During the summer, my long term partner shared an Instagram ad similar to this one:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Jessica | UGC Creator | Lifestyle Vlogger (@jessicalynnciraulo)

Well aint that a fucking cute cow.

In case that Instagram post gets deleted, here’s what the cow looks like:

So like any loving partner, I immediately thought to myself “this is going to be a hilarious Christmas present. I’m buying it right now.” 

I went to their website and saw it was built on Shopify. Great, love it when I can use that fast Shopify checkout.

Then I scrolled through the products and options. “Oh shit, they even have a JUMBO version for $60! Gimmie that one!”

Smashed that purchase button so fast.

Then I got this confirmation email:

“FUCK, I just got scammed.”

Yes, that is a blank confirmation email. They didn’t even bother to update the default Shopify message.

It immediately occurred to me that one of two things would happen:

1. There’s always a chance it’s not a scam and these idiots just don’t know how to set up a Shopify account. In which case I’ll get my jumbo weighted highland cow. VICTORY.
2. If it IS a scam, I’ll have a whole new investigation and can tear down these muppets. ALSO VICTORY.

Some of you might be thinking “Lars, you dumbass, it’s clearly an AI cow. You are not as sharp as I thought you were.”

To which I say: “I had that same thought! But the cow is fucking real! I found it! I bought it! I have it right fucking now!” Yes, the image is AI but the cow is real. But more on that in a minute.

Back to the scam. I waited.

And I waited.

After weeks and weeks, I FINALLY started getting shipping notifications. The package was coming from China.

As it meandered its way through US customs, I actually forgot about it. Got busy with other stuff.

Then one day a package arrived.

Spoiler alert: it was not the cow I ordered.

But before I show you the cow that I actually received, I want you to take a moment, and in your mind’s eye, imagine what you’d expect a scam highland cow to look like. How shitty is it? Does it scream cow fraud? Is it even a highland cow? Is it bad enough to ruin an entire Christmas?

Take a minute.

Alright, here we go.

THIS IS THE COW I RECEIVED:

No lies: it took me 20 MINUTES to realize this was the highland cow that I ordered.

I was like “what is this? who sent this to me? what idiot would ever pay for something like this?”

ME. I’M THE IDIOT THAT PAID FOR IT.

Now now, let’s not get too hasty. MAYBE it’s an honest mistake. (there’s no fucking chance it’s a mistake but let’s try doing the right thing). So I reached out and asked for a refund, using the email address that was listed in their refund policy:

The email address did not exist.

ALIGHTY THEN.

Chargeback time!

So I gave my credit card company a call, explained the situation, they initiated a chargeback that same day, and I went back to waiting.

Within like 2 days the scam company approved the refund. I got my $60 back. Even heartless highland cow scammers bow to the whims of Visa and Mastercard.

I could have let things go at that point. But what’s the fun in that?

After some digging, I discovered that a highland cow scam company (along with some bottom feeder scammers) had completely taken over the product category. The scam is so prevalent that people are blaming legitimate content creators and stuffed animal companies after they get scammed. 

At this point, if you do buy a weighted highland cow on the internet, you’re more likely to get scammed than get a legitimate product.

So who’s real and how does the scam work?

The Instagram Stuffie Scam Cycle

Here’s how the scam works:

1. Find a viral consumer product with a good margin. If it was me, I’d look for products that were constantly selling out AND above $50. You also want a product that’s using influencer videos heavily.
2. Create a fake website along with fake company profiles on Facebook and Tiktok.
3. Steal the legitimate creator ads, run your own ads with them, and direct people to your fake website.
4. After orders come in, either ship an inferior product. Or ship nothing at all.
5. If you really want to dial this up, start charging customers multiple times.
6. Once all the complaints come in and the chargebacks escalate (takes about 3 months if you drag your feet on shipping), shut the whole thing down.
7. Start over with the new brand and website.
8. Repeat until the product is completely burned, then move on to another product.

In this scam, the only real cost is the ads. And since you don’t have to worry about turning a profit with a real product, you can outbid all the legitimate companies. Your ad costs will be higher but the rest of the order is pure profit.

Doing this once is easy. The part I’m most impressed by is how these folks have managed to stay ahead of the merchant account companies and payment gateways.

Let’s go through all the steps in detail.

The Perfect Product to Scam

A weighted highland cow. The perfect viral product. Cute, adorable, and weighted. The perfect salve to… well… everything.

This highland cow, from Uoozii, is the real one. They only sell it on Amazon.

How do I know?

I fucking ordered it. And it arrived. Here’s a photo:

The cow is, indeed, real.

The best part if you’re a scammer? It keeps going out of stock. I’ve seen it go out of stock multiple times in the last 6 months. They can’t keep up with demand. That leaves the door wide open for someone else to feed that demand.

And the price point is delicious. $50 can cover a ton of ads with plenty left over. Assuming you don’t care about actually delivering a product. What? You want a product?! For money?! In this economy?! Such spoiled consumers!

The Influencer Ecosystem That Sells Real Products

Uoozii is smart. They’ve tapped into the influencer ecosystem to sell their products. There are tons of folks doing shorts for all tons of consumer products. I assume that Uoozii sends them a free version of the product and then the creators get a percent of all the Amazon sales. It’s pretty easy to sign up and become an Amazon affiliate. Some deals may involve a flat sponsorship fee too. TikTok Shop also has their own programs where I assume everyone is getting a cut.

Jessica Ciraulo is a influencer/creator. Basically she posts a ton of videos on all sorts of products.

Jessica regularly posts about the highland cows, whenever they come back in stock. Here’s a recent one:

She has people post comments (probably to trigger the Instagram engagement algo), and then sends links via DM.

She’s not the only one, Mary Fortune did a post here:

Allie Sholtis has also done highland cow posts, like this one where people are complaining about scams:

There’s a whole batch of this stuff on Instagram and Tik Tok. Every time I went looking, I found new creators running very similar ads for the highland cow. There are a ton of folks doing this.

Just so anyone doesn’t get the wrong idea: these creators are NOT part of the scam. So don’t send them any hate mail.

And we’ll get to the real scam in a second but:

• The folks in the comments on many of these videos were scammed
• They were NOT scammed by these content creators (that I know of)

I was actually able to trade a few emails with Allie and she claims she worked directly with Uoozii. I believe her.

In the cases that I looked at, the influencers promote the legitimate company: Uoozii.

It’s the next step of the process where everyone gets fucked.

The Beginning of the Scam: Facebook, Instagram, and Tiktok Ads

For the vast majority of people, the first time they encounter the fabled highland cow stuffy will be from a paid ad on Instagram or TikTok. Take this suspiciously inactive company profile:

See that creator post on the right?

It looks extremely similar to many of the legitimate creator posts:

At one point, that video WAS a legitimate creator post that pointed to a legitimate product. But no longer.

HugMates hijacked that video and is using it as their own.

Maybe I mixed things up and am blaming HugMates unfairly?

The website that scammed me was highlandplushy.com. Guess what’s listed as the domain in the HugMates Facebook profile:

HugMates isn’t running any Facebook or Instagram ads right now but they used to. My bet is they forgot to scrub their accounts as they started cycling through new brands.

Pretty simple setup here:

• Create a fake profile on Facebook for your ads.
• Steal one of the hundreds of real highland cow creator videos, use that video for your own posts and ads.
• Then point people to your own website.

So where did the HugMates ads go?

The Highland Cow Scam Websites

Today, the website that I bought from (highlandplushy.com) is dead. They shut it down a few months ago.

I didn’t grab a screenshot from the original site but here’s the homepage from the Internet Archive:

Yes, I know the images are all broken. I sincerely apologize for not thoroughly documenting the scam in motion.

Here’s the Trustpilot page for that domain which is full of complaints about scams:

If they shut the website down, did these folks pack up and run away with their money?

Of course not! They’re still at it.

They currently have an active site at highlandcowplushie.com. Here’s the homepage:

It does have the same stupid banner at the top in the exact same style.

The other dead giveaway that it’s the same folks is the privacy policy.

Here’s the privacy policy on the dead site I ordered from:

And here’s the policy from the current site:

I was going to highlight which sections were identical but THE WHOLE DAMN THING IS IDENTICAL.

So yeah, the same people. All they did was swap out the entity (KairaCo -> Highlandcowplushie). The same people are behind both sites.

In between these two sites, I believe this crew also ran highlandcowplushy.com, I’ve seen a few reviewers mention this domain. Here’s the order of their sites that I’ve caught so far:

1. highlandplushy.com
2. highlandcowplushy.com
3. highlandcowplushie.com

How original. Just burning through every domain variant they can get their hands on.

The highland cow churn and burn.

Why Rotate Through Different Highland Cow Brands?

Simple: to stay ahead of scam complaints, bad reviews, and credit card chargebacks.

If you spin up a brand and website, then run a bunch of ads of Facebook or TikTok, it’ll take about 3 months for the scam to catch up with you. At least if you drag your feet on shipping.

By that point, word starts to get out and your best bet is to shut everything down, switch to a new brand, and cycle through again.

For Maximum Profit: Charge Credit Cards Multiple Times

If you delight in reading hundreds of reviews about scam products like I do, you’ll come across tons of claims about people receiving extra charges on their credit cards when getting sucked into the highland cow scam.

Like this one on the TrustPilot page:

It’s not just a scam for the initial purchase, the charges keep coming. I even found people that said they had to cancel their credit cards.

This didn’t happen to me (luckily) but I 100% believe it.

It’s one the easiest ways to juice your scam profits. Especially if you’re gonna burn the whole brand down in a few months anyway.

The Highland Cow Bottom Feeders

It’s not just one company doing this scam. There are tons.

Go to the Facebook Ad Library, search for Highland Cow, and you’ll come across tons of different websites all running the same scam.

1. Run ads on Facebook
2. Steal a creator video and use that as your ad.
3. Point people to your fake website.
4. Don’t deliver a product at all or deliver an inferior product that costs almost nothing. 
5. Repeat under new brands as needed.

Here’s an ad from the PlushJoy account:

Same as always: a legit creator video used as the ad.

Here’s the cow on their site (plushjoy.co):

$9.95? Yeah, no fucking way that’s real.

There are a bunch of comments on their Facebook profile complaining about not receiving orders:

Here’s another ad that used a video from Jessica Ciraulo:

And this is the page it points to on their website (atgreenic.com):

People also claim this is a scam on their Trustpilot page:

These are just a few. I’ve dug up at least another dozen all doing the same thing. It’s endless.

The Impact of the Highland Cow Scam on Legitimate Businesses

This scam is EVERYWHERE.

How do I know?

Go into Instagram or TikTok and just search for highland cows. A bunch of legitimate creator posts come up. Many of them have people complaining about the scam in the comments. 

Allie’s post is not an anomaly:

So many people are getting scammed by these ads that there’s a flood of them going back to the real creator posts and expressing their frustration. Many of these folks have no idea that they got sucked into a scam funnel via ads that stole the creator videos.

SnugglePals is a legitimate company selling weighted highland cows. Here’s a post of the founder talking about the scams:

Here’s another one with him breaking down the impact to his business:

People are going to SnugglePals and leaving bad reviews about how they got scammed… by a different fucking company. SnugglesPals is losing out on revenue because of this.

A stuffed animal company founder has been forced to do PSA videos on Insta to lessen the harm inflicted on his business from highland cow scammers.

So that’s where the state of the stuffed animal market is at. Yippie.

Where to Buy A Stuffed Highland Cow (And Not Get Scammed)

I got scammed by buying from the wrong website. MOST websites selling weighted highland cows are scams right now. And MOST ads selling weighted highland cows on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are also scams. Be careful.

Do NOT buy from an ad that you see on Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok. Most (but not all) are scams.

There are two legitimate places that I found to buy your weighted highland cow. Don’t fret! They do exist!

I assume that you’re looking for this cow:

That is one of the real weighted cows that I ordered. The ONLY place to buy this cow is on Amazon.

If Amazon says it’s out of stock, DO NOT buy it from any other website. It is likely a scam.

Only buy it from Amazon or a location that’s linked directly from the Uoozii website. I believe that Uoozii was also on TikTok shop at one point but it looks like they took it down.

Uoozii is a real company and this product listing is real. I wouldn’t trust anything else.

Another Real Weighted Highland Cow

SnugglePals also sells real weighted highland cows. How do I know? I bought one.

Here’s it is:

SnugglePals is based in Oregon and has an active Instagram account. They do run ads regularly so if you see an ad from the SnugglePals account, that’s legitimate.

They also sell out regularly. If they’re out of stock, be patient and wait for a restock. Don’t try to find a different website. You’ll most likely run into a scam.

SnugglePals vs Uoozie

I REALLY wanted to prefer the SnugglePals highland cow. But if I’m being honest, the Uoozii highland cow is better:

• The fur is softer.
• The weight distribution in the paws is delightful. If you wiggle the highland cow, you can’t help but laugh.
• I think the design is a bit cuter.

Yes, I realize that I’m a middle-aged dude pontificating on the weight distribution in the paws of a highland cow stuffie. I do not know how my life ended up here.

ANYWAY.

Both are high quality. Both are real. You can’t go wrong with either:

• The Real Uoozii Highland Cow is here
• The Real SnugglePals Highland Cow is here.

Who Benefits the Most From the Highland Cow Scam?

Facebook. Sorry, “Meta.” And any other ad platform that allows these ads to run.

While you have to explain why your Christmas or birthday present failed miserably, Facebook made money from duping you. They made money off duping me. Facebook got paid to show that ad to my partner. She shared the ad with me and then I paid the scammers in an attempt to do something delightful for her.

I never would have paid the scammers if Facebook hadn’t allowed that ad to run.

That ad is the reason I got burned.

Even as the scammers rotate through different brands and accounts, or other scammers jump in to nibble at your pocketbook, Facebook makes money every step of the way.

I’m shocked that it’s so easy to rip a legitimate creator video without any edits, post it as an ad, and send people to ANY WEBSITE ON THE INTERNET.

There are always going to be scams out there but this one feels a bit too fucking easy. Come on Facebook. At least look like you give a shit.

They could do something about this scam and the countless others that are likely running at this moment. I believe they choose not to. God forbid ads revenue takes a dip to protect your own users from scams.

The post The Weighted Highland Cow Scam: How it Works and Where to Buy a Real Highland Cow appeared first on Lars Lofgren.

You find a co-founder, raise a bit of money, and pour your soul into your company.

The first couple of years, students love your program. Positive feedback, extraordinary student outcomes, employees love the mission. You are quite literally changing lives.

Your business grows. One day, you realize you’ve grown to 70 employees.

And then…

A competitor gets control of the main subreddit for your industry by becoming a Reddit Moderator.

That watering hole becomes their megaphone. They are not shy about using it. An all-out attack on your brand begins. The barrage of accusations and harassment are relentless. The attacks happen daily. You become a neurotic fixation of the moderator. Every little thing you do represents your failings as a company.

You get compared to a sex cult. One of your employees is accused of nepotism. The mod starts joining your company information sessions for prospective students, slinging conspiracy theories at every turn under a pseudonym. You avoid outright bans to avoid appearing biased yourself. Your own employees start wondering if these accusations have merit, some leave.

Even worse, confidential information from your company starts leaking out. There’s a mole. Or at least your team suspects it. No one knows who to trust. Your carefully built company culture? Eviscerated from the inside out.

Any time you attempt to defend yourself in the main subreddit, posts get deleted. Or you’re accused of running a Reddit bot army.

This goes on for years.

Every day, another attack. Every fucking day.

Student applications drop. First a little… then a lot.

Combined with a market downtown, your revenue collapses by 80%.

You go through 2 layoffs just to keep the lights on. A bunch of other folks move on. You’re down to 15 employees now.

The attacks don’t stop. If anything, they escalate.

And you begin to wonder, as the CEO and founder of your company… “Maybe I’m the problem? Maybe I am doing something wrong? Or somehow encouraging these attacks on my company?”

You make a decision to leave.

You step down, walk away from everything you built, and start anew.

But even then, the attacks don’t stop. Nothing can stop this nightmare.

This is the story of Will Sentance and his company, Codesmith.

It can happen to your business too.

The Codesmith Reputation Attack via Google

For many businesses, the first page of Google for their brand name is the single most important asset for managing their reputation.

Let’s say I’m considering a bootcamp, I hear about “Codesmith,” and pop it into Google.

Fuck me that’s bad. This is the number 2 result right after the company website.

• “Codesmith is an enormous waste of money”
• “Do Not Go To Codesmith”

I don’t even have to click, Google is serving that stuff up right under the company’s website. God damn.

That top Reddit thread has been ranking highly for Codesmith brand terms since Sept 2024. That’s a year’s worth of brand carnage.

Pay close attention to the subreddit all those threads are from: r/codingbootcamp. That’s the key to all this.

Are LLMs Also a Reputation Attack Vector on Codesmith?

Yup.

My prompt in ChatGPT was “is codesmith a good bootcamp?”.

The intro has a bunch of standard stuff, and then there was this:

Same Reddit threads are featured, same brand-destroying quotes.

By the way, CIRR is a nonprofit in the bootcamp industry that collects graduation data across the industry. It’s a neutral third-party with the goal of providing transparency on student outcomes across coding bootcamps. If your graduation rates are solid, wouldn’t it make sense for a competitor to call that data into question? ChatGPT is regurgitating those same doubts here.

At this point, I’ve done a quick brand search and asked ChatGPT if Codesmith is any good. I already have a TON of doubts as a prospect.

I don’t believe this is an accident. Or a result of Codesmith’s actual quality as a bootcamp.

I believe this brand attack is the result of one person’s actions.

When I’ve researched Codesmith’s brand, every Reddit thread I’ve seen in Google and various LLMs have all been from a single subreddit: r/codingbootcamp. That subreddit is controlled by the Reddit Moderator Michael Novati.

Who is Michael Novati?

For the best recap of Michael, listen to this interview from Pragmatic Engineer Gergely Orosz.

The highlights:

• Michael joined Facebook early in 2009.
• As he tells it, went through a bunch of promotions quickly and made it to Principal Software Engineer (E7).
• Left Facebook in 2017.
• In 2019, co-founded his dev bootcamp, Formation, with his wife, Sophie Novati. His wife is the CEO, Michael took the CTO title.

In that interview, Michael tells a story about playing Risk (the board game) with Mark Zuckerberg.

