Comment by chimen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chimen | Hacker News Reader

One of my side projects is battling on a difficult keyword. It's going up and made it to top 5 after 3 years. I'm monitoring SEO using ahrefs. 1 year ago I saw a new website going to top position (grammarchecker.net) out of nowhere so I got interested in finding out their "story".

Domain was new, never saw that website when I researched my competition and it was on top positions on multiple keywords. The tool itself is nothing but a wrapper to `languagetool`, stuff that you can see on hundreds of other websites starting from page 2 in search results.

Digging through the data I was amazed to discover that he's basically running xrummer to comment on all the possible blogs and forums out there, on discussions and topics completely unrelated to the target website so yeah 2000's hacks are still valid. 1 year passed and he's still above me.

How are they unable to detect a comment spam towards a new domain? Blog posts spammed to death with thousands of unrelated comments that even my 8 year old could spot.

It is even worse because there are multiple victims - You lose your place in search, people searching get bad results, and people trying to run a forum or any site where there is user content get crushed with SEO spam.

I just had a look on Ahrefs, and yes it seems he's using some crappy blog comment spam with Xrumer/GSA, but he also has a few powerful backlinks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camel_case https://timely.is/

Also note, this guy could be using PBN's, most people who build PBN block the SEO tools(Ahrefs, Majestic, SEMRush, Moz) spider user agents for looking at their site.

Also, he only has 585 referring domains compared to 748k backlinks, so the majority of his backlinks are sitewide backlinks.

All Wikipedia links are nofollow. So as far as I understand, they don't contribute to seo.

Nofollow's are still relevant. If 100% of your backlinks are dofollow, then that's going to look unnatural, and you will be more likely to receive a Google penalty.

Nofollow links aren't going to pump up your stats, but they are vital to diversifying your backlink profile.

Ahrefs goes into a lot more detail here: https://ahrefs.com/blog/nofollow-links/

You see all those xrummer blog comment links and forum links out there... but that does NOT mean that it's helping. Most likely those links are just there to hide the links that are actually helping the site rank. That's typically done in cases such as the one you're describing. If you can spot it, Google can spot it and just ignores those links.

Wow polluting the internet to protect your Golden Goose sites for backlinks.. I usually expect the worst but this wasn't on my radar. It seems very plausible however.

> but that does NOT mean that it's helping. Most likely those links are just there to hide the...

it's not only that they don't help, they could ( and afaik used to ) damage reputation/ranking. But maybe this changed in recent years.

My understanding is that they used to damage your ranking, but then people realized that spamming links to competing sites was an easy way to improve your ranking, so Google stopped.

If those links don't help and are ignored by google, how do they help hide the "real" links?

I've also noticed that comment spam seems to actually work, and have seen mention that nofollow links do contribute to pagerank, although I'd guess they'd contribute less than follow links.

'I've also noticed that comment spam seems to actually work..'

My pet theory is that with any filter there is always some stuff that gets through and if you're automatically spamming a few thousand comments then even a tiny percentage is going to make it worth the effort.

There is also a chance they'll get a few comments on sites with dofollow links, of which there are still some around.

Dofollow and nofollow don't matter as much as the did a few years ago. It will look like unnatural link building if 100% of your backlinks are dofollow.

There's usually a intial period where sites with zillions of spammy backlinks will rank, then they will crash after a weeks /months and will probably never resurface again.

I believe part of the challenge is that if all those unrelated comments sank the domain ... then I could also sink YOUR domain by running xrummer as a weapon against you (creating useless link bait comments). How can Google avoiding weaponizing some of these kind of things?

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