Blackhat SEO – Esrun

About Esrun

I’m known online and in the SEO industry as Esrun. I work full time for a London based search marketing agency.I work as a freelance SEO/outsourcing provider.

I have a positive reputation in on and off-page SEO, blackhat SEO (negative SEO, spam link generation etc) and general online shenanigans.

While I’m not working for the man (kidding) I build and rank my own websites, have fun gaming websites for traffic and occasionally do freelance coding and SEO.

Introduction to computers

Even before I had access to the internet I was addicted to computers. I’d play computer games, code simple applications or games in BASIC and generally just fiddle with them until they broke and I’d have to reinstall everything.

I found the internet!

When I finally got on the internet, there wasn’t really that much to see or do. But it didn’t matter, I loved it. I was using a low speed dialup modem and paying per minute. I was young and didn’t have much money so I was always on the lookout for free internet promotions. With a combination of AOL trials and ‘ad sponsored free internet’ I spent most of my time tying up the phone line.

It wasn’t long before I started making my own websites in Netscape Composer. The sites didn’t really have a point but they were online, visible to the world, that’s all that mattered. For the next year or two I didn’t really make much use of the internet. I was on it every day but I wasn’t really doing anything worth while.

AOL hack/crack/spam Scene

Eventually I got into the AOL chat scene. It wasn’t long before I was hanging out in private hacker/cracker/spammer rooms and getting tied in with a crew. We’d spend our days looking for exploits to take over other peoples accounts, kick them offline, take over control of chat rooms and general naughtiness. At the start, it wasn’t about the money, it was just about doing things that other people couldn’t and getting some bragging rights.

It wasn’t too long before we were building botnets and coding trojans in Visual Basic (VB). A few of us had our own websites punting software and tips, mostly related to AOL. Using our exploits and botnet to avoid rate limits, we began spamming chat rooms and AOL emails. It wasn’t long before we realised we could be making money by promoting products or services.

Moving from client side applications to server side

As time went on, the crew gradually got smaller and smaller as people moved on to regular day jobs. I realised the power of server side applications and began moving away from client side (VB). I could hit a password form 90 times a minute on my internet connection by using a client side application but if I coded it in PHP and put it on a remote server, I could hit that same form 900 times a minute.

I wanted to start earning money online. But I needed a way to set myself apart from everyone else, to get noticed. I began targeting specific forums looking for work. I’d scrape lists of usernames and then automate sending them private messages offering my services. It wasn’t long before I was getting paid big bucks to do freelance work.

Becoming a blackhat SEO

Eventually I got bored of working alone. I missed the days of being part of a crew so I started to seek out forums which matched what I was looking for. I’d played around with some basic SEO but it really wasn’t that big at the time. After joining a few seo forums, I realised that it’s really a growing industry and there’s a real niche for blackhats. I started creating and releasing tools and building up my online reputation.

I got a real job – selling insurance!

Sitting at home, playing around on the internet all day, is a pretty sad life. I looked for a day job and joined an Insurance brokers as a sales man. 99% of our business came from the internet, traffic generated from Google Adwords. I absolutely loved my job, finding something that someone needed and convincing them that we were the right people to use. I’d always go the extra mile for the customer, searching prices with insurers that can’t automatically give us a rates, calling insurers directly to get them to price match another company. Selling insurance was a challenge and I was good at it!

After a few months of being with the company, I built up a good relationship with the owners and started putting together improvements for the website. Before long my days were split 50/50 between sales and working on the website. We were already ahead of a lot of other insurance brokers at the time. We had a decent website, we let people submit details for a quote online which would get emailed to us and we’d call them back within 24 hours with a quote. We weren’t a drone call center, we loved insurance and we loved selling it.

As more of my time was being spent on SEO, we setup a new company specifically for this, with me as one of the directors. My time was now 100% dedicated on improving the website, adding features that set us apart from other brokers and increasing our position in the search engines. Within a year I’d gone from a junior insurance salesman to a director of a company with my own office. Times were good but there were still a lot of things we needed to work on. We were spending a huge amount of money on Google Adwords each month. I focussed on increasing traffic while decreasing our Adwords costs.

I knew what we needed to do next. Instant online quotes. Something that hardly any broker was able to do at the time. Insurance companies were very wary about this, it took a lot of convincing. They’re worried of customers complaining about incorrect quotes, about competitors stealing rates, about us leaking rates and a million other concerns. I’d only been in the Insurance industry for a year and a half and I was attending meetings with CEOs of some of the largest Insurance companies in the world, explaining how our quote system would work.

Eventually we convinced some insurers to allow us to provide instant online quotes and even allow us to accept payment online and issue the insurance documents instantly.

I was approached by a startup SEO agency

Pretty soon my online reputation was quite substantial. I was approached by a well known SEO who told me about a company he was setting up with some other reputable people. As much as I loved what I was doing, I knew it was time to move on and join other people who have the same passion for the internet as me. I accepted the offer and joined the company.

At the beginning, the company didn’t have much direction. We had no office and no real plan.. we just had a lot of talented people. Everyone had their own part to play in the formation of the company and without that perfect mix, it could never have worked. While there was a mixture of dedicated technical and SEO people, there was only one person who had real managerial experience, our leader. Fortunately he had the patience and dedication to get the company moving in the right direction.

Within a month or so we’d moved into an office. We had no furniture and no fixed line internet. But we had determination, a floor and 3g dongles. We were on our way. With the staff line up we had, our leader had no problem signing up clients. The furniture arrived within a week or two and suddenly things were getting busy. Every couple of months we were bringing in more people, more furniture. Now the company has offices worldwide and a selection of blue chip clients.

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