The Story Of A Self-Confessed Reformed Webspammer

Here’s the program!

Hey everyone! It’s Andrew Warner, I’m the founder of mixergy.com – comedy and ambitious upstart. You guys know the goal here: to interview lots of different (%antroponours), find out how they build their business, and just bring back some of their best ideas to our businesses – so we can use them. Today, and by the way I love talking to a variety of people and I don’t want to focus in  just the venture capital back companies or just on the boot strapers – I wanna find the all about every kind of on-line businesses, and learn from them all. And today I’ve got an interesting person with me. Tod Friesen is a self-confessed, reformed Viagra spammer. I’ve invited him in here to Mixergy to talk about how he got into it. Kind a find the biography of this Viagra spamming business. And he is not doing it today so we also gonna find out where he’s up to today. Tod, welcome.

Interviewee : Than you very much Andrew. It’s good to be here.

Andrew: You know, Tod, the first question I gonna ask you is: What’s the deal with Viagra? Why is there is so much freakin’ money in Viagra? Can’t anybody just go to their doctor, get a prescription, go to the pharmacy, pick up Viagra – do they really need the whole riguor of all of dealing with on-line sites and webspam and twitterspam and everything else?

Interviewee: Well, you know, it’s one of those things it back in the day when we started doing it. I honestly, never asked this question. I mean it, occured to me that, you know, why just guys just going and get it? And I suppose that a lot of the medication that we were distributing back then was just… you know, not maybe as necessary as the doctor would’ve seen it. There was easier to go on-line and get that kind of stuff and definitely outside of… health care plan, it might even been cheaper – I’m not entirely sure. When I was in that industry I lived in Canada and we were doing all our work in US so, you know, I basically just build asides and sold the products and didn’t really care too much about how to got distribute it, or why people wanted it, for whatever reason. And in, so the Viagra and (%Feramingwith) – which was a diet pill.. (%’Propesia’) for hair lost – it was all very, you know, kind of (bined) medication – it wasn’t dangerous to people so…

Andrew: You weren’t get anybody high…

Interviewee: Not – to my knowledge. I don’t know what they did with that with that sub of that medication maybe, but.. it was all very… very innocent kind of medication I suppose – is maybe the not the exact right word but along those slides.

Andrew: And these were a reasonable, competitive prices do you guys re-targed in?

Interviewee: We sold boat loads of that stuff so I have to assume it was

Andrew: All right… I guess there are some people who are self medicating and maybe others who just dare to embarrassed to go to the doctor and asked for it.

Interviewee: And there is whole audience older gentlemen that just don’t want on their shoes or roll out of bed at night.

Andrew: All right… You know what, I’m still a little curious about this – it’s seems that there is a lot of money in it but I actually always though that what was going on was – they were feeding of peoples desperation to get these pills and because is not that much money from a pill that’s available at every corner drug store what… What I thought the viagra spammers were doing was leading people to a maleware sites. Were you guys were infecting websites and

infecting computers…

Interviewee: Never, never… I mean there certainly…

Andrew: Not you but…

Interviewee: Yeah, and there certainly might be an element of people that were doing that and I mean even…

Interviewee: …there might have been an element of people that were doing that, and even today, Google flags malware sites as part of the service that they’re offering.  So it definitely was happening, but back when I was involved it was very much about what are people looking for…I mean it’s the same as today, providing people what they’re looking for and getting a cut of the sale.

And that was one of the things we’d always ask the search engine.  I’ve asked Matt Cutts this and Tim Mayer from Yahoo over the years, look, why do you guys care so much about how I got to be number 1 for phenermine when you know, someone is looking for phenermine, I have phenermine to sell them and I have it as a competitive price as anybody.  So they go to Google, type in buy phenermine, find my site, get their phenermine in 48 hours, they’re happy, I’m  happy, we should all be happy because it was a great user experience.  But Google is not as happy because they didn’t appreciate to how we got to that SEO…

Andrew: I was gonna say, because how you got there and yeah, the end user maybe got the Viagra he was looking for, but the way the end user found you was because you guys were putting spam in comments, copying web pages, and doing all kinds of stuff like that, which we’re gonna find out about here.  Apparently the audience is interested in that too.

I see Brendan in the audience is saying this guy is so cool.  He hasn’t even said anything yet, we don’t even know how he did it.  He might’ve spammed your blog, Brendan.

By the way, before we started I’ve got a nice little audience here.  Before we started you tweeted out that you were going to be on, and a bunch of people r-etweeted it.  I don’t usually get that many re-tweets for an interview like this.  It’s usually like the guy like Gary Vaynerchuk, who’ll get tons of re-tweets.

Were these legitimate re-tweets?  Or were you just setting a box to re-tweet that Mixergy is gonna be running?

Interviewee: This is 100% legit.  These are all real people, real friends of mine that are helping out promote the show for me.

Andrew: So Jenny Crickett is a real person, it’s not just your bot pretending to be Jenny.

Interviewee: Exactly.  A good friend of mine down in San Francisco.

Andrew: All right, OK, well thank you Jenny.  Thank you all for re-tweeting.  All right, let’s put out how you got started with this because nobody goes to school to learn how to be a web spammer and then goes out and gets a job in the business.  How did you get started?

Interviewee: That’s a great question.  I mean, people are going to school now to learn search and there’s programs…

Andrew: Really?

Interviewee: Oh yeah.  Lot of online universities now are offering programs in e-commerce and SEO and PPC and all that kind of stuff.  But I mean I got into this business like 11 years ago.  We didn’t call it SEO, it was just sort of woke up one day…actually for me, a friend sent me a copy of the very first version of WebPosition Gold, which was a little software package that built pages for Alta Vista, and HotBot and WebCrawler, and all these search engines and it would build unique pages, you’d upload them.  They had blue line from having an image on the page.

My buddy sent it over to me and said hey, you’ve got to check it out, it’s really cool.  It had never occurred to me until I saw what that software was doing when I installed it, that you can manipulate search engines.

So I was fascinated and I was off to the races at that point.  I started learning everything I could and at the time, I was working for Chevron in Calgary, Alberta, which is where the oilman comes from.  I joined searchengines.com, I had to pick a nickname for the forums, I was working for an oil company, so it was oilman and that’s the whole exciting story behind that.

Andrew: I see.  By the way, the reason he’s answering that is because I asked him before the interview to answer it in some point in the interview.  Your Twitter name is oilman, I’m not giving anything away here by saying that on Skype you’re oilman, the website is oilman.ca, it’s just oilman everywhere and I was just wondering where it happened.

OK, so you get this program, WebPosition Gold.  I remember these programs.  I installed them on my computer, I said you know, I should do this.  I want to get some traffic from search engines.  I want to get myself in there.  But I didn’t realize the power of it and I blew it off; I said I might as well focus on the rest of my business.

What made you see, how did you know there was gonna be significant traffic from programs like WebPosition Gold?

Interviewee: Well, I honestly didn’t in the first place.  Basically what happened was I met a dude who was working for a web design company, and this was when people were paying ridiculous amounts of money for websites.  That was the whole future.  It was a company called Intervisual, and they’ve long since gone out of business and so forth.

