SkyrocketSEO
BANNED
- Nov 5, 2012
- 4,614
- 12,219
At least there is happy end
[READ] Confessions of a Google Spammer
- Thread starter ice41
- Start date
ja1myn
Senior Member
- Feb 3, 2012
- 818
- 307
I also bought the same service multiple times with great success. Worked for a long time.
The user CaesarSEO was actually Isaac, his business partner he mentions in the Inbound article.
Here, a user with the username "crushedit" responds to posts and mentions his Skype ID as jgdeutsch. Sounds awfully familiar lol. Jeff's Twitter is the same ID. View crushedit's profile on WF and you will see this:
They had a good run but like you said BB, no way were they ranking for the keywords they claimed. Maybe HCG but definitely not "electrician" and "casino" based keywords.
Hi guys, I'm Jeff Deutsch, the guy who wrote this article on Inboundorg.
I completely agree. with nanavlad. I should have leveraged my position while I was making money to build a sustainable business model.
I have seen this tendency with a lot of guys the first time they make decent money. One of the guys in our spammer Skype chat who was still in college spent $100k in one year on bar tabs! Other guys just get lazy like me. You think the gravy train will keep on chugging forever. It won't.
My advice: when you find yourself crushing it, put your nose to the grindstone and start working HARDER. Set a realistic goal for an amount of liquid net worth that you can actually live off for life, like what MJ Demarco talks about in the Millionaire Fastlane. He recommends $10 million, then you can invest in low interest guaranteed bonds that get you like 3-5% annual interest. Then you get $300-500k per year for doing nothing, and you can still take your investment out whenever you want.
terrycody
Elite Member
- Sep 29, 2012
- 6,432
- 3,327
WOW, finally you are Here dude, welcome to the board.
Imagine if he put in a little more effort and built his own sites to rank instead of selling the backlinks. Being at the top of Google for 'car insurance', 'casino', 'diet pills', 'weight loss', etc... He could have been making $1,000,000 a month and been flying under the radar.
infoasian
Supreme Member
- May 12, 2011
- 1,419
- 438
He may not have been that smart after all.
Very good advice.
One of the suggestions a friend gave me at that time was to open a Subway restaurant in Sanya. Because Chinese LOVE Subway and there weren't any quick sandwich shops near the beach.
He had even done the whole market analysis and found it would cost about $100k to open one. I could have fronted that myself.
But MJ Demarco's advice was to steer clear of franchises. Because you don't have enough control over the business. Also I thought an offline business was beneath me.
That was stupid.
Now someone else opened a Subway restaurant in Sanya near the main beach and there is a constant flow of traffic through that place all day long. smh
I didn't mean to make it sound like SEO is dead. It's definitely not. As long as there are search engines there will be SEO.
My point is that I think it's really foolish to get into the spam game these days for most people.
To win at spam, you have to be very intelligent, technically skilled, hard working and have a scientist's mind. The combination of those 4 things is very rare to find in one person.
I happen to know from reading tony_d's posts in the past (and talking to him I think.. the profile image definitely rings a bell) that he (you) is (are) one of those people.
You work your a$$ off and are mentally switched on, not afraid to switch gears and stop doing ABC to move into XYZ if logically it seems sound to go in that direction
Most people don't have your sense and work ethic. So it would be foolish to recommend most people get into the spam game now. In 2012 it was easy enough that lazy people like me or hard working people who were good at making contacts and swapping up SEO secrets could win at it. Nowadays it's just not that easy.
The Google sandbox (delaying rankings results from link building by 1 month) was the most brilliant solution Big G came up with recently. It means spammers have to be way more organized and scientific in their approach. Like the scientists who do longitudinal studies.
Spamming is a game more geared towards engineer minds than guys like me (artist type). I have some technical skill but not nearly enough to manage all the signals that the Big G algo requires now.
Nah, the main benefit from this post has been the inbound connections. Dharmesh, Rand, and even Matt Cutts now know who I am. That opens up the possibility that they might check out Ptengine and like it. Also, maybe I can get to meet them someday and they'll know who I am.
