Rae Hoffman – SEO Pioneers
Pioneer: Rae Hoffman
Rae Hoffman, otherwise known as SugarRae started out in the industry in the mid-90s.
Rae had a son named CJ who suffered a stroke as a baby, so Rae established the first online international support group for parents of pediatric stroke survivors to meet other parents going through the same thing.
Through time spent online looking at message boards to promote her site, she managed to find an affiliate programme for long-distance calls.
To make a living whilst having time to care for her son is what drove Rae to start her first affiliate programme.
She posted on forums to ask for help and then Mike Mackin got in touch with her and guided her to more reading to learn about how to do SEO.
After only six months she was outranking Mike for ‘long distance calls’.
Mike then introduced her to promoting Phentermine and that is where she started to see huge success.
By creating a piece of link bait that generated quality links, she was able to outrank all the spammers in the space.
She made more money in one month than her then-husband did in a year. And SEO became her life.
After being wiped out in the Florida update she turned to spamming. She was involved with a close group of black hat affiliates who worked together to figure out how to stay one step ahead of Google to rank.
In this conversation, Rae talks about what techniques she used in the early days and her experiences in the early industry.
She also talks about how AI today is similar to the data feed sites she used to scale. And how to get the best out of a chatbot.
In this interview Rae talks about:
- What she did to outrank the spammers in the Phentermine space
- What made her turn away from white hat and embrace spamming
- How she scaled data feed sites to build a review site
- How she circumnavigated the Google sandbox
- What she thinks of Google and the relationship they have with SEOs
- Why Matt Cutts was so important to the success of Google
- How she uses AI prompts
- How search has changed in the last 25 years
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