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Yes and sometimes you don't even need to break into the sites. When I was doing some "blackhat seo" about ten years ago I discovered a high PR forum in the same

Yes and sometimes you don't even need to break into the sites. When I was doing some "blackhat seo" about ten years ago I discovered a high PR forum in the same niche that allowed anchor links in the username field. This meant that I could I put something like <a href="mysite.com">keyword</a> as the username and it would just appears as "mykeyword" on the forum index page. Just one of the many ways I've learned to game Google. Social engineering also works well for link building and plenty of other grayhat methods. While I had considered the possibility of outright breaking into systems to place links, I never believed it worth the risk. Not surprised others have started doing it (or started getting caught doing it).

kelvin0 7y ago
Yeah, thanks for shitting in the punch bowl.
- systematical 7y ago
  If it makes you feel better, none of it is sustainable. Google eventually shit on all those sites. Money is always good while it lasts. As always, hate the game, not the player.
- technion 7y ago
  As much as I appreciate with the premise that this shouldn't have happened.. I'd much rather people feel safe coming here talking about it. They talk about a long past incident and they don't suggest they are proud of it. Having this sort of discussion here increases the visibility of these sort of annoyances in ways that make Google more likely to clamp down on the practice. It makes forum administrators more likely to clamp down on abuse, and frankly anything that helps decrease trust in the SEO industry is a good thing.
  - systematical 7y ago
    Yeah there are a ton of ideas I came up with that I never acted on like faking being a resident of a cities with GOV TLDs who have business directories on that domain. There was enough of these directories providing do-follow links that it may have been worth the effort. Seemed borderline illegal so I decided not to. Actually, there was an article on HN recently about how easy it is to procure GOV domains by pretending to be a city. The balls of that one blew me away. Blackhat SEO is no different than hacking. It's just exploiting systems.
- dang 7y ago
  Please don't do this here.

kelvin0 7y ago

Yeah, thanks for shitting in the punch bowl.

systematical 7y ago
If it makes you feel better, none of it is sustainable. Google eventually shit on all those sites. Money is always good while it lasts. As always, hate the game, not the player.
technion 7y ago
As much as I appreciate with the premise that this shouldn't have happened.. I'd much rather people feel safe coming here talking about it. They talk about a long past incident and they don't suggest they are proud of it. Having this sort of discussion here increases the visibility of these sort of annoyances in ways that make Google more likely to clamp down on the practice. It makes forum administrators more likely to clamp down on abuse, and frankly anything that helps decrease trust in the SEO industry is a good thing.
- systematical 7y ago
  Yeah there are a ton of ideas I came up with that I never acted on like faking being a resident of a cities with GOV TLDs who have business directories on that domain. There was enough of these directories providing do-follow links that it may have been worth the effort. Seemed borderline illegal so I decided not to. Actually, there was an article on HN recently about how easy it is to procure GOV domains by pretending to be a city. The balls of that one blew me away. Blackhat SEO is no different than hacking. It's just exploiting systems.
dang 7y ago
Please don't do this here.