But we just got chatting and at that point, I mean I still hadn’t done and real SEO.  I was still learning about it and reading about it.  I had it in theory.  So we got chatting over beers and they had a client that was really interested in getting search engine traffic.  So they hired me basically to run WebPosition Gold on the scheduler to just create and submit pages.

We just got chatting and at that point I mean I still hadn’t done any real seo I was just learning it and reading about it and I had it in theory and so we got chatting over beers and they had a client that was really interested in getting search engine traffic and so they hired me basically to run Web Position Gold on the scheduler to just create and submit pages. And so I thought this was great i was making like 150$ a month I had this thing running and it didn’t take up any of my time and it just ran and ran and ran and then i just kept  learning more and more and more and then one day it just, really, it got big

i wanted to work in the industry i was an accountant at chevron it was, it was horrible. I hated the job entirely. And so i kept applying for any job that was remotely technically related webmaster, econ – like anything at all. And I finally got a job at a little tech startup called Replicon which is still running today.

And uh, i got the job about two months before the bust and so they laid everybody off and I wound up out on my own  and so i thought “well, this is it, I’m going to take my swing. ”

And so i started designing websites turns out I’m a really bad, bad website designer.

so i just started learing more about seo once i got laid off by then I was a moderator at webmasterworld.com. and theres a private forum for moderators to hang out and, you know, trade secrets we wouldn’t publicly talk about. And so I posted in the forum “Hey I just lost my job and I’m going to make a run on my own and if anyone needs  help with anything i’m available

And one guy a good friend of mine named Jeff private messaged me and said hey you should check out this phenermine stuff and it was really the very first few months of affiliate marketing in the prescription pill space.

And so i built a website for phenermine and a couple of months later that’s all i was doing

int who is supplying it?

It was  . . .basically there was a bunch of pharmacies throughout the US that had affiliate programs and it is like any affiliate program today  we would just get the search engine ranking, people would just click though a big “buy now” button and the traffic would go off to the pharmacies site with our affiliate id tagged to it and we would get wired money twice a month.

it was dead simple

where would you find these affiliate sites on commission junction the mainstream affiliate programs?

No, they were all roll your own programs, they were all individual companies with their own affiliate programs doing all their own tracking and all their own warehousing, with their own doctors on staff, all that kind of stuff.

US or Canada?

It’s all in the US.

Wow

Yeah, there was a big market for shipping medication out of Canada into the US but i never got into that business

You said that within two month you realized there was money here. How? What happened?

Well in the very first month i joined and put up my first site i made 150$. And I thought this is just silly. What’s he talking about this being big money? The second month google picked it up and i got into the top three for some of the big key words and made several thousand dollars and at that point my eyes got opened really wide and I started building websites as fast as I could. Back then it was just cut and paste there was no duplicate content filters, you could interlink like crazy, the spam filtering on Google was almost non existent as they were learning , it was a real cat and mouse game back then and it still is, but the holes were a lot bigger at the time.

what was that first site like what did it look like

oh it was horrible. like i said i was a really bad web designer to start with. the url was buyphenermine.com so it was a great url and it just said “buy phenermine” big blue banner hills in it, some copy and a giant button that said click here to but phenermine.

it was i mean the conversion was fantastic on that stuff because you only needed to get a little bit of content so there was something to index; but nobody was researching it, nobody like you didin’t have to sell anybody you just had to have the price the push here to buy button and the guarantee that you would get it in 48 hours. because everybody knew you didn’t have to convince them, they wanted that product. so as long as you had the price and the shipping that was competitive they were going to buy it from you,

i mean we were sending people to you know, credit card order pages that weren’t even secure and people were just hammering credit card numbers in that stuff all day long.

And the page ranked that quickly because there wasn’t a lot of competition?

There wasn’t a lot of competition back then the whole affiliate space was just starting to become a real thing. right?

Andrew: The page ranked that quickly because there wasn’t a lot of competition?

Interviewee: There wasn’t a lot of competition back then, the whole affiliate space was just starting to become a real thing, [start 15:00] right; and so there wasn’t that much competition and at the same time, this was way back when google only updated once a month.

So we all sit there waiting we built our websites and get all of our links in place and were just sit there waiting and waiting, and waiting, and waiting, and google will start shifting and somebody webmaster will say: “hey the dance has started” and for about 3 or 4 days stuff was shifted all around we all just be like sitting on the edge of our sits and then it will all settle and stop. And they wouldn’t move for a 30 days.

And, so if you manage to land on the top, then it was like a 30 day party ’cause you weren’t gonna move and just cash your checks and then about 30 days, 20 or 30 days later you’ll go though the whole stressful freak out again.

A: Looks like Andrew_SG in the audience actually put a link to how your website looked like back in 2002.

If you guys are listening to us in the recorded version of the show you gotta come in and watch or listen to one of the live programs because the links that Andrew_SG and Dan_Blank put up in the chat room are just incredible, they really add a lot to the experience here.

So it’s 11 am pacific everyday you could just watch on your computer and click on all these links. Are you clicking on the link yourself?

I: I am checking out. He’s actually got it, it’s buyfentermean, I’ll pull it up here

A: ah, so, maybe you’ll link over the right one end.

I: Oh; It’s not pulling it up

A: Ok, it’s not that bad I over sold it, there is still a lot of value for being in the chat room. Actually usually the chatroom will somebody is usually guys like Dan_Blank or Andrew_SG will find the link to the page you are referring to a link you thought was dead and put it in the chatroom to everyone else to look at.

But the very first page you put up you didn’t have any links coming into it? was there anything beyond putting that page or was there?

I: there wasn’t really back then. I mean this was when all about page rank, so you needed links but needed page rank, and the page rank flow through the links, so there was a lot of link purchasing going on but a little bit different to what happens today.

A: But for the first page you were you buying links into, or were linking into to or was it just a page?

I: So it was a five page website, and it really just, it pop on on it’s own originally, but then what we had to do to support it was get the green page rank juice flowing to it. So we would call up, we actually go out to the who is information and call up or e-mail guys that have websites that have a good page rank. And nobody knew what it was back then. It was so new. That we e-mail some guy that was running a Starwars forum out of his basement that had, you know, few thousand pages and some page rank; and go: “Hey man I’ll give you 50 bucks a month and just put this on the footer: you know; sponsor by: buyfedermean or buyviagra”. You know just some dude in his mom and dad’s basement thinking all right I got beer money. he’ll put the link on the page. And that started the whole buying of links just for page rank, and people will spend 5000 thousand 2000 thousand dollars per link if it was on the right site because it flow so nicely.

A: So, it just could be on the bottom of the footer, it didn’t have to buy big add, it didn’t have to be non discrete and was easy to get that page rank. If he had a high page rank and he linked to you your page rank would go up. Was that easy back then?

I: I was absolutely that easy back then, google moved very very quickly on it now. Today is entirely different game. I mean google can discount a link on a whole page it can block out entire footer and navigation sections they have gotten very very good at it now and it’s a lot harder to go about it. But that is sort of how it worked. We did our think, google did their thing and everybody got better at the end of the day; you know, trying to win the battle.