“The way we became friends, he [Zuckerberg] used to play Risk, the board game. I think it was once a week that people would get together. Like 4 or 5 people. He would show up often and I really liked Risk. I would always play Risk as a kid for whatever reason, I don’t even know why.

And one day, we’re down to the final three people. And it was me, him, and I was losing. Mark was in second place, the leader was taking over.

I did a really.. uhhh.. let’s say delicate, strategic maneuver. Where I made an alliance with him to share resources and go after the first place person. So he went all in on the first place person.

My turn’s next. I did not go all in against the first place person, I took over Mark’s remaining resources. He just dwindled going after the first place person. He accepted my friendship request [on Facebook] very shortly that evening.

It’s weird, I basically backstabbed him in the game, really bad. Blatantly to his face. But it’s the game, that’s what Risk is. It’s a strategy game. I think he appreciated the strategy I had. It made him feel more like he could trust me. Even though I backstabbed him, he knows where my strategic thinking is coming from.“

Now, is this just a funny anecdote about an early Facebook backstabbing Mark Zuckerberg and then becoming friends? Maybe.

For me, it tells me a lot about how Michael Novati plays competitive games. In my experience, people tend to run businesses the same way they compete at anything. Maybe Michael is the exception.

I do have to admit, it takes some real cojones to fuck over your boss that hard in a board game. Especially when that boss is Zuckerberg.

One last note: Formation raised a $4M seed round in 2021, led by Andreessen Horowitz.

Michael Novati’s Control Over the Coding Bootcamp Industry

Michael Novati’s power over the coding bootcamp industry comes from one place: being a moderator on the subreddit r/codingbootcamp.

He is, by far, the most active moderator for the subreddit. You’ll bump into him immediately just by visiting the subreddit:

What about the other mods?

• u/samabuna hasn’t posted in about 8 years.
• u/dowcet/ is still active on Reddit but rarely posts in r/codingbootcamp. When I checked, I only found one comment in the preceeding 1-2 months.

So the subreddit is Michael Novati’s show. Full stop.

We have to remember that Reddit isn’t just Reddit anymore. The powers that be have decided that Reddit is infallible, a reliable set of training data for LLMs, and should be featured fucking everywhere.

Before we get to what Michael has actually done, let’s lay out the potential power for anyone that gets control of a key subreddit in their industry:

• If the subreddit is greenlit by Google, threads in your subreddit can easily pop to the top of Google searches that are extremely valuable to your business. Brand terms, review terms, product categories, major how-to topics, all of it.
• LLMs prioritize Reddit heavily. If you want to spin conspiracy theories, those conspiracies will start to become part of the zeitgeist as every LLM regurgitates them.
• Skew the narrative for long enough and it’ll be impossible for ANY prospect to not stumble across your skewed narrative when they’re researching products or services. 
• You can delete posts and comments at will. Want to tip the narrative in your favor? Just delete some of the positive posts of your competitors. To cover your tracks, make up claims about a bot army that’s run by your competitor. You’re fighting the good fight and keeping the barbarians at bay! You don’t even need to actively post negative stuff (but you can if you want to dial up the torture). Just removing positive stuff skews the narrative nicely.
• You can ban users at will. Got some troublesome competitors fighting back? Just delete the little shits.
• You can pin posts in the subreddit and comments within posts. Great tactic for pushing a narrative when you really need to.

What about recourse from your competitors? Can they do anything to stop you?

You can only lose your moderator slot in a few instances:

• The Reddit Admis get involved, actual Reddit employees. Stuff has to get pretty egregious for that.
• Moderators further up the mod list can kick you out. But if you get on good terms with them, or they don’t care, you have free reign.
• If there are other mods below you AND you go inactive, you can get kicked by them too. So don’t let any new mods in. And always stay active. Simple.

No one else across the industry can do a damn thing. You get to act with impunity.

To be clear, any moderator of an industry subreddit has this power. That’s not a subjective opinion, it’s a fact. That’s how our online platforms currently work.

Michael Novati has this power over the bootcamp industry. Did he wield it benevolently? If he did, I wouldn’t be writing this fucking post.

How Michael Distorts Narratives on Reddit

At first, I was going to go through a bunch of Michael Novati’s claims and debunk them.

Then I realized I was missing the entire point.

This isn’t a normal debate where there are two sides of the truth and we need to sort through it to get to the real answer.

It’s about one side torching the truth with a firehose of chaos and distortion.

Prospects in the bootcamp space are evaluating whether or not to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a bootcamp. It’s the price of a goddamn car. It doesn’t take much to get someone to pause and redirect their purchase journey.

So let’s go through a few of the worst examples.

Compare Your Competitor to a Sex Cult (Loosely for Deniability)

Here’s a fucked up one. 

A Reddit user, with a first-time post, posts a major takedown of Codesmith, claiming to be a former employee. Tons of allegations about mismanagement, poor curriculum, and backroom dealing with CIRR. I personally think these allegations are bullshit but that’s not the most fucked up part in this thread.

u/rosiebeir joins the conversation and gives a measured take on their experience as a student in Codesmith:

Most of the comment is about different aspects of the Codesmith program that could be improved. It all feels genuine to me. Further down, they say this:

Wow, that’s a helluva endorsement.

This is where Michael jumps in:

If you’re not familiar with NXIVM (Michael got the spelling wrong), go watch The Vow on HBO. Short story: NXIVM was a sex cult disguised as a self-improvement group and the founder went to prison.

Did Michael just compare Codemith to a goddamn sex cult? Yes he did folks.

Let’s put aside the subject matter for a second. Michael’s use of rhetoric is a master class on how to destroy someone’s reputation without technically saying the horrible thing you’re actually saying.

Michael takes an incredible testimonial from a student (“Codesmith changed my life”), and associates that comment with the sort of things he hears from sex cults. He doesn’t technically call Codesmith a sex cult, he merely makes the association. He also wraps it with other positive comments to look more measured: “something I hear very often” and “I love that Codesmith changed your life.” But these aren’t good things, they’re red flags! Sex cults do the same thing! Someone could get taken advantage of!

Oh so innocent aren’t we Michael?

Now any time a bootcamp prospect wanders into this thread:

• They see the genuine, positive review from a former student.
• A supposed figure of authority (a Reddit moderator), plants a seed questioning that testimonial.
• The same mod connects Codesmith to a sex cult in a way that also offers complete deniability.
• To top it all off, most folks won’t realize that the Reddit mod is a cofounder of a competing company.

Bravo Michael, brav-fucking-o.

From Reddit Troll to LinkedIn Stalker: The Unhinged Escalation

This one might piss me off the most.

Michael doesn’t just go after employees, he goes after their kids.

This is a Reddit post about a defunct Codesmith program:

Somehow, as these threads often do, the conversation turns into an all-out attack on Codesmith. This time, Michael goes after Eric Kirsten, a Senior Advisor at Codesmith. Eric spends a good chunk of his time mentoring Codesmith students and helping prepare them for the job hunt.

Here’s Michael’s post:

I do not know what the original comment in this thread was (very convenient). But I do have the original comment from Michael before he edited it:

I talked with Eric myself, here’s the real story:

• Eric’s wife did a one-time contract project with Codesmith for 9 months.
• His son joined as a Codesmith student and had a great outcome. They paid the full program cost and his son went through the normal application process just like everyone else.

But it doesn’t stop there.

Michael also decided to email multiple executives at Codesmith about Eric’s son:

I’ve redacted the son’s name and details because WHY THE FUCK WOULD WE BRING SOMEONE’S KID INTO THIS?

I don’t think I could possibly swear enough in order to convey how utterly insane all this is.

Just imagine this happening at your own company:

• A cofounder of your competitor, starts attacking one of your employees on Reddit.
• Then that cofounder starts LOOKING UP THEIR KIDS ON LINKEDIN
• They post weird mentions on Reddit about that kid, accusing your company of nepotism.
• THEN EMAILS you and other executives, accusing the kid of falsifying their LinkedIn, threatening to keep calling it out in public.

WHAT.

WHAT. THE. FUCK.

What would you do in this situation?

I’m not sure what I would do. But there is no world where this is normal or okay.

The Great OSP Conspiracy for Manufactured Outrage

Another favorite tactic of Michael is to take something obscure, and allude to some grand conspiracy behind it.

Like OSPs.

OSP stands for open-source product. It’s a built-in part of the Codesmith program, the capstone project. Here’s how Codesmith explains it:

This seems incredibly boring, how the hell could someone possibly turn this into a controversy?

If you’re asking that question, you’ve severely underestimated Michael.

A since-deleted Reddit account posted this thread (convenient that it’s a deleted user huh?):

They claim Codesmith students are using OSPs to inflate their resumes to get jobs faster. And that this is endemic at Codesmith.

The comments are a dumpster fire. Michael has posted 11 of the comments, almost a third of the entire conversation.

A former Codesmith student jumps in:

There’s some back an forth between u/peppimenti and other Reddit users, then Michael responds:

Fuck me, that’s a lot to take in.

Quick tangent: this is another one of Michael’s tactics. Make accusations faster than anyone can possibly fact check them or even process them. I still haven’t figured out what that Phil Troutman reference is.

To summarize, Michael claims he has evidence that Codesmith is aware of the lying on resumes, alludes to a conspiracy with OSLabs, and he believes Codesmith helped verify some of this lying.

Then he associates all of this with “conspiring to commit fraud” and that it’s a “jail-able crime.”

We’ve gone from “Codesmith students complete an OSP during their program” to a shadowy conspiracy and fraud via student resumes. God damn did that escalate.

So I got a hold of the exact SOP that is given by Codesmith to students on how to write their resume. Here’s the section on OSPs:

Codesmith is telling students explicitly not to misrepresent their experience with OSPs as a role at a company. They advocate for transparency, as they should. What students do with that is up to them. And even if some students stretch the truth, no hiring manager is getting fooled by that. End of story.

What about the OSLabs stuff?

When I chatted with Alina (the current CEO of Codesmith), here’s what she had to say on how Codesmith students interact with OSLabs:

“They [students] get a chance to work on it [projects]. Once those are ready, they submit to OSLabs who keeps the repository and manages the repository. There’s no kind of financial exchange or anything like that. They just hold the repository of the open source dev tools.“

OSLabs is just a nonprofit that manages student repos. That’s it.

Maybe you think there are problems with Codesmith’s guidance. Real quick, why don’t we check some of Michael’s own students from his bootcamp company, Formation?

There’s tons of students on his site. Some of them get featured heavily, like here:

Here’s Carlitos’ LinkedIn:

Carlitos is listing his time at Michael’s bootcamp/training company in his experience section. The exact same thing that Michael RAILS on Codesmith for.

To be clear: I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this. Carlitos, all the Codesmith students, or ANY student from ANY bootcamp have done nothing wrong by putting stuff like this on their resumes. If Formation students list their time like this, I don’t see anything wrong with that either.

In the thousands of resumes I’ve reviewed, I’ve never had any trouble differentiating between full-time roles, part-time, freelance, training, or any other random item on a resume. Any hiring manager will sniff this stuff from a mile away. No one is fooling anyone.

But Michael has now turned this into a story of fraud facilitated by Codesmith. And here I am writing hundreds of words about this nonsense. There’s nothing here beyond what Michael has conjured into the ether of Reddit.

You might disagree with some of the guidance that Codesmith gives its graduates but no one is doing anything wrong. It sure as fuck aint fraud.

And that’s what Michael is so damn good at, turning innocuous little things into grand conspiracies that take hours of research to untangle.

Michael Novati’s Nonstop Attack Campaign Against Codesmith

Think I’m cherry picking examples of Michael’s posts?

Let’s zoom out.

My team and I looked at every Reddit post and comment made by Michael Novati over the past 3 months.

We then catalogued the posts that mentioned Codesmith or were referencing Codesmith based on context. Next we categorized those posts based on if the sentiment was positive, neutral, or negative towards Codesmith.

Here’s all the days that had negative comments along with their frequency over the past few months:

Fucking relentless.

It’s easier to highlight days where Michael DOESN’T talk about Codesmith. Dude, get a fucking hobby.

What if the past few months don’t adequately reflect Michael’s posting history? What if recent events have just been a negative phase of the bootcamp space? Can we really make any claims using just the last few months?

Fine, let’s go further.

I went to my team and said “fuck it, let’s go back as far as possible.” So we went through all of Michael’s posts since June 2024. That’s when Reddit stops making it easy to pull up comments. Yes, we looked at every post and comment from over a year. No fast and dirty AI analysis here, we did it by hand.

Here’s the timeline of negative posts and comments since June 2024:

What. The. Fuck.

Who has the time for this?

In order to adequately show how often Michael posts negative comments about Codesmith, we had to use HABIT TRACKER VISUALIZATIONS.

It’s relentless, it’s nonstop, and in my opinion, completely unhinged. At least Michael slows down a tad during the holidays. Otherwise, he’s all gas, no breaks.

Well, alright, MAYBE Michael was posting in such absurd volume that the positive mentions outweigh the negative? Maybe I’m selectively pulling data?

NOPE.

The comments about Codesmith are severely overweighted on the negative side. In aggregate, here’s how the sentiment breaks down:

Is it just me or is there a weeeee bit of bias in this posting?

Yes, yes, there fucking is.

Alright, fine, MAYBE all this negative attention is deserved. Maybe Codesmith is the villain that Michael claims. Let’s find out.

Other Bootcamp Competitors Hold Codesmith in High Regard

I interviewed 10 different folks. Including students, multiple Codesmith employees from the leadership team, and founders of competing coding bootcamps. I dug through countless docs, many of them internal, and probably annoyed some of these folks with my endless requests for screenshots to verify stories.

Overall, I found everyone at Codesmith to be:

• Extremely responsive and on top of their shit. They made promises and kept them.
• Transparent to an absurd degree.
• Humble, honest, and self-aware.
• A desire to do the right thing even at their detriment. These folks don’t know how to play offense, they assume good intent from everyone.

In short, these are good folks. Faultless? Of course not, everyone makes mistakes.

But I do believe that the world is better with Codesmith in it.

Which makes this whole situation all the more tragic.

Michael isn’t waging some war against another competitor hellbent on profit-seeking. These are folks that are helping people transition their careers. They are quite literally helping people change their lives. And they’re doing it for the right reasons in my opinion.

Don’t take my word for it.

I spoke with Anthony Hughes, a co-founder of Tech Elevator, another bootcamp. Here’s what he had to say about Codesmith: “The folks at Codesmith were competitors of Tech Elevator. Especially as everyone went online, we competed directly. I never minded losing to Codesmith. Either choice by students was a good one, both our programs vetted students heavily and would get students great outcomes. If we ever lost to Codesmith, we could accept that because we knew the student would get the outcome they wanted. Not like the lower-quality major programs.”

I also heard the same from Kush Patel, a co-founder and former CEO of AppAcademy “Codesmith is one of the best players in the space. They run their programs in a way that we benchmarked against. There are plenty of other schools that are questionable and are not getting any scrutiny from Michael.”

We have two co-founders of competing bootcamps saying that Codesmith is one of the good ones. Are there shady bootcamps out there? Absolutely. But Codesmith isn’t one of them.

The Tactics Michael Uses to Wage His PR Nightmare Campaign

After reading hundreds of Michael’s posts, a few patterns emerge on how he attacks Codesmith.

To be honest, it’s a masterclass on how to gut your opponent via PR. If every move is intentional by Michael, I gotta hand it to him becasue he’s exceptionally good at this.

Here are the most prominent tactics I saw:

• Relentless volume. It’s not enough to post a few days. If you want to destroy someone’s reputation, you gotta hammer the shit outta that drum. Over a 487 day period, we counted 425 negative posts on Codesmith. That’s an average of 0.87 negative posts per day. A negative post almost every fucking day.
• Reference multiple conspiracies at the same time. If you only mention one conspiracy, folks have a straightforward path to getting to the truth. But if you mention 3-4 at the same time? Only the true masochistics like myself will even attempt to pull it apart.
• Rarely, if ever, state your full accusation. For any single conspiracy, always allude to it. Don’t make a full, comprehensive case that allows someone to see the full picture. Let your audience sit with the uncertainty. You don’t need to win the argument, you only need to sow doubt and fear.
• Cherry-pick data. As the saying goes: “there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.” For any industry data you can get your hands on, find the slice that skews the narrative in your favor. Don’t worry about anyone fact-checking, they never do.
• Attack every misstep, no matter how obscure. Sooner or later, your victim will make mistakes. When they do, attack. No matter how small or obscure, blow it up into a major drama. Hype, distort, and magnify.
• Take down third-party arbitrators. If your industry has some sort of credential, certification, or regulator, attack that body just as much as your competitor. If your competitor has optimized for this transparency, you’ll turn their strength into a weakness. Even better, accuse both parties of conspiring together.
• Blame the victim. Whenever someone mentions that you’re going too hard, say that your competitor is forcing your hand. “You’d love to move on! You don’t want to spend your time on all this! If ONLY your competitor would do the right thing, then all this would stop!” But we all know it’ll never stop.
• Delete comments and posts. Delete comments and posts to skew the narrative in your favor. You don’t need to delete everything, just enough to make the conversation messy and difficult to follow. And a few key deletions tilts the scales in your favor.
• Make your claims squishy. Don’t ever say your competitor is a cult or committing fraud. Say that things look like it, or remind you of it. You’ll have deniability while the association still gets planted in the minds of your audience.

A sign of the times.

The Impact on Codesmith

Has all this had a material impact on Codesmith?

I spoke to both Will Sentence (former CEO and co-founder) and Alina Vasile (the current CEO). When I asked them how much revenue has declined at Codesmith since their peak, they both told me about 80%.

Then I asked how much of that was due to everything on Reddit. They said about half of the decline, so a 40% drop came from the negative PR on Reddit. And the other 40% is from a slowdown in the bootcamp market.

Will told me that Codesmith reached a high of $23.5M in revenue. A 40% hit from Reddit means a revenue drop of $9.4M.

What about the emotional toll?

I asked Will Sentance how it all impacted him “It made me doubt how I can start anything after. Michael Novati is still going at it by commenting on my fellowship at Oxford. And Reddit is so visible in Google – at a meeting last week in the UK, the person used ChatGPT to look up Codesmith and it referenced all those Reddit posts. I have genuine caution about launching new stuff.”

Even after leaving Codesmith, the Reddit harassment still impacts Will.

Students also feel deeply uncomfortable with Michael’s actions.

