I was facing legal action and possibly jail when my genius guerrilla marketing tactic backfired.

A couple of years ago I tried manipulating Google suggest. I structured a search query and harvested hundreds of Australian bank accounts. We made a batch file and were going to send one cent to everyone’s account.

The result was that business owners, bookkeepers, accountants or anyone else looking at online or printed bank statements would use the transaction description as a search query in Google to see where this one cent was coming from. It was not against the law to send people money, however, one of the accounts we sent money to was a trust account and they have strict accountability rules.

I got a call from a concerned manager from Commonwealth Bank of Australia investigating my case which looked like we were trying to probe bank accounts to see if we can steal their money later.

Later that week I received a letter from one of the companies who I’ve sent one cent requesting my bank details so they can return it to me. Apparently they lost $700 in staff and admin time trying to figure out what was going on.

They returned one cent back to us and decided not to take legal action. A close-call.

I think it was probably the first wave of Google unnatural link warnings that were sent out in July 2012. A client who had in the past been pretty aggressive with paid links for the previous 7-8 years received one and it was the first message any client had ever received from Google.

You may remember back then, that Google performed a turn-around and said the new warnings were not necessarily a problem, which was all a bit odd. It actually had no impact on performance at all, but it did convince us to help clean up their historic link profile to be sure. Of course, now they are a bit more commonplace!

Outside of having a site banned for cloaking once, which was enlightening more than terrifying since that client luckily did not need Google for traffic, the scariest SEO moment I’ve ever had is when one of my link builders got into a huge email fight with a webmaster who turned out to work for one of the most powerful media moguls in the country.
She was very difficult and he kind of lost his temper with her and I got called out for it of course. She and I traded emails and worked it out but it was terrifying. It’s now kind of amusing when I think back on it but at the time I was absolutely petrified as nothing like that had ever happened. It really goes to show you that you never know who someone is connected to so even though you might want to flip out and call someone a bad name, you have to just keep it together and let it go.

That’s easy. While at InsiderPages.com, I had just started figuring out SEO. Just by doing simple things such as updating title tags, we were able to grow our organic traffic by about 1.5 million uniques almost overnight. So we kept trying stuff and kept growing the traffic, until one day it dropped like a rock down to almost zero. I had no idea what was going on. I guess I didn’t know what I didn’t know. It was quite scary because the longer the problem dragged on, the more likely it was that the company would go out of business. I ended up finding a SEO consultant – they were a bit harder to find in those days – who pointed out that the following line in our /robots.txt might be a problem:Disallow: /

#Doh!

So the scariest thing for me in SEO, which is still the scariest thing today, is not knowing what you don’t know.

Definitely penguin 1.0, that completely wiped out my entire operation. Over a million dollars in revenue lost overnight. The way I used to check ranks back then almost like I knew it was coming, first thing every morning. I’ll never forget that morning after the rollout, complete devastation. 95% of my portfolio got dropped, was insaneeeee. From hero to zero…

My scariest SEO moment is when the original iteration of Penguin hit. I remember it vividly occurring during a Blueglass conference – I basically slumped against a wall and spent six really depressing hours trying to diagnose exactly what was going on, as I imagine a lot of others were as well. No doubt that moment created a lot of fears for SEOs everywhere, but the main thing that really made then subside is this was an issue hitting a lot of people, not just the sites I was working on. Very few people saw it coming, at least to that degree.

I have always gone into every SEO job I work on knowing I have no control in the long run so I tend not to get too worked up over anything search engine related. Like I always say, it’s Google’s world, we just live here.

That’s not to say I haven’t lost sleep over this job. My biggest stomach twister usually happens right before I step on stage and give a speech. I have done over 100 SMX and SES sessions through the years and I still get nervous. Like voice shaking, hand sweaty, ate-some-bad-Halloween-candy nervous! It lasts about 10 seconds and then I’m over it, usually because I can fixate on someone in the audience and pretend I’m speaking directly to them.

It was around November of 2013. I had excitedly emailed a client recommending they install the new (at that time) Universal Analytics. This would, of course, get them some useful demographic info. Their developer went ahead and installed the new code.

He wrote back saying it was complete, and I went on with my day, excited to check in later and start getting some of that great data. Except the problem was (I am ashamed to admit) a few weeks went by before I checked in with their analytics again. (I had been following rankings, and checked Webmaster Tools a few times, and sadly there’s no excuse but I let it slip.)

