Ready for the most interesting case study? Backlinks and the link spam update

Sorry for the baity title but this one is interesting. I have been following a dead website in my niche for about 2 years now. The website is an established blog with around 5000 articles but for some reason, at some point a few years ago, the owner simply stopped publishing although the website was doing great from what the stats tell me.

As you'd expect, with about a year of delay, in which the website stagnated in rankings, it started to slowly drop keyword by keyword, although due to the very established natural backlink profile, it kept its head above the water quite nicely.

The interesting part comes in June. Due to a vulnerability, spammers started to build doorway pages on that domain. These are your usual crappy chinese and russian redirects, but some are really nasty leading to porn, casino, and even malware websites. These doorway pages were pumped to the Moon and stars with very crappy backlinks, most of which aren't even indexed. And I`m talking about free .tk domain backlinks and hacked/exploited page redirects.

To get an idea, the website rose from June until now from about 400,000 backlinks to about 3,000,000 according to SEO tools.

Now, what do you think happened with that domain? It skyrocketed. But then the link spam update came. And guess what? The website almost doubled in ranked keywords and traffic!

The website is basically going through a marketer's most horrible nightmare, with hacked content on the domain itself due to vulnerabilities and millions of crappy backlinks pointing to it. But somehow, the website still stands. The links aren't ignored like you'd expect. They are pumping that domain up. The pumped doorway pages aren't ranking. But they are indexed. I see daily new ones getting indexed.

This is just so you guys get an understanding of how much spam you can push until it is basically too much spam.

Interesting anecdote. Can you post SEMRush screenshots with domain redacted?

This is for all the people that made this blackhat forum into a warriorforum copy with all your "Only guest posts work" and "Stay safe, wait for forbes to notice your 5 page website and link to it naturally" crap.

yeah, but this will not work for all sites, it's just one of those random things that google does to mess with us

Great share nonetheless...

Well, the hackers wouldn't bother building pages on the site unless they can get them to rank, and the way to rank spam is with yet more spam. If you can find a way to fix your site vulnerabilities and keep control of the traffic you're getting, ride the wave as long as you can IMO!

Steptoe said:

Well, the hackers wouldn't bother building pages on the site unless they can get them to rank, and the way to rank spam is with yet more spam. If you can find a way to fix your site vulnerabilities and keep control of the traffic you're getting, ride the wave as long as you can IMO!

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Well if I was the owner of the website I would ponder the possibility of redirecting all 404 to a random page before actually deleting all the redirects. to try to harness all of those backlinks just as an interesting case study. But that's a big risk for a website that was built clean for a lot of years. A nice test, of course, but still a risk. Anywho, I will be watching to see where this is going to see whether actually let your website get pouded by hackers is a good idea or not)

SunnyLeon said:

Now, what do you think happened with that domain? It skyrocketed. But then the link spam update came. And guess what? The website almost doubled in ranked keywords and traffic!

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That is wild!
Each time there's a Google update there are always sites like this that somehow not just escape but performs in manner that showed they got benefited by the update.

This is actually interesting.

By the way, I feel the owner is dead or something

Very interesting thanks for posting. It goes to show Google are never as far forward with their ability to analyse backlinks as they make our. Surprise surprise.

Yeah its really interesting analyzing same thing with 1 more website I think sometimes I feel google algorithm is unpredictable

Is this the same website that uses .blogspot domains as buffers and then uses GSA exploits and redirects type backlinks to pump up the buffers? iso........net.au ?

jr_sci said:

Is this the same website that uses .blogspot domains as buffers and then uses GSA exploits and redirects type backlinks to pump up the buffers? iso........net.au ?

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No, what happened to this website doesn’t seem like an on purpose SEO effort. It might be added as part of the same network after being spammed but truth be told, i didn’t go through the redirects to see where they lead because i got enough malware from the porn I watch, I don’t need more.

long story short, the website was spammed due to a vulnerability and then they pumped the resulting spam urls built on it with very low quality backlinks from websites built on free domains like ml and tk that have pages with just thousands and thousands of links going out one after the other with no other content. None of the spammy backlinks go to real pages, but still they pump the whole website.

And a small update: the website basically took all my rankings at this moment for the keywords we were fighting for, but I kept all my other rankings in place.

Very interesting case! Thank you for sharing! It turns out, the main thing here is to find the line.

Great finding, and a slap on the face that Google is messed up.

SunnyLeon said:

The links aren't ignored like you'd expect. They are pumping that domain up

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Well, you don't know this for sure. There might be other variables, like for example:
They did get ignored, perhaps even before the update. But the update killed competitors, making this page raise in rank.

This is just one example. We will not be able, to get any conclusions on what an update does, by just watching a handful domains, or just one. This will only lead to apparent causalities.

Don't get this negative, though - thanks for sharing
We should just take conclusions of things like this with a grain of salt^^

Interesting as the title says and unbelievable at the same time.
I would call them lucky but I guess they won't live long on the first page.

Bugfisch said:

Well, you don't know this for sure. There might be other variables, like for example:
They did get ignored, perhaps even before the update. But the update killed competitors, making this page raise in rank.

This is just one example. We will not be able, to get any conclusions on what an update does, by just watching a handful domains, or just one. This will only lead to apparent causalities.

Don't get this negative, though - thanks for sharing
We should just take conclusions of things like this with a grain of salt^^

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Well i am studying this particular website for a few years now. They have a big blog, not just one page ranking.. so they have quite the span across the keywords and many competitors. They have managed to beat huge names in the online space, Even big newspapers with Spot on articles.. ranking increase started way before the updates.. only thing to change in the last few years is this exploited vulnerability causing a few tens of thousands of thin Pages to be built on the website and around 3 million new lq backlinks.. so you tell me..

I assume spam links would probably not trigger a penalty solely by the algo because it's too risky for google to take a site down only because of spam links hike, considering seo attacks.

I assume it may mostly trigger a red alarm for sites with spam links that G sends some manual reviewers to see if the site is spam or legit. That makes sense to me.

interesting, like the title