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Google spam confession

The true story of how an unprincipled "nerd" made millions of dollars on the search giant


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Before I started telemarketing, I somehow managed to earn $ 50,000 in a month, all thanks to Google spam. Moreover, this exercise had to be given only about 10 hours a week. But, to be honest, I do not advise, quite frankly, to repeat such "feats".

In this post, I just decided to explain why.
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My vision of the world in 2009


I was not going to spam on the Internet at all. But Google did not leave me a choice, but then I argued, approximately, like that.

If spamming is so bad, I thought, why does spam always work fine? Most black SEOs are likely to adhere to the same point of view. They simply find a number of suitable excuses for spam against Google indexing:



Black SEO-shniki: Geniuses of ethical rationalization


But that is exactly what I did, forcing Google to index 45,000,000 new spam words daily. I created a real spam machine; the idea was so ingenious that my clients simply could not rejoice at the new positions of their sites (and this was before the advent of KontentMachine and other similar spam generators currently known).

A couple of examples of my "work":

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Several options for automatically generated articles that replenished my "portfolio" in 2009

In 2012, spam was very profitable.


Sales of subscriptions to our SEO SaaS reached a record high of $ 150,000 / month. Moreover, 70-80% is the net profit. Income we shared with a partner equally. We organized sales in two directions - one stream on the WarriorForum and the second on WickedFire.

Something like this looked like a sales report for several hours:

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The average picture of sales of my company in a few hours, its “high point”. And all this appeared miraculously by the time I was returning from the pool, after walking with my son in the park or after another street basketball match with local islanders.

The PayPal team, of course, did not even know why it was when I suddenly started earning so much. They were so stunned by the way I did business that they even froze $ 25,000 on my account. Apparently, hoping for a solid chargeback or compensation.

Yes, that's bad luck: the rate of damage compensation / chargeback was less than 1%. And all because our SEO service worked.

Most of our users went to the top thanks to partner keywords. I even managed to promote the site of a familiar electrician from New Jersey at the request of "electric", more for fun, of course. For 5 minutes I could, in the literal sense of the word, bring any resource to the first page of the search engine for any query.

So life has become much easier. I bought 2 apartments with an amazing panorama of Sanya Bay in the island part of China: one for myself, one for my son's mother.

I can hardly say that I worked. The entire business process was operated by 7 contractors from the Philippines and a representative of a transsexual from Nevada who was responsible for maintaining the client’s salary required to complete a course of hormonal therapy.

My schedule looked like this:


Lonely SEO Spam Millionaires


The above chart clearly demonstrates the specifics of the four-hour work week. And after all the majority of black SEO-snik continues to this day in the same spirit. Yes, it is convenient, but at the same time very boring: empty or something.

The most exciting moments (oh, and I had to be nervous) come when the loophole that you use suddenly disappears and everything turns upside down, and you try to get out and rebuild the necessary schemes again.

Boredom is when, apart from discussing any nonsense about life, with spamming contractors, there was nothing to do. One guy earned $ 100,000 in a week selling pills with Cambodian Garcinia extract after Dr. Oz’s malicious statement about her supposedly magical properties that promote weight loss.

There was also a woman who distinguished herself by taking note of not particularly moral, but technically legal tools, combining the sale of bath salt, sage and materials available to the general public on the topic “how to change a spouse.” The other guy (also from China, by the way) collaborated with prison guards, who forced prisoners to mine gold in World of Warcraft for sale on the Internet.

And they all bought links from me. And the profits were spent like spoiled little children.

We bought luxury cars and champagne for $ 5,000 just to splash around with spamming buddies during the next meeting. Ate LSD like candy, trying to stay awake and keep working as long as possible. They sold NLP stunts, which prompted incredible success in seducing the fair sex. When it bothered, it was always possible to return to the usual duet of "prostitute + cocaine." In a sudden rush to build muscle at all costs, many were actively involved in bodybuilding, taking steroids, hormones and other strange supplements.

When there is a lot of money and privileges at stake, it is not surprising that the fraternity members of spammers become merciless and extremely secretive. One day, without sharing useful information with a person who once gave the necessary advice, you risk losing a good reputation. You talk about the SEO loophole your buddy earned - and you're out of the game. By betraying the "family", you just fly out of the relevant group in Skype forever. Something like Sopranos, but instead of wise guys, your family consists of harmful cyber botanists who have invested in this business and want to make all their fantasies a reality.

