Matsta

Monzo also use Transunion for their credit checking which are lot more relaxed compared to the other big 2 (Equifax and Experian), which usually require 3 years of address proof to run through their KYC/credit checks.

Their current license is in Estonia. They're still trying to acquire their UK banking license (their HQ is in London).

When I interviewed at CM they said they actually provide data back to Google/Apple/TfL. I guess this for analytics, but I’m unsure if they charge companies for their data. As far I know, their Pass weekly transport card is now their biggest source of income.

They pre-purchase annual oyster cards and sell them back to you at a weekly rate. They recently got Apple Pay which is really useful with the express travel option so you don't need to use touch/face id to tap in.

They still have consistent problems with randomly charging you random amounts on top of the weekly cost. It's a normal MasterCard so you can check it on the TfL website, but I've had to work with them a few times to get refunded from random extra charges (usually 0.50 to sometimes 7 quid) which they can't explain why they happen.

It's always good to take inspiration from other companies on how they d acquisition.

Uber eats have people physically handing out $10 off coupons.

You could offer your first 24 hours is free by using a coupon. You can then get these posted on "deal" sites for people to use as a one off.

Also, look into to refer-a-friend and affiliates. Refer to a friend was a strong acquisition method for Uber in their early days. Refer to signup someone to your service and they receive 24 hours of complimentary parking.

I think everyone is confused. Everyone just wants their slice of the pie (aka $$$).

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a paid tool which allows you to search their whole database. Then depending on how much you pay you can get all their personal details (Email address, phone number, even their address sometimes.) https://business.linkedin.com/sales-solutions/sales-navigato...

Bingo. People using the same login on multiple sites.

The sellers get Massive email: password lists which are known combo lists. These are usually from hacked sites that have been SQL injected.

People probably all have giant lists of Netflix, Hulu Etc. accounts and then just recheck them on Disney+

Then they'll use a checker app which just mass checks the sites. I imagine Disney don't have a catchpa setup or requiring it after a large amount of failed logins.

There's no point IP limiting logins as most guys will be using massive botnet proxies services that give you a zillion IP's.

The Google algo still loves PDF's. They will review individual URL's if they receive a DMCA, but after looking at Ahref's, I can see the "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" PDF (Which I'm guessing can't be legally distributed by the person who uploaded) has been live since July 2018 and is still ranking in Google: https://i.imgur.com/Mp7prUn.png

It's Moz's Metric. Majestic has their own metric (TF/CF Trust Flow and Citation Flow) and Ahrefs (UR/DR URL Rating and Domain Rating).

I would say Ahrefs's is marginally more accurate then the others but to be honest any of these numbers can be gamed and are not a accurate representation of a domain and/or backlink.

As an example, people use the Google sites as a Parasite. I said in my other reply, with the last Google update, most of these pages are over a year old, so it would be hard to replicate it if you were build a site today: https://i.imgur.com/WX9uidg.png

Hmm that's not 100% correct.

Google still does apply this to some domains. Blogspot is a good example of this. and the s3.amazonaws.com is the same domain for EVERY bucket, so it definitely has link authority. The thing the article missed is that most of these medium/s3/blogspot parasites are a few years old. While a year ago you could chuck up a Medium blog and rank it in under a month, with the most recent Google update, it takes a lot longer to see things ranking.

However yesterday I saw an exception to this, as this Medium account ranked in literally 2 days without any backlinks (the page has since been deleted): https://i.imgur.com/8lPHUYs.png

Parasites do work well, you just need to find the right 'secret sauce'. Some people can still spam 1000's of backlinks using Xrumer and/or GSA or slowly drip feed cheap PBN links.

The article shows looking for keywords such as 'HostGator coupon' or 'Clash of Clans hack' and you'll see that the top 10 results literally change on a daily basis.

People are doing of lot 301 redirects (buy a expired domains with lots of high authority backlinks and 301 it to your URL) and then block the bots for SEO tools like Ahrefs/Majestic/SEMRush etc. so other SEO's can't find their backlinks.

Correct - it was more of the legal issue. The cool thing is that these cameras have FPGA's in them, is that they can support new codecs without and changes to the hardware.

Also to note, this is probably the same reason why Blackmagic dropped CinemaDNG [1][2](Adobe's raw video format) and made their own version - Blackmagic Raw [3]

[1]https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=87045 [2]https://www.reddit.com/r/cinematography/comments/ay3sm4/wtf_... [3]https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/uk/products/blackmagicraw

Nofollow's are still relevant. If 100% of your backlinks are dofollow, then that's going to look unnatural, and you will be more likely to receive a Google penalty.

Nofollow links aren't going to pump up your stats, but they are vital to diversifying your backlink profile.

Ahrefs goes into a lot more detail here: https://ahrefs.com/blog/nofollow-links/

True, building any sort of backlinks are aganist Google's ToS. But that doesn't mean legitmate don't do it. You just need to be smart about it and make sure it looks "natural" to Google.

This is lead gen and is a big business. People will build generic white label websites and rank them for certain cities. They'll then put a toll free number on them and then contact legitmate contractors and charge them either a monthly rate or a fee per each call.

