How I trolled myself out of Google and destroyed my affiliate business | Hacker News Reader

How I trolled myself out of Google and destroyed my affiliate business

sebastianjohnsson.com

8 pointsSebJohnsson5 comments

Just a little story about what can happen when you decide to troll Google with a bunch of sites fronted with cute little animals in the Pay Day Loan-niche.

Open articleView on HN

Thank you for this inspiring story of how to make money while gunking up the Internet for the rest of us and creating absolutely nothing of value. Real Horatio Alger shit here.

The author spent several paragraphs on how it would have been better if he focused his efforts on building a high quality site instead. Did you read the article?

Yes, I read the article - did you understand it? He talked about building a better AFFILIATE service, which works by tilting nominally non-promotional Google results the way someone with money wants them to go.

Then he said, "don't hate the player, hate the game," in the grand tradition of self-justifying sleazebags everywhere. Then he talked about losing Diablo 2 characters like that's some kind of moment of personal growth.

It seems that the lesson is, if you're going to be a spammer, use a separate IP for each site, use a separate ID for registering each domain, and make each site sufficiently distinct. Then, if Google decides to ban ALL your sites, they have a hard time figuring out which sites are actually yours.

That's the danger of shady SEO. It's an arms race between Google tweaking their search algorithm, and people looking to exploit flaws.

the fact that this exists is not just anecdotal but speaks to the vastness of the internet and the sheer inability of google to effectively apply their own rules without human intervention

to say this is nothing less than to cry out, 'the emperor has no clothes!'

we've seen this before many times. it takes a competitor or at least someone equally knowledgeable about a niche to finger a spammer and then make a lot of noise so that hopefully, google takes notice and action

just a few months ago we saw the EXACT same thing with rapgenius

google wants everyone to suspend disbelief and join them in their imaginary universe where their algorithms are effective

Reply on news.ycombinator.com