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"-xrumer - Developed by a few russian people and primarily used by russian pharmacies for fraud, this is the most powerful "spammer" too out there. You can literally spend $1k and get 1million backlinks within a matter of days and have your site in the #1 position for whatever keyword you're aiming for."

Sorry bro that ain't true anymore. Xrumer brutal blasts used to rule years ago, but I can assure you that just having a million of crappy profile/forum post links popping up at the same moment nowadays isn't going to help your site ranking as it used to be. It's just not as powerful as it was before the whole xrumer was translated and sold to non-russian speaking folks.

Xrumer is still being deployed by the "big dogs" but not to link your main, "money site" directly. More like to link to other pages with links pointing to your site (or to pages with links to other pages with links to other pages with link to other pages that eventually link to your money site). Never directly, too risky (even though it's debated how risky it is, but still why taking a chance to find it out).

Buying links today means (more like) purchasing services like seolinkvine.com or buildmyrank.com where you buy posts (about the kw you want to target and have on them a contextual link) on network of sites with an high home page Page Rank.

Nonetheless Google is catching up with these networks, recently deindexing a lot of their sites and making their users, who spent lots of money for those links, feel really, really, really bad.

Pros in tough industries had to adapt to Google's algo evolution: they now build their own networks, they put out decent content on them, they provide a good user experience, they tend not to over-optimize, they host them on different A-class IPs, they have their domains registered with different names/addresses/etc, they build multiple tiers of links to their backlinks with custom developed softwares (or Zennoposter) with private proxies and their 24/7 running servers and so on.

It's not a cheap process nor a quick one.

As for now and long-term rankings, spamming isn't just enough.

To be on the safe side you really need to follow Matt Cutt's evergreen advice: build a kick-ass site that even a human reviewer working for Google would love to see on the first spots.

Knowing how easy it was to manipulate google results (and to some extent, it still is) imo that's the right direction from the perspective of a everyday user who's searching for something that's not clicking on Adsense ads or buying something.

Google is a little smarter than all those spam tools... I think some might work, in some instances, but the real threat to google I think is buying links from high quality private sites off the grid, where you actually analyze which links are helping your competitors rank, using tools like opensiteexplorer and majestic seo, and approaching them privately to buy links or place sponsored blog posts on their sites....

Just to be clear, there are 40 some factors that effect the value of a link, and that is just on a generic level, these factors carry different weight in different verticals, and based on other signals. http://wiep.net/link-value-factors/

I think we need to wait and see how google rolls out this new penalty to see how it plays out.

"AI" is algorithms, and it is what a large fraction of Google engineering does all day.

The most obvious means to counter this strategy is to watch the rank delta of any given site and dampen it. If a site goes from 12 incoming links to 12,000,000 in a few weeks, penalize proportionally pending human review.

What if the site just went viral?

Should the human reviewer check every link by hand?

Think codecademy.com now first for "learn to code". I mean, is it best place to learn how to code? At the moment, I'd say it's not. Is it the third result "codeyear.com" (run by codecademy as well)? I'm sure there are better sites that could take that spot and provide more value to the user than that landing page pointing to codecademy (Nothing personal against the codecademy guys of course, big kudos for their venture so far and best wishes for the future).

The problem with today's algorithm is that it can't really tell which site is really good and which one is just popular, mainstream, consolidated, with a high PR. Think lifehacker.com second for "learn to code" (on my side of the world, on google.com and chrome incognito mode on).

Right now if every single newspaper of the world cover your site about how to build a homemade nuclear device and actually write something about the matter in the article (how it would be natural to be), use as anchor text "how to build an atomic bomb" and link to your site, your site will skyrocket to the top for that kw (and many others similar). Even if it's just a school project or a joke that made it to the news.

Where's the quality check?

Anyway I'm sure that smart people are currently working on these details and that a comment reply can't really do justice to the complexity of the issue.

Im sure humans can quickly ascertain whether a site suddenly went viral or is being gamed, as the number of such sites is fairly small. I never said a comment reply is the panacea or do can possibly do justice to the totality of search quality, just that an explosive delta in page rank should not be a major issue to a company with the resources of a google.

Google's claim on this subject is that they not only use PR or popularity of pages that link to you but also their authority (or domain relevance). So a link from Stack Overflow would count more for a search term like "learn to code" than say, a link from Howcast.

The most obvious counter to that is to drip-feed out links. Sites like http://linklicious.me/ offer this facility for a while now.

Nice try, pre Skynet bot. We're not falling for your suggestion of building an AI for search.

Besides, if one really good one does exist, many/most SEO people would be out of a job; white or black hats.

Why is that a bad thing? Maybe they could do something more productive with their lives than figuring out ways to corrupt one of the most useful information tools humanity has built...

Whitehat SEOs aren't corrupting anything. Hell, Matt Cutts gives them advice on how better to do their job.

Indeed I (SEO engineer for a large publisher) spend 70% of my time giving feed back to our developers on how to build a site correctly - whats the best way to handle pagination or faceting on a 10M page site for example.