The SEO Gold Rush: My Journey Through Joomla, Link Farms, and the First Taste of Digital Profit (Part 5)
The year is 2007. I’m in Kyiv with enough money for exactly one month’s rent. My assets consist of a few small embroidery orders and an unwavering belief that the internet is the future. I opened a job search website and placed my bet on two emerging fields: “designer” and the mysterious but alluring “SEO specialist.” A few days later, the phone rang. It was an invitation for an interview for a full-time SEO position. I had no idea what to expect, but I felt this was my chance.
Trial by Fire: My First SEO Job
The atmosphere of the early digital market was unique. E-commerce in Ukraine was just being born. People were still afraid to enter their credit card details online, and “nationwide delivery” sounded like science fiction. In the US, Amazon was already a giant, but here, people still trusted paper catalogs more. It was a time of transition and opportunity.
At the interview for a job at an online children’s goods store, no one tested my skills, because no one, including the employers, really knew what SEO was. They took my word for it. My mission was simple: get the site to the top of the search results. I dove headfirst into Yandex.Wordstat, analyzing competitors, and manually counting keyword density. It was true “trench warfare” SEO.
“With a zero budget for paid links, I had to get creative. I turned to a guerilla tactic: mommy forums. I would register, participate in discussions, share advice, and then, after building some trust, subtly create topics where I could casually mention our store. It worked. We got traffic. We got calls. Within a year, the company grew from one sales manager to three. I saw the direct result of my work, and the feeling was incredible.”
The Fork in the Road: A Partnership and a New CMS
In parallel with my day job, I met someone who would change my entire trajectory. We didn’t meet in a fancy cafe; we met on the street. He didn’t offer me a salary; he offered a partnership. “Let’s build websites together,” he said. He was the one who gave me the initial advice for my SEO interview, which helped me land that job.
He opened a new door for me. Until then, my experience was with basic HTML and the painfully rigid OS Commerce engine at my job, where I’d wait weeks for the programmer to make a single change. My new partner introduced me to something different. I typed `/administrator` after a domain name, entered a login and password, and a control panel opened up that was a world apart from anything I’d seen before.
It was Joomla 1.0. It was intuitive, flexible, and powerful. With my partner’s guidance, I learned its logic within a week. The days of begging a developer to add a meta tag field were over. I could now build, manage, and optimize an entire site myself.
Building a (Small) Empire of Links
Our business model was a product of its time—the “Wild West” era of SEO. The goal was simple: create dozens of thematic websites, pump up their search engine metrics (TIC from Yandex and PR from Google), and sell links on them through exchanges like Sape. We weren’t chasing user traffic; we were chasing authority metrics.
It was a gold rush. The income started small, maybe $20-30 a month, but it grew steadily. Within a few years, it reached over $800 in a good month. The formula was addictive: more sites and higher SEO scores meant higher prices for links. For several years after leaving my day job, this link-selling business was my primary source of income.
The Growing Pains: When the Gold Rush Turns to a Grind
But “easy” money comes with its own set of problems. Our small empire began to show cracks.
The Server Overload
Our hosting provider started sending “love letters.” Our 25+ sites, all running on a single shared hosting account, were generating so much database load that they were slowing down other websites on the same server. We were constantly being pushed to upgrade to more expensive plans, eating into our profits.
The Inevitable Hack
Then, the inevitable happened. We were hacked. Not just one site—the entire server was compromised. All 25 sites were infected. Our income from link sales plummeted overnight. What followed was a baptism by fire: weeks of cleaning malicious code, hunting for vulnerabilities, and painstakingly restoring sites from the ashes, all while trying not to lose our precious search engine rankings. It was an incredible stress test that taught me more about website security than any course could.
The Writing on the Wall
At the same time, the news from the search engines was getting ominous. The “link bubble,” we realized, was about to burst. In our conversations, two new acronyms emerged: “GS” (a Russian acronym for “Sh*t Site,” made for selling links) and “SDCH” (“Site aDapted for CHristian-people,” meaning “a site made for humans”). We understood that the future was in quality, unique content, not in automated link farms.
The End of an Era
The “Wild West” of SEO was coming to an end. That period gave me invaluable experience: I learned how to generate profit online, how to handle technical catastrophes, and, most importantly, I learned the fundamental difference between a short-term tactic and a long-term strategy. This lesson would become the foundation for the next, far more meaningful chapter of my career.
In parallel, I began exploring the world of e-commerce, discovering a component for Joomla called VirtueMart. I built my first online store… but that is the beginning of a different story.
To be continued in Part 6…