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Please don't do this here.

As much as I appreciate with the premise that this shouldn't have happened.. I'd much rather people feel safe coming here talking about it. They talk about a long past incident and they don't suggest they are proud of it.

Having this sort of discussion here increases the visibility of these sort of annoyances in ways that make Google more likely to clamp down on the practice. It makes forum administrators more likely to clamp down on abuse, and frankly anything that helps decrease trust in the SEO industry is a good thing.

Yeah there are a ton of ideas I came up with that I never acted on like faking being a resident of a cities with GOV TLDs who have business directories on that domain. There was enough of these directories providing do-follow links that it may have been worth the effort. Seemed borderline illegal so I decided not to.

Actually, there was an article on HN recently about how easy it is to procure GOV domains by pretending to be a city. The balls of that one blew me away.

Blackhat SEO is no different than hacking. It's just exploiting systems.

If it makes you feel better, none of it is sustainable. Google eventually shit on all those sites. Money is always good while it lasts.

As always, hate the game, not the player.