Part 3The rules I was paid to break
Search marketing has a white hat, a gray hat and a black hat. The line between them is Google's published rules. Every method in my budget sat on the wrong side of that line, and the budget was on the company's own server.
Chad Arrington, in his words
Nobody hires a white hat to move a page from nowhere to number one in ninety days. They hire what I did.
White hat is better writing, faster pages, links people give you. Gray hat bends the rules. Black hat buys the result: networks of sites built to look independent, links sold by the thousand, tiers of links pointing at other links. I was not hired to write better pages. I was hired to rank promotional copy above the news, and the only way to do that at the speed they wanted was to buy it.
What Google forbids, and what the budget called it
| Google's published rule | The company's own budget line | Documented |
|---|
| Buying or selling links for ranking purposes is link spam[5] | Purchased monthly dofollow links pointed at company tag pages, and a vendor whose pricing page for 5, 10 or 20 network sites a month was pasted into the review | Aug. 9, 2017 review set[2] |
| Using automated programs or services to create links[5] | A three-tier architecture: Tier 1 private blog networks at about $600 a month, tier 2 long-tail variations through crowdsourcing networks, tier 3 press releases and auto-blogs. Links pointed at links. | Aug. 9, 2017 review set[2] |
| Large-scale guest posting with keyword-rich anchor text[5] | Guest posts priced per campaign in the budget and expense plan sent to the manager | Sept. 8, 2016 email[6] |
| Advertorials or native advertising carrying links that pass ranking credit[5] | Paid influencer placements, and the ranking of long-copy promotional pages as if they were editorial | Aug. 9, 2017 review set[2] |
| Third-party content published on a host site to borrow that site's ranking signals[7] | Promotional acquisition pages hosted on the company's own news domains | Printouts in the archive, 2019[8] |
Breaking a private company's rules is not a crime, and no one is accused here of committing one by doing it. Google's remedy is its own: it can ignore the links, demote the pages, or remove the site from search. What matters here is who chose the methods, who priced them and who paid for them.
Nobody could say they had not been told
These were not obscure rules. Google's webspam chief had been saying so in public for years before my budget was written. In January 2014 he told the industry to stop using guest blogging for links, that it had become too spammy, and that Google would take a dim view of it.[9] Google's anti-spam updates had been demoting bought links since 2012. More than three and a half years after that post, the company's own review document still read: “We still build Private Blog Networks.”[2]
The clearest proof that everyone knew is in the file itself. In August 2016 I prepared and uploaded a disavow file, a list handed to Google asking it to ignore certain links pointing at the company's sites.[2] You do not file one unless you know the link profile contains links Google would object to.
Chad Arrington, in his words
Why buy the rankings at all? Because they could not buy the ads.
Google Ads will not sell you a get-rich-quick pitch. Its policy bars promises of large financial return for little risk, guaranteed returns, and testimonials of specific results without a disclaimer.[10] In 2018 it restricted speculative financial products outright.[11] The promotions I was ranking were exactly that copy. The paid door was closed. The organic door had no policy desk, only my link budget. Same keyword, same buyer, no ad review and no ad invoice.
That last paragraph is my reading of why the program existed, not something a document states. What the documents do show is the keyword table: fourteen top-tier keywords with backlink cost set against name-generation revenue and sales, ten of them running at a loss. The program kept its funding anyway.[2]
Whose name was on it
The vendor agreement that set up the biggest link relationship carries my name and my title, SEO Director, Money Morning.[12] The vendor accounts ran off a personal email address. The link buys, the network sites and the influencer placements were charged to a corporate card issued to me and coded to marketing accounts.[13] The company's ledger recorded marketing spend. The signatures, the accounts and the card all pointed at one employee.
No document says anyone planned it that way, and this file does not claim one does. What the documents establish is the structure: the company set the budget, approved the methods, funded them every month, and the paperwork for the part that broke Google's rules carried a single name.
The loop closes
One line in my budget was for negative and brand search at $180 a term, with the stated aim of pushing negative results down, and a section for fighting a consumer complaint site.[2] The complaints I was paid to bury were customers saying they had been charged without permission, refused refunds and sold lifetimes that ended early. Exhibit 07 collects 98 of those accounts from the public web today. They are the same complaints. The promotions are the same promotions. The City is now in court about them.[14]