how are people getting away with using popular web 2.0s?

I am talking about highly spammed web 2.0s like purevolume, snack.ws, pen.io, kiwibox

I am checking some backlinks of competitors and they have this kind of backlink. I just dont understand how they can get away with this. These platforms are highly spammed. don't believe me? just google site:snack.ws and you will come upon thousand and thousands of spam pages.

wouldn't the algorithm catch this?

Just because your competitors have some crappy backlinks doesn't mean that's what's making them rank. They probably also have some good backlinks too. The worthless web 2.0s might be part of their backlink profile, but it doesn't mean that's what's helping them rank. The bad links are probably just ignored by Google, and they're ranking based on other, better, backlinks. Don't know your keyword, so I don't know your competitor sites, so I can't say for sure. Just a guess.

firstnamelastname said:

I am talking about highly spammed web 2.0s like purevolume, snack.ws, pen.io, kiwibox

I am checking some backlinks of competitors and they have this kind of backlink. I just dont understand how they can get away with this. These platforms are highly spammed. don't believe me? just google site:snack.ws and you will come upon thousand and thousands of spam pages.

wouldn't the algorithm catch this?

Click to expand...

First, like @danparks said, just because you see these doesn't mean it's what's making them rank.

Second, I've emphasized a key point in what you wrote. The fact you can find these posts on Google is because Google is indexing them.

I agree that the algorithm should be smart enough to recognize these and not index them. And perhaps in time Google will de-index them. But, for the moment, Google is indexing the hell out of these domains. Your guess why is as good as mine.

Perhaps the subdomains are making them unique