I spoke with a former employee from Codesmith who told me “I was a teacher at Codesmith and the primary reason for moving away from teaching was MIchael Novati. I signed up to help a team of great people help people achieve their goals like I did, I didn’t sign up to be targeted and attacked by a Reddit troll. It took a toll on my mental health and I decided to step back to focus on my day job at Microsoft.”

Here’s another instance of a student calling Michael out on LinkedIn:

And another student that reached out to Will Sentence:

My sources also told me:

• An executive was threatened after moving to another company, accusations were going to be raised over IP conflicts. These accusations appear meritless and ridiculous to me.
• The morale at Codesmith has sharply declined.
• Some employees have had mental health difficulties, some left Codesmith.
• One contractor ended their working relationship with Codesmith because of a fear of being dragged into all this.
• An employee was doxxed after posting in the /r/codingbootcamp subreddit.
• Prospective students have pulled applications.
• Students that had amazing outcomes are afraid to post about their experiences.
• After graduating, some students began questioning their own experience and considered going back to their old careers.

As much as I wanted to detail these stories, I had a lot of requests from sources to remain anonymous. Even when folks went through some heinous shit from all this, they specifically requested not to be included.

It is difficult to understate the impact that Michael’s actions have had on Codesmith.

Is Michael Novati Breaking the Moderator Code of Conduct on Reddit?

I think so. But it’s not my call.

The Reddit Moderator Code of Conduct says this:

So what counts as compensation?

Basically, Reddit Moderators can’t receive compensation for doing basic moderator tasks. Good rule, the point is to prevent companies and third-parties from paying Reddit mods off.

Now here’s the tricky part.

What if that Reddit Moderator is a co-founder of a competitor? What if they spend YEARS shit talking you and destroying your reputation? What if they’re not technically receiving new stock but the value in their startup equity goes up after they destroy you on Reddit? Doesn’t that count as financial compensation and a violation of Reddit’s own rule to “Moderate with Integrity”?

I believe it does.

And I believe that’s why Michael is doing what he’s doing. He wins when Codesmith loses.

Shit like this is why Reddit has become extremely untrustworthy.

What Drives the Crazy Student Outcomes at Codesmith

If you dig around, you will find stories from Codesmith students and placement data that seem too good to be true. Is Codesmith actually that good?

As far as I can tell, it’s all real.

So how has Codesmith managed it? I found two forces that have driven these outcomes.

1. Codesmith Has an Intense Application Process

Not just anyone can join Codesmith. They screen folks OUT of their program. If you’re a line cook, kinda think a software engineer job sounds fun, have never spent even 5 minutes figuring out what that looks like, and apply, you won’t get in.

Codesmith only accepts folks that they think have a good chance of succeeding.

They filter the front of their student pipeline which keeps the outcome rates really high on the backend. That’s how they get their placement numbers as high as they are. That’s the “trick” to juicing the student outcomes.

Now, if you have some software engineering experience, you’ll likely find the application to be absurdly easy. That’s the point.

To me, Codesmith isn’t a true zero to one program. The students that thrive have already put a lot of self-study hours into their career transition. They’re motivated, have learned the basics, and are ready to dial up the intensity. These are folks that are also likely to succeed during the job application process after they graduate.

This is also one of the easiest ways to spot the shitty bootcamps. If they take anyone and everyone, that’s an enormous red flag. Stay away.

2. The Hiring Market Was Extremely Strong from 2019-2022

I spoke to one student that went through Codesmith in 2020, they reported that every single one of the folks in their cohort landed a software engineering job within about 6 months. That’s nuts.

Another graduate from the 2019 era told me that 80-90% of the students from their cohort, the cohort before, and the cohort after, landed software engineering jobs within a few months of graduating.

How were the placements that high? I believe the Codesmith program had something to do with it. But that was also a period where the tech market was exceptionally hot. Across all levels and functions, it was much easier to switch jobs, get promotions, and change careers in tech. I saw that myself.

I’ve also personally seen things tighten a lot in the past few years.

How do Codesmiths placement rates look now?

Even if we look at more recent cohorts, the placements are still pretty damn strong for the full-time program:

That’s one of the reports issued by CIRR on Codesmith. It’s the full report so I’m not cherry picking.

Even during 2023-2024, a pretty shitty period to try to start a career as a software engineer, 70% of folks are still landing in-field jobs within a year of graduating Codesmith. With a median salary of $110,000. Even if you only count full-time employment, it’s still 62%. I personally think that’s remarkable.

The part-time program is only slightly worse at 60%.

Again, this is during a hiring market when entry-level software engineering jobs are brutally hard to get. And the placement rates are still in the 60-70% range.

I’m also hearing that students have to work a lot harder now to land that job. And it can take a solid year. That’s that state of tech hiring at the moment.

So if you see old placement data of 80-100%, that was when the market was hot. Now it’s come back down to earth which is to be expected.

The Future of Codesmith

To me the future of Codesmith looks quite bright. Alina (the CEO) is very much in control, the team is excited about the future, and the student outcomes still look impressive to me. I’ve been told that there are no plans at Codesmith to shut down.

Especially with all the changes to software development from AI, there’s a lot of training that everyone is going to have to go through in tech. Good time to be in the education space.

If Michael could take his boot off Codesmith’s throat for just half a minute, they’d do a lot of good for a lot people.

My Recommendations for Anyone Considering Joining a Developer Bootcamp

I cannot tell you which bootcamp to attend. Or whether a bootcamp is worth it at all.

I’ve hired well over a hundred folks in my career, interviewed countless others. Including engineers and data scientists.

At no point did I ever place any value in a bootcamp. I also never considered it a detractor. It’s neutral to me, never really signaling anything. Neither good nor bad.

If you think it’ll get you your first job (which is all that really matters), and the price/time makes sense for you, go for it. But there are plenty of other paths. It’s not required by any means. I know plenty of self-taught devs that have worked at prestigious startups and big tech.

As for which bootcamp, that’s also up to you.

What I can say is this.

As I’ve gone through Michael Novati’s Reddit account, I’ve been appalled. I’ve never seen anything like this in my entire career. And I’ve played in some fucked up corners of the internet. That last thing I’d EVER want is to have my name or career associated with anything that Michael Novati has touched. That includes his startup, Formation.

You’ll have to make your own choice. But I know what mine would be.

At the very least, when doing research on bootcamps, I would consider anything on r/codingbootcamp/ to be completely contaminated. Whatever the real truth is, that subreddit is Michael’s personal fiefdom. He can do and say whatever he wants. And he has one helluva conflict of interest: he’s a co-founder and CTO of a leading bootcamp (even if he tries to claim that he doesn’t run a bootcamp).

If I was looking for unbiased reviews, I’d only factor in content from a community that Michael (or any other bootcamp founder) did not control. Make sure you know who your subreddit Mods are.

Every Company is Now Vulnerable to These Types of Reputation Attacks

For me, the craziest part of this story is that it’s not an edge case.

Anyone can use this exact same method to tear down their competitors.

You only need to complete one step: become a Reddit mod in one of the main subreddits for your industry. If you do that and the original mods of the subreddit don’t care what you do, you can completely fuck up your whole industry. Sow lies, fear, and misery at will.

Which means anyone can do this to you.

Reddit has become THE reputation attack vector.

And since Reddit is considered the default source of all human knowledge now, Reddit threads pop to the top of Google. Anyone searching for your brand will stumble into this madness. LLMs also prioritize Reddit so that narrative gets corrupted too. Getting control of one channel allows you to corrupt three major channels all at once. Most people don’t check receipts, they don’t dig for truth, they accept what’s put in front of them.

Reddit mods now control our search information ecosystem. Unpaid, corruptible Reddit mods.

I know there are good Reddit mods out there. But all it takes is one to fuck up your own business.

The post The Story of Codesmith: How a Competitor Crippled a $23.5M Bootcamp By Becoming a Reddit Moderator appeared first on Lars Lofgren.

I did some digging into these folks. And everything about their business screams “hey, we’re super duper sketchy!” It’s so bad that I’m still shocked that my Windows key worked (yes, I bought one).

First, Vendafly and Digital Chill Mart are the same company. I bought one of their Windows keys. While the key did validate, I cannot recommend that anyone buy a Windows license from them. These are sketchy keys in a sketchy market, I do not believe that Microsoft has given either company legitimate keys. There’s a reason why they’re so cheap. Which means the keys might fail at some point even if they authenticate initially.

I recommend only buying Windows keys from well-known retailers. You can get a Windows key on Amazon for $119 or at Newegg for $139.

For my whole journey into this sketchy corner of the internet, read on.

My Journey Buying A Sketchy Windows Key So You Don’t Have to

I was hoping for a blatant scam: fake Windows keys sold through Reddit rings, Groupon, and half-assed websites.

So I bought what I assumed to be a fake Windows key that would fail the authentication. What better way to prove the scam?

The key fucking worked.

Real Windows 11 Home keys go for about $140. I bought one for $32. Microsoft authenticated the sketchy $32 key.

Maybe I should have tried one of the $9 keys instead.

So I can’t say that these dodgy Windows key resellers are scamming people.

But what I can do is break down all the fucked up shit they’re doing with marketing. Cause it’s dodgy as hell.

Ranking for “Windows Key” in Google via Reddit

Like so many sketchy corners of the internet these days, we begin with a Google search and a Reddit ranking.

Right after a support article on where to find your Windows key on your retail box (if you bought one), we get a Reddit thread on buying a Windows 10 key. Surely this will be legit.

Here’s the post:

I’m confident this is a fake post.

If you go through the post history of that user, you’ll find tons of posts that sound like this from about 2 years ago:

A completely different person.

After going through the user’s history, a few things are clear:

• The user is likely from Argentina
• English is a second language
• All their old posts sound nothing like the Windows 10 key post that’s being used to rank in Google

There was an immediate tone shift on the account about a year ago, the same user posts 3 times about Windows 10 keys:

Then a couple token comments, then the account goes silent. Yeah, not suspicious at all.

This was a real account. It’s no longer a real account. Never trust a Reddit thread that ranks in Google. Even if a post looks real, it’s probably not.

So what do the comments look like in our original Windows 10 key thread?

Yeah, those are 100% fucking fake. That vendafly.com link is a dead giveaway. None of these replies are from real users. It’s probably the same person that published the original post and then followed up with replies from alt accounts. And I wouldn’t be surprised if a moderator of r/desktops was in on it too. That’s the best way to avoid getting the posts and comments deleted.

Both the post and the top comments have so many upvotes that the person that ran this fake marketing stunt also likely paid for Reddit upvoting. There’s a bunch of services that do this.

Let’s recap how a user enters this sketchy marketing funnel.

1. People are searching for “Windows key” on Google. Most people don’t know how Windows keys work, they just know they need one. They assume Google will help them find one.
2. The second ranking in Google is a Reddit post. I believe the post is fake. Someone got ahold of a previously real Reddit account and used that account to seed a fake post that would rank in Google.
3. The unknowing searcher will hit that Reddit thread and see a bunch of comments at the top that all recommend vendafly.com. “Everyone recommends the same site! What luck!”
4. All the comments and upvotes look fake to me.
5. With a click, that searcher is now in a sketchy funnel. All promoted by Google and allowed by Reddit.

The Trust Pilot Marketing Push for Vendafly

Across their website, they reference their Trust Pilot reviews heavily. This is right on their homepage:

Are we fuckign serious right now? This website is one of the top 10 computer software stores on the whole goddamn internet? Da fuq?

Surely a third party review site like Trust Pilot can’t get manipulated, right!?

I wish. Trustpilot rankings mean nothing.

To Vendalfy’s credit, they’ve put a ton of effort into jacking up their Trust Pilot rating (which I don’t believe for a second):

No fuckign way that most of those reviews are real. Many of them seem extremely similar and there’s a super consistent drip of reviews since they started on Mar 19, 2024. 550 reviews in just over a year? That’s nuts. There’s a few real reviews but I’d bet that most are fake.

Also, Vendafly hasn’t confirmed any of their company details with Trust Pilot:

Considering Trust Pilot is a pivotal part of their marketing strategy, I find it extremely suspicious that they haven’t taken the time to confirm any of their company details.

Vendafly And Digital Chill Mart Are the Same Company

The same folks behind Vendafly also run Digital Chill Mart. It’s almost an identical website, funnel, and marketing push between both websites.

Some easy proof that connects the companies: Trust Pilot reviews mention the same employees. Here’s one for Vendafly:

And here’s Digital Chill Mart:

Both mention Lamia. Other employees are also mentioned across both Trust Pilot profiles.

I see this as another red flag. Why run both websites that are nearly identical? And both of them are very murky on who’s actually running them.

Against My Better Judgement: Buying a Sketchy Windows Key

Now let’s go do something stupid.

When I was tipped off about this Windows key Reddit thread, my first thought was: “I HAVE to buy that Windows key. This is a terrible idea but I have to do it.”

So I did it.

The purchase funnel is pretty normal to be honest, it’s just a third-rate design. If you go to Vendafly site, you’ll see a batch of keys for sale just like any ecommerce site:

Pretty normal checkout funnel from that point on. And the key arrives instantly after purchase via email.

So I went over to my Windows machine and popped it in:

Then the fucker actually authenticated:

It worked the first time. As of publishing this post, it’s still working.

I Expect My Sketchy Windows Key to Fail At Some Point

When I was in high school, it wasn’t too hard to get your hands on Windows and Office key generators. Just had to sail into rough and choppy seas.

Those keys would work for 6-9 months and then fail once Microsoft caught on. Then you’d trial and error your way through some new key generators, eventually get an authentication, then wait until the next failure.

I’m expecting the same process here. I’ll add an update if the key ends up failing. If I haven’t updated this section, you can assume that my key is still working.

The Most Likely Outcome If You Buy a Windows Key from Vendafly

If you make the same dumb decision that I did and buy a Windows key (or any license) from Vendafly, here’s what I’d expect to happen:

• There is a chance that the authentication will go through and you’ll get a windows license on the cheap. I’d expect it to fail in the future though.
• There’s a good chance that the key fails. It sounds like the support emails are all dead, you’ll have to use their chat bot. Lots of reports from people that they get successful keys on the 2nd or 3rd try.
• This is definitely a moral gray area. The vendors are not supposed to have these keys, the odds they bought them directly from Microsoft is extremely low. Some websites might give you a real key, others might be a straight scam.

The Worst Part: Google Makes Money Off This Gray-Market

Not only does Google fuel this industry by not vetting the Reddit threads that it chooses to rank at the top of search results, they make money directly from companies selling these sketchy Windows keys. Look at all the ads at the top of the search results:

These ads have been running for years.

And yes, that Groupon link is part of this industry. A number of companies in this space have figured out they can open Groupon profiles and sell stuff at a discount. Perfect for the gray-market Windows keys.

• Conversions go up because Groupon feels like a trustworthy brand even though it sold its soul years ago.
• Groupon doesn’t ask too many questions on how these companies get their keys in the first place.
• Groupon gets paid, Google gets paid, and the sketchy reseller gets paid.

Where Do Windows Key Resellers Get Their Keys?

I’ve found a few theories on how all this works here and here:

• There are non-retail ways to get bulk keys from Microsoft like enterprise deals for a university. If those keys get resold when they shouldn’t, they could end up on these websites.
• Some folks have claimed there are credit card fraudsters that will quickly buy a bunch of keys using stolen credit cards, then quickly resell them.
• They could have a keygen that they’re using to generate keys themselves.

Regardless, these folks aren’t aren’t getting the Windows keys from Microsoft. And I’d bet Mircrosoft wouldn’t be happy if they discovered who was selling these keys to the resellers. That’s why the keys are so cheap.

I Do Not Recommend Buying One of These Discount Windows Keys From Any Website

Even if my reseller happened to sell me a real key (which I still doubt that it’s 100% legit), there’s so many sketchy things about these websites that I’d be shocked if there isn’t a scam of some kind. Ways that I’d expect to get scammed:

• The windows key fails at some point
• Some of the keys fail predictably and they make money when some users don’t contact their support to get a new key.
• I had to create an account and set a password on the site I purchased from. If people use the same password as their email, it would be very easy to get into their inbox without two factor set up. That’s game over.
• I wouldn’t be surprised if I got fraudulent credit card charges at some point.

This is a sketchy corner of the internet, stay the fuck away.

Go buy your Windows key from a major retailer. For Amazon, I can’t find a normal Windows 11 Home license on Amazon, only the OEM version (affiliate link). Newegg (no affiliate) and Microsoft (no affiliate) have you covered though.

Do not put your credit card into one of these reseller websites.

What’s the Best Way to Get a Windows Key Discount?

There is one 100% legit way to get a discount on a Windows key: buy an OEM version of Windows (affiliate link) for about $110.

I’ve been doing this since high school.

It’s not nearly as good of a discount as it used to be, I seem to remember it being like 40% off retail. These days, it’s about 20% off the retail version.

You get a 100% legit version of Windows with only these downsides:

• No Windows support from Microsoft. But who cares about that?
• You can’t transfer the key to another device. Normal retail keys get tied to your Microsoft account and Microsoft is pretty generous about letting you transfer keys between devices. OEM versions don’t get this benefit. It’s one and done on the device.
• Comes on a DVD instead of a USB. I can’t remember the last time I had a DVD drive so you’ll need to manage the install yourself instead of just plugging in a USB.

These days, I just buy the retail license so I can easily transfer keys between devices whenever I rebuild my gaming rig. The OEM isn’t worth the $30 discount to me.

Do ChatGPT or Perplexity Succumb to the Same Sketchy Marketing as Google?

ChatGPT and Perplexity both do better than Google. But they each make their own mistakes.

I asked ChatGPT for “how do I get a windows key?” and got the standard info on where to buy retail. I also got this:

Is this better than Google? Yes. But it has some flaws:

• ChatGPT calls these gray market keys “OEM keys”. That makes them sound way more legit than they are. OEM keys are a particular type of windows license that anyone can buy. These sites are not selling the same “OEM” keys that you’d get from Amazon.
• “Some are gray-market”….  that’s pretty optimistic. All of them are gray market. And these companies are not operating with transparency. They know they’re not supposed to have these keys.

ChatGPT does better than any other search engine I tested by giving a warning that these keys might stop working. That is, by far, the most common risk for these types of licenses.

