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How The Google Police Nabbed Me For Paid Links

By King Douche | May 27, 2011

So, let’s just start this off by all agreeing that I was a total noob dumbass.  Great.  Let’s continue.  This is a long-windy post but I have to tell this story and get it off my chest.  Get some coffee and prepare yourself.

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 PENALTYHow The Google Police Nabbed Me For Paid Links
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.

Topics: Notable Nut Jobs, Other Stuff | 55 Comments »

Posted on 27 May 2011 by King Douche

Preferred Marketing Destination Manager. (Thanks to MM for that title).

has written 16 articles for SEO Bullshit

  • http://searchmarketingwisdom.com alanbleiweiss

    This is priceless!   I really love that you shared this with us.  And it’s perfect for “live and learn”. 

  • http://www.justinparks.com Justin Parks

    Hence the name “king douche”? Cool story.

  • http://www.justinparks.com Justin Parks

    Hence the name “king douche”? Cool story.

  • http://www.justinparks.com Justin Parks

    Hence the name “king douche”? Cool story.

  • http://www.samuellavoie.com Samuel Lavoie

    haha priceless! That’s a great moment that you shared with us, thanks for the true story. We should all have our own “powerful” website to get stuff rank quickly. Next time I’m sure you’re not gonna put it up on Ebay ;-)

  • Shaunlecornu

    GOLD!

  • King Douche

    No problem, man.  It was still tough re-reading this just now.  Still can’t believe I was such an idiot.  Thanks for reading.  

  • http://twitter.com/seozoid Vlad Piersec

    This is a very nice story. It never crossed my mind some people hunt link sellers like that. “It’a jungle out there!” :)

  • Anonymous

    It is a great time you shared with us, thank you for the real story. We should all have our own “powerful” Site of the classification of things quickly.

    Property for Sale

  • http://profiles.google.com/ferruccio4 Ferruccio Cinquemani

    Great story. Loved it.

  • http://twitter.com/SebastianX Sebastian

    Great story :)

    I’d like to know whether “DAVID ANDREWS” is a Googler, or just one of those not exactly holy ‘sheer whitehat’ clowns who enjoy snitching more than real work.

  • Anonymous

    very nice sharing here, king! love the whole tone and take of same, eh!

    :-)Jim

  • John

    It would be a cool thing to know who that “david andrews” guy was, he needs to get a life.

  • King Douche

    Well, there is no way that any non-Googler could get ANY action on a site within 24 hours.  It could be submitted and reviewed by the Search Quality team but that would take days or even weeks or even months due to the sheer volume presented to Google.  There is only *1 team* that could impose action within 24 hours and that’s Cutts’ Google Search Quality Team/Web Spam team.  Nope.  It was a Googler.  I’m 100% sure.

  • http://twitter.com/badams Barry Adams

    Ouch. That must’ve hurt. At least you still cashed out, AND you learned a valuable lesson. Guess that made it a double-win for you after all. :D

  • http://twitter.com/SEONickLeRoy Nick LeRoy

    Priceless… You are right, a lot of us have a story similar.  Fortunately, mine aren’t to this degree but still I have my mistakes too.  The fact that you were willing to openly share your story is great!  How is the site doing today?  Is it still have the manual penalty or has the new owner cleaned it up?

  • King Douche

    That’s a great question, Nick.  Nope, even after I sold it and the new owner filed a ‘reinclusion appeal’ through GWT, the site is still a PR3 to this day.  Out of respect for the new owner I don’t want to reveal the domain name but I will tell you it was an article checker of sorts. ;)  The tool is hosed and it looks like he never maintained it but it still get 2-3K hits per day (he never removed my analytics from the results page.).  Conversely, I made another tool using AJAX and ASP.NET with a partner and as of May 1st, even my new tool is fully hosed due to Google’s new API ToS which charges $5 per 1000 queries instead of the free API access.  

  • http://www.seotallica.com Alejandro Ramírez Gallardo

    Excellent post, you dont get to see this kind of stories out in the open, we can learn a lot about this and how not to disclose information to any one that contacts you…and even more never use eBay to sell your site

  • http://seoroi.com Gab Goldenberg

    Awesome case study :D.

  • http://www.iamelliot.com/2011/06/my-daily-links-june-1-2011/ My Daily Links: June 1, 2011 | Elliot Ross

    [...] How The Google Police Nabbed Me For Paid Links | SEO Bullshit interesting story on one of the pitfalls of blackhat seo [...]

  • Anonymous

    Haha, this is a priceless expose on an oops moment. Thanks for being so blunt and honest in this post, it was a fun read. Selling websites or buying ones off of auction always has the potential to open up the can of worms. 

  • http://www.webtraphic.com/ BCox

    Still made out pretty good I’d say. Did your project sites drop in ranks as well after the Google penalty? 

