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The whole backrub/pagerank/backlink thing was from the 90's. Don't you suppose Google is weighting other things more highly in their search algorithm these days?

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Seo contests are a fairly good way to see that backlinks still work well.

This one was able to rank a website written in Latin, where that makes no sense, at the number 2 spot for a competitive local term:

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-loophol...

Kyle did great there and got his sites banned because of it!

And likely banned manually as a result of the publicity.

It was insulting to Google really! Nice to see someone bold enough to compete with lorem ipsum on the site. You are right most likely a manual penalty!

Missed opportunity to tweak the ranking algorithm to detect this sort of trick.

They are from the 90's, however for the most part they still signify importance of the page being cited. Deviating from links to mainly on-page factors makes it easy for new search engines to compete with Google. The results can also be manipulated much more frequently than when you need high authority links to rank on top.

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