Parasite SEO, Jacky Chou, Gets DeIndexed by Google: A Breakdown

Jacky Chou is a Parasite SEO personality who has appeared on YouTube and X (Twitter), offering the typical lineup of services and advice seen from gurus with big claims to entice you to give them money. Operating purely on trust me bro strategies based on yesterday’s short-term gains from banned black hat techniques, his advice and services will ultimately get your website penalized and deindexed.

With claims of making $500k/mo in revenue and the overused saying “clapped”… It seems his revenue claims are a facade to get you to purchase his tools, pay into his private group, and buy his spammy links. His claim to money and fame piggybacking off established brand “partnerships” has left him and his client “clapped”. More on that later.

I like to keep up with the SEO industry and its personalities, including solo contributors like Jacky Chou who make up the ever-rotating cast of characters that give this industry a bad name. Who squeeze all the juice they can out of unsuspecting SEOers and business owners until their bad reputation proceeds them and they disappear to scam people elsewhere.

From what I can tell, Jacky is a legend in his mind. This comes with a hefty upfront price tag and long-term consequences from strategies with short-term gains (some of which probably don’t even work anymore because of the latest core algorithm update) that transition quickly into disaster (not hyperbole, results below).

Why avoid SEO’s like Jacky Chou?

SEO is not a hack. It’s not a get-rich-quick scheme. Or something that can be learned overnight.

SEO is marketing. SEO is playing the long game. SEO can take years to master.

Even then, the best SEOs in the world can learn something new daily with endless skills and methodologies, and continue to evolve as the industry changes. With the best SEOs, an effective strategy that produces long-term results takes time. There is nothing quick or sexy about SEO. Never has, never will.

Every SEO who has used black hat tactics and tried to game the system does not last. Those who stick around constantly chase the next thing instead of just doing it the right way the first time.

That’s always the biggest red flag with SEO personalities like Jack, who is short-term, quick-results-oriented with no regard for long-term consequences and how they harm others.

People like Jacky promote black hat ideas and strategies that make their way to client-facing SEOs and cost business owners a lot of money paying for retainer SEO services that harm their website performance, resulting in losses in revenue.

With SEOs like Jacky when their websites are penalized, their clients cancel, they aren’t good enough to compete, or they get sued, they start to promote guru courses and other crap to put some money in their pocket on the back of an industry they cannot survive. That is where the black-hat stuff comes into play every time and leaves those scorned in their path looking at the rest of us with contempt.

SEO guru red flags

Typical red flags with these SEO “gurus” are paid courses, communities with paywalls, or selling paid tools.

Most of the time the course content is stolen or bad advice, tools are white label and upcharged or janky Chat GPT-built clones, and communities are echo chambers of ignorance where the owner upsells inexperienced, desperate, or unintelligent members (many of whom aren’t real people just fake accounts to mimic community).

“Website still struggling? Pay for my backlinks bro!!!” “Scale with my AI content tool!” “F**k Google!! Go spam my YT comments for the algorithm!!”

Here are some other things to look out for.

Selling the dream

Another red flag, as previously mentioned is selling a dream of sexiness, riches, and fast-paced progress. You cannot learn SEO overnight, get rich quickly, and you will not wake up next to a hot young thing. Here, or almost anywhere.

Low costs – sky-high profits!

Some gurus solely try to sell retainer services to new clients through YouTube videos and blogging. This is a great inbound marketing strategy. The problem is many sell a pipe dream that their sub $500/mo strategy is all you will ever need and more, give bad information about SEO to people new to the industry, sell them on a bunch of lies, and get them to sign up.

The low cost makes these agreements seem low-risk and these agencies close on more business than you would think. The problem is SEO cannot be effective for $200, $300, or $400/mo. It’s impossible. These agencies are purely sales-oriented, churn and burn machines. You sign the contract, they move on immediately to the next prospect.

Most businesses cancel when they see no results if they’re not convinced to stay by manipulated reports or excuses (blame Google, algorithm updates, etc), or forget about their recurring charge (a guru’s wet dream!) and pay for essentially nothing indefinitely.

White Hat SEO Pros vs SEO Scammers

Those who become great at SEO start their own business or go on to work for top agencies or businesses. Their price tag can be $150,000 per year, and I’ve seen some rake in over $400k. Others who do their own thing can make upwards of millions. An SEO has even been featured on Shark Tank (I will try to find and link it here). They do not share strategies, they do not tell you where they work, they will never share their website link, and most of them live in obscurity. Why?

Because SEO is black-boxed. To be good at SEO you need to do SEO and be patient. There is no secret sauce here, jump in and start. Yes, the basics are important, but hard work and years of hands-on practice are required. The sky can be the limit when you can run successful campaigns and build up a track record of success. With the time and effort needed to become a pro, no top-flight SEO is selling a course, doing YouTube, or starting communities. They just aren’t. Why would they, so you can compete with them?

People who suck at SEO sell courses. Jacky says to make more money in SEO to reach $500k-1M in monthly recurring revenue start YouTube, and sell apps, exclusive groups, or courses. This can be true, these can most definitely make money. But if you are ACTUALLY good at SEO, why not just do white hat SEO?

The demographic of SEOs who offer courses and private communities typically falls somewhere between having never ranked a website IRL and being mediocre without the ability to rank anything better than a low-competition niche local site in a small suburb outside of Columbus, OH. Or in Jackys’ case, bouncing from black hat tactic to black hat tactic and hop-scotching between different websites until they are penalized and deindexed.

Their courses and advice include boilerplate and beginner-level SEO concepts found on any free SEO blog or academy with little nuance or real-life examples. In Jack’s case, he teaches people the wrong way to do SEO so he can peddle his links (that are against Google guidelines) and other revenue-generating ventures that can only be justified by someone without morals promoting his black-hat tactics that get his websites deindexed as tangible proof of concept. LOL.

Learn for free, not from guys like this

SEO basics can be learned through free courses at Hubspot, SEMRush, Moz, Google, popular forums, and other reputable sources. Never pay for courses, they are unnecessary. Advanced SEO tactics are better learned from working on a website, and looking at what competitors are doing as you go along. Preferably a personal website or one with nothing to lose so you don’t mess up someone’s revenue.

Take that $1k+ Jacky wants you to pay him to play footsie in their private group and build a website. It will be cheaper, build tangible long-term skills, and protect you from spending more money on the crap Jacky will try to upsell you on after you enter his funnel.

Every SEO tactic and opportunity is hiding in plain sight. And trust me when I tell you, if you build and rank a website you will never take this guy’s advice which will tank your hard work.

From my understanding of his online presence, here is the advice and offerings Jacky provides from his expertise allegedly making $500k/mo.

Jacky Chou Business Practices

PBN links (public blog network), and spammy off-site strategies

Buying links from PBN networks is against Google guidelines, and if you are caught your website will be manually or algorithmically penalized and possibly deindexed. Can it work in the short term? Yes.

Is this tangible for anyone interested in long-term, full-proof SEO strategies? No.

Jacky sells them, ignoring the black-hat nature of these links and their probable negative effects.

Affiliate backlinks

I wanted to mention some other off-site SEO advice from Jacky that is incorrect. He claims affiliate links build your backlink profile. This is mostly false.

Most affiliate websites use nofollow links, which do not pass on authority and provide no initial SEO value. The real value of affiliates is referral traffic to produce revenue, and on-page behavioral signals from user interactions with the website which is a ranking factor, confirmed by the recent Google algorithm leaks.

Directory backlinks

He has also claimed directory links work well, but the cost/benefit is rarely worth it because you have to pay to be on the top of those lists, many directories are not from websites that are authorities in your niche (just topical authority, if that), and most act as affiliate partners and use nofollow links. Those websites are for brand awareness and sales, not SEO.

For SEO, local directories work best for local websites to display NAP and other business information accurately and consistently. Unfortunately, Jacky does not promote this White Hat SEO tactic.

Forum backlinks (ie Reddit)

Jacky suggests linking to your website from forums. Most forums produce no-follow links and ban solicitors. Members also usually sniff out these posts or comments that hurt your brand by being spammy and annoying.

Can this be done? Yes, but not for backlinks. I work with a client who developed a product in a niche where existing products have a lot of issues. They designed it to solve those problems. Their product blew up. How? They promoted it on their website and with their email list, and it grew from there through the chambers of the internet.

Redditors and users from forums related to their niche frequently complained about their OEM or aftermarket part issues, and gradually more people started mentioning this new product and how good it is.

I brought this up in a call and they said they had no idea about these forums. Word of mouth is alive and well on the internet.

CTR Boosters

CTR boosters, or click-through-rate manipulators, are tools that send bots to your website through the search results. The idea is to trick Google into thinking users are clicking through to your website, which is a ranking factor, and helping rankings.

They can also go to competitors’ websites, immediately bounce back to the search results, and then visit your website. Implying their website is bad, and my website is good.

These tools have been around for a long time, and are mostly used to help boost Google Business Profile, or Local Map Pack, listings.

