“Domination to the point of demoralization,” is my answer.

That’s when the bug-eyed, blank stare hits me.

The concept of my strategy is so under-estimated, so feared, so rare, that no one hardly ever gets it that THAT is what I’m doing.    Go fucking psycho on them.  But that’s my strategy.

WHAT IS PSYCHO?
Well, it starts with sleepless nights.  Or day-night sleep reversal, whatever you call it.  Personally, I can’t work while those wretched birds chirp so that means when the birds start chirping, it’s time for bed.  Although, I live in Vegas, and perhaps that’s par for the course.  However, the indisputable fact remains:  ”I worked well beyond what you’re capable of working. I win.”  And, that’s my strategy, people.  Work harder than anyone else to the point where other competitors look at your campaign and say to themselves, “that site dominates everything, why bother?”

Perfect.  The exact response I was looking for.

DOMINATION TO THE POINT OF DEMORALIZATION
That’s my motto.  I want to make you cry.  I want to make you feel hopeless.  I want it so you don’t even try to compete with me.  Why?  Because you CAN’T COMPETE WITH PSYCHO.   Nothing instills a win faster than someone contemplating to compete with you then giving up because you never became complacent with your campaign and this fact is evident when competitors try to belly-up and play ball with a pro.

“Don’t even try.”  That’s the message I’m trying to convey.

FINISH YOUR SHIT.  DOESN’T MATTER IF IT FAILS.
Don’t be a douchebag.  The MOST COMMON defense mechanism your big-fat oversized brain will try to impose on you is “If you don’t finish the site, and it fails, then it’s okay but you never gave it 100%.”

That’s TOTAL SEO BULLSHIT.

Recognize that your brain is trying to save you from pain.  If you were to deploy, what you considered to be a 100% awesome site, and it failed, you would then conclude that YOU are a failure and your brain will do everything in its power to prevent pain.     DEPLOY THAT SHIT.  FACE THE PAIN.

If your idea/site is a failure, then so be it.  But don’t NOT do something because you want it to be perfect and, therefore, if it’s not perfect it’s not deployable.  That’s a bullshit defense mechanism.  Recognize it.   Thwart it.

GOD HELP YOU IF YOU REACH THE TOP 10
If I could behead you, video it, and put you on THEYNC, I would.  All you do when you start making progress is piss me off.  Nothing aspires progress like hate.  It’s this writer’s opinion, and that of others, that HATE is the STRONGEST of all motivational emotions.  It allows you to accomplish anything.  It’s like an adrenaline-inspired emotion.  When you try to compete with me, you invoke an adrenaline-overdosed demon.  You create hate.   Just when you thought that I was done with my campaign, I will GLADLY double/triple/quadruple my budget for new content generation and campaign advancement to make sure that you don’t succeed.  At this point, my goal is to make sure you fail.

DOUBLE JEOPARDY, ALEX
Not only do you have to conjure up the motivation to succeed, and do it with such tenacity as to compete with me, but now you have me trying to make you fail with the SAME tenacity.  Matter of fact, my approach to make you fail is more mature than your attempt at getting psycho.  I’m a pro.  You’re just learning.

You won’t have a boss looking over you and that’s your disadvantage.  You see, it would be one thing if you were at a place of business, say APPLE, and that boss, say STEVE JOBS, went psycho on you and forced you to over-achieve.  This is the standard.  But what if you worked at home?  What if I knew you didn’t have a Steve Jobs to motivate you?  What if *I* was my own Steve Jobs.  What if I watched videos of Steve and modeled my own motivation after his?  Have fun competing with that.  You will fail.  It’s your only option.

CHECK OUT THE BIG BRAIN ON BRAD
So, Mr. Smarty Pants, you’re trying to pounce my shit?  You’ve just conjured up “the psycho in me.”  A normally kind, generous, helpful gent that will help grandmas succeed just turned into the most scary, relentless terminator that you can imagine.  Allow me to quote from scripture, paraphrased slightly (The Terminator)

“He doesn’t eat.  He doesn’t sleep.  And he absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are gone.”