There's also companies like RingPartner that are referred to Pay Per Call networks and give you a unique phone number to promote and you get paid per call.

Very true, Whitehat SEO is more comparable to doing a PR campaign nowdays.

Most of these guys will making Amazon affiliate sites where they recommend products throughout their content and make comission when you click on the link.

It's called negative SEO. There was a Google update that is a bit more lenient so your competitors can't negatively spam your site.

Unless your competitor had some serious dosh to mass spam your site on PBN's, they would most likely being using a tool like Xrumer or GSA where you can purchase a 100k backlink blast for as little as $5

Dofollow and nofollow don't matter as much as the did a few years ago. It will look like unnatural link building if 100% of your backlinks are dofollow.

There's usually a intial period where sites with zillions of spammy backlinks will rank, then they will crash after a weeks /months and will probably never resurface again.

I just had a look on Ahrefs, and yes it seems he's using some crappy blog comment spam with Xrumer/GSA, but he also has a few powerful backlinks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camel_case https://timely.is/

Also note, this guy could be using PBN's, most people who build PBN block the SEO tools(Ahrefs, Majestic, SEMRush, Moz) spider user agents for looking at their site.

Also, he only has 585 referring domains compared to 748k backlinks, so the majority of his backlinks are sitewide backlinks.

Agreed. Also the forum he's referencing to is BlackHatWorld for those curious.

It's well known that some of the sellers on there are artificially inflating their views and replies, and a few of the top sellers are probably using hacked logins to write reviews (their database was leaked a few years ago: https://hacked-emails.com/leak/8bf5ed9ca2ea1b009c1b/blackhat...)

For example, take a look at this thread: https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/captain-jack-sparrow-2019-...

Thousands of replies that all sound very similar "Order confirmed Transaction ID: XXX"

I see the OP submitted this article.

To be honest, PBN's are nowhere near as effective as they were a couple of years ago. The chance of getting a manual action against your site is a lot higher.

If you were going to drop a few thousand dollars on buying backlinks, you don't want to have your site de-indexed by Google in 6 months without getting an ROI.

Non-English versions of Google are more linens and are still easy to game for PBN's.

Also, all PBN's are not all created equally. Making sure the domain isn't dropped, different whois details/domain registrars/hosting providers. Also putting relevant links to sites other than what clients have paid for to make this look more legitimate.

Niches with big competition like Pharma/Gambling/Game Hacks/Lead Gen will continue to user PBN's, but bigger SEO's will be diversifying their link building portfolio by building more whitehat links like guest posts and then sending more questionable links like PBN's to them as a tier 2 backlink.

This is an example of Parasite SEO. You get a site with high Authority site that you can put some content on (HN/Reddit/Medium/Steemit/GetJar). Then you send a lot (100k+) spammy backlinks and then rank for some difficult terms.

Google doesn't penalise big sites for spammy backlinks compared to a fresh domain, and also with the high authority, it will rank a lot quicker.

A good way to find example of Parasites is to search "Fortnite hack". I can see links from LinkedIn, Steam Workshop and a PDF hosted on a hacked (presumably) website for a roofing company.

I imagine they are doing a sort of soft launch. It sounds like Monzo has lots of features lined upcoming in the future. The die-hard Monzo fans will all sign up (and will give good feedback).

A soft launch is a better idea compared to other companies launching new premium products, like the CityMapper Travel Pass, which is more like an Alpha than anything, and there have been lots of issues from the get-go.

Yes, these are A53 cores which the RPi 3 used. The RPi 4 uses A72 cores, which are a lot faster. A53 are efficiency optimised cores and A72 are performance optimised cores.

The RPi has such a big community that I imagine performance and optimisation will quickly surpass other chips, eg. Rockchip RK3399 [1] (2xA72 and 4xA53) and will probably end up on par with an Amlogic S922x [2](4xA73 and 2xA53).

[1] http://rockchip.wikidot.com/rk3399 [2] https://www.cnx-software.com/2019/02/01/amlogic-s922x-benchm...

To get the full performance out of the RPi, you are going to need a beefy heatsink or it will thermal throttle very quickly.

Yes - Ahrefs only measures Google search traffic.

If you were to use something like Similarweb, it will give you a estimate of overall traffic from all platforms: https://www.similarweb.com/website/dailymail.co.uk

I mentioned in my comment, but I think they have been struck with a manual action from Google. Reference: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9044175?hl=en

Having a brief look at their traffic on Ahrefs; They've lost a bit of traffic, but it doesn't look like it's halved: 59 million to 49 million. https://i.imgur.com/fB1z5aq.png

Having a look at what their organic search movements are, most of them are just for celebrity names. Here's a screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/NvWT0Y3.png

It seems in this update, and Google is putting a lot less emphasis on the word count. Instead, they are putting more emphasis on having the exact keyword in the title tag and coming from a domain with a lot of authority.

Google could have also struck DailyMail with a Manual Action (aka a penalty for breaking their TOS) which would vastly affect their organic traffic. Manual action is explained here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9044175?hl=en