It does work. This submission is literally an example of it working, and we will see 2 or 3 more today and again and again every day. It's not the single link

It does work. This submission is literally an example of it working, and we will see 2 or 3 more today and again and again every day. It's not the single link on HN that matters, it's the dozens of automated tweets, posts and whatnot followed by manual links from people if the post is lucky. I've started flagging SEO campaigns because it's getting a bit stupid that every jackass can write some dumb crap about "omg startup" and then have their coworkers or co-yc-alumni prop it up. Google will eventually address pandering/gaming social networks - it's not very hard to detect when a company writes and hosts completely unrelated content for somebody else's audience like when a video chat service writes about blogging for SEO. 10 years ago it was "free articles" (http://www.articlesbase.com/ http://www.articlesbase.com/) you could host full of juicy content + a couple spammy backlinks for the original author, 5 years ago it was stupid infographics, now it's "social media articles". It's just a loophole that unfortunately hinges on exploiting us.