A lot of the Google SEO “secrets” are not so secret. If you have an inquisitive mind - start a new blog with the means of getting your articles ranked on page 1. In 3 months you will know exactly how it works because there is real-time feedback. Google says it doesn’t use site authority, but it clearly does.
People will pay $5,000 (a number i saw once) to get a link from Forbes. Not because they give a shit about Forbes traffic but because Google still thinks that Forbes is some “above them all” content site.
But if you want to see the real dirty stuff people do, buy a subscription to a tool like Ahrefs and see how people manipulate links for SEO purposes. It might just give you gray hairs.
I cannot because I don't have a subscription (it's quite expensive and for my needs I only need to buy it few times a year).
I can tell you this though:
- Brands buy paid guest posts on "established" sites. (Using a stuffed keyword for their money site, service or whatever.)
- They wait until Google indexes their sponsored post.
- They then go ahead and buy links that link to the sponsored post instead of their service / brand site.
- The idea is that they can avoid a penalty in long-term. And Google largely looks past it because the sites doing such tactics (buying hundreds of private network links) are still on page 1 of Google results.
Past a certain point (5,000+ referring domains?) Google isn't going to penalize your site because it can't differentiate between legitimate or spammy links, or even care for matter[0]. Though the internals on the algorithm are very scarce in this regard.
If you do use the tool (Ahrefs) you have full freedom to analyze sites you suspect are doing shitty tactics. And you will find inconsistencies like the one I mentioned above. Needless to say, because Ahrefs is a crawler, it can be blocked and I imagine quite a few blackhat networks do this to avoid further detection.
Lastly, this is a big problem for smaller niches / keywords because all you need is 20-30 links pointing towards an article and Google will assume you have a PhD on that topic.
People will pay $5,000 (a number i saw once) to get a link from Forbes. Not because they give a shit about Forbes traffic but because Google still thinks that Forbes is some “above them all” content site.
But if you want to see the real dirty stuff people do, buy a subscription to a tool like Ahrefs and see how people manipulate links for SEO purposes. It might just give you gray hairs.