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I don't disagree. This just reminds me of a very "gray hat" SEO project I dabbled with 8-9 years ago. Back then we were grabbing dropped domains and rebuildin

I don't disagree. This just reminds me of a very "gray hat" SEO project I dabbled with 8-9 years ago. Back then we were grabbing dropped domains and rebuilding them in masse to harvest the search traffic and build an early "PBN." Not wanting to leave an obvious footprint for Google or having to build a ton of templates, we randomized everything. From generating logos on the fly to randomizing the html structure and css classes names an extra precaution. The sites were ugly as sin, but since Google wasn't rendering CSS on every crawl it didn't matter. Pair this with our monetization strategy that made extensive use of css's `content=""` to place large CTAs across different sites and this project reminds me of the lessons we learned back then. Needless to say, this isn't a project I'm super proud of, but when I saw how non-accessible this CSS font was, I couldn't help but think about scrambling the class names as well.

kuschku 9y ago
That’s not "gray hat", that’s entirely black hat, utterly immoral, and purely malicious. And honestly, we as society should do anything to eliminate people doing this.
- nickreese 9y ago
  Well that went from 0-60 in no time. Society has much larger fish to fry. No one was harmed in this endeavor. Sure it "polluted the web" and was against Google's guidelines, but we definitely weren't hacking or doing other true "black hat" things. Ultimately it was shut down in 2012 and in the entire time I was involved in this 2 people requested their domain back and we sent it their way no questions asked. Content was generated with our internal equivalent of a markov chain, so there wasn't content piracy either. Sure, this project added no value to the web and we should have spent our time building an awesome service that generated links naturally... but as they say hindsight is 20/20.
  - majewsky 9y ago
    > Society has much larger fish to fry. I wish I had a dime everytime someone used this justification.
  - entropie 9y ago
    Great and interesting comments anyway. As much I would call me a white hat, I guess most of us have done we're not proud of in the past. I for one used to work a very short time at a small dating portal that used like any available way to get users to pay.
  - tudorw 9y ago
    thanks for sharing this, it's good to know what's out there, hope you have found a vocation :)
- matte_black 9y ago
  Virgil led Dante down into the next layer of Hell, past the rapists, murderers and thieves. “And here...” he gestured “...is where they torture people who place CTAs in a css content=“
dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
> Pair this with our monetization strategy that made extensive use of css's `content=""` to place large CTAs Ah, it was you!... Whenever I searched for an obscure word and one of these sites cropped up, I was wondering what the monetization strategy for this garbage was. Now I finally know...

kuschku 9y ago

That’s not "gray hat", that’s entirely black hat, utterly immoral, and purely malicious. And honestly, we as society should do anything to eliminate people doing this.

nickreese 9y ago
Well that went from 0-60 in no time. Society has much larger fish to fry. No one was harmed in this endeavor. Sure it "polluted the web" and was against Google's guidelines, but we definitely weren't hacking or doing other true "black hat" things. Ultimately it was shut down in 2012 and in the entire time I was involved in this 2 people requested their domain back and we sent it their way no questions asked. Content was generated with our internal equivalent of a markov chain, so there wasn't content piracy either. Sure, this project added no value to the web and we should have spent our time building an awesome service that generated links naturally... but as they say hindsight is 20/20.
- majewsky 9y ago
  > Society has much larger fish to fry. I wish I had a dime everytime someone used this justification.
- entropie 9y ago
  Great and interesting comments anyway. As much I would call me a white hat, I guess most of us have done we're not proud of in the past. I for one used to work a very short time at a small dating portal that used like any available way to get users to pay.
- tudorw 9y ago
  thanks for sharing this, it's good to know what's out there, hope you have found a vocation :)
matte_black 9y ago
Virgil led Dante down into the next layer of Hell, past the rapists, murderers and thieves. “And here...” he gestured “...is where they torture people who place CTAs in a css content=“

dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago

> Pair this with our monetization strategy that made extensive use of css's `content=""` to place large CTAs Ah, it was you!... Whenever I searched for an obscure word and one of these sites cropped up, I was wondering what the monetization strategy for this garbage was. Now I finally know...