Links make you rank. Period.
No matter where they come from.
Little bit of History:
In the past we dropped links everywhere. Comments, forum posts, all kinds of profiles and web2.0 properties. In some cases you were able to drop content like it would be from the site author himself (Drupal and some others).
I had some legal issues with link spamming, but it didn’t really went anywhere.
So this wasn’t liked, but could be considered mostly legal.
Note: It’s legal on a criminal act level. The police won’t investigate, but there could be competition laws in your country which could apply. So competitors could bring you to court for link spamming. Could – I don’t know any case personally that actually went to court.
Site owner deleted the links often, increased the ‘security’ to make it harder/impossible to drop links there.
Those places were also heavily spammed and became of low value when ranking in Google.
Hacked Links
What to do if you want sticky links from non spammed places where the domain actually holds value but the owner doesn’t want to link to your Casino crap?
You just hack him 🤡
I guess the most hacked platform is WordPress.
Plenty of poorly programmed plugins are giving easy access and the actual mass of WordPress installations give an almost infinite amount of targets.
Anecdote: In Payday Loans someone owned a Plugin (can’t remember if it was WordPress). He was able to inject links to his Payday Loans projects to the plugin’s output after the plugin was installed and later updated. Those links did him very well for a long time. I would consider this half legal, if not even 100% legal. But I’m no lawyer 🤡
I don’t want to bore you with the technical details, but once you are able to upload something to the WordPress installation or get DB access you can put there whatever you want, whenever you want.
Many ‘hackers’ just hide those links (display: none, white bg and font, …) so the site owner doesn’t recognize his site is actually spreading Casino links.
The ‘industry’
You could do those hacks on your own and put your own links there or rent the spots.
I never bought any of those links so I can’t say anything about the prices. I would say the mentioned $100k a week would be a lot for such links.
So it’s either really a shit ton(!!) of links or it’s not true.
I would believe $100k a month. But almost half a million a month… not sure if I want to eat that. Not that I don’t believe there are such budgets, but that you could spend so much on hacked links. But what do I know? I’m just a small little spammer spending too much time on X 🤡
The consequences
I have a hard time staying away from such things, because to me it’s just tech. You weren’t cautious and I exploited that with tech. Nobody gets murdered, harmed, robbed or anything like that. It’s just a game and you got pissed because you lost 🤡
But it is what it is and it’s illegal.
And this time it’s illegal on a criminal act level, which means the police will investigate if brought to their attention.
I think every country in this world has laws targeting that. And it’s not little. The scale and that you are doing it commercial will most likely bring you to jail when being identified and caught.
The problem with this is, you can get away with hacking them. But if you use any of that to make money, you only have to follow the ‘money trail’ to find you. There’s nothing like ‘anonymous’ money. At some point you buy earthly goods, you convert to fiat. This is when you get caught.
I think many who operate in this space are working from countries which don’t care as long as you don’t hack properties in that country. (Note: you’ll often find in such scripts that .ru is excluded 🤔)
Anyway, do you want to be locked in your country, never being able to leave it because you have to fear getting busted at the airport?
Not the affiliate riches freedom that was promised, if you ask me 😂
My advice would be: Stay away from such kind of links.
If you buy them, I’m sure you could spend your money elsewhere and rank a legit site. If you hack for yourself, I think you could bring your skills somewhere else to bloom.
This stuff falls in the category ‘Not everything is worth the money‘. You don’t want to wake up in jail someday or have your freedom of movement trimmed, do you?!.
Just my personal opinion. Do with that as you please.
Anecdote: In the past many used the Sape network for buying links. Even if they claimed all links were legal, I am wondering why they looked like hacked (display: none etc)? 🤡
With Sape you could say you just bought them, or your contractor bought them for you. But, even if tons of people used them (and I don’t know any case where someone got into trouble buying them) you are already skating on thin ice with those links from Sape.
A last note: Some link dropping here and there and cloaked content, that’s not Blackhat. Naming it Blackhat, so the ‘Whitehats’ can sleep well manipulating the SERPs themselves but not being as bad as ‘Blackhats’ 😂
Those hacked links is what actually true Blackhat is. Blackhat is illegal. When it comes to hacked links I also know the term ‘Crackhat’, which I guess means people ‘crack’ things to get rankings, but it’s not used that often and I haven’t heard it since ages.
For any further definitions asks the Whitehats, they are the buzzword inventors here 🤡
If I missed something, leave it in the comments.
@apx_loot, thanks for the question