A guy named Charles F… has come out with an ebook on internet marketing warfare. He is only something like 18 years old but according to him he has accomplished quite a bit in his life. He says that the ebook will show how to make war and win the war in internet marketing. But he admits that not all of it may be ethical. This gives us pause since that may be a winning strategy short term, but may not be the best strategy long term.
One thing he seems to be saying is that in certain down and dirty niches, people will do link attacks where they link spammy sites to competing sites. We agree with his statement that it doesn’t seem very ethical. Yet, at the same time, he has said he has been the subject of such attacks once he has made it into the top 20 for some keywords.
He says that many attacks don’t work because they look like attacks. Too much, too fast and Google discounts it. He said it needs to be done over more time and mixed in with other things so it looks like a normal SEO campaign that is incompetent or being stretched a bit. Use SEMRush to see what pages are ranking and what keywords they rank for. Then use ahrefs to see what link building has been done.
He also talks about doing links from guest blog posts. He gets content using Fiverr and Textbroker. Then getting some Viagra or pay day loan sites for links. And, if you have a penalized site, redirect it to a competitor. This guy is way too creative in thinking about how to mess with other people. He should be figuring out how to make his stuff better, not other people’s worse.
Then he talks about scraping content from competitor’s sites and creating other sites so it looks like there is duplicate content. He says that it should be that the original content is good and copies are penalized. But, he says that often Google will treat sites with better links as the original. So if you create a site and get links to it, then you could confuse the search engines about which was original.
Man, we are such goody two shoes that we didn’t even know this sort of stuff was going on. This is just the beginning of what he wrote. Our guess is that he also discusses doing bad reviews of other people among many other things. If he is doing this and said he has been the victim of it as well, it is probably more widespread than we would have ever guessed. C’est dommage.