  • http://twitter.com/timwithers Tim Withers

    Sounds kinda similar to how they hunt paedophiles. :P 

    Cool story dude, thanks for sharing – brave of you to do so.

  • Anonymous

    The fact that you could be that blatantly black hat for that long really reflects poorly on Google.

  • King Douche

    Great question, BCox. They did drop TBPR at the next update but not rankings.  The PR5 niche site that was fed through the PR6 went to a PR1 after the next TBPR update (which was about 8 months after the incident).   However, rankings didn’t suffer for the demoted TBPR sites.   The target content was still relevant and well written/wordy, and had all the hooks enabled to target the keyword phrases I was trying to rank.   

  • King Douche

    You should research the term ‘black hat’ a bit more.  Thanks for your comment.

  • http://www.netbuilders.org/business/encounter-google-police-25414.html#post178463 Encounter with the Google Police

    [...] with the Google Police Here's a funny story: How The Google Police Nabbed Me For Paid Links That's something I used to fear every time I talked to a potential client. I was wondering if I'm [...]

  • http://www.brand5.com Mark Faggiano

    Great story. I wish more SEOs and site owners would admit to their dumb mistakes and write similar posts. There’s a ton to be learned from other people’s mistakes.

  • http://am22tech.com/s/22/blogs/default.aspx Soan

    Great Confession. It really takes guts to accept and reveal such dumbness. But it certainly is a lesson for all. Do not take Google for granted. They are pretty serious about what they show on their search results and they strictly mean business.

    So, cherish if you have got good PR but never misuse it.

  • Archana Bhat

    very interesting and funny too….Now we got how paid links are painful for our sites.

  • http://www.wonderworxs.com Post

    If youve been a bit more careful when you said you were selling links and passing page rank to David Andrews do you think it could have been different?

  • http://seobullshit.com King Douche

    LOL!!! DAVID!!!!!!! DAMN YOU TO HELL!!!! RAWRRRR!

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Tom-Aikins/100000948365772 Tom Aikins

    I never realized that a page rank of six would be so powerful. After a year I’m up to three so maybe I’ll get there in another year. Good story. It’s now a mistake I’ll never make. Thanks.

  • SeoBOII

    Funny as hell, great story.

  • http://www.youteck.com/friv-4-school/friv-4-school.htm friv 4 school

     I can say that this is the funny story…but it isn’t so funny for you!

  • http://www.sabrinasabino.com Sabrina

    Heheh, definitely a great way to learn the ropes in the SEO field. ;) But can’t blame you for trying right?

  • http://seobullshit.com King Douche

    Well, I certainly would have not been able to sell my EBAY listing so strongly.  Yeah, hindsight, I would have just said “$800/month – Marketing Revenue”.  Thanks for your comment.

  • Friv 2

    I want to thank you for this informative read, I really appreciate sharing this great post. Keep up your work.

    Friv 2

  • seocompany delhi

    Thanks for the post indeed, rather useful!
     

  • Smek2

    You’re the dumbass, bitch. This blog is the most idiotic thing i’ve seen in a long time.

  • http://www.y3friv.com y3

    good info my friend.

  • http://conversionchamp.com/ Adarsh Thampy

    Great story. Worth sharing to site flippers.

  • Ryan

    Fake!

  • http://seobullshit.com King Douche

    Not fake, dude.  Swear to God man. 

  • http://www.vidjin.com/ Imran Khan

    LOL

  • amritpal kaur


    Vinyl Banners    Thanks for sharing such a valuable information.

  • http://www.developmentcatalyst.blogspot.com/ Development Catalyst Admin

    Very interesting.I am now inspired in doing more of the SEO thing.

  • http://www.talaashmovie.net Talaash

    Very interesting turn of events which have been described quite uniquely. I say all’s well that end’s well. Especially when there is a lesson learnt.

  • Anonymous

    Cheers, mate.  Thanks for sharing the debacle.  I’m still trying to figure out this SEO business so I’ll be bumbling around your site for a while.  Cheers.  http://www.halecollege.com

  • http://www.seoweave.com/ Greg Fowler

    This is a great editorial and how Google busted you through Gchat.  Wow, Google is pretty good.

  • http://www.dating-internet.nl/ Dating Overzicht

    Did that site ever get back to it’s previous PR6 ranking? I guess the links are still there?

  • http://www.yafud.pl/ yafud

    Great story. Nicely written. Thanks for the good laugh :)

  • King Douche

    Was PR3 for 2 years, then up to a PR5.  Guessing a 24-month penalty was applied.

  • Pierre

    Great and incredible post!! And fuck Google! Oh shit I shouldn’t have said that, maybe they’re spying me…Damn someone knocking on the door…

  • Arvestlin

    well,encouraging for me,but my website still do not have PR more then 6…