Perplexity gives a similar answer:

There is a few things that Perplexity fucks up:

• In the answer above, Perplexity states that Digital Chill Mark and Vendafly (both operated by the same people) are reliable sources. It then references one of the Reddit threads that I believe is fake. Perplexity is falling for the same bullshit that Google is.
• I’ve asked Perplexity a few variants on how to buy Windows licenses and it will say that Trust Pilot is trustworthy and a good way to find the legitimate sellers for Windows keys. It most assuredly is not.
• In its warning about OEM keys, Perplexity makes it sound like these are normal OEM keys. They’re not. They’re likely to fail once Microsoft discovers that they’ve been sold illegitimately. Normal OEM keys are totally different.

I do appreciate that Perplexity has some warnings about buying these cheap Windows licenses, so that’s better than Google. The warnings aren’t as good as ChatGPT though since there’s no mention of how these keys can fail.

What about Google AI Mode?

Here’s Google’s AI Mode:

Not sure what it means by “Microsoft only retains records of keys bought from their online store”. That’s not true. Microsoft absolutely keeps track of all keys it sells.

As for the rest, it’s not technically wrong. But goddamn does it miss a lot. What about OEM keys? What about this sketchy gray market that people will be stumbling into? What about other retailers other than Microsoft? Like, I dunno, a tiny little retailer like Amazon?

It’s bland, superficial, and the lowest quality AI answer in my opinion.

To be fair, there is one warning below where I cut off the screenshot that says “Buying from authorized retailers is recommended to ensure you obtain a genuine product key.” Yeah, no shit.

How I Rank Platforms For Protecting Users from the Sketchy Windows Key Market

Here are my rankings on how well a few search engines do with the Windows key market:

Will the Windows License Market Survive the Migration to AI Search

Yup. These sites are doing just fine in the AI tools. I see many of the key players get named by brand in both ChatGPT and Perplexity.

They’re actually a perfect case study on how to survive the transition:

• Get your Trust Pilot and similar review sites (Trust Radius, G2, etc) reviews up. I should do a whole post on how to buy these reviews.
• Seed Reddit with plenty of threads with people talking about your product in a positive light. Either do it authentically or have a connection with the moderator team to make sure your post isn’t deleted. Also focus on subreddits that Google “trusts” for search rankings.
• Links don’t matter. Vendafly.com only has 64 backlinks and they’re extremely low quality. The Domain Rating is 17. So don’t worry about paying for backlinks, just go pay for reviews instead.

That’s the playbook: ditch link building, get your reviews up, and seed Reddit.

Are the AI Search Tools Doing Enough for This Gray-Market?

I don’t think so.

While AI does give some warnings, the warnings are insufficient in my opinion. They’re not 100% wrong, but key context is missing:

• The gray market keys are labeled as OEM which sounds way more legitimate than they are. Also, we’re not sure where the keys came from.
• The biggest warning of all (your key will likely fail) is barely mentioned at all. This needs to be front and center.
• Perplexity especially has a problem of making it seem like these keys can be legitimate if you find the right retailer. That’s not true, none of these websites are trustworthy.

Both ChatGPT and Perplexity should be doing more here. They’re better than Google but that’s a very low bar at the moment.

The post Are Vendafly and Digital Chill Mart legit? I Put Them to the Test appeared first on Lars Lofgren.

Right now, 2 paths are viable.

One is a race to the bottom. The other (if I’m right) will survive AI.

First, let’s ground ourselves on where we’re at in the evolution of B2B content marketing.

A Brief History of B2B Content Marketing: From 2010 to Now

I’ve been doing content marketing for over 15 years. It’s gone through a few key phases.

Content marketing goes back even further than these phases but I’ll start with the ones that I had a front row seat to.

Phase 1: The Company Blog As the Nucleus (2010-2015ish)

When I started fresh out of college, we were all figuring out content marketing on the internet for the first time. Blogger (hah!) was still a thing. WordPress was new and innovative. The strategy was simple:

• Post a ton of content on your company blog
• Push links to that content on social

Your blog was the center of your content marketing strategy. And every other marketing channel was an extension.

At the time, these ideas were radical. We could just help people with content and then they’ll become customers? And skip all the bullshit advertising costs? Hot damn! For me, Permission Marketing epitomized this philosophy. That was published in 1999 btw.

I swear I remember a graphic from Rand Fishkin from that time that looked sorta like this:

I could be misremembering the attribution. Regardless, many of us were doing this during that era. I definitely was.

Top tier content creators would even duplicate their blogs and email list. Every email became a blog post, every blog post got sent as an email. A 1:1 copy across both channels.

At the time, I worked on the marketing team at KISSmetrics. I even ran the department for a bit. We had one of the hottest marketing blogs out there. I know because any time I told someone I worked at KISSmetrics, the first thing they’d say was “wow, I love your blog!” They never mentioned the product btw. And yes, that was an indicator of serious product/market fit issues we had at the time.

While our product had some serious flaws, we nailed the marketing piece. Our strategy was pretty simple:

• Publish a blog post every business day. We went all over the place with topics like a lot of blogs in those days. Anything under “marketing” was fair game for us.
• We never looked at SEO or worried about keywords. And yet we did 700K visitors/month without breaking a sweat. The vast majority was from SEO.
• We put a ton of effort into content quality. Basically, we treated the blog like an industry magazine. And we always shipped posts on time. Quality plus consistency was all we needed.

I was personally responsible for lead quotas during most of my tenure there and I can say with absolute certainty: the blog drove the whole damn funnel. All the direct traffic, branded traffic, free trials, all of it. Without the blog, we would not have had a business. Even during this era, attribution was a bitch and we could never turn traffic directly into free trials. Instead, we turned blog traffic into email signups and then converted those folks into webinar registrants and demo requests. It worked beautifully.

During this era, you didn’t even need to worry about how content connected to the customer funnel. Not really. Ship content on your blog, push links on social, customers showed up. Fucking wild.

Phase 2: Siloed Content Channels (2015-2022)

After a few years of promoting our blogs at the expense of everything else, some of us realized that you could go a lot further if you… specialized. Shocker!

Also, this is when the social walled gardens started locking off huge sections of the internet. Pushing links on Facebook, Twitter, or IG weren’t an option. So most content marketers picked a lane.

To me, this made perfect sense. And for that time, it still does. By specializing, you dramatically increased your ability to win:

• You focused on a single channel so you got much further up the expertise curve. You’d run circles around anyone that was trying to do SEO, email, YouTube, IG, and Twitter all at the same time.
• Smart marketers realized that every channel was a power law. The bulk of the returns went to the few at the top, everyone else fought for scraps. By focusing, you grabbed a huge chunk of the total returns. Focus could easily get you a 10X return, even a 100X return.
• You could also build an entire machine around your channel. Freelancers, SOPs, specialized FTEs, it all turned into a predictable system. Hit your inputs and out popped your quarterly KPIs.

This is exactly what I did. From 2010 to 2022, I gradually focused more and more on a single channel: SEO. The company I started, my clients, and the companies I worked for all benefited enormously from that specialization during those years.

Notable differences from the previous era when the blog was the nucleus:

• Each channel became independent. Occasionally work would overlap but many B2B marketing and content teams divided themselves up by channel.
• Company blogs became 100% SEO plays. During this era, audiences gradually moved on to other content formats (mainly social). But that was fine because SEO brought so many customers and traffic.
• Every channel was viable. I told hundreds of startup founders on consulting calls during this period that they should pick the channel that resonated with them the most. Sustainability was the most important factor in getting an organic marketing funnel going.

In my opinion, SEO was also the ideal channel for B2B. No other channel came anywhere close to matching it on volume, profitability, and consistency of client acquisition. It also required a straightforward strategy. The only downside was that it took extreme consistency over 5+ years and demanded emotional stability. It was a lot like investing in index funds. The returns are obvious, the ROI comes from winning the behavioral game. Which is still pretty hard, hence the returns for those that stuck with it.

SEO also had a beautiful moat built in. You needed real domain authority in your topical area to rank (sidebar: Google has fucked this up tremendously in the last couple of years and the moats are now weird as fuck and not reliable).

I’m not the only one that figured this out, the SEO B2B content playbook became a checkbox budget item at many companies over this period.

And then AI blew everything up.

The False Trap of the AI Content Era: Content + AI = WINNING

Many content teams are trying to do some version of this in the age of AI:

1. Take the channel specialization workflows that we all learned in the last decade.
2. Replace as much of those workflows with AI as possible.
3. Do more, do it faster, do it cheaper.

Don’t get me wrong, this works so fucking well right now. I know multiple top-tier B2B content teams that went all in on AI and they are kicking the shit out of everyone.

I believe this window is still open. For how much longer? Who knows. But if you go hard on this with your own content program, it will work and you’ll do really well for a while.

I also believe the window will close at some point.

Taking a standard B2B content playbook and AI-ifying it is a race to the bottom. 

No matter how good your model, your AI training, or how much content you ship, someone else can train their model a bit better, run it a bit longer, or cut a few extra dollars.

That is not a game I like to compete in. Sooner or later, I’ll get outpaced. And so will you (most likely).

Instead, I’d much rather play a game where there’s tons of upside with a wide margin of error.

Influencer Nodes Are All That’s Left After AI Gobbles Up Everything Else

For my entire career, there’s always been one major content cheat code: founder-led marketing.

Build in public, bring people along for the journey, get raw and authentic. A ton of companies have been built that way.

It’s also the only thing that I think will survive the onslaught of AI content. And what does this look like when it’s not done by the founder? It’s just influencer marketing.

When we’re drowning in an endless sea of lukewarm AI slop that was trained on a brand book (now called a Brand AI Agent) that a team put way too much time into, what will we be left with?

Real stories from real fucking people.

B2C is already way ahead of the curve on this one. Everyone wants to be a creator and influencer marketing has become an established industry.

And while there’s a bit of influencer marketing in B2B, it’s nascent. A fraction of what it could be.

I believe anyone that wants to produce original, insightful content will need to distribute it via influencers. It’ll be the last distribution mechanism for real content (it sure as fuck won’t be SEO).

That means that every CMO is going to face a choice:

• Pay influencers to rep your shit
• Hire some of them, be one, hope to god your CEO is one

Lars, did you just invent influencer marketing?

… yes? Well no but yeah, this is just influencer marketing.

Lars, could this have just been a tweet?

Uhh…. also yes.

Look, none of this is new or groundbreaking.

Amanda Natividad has been pushing the zero click marketing idea for a while now. As always, her and Rand Fishkin are way ahead of the curve.

My point is that for the past decade, many B2B content teams have just been SEO machines. I am oversimplifying. There might have been a podcast, YouTube, webinar, whatever program also attached. But the core has often been SEO.

Going forward, I believe the core of B2B content marketing programs will be influencer marketing. That is a HUGE departure from the past decade. It’s not a new model. But it’s going to become THE model. At least that’s my bet.

What about the company blog?

The company blog will no longer be a primary channel for content marketing. People don’t follow blogs anymore, they haven’t for years. And with AI, information focused SEO posts will continue to see declining traffic. There are a few areas where a blog can still play a critical role (like bottom of the funnel posts), but they won’t be the centerpiece of content programs like they used to be.

What about paid marketing?

Of course, paid marketing is still alive and well. I’m looking at the organic/inbound side of things. That’s where most of my experience is and where I prefer to play.

What about so-and-so’s automated AI content?

Influencer marketing has always been a mix of real and fake content. Social media managers are not new. And before that, thought leaders (before anyone called them thought leaders) paid top-tier ghost writers fat piles of gold to write their NY Times bestselling books. Not all, but many.

And I do know of several prominent folks with major personal brands that are leaning heavy on AI. Of course they’re going to do it.

Some of them will do it well. And it may be hard to spot, at least for a while. Then influencer marketing will get overloaded with AI just like everything else.

My point is that influencer marketing is also the only strategy where you can still compete with original, high quality content. You can still stand out. If you can say shit that hasn’t been said before and engage an audience, you’ll do just fine. Even if other folks go all in on AI content.

I think my own LinkedIn profile is a good example of this. I haven’t used AI at all with any of my LinkedIn content. I haven’t even had ChatGPT give me feedback on any of my posts. It’s 100% unfiltered Lars content. I’ve tripled my LinkedIn follower count in the last year during a period where so many folks are puking AI slop all over their profiles. And yet, my content stands out just fine.

It’s still possible to win with great content as an influencer. And I believe that’s the only path forward for a B2B content program.

If you’re a CEO or CMO and are serious about setting a program like this up at your own company, we should talk.

The post The Next Phase of B2B Content Marketing: Influencer Nodes appeared first on Lars Lofgren.

I’ve seen a bunch of Medium articles ranking on page 1 for super valuable terms in Google. So I decided to figure out how it works.

Fuck it’s simple. So simple it’s insulting.

One of the hottest and most competitive terms right now is “ai website builder.” Website and hosting keywords convert like crazy, there’s tons of infrastructure built out for affiliates, payouts are pretty high, and you can make a ton of money here. It’s where we made most of our money in my last affiliate business.

But most importantly: ai anything is fucking HOT right now. When something is “in the moment”, there’s gobs and gobs of money to be made.

And some random dude, unbeknownst to anyone, was doing exactly that.

At least he was until his Medium account got nuked.

The AI Website Builder Rankings

To Google!

Let’s look at “ai website builder”. For me, currently, the entire page 1 of Google is just a list of products except for one page at rank #4 (I’ve also seen it at #7 so it’s bouncing around a bit):

Medium! I know that brand! Should be trustworthy right?

Not a fucking chance. But we’ll get to that.

If you go looking for this ranking, it’s already gone. But not because the loophole was closed.

This was the post:

Nitin Sharma’s primary goal of this post was to get it to rank and then make money via Fiverr affiliate deals. He says the AI website builders have flaws so get a real person instead. And that Fiverr is the best place to do it.

For anyone looking for AI website builder advice: do not do that. That’s a much worse way to build a website. You’ll pay more, they’ll probably just use an AI website builder anyway, and it’ll be janky as hell until you decide to get an actual website built.

Here’s the first batch of Fiverr affiliate links from the post:

He also pushed a batch of hand selected Fiverr experts, all tagged with affiliate links:

The second product featured (Butternut AI) also had an affiliate link:

The funny part is that Nitin hasn’t bothered to monetize the other products that all have very easy affiliate programs to set up, like Wix:

Come on dude! The money is right there!

Was Nitin Sharma Recommending to Hire People Instead of AI Tools in His Product Recommendations?

Yes, yes he fucking was.

And Google was anointing it. Blessing it. Lauding it as the best article across the incomprehensible vastness of the internet.

The fucking irony.

Look, I’m skeptical about a lot of the AI stuff. But if I wrote a roundup of the best AI tools, you know what I’d include for all of my recommendations? Some fucking AI tools.

SEO Performance for this AI Website Builder Post on Medium

Published in mid April, on the first page of Google for one of the hottest transactional terms right now by early July. 2.5 months, fuck that’s fast. Here’s the Ahrefs report for the post:

What about the link building situation?

Here’s how the links break down:

• 1 link from Genspark AI. It’s an AI generated post. So junk.
• 1 link from idma.in which looks like a content mill. It has a DR of 1.9.
• 3 links from different content scraper mills. They’re ripping off Nitin’s work and republishing his content. All have DRs of 0.
• 342 links from AgoraFeeds, looks like an old, broken, shitty feed site that’s probably picking up the post from the Medium publication blast.

So there isn’t any link building going on. I’d be shocked if Nitin deliberately built any of these links. They’re just trash links that get picked up when publishing through a distribution mechanism like a Medium publication.

A Portfolio of Affiliate Posts

Nitin didn’t stop with just one post. Oh no siree. He had grand ambitions.

Here are the top 10 pages for organic traffic across the entire “Start it up” subfolder on medium.com:

• 8 are from our friend Nitin and they all follow the exact same formula.
• 1 is from a different person that has embedded affiliate links into a post on plagiarism checkers.
• 1 is a genuine article from a dude that wants us all to know how to clean our airpods. Adorable. You know, it’s always shocking (in a refreshing way) when I come across 1 legit post in a sea of bullshit.

Nitin’s going after keyword gems like:

• ai photo editor
• ai voice generator
• ai headshot generator
• ai tattoo generator
• ai website builder
• ai logo generator
• ai video maker
• ai resume builder

And he was winning. Most of the time, he’s easily ranking on page 1 for these keywords or a valuable keyword variant.

The Key to Making this Work: Get Your Article in a Top Medium Publication

How I assume the Medium ranking conversation went in Google:

Google Search Product Manager: Hey! We should use Medium for authentic, quality content! That’s not a husk of a bullshit site! And we can filter out the spam by prioritizing publications with large followings!

Google Search Engineer: Will you mark my OKR as complete if I ship this and don’t ask questions?

Let’s see how that works in practice.

Easy to find the publication for any Medium post:

So who the fuck is The Startup?

Well, it’s actually “Start it up” now. They rebranded but didn’t update their Medium profile. What a great sign.

After the Medium Blog itself, it’s the largest publication on Medium at 853K followers (the profile description is out of date).

The publishing model is based on volume, 1-6 posts go out every day.

It looks like anyone can submit a Medium post to this publication.

If you dig around, you’ll find this post that talks about their big ol’ pivot and rebranding:

If you check yourself, you’ll find it locked behind a Medium paywall. At which point, you might ask “Lars, did you seriously pay Medium $5 just to see how the post submission works?”

You fucking betcha. I’m not thrilled about it.

At the bottom of that post is this form:

It asks for only 5 items:

1. Confirmation that you read the post carefully above
2. A quick explanation on why you think your post is a good fit for “Start it up”
3. A link to your Medium draft
4. Your email
5. And lastly, “Any personal message we should take note of?”

Yeah, not a lot.

Submit your post and the “Start it up” team will decide to post within 36 hours. At least that’s what they claim in their instructions.

I’m 98% confident that whoever’s going through submissions is dumping content into the publication feed without checking any of it. In one post, someone copied a “Alternative title” note and pasted it right into the Medium post:

To be fair, I don’t think the “Start it up” folks did the copying, they only accept Medium posts themselves. But even a half-awake Editor that was completely phoning things in should have caught this one and told the author to fix it before publishing.

The State of Editorial at “Start it up”

Is this affiliate stuff part of the “Start it up” publication? Or was Nitin sneaking everything past the “Start it up” team?

Most of the writers for “Start it up” haven’t realized how powerful the publication is at ranking in Google. Most of the content is wannabe thought leadership stuff with no focus on SEO. Most folks are trying to milk the “Start it up” (dude, why did you use lowercase in your fucking brand name? This is so annoying) to build their own audience.