I liken myself to how birds fight with each other and how ants dismember their prey when I judge how to punish you.  Peck your eyes out.  Dismember you.  Whatever.  As long as you suffer, I win.  I want it so you associate pain with your campaign.  This works.  Everytime.

Not only do I meet the minimum, not only do I go over the minimum, not only do I go to MAXIMUM, I go to Level 11, where you cry to your mommy, “Please God make him stop.”

I will never stop.  I will never quit.  No matter what.  Not ever.

You can’t compete with psycho.

There’s adjustments, and there’s EVICTIONS.  Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to Google’s latest algo adjustment dubbed ‘Titanic.”  Why “Titanic?”  Because you’ll be searching for survivors, that’s why.  Well, the official name has now been officially entitled “Penguin.”   Our original “Titanic” moniker was at least  related to something being cold and frigid.

THE FALSE ALARM
Last week, we saw some interesting, albeit odd, adjustments in the SERPS as Google wrangled with a buggy ‘parked-domain’ signal.  Many, like myself, thought it was some A/B/C split testing going on with Google SERPS and was likely a premonition to come.  This was not the case.    That false adjustment alarm was prelude to the real adjustment which was designed to further signal unnatural linking and ‘webspam.’  Both grey and white-hats were affected by this adjustment.

So, you say, “big deal,” King.  Well, here’s why I posted.

GOOGLEBOT IS AN ANGRY STEP-FATHER WHO DRINKS
As you might have read a few weeks ago, I went white-hat with my money site in January due to weak nerves and was sodomized by a robot named GoogleBot.  Sure, GoogleBot is cute and bleeps a lot but there’s a side to that machine that anally rapes you, uses sand as lubricant, and punches you in the face on the way out the door.   Yes, GoogleBot is passive-aggressive and has a temper.  Deal with it.

JUST MADE THE CUT-OFF
So, it seems, by 60 – 90 days, I went white hat just in time.  Because my money site, which was in the shitter a few weeks ago, just got promoted to #1 across the board for pretty much any keyword phrase even REMOTELY related to my niche.  All the other competitors that were running grey got their ass handed to them….many of them totally fucking nuked.

A FIERCE ADJUSTMENT
What shocks me the most about this algo adjustment is the fierceness of  it.  This isn’t some “move this site down 2 positions, or to page 2″ adjustment.  This is a total adjustment of a 3.1% of all search queries (the name “PI” for this adjustment was a close second.)  This is huge.  I would venture to say that this makes Panda looks like a cute, furry adjustment.  No, my friends, this adjustment is nothing less than MAJOR.

NOT A NEGATIVE SEO OPPORTUNITY
Some are saying that this is prelude to a new type of SEO campaign.  The “Negative SEO” campaign where you can actually hurt your competitors by placing shit-stained links in bad neighborhoods.  Me?  I am always on the prowl for my backlinks showing up in a bad place and am ripe-and-ready to file a notice to GoogleGods stating “that link is NOT mine, please don’t kill me, my income, and my life.” #kthxbye.

However, and this is what gives me pause, if Titanic was just a devaluation of poor links and/or content, then why are the affected sites NUKED rather than just demoted?  It sure looks like there is more than just de-valuation going on here.    This is a penalty, it seems and this paves the way for Negative SEO which is scary as hell.   Perhaps this was a one-time sweep although I highly doubt that.

TRENDS/PATTERNS
How did you do after this adjustment?  Did you find any pattern to the sites that were nuked?  I did.  The ones with paid links in shitty web spots all had the SERPS that were affected NUKED.  It seems that Amit found a way to really find many paid links and nuke the fucking shit out of the benefit of those links.  I personally don’t think that NEGATIVE SEO is possible.  I do think that there was benefit from even slightly shitty links and that benefit has now been mitigated.

FEEL CHEATED?  READY TO INFLICT MORE DEATH?
Google’s got a form for that.  If you feel that your site was wrongfully affected by the algo adjustment, you can submit your request for review using this form.  If you feel that the change wasn’t deep enough and there are still sites that missed The Death Penalty, use this Google Spam Report and mention the keyword “Penguin” in your report.

Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve got legal, paid juice passing. This means that there is a white-hat way to flow juice while paying for it. So, yeah, it’s not a ‘paid link’ but it is ‘paid juice’ and since juice means domain authority, I think we’ve caught a break.

So, let’s take this to the extreme then. What if I had a huge-ass budget and I decided I wanted banner ads placed on hundreds, even thousands of sites. In theory you could jack up your site to a PR 7 or even a PR8. PR6 should come relatively easy with even a modest budget and now, it seems, you can get a PR6+ site by coughing up recurring monthly dough. But, holy fuck, talk about recurring monthly marketing budget nightmare. You’ll be in bed *forever* with hundreds of sites, paying them monthly, yearly, etc. You’ll need to ask yourself, “Is it worth it?”

So what ARE the advantages of having a PR6+ site? Well, first you’ll pass authority to each sub-page. Okay, so what does that do? What effect does domain authority have on SERPS?  According to Rand @ SEOMoz:  None whatsoever.   However, if you’re looking to monetize your site, you’ll only have 2 metrics in order to classify how much you can charge:  PageViews, or PageRank.  That’s it.  You either have 1, or the other, or both, but never neither.

FUCK IT, CREATE A BANNER AD MARKETPLACE
So, if it’s legal, let’s take it to the fucking extreme. Form a marketplace like TLA and sell only Banner Ad placements with followed images. TLA’s infographic marketplace won’t work since they only require an infographic be placed for 30 days. You need a way to place that shit long-term in the same spot. Any one out there know of a marketplace that sells banner ad placements? I say take that shit to the max. If it got the blessing from Cutts then I say that could be one of the last, paid ways to get more PR juice to your site. I don’t care what anyone says, I want my site to have the highest PageRank possible. And if there is now a paid way to accomplish that then I say go to Level 11 on that shit.

I’d like to pose this question to the visitors: “What are the advantages of having a high PageRanked domain?”   Since we can apparently pay to get one now, how would we leverage it?   Now is a great time to watch Fishkin’s video on PageRank.  I’m going to get crackin on finding some way to pass seemingly worthless link juice to my sites, legally.

So, last quarter, I wrote about how I declared Google the winner of the “you better go white hat or else” stalemate.  I did paid links, paid reviews, and never, ever did any shit like “cloaking”, “spam”, or “stuffing.”  Hence, the “grey” hat campaign type.  I had awesome content.  I had a crawlable site.  It was perfect in every way.  I used paid links and reviews to scream at GoogleBot, “Hey, notice me!  I’m right here! I have killer content and reputable sites link to it.”  The results were great.   The money.   Terrific.  I left the competition scratching their heads since my site was HTTPS, it was hard to reverse engineer as most link-finding tools couldn’t really find my backlinks.

However, the stress of running a grey-hat campaign eventually wears on you and you long for the peace of a white hat campaign.  So, I hatched a plan to wean my site from grey and pray that the results weren’t too bad.  I expected a 15-25% drop in SERPS and traffic which I could then recover by getting a big relevant, content piece linked up to the pages where I removed the TLA’s.

Fucking failure.   Total and monstrous failure.

Because I didn’t have the BALLS to gut out the imaginary stress of my campaign,  I think I have nearly ruined it all.   My total traffic drop?  -72.5%.   About 10 days after the first phase of removing TLA’s, I saw the first hit to my SERPS.    It was bad.  Way worse than I had imagined.  Then when phase II came around 30 days later, it was nothing less than a total disaster.

It’s hard for me to write right now.  Because writing this means that the realization is true.

SAME PAGES, SAME CONTENT, DIFFERENT SUBDOMAIN
The way that my money site is setup is “mysite.corporate.com” and other competitors in my space have “theirsite.corporate.com” and “grandma.corporate.com”.   It’s a sub-domain structure.   So, what’s happened now is that mysite.x.x has been replaced, with a roaming/constantly-changing yoursite.x.x, someothersite.x.x. Google is so confused now that it doesn’t know what competitor site to rank where my SERP was.  I’ll tell you one thing, it ain’t my site anymore.   Did an experiment where I tried to get one of them back and I can’t even get the page to index.  I am seeing the total number of indexed pages drop EACH day from 530 -> 460 -> 420 -> 411…pages just keep dropping out of the index.    Organic SERP traffic DOWN from 290 keywords a day to a paltry 60.