A: OK, so the first thing that you did was put up a  webpage that worked, the next thing was looking for people with high page ranks you started to calling them up, and saying: dude for 50 bucks I’ll buy a link from you that help you get even higher help you get even more revenue; what was the next thing? Was it building another site or was it another marketing Technic?

I: At that point in time we call it churning burn, where we would just built sites as fast as we could because they were still getting; like google was still finding those things and kicking them out. I mean, it wasn’t really that simple, You know it was all simple but google was still learning very very quickly and how to manage this kind of stuff and they always knew from the get go what sites were selling links purely for page rank and all that kind of stuff so we will just built sites built sites, launch them launch then, and they will just burn and fall out and we just kept on going. It was very much the same Technic for a long long time. I mean, everybody got better, tools and software it was built and churn built and churn there wasn’t any real there was no real marketing attached to any of it.

A:I’ll buy link from you what was the next thing?

I: buit sites, google find those links and kicked them out, we will buit sites buit sites pretty much was , there was no real marqueting.

A:

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Interviewee: …for page rank and all that kind of stuff. So, we would just build sites, build sites, build sites, launch them, launch them. And they just get burned and fall out, and we just kept going. It was very much the same technique for a long, long time. I mean, everybody got better tools and so forth, but it was just build and churn, build and churn. There was no real marketing attached to any of it.

Andrew: Were you surprised when that first page was shut down? I guess they’re not shut down, but when it stopped showing up in search fields?

Interviewee: No. No. It was a bit disappointing.

Andrew: Before you did this, you were already building pages that were being kicked out of search results.

Interviewee: Definitely.

Andrew: So, what were you building before this, before you built the Phentermine site that within two months popped and brought you money? What other sites were you helping rise up in the rankings?

Interviewee: I mean, at the time we were just in all kinds of stuff. We called it the wild west days of affiliate marketing; building sites that sold dental plans online.

Andrew: But, this was before the Phentermine. You were still doing it for your employer at Replicon? You were building websites like this?

Interviewee: Well, we were building the web position goal kind of pages, right? We weren’t doing the sort of web spammy stuff. The Phentermine was really my first foray into the true, you know, potential get kicked out of the search engines. But I didn’t go into it naïve that I was going to survive with any of these websites. I went into it knowing that we’re going to get what we can out of the sites and just keep going. It was very much an eyes wide open situation.

Andrew: But, the non-spammy sites, they were still getting kick out or not?

Interviewee: No. No. We were very [?] on the client side.

Andrew: So, if the other stuff was not getting kicked out, why weren’t you surprised when the Phentermine site got kicked out?

Interviewee: Well, we still knew what the rules were.

Andrew: You knew you were breaking it, and you knew that at some point they were going to come after you, that they were going to shut you down.

Interviewee: Yeah. Definitely.

Andrew: OK. So, this one pill works. Do you move on and start another pill, too? Do you call up the pharmacy or look at their website and figure out what’s going to be the hot seller?

Interviewee: We build websites for all kinds of stuff. So, every online pharmacy had Viagra, Phentermine, Propecia, various other pills; birth control pills, a variety of diet pills. But, it all boiled down to, basically, Phentermine and Viagra were the two big ones that outsold anything. The entire rest of the catalog combined couldn’t even compete with those two pills. So, that’s basically what we focused on and just built site after site. I did more Phentermine than I did Viagra, actually. Viagra was way more competitive, but the payouts were about the same. So, you know, I found the one that I did well with and pushed really hard with that. And then, the whole thing kind of came crumbling down.

Andrew: Hold up on that. I want to get to the whole story and understand the whole thing. Here’s one of the things that I’m wondering. Google search results, 10 results in the standard search results, right? And more than 10 guys, especially back then, who were in this space. Why were you one of the top 10 that stayed in the first page?

Interviewee: Back then, it had a lot to do with the domain name as well. So, the first guys into the business were able to get a lot of the good domains, like buyphentermine.com, really sell a domain; the right contacts. There’s a lot of personal networking that goes along with this stuff, too. Being in the business as long as I had been, being a moderator and an administrator at Webmaster World, I made some really good friends. We would pass around, “Hey, here’s a really good link source” and all that kind of stuff. So, there’s that kind of inner circle information that gets passed around. You know, and a lot of it, sometimes it’s just pure luck. Maybe, I had a little better copy that I had rewritten from the site I took it from, that kind of thing. And then there were months where I remember distinctly Google wiped out my entire network, like overnight. I went from making really, really great money to literally almost zero overnight. So, that was the risk. That’s how it went.

Andrew: How do you think they found out about all these sites?

Interviewee: Oh, the entire network was all interlinked. By today’s standards, it would be silly. It would absolutely be easy for any amateurish yoda to spot what we were doing. And Google finally updated the algorithm and wiped me out which we all knew that was going to happen to our networks at some point because that was the game. Build as hard as you can…

Interviewee: at some point because that was the game, go as hard as you can as long as you can and then build the next one.

Andrew: A few people in the audience are asking if you were into email. Were you doing email spam too?

Interviewee: Not ever.

Andrew: Not ever.

Interviewee: No email spam. I will apologize to bloggers but I don’t have to apologize to anybody that gets email.

Andrew: Why do you have to apologize to bloggers? What’d you do?

Interviewee: I may have comment spammed one or two-hundred thousand of them. It’s hard to say.

Andrew: And why did you do that?

Interviewee:  That was once Google started going, you know, really into the links it was all about volume of links and the anchor text in the links. And one easy way to go get all that without having to pay for it or ask people for it was to go and comment on people’s blogs.

Andrew: And the way that you would get that, the links and the anchor text, is by having the name in the comment box. You know, it asks for a name, URL, email address and comment. You’d make the name into “by Viagra” and the link over to your site and that mattered back then.

Interviewee: It did. I mean, a lot of blogs you could put html in the comments too. And, you know, you would do that and position it way off the page using some inline CSS and, ‘Hey, I really like your blog. Keep up the good work.’ And then off the page is, you know, “click here to buy Viagra” in some negative position CSS.

Andrew: I didn’t know that. I didn’t know you guys did that. How could you do so many?

Interviewee: It was all automated. It was all automated. Crawlers and automated bots going and doing this and that and, yeah. I gave a talk at [Nomedex] here in Seattle last year and I talked a lot about all these different tactics that we used to use. People want to go down the road of talking about, you know, it was immoral or it was illegal or it was unethical and, you know, I’m not interested in having that disscussion because, you know, it is what it is. I mean, we went and did it and it was, in my opinion at worst case scenario, it was annoying.

And the one thing I will say about it though is we actually tried very diligently to scrub our database and not hit blogs that were live. I mean, we tried to find, I mean, because there’s, you know, at that point in time there’s millions and millions of blogs that had been started all over the place that people had let go. So we’d go hit a blog and go check it again and if our comment was gone, we would dump that blog out of the database so we wouldn’t hit them a second time. There was some diligence, you know, to not just being completely rampant with. And it worked as long as long as it worked. And I mean, people still do it today. I haven’t done it in many years. And any time I’d give a talk about this kind of stuff I do, you know, say, ‘Who had a blog in about 2003? I apologize.’