Google forced us to go for it


Initially, I did not think to fall so low. By chance, in 2010, I sent a resume to get a job at Google’s anti-web spam department. I was familiar with all the tricks and tricks from textbooks, and therefore I was sure that I could be useful.

But when they ignored my request, I promised that they would pay for it.
And paid, and for several years ...

Until one day Matt Cutts published his historical tweet:

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Tweet that shook the world of SEO

We used the ALN (Authority Link Network) as a platform to wind the resource rating of all our clients. Our service, in fact, was called “ALN service” - the brand both helped to generate interest in the network, and subsequently contributed to its imminent collapse.

At one time we were the most popular service on the WarriorForum. We were the founders of SEO spammers nirvana, and everyone was in a hurry to make money.

Dozens of volunteers quit their jobs and, using our services, opened SEO offices, which also became our clients. Our main client, a Mexico City-based SEO company specializing in celebrity promotion campaigns, paid $ 25,000 each month, which means that she most likely received 50 or even 100 times more from her clients. One can only guess what it cost them to be in 2012 on the Inc. list. 500

And now this tweet by Matt Cutts with a warning that the network with which we worked, was out of order. When customers became interested in tweeting, I pretended that there was no cause for concern. I laughed at people. How did they manage to discover a network of 25,000 blogs? If they reveal it, we will simply create a new one.

Nothing wrong.

But inside me everything was raging. I realized that it’s easy for Google to compute any site on the web. To do this, just buy a couple of links to it, wait for indexing, and then manually check each resource that receives links from this blog. Such monitoring will allow you to calculate spam blogs that link to these sites. And here on a chain we calculate one swindlers behind others.

In fact, thanks to one spamming site, you can, could and Google, detect and destroy the whole network ALN. We saw ourselves as fighters for the freedom of Zion in the Matrix. Google employees acted as agents who sent the Guards to grab us. I'm sure Google had a completely different vision of the picture. We cracked their algorithm and spoiled the search results for fun and profit.

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How would Google and SEO look like in the Matrix

In public, I said that we are good guys, and Google is an evil empire. But deep down I knew that we were bad.

Google provides “clean” search results for free, so users are in the black. And what is the use of Internet spam? He helps only two: the spammer and his client. All others are uncomfortable.

Yes, I knew perfectly well that this is not fair. A part of me has always dreamed of opening a more legitimate business. But it looked as if Michael Carleone would convince his wife that in 5 years his business would become completely legal - it would be too profitable to continue spamming.

Spam Psychology for Money


Spammers always think that “they will be engaged in something legitimate in the near future.” I was an avid, implacable spammer, outcast in the world of real trading. This became apparent at the LinkLove conference organized by Distilled in London in April 2012.

My Dutch partner and I learned about LinkLove from one of our favorite customers who was to give a speech at the event. So we bought tickets and agreed to meet on the spot.

As soon as the tickets were on hand, for some reason, our protege suddenly disappeared from the list of speakers. There was no explanation (Around this time, ALN was taken out of indexation, and therefore, most likely, our favorite user went to assess the damage as soon as the rating of his clients' websites began to decline rapidly).

My partner and I still went to the event, feeling like experts in the field of marketing, in favor of which was testified by substantial sums in PayPal accounts. But a couple of days spent in London finally dispelled the myths: we understood how the telemarketing community treated the supporters of black methods of earning.

On the eve of the event, we were present at the dinner with all the VIP guests. Rand Fishkin and Mike King were also invited. Other famous internet marketing gurus also arrived.

Everyone was discussing telemarketing, quality of content, obligations of the parties, and much more, which I had no idea or simply classified as nonsense.

It seems that they were not interested in what we were doing.

“F # $%! Link Building »


Their claims became quite obvious when Rand came on the scene to announce the opening of LinkLove 2012. My ego was already indignant - there were enough sluggish comments at dinner, but I did not expect the rapid attack planned by Rand.

Smiling broadly, he went to the microphone, introduced himself, and continued with a presentation entitled “F # $%! Link Building .

My heart sank.

Soon the state of aching pain was replaced by open aggressive indignation. He insulted the whole industry. This was akin to the feeling that Michael Corleone of Godfather II experienced when Senator Giri initiated a meeting on casino rights, which the latter liked.