Do they work? Sometimes, with the right tool and setup. As of now, Google does not seem to have this on their radar, or at most they do but can’t do anything about it yet.

Is this unethical? Yes, very much so. Manipulative tactics and negative SEO campaigns against competitors are very unethical.

Do not be surprised if Google finds a way to identify those who use these tools in the future and penalizes their websites. They have before. No one thought Google would figure out review gating, a strategy to filter users to Google review pages with positive experiences to leave a good review and divert others elsewhere. They figured it out, and reviews started disappearing left and right. How do I know? I worked for an agency that employed this tactic.

I would not recommend using CTR boosters for any client-facing projects with the long-term risks associated with this strategy. If you are good at Local SEO, this tool is irrelevant anyway.

AI Content Tool

Google’s latest update hammered website scaling using AI content. That is what Jackys tool is geared toward with the proposed packages, claims on his tools website to “Relax, while your business is on autopilot”, and current SEO practices seen on his websites and YouTube advice.

Don’t waste your time, unless you want your website deindexed like his now is.

Use Chat GPT as a tool for free, but never publish content directly from any AI tool. If you do want to take your chances with AI content, find a reputable tool with the money and resources to develop one that works.

Private Communities

Private communities are used by gurus and scammers to shield their subscribers from outside noise so they can continue to be lied to and exploited. Many of his viewers are new to SEO and don’t know better. This is evident in the comments on his videos in response to obvious nonsense.

Jacky recently published a conspiracy that he was specifically targeted by Google, and they deindexed all websites in his Google Search Console property. He then claimed Google still doesn’t know s**t, and he will continue with his tactics for other websites. Claiming he was only penalized because he posted one website on Youtube, and they saw other sites on the same GSC login and screwed him over. Google is really after this guy huh? What a legend!

He was penalized for practices that go against Google’s guidelines. Yes, they see all websites you manage, regardless of what email and Search Console property is used. Google has been able to do that for over 20 years because people used to buy a bunch of authoritative websites and interlink them to rank on Google via topical backlink authority. Google had to identify these groups and deindex them because they were promoting websites with poor user experience and ranked for irrelevant keywords.

Jackys’ conspiracy theory is not what happened though. He had multiple websites deindexed because he used his own PBN network to prop them up artificially with spammy backlinks. One website put all others utilizing those spammy backlinks on their radar, and his black hat practices caught up with him. He also utilized AI content to scale rapidly, which is a big no-no now as of May 2024.

But he cannot say that, because he is trying to sell those links to you for thousands of dollars with his AI content tool that lets you sit on the couch all day and never work again. That would be bad for business. Not to mention, they work dangit! F**k Google, they don’t know s**t!

Here are real comments from his viewers after he broke the news.

Google spam update… So what do you think…. should we stop using google analytics and search console? I hate both and never use them, even though they are installed. Thoughts?

@ryanc9432

🤦🏻‍♂️

@Fedgery007

Should we disconnect google search console from any sites we used AI on?

@cesarzunigany

Thats a really personal Attack by google

@webkad338

Yeah, how dare they remove useless trash gunking up their search results!

@amoliski

Jacky targets people who don’t know better and are not equipped to see he is a scammer, and he gladly takes their money. It’s sad, and bad for the SEO industry.

“Partnerships”

Jacky says he generates most of his revenue through partnerships with established brands by turning their blog into affiliate revenue generators and taking a percentage of profits. He claims he started working with this brand because they were borderline bankrupt, and he saved their business. What a guy. That business is now dead. More below.

FarAndAway.co

Now let’s look at a website Jacky has talked about on Youtube, farandaway.co. His strategy here was to take an existing e-commerce website and build out an affiliate blog. The goal is to rank these articles by piggybacking from the stores’ existing domain authority. Then funnel the traffic to Amazon to get paid by their affiliate program. He is essentially trying to copy what Forbes is doing. Forbes goes against what Google claims to stand for and is despised by the entire SEO community, who hopes they are penalized at some point.

This strategy was never a good long-term option, for a few reasons.

Irrelevant blog posts

This website sells ceramic dishes and dining table placemats, and they were making articles irrelevant to their niche purely to generate traffic and produce revenue. Google is a big fan of relevance over topical authority and hates websites built to rank rather than serve users. This website never had anything close to the authority of websites still pulling this off (he claimed it was DA 50, but that was a lie), making this strategy a serious misjudgment before accounting for the black hat tactics used.

Want to see the now-removed blog posts Jacky published?