If any of those guys (and most of the other guys who've contacted me since the post went up) try the product and like it, that will be really helpful for our business. It's really, really hard to get awareness of a new brand. Especially with a piece of software that has a tough-to-determine USP like a heatmap/analytics tool.
The jury's still out on whether I'll be able to convert the interest in this post into something really meaningful for our company. But I will work as hard as I can to make that happen.
Nobody ever said inbound was easy.. it's just better when it comes to making and developing contacts in your network than spamming.
That said, one of the main reasons spamming appealed to me so much in the beginning is that I used to HATE social interaction. I've improved at it slightly over the past few years though, and now it doesn't terrify me as much as it used to lol
Not so subtle. :headache: I didn't include it in the first few drafts, but I figured sex sells.. It worked.
Still makes me look like even more of a douche for sure. But hey, if the shoe fits.. lol
jazzc
Elite Member
- Jan 27, 2009
- 2,964
- 14,717
In other words, you're trying to do it like Neil Patel (personal branding + multiple saas). He's proven the model, so nice choice for a "whitehat" path.
I'm a big believer is SaaS, but personal branding gury style looks like a real uphill battle to me. Good luck
terrycody
Elite Member
- Sep 29, 2012
- 6,432
- 3,327
Yeah, a love reading about your post dude
Anyway, I pmed you, but got no response yet, I pmed you about my site which use expired domain content but got 0 traffic after 2 month, did you see that man, wish i can get some good directions from you.
And for sanya case, Im a Chinese, food industry is very hot in our country, its not a idea is good or not, its only about you got enough money or not, sorry for the poor english.
Cheers, terry
catwithhat
Senior Member
- Oct 6, 2010
- 808
- 621
Sam from Hubspot actually came up with the title, but I actually think it?s accurate to say ?spamming Google.?
We spammed the crap out of Google?s index.
Anyone who used ALN Service knew this, because we (unwisely) provided tokens that people could exact search to find the links we built for them.
The unique article creation app I coded would automatically take one sentence from each article and add a key phrase, like: ?Dr. Allen Shepherd subtly retorted, ?To buy a quality supplement for the muscle built, one must to have a protein powder of the blah blah blah contextual spam contextual spam contextual spam.??
In the dashboard I built, our users could click on the date of an article submission. That would direct them to the page on Google that searched for ?Dr. Allen Shepherd subtly retorted?. Then you could see the blogs your backlinks were on.
ALN didn?t provide success URLs for a very good reason. That would make finding the blogs in the network WAY too easy.
So we hastened Google?s Matrix-esque Sentinel-like discovery of the blogs in ALN so they could deindex the network way more easily.
Pretty dumb.
But looking back, our biggest mistake was calling the service ?ALN service? anyway. Because that caused two main problems:
It became way too easy for competitors to copy us. Our ALN service was first, but we were only unique for about 4 months before other link sellers started making copycat services.
It became way too obvious to Google that deindexing ALN should be one of their top priorities. (BuildMyRank was the other obvious target.)
We allowed customers to find their links because we were afraid they wouldn?t believe we were doing any work.
In hindsight, that clearly wasn?t necessary.
Our service cost max $64/mo, and for that a customer could rank first page for most keywords.
Think about how ridiculous that is for a second.
$64/mo!
We could have easily charged 5-10x that price AND not told anyone how we were doing it.
But even more facepalm-worthy is the fact that we ran it as a service at all.
We would have made 10x, 20x, maybe 100x more money had we just ranked our own money sites.
My partner had a great idea we never acted on for some stupid reason: buying sites on Flippa that ranked 2nd or 3rd, heck 5th or even 10th page and just blasting them with links.
Had we done that we wouldn?t have had to even build our own money sites. We could have made a KILLING.
Just in general my mistake was, when we started making so much money, I started coasting. I think that has a lot to do with my story growing up.