When I did finally log in to analytics a few weeks later, my heart sank. The site appeared to have taken a massive drop in traffic. I quickly began segmenting everything, checked rankings. I couldn’t figure it out.

I then noticed the blog had not been hit. And then it hit me. The blog is a separate install of WordPress. The Universal Analytics code had not been installed correctly on the main site. In other words – we lost all analytics data for that few week period.

You can see a screenshot of this oversight here:

It’s the worst mistake I’ve made by far. One that I’m not afraid to admit, because I’m happy to say it will never (and has never) happened again. Lesson learned.

There have been a few scary moments but one that immediately comes to mind is a client that we were doing some SEO and content marketing for last year.

The client outsourced their website management to a local company who came highly recommended. Their role was to take care of backing up the website, maintaining it, keeping everything up to date, etc.

We spent around 6-8 months working closely with the client on developing engaging content for their blog.

Then one day I tried to load the blog and it was not there.

It turned out that this local agency migrated the client’s website to a new web host without taking a complete backup or letting anyone else know and in turn “forgot” to migrate the WordPress database.

On the same day, they closed the old hosting account and all the data was immediately deleted. Rankings nose-dived.

It was a Friday morning and I was on my way to the airport. I’d been looking forward to this trip for quite a while, my first vacation in a few years. As I was boarding the plane, I got a text message from our largest client. All it said was: 911. Call me.

It was April 27, 2012. Yes, the day Penguin 1.0 hit. I will never forget this day. It was also the day we closed the deal on a brand new fixer upper house.

As soon as I landed in New York City, I headed straight to the hotel and pulled out my computer to figure out what this 60% loss of organic traffic meant. And truth be told, I hardly left the hotel during my “vacation”.

I ran link reports, analyzed backlinks, read every single post people were sharing about Penguin. Remember, it was D day. No one really knew what Penguin was all about. We didn’t know what types of links it was targeting, or how it functioned. This was a brand new beast that we knew nothing about.

Even though the penalty wasn’t our fault (it was due to links built by a previous SEOs), we still took the rap, and the client cancelled. So there I was with a brand new house that I couldn’t even move into because it needed too much work, and no income.

So, April 27th, the advent of Penguin, is definitely one of the scariest moments of my 15-year long SEO career, in truth, of my life!

The scariest moment was when I read this post on Moz by Carson Ward. I had been using Build My Rank on some sites, but trying to do it with a more “white-hat” approach (Yup, I was pretty much fooling myself). It was a different time then, and I was being extraordinarily lazy – but that damn network worked incredibly well.

So when I read the post about (to my knowledge) the first GWT notice on this problem, of which Google was just starting their epic all-out-war on linkspam, I quickly jumped into my own GWT account. Sure enough I had the same exact notice.

Granted I had burned my own personal experiment sites doing black hat things (I believe most well-rounded SEOs should have a playground), but this was the first time it happened to a client’s site. It was a giant wake-up call that luckily ended favorably, but definitely kept me up a few nights.

The second scariest moment was when I accidentally deleted a few old clients’ Google Analytics profiles thinking I was just removing my particular access. Thankfully Google’s AdWords support was able to save my ass. Less SEO related I guess, but equally stupid!

Over the years, I’ve had a few SEO moments that made me lose sleep. On one site I was working on, I stumbled upon a buried subdomain targeting a major keyword. No big deal, right? Ok, then why are my Spidey-senses tingling?

I dug deeper and quickly discovered thousands of low-quality pages with keyword variations and city names getting injected into placeholders in the poorly spun content. I freaked out at the scope and intent of this spammy subdomain and sounded the alarms.

Despite the SEO risks, this subdomain was driving too much revenue to just take down. It was working but for how long? So we spent a few months rewriting content and consolidating pages to minimize the footprint.

Discovering this SEO headache led to an initial rush of pure fear followed by months of looking over my shoulder, nervously waiting for the spam police to show up and burn everything to the ground.

I’d say my scariest SEO moment, was when a friend of a friend (let’s call him Ted) asked me to review an SEO audit his company just received. Ted’s company was an older (and very profitable) industry with limited digital experience, so he just wanted another set of eyes on it. What I saw after reviewing the first few pages was terrifying and depressing at the same time.

The audit was full of blatant lies, like “Google Adwords has a minimum monthly spend requirement of $20,000”, “it’s impossible to gain SEO value without rebuilding the entire site”, and my personal favorite “You can pay $X to most search engines and get a top ranking in organic listings.” It became obvious that the “agency” was trying to take advantage of this companies lack of digital expertise and get as much money out of them as possible.

