Business "Partner" fu**** me over, worked on seo for free. What now?

i was stupid enough to work on a new site for 4 months without a contract. I had good reasons to do that, but thats another story.
I was doing white/ grey hat seo and tried to do my best. The site started ranking in a competiitve market (limousine service). Now my "partner" don t remember agreements we made.

The domain belongs to him, but i have access to all accounts (analytics etc) and to the server.

What can i do to harm the traffic (that i build up) without leaving a legal proof that i was behind.

I don t care for moral advices, because i m the only one who build up the traffic.

Well, depending on the relationship (was it IRL or virtual?), I would either pursue it, get your moneys worth, or live and learn.. and maybe if you are feeling a little bit evil, Neg SEO it.. But what comes around goes around.

Do be careful about damaging his intellectual property.. you can get in trouble for that.

a verbal/emal agreement is just as binding as a signed contract.. so do you have records of the agreement you made?

he not remember? if you can screw his site total and say him u can and will back it again if he pay first.. if he deciede to pay say him u didnt pay anything and ignore. well he deserve that..

JuriR said:

i was stupid enough to work on a new site for 4 months without a contract. I had good reasons to do that, but thats another story.
I was doing white/ grey hat seo and tried to do my best. The site started ranking in a competiitve market (limousine service). Now my "partner" don t remember agreements we made.

The domain belongs to him, but i have access to all accounts (analytics etc) and to the server.

What can i do to harm the traffic (that i build up) without leaving a legal proof that i was behind.

I don t care for moral advices, because i m the only one who build up the traffic.

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Find out where he lives, find him, beat him up until he forks over the cash. Simple.

terminate hosting until he pays you

a) Learn by your mistakes and move on.
b) Take down the website and hope he doesn't have any backup, tell him to pay up or lose it.
c) Build a backdoor for future use. Redirect his traffic or place your own ads on the site.

Take down the website, if he doesn't have the source code, he won't be able to get it up back. Keep it down, if he doesn't find a hosting, all his rankings will drop in a short time, because Google always deranks sites with downtime.

unlimited popups and yeah negative seo.

legal actions will be the first thing i m going to consider, but i need something to back up my position while argumenting with that piece of shit.

small_town_boy said:

Find out where he lives, find him, beat him up until he forks over the cash. Simple.

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Stop giving such illegal advise, he can end up in jail on attempted murder if he do so.

Its better to just talk to him and tell him that you will mess up the site rankings, remove all the links you built for him, that should be enough to get him thinking.

JuriR said:

What can i do to harm the traffic (that i build up) without leaving a legal proof that i was behind.

I don t care for moral advices, because i m the only one who build up the traffic.

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If you don't care I can give you a good advice. Bring him hell, destroyed him if he is not willing to pay!

Edit: when I say destroy him, I meant to say destroy the website you have work on

DDoS his website until he pays up hehee

Quite amazed on the number of responses suggesting extreme steps. Remember and Remember..what goes around always comes around. I'm not suggesting you give up and put up with the raw deal. Drop him a note to suggest that all the work done by you can easily be undone and also suggest about dire circumstances by giving examples of sites that fell off rankings due to negative seo and spam.

If you end up with eveil thoughts its only going to burn you eventually. I suggest you channelling it in a postivie way so come out successful with lessons learnt. Almost all of us have had situations where client doesnt pay and walks away. In you situation he denies your involvement but more often than corporates/individuals find silly excuses to terminate a contract.

In summary, if you know you have built the traffic and it looks you have so how about spending double the amount of time (knowing what seo works for that niche) and bringing another site in the same niche and blow the s**t out of his site. I had a same situation with one of the local seos so had to swallow the bitter pill and built an authority site to outrank the client who blatantly denied the seo efforts. It all ended with an apology and new authority site leased for 500$ per month

Forget it and move on... spending time on that type of crap is a total waste of mental energy.

I hate giving advice to post like this because well....two sides to everything ya know!

-RK

It is a lesson you have learned about both positive and negative.

What does he say? Take your action depending upon his response. Its a lesson for you.

samatar_h said:

terminate hosting until he pays you

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agree with this for sure

JuriR said:

i was stupid enough to work on a new site for 4 months without a contract. I had good reasons to do that, but thats another story.

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Unless I know that story I couldn't comment and neither would a legal team.

You admit you were stupid, so forget and move on. Learn a lesson in future.

Harming that site isn't going to benefit you, you'll only be wasting your time further.

Negative actions do not bring positive results