The tl;dr is I never had any concept of money growing up. My family started off wealthy and suddenly lost everything when I was 10. After that, we were poverty level.*
Like, I only bought one pair of shoes throughout all of high school. Anything I wanted to buy that wasn?t an absolute necessity, I had to pay for myself. That meant summer jobs, part-time jobs, etc.
I was constantly jealous of other kids who had money. I thought that?s what made them popular. Why other kids liked them.
But the real reason was that I was a really awkward kid. Very few friends. I was really, really weird. And I generally made other kids uneasy.
I grew up to become an awkward adult. But I still believed that if I could become successful, one day I would be popular. It didn?t happen until I was 35. That?s when the link building made me rich.
So all I wanted when I had all that money was to finally become popular. I lost my focus on work. All I cared about was being cool.
I found out something different.
I didn?t learn how to become cool. However, I did learn that the easiest way to be uncool was to try to be cool.
My point with all this is to tell you guys. For the love of God, when you make money, do NOT coast. Do NOT become satisfied or content. Put your fucking foot on the gas pedal and go HARDER. KEEP GOING until you reach a REAL goal, like $XX million.
Also, you know that expression ?beer budget, champagne taste?? Do the opposite. Have a champagne budget and beer taste. Always live like you might lose it all at any moment.
UNTIL you reach your goal. THEN you can coast. But again, set a really high goal for yourself.
In that way, the only way you can fail is if you quit.
And don?t quit.
*Note: None of the information below is meant to make you feel sorry for me. I freely admit to being kind of a douche. I?ve done enough self reflection at this point to recognize that.
Also, I?m writing this on an airplane with no movies, so I?m offline with nothing to do. If you don?t want to read my gay story, by all means don?t. If you do, go for it.
And remember I?m not trying to be cool. Just trying to motivate you guys to stay focused and keep grinding hard even when you make money. Party, but don?t get caught up in the party lifestyle. Seduce women, but don?t get lost in girl drama. Look good, but don?t spend beyond your means to achieve it.
Respect your money and your wealth, and work hard to grow it until you reach critical mass and really don?t HAVE to work anymore.
I was born in Laguna Beach, California. It?s paradise. My parents were divorced, so my brother and I split our time between my mom?s house, which was in a gorgeous cul de sac by a canyon in the hills where we would explore during the week and my dad?s house, which was a staircase away from a private beach.
My dad (Ronald M. Deutsch) was a successful author and consultant for organisations like the snack food association. He was a money-makin? hustler.
Picture a Jewish Donald Draper who left NY for the California coast. That was basically my dad.
We never wanted for anything. My dad was a genius at making money. He wrote books on all kinds of subjects. Marriage counselling, biology (one of his textbooks is still in print), and nutrition (his book The Nuts Among the Berries was one of T. Coraggheson Boyle?s primary inspiration for his book A Road to Wellville, which was adapted to a movie starring Anthony Hopkins), and psychology/self-help.
The ironic thing was that he had two marriages, both of which failed. His body was broken down from eating mostly chocolate and meat, and being drunk morning, noon and night (another thing he had in common with Don Draper.) And his solution to anxiety and depression was, rather than help himself, go out and find a young woman to seduce.
He was very good at seducing women. He used to brag to my brother and I that he?d slept with a woman from 49 out of 50 U.S. states and kept a map in his office with the name and phone number of each of his conquests. That way when he went back on business, he had a little somethin? somethin? all set up.
He died of cirrhosis of the liver at 59. I was 10. At the time, we had a trip scheduled to go lobster fishing in Alaska?I presume so he could make it an even 50.
After he died, the IRS found my mother and gave her even more bad news: he had never paid his taxes.
They took everything.
My mom had to sell our house. She moved us to rural Michigan so we could hole up in my uncle?s house, which was vacant.
Then we had to move out of that house when my uncle (who was wealthy, but we didn?t know from what?, owned a private airplane, was always flying down to Mexico? And smoked these funny cigarettes that smelled like skunk spray? You do the math) suddenly got in trouble with the law.
Anyway, my life was comfortable when we had money. Then we lost everything and my life started to really suck.
