My contract with a client expired on the 12th of February. He did not want to renew. I took his website from making him $0 to making him a few thousand a month. But, he figured, most of what I did for him was get him backlinks. And he could do that too.

Sometime in April, he approached me to hire me again. I'd like his money but, being busy, I did not get back to him right away. Then, when I had time to deal with him, I thought I'd first check what had happened to his site since I stopped working on it.

I'd had 9 keywords on page 1 (most #3). Now, none were in the top 100. Called my guy and asked him if he'd done anything. He said no. But his site had stopped making him money.

Yesterday, I looked into his site again. This time, my link checking tools showed that the home page had gotten 4361 backlinks (used to have a bit over 700). Opensiteexplorer.com says 3,654 links are coming from one site, using the same anchor text (an odd one at that too).

They're coming from a site my guy's advertised on before (though, at that time, he got only 3 links).

So, to fix it, I have to either remove 3,654 backlinks (assuming the site owner is willing to let me in his/her site) or create so many backlinks that 3,654 goes from being 83+% of the links to the page to something like 30%. In other words, some 12,000.

Yes, I know, I can spend $10 on fiverr.com to get that kind of backlinks.

But how much do I charge this guy to hire someone on fiverr?

The story went, "Plumber, why are you charging me $800? All you did was tap the pipe. I want an itemized bill."

The bill was:
$1 for tapping the pipe
$799 for knowing where to tap