
Confessions of a Google Spammer (2015) - eugenoprea
https://inbound.org/blog/confessions-of-a-google-spammer
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kenny-log_ins
This guy reminds me how normal i am in the grand scheme of things: "I felt
discouraged and depressed. I tried to buy myself some fancy clothes and toys
to feel better about myself. I immersed myself in a shallow relationship with
a model who would end up being Miss Universe China 2014. I took weekly hiking
trips with my friends in the hills of Beijing on psychadelic mushrooms."

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inopinatus
Appropriately enough, this page triggered >400 requests blocked by my various
privacy tools.

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gnodar
Interesting. I'm using uBlock Origin with pretty much all 3rd party filters
enabled, and only have 19 requests blocked. Would you mind sharing what tools
you're using?

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gorhill
Block `twimg.com` and see the count climbing to over 460 -- because of the
avatars in the comment section. Personally I block such ubiquitous hostnames
by default (using uBO's dynamic filtering), as they are as good as trackers
(for Twitter in the current case).

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arca_vorago
Lots of people install ublock but never look at the settings or enable dynamic
filtering. Thats probably why you get more than them.

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trukernels
Ironically, the guy you replied to is the developer behind Ublock. He's the
person who knows the !most about internet privacy in Canada.

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antitamper
Google is only a proxy to The Internet, nothing more. There's a bucketload of
untapped traffic coming from sources Google could only dream of. I found this
out by mistake when I had AWStats running for way longer than it should have,
and it hoovered up globs of what we would call 'big data' today.

Some of the referal links are still alive today and funneling terrabytes of
metadata through their servers; a practice I thought was more or less frowned
upon, but still serving SEOs today. Still so much to tap into, still like 2012
too!

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gscott
Google has been trying to put a damper on linking from your website to another
one for years now. My first website in 1996 I developed the first thing I did
was go to websites that had similar customers and we would exchange links so
our customers would find out about our complimentary services. Now that freaks
google out because they prefer everyone to see Google ads when searching so
finding websites must be done inside of Google otherwise they threaten you to
take you out of Google search.

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MicroBerto
I was kinda one of those guys.

I never used ALN (Authority Link Network), but I used smaller-tier services.
And I ranked well for quite a while in my low-to-medium keywords -- things
that I loved, used, and believed in (and still do). Never touched crap like
HCG or Acai.

So here's the truth: It took me exactly 3 _years_ to get back to the pre-
Penguin traffic levels. Only difference is, this time I've done it with an
actual _brand_ and legitimate content: Breaking stories, researching things
never heavily-researched, getting quotes from sources, and exposing scams and
scandals as well.

Building a small brand is a chore, and we still have tons to do, but it's SO
worth it. This isn't some-scumbag-domain.com - it's a real brand that has its
own personality, fanbase, and return visitors who regularly come back to read
new stuff and use our services. People Google _for_ our brand more every
month... We even have our own haters!! That's like the highest honor!

Branding is hard work, but it's FUN. Repeat: it's FUN.

I still get emailed and asked about SEO frequently. My simple advice is this:
_blow the lid off of something_. If none of your content isn't worth real
people legitimately sharing... if none of your content isn't worth an
experienced user from a niche forum reading it and saying "wow"... then you
might as well not even waste your time.

Who needs to build links when you can write (or code) so damn well that people
build them _for_ you?! What's better than that?!

Thankfully, when I was doing well, I wasn't stupid with my money. I invested
into the future, and was able to handle the downturn without getting a job.

The lessons learned from this:

1\. Many entrepreneurs make their most serious money in SHORT bursts of time.
No matter what it is, it can dry up, so don't go buying cars just yet. Get
financial help from someone who knows what's up (not easy to find)

2\. If people aren't searching for YOUR brand name, then you're not doing
"SEO" right, or you have ways to go.

3\. Despite all this social media stuff, Google _still_ controls some of the
most valuable traffic. Don't do things that piss them off!

4\. You can have your filler content, but on frequent occasion, you must write
full-tilt content like this article here - fresh, insightful, and worth
sharing and posting to a number of sites and forums. Otherwise, you don't have
a real content strategy. You have a WOMBAT strategy. (Waste Of Money Brains
and Time)

5\. You can hustle for short-term money, but if you do that, you MUST re-
invest it into the long-term game. If you don't, you'll just turn into that
old guy spinning and hustling until the day you die. And at that point, you're
not an entrepreneur, you're just a hustler.

Dang, maybe I should get back into blogging. So much to say...

