Google’s de-indexing

I swore I wouldn't let Google make us stop hustlin'. But Rand was right. Within two months, our entire network of 5,000+ blogs -- for which we paid more than $80,000 -- was de-indexed, dead, simply kaput. Our $100k/mo. business was ruined.

However, I remained defiant. I still believed that making money online would be easy. I thought I could just make some minor adjustments to our strategy and keep on banging out new successful products.

I funneled more than $100,000 into various new link schemes, each one more "white hat"-seeming than the next.

Nothing worked for long. Google’s de-indexing, plus Panda and Penguin, were just too much of a challenge for us. I would put in three months of work, get four months of sales, and either almost break even or have a huge deficit.

I felt discouraged and depressed. I tried to buy myself some fancy clothes and toys to feel better about myself. I immersed myself in a shallow relationship with a model who would end up being Miss Universe China 2014. I took weekly hiking trips with my friends in the hills of Beijing on psychedelic mushrooms.

I was an empty shell of a human being, lost with no sense of purpose or what to do with my future. With anxiety levels at an all-time high, I could only sleep 2-3 hours a night. Most people I met at that time felt uneasy around me.

And I wasn't the only one having trouble adapting to the post-de-indexing world. The Google-hating spammers reached their official low-point when SEOnitro (another public blog network) tried to start a class action lawsuit against Google for intentionally doing harm to many “competing businesses."

Seriously guys? That's like spray painting your business's phone number on someone else's building, then trying to sue them when they paint over it.