This sort of thing is pretty common at the end of posts:

Or this:

So mostly CTAs for contributors to build their own lists and audiences.

Some of them will also hawk their own infoproducts:

Which are usually on Gumroad:

To be clear, none of this bothers me. If folks want to nibble on the carcass that is Medium and the “Start it up” publication, go for it. None of my business.

Why am I going through all this?

I get the sense that “Start it up” is completely unaware of the affiliate scam that they’re enabling. Here’s what I think happened:

• They built up their Medium publication back when Medium publications were hot (were they ever really hot though?)
• In the past few years, I assume they moved on to other stuff and they’ve been phoning it in. I don’t blame em.
• It’s now widely known that folks can pilfer the “Start it up” audience to push their own lists and infoproducts.
• Some random dude, Nitin Sharma, figured out the affiliate SEO loophole. All the affiliate posts I found were his except for one.

Is the Post Engagement Real or Fake?

At first, I thought it was fake. When I first found Nitin’s post, I expected it to be tied to a random Medium account with a bunch of fake upvoting that was driving the Google ranking.

But after figuring out the connection to “Start it up”, the Medium “claps” could be real. The audience is large enough, even for a rotting corpse of a platform like Medium.

The post comments have the standard mix of possible AI, some with poor english, and a few that look real. So pretty standard for any comment box these days. I don’t think he’s doing anything to jack comments up.

Right now, I think the engagement metrics are mostly real. Or at least as real as anything is on the internet.

Did I Get Nitin Banned on Medium?

So I was going to publish this post yesterday. Before I did, I thought to myself “let’s go check the posts and profiles one more time so I don’t look like a doofus.”

That was a prescient thought.

Here’s what I now get when checking any of Nitin’s posts or his profile:

All of Nitin’s posts and his profiles have been completely nuked.

And there’s chance I had something to do it with it. This is 100% speculation btw.

Last week, I did post to LinkedIn about this scam when I first found it:

Off the top of my head, I can think of 6 different people that follow me somewhat on LinkedIn and are actively going after ai website builder keywords in Google.

Did one of them see it and report Nitin’s account for spam to Medium? Possibly.

Or maybe it’s just crazy timing. I don’t know.

All I know is Nitin’s posts have been nuked from Google.

Nitin Sharma, I Have Some Recommendations

First dude, props. You found a helluva little loophole in Google. Complete respect.

At least you did until you got sloppy.

Your monetization is fucking embarrassing. It makes affiliate marketers look bad. Not only are you leaving money on the table, you’re outing yourself as an affiliate spammer. Whatever you’re earning right now, you could easily 3X it if you took it seriously. Probably a lot more. And you wouldn’t have gotten caught. More money for less risk.

First, ditch that Fiverr bullshit. It screams “look at my little scam over here.” Come on man, do better.

You have tons of better monetization options, especially on that AI website builder post. Almost every web host has an AI website builder now and their affiliate programs are super easy to sign up for. They also have fantastic payouts. Go sign up!

Also, I can’t imagine that the Fiverr offer converts that well. If someone is looking for AI tools, they don’t want to deal with some random contractor in another country. They probably already know about Fiverr and think that stuff is a hassle. They want a tool, a quick chat box, and BAM, they get their little thingy. Give them a tool that does that. Your conversions will go up and you’ll make more money.

Seriously dude, you’re even trying to push Fiverr for tattoo designs:

Better if a real human artist makes the final design? No shit. I got something even better than that: maybe have your actual fucking tattoo artist do your tattoo design. I know, crazy right?!

Here’s how people actually buy tattoos:

• Dig through social, pinterest, AI generators, whatever for inspiration
• Find tattoo artists that specialize in that style
• Get a design from that specific artist (not Fiverr)
• Get the tattoo

Good affiliate marketers know how to lean into purchasing behavior and journeys. That’s why they focus so heavily on search. Nothing converts like buying intent.

And maybe you wouldn’t have gotten your account banned if you gave people real offers, inserted a few affiliate links, and stayed under the radar.

One other tip when doing affiliate spam: maybe don’t go after some of the hottest fucking keywords in the internet right now. Go after more niche stuff. There’s so many nooks and crannies across Google. No one would have ever caught you.

But going after the top tier stuff? Every half-way decent SEO will be on your ass as soon as you hit page one. That’s the only reason I caught on to your stuff.

First rule of doing dodgy shit on the internet and not getting caught: restraint.

Google, We Need to Have a Word

Let’s be clear Google: you’re not off the hook just because Nitin got banned from Medium.

Nitin got shut down but this loophole still exists. Anyone with a bit more discipline can exploit this and generate a $10K/month revenue stream for themselves. And with AI content, it’s basically 100% profit.

Google, I’d tell you how embarrassing this is but I don’t think you give a shit. What better way to get people to switch to AI Mode than by poisoning old school search?

Not that AI Mode or AIOs are immune from shit like this. But that’s for another day.

But seriously, this is too easy.

Maybe I should throw down and take this as a challenge? Either close this dumb as hell loophole or I’m going to jump in and see how much money I can make before you close it. I’ll do the entire content workflow with AI just out of spite for your HCU and EEAT bullshit.

You’re relying entirely on Medium and the publication owners to catch this shit for you. Really?

Is no one on your search team doing any legit QA or red teaming? That’s what it seems like. Fucking hell.

I don’t care how, just make your search results something other than complete shit. Thanks.

The post The Stupidly Simple Medium Hack That’s Generating Page 1 Rankings in 2.5 Months appeared first on Lars Lofgren.

But no matter how crazy things got, my teams and departments have always had a top-tier reputation to execute. We ship. And we keep shipping. All of it high quality work, day in and day out.

I’ve had to turn around teams, work across a range of disciplines (marketing, engineering, design, HR, finance, sales, etc), multiple business models, and various stages of startups. I also built a $7.2 million dollar business from scratch in 3 years.

Over all those experiences, I’ve developed a set of management principles that I always use. Once I get them in place, all quotas get hit, KPI goals are met, projects get shipped on time, and my team sets the pace for the rest of the company.

All the rules are simple, and I believe anyone can apply them, which is why I’m sharing them today with you.

#1: If Morale is Bad, Put Just One Win on the Board

A few years ago, I was in charge of a Sales department. One month, the team produced zero sales. They delivered a big ol’ goose egg.

This wasn’t an anomaly either, the team was struggling to deliver. They needed to generate dozens of sales per month with a path to 50+, yet they weren’t delivering any.

Many leaders would have stepped in, lit some fires, and made the whole team feel terrible, or fired everyone.

I didn’t do that. I did step in, but I took a very different approach. Instead, I said, “alright, our outreach campaigns aren’t working. We’re going to try something completely different and we have one goal: get a single sale from that one campaign. That’s it.”

And it worked. Within about a month, we had our first sale. Then we had a few more after that. And a few more after THAT. A year later, we were closing about 40 customers per month. Very close to the original goal of 50+. 

Yet, if I had held the team to the original goal of 50/month, it would have never worked. The team was beaten down, exhausted, and lacked confidence in everything they were doing. Hence the giant miss of a month that started all this.

When a team (or any individual) is in that negative headspace, even modest goals seem impossible. 

During times like this, I look for one simple win to put on the board. Anything to get the momentum back. And I purposely look for a goal that’s a breeze to accomplish. 

Then, I nurture that momentum over time by stretching goals a bit more. “Great, we closed a customer. Now we need 5/month.” Then, move to 10, 20, and so on.

With every step, the team gains confidence, gets faster, and builds real camaraderie. Doing this for a year, I guarantee that you’ll be shocked with how far you can go.

This works regardless of what’s causing the morale crisis.

Getting blocked by a mismanaged department? Find a way to get one thing through their convoluted system.

A competitor eating your lunch? Pick one feature to improve and launch it.

No matter how bad the morale or how bleak things seem, put just one win on the board. It always gets better from there.

#2: To Get Team Buy-in, Make a Promise and Keep It

When you join a new team to lead them, everyone is trying to feel you out. They’re asking themselves and each other questions like:

• Is this person legit? 
• Are they going to ask for dumb stuff? 
• Will they listen if I share harsh truths?
• Can I trust them to look out for me if I go above and beyond for them?

You have a very short window to answer those questions and build a foundation of trust with everyone.

So how do you build trust?

Stephen Covey, author of 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, has said “make a promise and keep it.” That always stuck with me.

During that fluid period with a new team, I look for promises that I can make. Then I move mountains to make them come true. Ideally, these are small things that are getting in the way of your team.

Go to your team and ask them: 

“What are a few things in the last week that have really annoyed you? Can be useless work, unnecessary friction, or requests that drive you bonkers.”

Your team will give you PLENTY of ideas if you ask and listen.

Here’s some things to look for:

• Onerous requests from other teams. Some requests will completely bury your team. Often the other team means well, they just don’t have context on the full costs of their request. Go to the other team and figure out if it truly is mission critical. If not, see if it’s possible to hold off.
• Friction with day-to-day tasks. Every software, workflow, and regular task has useless steps. Maybe they made sense at one time but things changed and now they’re unnecessary. Some of these can’t be fixed without a complete overhaul, but some are easy fixes.
• Required tasks that everyone knows are busywork. Reports, regular updates, regular meetings, there’s always cruft that has built up over time. Ask your team which of these they suspect is a waste of their time, then find a way to kill it.

Keep in mind: When you’re fact-finding, don’t make any promises. You’re just looking for a ton of problems and ideas first. 

Once you have a list of stuff to fix, go through it and look for items that you’re extremely confident that you can fix. Like 100% confident. Make promises on those. And err on the side of fewer promises at the start.

Make a promise to fix that item, then go fix it. 

Do it again and again.

Before long, your team will be feeling relief and they’ll start trusting you. And once they trust you, they’ll follow you through the tough times. They’ll also push hard to keep major projects on track.

Remember: you only have a few chances to make this work. If you make even 2-3 promises and miss on all of them, you’ll lose your team. 

Sure, they’ll nod along and tell you that they’re bought in, but they won’t be. They’ll put things on autopilot and stay checked out. You won’t get the results you hoped for. 

#3: Break Work into Pieces That Can Be Finished in 2 Weeks or Less

I have redesigned a lot of websites in my career. Some pretty major brands, too. The highest quality redesigns were by far the cheapest and the fastest.

How did that happen?

Pretty simple: we didn’t tackle the whole redesign all at once. We chunked it into small pieces.

Let’s say you’re doing a complete rebrand of a website, that’s a lot of work. But there’s also an infinite number of ways to make it more manageable:

• Can you get the logo redesigned in less than two weeks?
• No? Okay, what about the first draft of a logo in less than two weeks?
• No designer? Can you reach out to 10 freelance designers to see if they’re interested in less than 2 weeks?
• Yes, you can absolutely do that.

No matter how big the ultimate project, there’s absolutely a milestone that can be completed in the next 2 weeks.

In my experience, 2 weeks is about the limit of what anyone can reasonably predict for a deadline.

Anything past that and everyone’s just rolling dice. If someone tells you something can be done by Friday, it’ll get done by Friday.

If someone tells you something will be done 3 months from now, it’ll probably take 5-6 months. And a ton of time will get wasted along the way. Even worse, the adage “work expands to fill the time available for its completion” has become so popular that we just call it Parkinson’s Law. It’s absolutely true.

With large chunks of time, work expands and timelines slip perpetually.

2 weeks really forces someone to break off the next critical step that should get done right now.

There is one major exception to this: large projects with long timelines and major dependencies. Some things take a year and go live during a major launch event. In this case, you might need the Gantt charts and advanced project management stuff.

But even in this case, I’d try to chunk milestones and projects into 2 weeks or less. You’ll have a much easier time getting things back on track when they do waver.

#4: Empower Your Team Members to Set Their Own Deadlines

Here’s my simplest and easiest trick to accelerate your shipping speed: ask each person to set their own deadlines.

What? Won’t they just sandbag the due dates and give themselves plenty of time?

In my experience, they don’t. In fact, people will set deadlines that are WAY too aggressive. Even when I’m aware of this, I still do it to myself: “I’ll have that done by Thursday.” Then Wednesday rolls around and I have a mad dash to get it all done.

It’s also one thing to push for a deadline set by your boss, it’s another to push for a deadline that you’ve set yourself. You can’t complain, externalize, or cut corners. You agreed to it so time to buckle up and get it done.

As Daniel Pink recommends in his book Drive, make sure your employees have autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Having folks set their own deadlines is a very easy way to give them a ton of autonomy.

Overall, your team will push a lot harder to meet all their deadlines when they’re setting them.

This does require a few things to work:

• You need to have the trust of your team. If you haven’t built that up by making and keeping promises, your team won’t feel motivated to reciprocate. And the more trust they have in you, the harder they’ll push.
• This does work best for work environments that can be managed with flows (like Kanban) instead of really intense dependency plans. I realize this may not be an option. Even if you have tons of deadlines to sync across teams, I’d still work to get buy-in by having teams sort out deadlines amongst each other with yourself as the mediator.
• Your team does need to consist of solid folks. If you have one of those rare people that externalizes everything, makes excuses, and never ships on time, this won’t work. In my experience, nothing does. The only play is to get them off the team. More on this below.

Combined with my rule to chunk projects into scope that can be done in 2 weeks or less, this builds a very stable operating rhythm across the team. Pick a project that can be reliably estimated, ask the person when they will have it done, they set the date, it gets done, repeat.

#5: Have Daily and Weekly Check-ins with Everyone

When I started my last company, we didn’t have any regular check-ins. No 1:1s, no weekly kick-offs or recaps, nothing.

Makes sense, no need for any of that stuff when it’s just you, your co-founder, and a few contractors.

Then we got to about 4 or 5 employees. And I pushed for adding weekly 1:1s, daily standups, and a weekly kick-off call.

At first, some of the team resisted. We were living the good life as a small company, everyone knew what to do anyway, why add all the extra stuff?

I told everyone: let’s try it for a month and see what happens.

By the end of the month, all the dissent evaporated. Our productivity probably doubled after that.

Why? A few reasons:

• A daily cadence from a daily standup made sure that everyone knew that they needed to get done that day. Then they went and did it. There wasn’t any room to mess around for half a day and then sorta work on something valuable in the afternoon.
• A weekly kick-off oriented us on our key goals and major projects. We knew where the business was at and how our work fit into the larger picture.
• Weekly 1:1s with managers (myself and my co-founder) helped surface any ongoing issues so they didn’t fester in the background.

I have used this template at every department that I’ve managed and it always works: weekly 1:1s with your manager, daily standup with your team, weekly kick-off at the team level or the department level based on your overall size.

I typically only do standups Tues-Fri since there’s already a kick-off call on Mon

Assuming 15 min for a standup, 30 min for a 1:1, and a 1 hr kick-off, that’s only 2.5 hours of regular meetings for each individual contributor. Very reasonable.

So the meeting overhead is quite low and the productivity gains are massive. You’ll notice the change in shipping cadence within a few weeks.

#6: Reduce Your Team’s Goals to 1-3 at a Time

One year, I was running a Growth department. And my CEO asked me, along with the rest of the Leadership team, for each of us to set 7 goals for the year. We did.

It was a disaster.

I think I hit 5 of mine, almost hit the 6th, and missed the 7th entirely.

Most of the other leaders only hit 2-3.

At first, I was a little smug. Then I realized that this whole thing was a complete mess. And even if I hit most of mine, only 1 or 2 actually mattered. How much further could I have pushed those goals if I hadn’t been distracted by checking the box on the other 5?

That’s when I realized that every team and department can only handle 1-2 key goals at a time.

This feels shockingly low. When I was setting goals across an entire company as a co-founder, it felt really scary to go this low. I fully understood why my last CEO started at 7.

The craziest part, everyone FOUGHT me to have more goals. All my department heads, and my co-founder. Everyone was terrified of really getting down to the 1-2 things that actually mattered.

But every time I allowed it, I regretted it. Goals got missed or major initiatives turned into “check-the-box” activities. One of my regrets is not holding the line here.

When your team has one goal to obsess about, the progress they can make on that single objective will outstrip your wildest expectations.

The literature supporting this is deep, I highly recommend reading The One Thing if you haven’t already.

As a team lead or department head, I fully realize your ability to reduce goals may be limited. You might believe in only having 1 critical goal but your CEO may demand 7. So what do you do?

Do what you can. Even if you have 7 goals, try to divvy things up so everyone on your team only has 1 goal.

And if I was pressured to have 7 goals, I’d try to set things up so 5 goals were in the bag but still looked good. Then I’d go spend all my time on the critical 1-2.

#7: Add Ad-hoc Requests to the Queue, Don’t Throw Them on Top

The easiest way to lock up a high performing team? Keep throwing in ad hoc requests that need to be done right now.

So many leaders have a compulsive need to demand random stuff with immediate deadlines.

And their team hops to it.

But at what cost?

Well, the really important stuff that drives the critical goal for the year gets neglected entirely. First it slips, then it’s behind, then it’s dead in the water.

Death by a thousand Jira tickets.

The fix is easy in practice but very difficult to pull off emotionally as a leader. You’re going to want to just sneak that one little thing in. Why not? It’ll only take 5 minutes.

But a hundred little things add up. Without the discipline to postpone the first one, it’ll be much harder to postpone the rest.

So when a random request does come up, I always put it in the backlog.

Then when it’s time to select the next project, maybe it goes to the top of the backlog and gets queued next. That’s fine. But it should sync with your operating cadence, it shouldn’t break it.

Yes, there are occasionally fires where everything gets put on hold for a genuine emergency.

In those cases, break whatever you need to. But this should be rare. If this happens more than a few times a year, you’re most likely leading by crisis.Whenever I’ve been on a team like that, it’s only led to worse results in the long term.

Lean manufacturing had a huge impact on protecting workflows and avoiding expediting work. While this sort of made its way into knowledge work via agile programming, the core lessons are often lost. I highly recommend reading The Goal as an introduction.

#8: Get Ahead of Any Team Member Fires

By doing all the above, you’ll get the team moving. They’ll be shipping at a consistent clip and you’ll be building real momentum. It’s a matter of time before you hit your goals.

I’ve been here multiple times, just to get taken out at the knees.

What happened?

Something blows up with one of the team members. If it’s bad enough, it can completely kill the momentum.