Andrew: I happen to know that people are still doing it today, that there are some popular blogs that don’t add the no follow to links and frankly, I know this pisses some people off in my audience, but I’m not here to criticize, I’m not here to judge, I’m here to just sit and listen and learn. And you know what? I think that that’s the best way you get information. If we’re just all going to the same stories: how did facebook make it, how did twitter make it, how did three other companies do it and we’re just studying the same ones, we’re never going to come up with fresh ideas. And so I want to get fresh ideas. And the way to get fresh ideas is to be respectful and shut the F up and just listen to what the person did. And somewhere in this there’s an idea that’s actually going to help.

I got to say that one of the first ideas that I got for my first business came from a Wall Street Journal article about a guy who was selling toe fungus cream online. Sold toe fungus cream. But I said if he could sell toe fungus cream online, I sure as hell can come up with a better product and make more money than this guy. And the Wall Street Journal was counting up how much money they imagined he made and I said, ‘I’d love at least a slice of that.’ So you never know where the ideas come from and I think you got to just listen to the whole thing. And if you’re not happy with that then you probably wouldn’t like my website and you should probably not listen to any of my interviews because this isn’t the last time I’m going to do it.

Interviewee: Fair enough.

Andrew: Why no email? Why no email spam?

Interviewee: That is, I hated getting email spam and, you know, it was I just figured that was, I mean, just across the line for me. And so I just never went down that road and it was, I mean, back then it wasn’t a problem that it became, right. And so we could have got away with a certain amount of it. And partly, I was a little bit too lazy. Email spam’s actually a lot of work, you know.

minute 30 to minute 35

Interviewee: …Partly, I was a little bit too lazy, email spams are actually a lot of work. You got to get all the servers and this and that and you just got to really manage it, and I didn’t want the headache of doing that. There’s no went down the road, to be quite honest. The conversion right on it is simply atrocious versus the conversion rates we would get for actually being where people were looking. If someone’s looking to buy Viagra or buy Phentermine, and you’re there, the conversion rates were fantastically converted 40-50% on that stuff. Conversion rate in email is you’re sending email to somebody who isn’t looking, necessarily, for what you’ve got. The conversion rates are absolutely ridiculous, it’s a very bad business model, in my opinion.

Andrew: Our laws are different, and actually, the ethics around it are different, mostly, because I think people don’t understand it. I think, email spam is the end user’s problem, but Web spam is Google’s problem, and nobody wants to go and have Google out. They’ll figure, they can solve their own issues.

Interviewee: Well, Google’s actually done massive favors for the world, as far as with Gmail and filtering Web spam.

Andrew: I hardly get spam at all.

Interviewee: Yes. Exactly. I get, my personal email, my Oilman email, flowed through Gmail, and nothing shows up. They catch, absolutely, like 99.9% of it, which is fantastic. That’s part of everybody learning off of what’s been going on, and we’re at a very different point in the industry now. I won’t ever say I regret having done all the blog spamming, it worked out quite well for me, but I do understand the complaints and the frustrations. I mean, I started my own blog, shortly, after that, and I get pounded with the comment spam. Maybe it’s a little bit of a karma – I’m fine with it, I deal with it – but yes, I can see the annoying side of it back when it was a huge, huge problem.

Andrew: I did an interview with Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder of WordPress. I think, it was the first source of real revenue for his business, coming up with the Akismet, the anti-spam program. Really, Akismet works, at least, as well, as Gmail does today, and they both keep out spam. Another systems, even, I think, on Yahoo, I don’t get spam, on other systems, I think, spam has been reduced.

Interviewee: Akismet was a huge step forward for WordPress in filtering the spam. The problem with Akismet, though, is that if you got mistakenly blacklisted on to Akismet, really, really difficult to get back off it, so that was bit of a problem. I haven’t heard, in a long time, if that’s been fixed, but in the early days of Akismet, it was one of the signs.

Andrew: We talked about linking to your sites, within you site network. We talked about comments, what else did you do?

Interviewee: That was it, we just kept at that as hard as we could.

Andrew: I asked you earlier, how many Web pages did you have?

Interviewee: Oh, many, many; many, many, many.

Andrew: How did you create so many Web pages?

Interviewee: It was cut and paste.

Andrew: Not literally sit down and hit Command, Copy, Commands paste. You had a system that automated that, right?

Interviewee: No. No, I did it by hand back then. You just pop into Photoshop and create a template. In ten minutes, and like I say, they were horrifyingly ugly. So in the early days, some of the sites that we were competing against didn’t have graphics on theirs, just these text-based sites. It was terrible, so we just cranked out anything that looked remotely possible, cut and paste the content on to it, fired it up onto a host, submit it to all the search engines with the program like Dump Truck, there’s something like that, program and links, linked to it. The only thing I’d ever automated was I had a little program that hold links to all the sites from a master file, randomly, so that all the sites had links going back and forth, which is ultimately what burned me, I think.

Andrew: Because they were all linking to each other and it was obvious that this was a network of connected sites.

Interviewee: Totally. Totally.

Andrew: What about RSS, how did that affect you, guys?

Interviewee: RSS, I mean, Really Simple Syndication or Really Simple Stealing. If you’re going to put your content out there in RSS, it’s basically packaged with a bow on it for anybody to do as they please with it. I didn’t do a lot with RSS back in the day, but I knew a lot of guys that were basically using RSS and building up humongous websites automagically.

Interviewee: …they, I knew a lot of guys that were basically using RSS and building out humungous websites “automagically” just pulling in different RSS feeds and going hard with it.  And there were some sites back then that looked, you never would’ve guessed.  They were really well designed, content was sorted really nicely on them, and they just were 100% automated on RSS.

Andrew: I’ve seen programs like that.  You can just Google for them and you’ll find them.  What they do is you just plug in the RSS feeds that you want of the sites that you want to scrape data from — I guess not even scraping at that point — and it just automatically pulls in those articles from those sites, pops it into your WordPress.  WordPress has these beautiful themes that you can customize.  And you’ve got a fully functioning business.  For a long time you’re saying that Google didn’t care, or didn’t do anything about duplicate content.

Interviewee: Well, that’s what we’ve evolved too, right.  I have maybe a big of an arrogant opinion that the spammers of the early days are what made Google better because there were all these issues that Google had to deal with.  Google had to learn to deal with duplicate content through massive scraping and syndication.  They had to learn how to deal with people gaming the system by buying links on completely unrelated websites.

Everybody has gotten better.  And we’re at a point now where there’s really not that much black hat stuff left.  And the black hat stuff that’s still out there is some really, really serious stuff cobbled together with content Markov chains, and stuff that’s really actually beyond me because I haven’t been part of that world in several years now.  I mean I keep up some projects just to keep poking around the boundaries of what’s real and what we can actually do, but I’ve been working in the agency world now for about six years and that’s all very standup stuff.

I don’t want to get any clients in trouble, but at the same time, I’m coming from the world of very aggressive online marketing tactics, let’s call them.  Knowing where the boundaries are and having done all that, you get a much better sense of how everything works.  So when you come back to doing it in the white hate fashion, I honestly believe you have an advantage.

