Jacky Chou's SEO Survival Playbook: Manipulating Google's Algorithm for a Living

Jacky Chou built his income gaming Google's algorithm.

At his peak, he pulled $550,000/month from affiliate partnerships with legacy media properties. His local SEO software launched and hit $34,000/month in 6 weeks. A private community of SEOs pay monthly to access his Slack channel and to watch his daily YouTube videos.

Then Google came after him personally. They spent a year investigating his network, then wiped every asset connected to his name. That's why the people manipulating the algorithms don't want to talk about it as manual penalties exist.

His affiliate revenue collapsed from $550K monthly to roughly $16K monthly. His mother's vegan blog—once earning $5K per month in display ads—dropped 60 to 70 percent year over year.

Jacky accepted it as part of the business: "I game the algo for a living, so it's bound to happen."

How Private Labeling's Pain Tolerance Led Him to Search Traffic Goldmine

Jacky started in e-commerce before discovering SEO offered better economics and lower operational pain.

Private labeling demanded constant supplier negotiations, inventory management, and razor-thin margins. Jacky swears he'll never return to it as the physical logistics wore him down.

SEO presented a different model: build authority once, monetize repeatedly, avoid warehouses and shipments entirely.

His early experiments included a vegan recipe blog for his mother that climbed to $5,000/month from display ads at its peak. That blog still earns approximately $2,000/month today despite algorithm hammering.

The shift taught him that digital assets could generate passive income without the operational nightmares that plagued product businesses. Search traffic became his core competency.

The 50% Revenue Collapse after Google Investigation

Jacky's current revenue streams span local SEO software, display ads, a private community, agency work, and Amazon affiliate income.

His numbers from May 2025:

• Local SEO software: $34,000/month (launched just six weeks prior)

• Display ads: roughly $30,000/month via network

• Private community of local SEOs: converting YouTube viewers who trust him

Despite these wins, he reports being down approximately 50% year-over-year across his SEO business. The vegan blog dropped 60 to 70% in the same period.

A year ago, Google conducted what Jacky describes as a personal investigation and removed all accounts linked to him. The wipeout reshaped his entire revenue model overnight.

Most SEOs would panic. Jacky pivoted.

The Rank and Rent Strategy Paying $50K + 50% Commission on Legacy Domains

Before the Google purge, Jacky carved out his highest-margin play through legacy media partnerships.

His approach: partner with dying local newspapers that held decades of domain authority. Sites like Vancouver Sun had trust but declining revenue.

He proposed a deal—let him publish supplement and affiliate content on their domains in exchange for revenue share. The articles ranked instantly because Google trusted the parent domain.

Jacky monetized placements by reaching out to brands directly. Supplement companies paid for sponsored "rank-and-rent" slots on high-ranking articles.

The highest placement he secured: $50,000 per month plus 50% commission.

Keywords in the supplement space—"best protein powder" and similar—commanded those premiums because competition was brutal and conversion rates were high.

At peak, his affiliate revenue hit $550,000/monthly. Today that figure sits at $16,000-$17,000/month.

The collapse came when Google's algorithm updates and manual actions wiped the domains from the index. Jacky notes the SEO industry demands constant pivoting because market conditions shift with every core update.

How Rank-and-Rent Works in Tier-2 Cities with Google My Business

The rank-and-rent model follows a simple pattern:

Sign a client for recurring fees (Jacky charges $2,000), then fund paid ads to generate immediate leads while organic rankings mature. Once the site ranks, scale back ad spend and collect margin on organic traffic.

The linchpin: verifying a Google My Business location.

In tier-2 and tier-3 cities, a verified listing can trigger call flow within days. Jacky's friend operates 30 to 500 Google My Business listings across various niches and earns $300-$500 daily by routing calls through networks like Ringba.

Those networks pay $19 to $23 per qualified call. The operator avoids client fulfillment entirely.

The Pay-Per-Call Operators Spending $100K Daily on Lead Generation

Jacky finds pay-per-call to be one of the most lucrative corners of performance marketing—if you have the capital.