So I figured if I ever made enough money, I could become popular. My motivation wasn?t to get rich. It was to be popular.
So yeah, don?t get caught up in all that crap like I did. Stay focused, stay on target. Until you reach critical mass with your money and don?t have to work anymore.
We spammed the crap out of Google?s index.
Anyone who used ALN Service knew this, because we (unwisely) provided tokens that people could exact search to find the links we built for them.
The unique article creation app I coded would automatically take one sentence from each article and add a key phrase, like: ?Dr. Allen Shepherd subtly retorted, ?To buy a quality supplement for the muscle built, one must to have a protein powder of the blah blah blah contextual spam contextual spam contextual spam.??
In the dashboard I built, our users could click on the date of an article submission. That would direct them to the page on Google that searched for ?Dr. Allen Shepherd subtly retorted?. Then you could see the blogs your backlinks were on.
ALN didn?t provide success URLs for a very good reason. That would make finding the blogs in the network WAY too easy.
So we hastened Google?s Matrix-esque Sentinel-like discovery of the blogs in ALN so they could deindex the network way more easily.
Pretty dumb.
But looking back, our biggest mistake was calling the service ?ALN service? anyway. Because that caused two main problems:
It became way too easy for competitors to copy us. Our ALN service was first, but we were only unique for about 4 months before other link sellers started making copycat services.
It became way too obvious to Google that deindexing ALN should be one of their top priorities. (BuildMyRank was the other obvious target.)
We allowed customers to find their links because we were afraid they wouldn?t believe we were doing any work.
In hindsight, that clearly wasn?t necessary.
Our service cost max $64/mo, and for that a customer could rank first page for most keywords.
Think about how ridiculous that is for a second.
$64/mo!
We could have easily charged 5-10x that price AND not told anyone how we were doing it.
But even more facepalm-worthy is the fact that we ran it as a service at all.
We would have made 10x, 20x, maybe 100x more money had we just ranked our own money sites.
My partner had a great idea we never acted on for some stupid reason: buying sites on Flippa that ranked 2nd or 3rd, heck 5th or even 10th page and just blasting them with links.
Had we done that we wouldn?t have had to even build our own money sites. We could have made a KILLING.
Just in general my mistake was, when we started making so much money, I started coasting. I think that has a lot to do with my story growing up.
The tl;dr is I never had any concept of money growing up. My family started off wealthy and suddenly lost everything when I was 10. After that, we were poverty level.*
Like, I only bought one pair of shoes throughout all of high school. Anything I wanted to buy that wasn?t an absolute necessity, I had to pay for myself. That meant summer jobs, part-time jobs, etc.
I was constantly jealous of other kids who had money. I thought that?s what made them popular. Why other kids liked them.
But the real reason was that I was a really awkward kid. Very few friends. I was really, really weird. And I generally made other kids uneasy.
I grew up to become an awkward adult. But I still believed that if I could become successful, one day I would be popular. It didn?t happen until I was 35. That?s when the link building made me rich.
So all I wanted when I had all that money was to finally become popular. I lost my focus on work. All I cared about was being cool.
I found out something different.
I didn?t learn how to become cool. However, I did learn that the easiest way to be uncool was to try to be cool.
My point with all this is to tell you guys. For the love of God, when you make money, do NOT coast. Do NOT become satisfied or content. Put your fucking foot on the gas pedal and go HARDER. KEEP GOING until you reach a REAL goal, like $XX million.
Also, you know that expression ?beer budget, champagne taste?? Do the opposite. Have a champagne budget and beer taste. Always live like you might lose it all at any moment.
UNTIL you reach your goal. THEN you can coast. But again, set a really high goal for yourself.
In that way, the only way you can fail is if you quit.
And don?t quit.
*Note: None of the information below is meant to make you feel sorry for me. I freely admit to being kind of a douche. I?ve done enough self reflection at this point to recognize that.
Also, I?m writing this on an airplane with no movies, so I?m offline with nothing to do. If you don?t want to read my gay story, by all means don?t. If you do, go for it.
