Why is this spammy tactic working?

[VertigoMG]

We've recently taken over this account and are baffled how the previous SEO company has been attaining rankings. Why in the world is this spammy tactic still working in this day and age?

This is one of many landing pages on the website consisting of an iframe of the home page and a hidden article. The page had a ton of spammy incoming links with spammy anchor text from horribly spammy blog posts.

https://www.tallorder.com/Pages.php?socks-dress-calf-wide-mens-16-13-size-tall-very-12-store-sock-online.htm

[Smileworks_Liverpool]

Thanks Christy!

Glad i'm becoming a useful part of the group.  It's tough questions every day. I love that.

[Christy-Correll]

I second what EGOL said, Ed! high-fives

[VertigoMG]

I guess it will remain a mystery. I'm just surprised to see people using this tactic right now when so many websites have been wiped off the net doing this stuff.

[Smileworks_Liverpool]

There's just too many things it could be and I'd also be scratching my head.  Maybe I'm getting paranoid listening to conspiracy theorists but sometimes things seem to be intentionally obscured so there is always ambiguity about the workings of the system.

It's enough to drive you insane but whenever in doubt just turn to thinking up a great new topic and writing a great new article that people will want to read and engage with and that might earn some decent backlinks.  I swear if I spent as much time doing that as I do trying to reverse-engineer the algorithm then I'd be lots happier and more successful

There was a person last night from a major price comparison site here in the UK with a very good reputation.  She told me that they had been engaging in successful black hat tactics until very recently. Like April 17th 2018 or around the time of 'Fred'

She said she was terrified to move because it felt like a house of cards about to collapse.  I just didn't know what to tell her. It's the same here.  What is your clients view of it?  Do they accept responsibility for the shaky foundations? Have you discussed the position they're in?  I'd get them to agree a strategy and make sure it involves the risk of losing rankings in the name of clearing the decks for future development and nail the financial risks associated with a drop in traffic.

[VertigoMG]

The SEO company definitely did the client a favor by taking the links down; I'm just scratching my head that these pages were ever able to rank, given the recency of their creation.

[Smileworks_Liverpool]

Yikes.

Check this out.  It's a poll on Barry Schwartz' site.  They have some more grey and black hat peeps over there (especially in the comments) and they are saying that huge numbers of dodgy backlinks aren't affecting them at all.  I really believe backlinks are becoming less and less important unless they are really powerful and relevant ones.  It's almost like Google is ignoring this whole swathe of bad sites and the algorithm just doesn't take a blind bit of notice.  But when a real person does a quality survey then this type of thing:

• Automatically generated content
• Participating in link schemes
• Creating pages with little or no original content
• Cloaking
• Sneaky redirects
• Hidden text or links
• Doorway pages
• Scraped content
• Participating in affiliate programs without adding sufficient value
• Loading pages with irrelevant keywords
• Creating pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware
• Abusing rich snippets markup
• Sending automated queries to Google

is going to get you a penalty. (I pasted them straight over from google)

[Smileworks_Liverpool]

Hey EGOL,

thanks so much.  I really enjoy the community.  And answering the questions helps me learn more because there's never a right answer and it encourages me to be creative and think about my own site.  Also I want the T-shirt lol!!

I just came back from the SEM rush conference in London and was doing a Q&A for in-house users of their product.  It's amazing how much has changed really recently.  I'd be genuinely afraid that if I stopped engaging I'd miss something!  We have 32,000 users to our site now.  Pretty much all my learning has been from Whiteboard Fridays and Moz blogs.  I love the way this forum is never about gaming google like some others. It's all whiter than white hat.  That's the future of SEO.  There will be no black hats in a few years. It's going to be impossible to compete.

Thanks for the vote of confidence. I must have read about 100 of your responses on here. You're prolific.  Are you from the UK?  It's Brighton SEO tomorrow?

[VertigoMG]

Thank you for your thoughtful feedback. The ironic thing is this website is actually relatively new - I believe it was created in fall of 2017. The previous seo company took down all the back links to these pages, but here is a sample to give you an idea what kind of junk was linking in. (All the backlinks looked like this). http://wadoptc.com/?How-To-Create-A-Business-By-Selling-Socks-Online-1068914.html

[EGOL]

Hi Ed,

You have been giving a lot of great responses in Q&A.  They are very generous and high quality.

I just want to thank you for the help that you are providing and encourage you to keep up the great work!

Cheers!

[Smileworks_Liverpool]

I've just come back from a forum where we were discussing this exact thing.  It was suggested that older sites can have a multitude of sins and google will overlook them or ignore them until a big event (such as an https switchover) where google take a closer and more comprehensive look at the site and it's pages and backlinks.

A few people said that they were not immediately hit by panda and penguin type issues until they did some big event on the site and it came under scrutiny from google.

This was only anecdotal stuff but I see tons of sites with legacy black hat and grey hat SEO that are still ranking and seem to be doing ok. It was also suggested that links are just less important these days and so long as the page is getting good implicit user feedback signals like time on page, users clicking around and engaging with content then things hold out for longer.

Just like it takes time to get a pages authority and position up it also takes time for it to diminish.  So in the long term you need to correct these issues or you'll gradually (or sometimes quickly) get either a penalty or an algorithmic suppression of your page.

Newer pages will never get ranked with this type of profile and the standards for indexing newer pages are much higher now.  So just because it's not causing problems now doesn't mean you don't need to get it fixed or at least start adding pages that are in line with the latest stricter quality guidelines.

Hope this helps.  I know it's not really an 'answer' because it's a very tricky issue.  I can see how these ideas make sense though. If you were doing things that used to be ok and now are not ok, google is going to be less likely to hammer you like if you tried to launch a brand new site using clearly banned practices.

[martinxm]

Well, it works. According to the spam spam analysis, they are at level 3 of 17. You can see it yourself here:

https://mza.bundledseo.com/researchtools/ose/spam-analysis?site=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.tallorder.com%2FPages.php%3Fsocks-dress-calf-wide-mens-16-13-size-tall-very-12-store-sock-online.htm&target=domain&source=page&page=1&sort=spam_score