OMG you're absolutely correct. For starters, no one said it was a zero-sum game. What I did say is that how he runs his business will hurt my client's business and ultimately I'll be caught up in that shitstorm. And yes, I must be a fucking idiot to have left a career overseeing the drug development arm of one of the country's largest CRO's and making low-mid six figures only to increase my net take home by about 30% running my own shit over the past couple of years. I obviously have no fucking idea what I'm doing.
Partnering up with him isn't an option with his current bullshit link spamming, but my clients using his service in conjunction with mine is a potential problem.
But then again I don't run or promote a link spamming service either. Because you know, paying 100 or so bucks a month for 30,000 links is obviously something far more glorious and righteous than a link farm.
Seeing as I've been doing this for a number of years, both part and then later full-time, I'd say my "time horizon" (whatever the fuck that's supposed to mean) would be significantly longer than two weeks. I run a small marketing firm for fucks sakes, if I only looked two weeks ahead I'd have been dead in the water within my first year.
Collusion in a number of small and close-knit business communities can absolutely make you more money in the long run. Right up until the time the businesses you service find out you're colluding with another party to either fuck them over or increase their costs. By the way, collusion is generally frowned upon/illegal in the U.S. Maybe you meant "partnering", in which case I've already explained why that's out of the question at this point.
Down the line it's likely that he'll find out. Somewhere along the line he'll approach a business that my company services. At that point he's likely to find out that we're competing on some level. Yes right now, I have the upper hand and agree with your general sentiment here.
This has very little to do with rankings in a general sense. Like I said, it's a relatively small metro area, only about 2 million people over 10 or so counties. So keeping them at the top of Google is fuckoff easy for local searches. That's why seo is only a small part of what I do and it isn't even really a service offering of ours in itself. It's a by product of the web presence marketing we do for clients.
If my clients wanted to hire someone to do SEO that did it in a responsible non-spammy way, I'd be happy as hell for them, because I have very little interest in having me or my employees spending our days link building. We create content that will get linked to and then carefully select the places we distribute that content so that it can be seen by our clients' target demos. Having a legit SEO company come in isn't cutting into my business at all. But with this guy's "nothing but spam and keyword stuffing seo" it's going to do nothing but increase the likelihood of Google de-indexing their sites. That's why I'd like to nip this in the bud before I have to deal with the fallout from that.
Once their sites get de-indexed it's a pain in my ass to get them back into the G serps in a timely manner, if I can at all. We work on retainers and contracts and do our best to build personal relationships with the clients since we handle both their online and offline marketing. So I'm not interested in fucking them over for more money when they don't need to spend it.
I also don't want to go to them and just out of the blue be like "hey, don't use this guy if he should approach you." I'd prefer to cut him out of the picture before it becomes an issue. If I can just absorb him into my company I'll be able to have final say over his linking strategies and all of this would be moot. Plus, as I said previously, he has some assets that could be incredibly valuable if they were brought in and developed systematically.
So ultimately, my best bet is probably to run him into the ground and then offer him a small stake in my company because he has value to offer but his instance on trying to game the fucking system has already caught up to him once (which is one of the reasons he moved back to the area) and in order for me to take him on or even feel ok letting my clients work with him his "getting over on Google" mentality needs to change.
