Registering a .com with a simple additional word such as "doitforstatedudes" and then spamming Google would have gotten him to page 1. Black hat SEO works.
It's like adblocking. 5+ years ago it was generally enough to target HTML elements with an ID of "advertising-wrapper" or something obvious like that. But ad networks and the sites that implement them got smart and started using generic or randomized IDs so that would work. Then the new method was blocking known advertising domains. Now some of them are starting to serve ads from the same domain you access the site through.
hu? like buying a ton of paid links?