Here’s a few things I’ve been through myself or have seen firsthand:

• A critical engineer leaves just as the team ramps up. The rest of the team is almost entirely fresh. Engineering progress grinds to a halt and the team begins a two-year refactor while the startup loses momentum and ultimately implodes.
• A bonus was negotiated with a senior marketer before I took over the team. Expectations weren’t set well so after the bonus was hit and paid, it was not replaced. Obviously, that person was not happy and ultimately left.
• A senior marketer that managed an entire channel had a junior marketer report to her. They were hired as a pair. When the senior marketer left, the junior marketer also left with her. The entire program for that channel collapsed and never recovered.

If I’m a manager at any level in an organization, I would get ahead of any items like this. First, do a broad career discussion with every direct report. Figure out their goals, aspirations, comp expectations, everything. This will help raise red flags that need to be fixed long before they reach a point where they can’t get fixed.

I also highly recommend that you review your company’s compensation benchmarking systems, all the hiring agreements with your team, and know the compensation philosophy of your company really well. Then look for mismatches on what your team desires.

If someone on your team wants something that the company can’t give them, that’s okay. You just need to figure that out sooner rather than later. Then you can build around that person instead of making them a key part of the team foundation. If they leave at a really bad moment and something collapses, that’s ultimately on you. I know it sucks, I’ve had this exact same thing happen to me. That’s why I tend to be more paranoid about this stuff than I was earlier in my career.

#9: Get Everyone in the Right Seats

This is a bit of an overused metaphor at this point but it’s still really valuable: get the right folks in the right seats on your bus (your business). Jim Collins popularized this metaphor in Good to Great and it still holds true.

Just because your team has assigned tasks doesn’t mean they’re the right ones to do them.

This is also why I spend a bunch of time trying to figure out where people really love spending their time when I’m recruiting. If their instincts match the role well, they’ll easily overperform. If not, performance will be less than ideal.

I always ask folks these two questions:

• What type of work do you really enjoy? Where do you really love to spend your time?
• What type of work do you prefer to hand off to someone else?

These are basically just strengths/weaknesses questions but rephrased in a way to get a real response. If you ask directly for strengths and weaknesses, you’ll get an answer that the person thinks you want to hear. Rephrasing the questions this way gets much better insights. You can also ask people which project they’re most proud of in their career. That tells you where they’d prefer to spend all their time.

I highly recommend that you ask these questions of your team if you haven’t already.

Once you know where someone wants to spend their time and what type of stuff they want to avoid, it’s time to make some judgment calls. Is there enough of a conflict between that person and their role that you need to get them into a different seat on your bus? If they actively hate 5% of their role, it’s probably fine. If they hate 50% of their role, probably time for a change.

Getting everyone into the right seats will have a huge impact on your team’s ability to perform.

#10: Manage the Underperformers and Jerks Out

This is the hardest one and sooner or later, every manager has to deal with it. The sooner you work through it, the faster your team will hit their true potential.

I’ve come across three types of underperformers in my career.

The first is someone that’s just in over their head. They mean well, they’re trying, they’re just not up to the difficulty of the role that they’re in. Sometimes, a little coaching, guidance, and structure is all they need to get back on track. So start there. If that’s not enough, you may have to go the termination route.

The second is the real jerks. While these folks aren’t pleasant, they’re easy to spot. Set expectations with them and if things don’t improve, manage them out of the org. As the famous Netflix Culture deck points out, the “cost to effective teamwork is too high” for “brilliant jerks.”

The third is another type of underperformer that drives the team crazy. They’ll single handedly destroy the morale of the team. And nothing gets fixed until they’re out. This is where the real hit to performance comes from.

It’s a smooth-talking externalizer.

Some people are internalizers, they put all the blame on themselves. This has its own issues at the extreme but folks that always start with “what could I have done better?” tend to make great team members.

Externalizers, on the other hand, put all the blame on something else. Circumstances conspired against them, someone got in their way, personal emergencies were distracting them. It’s always something. 

Because they’re so busy blaming everyone else, tons of fires get started around them. Projects fail and other people feel blamed. Things are never working and no one really knows why. It starts to feel like the ground beneath the team is constantly shifting. And it is, there’s always a new story or excuse.

Externalizers that have taken their career pretty far are REALLY good at talking themselves out of a jam. 

It’s selection bias, they wouldn’t have gotten to where they are without that skill. So if you lead from a position of empathy and give people the benefit of the doubt, these folks will get a lot of extra chances from you.

The red flag I look for that tells me I’m dealing with an externalizer: the story changes. One lie gets told, time passes, then another lie gets told that conflicts.

If I ever think to myself “wait, didn’t that person tell me something else?” then I know to start paying very close attention. Maybe it’s a misunderstanding. Or maybe there’s an externalizer on the team. Either way I know to keep my eyes out.

Regardless of the circumstances, as soon as you know it’s not going to work out, go to your HR team and figure out your termination process. Document everything, get the approvals you need, and make the changes that your team needs in order to get back on track.

Also, the easy hack to figure out if someone is truly meeting the expectations of their role: ask yourself if you’d rehire that person today. If not, consider making the changes you need to.

The post 10 Management Principles to Copy from Top 10% Teams appeared first on Lars Lofgren.

Google has gone so far as to publish an official policy (documented here) on how this isn’t allowed:

Site reputation abuse (parasite SEO) is rampant today. I made the case that Forbes Marketplace is a third-party from Forbes, they also manage sections of CNN and USA Today.

TONS of other media sites have partnerships like this. It’s so pervasive that we could call the current SEO environment the Parasite SEO Era.

Now, you may think that I’m a fan of the Site Reputation Abuse policy from Google.

I’m not.

I hate the fucking thing. It’s colossal stupidity.

It Shouldn’t Matter Who’s a Third Party and Who Isn’t

Let’s look at an extremely common example from the world of content marketing.

Tons of marketing departments outsource all their blog production to content agencies. It’s a massive industry. I’ve built several blogs for clients as a service provider doing exactly this.

The site owner comes to me, I take over management of the blog, I set up brand guidelines and SOPs, hire a bunch of writers (some full-time, some freelance), and away we go. This is for a straight service agreement where the site owner is paying for the content, no weird revenue shares or anything like that.

Often, the client is barely involved in content production. Or not involved at all. In my experience, most CMOs and VPs of Marketing don’t care about the content, they just want to cut a check and have their KPIs go up.

In this extremely common arrangement, we have:

• A third party doing all the content
• Little or no oversight from the actual team
• Everything published under the brand of the site owners

Should this count as site reputation abuse? Of course not, that’d be ridiculous.

But it could under Google’s policy. That’s absurd.

On my LinkedIn, my DM’s, and my inbox, I’m having regular discussions with folks on what technically counts as a “third party.”

How many layers of freelancers does it take to become a third party? Can the editors be freelancers? How much ownership of the parent company counts? If the main company is a minority shareholder in a separate company but has board control, is the second company a third party? How much board control is enough?

These are stupid fucking discussions. It shouldn’t matter, no one cares. I don’t. And I don’t believe the typical search user cares either. They just want high quality content that answers their question truthfully.

Doesn’t Site Reputation Abuse Only Apply to Search Manipulation?

You could say “hey, this site reputation abuse policy only applies to situations where the primary purpose is to manipulate search rankings.” And I’d respond “THAT’S ALL OF FUCKING SEO.” The whole job is to get more traffic, that’s the whole fucking point. Yes, we should do that by building a real audience with high quality content, I believe in all that stuff. But to pretend like we’re not here to get more traffic is naive.

One person’s genuine content is another person’s search manipulation. The line between the two is blurry as all fuck.

The distinction that always made sense to me was white hat vs black hat SEO. We’re all here to get rankings and traffic. Some of us will do it in a genuine way, some of us will do the dirty tricks, but we’re all here for the same reason. It’s all search manipulation to some degree.

I don’t believe Google’s defining search manipulation as the old “black hat” definition anymore. Tons of sites have been completely crushed in the past few years that never dabbled in any of the sketchy stuff. They simply wrote content, optimized it too much for SEO, and were then left to bleed out on the sidewalk by the HCU algo.

So where does Google draw the line between helpful content and search manipulation? I aint got a fucking clue. I’m not sure Google does either. That part of the policy is completely worthless.

Terrible First-Party Content is Just As Problematic

Take a typical parasite SEO program: aggressive content expansion, highly templated, a thin veneer of authority and expertise, shady monetization deals.

What if the entire program was managed by an in-house team? Would that suddenly be okay?

Absolutely not! The end result is the same: SEO junk content stuffing every corner of Google while every indie publisher that actually knows what they’re talking about goes bankrupt.

And just as many people trying out Chatgpt, Perplexity, and Kagi for search.

The first-party/third-party distinction is completely pointless.

None of this is hypothetical, there are sites shipping endless amounts of SEO bullshit content because they get the same boost that all the parasite SEO sites do.

My favorite example is Indeed.

Now, as far as I know, Indeed does not have a parasite SEO program. I’ve poked around and didn’t see anything blatant. If I missed it, let me know.

Their career advice blog has exploded in the past few years:

From about 2 million monthly visits in 2019 to just under 20 million monthly visits in 2024. A 10X increase in 5 years. Damn that’s impressive.

But maybe they earned it? Hahahaha. Uh no. If you’ve read any of my other posts, you already know where this is going. 

Let’s look at one of their premier posts, we’ll get a sense for their top-tier content.

For me, Indeed ranks #2 in Google for “cover letter.” This is a colossal term, Ahrefs estimates it at 294K searches per month. A lot of people need genuine help on this topic. A pretty important topic too. Good advice could help someone change their entire career, financial situation, and life trajectory.

Getting a 20% raise is life-changing for tons of people. It’s probably the one financial lever that has the biggest impact on someone’s quality of life.

This shit matters.

And I bet tens of thousands of people read Indeeds cover letter post every month.

So is Indeed offering good advice?

Here’s a snippet of what Indeed recommends to people asking for help on their cover letters:

Fuck this is bad. That example is complete trash. And the advice is worse than useless. This is the most banal content slop that I’ve seen in a long time. And it ranks # fucking 2.

I’ve hired hundreds of people across multiple companies and I’ve easily reviewed thousands of job applications in my career. If anyone submitted a cover letter with an intro like that, it’s an instant rejection. I wouldn’t even look at the rest of the application. It basically says “I put zero effort into this and don’t even know what I’m applying to.” It’s the most templated template that I’ve ever seen for a cover letter.

Sidenote: before anyone says I’m too harsh, I think cover letters are a waste of time for everyone and I prefer to not even ask for them in job applications. There are much better ways to screen for genuine candidates that also require less effort from the candidate.

And that brand mention of Indeed (“position at Clearwater I found on Indeed”) is just too good. Hey, here’s an idea: tone down the self-referential brand braggadocio by juuuust a smidge. Like one smidge. Thaaaaat’d be great.

Maybe so many people are complaining about how hard it is to get hired in this economy because they took advice from Indeed on how to apply for jobs. Indeed, you are actively helping people get REJECTED from job applications.

Now remember, this is the BEST content on Indeed. It’s one of their biggest pages and as bad as the content is, it’s still better than the vast majority of their other content. Go look. Pick a card, any card! They’re all shit.

I see their posts constantly on page one in the SERPs and they all feel like extremely low effort AI slop. If there are real writers behind this, I’d highly recommend those writers start using AI. Their editors won’t notice and at least the writers will make more money for less work. Someone should benefit from this stupidity.

I will concede one thing to Indeed. In every interaction I’ve had with their company over the years (job placements, salary estimates, candidate quality, etc), it’s all been borderline spam. They set the bar for low quality content and products. So in a way, their blog posts are VERY on brand.

Here’s my point: internal SEO teams can and do abuse Google just as much as third-party companies. Just because it’s in-house doesn’t mean it’ll magically become great content.

The reason site reputation abuse is possible is because Google no longer requires major domains to do the work before reaping the benefits of high rankings.

The Real Problem: Topical Authority No Longer Matters

The site reputation abuse policy is just a bandaid.

The root problem is it shouldn’t be possible for sites to abuse their authority in the first place. Regardless if it’s employees, freelancers, or some parasite third party.

I remember a time, in the distant past of 2019, when sites had to EARN their authority. Even someone like time.com or cnn.com couldn’t just rank for anything they wanted. If they went into a new content category in Google or just tried to expand their SEO footprint at all, growth was slow and painful. Just like anyone else.

Look, if Forbes wants to post a bunch of articles on CBD gummies and make a bunch of money, go for it. I don’t care. But they should have to earn that #1 ranking just like everyone else. Not magically float to #1:

Hell, I’m even fine if major sites get a slight leg up on smaller sites. But it shouldn’t be a free pass like it is today.

When topical authority doesn’t matter, you will have a flourishing ecosystem of parasite SEO.

And internal SEO teams shipping enough content slop to reduce the average IQ of the US by 10 points.

There’s simply too much money to be made.

The post The Stupidity of Google’s Site Reputation Abuse Policy appeared first on Lars Lofgren.

Content often gets published in a subfolder or subdomain or the website. The goal is to leverage the domain’s trust with Google to get rankings and traffic easily.

With the right agreement, you can make millions just by publishing a bunch of blog posts. Then you’ll monetize everything with affiliate offers and sponsored ad blocks in your posts.

Currently, the most notorious parasite SEO company is Forbes Marketplace. The actual Forbes company only owns a minority share of Marketplace while Marketplace operates multiple subfolders of forbes.com. The Marketplace team has also entered into partnerships with CNN and USA Today to run parasite SEO programs on those sites.

For competitive categories in Google, it’s not uncommon to find a batch of parasite SEO programs dominating the top rankings.

Why Parasite SEO Has Become So Popular

If you want to win competitive categories in Google today, you must adopt a parasite SEO strategy.

I hate that this is the case but it’s true. Partnering with the right domain is such an enormous advantage that no other SEO strategy can compete. You’ll start publishing content and pretty much rank for whatever you want.

The bias that Google shows to major domains is simply absurd at the moment.

Yes, there are a few exceptions. I know of several independent publishers that are doing well. But they are far and few between.

Parasite SEO has enormous upside: I estimated that Fores Marketplace has been doing at least $400 million in annual revenue. That’s Scrooge McDuck levels of wealth.

Even a modestly successful parasite SEO program will do millions of revenue per year. And all it takes is the ability to strike a deal with the right domain. 

Now I’m going to show you how to cash in.

Picking Your Site Targets for your Parasite SEO Play

The success of your venture lives and dies on the site that you partner with. Get it the domain wrong and you won’t have the cover you need to run rampant across the SERPs.

A few guidelines:

• If at all possible, get on a top 1000 domain. Beg, flatter, and schmooze your way into the good graces of the folks that control one of these domains. The main parasite SEO programs I know are in the top 1000. And the further down you go, the more risk that you’ll get hit during a Google update.
• News sites do especially well. Prioritize these, Google loves them beyond all reason.
• The US market is getting competitive with multiple parasite SEO companies. Consider jumping into other geographies which tend to be a few years behind the US SEO market.

Do NOT compromise here.

I’d set a goal of having genuine conversations with key players across at least 10 different sites. Which means you’ll probably have to do outreach to at least 100.

These deals will die for all sorts of reasons: killed by a key stakeholder, legal flags, roadblocks while negotiating the contract, etc. So get multiple deals in motion so you don’t end up compromising on the domain strength. Even a domain in the 2,000-3,000 ranking is too low in my opinion. It might work for a while but it’ll be vulnerable during Google updates.

Pitching Your Parasite SEO Partnership

You can’t roll into an all-glass conference room and throw up a bunch of slides that yell “PARASITE SEO = $$$$$$$” for the entire floor to see. It’s uncouth.

We have to dress this pig up.

Roll up your McKinsey sleeves and start using words like “turnkey transactional content” or “white label commerce content”. All the media execs will love that stuff. Then push the benefits of your proposal:

• The host site pays for nothing! No investment, no ongoing expenses, no downside!
• They don’t have to do any work at all! Sit back and collect checks. What’s not to like about that?
• Promise you’ll follow any editorial guidelines or processes that they like. In practice, we all know they’ll get lazy and won’t do or check anything. So this is an easy promise to make.
• Operations will be set up to blend in perfectly with the existing site so no one will ever know.
• People want this content! Tons of people search for stuff like this. We’re just giving the market what they want!
• Instead of building in-house SEO expertise over the course of 5-10 years, our team of world-class experts gets all this going in just a few months!

In other words, make gobs of cash with no downside and no work.

Because these are fancy execs that prefer to play business than actually doing it, you’re gonna have to fill your pitch with a TON of projections.

Traffic estimates, revenue estimates, ranking timelines. All of it.

Now, you and I both know that this is bullshit. That’s not how SEO works. In all my career, SEO growth either exploded past all of my wildest dreams or limped along like a dead fish. Either way, it never hit my estimates. But we won’t tell the fancy execs that. We’ll show them pretty graphs and overwhelming spreadsheets that no one takes the time to look at. With tons of charts that go smoothly up and to the right.

Dazzle them with your numerical bullshit.

How to Structure Your Parasite Agreement

Getting the partnership structure right is actually pretty complicated. And getting it wrong will cause you all sorts of headaches.

You can either form a contractual agreement between your two companies, or you can form a joint venture.

My Recommended Structure: Form a Joint Venture

A joint venture is a new company where both the original companies have an equity stake. Then this new company operates everything for the parasite SEO program. Whenever there are cash distributions or this new company gets sold, money gets distributed based on the terms of the operating agreement.

Why do I recommend an actual joint venture?

To hitch the domain owner to you. The company that owns the domain has all the power. They can cut your access, delete your content, or just take all the content you developed whenever they want. Yes, you can add protection clauses and threaten lawsuits. But that only goes so far. It doesn’t compare to cementing the relationship by forming a new company. Burning an entire equity stake down is a lot more painful than ending a basic contract.

This is what Forbes Marketplace did. They were really smart in setting up a new company, getting Forbes to invest in exchange for a 40% stake, and making the partnership as rock solid as possible. Kudos.

The Easier Structure: A Standard Contractual Partnership

Instead of forming a new company, you could just get a contract signed between your company and the owners of the domain you want to work on. You could call this an asset development agreement or something.

The main benefit of this is that it’ll be WAY easier to get signed. The domain owners aren’t investing any cash, no one is getting any equity, there aren’t any control issues to sort out for a new company. The terms are the terms, that’s it.

The downside is you’ll always be looking over your shoulder. The only protections you have for your company are the protections in the contract. If it was me, I’d always be worried about something going sideways. Then I’d hold back on doing everything I could to make the program as successful as possible. It could easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I hold back, get beat by competitors, then it wilts and dies anyway.