Andrew: I do too.  And you know that thing you said about having some sites on the side where you get to experiment and see what’s possible and what’ll get you banned, I know of many well-known sites whose owners have these side projects and they just want to test.  They want to know what’s acceptable, what can I do?  What kind of links are OK?  What works and what doesn’t?  They don’t want to burn their main sites, and at the same time because Google is a big black box, they don’t know what they’re allowed and not allowed to do, so it allows them to take those tests.

Interviewee: We talk a lot about you know, any serious SEO in the business has to be doing something on the side to be poking around and finding the chinks in the armor, but don’t ever, ever do it with a client website.  That’s the straight up rule, man.

Andrew: What are some of the chinks that you’ve noticed recently?

Interviewee: It’s still, the big thing is still links.  The way, and it’s not so much a chink in the armor as it’s just how it works now.  In the early days search engines didn’t have any sense of how the internet was interrelated.  They looked at the internet as a big pile of papers and every page was its own discreet thing, which that’s why you could put “buy Viagra” 1,000 times in a title tag and it would be better than the guy putting it 900…

You know, over simplifying a little bit, but that’s how it went.  So we would just go to Infoseek and pull down the top page, copy it, add the keyword one more time, push it back up, and hooray, we’re ranking.  It would happen in minutes back then.

Then along comes Google and basically comes up with a better search engine, but we’re still only looking at discreet pages.  And then PageRank comes along and we have this whole extra thing that takes into account a whole different way to look at a page.  Then we realized PageRank trickles down.  So all the sudden we’re on the verge of understanding how the internet relates to itself, how everything is connected.

That’s just the road that search engines went down is how to understand how things are related because that makes a lot more sense as far as ranking something when you look at trust and authority and who’s linking to who.  That’s the world we live in now.

There’s a certain set of online, on page criteria.  You want to have a good title tag, you wanna have good body content, you wanna have an H1 around the main title of your article, your product…

Interviewee: …around the main title of your article, your product. There’s the fundamentals, but then you’ve got to go out and get authority. You need to become the expert in your space. You need to have unique content, and the days of automated ranking we would call “push button” marketing. You’d push a button, go to bed, wake up, hey 60,000 links and blog comments. It’s kind of how it worked. But, those days are gone. It doesn’t really work that way. Now, we sit around at these conferences, and we drink beer, and we moan about how much work we actually have to do now. We have to hire copywriters, and we have to go actually ask for legitimate links. And we have to go guest blog, and we have to do all these things. The chinks in the armor don’t really exist so much as they used to.

Andrew: Let’s see what… Actually, before I take questions from the audience and go into the notes that I have made and have follow-up questions, I’m wondering about the revenue. What kind of revenue do you remember making the first two months?

Interviewee: Well, we won’t go down that road too far, but I will tell you the first couple of months. So, that very first month was $150. And that’s where I was like, this is just silly. I had already decided to go on my own. I had been laid off from the job I had. I had planned a trip to Europe for the following month which we were going to go on anyways and just go nickel and dime our way for a couple of weeks. And while I was there, I kept checking my search engine rankings and my revenue. I had a good rank for a couple of turns and made about $8,000 while traveling, and that got home from the trip and just went hard building sites after that because that kind of jumped in a couple of weeks. It was massive, and then after that it went up. For another couple of years it did really well and then, like I say, one day Google burned the entire thing to the ground. And shortly thereafter, the entire industry just about went away. So, it seemed time to move on. That’s when I moved over to the agency world and decided I didn’t want to work in the basement in my pajamas anymore and I wanted to have a little bit more guaranteed income and a real career out of this industry.

Andrew: At the height, what kind of revenue were you bringing in monthly?

Interviewee: [laughs]

Andrew: I don’t want to get into a place where you’re revealing that you can’t, but monthly revenue that’s an anomaly but also shows the height, I think, would help.

Interviewee: Yeah. There were months that you’d average 40-50 grand a month for a while, and there were guys doing a lot more. I look back on it. It was my first foray out into that world, and I thought that was really good and it was, don’t get me wrong. But, there’s no reason I couldn’t be retired right now if I really understood how big it was. I was still very green and very naïve as to how big the Internet was and how many people were out there looking for stuff. It’s a classic case of, you know, if I knew then what I know now, kind of deal. So, I was very happy.

Andrew: What were your expenses?

Interviewee: There was none. I mean, there were domain names and there was the hosting which was–all that’s very nominal. And then, every single site that you launched you paid the $300 to Yahoo and the $300 to LookSmart and then whatever link money you decided to spend. But, yeah, the expenses were very, very nominal.

Andrew: And for the industry as a whole, is it fair to say that they were less than 20 percent for the average person doing this?

Interviewee: As far as expenses?

Andrew: Yeah.

Interviewee: Yeah.

Andrew: Why LookSmart and Yahoo? Why did you pay them?

Interviewee: Those were the guaranteed linkages, like the Yahoo listing was guaranteed to work. And the LookSmart listing was guaranteed. Those two links passed a ton of authority back in those days. So, every single site you put up, you put it in both of those.

Andrew: Do they still do it?

Interviewee: Well, LookSmart isn’t worth the time of day.

Andrew: Yeah.

Interviewee: Yahoo, you definitely still go in there. At this point there’s so many links out there and there’s so many ways to get links that Yahoo–we still do it for clients as a matter of course. I haven’t done it. I haven’t looked at measuring Yahoo specifically in a long, long time. It’s a good place to be. It’s one of those fundamental things at this point.

Andrew: Do you know of anyone? How well do you know the guys who were really making it big financially in this space during that little window that opportunity was available to them?

Andrew: Do you know… How about… Do you know any guys that are really making it big financially in this space during that little window that the opportunity was available to them?

Interviewee: There is a handful that I’m still very good friends with. Like I said, I’ve been out of that affiliate space for a long time. I know a lot of guys in this space still. It’s shifting a lot. The guys that are making the big-big revenue dollars are doing PPC these days not so much FCO.

Andrew: Pay Per Click means they are buying the ads and they sending them over to the affiliate programms and they buying them intelligently increading intelligent landing pages and basicly really working it.

Interviewee: Definetely. I mean, you’ll see, you know, you’ll talk to guys that are —- saying: “I did seven hundred thousands dollars last month.”, and what they don’t tell you is they did six hundred thousands or five hundred thousands dollars against it in, you know, cost for PPC ads. But…hey, revenue numbers are revenue numbers, right?

Andrew: Yeah, yeah. It’s a good point actually. A lot of times people don’t talk about their expences, they talk about the revenue and I know in the PPC space, there are people who are buying ads, their expences are hundred percent of their ad buy. They only doing it because they know they gonna get miles on their black-heart and get special treatment from Google.

Interviewee: Yeah-yeah.

Andrew: And they are hoping —— to figure out how to e-count hundred and one percent of their expences.

Interviewee: Yeah.

Andrew: Let’s see what else do we have here. By the way, does anyone know who’s Konstantin is? In the chat room? Isn’t he someone I interviewed in the past? This isn’t a guy fron the Inject, is it? Who also was doing all kinds of linkings between the sites. The host. Did you ever have issues with the webhost? —-, I think, or something like that.