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dchuk
Congrats on the biz Mike, hope you're doing well :)

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MicroBerto
Thanks dchuk, you too! Gearing up for a "go big or go home" kind of attack
soon... definitely can't complain!

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rackforms
Apologies for the long posts chaps, but here's a genuine riddle I'm hoping
someone with black hat SEO experience/knowledge can help answer for me:

A quick spot of history: I started my business in 2007. Organic traffic grew
steadily until 2012 when I suffered a Penguin penalty that promptly wiped me
off the map.

Until that point I had reached a steady 1 or 2 spot in organic rankings for
the keywords that exactly described my product and service, which, considering
the market I'm in had around 12 competitors (at that time), and considering my
site was built for humans, had no keyword stuffing, and so on, felt, well,
justified.

At very minimum if you were in the market for what my product did a visit to
my site was a _great experience_. The site was fast, easy to read, well laid
out, the product rocked, and so on.

I stress those points as the penalty left me reeling. I had _heard_ about SEO
before sure, but considered it a gross exercise in unnatural manipulation -- I
would never go down that road. Hell, it took me months to realize I had a
"penalty", and then several more to figure out it was from this thing named
after an arctic fish.

And yet here I was penalized, and where my question comes in. I have a few
small pieces of information that may be relevant.

About a year before my penalty I started a blog covering general product
announcements and other items of interest to programmers. These items almost
never had links, and if they did, would be directly related to the subject
mater. As a concrete example, I wrote a post about learning SSE in assembly,
and linked to an Intel blog post on the same subject.

However, I did allow comments on this blog at first, and exactly two times I
logged in to find spam comments linking to discount shoes or handbags. These
comments were promptly removed, and, after that second time, I disabled
comments altogether.

Fast forward two years into the penalty (yes, two years in!). It's mid-2014
and I've been researching what happened. Turns out at the time of my initial
penalty I had well over a million "back links" pointing to my site. All were
from incredibly shady sites. Chinese language pages with literally hundreds of
"form posts", 99% filled with absolute gibberish text. But within that mass of
garbage would be a link to my site, the homepage no less, advertising discount
Louis Vuitton handbags. The link would generally be along the lines of (broken
HTML intentional) href = "formboss.net" > Discount Handbags </a

At first the scam seems obvious: If my site had links pointing to knockoff
handbag retailers, then my high Google rank would transfer over...wait...huh?

See, that's where I get stuck. I see the individual pieces, but I cannot piece
the scam together in any way that makes scene. The Chinese sites that linked
to me, who in the world would be reading those? Further, they linked to my
home page. Short of being hacked (which I never was), how would a home page
link make sense?

The short-lived links on my blog: Sure, they linked to outside sources, and so
conceivably my high rank would valuable, but _why_ the 1,000,000+ inbound
links to my site?

That’s the part that keeps me awake at night. The thing I had control over,
the outbound links -- Zapped ‘em immediately. The damage clearly came from
those inbound links, but they make no sense to me.

What was the game I played for?

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nstory
I am not a black hat SEO expert by any means, so take my thoughts with a grain
of salt. It sounds like you may have been the victim of a negative SEO attack.
In short: one of your competitors may have created these millions of spammy
links in order to decrease your rankings (and, presumably, raise their own
closer to the top). If this is still a site you care about, consider
disavowing the spammy links:
[https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en)

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rackforms
A very solid piece of advice on the disavow links, and very much acted upon a
few years ago (of course I still maintain a close watch on links!)

Also, to another reply a bit further down, I actually started fresh with a new
domain about 6 months after the initial penalty, and used 301 redirects from
the old (penalized) site to the new.

I did this to reduce confusion from my existing users, as their was no reason
why they should have to retype or bookmark a new domain name. Sure I was going
through a very rough patch, but my users should not have to as well!

I had a simple bit of logic that said if you were coming from the old domain,
to pop up a message say hi, we had a name change. Not ideal, but that's the
best I could come up with.

Little did I know that the 301 actually transferred the penalty to the new
site. Shortly after launching I was hit with a second penalty, and the thought
of having to change domain names _again_ was just...it's just wrong. The
inconvenience and confusion this creates for users is still being felt to this
day. I routinely get emails from users of the first domain asking if I'm the
same company.

So yeah, I've been trying here, but my lucks been pretty bad : )

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alexashka
Fun read, thanks for posting. Illustrative of a young industry and people
exploiting the temporary holes.

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chris_wot
Wow, he's still slimey - and he considers himself reformed!