THE SWEET TLA CAMPAIGN FLIES UNDER THE RADAR
I was piping in sweet link juice from about 4 PR6 sites and a couple of PR7 sites (all with less than 20 outbound links per site so that juice was sweet.)  My TLA bill was $380 per month which I didn’t give a fuck about because I was making $11-$27K per month NET NET revenue.   Who fucking cares about $380?    My new numbers are more like $7 – $10K now.   Yeah, yeah I can hear all you haters out there, “You should be happy with that!”  My answer is a whole-hearted FUCK YOU.   No douchebag entrepreneur settles for a 50% loss on their revenue and takes it in the ass and says “THANKS!”

Fuck that.  This loss is the SAME EXACT thing (analogously) as getting robbed at gun-point and having to give up my wallet and jewelry.    Then punching me in the face as they leave.

CONTENT STRATEGY IN EFFECT
So, my only strategy here is to work the problem.  I’ve dumped almost $3800 in content these weeks…big, nice pieces, beautifully interlinked with the rest of the site however the traffic upswing is slower than expected.   Plus, certain SERPS that I was certain I could pounce with some nice content aren’t going anywhere and some grandma seems to be out-SERPING me with NO TEXT and some fucked up “BUY NOW” button that has been upscaled from 75X75 pixels to a 20/200 vision 250 X 35 pixels and looks like it was done by a 7 year old.  Yes, Google, that outranks my shit.  So much for user experience.

I could write for days on this and correct the fucked-up sentences in this post that don’t make much sense or are awkwardly worded.  However, I’m just going to hit Publish before I change my mind on posting this.  Cheers.

Sidenote: Please, colleagues. This is really rough on me. Go easy on the flaming. This one’s hard. (That’s what she said.)  I write these pieces so you all can learn from other’s mis-steps and hopefully prevent disaster on your end.

UPDATE:  SEE WHAT HAPPENED!  http://seobullshit.com/google-presents-titanic-coming-serps/

So, the time has come.  Sleepless nights.  The wondering.  The fear.  Your grey campaign is milking years off of your life. (I just HAD to reuse that image on the left. It’s more appropriate than ever for this piece.)

You’ve weighed the negatives, the positives.  You wanted to stand tough.  But there was one factor that tipped the scales.   The domain.

THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE
You see, Google basically gives you one ‘get out of jail free’ card in regards to paid links.  Yes, you can ride the grey, get caught, and beg for forgiveness promising never to do it again and thou shall be saved.  But, you only really get one bail out.  Even if you tried it again on another domain, and got nailed, I doubt that the Google gods would be as forgiving on your 2nd and subsequent requests.  So, throughout your whole life, you get one and only one pardon.

When will you use it?  How long do you plan on being an SEO?  5 years?  20 years?  40 years?  Perhaps time refills the guff.

But getting a pardon for paid links requires one important fact:  You’ll need to own the domain, or have full access to it in order to authenticate through Google Webmaster Tools in order to file the reinclusion request.   Meta tag, DNS, file upload, or Google Analytics authentication.  You’ll need access.

THE COMPANY-OWNED DOMAIN TIPPED MY SCALES
“So,” you say.  ”What’s the significance of that domain ownership fact, King Douche?”

Well, what if your money-maker was on an affiliate corporate-owned domain where you had no access to the site?  What if you couldn’t file a reinclusion request if you ever got nailed?  Would you then have to scrap the subdomain and start over?  Is there a better way?  Are you really better off riding the grey and just facing the penalty if it ever comes?  What if would have never came?

Well, therein lies the question.  What if you would have never got caught?  What if you raked in the dough throughout the product’s lifecycle and by the time the algorithm caught up with you the product’s life cycle was on its way out?  Which path would you choose?  Turning the grey into white?  Or riding the grey?

