Jasja ter Horst is founder of SEO Review Tools: “Somewhere between 2005 and 2008, after I finished my studies, I started as a freelance web designer. In addition to working for clients, I am always busy with my own projects. In order to tell this story, it is important that I first provide some background information. This is the strategy for my first SEO project(s):
Automated content creation, using content syndication / scraping. This content was then automatically rewritten and provided with new images.
Using all possible link building strategies that could be applied on a large scale. Think of social profile links, comment spam and PBN links.
And what started as an experiment to learn more about SEO and see what was technically possible, grew into a steadily growing source of income. I then started applying this strategy on a large scale and managed to rank in the top 10 for keywords such as: web design, kitchens, cheap loans and holiday Spain.
Technically these projects were pretty good, but the automated content was of course of very low quality. The backlink profile was also of a questionable level, but 15 years ago you could still canada telegram data get away with this in the eyes of Google. At one point I had +/- 25 automated websites running, which were fully responsible for my income.
It took about 2 years for the horror to hit. And when it did, it happened very quickly. From one day to the next, you saw the traffic of this website halved and then never showed any sign of recovery. When this happened, I didn't invest any more time in it myself. For me, this was also the moment to look at black-hat SEO in a different way.
It is very interesting to explore the boundaries of SEO and to see what is possible, but at the same time it also hurts a lot when your income evaporates completely from one day to the next. Despite the frightening experience of the collapse of my source of income, the positive outcome is that I started working at an agency as an SEO consultant. I have never used the above techniques for clients, but I do think that they have given me a lot of knowledge about how Google works.
Innovation is often messy
As you can see, adapting quickly can make the difference between staying afloat and sinking. Most importantly, business leaders and managers need to reevaluate and rethink risk, uncertainty, and failure. Many organizations have highly structured processes for managing innovation to keep things as clear and predictable as possible. But the reality is that innovation is messy and requires accepting high failure rates.
