Julien Jimenez, Korleon’Biz, Nextlevel.link… rise and fall of the godfather of french SEO

On 27 September, Julien Jimenez announced the liquidation of his company. A shock in the SEO world that did not surprise those who knew him closely.

In the French SEO community, September 27, 2023 will be a milestone. On that day, Julien Jimenez, a superstar in the field, announced on Twitter the liquidation of his SEO agency Korleon’Biz and its subsidiary NextLevel.link, a famous netlinking and website sales platform. This is bad news for link sellers who have been complaining about unpaid bills for several months, for sums ranging from a few hundred to several tens of thousands of euros. But also for customers, fearing that the purchased links will cease to be operational.

A little more than a month after this small earthquake, the SEMJuice agency announced on November 6 the acquisition of the NextLevel.link platform for 100,000 euros. “Given the power of the brand, it’s a great deal,” said Nicolas Mercatili, CEO and co-founder. “The liquidator told me that the total amount of unpaid bills was several million euros. There must have been internal management errors because the platform is of very good quality and the company still achieved 4.7 million euros in turnover in 2022.”

Legal notice abroad

Management errors that forced Korleon’Biz to sell its most visible, and therefore bankable, websites to mysterious companies. This was not surprising, given that the company was on the brink of collapse. However, in the SEO world, the sale of these sites raises questions: “These sites can cost up to 150,000 euros while the garbage sites have not been sold,” says a professional.

One of them, breakingnews.fr, sold a few days before the liquidation, currently has legal notices referring to Digital Marketing L2 Web SL, a Spanish company based in Malaga with a publication director domiciled in Venezuela. A buyer who may seem surprising, unless your name is Julien Jimenez. In 2021, Korleon’Biz congratulated itself on having “set up and sold” two other websites: tekpolis.fr and objeko.com. The first of these is now also owned by Digital Marketing L2 Web SL, with another publishing director also residing in Venezuela and after passing into the hands of a Portuguese company owned by the shareholder of Digital Marketing L2 Web SL (are you following?). Objeko.com is owned by another Spanish company – this time with a publishing director based in Peru – but after having also transited through the Portuguese company. A network that knows each other well.

We managed to get in touch with the French owner of Digital Marketing L2 Web SL. The latter, who immediately threatened us with defamation if his name appeared in the article, assured us that the transaction had turned out to be perfectly classic (implied without any ambiguity). A confession certainly not enough to put an end to the mistrust of the SEO community, some of whose members believe that Julien Jimenez, who was looking to sell his villa with a pool at the end of 2023, has “prepared his exit”. The fact that the latter is trying, a week after the liquidation, to buy a tool to improve its performance on Google Discover is causing a little more talk.

No doubt Julien Jimenez had a good reason to buy such a tool. Indeed, the 35-year-old is not done with SEO and continues his activity as a site editor. More through Korleon’Biz. But with a company located in Spain, also in Malaga, which surprisingly has the same address as Digital Marketing L2 Web SL. This new company, called Amanecer Media International SL, was registered in November. It already owns at least five sites. One of them belonged to a former employee of Julien Jimenez a few days before the liquidation.

If the liquidation of Korleon’Biz raises so many questions, it is because its founder is renowned for his extravagance. To find out more about the character, the Journal du Net contacted Julien Jimenez directly, who did not respond. We interviewed about twenty people from the SEO community, a small world where there is no shortage of legends and rumors about the former leader of Korleon’Biz. Part of the milieu idolized him and rushed to the training sessions and conferences that he delivered with great pomp. Another, more important, fears it strongly. As proof, all of the people interviewed for this article wished to testify anonymously. “Julien Jimenez, it’s really a reign of terror.” “The last time I criticized Korleon’Biz on Twitter, he told me right away that he was going to destroy my business,” we were told. A threat made credible by the rumors surrounding the character: “Apparently he has a friend at Google Ads who can harm our respective activities. Many are afraid of reprisals…”

The intriguing Jimmy Pochon

Despite the fear, several former Korleon’Biz employees agreed to testify anonymously. One of them said he was the victim of “moral harassment” and “threat of physical violence” after telling Julien Jimenez that he was leaving the company. Afraid that the ex-members of the agency will end up exposing questionable practices? The same ones that precipitated the downfall of Korleon’Biz?