Operators run ads on Meta, TikTok, and Google, driving traffic to quiz landers or ring trees that route calls to buyers in real time. Networks like Ringba handle tracking and payout distribution.

The scale: operators spending $100,000 to $200,000 daily on ad spend in verticals like debt consolidation, Medicare, auto insurance, and final expense leads.

A successful campaign yields approximately 20% net margins—translating to $20,000 in daily profit on 6-figure spend.

Some affiliates scale individual offers to half a million dollars monthly when markets are hot.

Jacky's friend Carlos built an entire business around brokering traffic. He buys media, routes it through his network, and sells calls to multiple buyers who bid in real time.

The model requires constant optimization because payouts fluctuate and compliance rules shift. But the upside dwarfs traditional SEO margins when executed at scale.

The Info-Coaching Model and the 92% Who Never Log In

Jacky describes info-coaching as a 2-tier ascension funnel:

Tier 1: Low-ticket community priced between $50 and $300 per month Tier 2: High-ticket one-on-one or group coaching ranging from $5,000 to $25,000

His own community Advise peaked at $100,000 monthly with roughly 20,000 members on Slack. The group functions as a "cool kids club" where members share tactics openly—rare in the guarded SEO world. It is now making $30,000 per month.

Tony Robbins once claimed a statistic that 92% of course buyers never log in. 90% of info-coaching purchasers fail to take action post-purchase.

Coaching retention improves outcomes because clients attend one-on-one calls twice weekly and receive direct accountability. The difference between info (login access) and coaching (implementation support) determines whether buyers actually execute.

Jacky hesitates to launch his own high-ticket offer despite the demand. He worries about underdelivering if he charges $10,000 and clients don't extract value. He rather loves performance-based consulting—taking a percentage of client profit instead of flat fees.

He also considers running his local SEO software at break-even and upselling info-coaching on the back end, mirroring the playbook used by Hyros (by Alex Becker) and similar tools.

Inside Iman's London Event: How Info Coaches Hit 84% Margins at Scale

Jacky recently attended an event in London hosted by Iman, known for building an organic-driven info-coaching empire with minimal paid ads and global talent achieving 80 percent margins.

William Brown, another attendee, reportedly runs at 84% margins while generating $500,000 monthly.

Jacky contrasts this with his own structure: paid ads, evergreen funnels, one-on-one coaching, and United States-based W2 employees. His margins sit lower as a result.

The pattern in the room: organic traffic funneled into low-ticket or mid-ticket offers, then ascended to high-ticket packages priced between $5,000 and $25,000. Many operators used worldwide talent and maintained 70%+ margins while doing hundreds of thousands in monthly recurring revenue.

The Reddit SEO Hack: Buying Upvotes for 5 Cents to Rank in ChatGPT

Jacky outlines a tactic for manipulating large language model search results through Reddit:

Post answers to product queries using proxy accounts, then buy upvotes for approximately 0.05 USD each and layer in fake supportive comments. If a post ranks on Google, it begins appearing in LLM-generated summaries.

The cost structure makes it accessible. Jacky claims bribing Reddit moderators costs roughly $1,000, allowing operators to control narratives in smaller subreddits.

He purchased 100 United States-based TikTok accounts for a total of $5 to farm content at scale. He's exploring consumer-facing AI-driven software with his business partner, aiming to launch quickly and iterate based on user feedback.

He acknowledges this approach works best in lower-competition niches. High-stakes categories like supplements or VPNs are harder to crack because established players have deeper moat-building resources.

The insight: LLM search results pull heavily from Reddit threads. Gaming those threads at scale is cheap if you move before the arbitrage closes.

Expired Domain Strategy: Using GoDaddy Auctions for Black-Hat Affiliate SEO

Jacky argues blogs still work but most operators execute poorly in the post-AI era.

Google's filters have become ruthlessly strict. Spamming hundreds of AI-generated posts per day leads to instant domain blacklisting with no recovery path.