Go to the old trusty WayBackMachine, and enter “https://farandaway.co/blogs”. Look at all those blogs that have nothing to do with dishware. “21 Best Air Fryer for Family of 4”, “6 Best Induction Cooktop with Downdraft”, “16 Best Commercial Ice Makers”.

After being deindexed, he took down all of his content and claimed he would use it again on another website employing the same strategy. As of press time, content from the old blog cannot be found on the web. They were either not published, were published and never indexed, or rewritten (yay AI content spinning).

If you find their old content elsewhere, please email me so I can update this blog.

Spammy backlinks

He was using his PBN network to build spammy backlinks to this website. Every article magically had a related article linking to it. Convenient? The website went from having 2k backlinks a year ago to over 60k. For a small niche e-commerce website, these are some serious numbers. Almost too good to be true.

He is using AI and programmatic SEO to build out websites in his PBN that were used to link to his websites. You can go ahead and assume those are the same links he’s trying to sell you for thousands of dollars. Google spam updates and previous updates have tackled spammy AI-generated programmatic SEO websites, domain purchasing to redirect or link to websites to pass authority, websites built for search engines rather than users, and other Parasite SEO tactics used by people like Jacky.

AI Content

Along with his PBN network, he is using AI to write the content on this website. Google has said AI content is fine if it serves the user and is relevant, but take everything Google says with a grain of salt. That suggestion is also highly dependent on the context of the situation.

Google’s latest algorithm targets websites that scale, or build out pages quickly, using AI content and other tools. Google uses its servers to crawl and index webpages, and cannot keep up with the demand from people like Jacky throwing up PNB networks and scaling website blogs, so they penalized them. These blogs also tend to be topical with no real insights, making user experience and the ability to serve user intent bad. Google does not like that.

High-quality original content with insights about the products and the brand you can’t find through an AI tool is still king. If any AI content is used, it needs to be combed through and revised.

From my experience, I have yet to use an AI tool that produces content that makes the process more efficient and effective than just starting from scratch and using AI as a tool to feed you information throughout the creative process.

Industry-wide shift

Every sign in the past year has signaled AI-powered search results taking over informational keyword search results, where blogs and affiliate websites once thrived. From lawsuits over privacy concerns and ownership of content Google uses for their AI, Google buying Reddit to use its content for machine learning, the Search Generative Experience beta (experienced by those who made it into the beta like me), the helpful content algorithm update, and Google shareholders always expecting profits to go up… The writing was on the wall.

Google does not want a middleman between users and information benefiting where they should be. Google hates affiliates. I also think we’re all sick of scrolling through 1,000+ words, 20 images, and a million ads to find information that could be immediately served by an AI assistant.

Jacky creating this strategy last year for this website was doomed to fail. He either knew it, was uninformed and negligent or is a scam artist cashing in on short-term gains at someone else’s expense. He said in a YouTube video that affiliate websites are still bullish in 2024, but he lies so much I don’t know if I believe that he believes that. I may also be giving way too much credit to a complete idiot.

The result? Jack’s partnership ceramic dishware e-commerce website was penalized, rankings tanked, domain authority decreased, and he pulled all blog articles from the website. That is one heck of a partnership. No indexing, no rankings, now penalized authoritative domain, and all work is removed. If this “partner” exists, I hope they sue this guy.

He did post two blogs with interesting intros though, in strange public-facing acknowledgment of what happened, totally unrelated to the article. The psychology of playing the victim and putting on a mirage of transparency is gross. He also addressed this in a YT video I previously mentioned, with disingenuous transparency and lies.

I can’t tell if these blog intros are a total hack job attempt to save face with his followers, if he believes the lies he is telling people, or if Jacky convinced the business owner of these lies who is speaking in this blog. You cannot make this stuff up.

As seen from keyword rankings above, they did not “manage to rise again”. The little non-branded keyword rankings they had continued to decline going into late June when these blogs were posted.

That is a lie.

Final Thoughts

Avoid people like Jacky Chou. They pop up every year and disappear when lawsuits come in, all of their websites tank or fail to launch, or they make enough money ripping people off to scam people elsewhere before their practices bite them in the butt. Do not pay for links, do not become a Parasite SEO, or use AI to scale. Especially if you are client-facing, never use his tactics.

SEO professionals are meant to help business owners increase revenue to keep the lights on, pay their employees, and take something home for themselves. Do not use shady practices for short-term gains to secure a case study to target other businesses for retainer services, or fool current clients into thinking you did something great. It is highly unethical to put others well being at risk.

If integrity and morality were more prominent the SEO industry would not have such a bad name. I don’t know how people like Jacky sleep at night, but then again with people like him, I’m better off talking to the wall.