[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?