His recommendation: use affordable tools like Neuron Writer from AppSumo to optimize content, then publish 1 to 2 posts daily at most. Weak domains cannot absorb high publishing velocity.

For black-hat campaigns, Jacky sources expired high-authority domains—former billion-dollar crypto projects, for example—through GoDaddy auctions. These domains can withstand aggressive affiliate articles on supplements or VPNs because their legacy trust gives them short-term immunity.

The goal: monetize within the first few days before Google catches on and deindexes the site.

He also flags organic Facebook traffic as underexploited. The playbook: buy cheap page likes, post clickbait content without links in the initial post, and funnel traffic to display-ad-heavy blogs. Posts that go viral can generate $1,000 to $10,000 daily.

The strategy mirrors tactics on X, where engagement bait drives readers to external properties. The key is never linking in the first post—always in the comments or follow-up thread.

Why 500 YouTube Episodes Can't Beat One Weekend with the Right 50 People

Jacky filmed a video titled "How Isolation Cost Me Millions" after returning from the London event.

He identifies as an introvert who spent years in the cave—working 16 hours daily at his desk, rarely leaving his home, avoiding travel and in-person networking.

The London event broke that pattern. He met whales in the info-coaching space, went to downtown London with new connections, ended up at high-end venues with operators doing seven and eight figures annually.

The contrast was stark. Jacky had spent years producing daily YouTube content—over 500 episodes—to reach 20,000 subscribers. Yet one weekend with the right 50 people generated more opportunity flow than months of content production.

Content builds authority, but in-person access builds deals.

The operators he met weren't selling courses or running ads. They were structuring partnerships, taking equity stakes, and building businesses through relationships formed at exclusive events.

The Whale Advice That Unlocked $100K Daily Ad Spend

Jacky notes a mindset gap between SEO operators and affiliate marketers running paid traffic.

SEO operators celebrate $10,000 monthly revenue because margins approach 99%. No ad spend, no inventory, minimal overhead. Pure profit.

Affiliate operators running pay-per-call or direct response campaigns think in terms of daily six-figure ad budgets with 20% net margins. They make $20,000 in daily profit on $100,000 spend.

The scale difference is massive. SEOs optimize for efficiency. Affiliates optimize for volume.

Jacky met an operator who added a zero to his daily ad budget on advice from a whale who told him: "Don't open your laptop for a day. Just let it run."

The operator went from spending $10,000 daily to $100,000 overnight. By end of day he was breaking even. The scale unlocked new volume that smaller budgets couldn't access.

That mentality shift—trading efficiency for scale—is foreign to most SEO operators who've been trained to extract maximum margin from minimal input.

Algorithm Survival Tactics: How Aggressive Testing Prevents Fatal Revenue Collapse

Jacky frames his Google penalties as occupational hazards rather than existential crises.

When the platform wiped his assets a year ago, his affiliate income collapsed from $550,000 monthly to roughly $16,000. His vegan blog revenue fell 60%-70% year-over-year.

Instead of retreating, he diversified into software, coaching, and paid media experiments. His local SEO software hit $34,000 in its second month, proving speed and iteration matter more than perfection.

He publishes daily YouTube videos that convert viewers into community members at a rate high enough to justify the time investment despite modest subscriber counts. He explores Reddit manipulation, TikTok content farms, and Facebook virality as low-cost acquisition channels.

He considers performance-based consulting and profit-share partnerships to align incentives with clients. The throughline is adaptability.

Jacky treats each revenue stream as temporary and builds multiple engines in parallel.

He accepts that domains get burned, algorithms shift, and platforms crack down. The businesses that survive are those that pivot before the collapse becomes fatal.

His playbook combines aggressive testing, lean operations, and a willingness to walk away from any tactic the moment it stops working. The alternative—doubling down on a single asset or method—is how most SEO businesses die when Google updates roll out.

That's how you survive when the platform that made you decides to personally investigate and wipe your entire network: you've already built the next 3 things before the hammer drops.

Source: Ryan Clogg interview with Jacky Chou

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