You also don’t want to have to worry about other parasite SEO companies sniffing around and undercutting you.

If a once-in-a-lifetime type deal starts to blossom, I’d push for the joint venture. Make it as permanent as you can. But for a quick SEO cash grab, I’d understand going for a contractional partnership and keeping it loose.

The Deal Terms of Your Parasite Partnership

There’s a bunch of terms you’ll have to negotiate. Here are the core ones along with my recommendations.

Revenue or Profit Split

Most folks in the space will expect a revenue or profit split. If at all possible, I’d push for a profit split. It keeps the parties most aligned. If you run into any stumbles and need to invest hard for a few years, you want both parties to have the same incentives. And to share the load. I can promise that you’ll get real sick of cutting checks off topline while you’re eating all the expenses during rough periods. Do a profit split if you can.

I guess you could explore different arrangements, maybe a hefty annual leasing fee or something. But I prefer to keep things as simple as possible. And to keep incentives aligned. That’s how partnerships survive.

Split Amounts

Most players will enter negotiations expecting something around a 50/50 split. If the site owners are savvy or have multiple suitors, they’ll probably push for a 60/40 split in their favor.

Closing Fees

A source recently told me that one of the major parasite SEO deals was closed when the parasite SEO company promised to pay the domain owner $1 million dollars just to get started. This was a major media brand.

Be aware of this. I’d personally avoid this at all costs but I wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes an industry norm. And if you’re among several parasite players negotiating with a domain owner at the same time, I’d expect someone to play this card.

Payment Schedules

However you do this, don’t promise monthly payments. They’re annoying. Distribute cash on a quarterly or annual basis. You shouldn’t have any trouble getting agreement on this.

Protection Clauses

This part is SO much easier if you have a joint venture. If it’s a standard contract, you need to think through this extremely carefully.

What happens if you dump millions of dollars worth of content into a site, get a ton of rankings and revenue flowing, then your partner cuts you out and shuts down your access? If there’s enough money, at some point, it makes perfect sense to cut you out and bring the whole thing in house.

What happens if another parasite SEO company comes along and undercuts you? The word is out and there are a bunch of companies sniffing around for deals.

What happens if the domain gets sold while you’re operating on it? You don’t own any equity so you won’t benefit by default.

Some ideas to consider:

• A clause that prevents both parties from exiting with less than 2-3 years notice.
• Add any number of destructive clauses, like owning the content you produced and being able to take it with you if you’re cut out of the deal. Unpublishing hundreds of posts during a contract dispute could cause real harm to a site.
• Add a hefty buyout fee if the domain owners want to cut you out on short notice.
• Fees with an included valuation if the domain/business gets sold.

KPI Commitments

Some teams will try to force KPI commitments. Hit X traffic or Y revenue by Z date. And if certain goals don’t get hit, they can end the contract with fewer penalties. Personally, I’d walk if the opposing side is demanding stuff like this.

How to Overcome Objections about Google’s Site Reputation Abuse

As you’re trying to close a deal, you might get objections about how this “white label commerce content” runs afoul of Google’s Site Reputation Abuse policy. In which it states:

To which you’ll yell “preposterous!” And then proceed to counter their objections with any of these arguments:

• Google is generally full of shit and says stuff all the time. Any good SEO knows to take everything they say with a grain of salt.
• We’ve already promised to give the domain owners full oversight, so we’re good!
• If they didn’t want sites doing this, why is it working so well for a bunch of major domains? Sure, some of them have taken some hits but they’re still pulling millions and millions of visitors every month. And the sites that got hit got too greedy, we’ll stay focused on core categories to stay clean.
• This is why we’ll structure operations to keep it completely hidden, they’ll never catch us!
• Google has been fumbling hard the past few years, it’ll be YEARS before they get their shit together and can catch any of this consistently. Let’s grab the gold while we can!

To clarify: I don’t actually believe these arguments. Well, I do believe Google is full of shit and it’ll take awhile before they get their act together. But I don’t believe in the spirit of all this. I do think clueless media execs will believe some of it though.

How to Keep Your Parasite SEO Hidden from Assholes

The biggest risk of running a parasite SEO strategy is that some random asshole on the internet will figure out what you’re doing, then expose it to the entire SEO community.

The whole point of parasite SEO is to fly under the radar and hope that Google never figures out what you’re doing. So put some effort into keeping it that way.

If it was me, I’d try to structure operations to get your affiliate content embedded into the same content flow as the rest of the site. I totally understand that this will make things a pain in the ass. You’ll have a lot less control on blog post templates, internal linkings, CTAs, tracking, etc. You’ll also have to fight the internal time on access permissions and SOPs.

I still think it’s worth it.

It’s not that hard to spot a parasite SEO play when there’s a unique subfolder or subdomain. It’s a dead giveaway. Yes, you could set things up on a unique WordPress install and try to copy the original site design like Forbes Marketplace did with CNN and USA Today. That will make it a lot harder to spot. But if anyone looks closely, you’ll look like you’re trying to do something nefarious.

The rule I’d use: make all the content look like it’s being managed by the real team at the host company. Similar authors, same blog feeds, same site folders, all of it.

Kicking Off Your Parasite Partnership

Okay, you landed the deal. Now what fucking what?

I recommend a T-shaped strategy for content:

• Do a shotgun approach across a range of key transactional content and pillar SEO terms. This is the horizontal piece.
• Pick 1-2 content areas that are really important to you on day 1, then go really deep. This is the vertical piece.

I’ve done shotgun plays with SEO before and they do have their advantages. With a strong domain that Google favors, you will be shocked at the random rankings you grab without any real work. Consider this a radar blast across Google. This used to be a go-to move for any decent site. These days, I would only do this with major media domains. Also, I recommend curtailing your shotgun approach in two ways:

• Don’t go TOO horizontal. Stick to your overall category that your brand is in. So if you’re a business site, I’d do a shotgun play across just business. Expanding into brand-new SEO categories requires a different approach.
• Set a time limit on your shotgun strategy. You do not want to keep pushing horizontally year after year. If you do, your site will get spread way too thin, your team will never be able to stay on top of the content, and eventually you’ll get dinged by Google. Do the shotgun approach for 6-12 months, see what gets traction, then double down vertically. Once you’ve really built things out and it’s healthy, consider another expansion later.

For the vertical push, pick 1-2 content areas that are really important to your goals. I pick these on a mix of mid and bottom funnel overlap with the core business, traffic potential, and revenue potential. Even if there’s little sign that Google favors the site in these areas, I’ll still go hard right from the beginning if I know that category is essential to the business. If you push hard enough, you can create category authority. And if they truly are essential to the business, it’s a matter of time before Google realizes that too.

Out of the gate, I’d be looking to publish 30-50 posts per month.

And I’d be working furiously to put some revenue wins on the board. Once you have a track record going, then you can get to the real foundational work for a healthy long term program. But your partners will be expecting results. The sooner you can point to growing revenue, the better.

Wait, is any of this Parasite SEO stuff a good idea?

I don’t think so.

If I thought it was a good idea, I wouldn’t be sharing any of this stuff.

Google clearly has a long way to go before the parasite SEO era of Google ends. So in the meantime, I want to create as much competition in the parasite SEO industry as I can. The more people fighting for the spoils, the more ridiculous the whole situation gets.

But if a friend asked me if they should start a company to do this, my advice would be fuck no.

It’s nothing more than a cash grab and I don’t believe there’s a way to do parasite SEO while delivering world class content. The incentives get all fucked up:

• You don’t own the domain. So why obsess about content quality? Even if your content starts strong, it will suffer as you scale and you’ll never be able to get it back on track.
• Your partners just want their checks. And any business that makes revenue the end-all, be-all just becomes an extraction machine. They work great until they don’t.
• You’ll always be looking over your shoulder for the Google smack. More short-term incentives to push push push while neglecting real value creation.

Ultimately, I don’t get any pride from a cash grab business. Others might, great for them. I need to go build something that I’m proud of and that helps people. I don’t believe that a parasite SEO program can do that.

The post The Billion-Dollar World of Parasite SEO: How to Cash In appeared first on Lars Lofgren.

And that Forbes Marketplace was stuffing those sites full of affiliate content just like it is with Forbes?

And what if Forbes Marketplace went to extreme efforts to hide everything?

Would this be considered parasite SEO?

I believe all this to be true.

If you haven’t been following the Forbes Marketplace story, read my first post here. For the rest of this post, I’ll refer to this company as just Marketplace.

Once more, down the rabbit hole we go.

The Hidden Website on CNN

Let’s start at the top. Go to the CNN homepage and if you scroll down a tad, you’ll find CNN Underscored:

I’ve known about this for a while, thought it was a Wirecutter copycat. Turns out there’s a lot more going on.

Now, if you poke around the majority of CNN Underscored, it looks like a standard affiliate site. And as far as I know, it’s run by CNN itself.

EXCEPT for one section that I know about.

That section is CNN Underscored Money.

The first clue I found was in the staff bios.

Here’s a normal CNN Underscore bio:

At the very bottom, this person has a cnn.com email address. Good sign that it’s a real employee of CNN.

But what if we look up a bio of someone working on the Money section of CNN Underscored?

In this case, the email is under wbdcontractor.com. I assume that Warner Bro Discovery (the owner of CNN) uses this domain for all contractor emails. So this person isn’t an actual employee, they’re a contractor.

Now this particular person I found is a Lead Editor, not just a freelance writer where a contract relationship would be expected. An editor has a lot of influence over the content, especially a Lead Editor. If it was me, I’d want all my editors as employees, especially for a brand like CNN.

Every bio I checked under CNN Underscored Money had an email at wbdcontractor.com. Maybe I missed one but I checked a bunch.

Also, all the Money “employees” are separated from the rest of the Editorial staff on the CNN Underscored About page. They’re under a separate list called “Money.” Curious.

Why oh why are ALL the CNN Underscored Money folks contractors?

Might it be because they’re working for a COMPLETELY different company? Hmm. We’ll see.

The CNN Underscored Money Website

Now let’s turn to the CNN Underscored navigation bar. Here’s the normal one:

And here’s the navigation bar for the Money section of CNN Underscored:

I took these screenshots with the same size browser window. And yet we see a LOT of differences.

• Money has a lot more categories.
• The “Sign In” button has slightly different styling.
• “More” has a little dropdown arrow in the main nav bar, it’s missing in the Money nav bar.
• For the affiliate disclaimer, the main nav is italicized while the Money nav is not. And the copy in the Money section is different.

Why would the navigation of CNN Underscored Money be different?

And why are there so many little details… off?

It’s almost like someone spent a LOT of time and effort to make the nav appear identical… when they’re not.

What is going on?

Easy: they’re DIFFERENT FUCKING websites.

Here’s the beginning of the source code for CNN Underscored:

And for CNN Underscored Money:

I’m not even a front-end dev and I can easily tell they’re very different.

Here’s a few differences I noticed:

• CNN Underscored Money has Google Tag Manager installed, I can’t find it on the normal CNN Underscored. It’s highly unusual to place GTM on just one category of a website in my experience. And if it is installed, I’d expect it to be installed in the same way.
• For Underscored Money, a bunch of the WordPress files are in /cnn-underscored/money/wp-content/ which means there’s a separate and unique version of WordPress installed in /cnn-underscored/money/. I believe the main Underscored site is using cms.cnn.com for all its stuff.
• CNN Underscored has Optimizely installed, CNN Underscored Money does not. Usually tools like this will run across an entire website.

I could understand CNN Underscored having its own CMS from the rest of cnn.com. That makes sense.

But having ANOTHER WordPress installed for just the Money category of CNN Underscored, that makes zero sense. Unless you wanted to cordon off another company into a restricted area of your site. THAT makes sense.

I believe someone installed a unique version of WordPress so they could operate the Money category independently.

Who oh who could it be?

My New Favorite Part of Every Website: Privacy Policies

In my original post on Marketplace, the privacy policy helped me figure out what was going on.

And for the rest of my career, every time I see a privacy policy, I will think to myself: “ahhh, privacy policies, the beacon of truth in a world drowning in bullshit.”

Just like the rest of CNN Underscored, there’s two of everything.

For the main CNN Underscored site, if you click on the privacy policy, you’ll end up here:

It’s the Privacy Center for Warner Bros Discovery. Makes sense. Looks legit.

Buuuuuut what about the privacy policy for CNN Underscored Money?

It’s a COMPLETELY different privacy policy on its own URL: www.cnn.com/cnn-underscored/money/privacy. That’s weird as hell.

And who’s Solutions Underscored LLC?

I’ve got a feeling that we’re on to something.

Who Is Solutions Underscored LLC?

Luckily, the organization running CNN Underscored Money included the address for their company Solutions Underscored LLC in the privacy policy. It’s based in Georgia.

So now we can look up the business registration of Solutions Underscored LLC.

You can do this with any business. But they’re rarely indexed by Google. You have to find the business registration website for that specific state, then search there. Since I have the address, I know what state to search instead of having to check every state.

If you search business registrations in Georgia, you will find one for Solutions Underscored LLC. Click around a bit and you’ll get the actual PDF of the business registration. The first page of the registration looks like this:

Pretty standard stuff.

If you check it yourself, I HIGHLY recommend looking at page 2:

The Manager and Authorizer of Solutions Underscored is listed as Thomas Callahan.

Where have I seen that name before?

IT’S THE CFO OF MARKETPLACE.

Or at least, someone with his exact same name. Maybe it’s a different Thomas Callahan. Or maybe it is the same guy and he has a COMPLETELY legitimate reason to be running a business that controls CNN Underscored Money. I doubt it. But it’s possible.

What I Believe Is Happening with CNN Underscored Money

Based on everything I’ve seen, here’s what I think happened:

• Marketplace wanted to expand. Running an affiliate program on Forbes wasn’t enough. 
• They reached out to CNN and offered to run a section of their website.
• For some unfathomable reason, CNN agreed to a deal. What the fuck CNN? You’re CN fucking N. What in god’s name convinced you this was a good idea? And you already had a ramped up affiliate program. I say again: what the fuck CNN?
• Folks involved decided that CNN would install a completely unique site under cnn.com/cnn-underscored/money/ for Marketplace.
• Marketplace then went to absurd levels of effort to make that site look identical to the normal Underscored website. I believe this was intentional. It’s actually really easy to miss unless you’re looking for it. And there’s no way CNN didn’t realize what was going on.
• I believe Marketplace has since been running CNN Underscored Money with little, if any, oversight from the main CNN team. If CNN was interested in oversight, I don’t see why they’d let another company set up a completely unique website on their domain in the first place. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe editors employed by CNN are involved in day-to-day content operations. I hope I’m wrong. Please tell me if I’m wrong.

And for those of you that are curious about the success of this little endeavor, here’s the search traffic:

Got hit a bit in the Aug 2024 algo update but still doing over 600K search visits/month. And way up in the past few years.

Starting to rank for some real money terms too. At number 4 for me on “best mortgage lenders”:

Yeah, it’s not like mortgage lenders have any real impact on people’s lives.

Also number 2 for me on “best loan apps”:

The Same Thing is Going on With USA Today Blueprint

To me, it looks like the exact same thing is happening with USA Today Blueprint.

Here’s the normal USA Today navigation bar:

And the USA Today Blueprint navigation bar:

Tons of little differences:

• Spacing is off.
• Font is different or has a slightly different weight.
• The normal USA Today nav bar has a weather widget, a sign in button, and a CTA button for the USA Today subscription. USA Today Blueprint doesn’t have any of that stuff.
• USA Today Blueprint doesn’t have as many ads but I could understand that, I’d fight to remove display ads in any affiliate program. Even a legit one.

The sites look very different once you get under the hood too. Again, someone put in some real effort to make these sites look identical when they’re not.

But time for the smoking gun.

A few days ago, I grabbed this screenshot of a USA Blueprint bio:

In the bottom left, you’ll see the mouse-over for the email address tied to the email icon.

To make this easier, let’s ENHANCE:

The domain is marketplace.co. Yes, THAT marketplace.co. The same website for the company that runs the affiliate program on Forbes:

An Editor at USA Today Blueprint has an email address on the same domain as Marketplace. I’m going to assume that’s because the editor is an employee at Marketplace and NOT an employee of USA Today.

By the way, I just tried to get a better screenshot of that email address. Now the bios look like this:

Seems like the team is scrubbing info since my original post went viral. Feels like a rush job too. I wonder why?

The funny part: that marketplace.co email address is still listed on that email icon:

They missed scrubbing the best part!

As for the search traffic on USA Today Blueprint:

Took a sizable hit during the March 2024 algo update. Still doing over 800K search visits/month though.

Before we wrap for USA Today Blueprint, I’d like to point out a link added to the bottom of the About page for USA Today Blueprint:

See that link for Ethical Conduct For Newsrooms? It goes to the ethical conduct page used by all of USA Today.

On that page, there’s a section on maintaining independence.

What a load of horseshit.

The post CNN and USA Today Have Fake Websites, I Believe Forbes Marketplace Runs Them appeared first on Lars Lofgren.

For topics that Forbes doesn’t have any expertise in?

Here’s the organic rankings for “best pet insurance”:

Forbes ranks #2. Not sure a business website knows how pet insurance actually works. But okay.

They also have the #1 ranking for best cbd gummies:

Because it’s a marijuana category, PPC ads don’t show for that search term at all. I bet the traffic and click through rate is unreal. Forbes also has another post ranking at #4 for the same keyword. They might be making over $100K/month just off these two blog posts. I’ve made that much off a single post that ranked #1 for a major product term. Since the normal ads don’t show, this might be one of the most lucrative affiliate terms on all of Google. It’s definitely up there.

Let’s do one more. Here’s Forbes ranking #2 for “how to get rid of roaches:”

And right at the top of their cockroach post, a juicy ad:

A highly ranked “how to” post can make just as much money as a “best of” post if you cram an ad into it. Done that plenty of times myself.

So. Does anybody think Forbes is the best authority on pet insurance, CBD gummies, and cockroach infestations?

I sure as fuck don’t.

The Rise of Forbes in Google – Parasite SEO Perfected

None of these Google rankings are an accident. And I’m not cherry picking a few high ranking posts.

Forbes completely dominates Google today.

In 2020, a completely different company from Forbes partnered with Forbes to run their SEO affiliate business. They created a new company, made it look like it’s part of Forbes (it’s not), and then went to town exploiting every last corner of Google.

They refer to themselves as Forbes Advisor publicly but the official entity is Forbes Marketplace.

