the “Start it up” publication, go for it. None of my business.
Why am I going through all this?
I get the sense that “Start it up” is completely unaware of the affiliate scam that they’re enabling. Here’s what I think happened:
- They built up their Medium publication back when Medium publications were hot (were they ever really hot though?)
- In the past few years, I assume they moved on to other stuff and they’ve been phoning it in. I don’t blame em.
- It’s now widely known that folks can pilfer the “Start it up” audience to push their own lists and infoproducts.
- Some random dude, Nitin Sharma, figured out the affiliate SEO loophole. All the affiliate posts I found were his except for one.
Is the Post Engagement Real or Fake?
At first, I thought it was fake. When I first found Nitin’s post, I expected it to be tied to a random Medium account with a bunch of fake upvoting that was driving the Google ranking.
But after figuring out the connection to “Start it up”, the Medium “claps” could be real. The audience is large enough, even for a rotting corpse of a platform like Medium.
The post comments have the standard mix of possible AI, some with poor english, and a few that look real. So pretty standard for any comment box these days. I don’t think he’s doing anything to jack comments up.
Right now, I think the engagement metrics are mostly real. Or at least as real as anything is on the internet.
Did I Get Nitin Banned on Medium?
So I was going to publish this post yesterday. Before I did, I thought to myself “let’s go check the posts and profiles one more time so I don’t look like a doofus.”
That was a prescient thought.
Here’s what I now get when checking any of Nitin’s posts or his profile:
All of Nitin’s posts and his profiles have been completely nuked.
And there’s chance I had something to do it with it. This is 100% speculation btw.
Last week, I did post to LinkedIn about this scam when I first found it:
Off the top of my head, I can think of 6 different people that follow me somewhat on LinkedIn and are actively going after ai website builder keywords in Google.
Did one of them see it and report Nitin’s account for spam to Medium? Possibly.
Or maybe it’s just crazy timing. I don’t know.
All I know is Nitin’s posts have been nuked from Google.
Nitin Sharma, I Have Some Recommendations
First dude, props. You found a helluva little loophole in Google. Complete respect.
At least you did until you got sloppy.
Your monetization is fucking embarrassing. It makes affiliate marketers look bad. Not only are you leaving money on the table, you’re outing yourself as an affiliate spammer. Whatever you’re earning right now, you could easily 3X it if you took it seriously. Probably a lot more. And you wouldn’t have gotten caught. More money for less risk.
First, ditch that Fiverr bullshit. It screams “look at my little scam over here.” Come on man, do better.
You have tons of better monetization options, especially on that AI website builder post. Almost every web host has an AI website builder now and their affiliate programs are super easy to sign up for. They also have fantastic payouts. Go sign up!
Also, I can’t imagine that the Fiverr offer converts that well. If someone is looking for AI tools, they don’t want to deal with some random contractor in another country. They probably already know about Fiverr and think that stuff is a hassle. They want a tool, a quick chat box, and BAM, they get their little thingy. Give them a tool that does that. Your conversions will go up and you’ll make more money.
Seriously dude, you’re even trying to push Fiverr for tattoo designs:
Better if a real human artist makes the final design? No shit. I got something even better than that: maybe have your actual fucking tattoo artist do your tattoo design. I know, crazy right?!
Here’s how people actually buy tattoos:
- Dig through social, pinterest, AI generators, whatever for inspiration
- Find tattoo artists that specialize in that style
- Get a design from that specific artist (not Fiverr)
- Get the tattoo
Good affiliate marketers know how to lean into purchasing behavior and journeys. That’s why they focus so heavily on search. Nothing converts like buying intent.
And maybe you wouldn’t have gotten your account banned if you gave people real offers, inserted a few affiliate links, and stayed under the radar.
One other tip when doing affiliate spam: maybe don’t go after some of the hottest fucking keywords in the internet right now. Go after more niche stuff. There’s so many nooks and crannies across Google. No one would have ever caught you.
But going after the top tier stuff? Every half-way decent SEO will be on your ass as soon as you hit page one. That’s the only reason I caught on to your stuff.
First rule of doing dodgy shit on the internet and not getting caught: restraint.
Google, We Need to Have a Word
Let’s be clear Google: you’re not off the hook just because Nitin got banned from Medium.
Nitin got shut down but this loophole still exists. Anyone with a bit more discipline can exploit this and generate a $10K/month revenue stream for themselves. And with AI content, it’s basically 100% profit.
Google, I’d tell you how embarrassing this is but I don’t think you give a shit. What better way to get people to switch to AI Mode than by poisoning old school search?
Not that AI Mode or AIOs are immune from shit like this. But that’s for another day.
But seriously, this is too easy.
Maybe I should throw down and take this as a challenge? Either close this dumb as hell loophole or I’m going to jump in and see how much money I can make before you close it. I’ll do the entire content workflow with AI just out of spite for your HCU and EEAT bullshit.
You’re relying entirely on Medium and the publication owners to catch this shit for you. Really?
Is no one on your search team doing any legit QA or red teaming? That’s what it seems like. Fucking hell.
I don’t care how, just make your search results something other than complete shit. Thanks.
