Re:How I recorded user behaviour on my competitor’s websites
by brosirmandude on Thursday August 23, 2018 @02:17PM
(#17829462)
Sounds like that old site got bought by someone building a PBN (Private Blog Network).
They buy old domains, get the old content from archive.org, and then add a link in somewhere to their "money" site, or to another site in their tiered linking structure.
It's a BS tactic that can sometimes still work, but it's a LOT of effort to really keep up with it. TBH it's much easier to just actually make a site people want to use and reach out to people who might be interested in sharing it.
Hosting/managing 100's of sites just to prop up 1-2 money sites is too labor & time intensive for most of us. That said, there are some people making good money still using these tactics, as shady as they may be.
I built a brochure site for a mom-and-pop business a decade ago. The domain expired some time ago, and it was snapped up by someone who repopulated it with the original content scraped from the Internet Archive. It looks and behaves exactly like it did when I controlled it, except that a phrase in the frontpage content now links to some supplement sale site.
Is there a name for this SEO bullshitery? What can someone do who isn't American and who therefore can't file a DMCA.