Since when was putting the selfish desires of a for-profit company ahead of your own well-being virtuous? This behavior is inherent to human nature, and presum

Since when was putting the selfish desires of a for-profit company ahead of your own well-being virtuous? This behavior is inherent to human nature, and presumably to everyone here who calls themselves a hacker. That Google doesn't "like" what I do has no moral or legal weight. The same goes for sites that accept user-generated content. Obviously not everybody who's a spammer is good at it or a true hacker, but I would venture a guess that most hackers are blackhat if they do SEO, simply because they see this as a system that can be exploited with controlled heuristic testing as apposed to some superfluous tools and a whack community a la seoMoz.org And it's not a zero-sum game. Google is forced to improve their natural language processing capabilities, their ability to execute more computationally expensive processing on massive amounts of content, so on and so forth, to try and keep up and provide a legitimate product. So back to the spamming; Any site that allows you to put a link on it is a target for seo, of course. Maximizing c-class IP diversity among links is important. But more importantly, these pages are usually Tier-1 to Tier-2 in link schemes as it's effective to point the low level forum spam at user-content generated sites with strong domain authority and funnel the juice to your primary site. They're basically just buffers. How long does it last? Varies greatly on how you're promoting it, the niche its in, etc. It doesn't always have to be "pump and dump" - I have multiple blogs over a year old that are alive and producing $1,200-$2,000 month each with almost no effort. When you can create just one of those blogs with about 10 hours worth of work (in total), there's obviously money to be made. And if you can write all of your own software to automate it, you can pretty much just "print money."