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Almost every SEO "guru" and "expert" is a glorified snake oil salesman. I look at that whole industry the same way I look at the traditional woo-woo peddlers.

Makes me wonder what are the snake oily things they do?

Private blog networks, guest post spam, paid back links. Seems to be about 80% of the dodgy side of SEO.

Bottom line is that they ruin the quality of search and create a tremendous amount of churn that requires search engines to constantly refine their algo.

Is snake oil the right word -- if it actually works?

(Well at least until the search engines get better at detecting gray? hat SEO)

However, it's a tragedy of the commons failure? (Is there any short word for that)

I get those even without a website at the domain. They just spam everyone who can be found from whois data (lists of non-expired domains they probably just buy from somewhere).

I linked the Instagram handle of a friend on one of my posts, and now I even get posts about promoting and marketing my Instagram handle with “real likes and comments”.

Just one link.