I’D RATHER CLAW MY WAY BACK THAN TRY AND BREAKOUT OF THE DOG-HOUSE
Even if I did have access to the domain, this solid realization remains:  I’d rather experience a drop in rankings switching to white hat, then work my ass off to get it back, rather than ride the grey until (if) it breaks then work my way out of the dog house.

You see, a good SEO isn’t afraid to work hard.  Yeah, yeah we work smart, too, but a solid campaign is almost never ending.  The fact that a good SEO has a strong work ethic plays is his/her favor.  Many simply won’t work that hard.  99% want to take a shortcut somehow.  If you vow to keep cranking away on your campaign, you’ll end up right back at the top.  That’s my logic anyway.

THE PRICE IS RIGHT
Go as far as possible without going over.  This is the strategy for running a grey campaign.  But when Google penalizes one of their own products, and even their own search engine in Japan for violating their quality guidelines, it’s time to chainsaw the main beams in your link strategy and try and go white hat.  (Go ahead, Google “Google Chrome”...GONE is the download page, completely.)

WE SAW IT COMING
From SearchEngineLand:

“Paid links drew much attention last year, after Google penalized JC Penney, as well as Forbes and Overstock for using them. Google even banned BeatThatQuote, one of its own companies last year, BeatTheQuote, over the issue.”

THE DECIDING FACTOR:  GOOGLE CHROME RESULT GOT NUKED, GOOGLE’S NOT MESSING AROUND ANY MORE
It used to be somewhat easy to jack-up rankings.  A few paid reviews, a few paid links, a handful of this and that, good relevant content, good page architecture and you were pretty much at the top of the SERPS and assuming your site was well designed, it converted.  Now, with even more intense algorithmic changes, at best you’ll just not realize any gain from paid links.  At worst, demotion or at ultra-worst, total nuke.  Hell, Google demoted GOOGLE JAPAN for 11 fucking months from a PR9 to a pR5 and then they came back a PR8.   If they’ll do that to one of their own companies, imagine what they’ll do to me.   They’ll feed me to the lions without blinking an eye.

With Google Chrome getting nuked, I’m not doing grey hat anymore. No way.  Not any more.  It’s a new year.  It’s time to take the hit, recover, and sleep easy as a white hat.  Before it’s too late.  Me?  I’m out.

In a few months, I’ll let you know the repercussions of going white hat from grey.  Hopefully, it’ll just be a few hiccups and not a total loss of lifestyle.  I’ll keep you posted.

Well, my friends, I am happy to report that we’ve caught a break.  It’s now hard as hell to reverse-engy a HTTPS backlink campaign with the death of Yahoo! Site Explorer.  Open Site Explorer only allows HTTP links and you have to PAY to get to see Majestic’s data so that leaves shitty and totally non-useful “link:” data as the only method to get any data on a link campaign.

Of course, you could just quote out a domain name in a search query and have fun analyzing every reference to that domain then visit the link, draw a conclusion, then move on to the next result but with a domain with > 500 links/references, you can bet that your competition will give up quickly.

However, if reverse-engy’ing a campaign is something that you do to get traction, then here are some cool backlink tools you might want to know about.  And, no, there are no fucking affiliate links in here any where.  SEOBULLSHIT doesn’t pull that shit.  Our bullshit is for the sake of bullshit, not affiliate bullshit.  It’s just for your reference.

MAJESTIC SEO:  http://www.majesticseo.com/plans-pricing

SEO SPYGLASS:  http://www.link-assistant.com/seo-spyglass/

OPEN SITE EXPLORER (I love Rand, but there is no  HTTPS option):  http://opensiteexplorer.org 

Got more backlink checkers that you want us to know about?  Put your non-affiliate linked URL  in the comments below.

Did your site go up or down?  Post your link to your site in the comments below.

