[paxtonab]

This is 100% not effective anymore. This is just a slightly more malicious version of the the spam bots that post back links in wordpress comments, except in this case they were adding entire html pages to the sites. This is a violation of Google's duplicate content rules and if anything would be viewed negatively by Google.

The efficacy of this hack is nil as the "money domains" that were profiting from these backlinks had little domain authority or relevant traffic according to the author's article.

The only only way that linking strategies are viable anymore are gaining links from domains with authority or huge numbers of links.

Maybe if the hacker would have created tens of thousands of back links from vulnerable fashion blogs (same category of site as the money sites) they would've gotten some SEO juice.

[etcet]

I work in webhosting so I get to see a lot of this shit. What's interesting is seeing how backlinking has changed. These days, I think that it hurts your ranking to have a bunch of junk backlinks. This doesn't mean it's not effective for SEO though.

If I'm on page 2 of a search and I want to get into that precious top 10 I can spam the site which is ranking above me until I'm there. Or I can threaten to do a really shitty job trying to blackhat SEO optimize someones site unless they pay me $x.

We often get abuse@ emails from people who have their link spammed on one of our clients domains and want it removed. We just link them to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main and wish them luck. In some cases these people paid for that 'service' in the past and now regret it.

[rcarrigan87]

I have a friend who worked in coupons and the first part of his day, every day, was to sit and go through their backlinks and basically disavow everything. Coupons is so competitive literally everyone is link-bombing each other trying to trigger a Google penalty.

[paxtonab]

Wow. Reporting blackhat seo websites (of competitors) used to be one of the worst parts of my job. Having to defend myself against blackhat seo attacks on a daily basis would have sucked my soul...

[paxtonab]

Horror flashbacks reading your comment... But for real, do you think 10k or 20k links from legitimate blogs/social profiles would provide any SEO benefit? Or would the only benefit be the referral traffic?

[patrickfl]

I agree, I didn't think it was really that effective for the amount of time and effort they had to put forth. Not to mention the fact that I got 2 follow up emails (1 on the NYSE) really angry going after them legally.

[paxtonab]

Not to diminish your analysis though which was very entertaining to read!

[patrickfl]

none taken :) I was a tad worried when I saw this got submitted on HN. Honestly it was a bucket list of mine to write a post worthy enough to be appreciated on HN without artificially boosting it of course.