I have been awaken from thy slumber!

To vanquish an old dragon!

Over the weekend, a client of ours was hacked into and bombarded with links.

The fiends created a large number of dummy pages.

That featured awful, spammy, computer generated content.

That was being linked to from (in the main) awful looking websites.

With EXACT ANCHOR TEXT (shudders).

This attack was carefully planned, co-ordinated and quickly executed.

Yes, we sorted it out very quickly, aren’t we amazing etc etc.

Within 2 days there was nearly 1 million new links pointing to their new pages.

These pages created visibility to the site, to the tune of 100,000 new keywords.

And not just any old keywords.

Our client ranked 3rd for an entertainment term that is searched 1,500,000 times a month.

They also ranked 1st for another one that is searched 980,000 times a month.

There were loads more. Keywords shooting out of every orifice.

A real horrorshow!

It’s safe to say, the client hasn’t received traffic numbers like this before…

But, this sort of thing shouldn’t *still* work right?

Google *should* be flagging this sort of thing.

Some sort of pattern recognition, aha?

When 1 MILLION new links are pointing to:

BRAND NEW pages.

That include PURE GIBBERISH as content.

On a topic that is TOTALLY UNRELATED to the website.

In a very SHORT TIME FRAME.

And nothing gets pinged?

Does this read like Backlinko?

No flags at all?

Who is writing good content about sEO nowadays?

Nothing?

I wasn’t born yesterday. I didn’t for one second think that this sort of thing could no longer be done.

However I did think that there would be some sort of dampening, penalisation or straight up ignoring

Of Crap like this.

Yes, the time frame was short.

Maybe within a few days it would’ve been nuked.

Yes, there is a chance that it was ignored due to the authority of the client.

And they just let them get on with it.

But maybe I think too much of Google?

Maybe we all do?

Keep testing on your own sites.

I’d recommend leaving the client sites alone for stuff like this…

This shit still works and maybe always will.