First, let’s start of with the norm.  Bashing PageRank.  Yep, it’s cool for an SEO to bash PageRank.  If you really want to look like a cool SEO, you gotta continually dismiss and downplay PageRank even though it’s the single quantifiable metric available for public observation.  Only to COOLEST SEO’s can disregard PageRank and claim that ONLY traffic and sales matter.  The rest of us are forced to look at it and get excited that we’ve built a site that seems to have a strong and trusted foundation and that are efforts are being positively validated by the world’s largest search engine company.

MONETIZATION
Another great feature of a Toolbar PageRank update is the ability to monetize your site.  You can monetize a site based on 1 of exactly 2 factors:  TRAFFIC or PAGERANK.   So, why would an SEO dismiss the 2nd factor?  If your site doesn’t rack in 1,000,000 PV”s per day/week/month, then all you have to go off of is the PageRank.    And it you’re going to sit there and tell me ‘But, hey, King Douche, you’re supposed to ‘nofollow’ paid links!’  Yeah, and I’m supposed to brush after every meal and eat lots of fiber but I don’t do that either.

When you launch a new site into a marketplace, your site’s PageRank will govern how much money you make off of that site.  No, don’t tell me that PageRank is unimportant.

PUBLIC ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
If you’re an SEO for hire working on a new client’s site, your traffic generation and sales goal will be a long one.  It doesn’t happen quickly unless you want to pay big for it.  So, as an organic SEO, you’ll want to prove to your new client that you’ve taken their brand new site and built it up to a point where the reputation has been QUANTIFIED.

ABILITY TO LAUNCH NEW SITES
So, last post, I wrote about how my PR6 site was awesome for launching new sites.  That brand new site would come out of the gate a PR5 and the Link Juice Tree was bearing fruit waterfalling into each of my linked subpages.  Sweet, sweet TBPR fruit.   

THE PAGERANK FRUIT TREE
With the assignment of a metric, i.e. TB PageRank, you’ll get to see how your site’s equity is trickling into the subpages.  You’ll get to see how and reverse-engineer why certain sub-categories get more PR juice than others.  You’ll see how your footer links seemed to all get PR while links 3-deep away from home ended up getting 1/5th of the root pages PR (as it probably should.).  These are just examples and not ‘rules of PageRank‘.  You’ll get to see and deduce why pages with original content got more PageRank assigned to them when they had outbound links  to relevant sites and inbound links from relevant pages all in a beautifully inter-weaved cacophony of ordered chaos.

It’s exciting to see your tree bare fruit.  PageRank is the report card that shows how much fruit you’ve got to give out.

Now, let’s get into this true story that happened in 2008.

THE SHITTY PLAGIARISM CHECKER
One of the first successful sites I developed was a shitty little plagiarism checker that I paid a Russian $150 through GAF to build for me based on  a simple premise:  break an article up into small fragments and search Google using the SOAP API for the appearance of these fragments then report the results.  The tool came out of necessity (as most good inventions do) and since all other plagiarism detection tools charged monthly fees, or offered limited functionality for free, my fully functional, free tool gained popularity quickly and word spread at Universities for teachers to use the tool to pre-check students papers for blatant plagiarism.  The site gained PageRank quickly and I got it jacked up to a PR6 in about 2 years with LOTS of inbound .EDU links.

THE POWER OF THE PR6
Now, for an SEO, a PR6 site is pretty powerful shit.  You can pretty much put a link on that page and it’ll pop up to first page for most any medium-competition keyword so I used the site to introduce new niche markets and it was the catalyst for all of my successful sites.  I pwned the competition quickly for my niches simply by introducing new sites with a link from my PR6 site and the new niche site would come out a PR5 right out of the gate.   A PR6 site is a powerful tool if you can get one.

So, I was new to monetizing sites and I had the bright idea to sell Text Link Ads and i was fetching $280/month per link and I had 4 links paying me monthly.  For a SEO noob, to have 1 site that generated over $800/month was pretty good.  That, combined with the new-site-introducing power of the PR6, I had a nice thing going.  So, of course, I found a way to fuck it up as efficiently as possible.

That was until I had the idea to sell the site and ‘cash out’ my PR6.  I figured I could fetch 15 months ROI and get about $15K for the site.   I put an ad up on EBAY, did screenshots of the traffic, and some of the link-revenue I was generating to backup the ‘the site makes so-and-so per month’ claim for the eBAY ad.