In fact, this Forbes affiliate frankenstein has gotten so big and so successful that I found claims that Forbes Marketplace is trying to buy the actual Forbes company. More on this later.

Forbes Marketplace runs a few sections of the Forbes website.

Here’s the traffic for forbes.com/advisor/:

From nothing to over 20 millions search visits per MONTH in less than 4 years. Holy shit is that some serious SEO growth. This was the first section of the Forbes website that they began operating.

This isn’t the only section of Forbes.com that this company runs. They also manage forbes.com/home-improvement/:

And they manage forbes.com/health/: 

To recap the current search traffic controlled by Forbes Marketplace:

• Forbes Advisor =  20.6 million search visits/month
• Forbes Home Improvement = 2.9 million search visits/month
• Forbes Health = 3.8 million search visits/month
• Total = 27.3 million search visits/month

For context, Nerdwallet gets 14 million search visits/month across its entire site. Forbes Marketplace is almost twice the size of Nerdwallet already. Nerdwallet was founded in 2009, it took them 15 years to get as big as they are. Forbes Marketplace basically 2X’d their size in a third of the time.

I’m using Ahrefs data which is never perfectly accurate but the overall scale will be close.

The crazy part: Forbes Marketplace isn’t going to stop there. They’ve ALSO been working on Forbes Betting for the last two years, it’s already at 455K search visits per month:

And there’s an open role in their careers section for an SEO Strategist, Sports Betting right now:

They want to create “the #1 organic site for all things related to the NFL, NBA, MLB, MLS, and much more.”

You know who I think of when I think of professional sports? Not fucking Forbes.

Forbes Marketplace is the single largest (and most successful) parasite SEO program of all time. And it’s just getting started.

I firmly believe that Forbes Marketplace is going to go after EVERY affiliate category unless Google stops them. I wouldn’t be surprised if Forbes starts pushing Viagra content soon.

Who is Forbes Marketplace? Untangling Who Manages the Forbes Affiliate Program

You’d think that the Forbes company is publishing this content and taking all the cash. They’re not.

Actually, the players involved have taken steps to obscure who’s actually running the show. It’s a completely different company, Forbes Marketplace. And while Forbes Marketplace is positioned as a subsidiary of Forbes, Forbes only owns a minority stake.

Now, I’m really going to get into the weeds for the rest of this post. We’re going to dig through SEC filings, business registrations, and some notes from a scorned founder. This might seem tedious. But when a single company dominates Google to the extent that millions of Americans are pushed to buy their recommended products every month, I think it’s important to know who’s calling the shots.

At the end, I’ll tell you who the key players are for the Forbes affiliate program. It’s also a world-class case study on how to set up an affiliate parasite program to rake in hundreds of hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. In fact, the affiliate program is SO successful that the folks running Forbes Marketplace are trying to buy Forbes in its entirety. It’s nuts.

Let’s head down the rabbit hole.

If you dig around the affiliate content on Forbes, you’ll end up on Forbes Advisor:

Forbes Advisor is used in two ways which can make this confusing.

• Forbes Advisor is the B2B, finance, and insurance affiliate category on the Forbes website. This is where the team started.
• As they expanded, Forbes Advisor got co-opted as the brand they operate under for all the affiliate content on Forbes. Now Forbes Advisor is also the public team that all the other affiliate categories operate under (like Health and Home Improvement). When Forbes publicly refers to its affiliate content, it uses Forbes Advisor to describe all of it.

Digging deeper, this is how the Forbes Advisor team presents itself:

If you check the other affiliate categories on Forbes, Katie Doyle is always listed at the top as the SVP of Content. Then the content team dedicated to that category.

But as anyone in the affiliate game knows, content is only one piece of the business. You’ll need tons of folks in revenue management, link building, tech, and company operations. Where are those people?

And where’s the CEO along with the rest of the leadership team?

There are tons of open roles across Delaware, India, Israel, and London:

Again, someone might assume that all this other stuff is managed by Forbes itself. Again, it’s not. All of this is a completely separate company.

The first time I realized that Forbes Advisor is basically a public front is when I checked the Forbes Advisor privacy policy. It references an organization called Forbes Marketplace Holdings Limited:

Looking for information on Forbes Marketplace will bring up this SEC filing which has a few mentions of Forbes Marketplace. Here’s how it’s described:

Yup, an affiliate content business going after every content category that it can.

There’s a few other really interesting facts in that SEC filing.

Forbes Marketplace did $22 million in annual revenue from Jan 2021 to Sep 2021:

Making a projection for Q4, we can confidently say that Forbes Marketplace did at LEAST $29 million in revenue for all of 2021. Traffic was in a big upswing during this period so I’m confident that revenue grew even faster than the pace set for the first 9 months of 2021.

Forbes Marketplace EBITDA was $6.7 million from Jan 2021 to Sep 2021:

They were already rolling in cash in 2021 and they had barely gotten started.

Forbes Marketplace was officially launched in Sept 2019:

Now for the good stuff. Forbes purchased $1,757,000 worth of equity in Forbes Marketplace Holdings Limited:

Oooooh man. That “See Note 4” sure does look tasty. What does it say?

Here it is in full:

All the good shit is always buried in the notes. This tells us EXACTLY what’s going on. I’ll recap:

• Forbes officially granted Forbes Marketplace the right to use its trademark.
• Forbes has one seat on the Board of Directors of Forbes Marketplace.
• The majority shareholder of Forbes ALSO invested in Forbes Marketplace and also got a board seat.
• Overall, Forbes controls two board seats of Forbes Marketplace.
• Forbes initially owned 20% of Forbes Marketplace but purchased additional shares from the majority Forbes shareholder, bringing the total ownership to 39.53% after some share dilution.

In this filing, Forbes claims they control Forbes Marketplace through its two board seats. Maybe those two board members exert a lot of control. But in my personal experience, boards are pretty damn passive. It’s the founders with board seats that drive everything. As we’ll see below, there are multiple individuals that are major players and I’d bet good money they have board seats. I’d be shocked if Forbes has majority control via the board.

It’s safe to say that Forbes has a minority interest in both shares and board control of Forbes Marketplace.

The Company Behind Forbes Marketplace: Marketplace Platforms Limited

Who controls Forbes Marketplace?

We’ve already established that it’s not Forbes. Forbes only controls 40%. So who is it?

Searching for Forbes Marketplace brings you to a company called Marketplace:

Going to the team section shows who’s actually running the show:

Hey! It’s our good friend Katie Doyle! And we have the CEO: Ash Rahimi.

Anytime you see a bullshit listing of Forbes in Google, you can blame Ash Rahimi.

Let’s keep going. Diving into the Marketplace company eventually leads you to a London-based company that’s officially called Marketplace Platforms Limited:

Quick tangent, Marketplace Platforms Limited used to be called Forbes Marketplace Operations Limited:

Definitely the right company.

Now for why we dug this far. There are two people that are listed as the Registered Officers of Marketplace Platforms Limited:

There was a third officer (Achir Kalra) but they resigned in May 2023. Tom Callahan and Chris Thermistocleous are the two current officers. Turns out both of them also have roles at Marketplace:

But the real story comes from that resigned officer: Achir Kalra.

The Scorned Founder: Achir Kalra

On a lark, I looked around for Achir Kalra to figure out why someone would resign from Forbes Marketplace. These folks are printing cash so fast you’d need a fleet of dump trucks to move it all. Why would someone bail?

So I found his LinkedIn page. It just so happened that I found his LinkedIn at the exact perfect moment.

Recently, Achir Kalra left Forbes Marketplace/Marketplace Platforms Limited. From what I’ve seen, the transition has been contentious. Achir shared a bunch of screenshots of a text message conversation he was having with a reporter from a major news publication.

Achir posted screenshots of tons of text messages straight to his LinkedIn profile. He has since deleted them. I grabbed them all before they were taken down.

Now, I’m not going to share them all. There’s a bunch of allegations and I’m not going to wade into the fight between Achir and the Forbes Marketplace team.

But I’m going to share one where Achir breaks down his timeline and the key players of Forbes Marketplace:

There’s a couple of key facts worth highlighting:

• Achir Kalra was involved in the founding of Forbes Marketplace, he worked at Forbes before then. Sounds like he brought a bunch of the key players together when all this started. At this point, he’s no longer involved.
• In the original version of this post, I thought TC was Tom Callahan, the current CFO of Marketplace Holdings/Forbes Marketplace. I’ve had several people tell me that TC is actually TC Yam, the Chairman of Integrated Capital. I believe this is the same Integrated Whale Media Investments that owns Forbes.
• Namit is Namit Merchant, the former COO of Media.net. Media.net was acquired by a Chinese tech company for $900 million in 2016 in an all cash deal.
• I believe Shaifali is Shaifali Sharma. There’s a company registration for Forbes Technologies India Private Limited where Shaifali and Achir are both listed as directors.
• Definitely looks like these non-Forbes folks have majority control.

These are the folks that control Forbes Marketplace.

And the biggest reveal of them all: Forbes Marketplace bids to buy Forbes in 2024.

The Forbes affiliate program has become so successful that it might gobble up Forbes itself. Does that sound like Forbes is running the show?

I’m not sure what the management dispute refers to. It could refer to the situation with Achir or it could be an entirely different controversy.

How Much Money Does Forbes Marketplace Make?

I’m going to walk you through my rough revenue estimate for Forbes Marketplace.

My estimate is definitely going to be off, I’ve had to make too many assumptions. But it’ll be in the ballpark. And the revenue is crazy enough that just getting the right number of digits is eye opening.

Forbes has stated that Forbes Marketplace earned $22 million in revenue from Jan 2021 to Sep 2021. Multiplying by a third gives us an estimate of $29 million for all of 2021. Again, traffic was on a huge upswing during this period so I’m extremely confident that $29M is a conservative estimate for 2021.

Now let’s get a traffic estimate for 2021.

• Forbes Advisor started the 2021 with about 1.2M searches per month. And ended 2021 with about 4.6M searches per month. Let’s split the two and get a very rough average for the year: 2.9M searches per month.
• Forbes Home Improvement can be ignored, it didn’t have any traffic in 2021.
• Forbes Betting can also be ignored, it didn’t start until around July 2021.
• Forbes Health did start around May 2021 and was earning 770K in monthly searches by the end of 2021. Let’s add another 500K in monthly searches for this. This overestimates the traffic in 2021 and will help make our final revenue estimate more conservative.

So we have $29M in annual revenue on an average of 3.4M searches per month in 2021.

Now for the current search traffic volume:

• Forbes Advisor =  20.6 search visits/month
• Forbes Home Improvement = 2.9 million search visits/month
• Forbes Health = 3.8 million search visits/month
• Forbes Betting = 400K searches/month

Total affiliate traffic is currently about 27.7M searches per month.

If Forbes revenue has scaled proportionally with traffic, revenue will have also grown to $236M in annual revenue.

I actually believe the real revenue is a lot higher than this:

• As search rankings improve, the value of each visitor increases. You get a larger percentage of buyers at rank #1 than you do at rank #5. When traffic grows, ALL your metrics improve (conversions, click-through rates, value per click, etc). Revenue is always higher than you expect once you go through a major traffic growth spurt.
• When you have a ton of traffic, you can squeeze your advertisers for higher commissions. A company might start out by paying you $200 for each new customer but when you have a ton of traffic, you can get $400 per customer from them. Doubling payouts from partners is very common.
• I almost missed the Forbes Betting affiliate site. And I know their team is going after other categories (like travel, automotive, and real estate). I have probably missed a few other categories that are starting to get traction and generate their own revenue.

My gut instinct estimate is that Forbes is doing $300-400M in annual revenue right now. And I’m extremely confident that they’re in the 9 digits.

No wonder they’re trying to buy all of Forbes.

Why Is Parasite SEO Even a Problem?

Parasite SEO is when a company abuses the domain of another company. They set up a subfolder or subdomain, then post a ton of content trying to rank on Google. Wow does that sound exactly like Forbes Marketplace.

Well, Google itself has said it’s a problem:

That’s a screenshot from Google’s own spam policies.

The key part: “third-party pages are published with little or no first-party oversight or involvement.” I would classify Forbes Marketplace as a third-party. It’s a separate business and Forbes only owns 40% of it.

As for oversight, Forbes only has 2 board seats. And really it only has one. It claims it has a second but that’s just the majority shareholder of Forbes. That individual is looking out for their own interests, not Forbes. But fine, we’ll call it 2 board seats.

I count at least 2 other major investors in Forbes Marketplace: Namit Merchant, and Shaifali Sharma. Plus the CEO usually gets a board seat (Ash Rahimi). So we have 2-3 other board seats that Forbes does not control.

Do any of these folks have backgrounds at Forbes? Nope. The one person that worked at Forbes previously was Achir Kalra and he has since left Forbes Marketplace. Not a whole lot of Forbes DNA in Forbes Marketplace.

To top it off, Forbes Marketplace has gotten so big and powerful that it’s trying to buy all of Forbes. Would that happen if Forbes was actually in control?

To me, Forbes Marketplace looks like a completely different company where Forbes is a minority shareholder.

I’d also argue that the Forbes affiliate content is “independent of a host site’s main purpose or produced without close oversight”:

• All the affiliate sites are set up in subfolders with completely different infrastructure. It’s clear that Forbes Marketplace is using its own section of forbes.com to do whatever it wants.
• Forbes Marketplace has pushed HARD into health, home improvement, and sports betting. How in the fuck is that related to the core website of business?
• When you’re making this much money, you stop asking questions. There’s no way that the Forbes editorial team is putting the brakes on anything when there’s hundreds of millions to be made every year.
• Forbes Marketplace is deliberating obfuscating who’s running the show by using the Forbes Advisor brand. It requires real digging to figure out who’s actually running the affiliate program. This was deliberate.

But maybe the Forbes Marketplace team is doing the right thing on their own? Real experts and great content?

Are any of us naive enough to believe that Forbes Marketplace has gone from nothing to 27.7M searches per month in less than 5 years while also having the expertise to truly help people across such diverse topics as credit cards, roaches, CBD gummies, and sports betting? It took Nerdwallet 15 years to do that in one category. We’re supposed to believe that Forbes can do it in at least 4 categories within 5 years? There’s no feasible way to build a team with genuine expertise that fast.

No way in hell. Forbes Marketplace is a Google heist of the highest order. It’s generic, thin content with a single goal: rank to generate affiliate revenue.

And Google has lapped their shit up.

Even Forbes Itself Can’t Be Trusted

Maybe you think I’m being too cynical. Maybe Forbes does have oversight of all the affiliate stuff.

But can we even trust Forbes itself?

Forbes was caught spoofing ad inventory. They created a new domain (www3.forbes.com), republished articles from Forbes.com, and then increased the ads in each article from 7sh to 150. And they billed their advertisers for it.

Then a bunch of agencies unknowingly bought ads from this shit alternate site for their own clients.

This went on for YEARS and they didn’t take down the spam domain until AFTER they were caught. It was theft via ad spend. Plain and simple.

This, my faithful reader, is the lauded company that Google has decided to trust above all other companies.

The Real Villain: Google

I don’t wish any ill will towards the Forbes Marketplace team.

The SEO in me respects what they’ve done. They partnered with the ideal domain, then caught a massive boom in Google as Google rolled out an extinction-level event in the SEO world while boosting massive media sites above all others (along with Reddit). And Forbes Marketplace executed perfectly. At scale.

Perfect execution and a once-in-a-lifetime lucky break.

I’m impressed. Even a little jealous.

And at the end of the day, all their employees are just doing their jobs.

But holy fuck do I have a grudge with Google.

Google has decided that Forbes is the authority in everything. Credit cards, cockroach removal, and getting too high from gummies. Forbes is now the dominant authority in damn near everything.

And that is fucking absurd.

This is not a simple mistake at this point. This was absurd back in 2022. I watch a ton of B2B search terms closely and that’s when Forbes started appearing EVERYwhere.

At the time, I thought to myself: “alright, this is getting out of hand, Google has to pair this back a bit.”

Since then, Forbes Marketplace has rolled out entire divisions to dominate the health, home, and sports categories in Google. With plans to keep going. And they’re winning. They’ll keep winning until Google gets off their ass.

I know a lot of folks in the SEO industry. Not one person thinks this is normal or okay. I even heard from a source that I deeply trust that Google employees were complaining about Forbes internally. That was two years ago.

Since then? Not a goddamn thing has changed.

Instead Google continues to unleash their HCU algorithm to nuke niche and small publishers.

The worst part about this? I suspect that all this insanity isn’t even a deliberate decision by Google. I believe the search ranking has gotten away from them. That Google isn’t in control of their own rankings or algorithms anymore. Too many subpar leaders in positions with way too much power, way too much complexity in the SERPs, and AI as a massive distraction for the entire search team.

It’s a perfect recipe for shipping shit.

And now we all have to wade through that shit every day.

UPDATES

After this post went viral, I got a lot of additional information. And there were a few minor facts that I got wrong. I’ve since corrected these in the post above:

• I got the wrong TC. I originally thought TC was Tom Callahan, the current CFO of Marketplace Holdings/Forbes Marketplace. I’ve had several people tell me that TC is actually TC Yam, the Chairman of Integrated Capital. I believe this is the same Integrated Whale Media Investments that owns Forbes.
• Also reduced the number of non-Forbes board seats that I speculated on since Tom Callahan isn’t one of the investors. TC is the investor that’s also an owner of Forbes. He’s one of the two Forbes board seats.
• Someone reached out and said I got the marriage of Shaifali and Achir slightly wrong. Apparently, there was another divorce and they’re now married. I don’t know and I’ve removed this from the post since it doesn’t really matter.
• Fixed a few typos.

About a week after I published this post, Axios reported that Koch Inc. private equity arm is trying to buy Forbes. Achir Kalra also responded to one of my LinkedIn posts and had this to say when I asked him about the Marketplace buyout of Forbes:

My only source about the buyout is Achir Kalra so I have to defer to his description. It does sound like a deal of some kind was in play at some point but that deal is now dead.

The other thing I’ll add is that I’ve gotten a lot of notes from former employees. And a current employee responded on this thread of Hacker News. Across all the feedback I’ve gotten, I’ve gotten the impression that I got the core story right.

I’ve done a follow up to this post on how I believe Forbes Marketplace is connected to CNN and USA Today.

The post Forbes Marketplace: The Parasite SEO Company Trying to Devour Its Host appeared first on Lars Lofgren.