The Daily Beast reports someone is hiring bloggers in India and Indonesia to write articles to help distance Donald Trump from Felix Sater.
Spokespeople for online reputation management companies in the two countries confirmed that they had been paid to write articles attempting to whitewash Trump’s ties to Felix Sater, a Russian-born businessman who, with former Russian trade minister Tevfik Arif, collaborated with the Trump Organization on numerous real estate deals from New York to the former Soviet Union.
The campaign appears designed to influence Google search results pertaining to Trump’s relationship with Sater, Arif, and the Bayrock Group, a New York real estate firm that collaborated with Trump on a series of real estate deals, and recruited Russian investors for potential Trump deals in Moscow.
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In 2010, a one-time executive at Bayrock brought a lawsuit against the firm. “For most of its existence, [Bayrock] was substantially and covertly mob-owned and operated," the suit alleged. Bayrock and Sater denied the allegations, and the lawsuit—which at one point listed Trump and Ivanka as co-defendants—was settled in February.
In the meantime, an attorney for the plaintiff in that suit had brought another lawsuit alleging tax fraud by Bayrock. That second suit, which was based on evidence suppressed by the judge during the first, was dismissed last year.
That’s when someone began paying for blog posts about the case.
The Daily Beast previously reported that a Pakistani blogger had been paid to write an article for the Huffington Post’s now-defunct contributor platform hailing the dismissal of the tax fraud case. That blogger, who went by the handle Waqas KH, said his client, whom he declined to name, had provided the text of the piece in full.
... [O]n more obscure platforms, used explicitly for search-engine optimization, over 50 other stories have popped up hyping the lawsuit’s dismissal and attempting to insulate Trump from controversy involving Sater and Bayrock. The articles were published over an eight-month period, from September 2017 through June 2018.
“Certainly now that Trump is President of the United States, there is not likely to be any further implications for him in this case,” declared a November article at a since-deleted website billing itself as a forum for a “business development specialist.” The article was written by Abhishek Chatterjee, who owns an Indian SEO business that offers to place articles on a network of 900 websites for $20 apiece.
Chatterjee said he’d received an order to publish the article “via a random email,” and that he doesn't know who placed the order ...
A day before Chatterjee’s article posted, another piece popped up on a similarly suspicious website hailing the dismissal of tax fraud charges against Sater, whom it dubbed a “former Trump crony.” That piece was authored by Mahruz Aly, an Indonesian SEO marketer who charges up to $225 to publish stories on a network of more than 2,000 websites.
Aly declined to say who paid him for the Sater piece.
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Another Indonesian SEO vendor, Ongky Firmansyah, said in an email that he had been paid to randomly insert the names “Tevfik Arif” and “Tevfik Arif Doyen” into articles on his website.
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The use of “private blog networks” (PBNs), or dummy websites set up to game search engine results, is a common, if often frowned-upon, internet marketing tactic, according to Brendon McAlpine, a business development manager for Australian online reputation management service Internet Removals.
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Google’s Webmaster Guidelines explicitly prohibit of use of “large-scale article marketing or guest posting campaigns” like the one used to publicize Sater ...
The tactics aren’t limited to websites either. A host of dummy social media accounts—including Twitter and Facebook pages bearing the names Tevfik Arif, Tevfik Arif Doyen, TevfikArif Bayrock, and Тевфик Ариф (Serbian for Tevfik Arif)—have been used since last year to plug the dismissal of the lawsuit against Sater and Bayrock.
“Another victory for our great president Trump reputation,” declared one such account in December. “Fake news loses again.”
Inside the Online Campaign to Whitewash the History of Donald Trump’s Russian Business Associates (Daily Beast)