And you're saying spam doesn't work?

[biz]

It really depends. You really need to know what you're doing through and through. What to cloak, what to buffer, what doesn't matter, what does, and so on. All though theres definitely a little luck, in my years I've seen sites that focused on all "white hat" techniques get dropped from the SEs and replaced by sites with spam. And vice versa. And the trends change. This year spam might be working for a particular niche and then in 1-4 years that changes and you're being out ranked by sites with topical siloing, YMYL content, established authorship, use of entities and blah blah blah. So when you're talking about the "long run" with Google, who the hell knows?

So it's really looking at the way Google is reacting to your niche by analyzing your competition atm.

AND

Having testing sites where you test links, on-site optimizations, technical optimizations etc etc where you can see how Google reacts to any changes is 100% necessary. I NEVER TEST on sites I care about. Never. You do one change at a time to multiple test sites and see if theres positive movement.

If the optimization moved all sites in a positive direction, well it's conclusive. I honestly only do one test site nowadays. But for those that are really into experimentation and spending a ton of time you don't need, have at it

The same effort can be better spent in building a quality site which stays there for a long time.

 

[Albert Camus]

LOL.
Those are indeed good-for-nothing sites.
There will be a few good links, you need to figure them out.

Those bad links could be added to camouflage the real links. Some sites do that always, so that their real links are not exposed.

10k complete spam rds, 1k fresh websites, the whole profile is just spam sites with no good links at all.

Also I went scrolling some pages and found that a big portion of the content is just ai generated shit. Only the top ranking pages seem to have good quality content (mostly it's proofreading and editing the ranking pages??)

This year spam might be working for a particular niche and then in 1-4 years that changes and you're being out ranked by sites with topical siloing, YMYL content, established authorship, use of entities and blah blah blah. So when you're talking about the "long run" with Google, who the hell knows?

That's what I meant by luck

The same effort can be better spent in building a quality site which stays there for a long time.

Not true! This kind of sites doesn't require much time or effort. Few hours for domain, niche and keyword research, few more hours to setup the bots and tools, contact link sellers, then your online and all you need now is electricity and some processing power (renting a vps/server) to run the bots!

 

[biz]

10k complete spam rds, 1k fresh websites, the whole profile is just spam sites with no good links at all.

Also I went scrolling some pages and found that a big portion of the content is just ai generated shit. Only the top ranking pages seem to have good quality content (mostly it's proofreading and editing the ranking pages??)



That's what I meant by luck


Not true! This kind of sites doesn't require much time or effort. Few hours for domain, niche and keyword research, few more hours to setup the bots and tools, contact link sellers, then your online and all you need now is electricity and some processing power (renting a vps/server) to run the bots!

They may be camouflaging their links as I said.

You said it doesn't take much time, but that is for setting it up. Then you need to constantly keep up with the bans and delistings and all.

 

[coolsheet]

The same effort can be better spent in building a quality site which stays there for a long time.

Did you not read what I said totally? I'm literally looking at "authority" sites being out ranked by sites that are a few months old and spam links... Meaning those sites aren't there for a long time. I've seen this for about a year with another site, that has nothing but spam and has plowed through every G update and outranked everyone. Get outta here with that "build a quality site" nonsense.

 

[tidelow]

12k pages, what brings the internal linking here? Anyway, every page has 62 internal links to other random pages with the exact same placements, all the pages link to the home page.

This is a typical mass auto page site with spintax. The internal linking structure is the key to the ranking, without it those backlinks would barely move the needle and certainly wouldn't stick the rankings.

 

[biz]

Did you not read what I said totally? I'm literally looking at "authority" sites being out ranked by sites that are a few months old and spam links... Meaning those sites aren't there for a long time. I've seen this for about a year with another site, that has nothing but spam and has plowed through every G update and outranked everyone. Get outta here with that "build a quality site" nonsense.

I have seen them - and then I see them disappearing as quickly as they'd come.

 

[Starblazer]

Have a look, are those good as standalone sites?

I think Google's latest algo gives priority to links from low OBL domains to avoid spam. But they end up helping these spammy sites. I have seen such sites rank for tough niches like weight loss and MMO. We should see how long they stick before Google releases their next algo.

 

[Albert Camus]

They may be camouflaging their links as I said.

You said it doesn't take much time, but that is for setting it up. Then you need to constantly keep up with the bans and delistings and all.

What I meant is that most of the work would be automated , needless to say that you should maintain shit once it's running.

Camouflaging more shitty spam-aurhoeitive links or some of the worst Pbns ever? I am analysing as hard as possible and that's the only left possibilities..