The scariest part… Ted brought up his worries about the proposal and suggested they get another opinion. He was let go soon after for “sharing confidential information” (the audit itself). The company then moved forward with the agency’s plan.

My scariest moment came in September 2012 when Google decided to go after EMD. While most people got hit by the first Penguin update, I was happy about! Because sites that had spammed their way to the top for some of my niches were penalised and this meant me moving up in SERPs. My joy was short-lived with the EMD update though as over 96% of my sites and niche affiliate sites took the hit!

Even now, I still take EMD with a pinch of salt when launching a new project since building brand name using EMD can push you into the penguin anchor over optimisation.

I can think of a few scary moments in SEO, ranging from rankings to client relationships. I’ve never experienced the ultimate scare of penalization though. I do a lot of testing with my own sites which inevitability sees ups and downs, which can be scary even if they are not monetized.
A major milestone (and scary moment) was getting my first big client some years ago. Although I was highly educated in marketing and SEO, I was completely inexperienced when it came to managing client communications and the “account representative” side of the job. This was scary because the communication can make or break the entire business relationship.

Other scary moments include informing new clients that their old “SEO provider” screwed up their website and was paid for it. Especially when digging into link profiles. This is scary because you don’t want to talk badly about another professional in your field. How professional is that!?

I did really want to think of something funny but looking back at this year… can I really do that?

My scariest moment was not my own site penalty (which I could foresee 3 years back). The scariest moment was that it affected many other people, those who never meant anything bad and simply were the part of the community. That’s something I lost sleep over…

I believe it’s only fair when you get affected for your beliefs and actions… It’s sad that someone else may get affected under way.

On the positive side, none of our community members ever voiced their anger. I’ve heard nothing but support and many of those people were awesome enough to stick with me and my further projects. As much as that scary moment affected me, that support was the best part of the year as well!

More in this here: I APOLOGIZE TO OUR COMMUNITY FOR BEING TRANSPARENT #MYBLOGGUEST

It was when someone was impersonating me (I’m not sure if it’s still going on). An anonymous guy was using my brand image to land some big clients by emailing various industry people like ‘Chris Dyson’ and offering links from high authority sites such as Moz for $200 onwards. Before it start hurting more, I decided to write a blog post to let everyone know about my stand. I never thought things like this can happen but being in the vast online industry, anything is possible.

I think the scariest things to happen are events you haven’t anticipated. Google updates & the overnight shift of what’s considered white to grey and grey to black can be extremely frustrating and immediately impact on existing workflow and whilst you don’t always know when to expect them, you know they’ll happen.

Scary for me is finding out a client side developer you’re working alongside has de-indexed a site knowing the long-term potential impact it might have. The scariest thing I can think of personally is when SEO Book wouldn’t let me login. It’s an amazing community of very clever people. I thought they’d kicked me out for being a miserable Scottish git but was thankfully just a technical glitch

On a purely tactical basis it would probably be a challenge laid down by a major brand we had just started working with. They had been hit by a significant manual penalty and had come to us looking to kickstart a ‘content-led’ strategy. Before we could do that, however, we were given seven days to ‘get the out of the penalty’. We knew how important that tasks was as it came from the CEO of the business and would affect what was reported to the City so it was a big deal for the entire team.

Thankfully the technical team worked night and day for the first 24 hours to extract a link removal list (manually) and they then passed that across to our outreach team who expertly began manually requesting removal. Around 48 hours later we then compiled the reconsideration, disavowed those domains we couldn’t manually remove and waited. The revoke came through with about 12 hours to spare!.

As I also own an agency, I would say that there are macro experiences that have been scarier – like hiring our first ever employee or having to make big calls on more heavyweight management hires. Taking on big property leases and opening our London offices are also right up there!

As far as I remember, the scariest moment that I have experienced in the search industry was having print-friendly version of indexed pages on one of our websites. This website is about real estate news in an English speaking country in North America. The website has active journalists posting articles 5 days a week and it also has a forum section where its loyal users could create a page when they start new topics.

I first thought that it was a good opportunity to be promoting this type of website for several reasons:

• Content driven focused
• Recognized content publisher in its industry market
• Has a high branding authority
• The website earns it links from other related blogs and news sites

But then I noticed when I checked the year comparison of traffic that the website acquired to see if the website performed well versus the previous year, I got this result from the analytics.