I recently spent a few days in new york. Philadelphia and new jersey, and got to meet with great friends. At consulting firms. One conversation in particular stuck with me regarding the hardest project they’d worked. On in the last few years. It got me thinking that I should share a few of my most. Challenging seo projects, and see if the community had stories they could share, too. I learned a lot in my short chat on the subject. And I’m hopeful that will translate here on the web, too.

Thus, my top 3 “Toughest” seo projects over the last decade were

It’s hard to believe in 2011, but in 2005, moz really did have a client who’s entire goal was increasing toolbar pagerank. He was a very wealthy Chinese Malaysia Phone Number List individual who fretted over his pagerank score in comparison to a rival’s organization in the same sphere. We were able to grow it from 6 to 8 with mostly white hat stuff (yes, even I used to dabble with link buying back in the day), but when he continued pressing for a pagerank 9, we gave up and sent him to a link broker. We provided very stern, very aggressive warnings that this could hurt his traffic or even make google penalize the pagerank score, but he wanted all the options and did end up spending a small fortune on paid links.

The “Breaking out of the sandbox

One of my first few seo consulting clients, starting in 2003, was a commercial lender in seattle. I did very old school seo for them (not knowing any better, and really learning the practice as I went along), jamming anchor text and links wherever EF Leads I could. Unfortunately, this was right around the time of google’s “Sandbox effect,” which a googler explained to me once as “An artifact of something else we created.” for nearly 18 months, I fought against the sandbox, earning #1 rankings for nearly every term in msn search and yahoo! (which, at the time, had much more significant market share), but page 10+ on google. Then, suddenly, one morning, we were .