Interviewee: No. I never had issues with mine. Maybe once or twice there would be an e-mail and there’d be: “Oh, I’m sorry, was an accident…” and the way, you know. I’ve never had… I’ve been using the same host for ten years, I still use them today. So there was never an issue with any of that.

Andrew: Let’s see what else was there. Can’t slide this up to see their questions. “Where do you get links today?” Quell Horse is asking. Not necesserilly — the links you — to be gone today. What will you recommend people though?

Interviewee: There is… There is all kinds of good link builders out there today. I… It depends on what you’re going for, right? You know, if you talking about for, you know, real clients that you’re, you know, going down, you know, white-hat path, then, I mean, we can have whole another hour and half interview about link-building. You know, press releases, social media, blogs,  legitimate comments, you know, on other industry blogs, becoming an authority, news articles, charitable donations to different places… There is a ton of different ways to get links. If you still going down that spammy road where you wanna just go hard burn —– there is all kinds of link-networks out that you can bind into. Just go to Google and search for bind links. That’s sort of one things that comes up routinely is that Google is very anti-paid links, which is, you know, I understand that, but they still sell you ad— for bind links and pay links.

*They laugh and talk simultaneously, can’t understand a word*

Andrew: You know, let’s go down —– for a little. Actually before we go down —.

Interviewee: Yeah.

Andrew: I have to decide what questions I ask before I ask, because there is too many times I go to one action and then swith to another, but —- I saw the house. I watched —- video. By the way, Jane is incredible producer. I’ve never would have found out —— not for her and now when she did tell me about you and hook up this interview, she also sent me a research on you and that full — doc presentation which was phenomenal. It was really interesting.

Interviewee: Thank you.

Andrew: And now I get to come to this interview meeting somebody whom I wouldn’t find about otherwise, and prepared. And you showed the house in that programme. You paid for the down payment for that house? You paid for the full house? Or what was the situation with that house?

– Oh, it’s… really, just is… really cocky arrogance gimmet that I came up with, I needed a backup estate, so… I speak a lot of conferences and how I got involved speaking the conferences when I was in those early days and good friend of mine Greg Bozzer invited me to a search —- strategies and introduced me to Danny Soven, and Danny invited me to come speak at STS in Chicago many years ago now. And at the time I was doing all these — spamming, I sort of had a shtick about being a spammer and being way over the top and… Quite honestly, talking a lot bigger than I ever was.

Interviewee: …quite honestly, talking a bit bigger than I ever was.  That’s you know, sort of how I was rolling at the time.  So you’ve gotta keep all that in mind when it came to the whole house thing.  That was just a further extension of being this cocky, arrogance, sensationalist around the whole black hat thing.

The reality is, most of that house was paid for by selling pills, it’s not like it was a million dollar house, let’s keep that in mind.  So, but yeah, that business enabled me to move up in the world of real estate, which is fine, but it was very much a sensationalist, arrogant, gimmicky thing to put in that kind of talk.  I wouldn’t put that in a regular talk where I’m talking about SEO.  That was very much in the sensationalist, get some press kind of thing.

Andrew: I dig guys like that.  I dig guys like you who come up with sensationalistic ways of getting attention.  There are so many boring speakers.  If I could come up with someone who’ll just get me riled up a little bit, or get my imagination fired up, I remember them.  I’d like to be more like that.  I like that.

Interviewee: You should’ve been in the room for the Gnomedex talk then.  People wanted to beat me up after that one.

Andrew: Yeah, that’s not the type of room to talk about that to and expect people to love you, but from the video I saw, it looked like they did.  So it’s interesting, video is sometimes misleading.  It looked like they did like you.

Jenny is asking who’s hosting my site.  Media Temple.  Media Temple is hosting, I don’t think they have a problem with me talking about this stuff.  They love me, and I love Media Temple too.  Thank you guys.

All right.  I was gonna ask now…knowing what you knew then, this job, the transition, how would you explain to them that you’re this guy that used to SEO for pills?

Interviewee: It actually, it took a while.  Basically what happened, I was speaking my second time at SES.  It was in New York and I was on a panel with one of the VPs from Commission Junction and the President from Performax which back then was an affiliate company, not what they’ve evolved to today.  Another friend of mine named Cathryn Seda who’d written a book about marketing, and I was on the end of the panel as the hi, I’m the evil affiliate spammer that I don’t read your terms of service, and I’ll do whatever I want until you tell me to stop or kick me out of your program.

My point was not so much hey, look how cool spammers are, but it was like as a merchant you need to be aware of what your affiliates can do to you, and you just don’t build an affiliate program and put it out run wild, you need to police it and track your affiliates.  I had this whole point.

Then in the Q&A section at the end, this lady gets the microphone and she stands up, looks directly at me, and starts very passively aggressively calling me names.  She’s like when you’re using you know, scum bag tactics…I’m calling you a scum bag, that kind of thing, and she did it twice.  And then she came up to me after the session all apologetic.  You know, make sure she knew she wasn’t commenting on me personally.

We became instant friends.  And about 18 months later of her and her business partner convincing me I could be so much more, and I could be a white…I wound up becoming the director of SEO at their company, which is Range Online Media.  And to this day, two of my very dearest friends.  And that was how I moved out of that.

One, I was kind of done and felt it was time to have a career more so than just sitting in the basement like I said, but at the same time, they opened up a whole world to me on the agency side that I didn’t really understand, didn’t know was there.  And so we went down that road and honestly, I’ve had a blast on the agency side.  I’ve got to work with companies and clients that I never dreamed I’d have contact with.

Andrew: Like who?  Who have you done work for?

Interviewee: When I was at Range we managed SEO on a global scale for Nike.  We worked with Neiman Marcus, CompUSA before they went out of business.  To be clear, let’s go to brick and mortar.  The SEO was dynamite.  So just a bunch of other companies like that.  It’s been fantastic.  It’s been a kick to go walk around the Nike campus and see all the endorsed athletes walking around.  They’ve got their own little parking lot with all their…

Interviewee: They’ve got their own little parking lot with all their fancy cars and stuff. I love the agency world. It’s actually been a much better fit for me. I like the social side of working with clients and managing those kinds of projects, so it’s been fantastic.

Andrew: All right. So, let’s give out some advice now. People are listening to us. They want to build businesses. They want to get ideas from you on search engine optimization. What do you tell them–legitimate?

Interviewee: Like I said already, we sit around and moan about how it’s real work now. You can’t run around, and you can’t really short cut stuff anymore.

Andrew: That’s cool. Nobody in my audience is afraid of real work. We’re getting entertained by watching people get away with stuff, but we roll up our sleeves.

Interviewee: It’s gotten to the point where you need to take a longer view from the SEO side of things, and we have so much more measurement around it now. So, if you’re going to go out and Mike back in the chat room goes, yeah, I am afraid of real work.

Andrew: He’s now banned. I hit the button on you. Sorry, Mike.