I swore I wouldn't let Google stop us. But Rand was right. Within 2 months, our entire network of 5000+ blogs, in which we invested more than $ 80,000, were de-indexed, dead, sunk into oblivion. Our $ 100,000 business was destroyed.

Nevertheless, I remained uncompromising and impudent. I still thought it would be easy to make money online. I thought that I would only have to slightly adjust the strategy and it would be possible to continue promoting new successful products.

I invested more than $ 100,000 in new link schemes, which more and more looked like legal ones. This gave only a short-term effect. The de-indexing campaign launched by Google and picked up by Panda and Penguin turned out to be too tough for us. I spent 3 months of hard work, extended sales for another 4 months, but ended up with nothing, not to say, with a serious shortage.

I was overwhelmed by depression and depression. I bought fashionable things and toys, trying to cheer myself up. I even started an affair with a model that will later become the “Miss Universe of China” in 2014. Trying not to break the weekly tradition, I went with friends to the Peking Mountains to taste hallucinogenic mushrooms.

All that remained of me was a shadow, with no goal, no idea how to live. Because of not leaving anxiety, at night I could sleep for 2-3 hours. Most of the acquaintances I met with during this period experienced discomfort while being close by.

And not only was it difficult for me to get used to the reality after the new indexation. The lawsuit of SEOnitro (another publicly accessible network of blogs) against Google for deliberately causing harm to many “competitive enterprises” became the apotheosis of the fight against spammers with Google. Are you serious? It's like trying to sue the owner of the house who painted over the graffiti with your phone number on its walls.

I give up and get a job in the field of telemarketing


Having found no results, banging my head against the wall for 18 months, I again thought about LinkLove. What if you start over? What could I create with $ 100,000 wasted chasing the loopholes in the Google algorithm? How many amazing materials could I get? How many online subscribers could I attract?

Maybe there was something worthwhile in those aspects of telemarketing that Rand and Mike so enthusiastically talked about?

Maybe this was my opportunity to go to a legal business?

So I returned to Beijing and shared my thoughts with friends. I was ready to get a job in marketing. I received a few sentences, but none of them interested me as much as the letter to Ptengine. It was a small startup specializing in what I would later call the "Swiss Army knife in optimizing conversion tools."

The guys achieved success in Japan and planned to enter the market of English-speaking countries. They needed to double the number of users over the next 2 months in order to demonstrate to one venture investor their ability to achieve high performance in a short time.

They wanted me to help them with SEO. I told Ptengine that SEO will not work, as the new Google Sandbox does not allow this. It was necessary to seek a safer solution. They were confused. “What about PBN?” They asked. “We are working with a famous SEO blogger from the United Kingdom, who has tens of thousands of subscribers. He will take care of PBN. ” I studied the work of this SEO- "ace". (Actually, it turned out that shortly before that he had signed an agreement with SEO contractors from London).

It was like opening a time capsule sent from 2012. Expired domains, duplicate content extracted from Archive.org, he didn’t even bother to block backlinks, saying: “By blocking backlinks I’ll only cause suspicions to Google’s robots”.

I was sorry Ptengine. They have already spent $ 4,000 on this project. And the state of things was shocking. Even the SEO gurus who praised telemarketing, it turns out, tried to cheat.

How I defended telemarketing


It was impossible to surprise me with any SEO experts. Instead, I followed the path of new ideals.

With the help of various methods of expanding the reach of the audience, including allowed mailings, advertising posts, social networks and a successful transaction on StackSocial, we impressed the investor. He financed the company, making serious demands on the development program for 2015.

And I will not turn from the chosen path. We just started working with Joanna Vibe with SnapCopy.co (which Chanel Mullin of Onboardly called perhaps “the best SaaS copywriter in North America”) and Talia Wolf with Conversioner.com, who will help optimize our entire portal.

We also gained the support of many followers and influential individuals who play an important role in conducting case studies that define the objectives of the target segments of Ptengine. In fact, the content of the resource will cover the interests of various groups of the target audience, worthy of attention.
By the way, as for all these discussions of content.

In a nutshell: for 5 years I firmly believed that simple SEO-people and telemarketing specialists are terrible snobs, now I choose Kool-Aid.

Google, you won .

Content is really our all.

PS Today we, like many others, have “Black Friday” and, accordingly, big discounts on servers .

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/271803/

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