At some point I was hired by a Internet marketing company as a SEO expert. My job would be search engine optimization of course, mainly building backlinks. So, the owner says that I will get paid based on the number of backlinks I bring and he was willing to pay me $1 per link.
I accepted and didn't try to negotiate a better price. So I go back home and turn on my good friend the desktop computer. I open one of the 200 software programs I had and click the magic button. 1 hour later I have 3690 backlinks and thought they were enough.
I forgot to mention here that before the click, there was a lot of hard work I had to do manually. Like copy paste the website URL and putting the info I wanted on the program, including website title and description, keywords for the target websites and some other stuff. 10 minutes of backbreaking labor!
Next day, I send my report and in minutes I got my boss on the phone shocked with the number of backlinks. The poor guy thought now I was going to ask for 3690 dollars! As a good guy I am I assured him that was not the case and he could relax before having a heart attack and ruining my day.
Later I did regret that decision. Not killing my boss I mean. But the fact that I delivered so many backlinks. Because we negotiated a new deal. Monthly salary (that was my goal of course).
And I also started to spoil him with more and more backlinks and him slowly asking for more. I would get a client's website on the first page of Google in a week and he would complain why it was not on the Top 3 positions or something.
For those who are familiar with SEO, to bring a website on the front page of Google is extremely difficult. And sometimes, depending on the keywords the client is interested, is impossible. For example a guy was asking me to het him on the first page for the keyword "car". When I said it would cost him at least 100.000 dollars and nothing was guaranteed, he was looking at me like I was crazy.
People don't understand what it takes to rank for single generic keywords. It's a war actually. You against Google. One guy against thousands of employees, creme de la crème in terms of engineering.
And you have to think about around 300 different ranking factors (although nobody knows the exact number) that Google keeps changing and updating. And constantly adding new ones of course and never anouncing them.
It's very similar to crypto. You have to keep reading in order to stay informed and follow everything.
It was easy in the beginning. And a lot of people in the business world use spam and what not in order to get the job done. But it became more and more difficult by the day.
You had a great arsenal of tools first for all kinds of different uses. Most of them with limited lifetime. Sure there were a few who stood the test of time but the cost was thousands of dollars.
Big SEO companies with important clients had no problem buying them, but for someone like me it was a lot of money. BTW, big internet marketing companies always deny the use of such tools and practices.
I remember at some point that forums like The Black Hat World became my second home. Always trying to find the latest tricks, discuss complicated strategies in order to beat the Goliath and testing new tools that could get your website banned in seconds, forever. So you had to buy throw away domains and build websites you knew that could be useless in a few days.
Anyway, my post got too long as usual. Maybe will write another one, another day.