Wait, it gets worse.

HEY! I’VE GOT AN IDEA!
Then I had the bright idea that I wanted to advertise the EBAY listing so I saw an SEO article and plopped the auction link as comment spam justifying it by saying ‘Hey, maybe an SEO wants to buy this site?”  Again, this is fucking hard as hell for me to write this—I was such a dumbass. It was the first project that I had undertaken and this was what got me started in SEO as a full time job.   I was starting to make money from creating websites and getting those sites to rank and making money off of the ranking.   But every successful SEO has the project where they learned *NOT* to do a certain action.  This was my fuckup story.

So, like watching a slow-motion trainwreck, let’s continue.

Let’s paint this picture now.  I have a PR6 site selling links, and then created an EBAY listing announcing that I was selling links for the purpose of passing PageRank and you could own this wonderful site for only $15,000 which was about 20 months ROI.  I then advertised this by comment spamming the presence of the EBAY listing on an SEO forum site (searchenginejournal.com).  Holy dickwad, Batman!

THE BUST
About 48-hours later I get an GMAIL CHAT instant message from some guy.   It wasn’t broken English he was chatting but perfect, eloquent English.  American name….we’ll call him David Andrews (fake name but you get the idea on how normal the guy sounded).  So David asked me a few questions over chat.  ”I see you’re selling your website?’ and “I see that you’re making about $800 per month selling assets on those website?”

I then went into a record-setting chat marathon typing-session bragging on how good the PR6 site was at getting other sites to rank and that $280 per month was CHEAP for such a powerful ranking service.  It was then that the dagger-question came from DAVID ANDREWS (CAPS and punctuation are for editorial emphasis).

“So, you ARE selling links on your site then for the purpose of passing PageRank?”

My response, “Hell yeah, and it works awesome, too!  Any link that gets put up on that site ranks at or near the top for medium competition keyword.”

I then pasted examples of the people’s websites that were currently advertising with me to prove it.

DAVID ANDREWS then simply responded “I have all the information I need now.  Thanks for your time.”

And just like that he was gone.  I thought to myself “Damn I was pretty sure he was gonna buy it to!  He seemed really interested and asked some good questions.  Oh well!”

THE PENALTY
So the next day I awoke to my site completely de-indexed from Google.  Not a listing to be found anywhere.  Yes, the EBAY ad was in it’s 5th day of the 10 day auction.  Wouldn’t even come up for the DOMAINNAME.COM search.

Yep, it got nuked.

“What happened?” I thought.

The next day, still no show, The 3rd day, it was back.  I checked the Toolbar Pagerank and it got reduced from a 6 to a 3.  Just like that.  3 full PR coefficients.    It was then I realized that I had been nabbed by the Google manual penalty police.  The user DAVID ANDREWS never answered any emails nor responded to additional chat requests.  He was gone, 100%.

THINGS HAPPEN FOR A REASON?
So, about six months later, the good news is that another buyer eventually came along and bought the site, unsolicited.  I didn’t even offer it for sale after that and his offer was, *coincidentally*, $15,000.

I took the $15,000 and steamrolled it into a nice portfolio of Internet businesses across different markets.  It’s what I do to this day.

“Create an EBAY listing about selling my PR6 site and monetizing said site with Paid Links then comment spam the listing in an SEO forum. ”  Sheer genius, dude.  Sheer fucking genius.

God, what a dumbass.  Cheers.

Now, I understand that the full PR Algo paper written by Page and Brin is a lengthy one, but surely people understand the basics of it, right?  Surely NO ONE would think that PageRank 1 means ‘The First Page of Google Results’ and PageRank 10 means ‘The 10th Page Of Google Results.’  Right?  RIGHT?!

Thanks SmashingHub.com. No seriously, THANK YOU.

You can see the full “article” (Google cache) by clicking on the image.

So, you ‘d think that no one would see this right? Well, it was on Digg, which further reinforces my assertion that ‘Digg is Dying.’

Digg is Dying