Interviewee: One thing I always looked at and back in those days you were either like a SEO or you did PPC, and the two didn’t really meet. Now, we take a much more holistic view of everything where you take a slower approach, build your SEO properly. While you’re doing that, run some PPC to start getting some traffic. That will help you get authority out of the gate because you get your name out there and you’ll probably get some links. You need to get involved in social media, whether it’s Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn or however you’re going to be connected on that stuff.

Andrew: Those links, do they count? Does Google look at those links when it determines who shows up where in the rankings?

Interviewee: Oh definitely, definitely. We’re moving beyond just links as well, right? Everything on Twitter is though followed, but start to think about the authority of balanced Twitter accounts. There’s a ratio of who you’re following; how many followers you have that makes sense. Like a truly authoritative Twitter account is going to have way more followers than who they’re following. People that use Bosch to be following 20,000 people and have 21,000 people following them back, that’s clearly not a real natural authoritative account. So, we’re looking at all kinds of other factors now beyond just links.

Andrew: Search engines are actually doing that now?

Interviewee: It’s hard to say, for sure, exactly what’s really in there, but there’s so many signals out there. Google may not follow the link from a Twitter profile, but they know that this Twitter profile is for this company or that person. And it may become a signal into the whole algorithm. I’m speculating to a certain extent here, but these are signals that exist on the web. And the search engines are getting so much more sophisticated as we move forward, beyond just looking at who links to who. There’s hundreds and hundreds of signals out there. And so, you can’t even just go–you can still just go get a ton of links and overbalance the algorithm because it’s a whole bunch of things, right? And if you’re lacking in this, you can overbalance it with, maybe, something else from the algorithm. But like I mentioned before, Google is dialed in on the link building. They’re pretty good at spotting paid links and finding link networks now.

Andrew: You’re not paying for links, you’re asking for links. I notice you said that earlier. Should we be doing a better job of asking? Should I actually at the end of an interview really think about how I should ask my… What am I thinking? Should I send you a separate email about this interview and say, “Hey, Todd, can you link over to me to the post that I just did about you?” Should I find other ways to get people related to you to do a link to me, or is that just a big waste of time? Thatt takes up a lot of time.

Interviewee: It’s absolutely what you should be doing, but let’s take it one step further. Don’t email me and say, “Hey, can you link to me?” Send me a snippet of HTML that goes, “I had a great interview today. It was a lot of fun. I’d love it if you would put it up on your blog. Here’s the HTML to cut and paste.” And then in that HTML is the bed for the video and then at the bottom is a little HTML link that says, you know, “This video from mixergy.com or whatever online interview”, put your key word in it and make it easy. If you’re going to go out there asking for links or wanting to distribute your content or your videos or connect like that, you’ve got to make it easy, right? Don’t just ask for the link. Give the person everything possible to give you exactly what you want because if you leave it to me to just give you the link, I’m going to link to mixergy.com with the text, mixergy.com.

Interviewee: I’m going to link to Mixerg.com. With the text Mixer.com. Alright? That’s why every brand ranks for its name. Not because Google is start enough to know this is a brand, it’s because when you leave the world to its own choices, people link using www. whatever or the name. They don’t link doing radio interview or Skype interview or online interview. So if that’s what you want you need to, you need to hand it out that way.

Andrew: Moe is saying good tip. Got another good tip like that?

Interviewee: I don’t know. Maybe.

Andrew: How about one more. How about one I don’t even know how to ask for one. You know the business better than I do. What’s one that you think you want to just shake people and say look you got to understand this.

Interviewee: You got to understand that you still need to cover the fundamentals. It sounds like kind of a lame tip right? But people want to jump ahead all the time and go I want to get involved in Twitter and Facebook and social media and I want to go get a bunch of links and I’m doing press releases and I’m doing all this that and the other thing. But they still have every single title tag on the page on the website exactly the same. Or you know they haven’t put in their H1 tags or they don’t have ALT tags on their images.

You can go ahead like I said before you can go ahead and overbalance the algorithm and say you know well I’ll just get a bunch of links and it will overcome all that stuff. why would you go put all that effort and time and resources into emailing people and asking for links and distributing content you have, when let’s say you can do half that amount of work if you get your site optimized. Because it all works together. So if you get your titles squared away and your ALT tags squared away and get your body content written properly, you might only, you might only need fifty percent of the effort you might you might have otherwise spent. So the fundamentals are the very very first thing.

Andrew: Randy Fishgen in the audience is saying, “Andrew ask him how to get rankings in local.” Do you know him by the way? do you know Rand?

Interviewee: Rand Fishgen is a very good friend of mine. He’s here in the Seattle area.

Andrew: See actually and his next comment after that is for Locksmiths. I went over to yellowbot.com’s offices. They have an online yellow page directory. He said look Andrew look what happens when you do a search for for locksmiths. The the map just lit up. These locksmiths apparently are incredible at mastering this. what do we need to know about local?

Interviewee: Well the the key to local there is a couple of things going on there. The real key to local is consistency and accuracy. So if you’re going to register your business, you go verify your business with Google. That’s sort of the thing that everyone knows to do. You submit it, they call you, you say this is me and everybody thinks that’s where you stop. There’s actually a handful of places you want to submit your site to. You want to submit it to Google, you want to submit it to Yahoo!, you want to submit it to USA, you want to submit it to Universal Business Listing, you want to submit it to Axium, because all especially with Google when they look at where to put somebody in a local search result, they’re not just looking at the data they get they are verifying that data with all these other sources. All these other sources all these other signals and they are saying do we actually have to best data is it the most accurate? And so what you need to do is you need to submit to all those sources you need to submit the exact same data so that when Google pulls it all together that there’s no possibility for confusion. That the data doesn’t match. And then you go to your website and you need to have that address and that phone number and location listed actually on your website. Because they’re going to come to your website and see is this the same address? Is this really who we’re supposed to be linking to? Put it in a I think its’ called an H-card if I remember the name correctly. A micro format that basically says to the search engines, this is an address. It’s HTML tagging. And you know those are all the places to start. But then at the end of the day it still goes back to well you got to go get some links that say you know especially if you’re trying to rank for like Seattle Pizza, right? Where it’s a more generic term and so you got to do that. But the locksmith one I’ve never gone and investigated that one. Danny Sullivan if I recall an article that he wrote I don’t know why it’s locksmiths that seem to have it so beaten up.

Andrew: I got to I got to check that out because I have been curious ever since he showed it to me. And by the way, apparently Rand, I should have known this, apparently Rand Fishgen runs SEOMA’s one of the top sites in this space. I didn’t know it. People in the audience are saying that I that he should come and do Mixerg I’m going to invite him right here in this interview and say Rand if you want to do an interview on Mixerg send me an email there is an open invitation to you I’d love to have you on here. Oh yeah look yeah James Af is in caps. Saying yes

Andrew:  …is in caps saying “Yes! Do an interview.”  I’m going to say the same thing in caps but here with my voice. Do an interview!

Interviewee:  That’d be a great interview.

Andrew:  I would love it.  Let’s set it up.  I’m not sure if he’s…yeah you are.  We gotta get him on here.  Today what are you doing?  Beyond this.  Can you talk about the new local product that you and I talked about in the pre interview?

