After Neil Patel’s tweet this morning I attended his online class Underground SEO Tips for Startups hosted by EduFire. It proved to be very interesting and useful.
I’ve never heard of EduFire but they seem to have a slick system to offer virtual coursework via the net. There were a few technical glitches: jitter, some echoing audio and the worst was a freeze up during Neil’s best SEO linking tips. Fortunately he was nice enough to repeat it for everyone after hearing our desperate sobs.
It was not so much a course as an interview and Q&A session, which is what it seemed like everyone in the chat room wanted.
The interview was hosted by Lily Chiu who did a good job as a moderator. Overall it was a big win and I’ll put the link up here if they offer the recorded version. Someone in the class posted their transcript to Google Docs, but darned it if I didn’t forget to get the link. I’m hoping they post a transcript.
I, of course, had to ask a few questions and confirm things I’d heard about Neil and his wealth of knowledge.
Aside from pissing me off that he is only 24 years old, he went into his origins of being known as the guy with all the pirated stuff in high school. He must have gotten a lot of money from cable descramblers and pirated music because he had enough cash in high school to fund at least one business and spend something like $10k. What the hell did I do I high school anyway?
He went into detail on a comment Andrew Warner had made in an interview with Neil on Mixergy.com about how he “gamed twitter” basically getting tons of followers using black-hat scripts he’d gotten somewhere. He also admitted he did the same thing to YouTube having thousands of subscribers to his channel, but he never put up a single video. All very cool and even cooler that ‘d he’d still admit it.
It wasn’t all goofiness, he gave lots of practical answers to questions about on-page SEO factors, some of it pretty much common knowledge but good to hear again. Confirmed that there are no real useable meta-tags aside from the description. (meta-keyword tags being long gone.) Etc.
There were some other black-hat, white-hat discussions and suggestions that I’ll leave for the recording. He stated that, to him, everything’s white hat. I’ll leave the interpretation of that for your imagination. 
He also gave a slap to ad agencies which he said were “a waste of money”, “that you’d be better doing it yourself. It’d be cheaper and you’d probably do a better job.”
If you weren’t there, there were some good links given out:
- Another interview with Neil with transcript.
- SEOBook (Aaron Wall was someone Neil mentioned being influential in SEO to watch)
- Tips on how to do 301 redirects the right way
- webmasterradio.fm
All in all and considering the price, it was so worth the time to get an hour of Q&A with someone of Neil’s experience. Pretty cool. I’ll keep my eyes open for more on EduFire.
Update: Another transcript of a few hilights courtesy of Emil Hajric.
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