Did you not read what I said totally? I'm literally looking at "authority" sites being out ranked by sites that are a few months old and spam links... Meaning those sites aren't there for a long time. I've seen this for about a year with another site, that has nothing but spam and has plowed through every G update and outranked everyone. Get outta here with that "build a quality site" nonsense.

I thought that this doesn't work anymore, but here we go..

I prefer to take a grey route.. Building a quality site while at the same time moderately using lack techniques with the least possible risk..

This is a typical mass auto page site with spintax. The internal linking structure is the key to the ranking, without it those backlinks would barely move the needle and certainly wouldn't stick the rankings.

Right, Internal linking and on site SEO in general are well done.
So it seems that a site with good structure, good interlinking would rank this high with spam links!

We should see how long they stick before Google releases their next algo

It's working for now, if I have the needed capital I'd start doing something similar asap as it's still working great.

This site is still adding shitty content and building links of the same shitty quality (around 200 new rds per month with 1000's of links), this indicates this is still working till the moment and it doesn't seem to go away any soon.

How long the ranking will last? Mostly not long, but with this crazy traffic you don't need much time to make profits!

 

[biz]

What I meant is that most of the work would be automated

Oh I see. What makes you think you can fully automate the maintenance process? You don't know when and how Google will hit you.
What if your site gets knocked out? With a legit site you have a chance to come back like that guy who came back. With a spam site, you are gone forever. Bye bye money.

 

[sam55]

After looking at those blogspot sites I think these could be their own way of selling spam links.

 

[shindou90]

Spam will always be viable, just more risky.

 

[blackbeans]

Interesting analysis on backlink spam.

What is the quality of the content on those off-page links?

Are they at least readable?

Do they make sense?

Also, this might have a lot more to do with the domain authority of the site.

After all, you're showing two-year stats.

So, there's still a lot of details that may be missing for people to get a realistic answer on whether link spam still works.

 

[Albert Camus]

Interesting analysis on backlink spam.

What is the quality of the content on those off-page links?

Are they at least readable?

Do they make sense?

There's nothing to be read at all! The content quality is zero degrees! A 300 words of nonsense (literally random nonsense), then a big block of stuffed keywords linking to random sites and after that a bigger block of hundreds of links to the money site with the brand name as anchor!
Checking them manually, some of the sites tried to download some melicious files and malware. Can it get worse'?

Also, this might have a lot more to do with the domain authority of the site.

After all, you're showing two-year stats.

So, there's still a lot of details that may be missing for people to get a realistic answer on whether link spam still works.

The domain is 13yo but the current site is just 4 years. Checking wayback machine, a completely different site used to live on this domain and was dropped in 2014!

 

[VortexAlpha]

I was checking the serp for some keywords, analyzing and checking the competition. For one of the keywords the first page looked like that:

- Wikipedia

- A couple of authority sites I already know

- One site that's really bad, bad quality on all aspects, shitty design, thin content, but It's old and established and has that power and authority that makes anyshit they post rank instantly

- At the 7th position I found something interesting

View attachment 197109

Great metrics, great rankings and traffic as well

View attachment 197110

670k words, top organic words all have 100k+ monthly searches!

Till now, it's all great, the content is fairly good and unique, the on page work is done well!

But what about the off page part?!

Out of those 11k referring domains 1863 are fresh made blogspots!

There's a single domain with 400k backlinks to this site!

5k referring domains with DA below 20. All of the low DA referring domains are newly created web 2.0, and sblogs of all kinds with 100's of pages of spun content all linking to this site.

The only quality link in this profile is a wikipedia link, the rest are all complete spam shit.

Anchor texts are also interesting; 50% are brand name, the rest are foreign language or random English words!t Btw the brand name itself is a made up word with no search traffic.

Of course spam doesn't work!

I don't know what's happening lately, earlier it was almost impossible to get high rankings and good results this way, but currently, more and more people are noticing the same. The only question is how long it will last and if algorithms will ban these kinds of sites at some point.

 

[Albert Camus]

The only question is how long it will last and if algorithms will ban these kinds of sites at some point.

Most sites won't last for long. Few ones (as the example shown here) are lasting for years!

 

[Th3 Canadian 3h]

Judging by this, not much.

I think that is just a list of expired ones, not claimed with an email so the cost is a bit more for the registration and proxies

 

[TacticalTechZone]

Btw the brand name itself is a made up word with no search traffic.

does the brand name have anything to do with the domain name or you mean it's completely made up and has nothing to do with the url structure at all?

 

[itz_styx]

only people who never tried it say serp spam doesnt work

 

[CammerCash]

You have no information if the webmaster disavows these links or not.

 

[sumrah]

I hope you are carefully