Vivastreet is one of the biggest classifieds platforms around — the kind of site with real scale, and serious competition for every term that matters. I worked with them on an SEO campaign more than ten years ago, in the period before they built out their own in-house team and brought everything under one roof.
I’m bound by an NDA, so I can’t tell you which pages or which search terms I worked on. But I can tell you what happened to them — because it’s the part I’m proudest of.
Rankings that still stand, ten years on
Those pages are still sitting on page one of Google. Not for a few months, not for a year — for the last ten years, without interruption. They’ve never needed to be touched again, never needed re-working, and never needed rescuing.
In that decade, Google has rolled out update after update — the kind of algorithm changes that routinely wipe out rankings built on shortcuts. Those pages have weathered every single one and stayed exactly where they were put: right at the top. In an industry where most rankings need constant feeding just to stand still, that kind of durability is rare — and it’s no accident.
How I did it
I started where most people don’t: with everything that was already there. Before adding a single thing, I personally went through the work that had already been done — on the site and off it. I audited the existing backlink profile, mapped the site structure and the internal linking, and worked out exactly what was holding those pages up and, just as importantly, what was holding them back.
I looked hard at the quality of what was already pointing at the site — which links were doing real work, which were dead weight, and which were an actual risk — and then, rather than tear it all up and start over, I built on the foundation that was already working. I tightened the internal linking and the structure so that authority flowed to the pages that mattered most, and I pushed genuine authority into them: quality, relevant links, placed carefully and at a natural pace, varied enough to look like exactly what they were — a good page earning good links.
And every bit of it was done safely. No shortcuts, no manipulative tricks, nothing that would look clever for six months and then collapse the moment Google tightened the rules. Just solid, white-hat SEO built on a proper foundation.
Why it lasted
That’s the whole point — and it’s the difference between SEO that costs you forever and SEO that pays off for years. When rankings are built on real quality and authority rather than loopholes, they don’t need babysitting, and they don’t fall over when the algorithm shifts. The pages I worked on were built to last, and ten years of Google updates have proved it.
It’s the same built-to-last approach I bring to every project — whether that’s a national SEO campaign or rebuilding an entire hosting platform. Do it properly once, and it keeps working long after the invoice is paid.
Want rankings that actually stick?
If you want SEO that holds — rankings still earning their keep years from now, not quietly slipping every time Google sneezes — that’s exactly the kind of work I do. Drawing on over 15 years in SEO and search, I’ll tell you honestly what’s working, what isn’t, and how to build something that lasts. Get in touch and tell me what you’re trying to rank.