According to the former employees, starting in the summer of 2021, the company sent transfers of several hundred thousand euros to a certain Jimmy Pochon, manager of a company specializing in the online sale of household objects and equipment (according  to Societe.com). These transactions are supposed to correspond to the purchase of websites intended to be resold on the NextLevel.link platform. But there are several indications that these transfers had a completely different purpose. “No one from the team saw the slightest trace of these sites,” said one of our witnesses. Admittedly, Julien Jimenez, with his “messy management”, could have made these purchases without informing the rest of the team. A hypothesis quickly dismissed: “Strangely enough, the invoices did not mention any site name. Above all, we have never seen any return on investment.” Neither “revenue generated from the resale of these sites”, nor “any money earned from the sale of links” that could have been placed on these new sites.

No return on investment while the amounts are far from negligible. “Korleon’Biz sent more than a million euros to Jimmy Pochon. Even our best partner didn’t take a tenth of what he touched.” This was enough to arouse the astonishment of former employees when Jimmy Pochon, who regularly sold links on NextLevel.link placed on his site for the sale of household equipment, “complained about 200 euros in unpaid bills” when financial difficulties appeared. Their surprise was even greater when some of Korleon’Biz’s creditors, who also complained of unpaid bills, were “reimbursed by Jimmy Pochon”.

Contacted by phone, Jimmy Pochon never replied. According to several interviewees, he filed a complaint against the former leader of Korleon’Biz. One of his relatives told us that Julien Jimenez had “psychologically manipulated him to use his bank account”. “He didn’t do anything wrong, except to be weak and impressionable.” A plausible hypothesis according to a former member of Korleon’Biz: “Manipulation, it’s very much like Julien”.

Jimmy Pochon is not the only one who has blindly trusted the self-taught SEO. It must be said that Julien Jimenez is not the last to praise his merits, whether through training, YouTube videos, conferences or tweets to his 11,000 subscribers. He doesn’t hesitate to put on a show, like the time he recruited a new employee at a kebab shop. Nor to flout conventions, such as hiring an accountant… who has never done any accounting. His communication has propelled him to the rank of French SEO star.

“Even to my loved ones, I wouldn’t have lent so much money”

A status that has given him a psychological ascendancy with some members of his community. To the point of soliciting them for money loans, sometimes in the form of cryptocurrency. One of them confides: “I lent him the equivalent of 2,000 euros in bitcoins. In exchange, he had to give me NextLevel.link credits.” A promise that will never be kept. Luckily for Julien Jimenez. Using your company’s resources to gain a personal advantage “is a criminal offence,” said Claire Poirson, a lawyer at Firsh. “He ended up paying me back in euros after countless reminders. I trusted him blindly. Even to my loved ones, I wouldn’t have lent such a sum.”

Apart from cryptocurrency loans, Julien Jimenez has solicited his admirers to lend him large sums of money, which can reach tens of thousands of euros. Those who accepted had two options. Or send the money to Korleon’Biz’s bank account, a practice that requires a loan agreement to be drawn up. Or on a Wise account located in Belgium. Sometimes, a place in one of his SEO training courses was offered as a refund. Julien Jimenez used his company’s financial difficulties as an excuse to obtain these loans. But there’s one more rumor about him that he’s in debt from gambling. According to a former Korleon’Biz employee, the company “sent more than €30,000 to two German poker players, supposedly to buy sites from them.”

A trick reminiscent of the Jimmy Pochon episode. And that shows that Julien Jimenez dares just about everything. In the company’s men-only Skype group, he doesn’t hesitate to mock one of his female employees with sexual innuendo. Comments that are not limited to the private sphere. During games organized as part of a seminar, employees had to raise their hands if they were “fantasizing about a colleague” or if they had “already had a threesome”.

Julien Jimenez doesn’t rule anything out. Both with its employees and with its customers. “I bought links from him on sites that he presented as highly visible. I then realized that the sites had just been created,” says a former client of NextLevel.link.

One of his former employees explains that Julien Jimenez did not always believe that he “allowed everything”. When he created Korleon’Biz in 2009, he was only 20 years old. “At the time, he certainly had aggressive business techniques, but he wasn’t doing anything illegal as far as I knew.” His ex-wife, who worked at the agency for several years, managed to contain him for a long time. But when he left the company in early 2022, he “twisted”. A real turning point… before leaving the road.

Source: https://www.journaldunet.com/seo/1526445-korleon-biz/