Page 7 - The Dark Side of Back Link Building

THE DARK SIDE OF LINK BUILDING 7

Introduction: Is There Still

A “Wild West” In SEO?

Before 2012, it wasn’t that difficult to get a

website to the top of page one in Google results.
All you needed was technical know-how, original
content, and site authority. Then, with some

carefully crafted linking budget, you could rocket
a page to the front page of Google for pretty much
any keyword relevant to the site. Loren Baker

Founder,
The tactics people employed back then were Search Engine Journal

generally called “link schemes.” Google describes
link schemes as links that are created to
manipulate search results. It’s a broad definition

that includes many different tactics.

Google search results relied heavily on PageRank when the algorithms were less
advanced. One could manipulate PageRank because it weighted the volume of links
pointing to a website heavily.

Money for links changed hands frequently. If you had a site that ranked well, you
could sell links from your pages. And there were all sorts of manipulative strategies

for pushing a page to the top of search.

You could run an article through a spinner for a few hundred permutations and post
them en masse on article directories with links back to your website.

Or, you could make deals with other webmasters and set up networks of websites all
linking to one another.