And remember I?m not trying to be cool. Just trying to motivate you guys to stay focused and keep grinding hard even when you make money. Party, but don?t get caught up in the party lifestyle. Seduce women, but don?t get lost in girl drama. Look good, but don?t spend beyond your means to achieve it.
Respect your money and your wealth, and work hard to grow it until you reach critical mass and really don?t HAVE to work anymore.
I was born in Laguna Beach, California. It?s paradise. My parents were divorced, so my brother and I split our time between my mom?s house, which was in a gorgeous cul de sac by a canyon in the hills where we would explore during the week and my dad?s house, which was a staircase away from a private beach.
My dad (Ronald M. Deutsch) was a successful author and consultant for organisations like the snack food association. He was a money-makin? hustler.
Picture a Jewish Donald Draper who left NY for the California coast. That was basically my dad.
We never wanted for anything. My dad was a genius at making money. He wrote books on all kinds of subjects. Marriage counselling, biology (one of his textbooks is still in print), and nutrition (his book The Nuts Among the Berries was one of T. Coraggheson Boyle?s primary inspiration for his book A Road to Wellville, which was adapted to a movie starring Anthony Hopkins), and psychology/self-help.
The ironic thing was that he had two marriages, both of which failed. His body was broken down from eating mostly chocolate and meat, and being drunk morning, noon and night (another thing he had in common with Don Draper.) And his solution to anxiety and depression was, rather than help himself, go out and find a young woman to seduce.
He was very good at seducing women. He used to brag to my brother and I that he?d slept with a woman from 49 out of 50 U.S. states and kept a map in his office with the name and phone number of each of his conquests. That way when he went back on business, he had a little somethin? somethin? all set up.
He died of cirrhosis of the liver at 59. I was 10. At the time, we had a trip scheduled to go lobster fishing in Alaska?I presume so he could make it an even 50.
After he died, the IRS found my mother and gave her even more bad news: he had never paid his taxes.
They took everything.
My mom had to sell our house. She moved us to rural Michigan so we could hole up in my uncle?s house, which was vacant.
Then we had to move out of that house when my uncle (who was wealthy, but we didn?t know from what?, owned a private airplane, was always flying down to Mexico? And smoked these funny cigarettes that smelled like skunk spray? You do the math) suddenly got in trouble with the law.
Anyway, my life was comfortable when we had money. Then we lost everything and my life started to really suck.
So I figured if I ever made enough money, I could become popular. My motivation wasn?t to get rich. It was to be popular.
So yeah, don?t get caught up in all that crap like I did. Stay focused, stay on target. Until you reach critical mass with your money and don?t have to work anymore.
So correct. I had no idea the goldmine I was sitting on.
I had never owned a money site before so it wasn't even in my consciousness. Up until early 2012 I also thought the good times would roll forever because Google would never be able to shut us down. Dumb af.
Yeah man he's pwned so hard with that. CrazyEgg is our main competitor so my hat's totally off to that guy.In other words, you're trying to do it like Neil Patel (personal branding + multiple saas). He's proven the model, so nice choice for a "whitehat" path.
I'm a big believer is SaaS, but personal branding gury style looks like a real uphill battle to me. Good luck
Comments from the article (very informative i might add):
- jgdeutsch
Re: backlinks no of course they're not frowned on. PageRank is still the primary basis for their ranking algorithm.Unstable, spammy backlinks are very frowned upon by Google though.
White hat links are hard to come by for sure. If you really want to be white hat and in the clear, just focus on promoting your site via traditional means.
No matter what Google says, guest blogging is not spamming if the post is on a relevant site and the content is useful.
The problem is, making engaging content is VERY hard and tbh it's hard to calculate ROI. I've been extraordinarily lucky with this post but I spent several days writing it and have spent several more riding the viral wave.
But I'm not sure what Ptengine exactly is getting out of it. I'm hoping some of the more knowledgeable people on inbound.org will mentor me and help me figure that out.
Did you just say PAGERANK? (5 days ago)