[bt3]

I was coming to find this comment. Back then, most people looked to Google PageRank[1] as the source of truth for the value of the your website. That "value" translated into a lot of interest in advertising dollars, particularly if you ran a blog with PageRank > 7.

The interesting part was that PageRank was only "recalculated" on a somewhat infrequent basis, so you ended up with tons of domains that that weren't really human readable, just gobs of regurgitated text meant to throw off any "unique" filters, and hundreds of links to outbound sites. In early iterations of the algorithm, sites like this scored highly, and those "services" that would help you build backlinks, etc. basically just plugged your domain on these trashy sites with the hope the algorithm would see this "highly rated" site linking to your site.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank