It's a fairly lucrative "business practice". Getting juicy links from authoritative websites can skyrocket your rankings within a few days, even if that. Yet, this isn't a new thing or something that someone just came up with.
Such gamification has been going on since the early 2000s, it's just kept lowkey enough that people don't see it as the biggest deal ever. However, it's a big deal for people who pay for such services.
If you look at certain job advertising websites for bloggers/marketers, you'll find plenty of job listings where the employer is looking for writers with "access to high-authority editorials" -- because naturally, they know that those links are worth a hundredfold more than 50 links from an average blog.
Whether it's a problem on Google's side is up for discussion. Giving sites high authority and then bumping up other sites who are linked from those places is definitely a weird way to implement a ranking system. But rest assured, it's there and it works.
And as for the title, it should read "bloggers are paying hackers to break into websites", rather than blaming one side only.
A lot more could be said on this, especially from experience, but there's really no point. Addressing an elephant this big would require Google to be actively involved in the discussion. And that's unlikely to happen.
But a lot of them do a really bad job of it like linking to irrelevant sites multiple times even on a single page. This makes it fairly obvious a site has been hacked and severe de-ranking soon follows.
Those doing it in a clever way are few and far between and, it could be argued, if they are simply linking to relevant sites in a measured manner, who cares? The 'legitimate' links on many commercial sites are paid for one way or another anyway?
I agree it goes against the spirit of a supposedly neutral search service though.
> Giving sites high authority and then bumping up other sites who are linked from those places is definitely a weird way to implement a ranking system.
“We hacked thousands of porn sites and replaced their content with links to our own commercial porno offerings, now that we’re in that business.” -Blackhat Dominatrix CEO Chick
Such gamification has been going on since the early 2000s, it's just kept lowkey enough that people don't see it as the biggest deal ever. However, it's a big deal for people who pay for such services.
If you look at certain job advertising websites for bloggers/marketers, you'll find plenty of job listings where the employer is looking for writers with "access to high-authority editorials" -- because naturally, they know that those links are worth a hundredfold more than 50 links from an average blog.
Whether it's a problem on Google's side is up for discussion. Giving sites high authority and then bumping up other sites who are linked from those places is definitely a weird way to implement a ranking system. But rest assured, it's there and it works.
And as for the title, it should read "bloggers are paying hackers to break into websites", rather than blaming one side only.
A lot more could be said on this, especially from experience, but there's really no point. Addressing an elephant this big would require Google to be actively involved in the discussion. And that's unlikely to happen.