[leephillips]

The other side of this coin is that spammers can buy pagerank by purchasing a reputable domain and then using it for spam. That, it turns out, it what happened here (according to a Google engineer who explained after I published this): http://lee-phillips.org/hitchYellowPages/

[sharkweek]

Yep - not uncommon for spammers to create powerful link networks by buying up a bunch of quality domains, and then spamming links at what they want to rank for.

It normally takes Google a few weeks/months to catch this stuff, so for super competitive terms, it's easy to make it worthwhile by ranking for something like "fast payday loans." Then when the domain gets penalized, rinse/repeating.

Someone teased Matt Cutts with this a while back:

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-payday-loan-cutts-16940.h...

[diminoten]

It consistently blows my mind how effective spamming actually is, given how much money, effort, and time spammers are willing to throw around.

[saraid216]

It's easily one of the best illustrations of how naturally skewed our worldviews are.

[datathis]

Good post but I wish it had a date on it -- hard to know if recent or 5 years ago. Am I just not seeing the date?

[leephillips]

No, I neglected to date it. As far as I can tell from my notes it's from Jan. 20, 2012.

[fhars]

If you look at the screenshot, it looks like it is from mid-december 2011.