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Comment by quickthrower2 | Hacker News Reader

SEO play? See sponsors on: https://emmet.io/

This is it...they are just buying backlinks.

"Become a bronze sponsor and get your logo marked as Bronze Sponsor on our website that has 100K/month pageviews (https://date-fns.org) with a link..."

"Become a sponsor and get your logo on our website https://socket.io/ with a link to your site."

Honest question: is a single backlink on a single website actually worth $150/month?

With every low quality site doing it for the past 20 years SEO hacking has become a thing, how can it still be so valuable?

How's it possible the Google algorithm changes against spam and extreme competition haven't driven this figure way down?

Maybe a consultant came up with this scheme many years ago, nobody has revisited it since, and the marketing department just keeps paying the bills because nobody at the casino knows if it’s important or not and it’s not a lot of money for them.

Lot more than that for pretty good websites. During the heydays of the early blogging years, there was a thing called the Pagerank and my personal website had 8 out of 10. So, a website paying me north of $200 each month just to link to them from the "Sidebar" was a common thing. Casinos and gambling websites would go for $500 or so.

It changed a lot over the years, but I've definitely seen periods where Google responded well to schemes that looked like obvious paid links, spam, etc. And there seemed to be a distinct change when Matt Cutts left, where they cared less about organic result quality.

> how can it still be so valuable?

Google is still mostly relying on links, that's precisely why they're still so SEO-hackable after SEOs doing it for two decades: they have no other mechanisms. $150 is totally worth it.

It does seem so. After losing a top ranking domain, our company managed to get back to the top in 6-9 months. Part of the process was going back and asking to update the backlinks to the new domain.

For the casinos so even a 10% chance of getting a single new customer as a result of the SEO is worth more than $150. Gambling whales make these companies insane profits.

See also https://sweetalert2.github.io/ which has a lot of NSFW sponsors for some reason.

What an unlikely business model for open source. It would be amazing to see casinos contributing to a more thriving open source ecosystem. My OSS project [1] gets about 50k visitors per month but is far from being sustainable ....

[1] https://www.filestash.app/

I am going to state a hunch: the site has been sold on to an SEO farm. Or expired and reregistered. They keep it functional and not 100% spammy so that people keep their backlinks to it.

As a result this is not money for OSS at all.

https://date-fns.org/ links to these "sponsors" with rel="noopener noreferrer" - how is that even worth anything to them?

Edit: nevermind, I mixed it up with rel="nofollow" which would be worthless to spammers.

nofollow links are not entirely worthless

Swiperjs

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