Interviewee:  Definitely.  Position Technologies, we’re launching a new local product. Its at AllLocal.com.  Basically, it is a platform that you can come in, like I talked about how you need to make sure you’re in all the proper indexes and your data is accurate and consistent.  What we’re building is a platform that takes care of that for you.  You come into our system, put all that information in one time, we push it out for you, and make sure its consistent and updated on a regular basis.  So if you want to make a change, you want to add a location, or drop a location, if you have a change, you just come in to our one platform, make that change, we take care of it for you.  There is other things under the hood.  We’re doing some work tracking reviews from different places like Yalp and that sort of thing.  So you can come in, once again, one platform for your local business.  See who’s talking about you.  Where they’re talking about you.  Make sure your data is consistent.  If you want to push out coupon codes to Google, that kind of stuff.  All that kind of stuff is coming to the system as well.  We’re in a soft launch beta right now, but you can go to AllLocal.com and read about it.  We’ve got a blog up there.  We’ve a great local expert in the company that runs that.

Andrew:  You know I’m glad that you guys are doing that, because, I don’t know if you’ve noticed it in the video, as you were telling me all the different places that I, as a local pizzeria, would have to submit my site and my address, I just got exhausted listening to that list.  If there’s an easy way for somebody else to take that responsibility off my shoulders, then as a pizza shop guy, I would love it.  Somebody in the audience was talking about Aaron Whal[sp].  Aaron Whal[sp] from SC Opal[sp] was frustrated with me, because I didn’t send proper links and he’s absolutely right but, I’m exhausted just doing research.  I’m exhausted just making sure that “Todd” is who he says he is and that he actually has some substance to him.  You talk to some people who are bootstrappers.  I gotta go and look at their tax papers to make sure the numbers they give me in the interview are right.  Sometimes I go and I look at the account registers on their PayPal or whatever it is that they are using to make sure the revenue is there.  That stuff takes time!  I get exhausted.  I feel bad that I can’t do all the SCO stuff that I need to and I’m glad that you guys are automating it.  I hope that other people automate and make it easier for us to do it.

Interviewee:  That’s the nut of running a business though, right?  You do what you do.

Andrew:  Yes.

Interviewee:  Its one thing in a small business where you have to wear different hats, but where you can, its really valuable to defer to the experts.  I don’t remember much.  I have a business degree from university.  I don’t remember much of what I learned.  There’s a couple of things that stuck with me.  One is, and its obviously changed a little bit, you can add a good search marketer to the list, but there’s two things you should never try and do by yourself.  One, never be your own accountant.  Two, never be your own lawyer.  Do what you do best and get the real expertise to do the other things.  You know, I’d love to know more about doing online video interviews and that kind of stuff but I’m busy doing SCO and so if I need to go down that road, I need to go get people to help me with that.  I think the same applies for SCO.  Especially, if you can’t put enough time into it to really learn it because you will get yourself in a world of trouble if you’re not careful.  There’s so many people out there who think, that are believing lies. I’ll say it. Lies.  Straight up.  People that are selling links or selling services and people are listening to bad advice and getting in trouble.  It’s one thing for a national brand to get in trouble and be spending a million dollars on ad words and have some recourse to possibly get some help, but when its mom and pop dry cleaners, mom and pop pizza stop down the road, all of a sudden one day they’re gone out of Google.   They don’t  know what happened.  They don’t know who to talk to.  It possibly because they made some kind of mistake.  SCO suffers from a certain amount of credibility issues, because of what sort of goes on.  You mean Cali Cane-ish [sp] and different guys over the years called the snake oil salesmen and there’s certainly people within the business that have given us a black eye.  You know, lawyers have all kinds of credibility issues too.  People still pay them big money.  You gotta know what you are doing.  There is a very big downside.

Interviewee: …a very big downside to screwing up in this business.

Andrew: Yeah, actually I talked to the guy, I only know him as “the oatmeal” right now.  Do you know “the oatmeal”?

Interviewee: Yeah, and now that you’ve said you can’t remember his name, it’s gone out of my head too.

Andrew: The reason I thought of him is because he used to work I think at SEOmoz.

Interviewee: Inman.

Andrew: Matt Inman, thank you.  He had this great business in the dating world and suddenly his site was pulled from the search engines, from Google specifically, and the whole thing was just dead in the water.  And he had to have a couple people beg Matt Cutts to help him out.  So I see the danger there.

That one and also I did this interview with this guy, he’s goes by the name Andrew Fashion, Andrew Thompson, that’s his last name.  He had this million plus dollar business that he was doing MySpace templates.  And people would just come into his site from MySpace, they’d come into his site from Google, he said you know, I’m spending all this money on fun stuff.  Why don’t I spend this money on re-doing my site, make it look really nice.

He made it look really nice.  He changed the URL structure.  Google considered it to be a whole new website so he lost all the rankings that he had there.  He lost all the traffic that went with it, and the revenue along with it.  That was one of the most painful interviews that I’ve ever done.  And you’re right, it just reminds me of how bad things can get if you screw this part of your business.

Interviewee: We have a cardinal rule in SEO — If it’s working, don’t mess with it.  I was talking with someone just last week and they were asking should we do this or this and a couple of changes to the website.  And you know, we asked where are you for your main keyword?  They said well, we’re number one.  Don’t touch your website then, leave it alone.  If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Andrew: Look at ugly ass about.com that thing is stuck in the GeoCities days, it’s the most annoying website to get stuck on, but you’re right, they shouldn’t touch it.  They’re ranking really high, they’re getting all my traffic.

Interviewee: Yep, and it’s got authority.  About.com is got so much authority.  Yeah, don’t mess with it.  And it’s really funny too, ugly works.  Ugly sells.  A very, very dear friend of mine from back in the webmaster world days had the most horrible websites and he’d crank out new websites, and they were just awful.

They converted like gangbusters.  They just did really well.  All the Phentermine and Viagra, they were ugly, ugly websites.  Make it simple.  Make it easy for people to find what they’re doing, and don’t worry so much about how pretty it is.  Because people don’t know.

We have a hard time stepping out of what we know, right?  Really going, well what would my mom think of this?  Would this work for my mom?  And if it does, don’t get all caught up in getting too fancy with it.

Andrew: Well, let’s leave it right there.  Thank you for doing this interview.  Usually at this stage I would in addition to thanking you ask you where can people connect with you?  But I’m gonna tell them where they connect with you…

Anywhere that you’re online, look for oilman.  It’s oilman.ca, it’s oilman on this, it’s oilman on that.  Right now there are two kids in a garage somewhere building a website.  When that website launches, maybe even 24 hours before that website launches, Todd will be oilman on that website and you’ll be able to find him on that website too.

So that hopefully, unless one of the jerks in the audience decides to start snatching the oilman name from you.

Interviewee: It has happened.

Andrew: He’s a very dangerous man.  Stay away from oilman.  Go get other names for yourselves, pick your own handle.  Todd, seriously, thank you for being here.  Thank you for doing this interview.  Jane, thank you for finding this great interview and for setting me up with all this great information.  Everyone in the audience, come back to Mixergy, give me your feedback.  I’m always curious what you thought.  I’ll see you there.