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Comment by skilled | Hacker News Reader

I get anywhere from 50 to 100 emails every month asking me to put gambling/casino links on my site.

Let’s say the average is 75. Lets deduct another 25 because it’s probably the same guy.

At 200$ per link (low end) thats 10k per month.

50 blog posts with each one linking to a gambling site is kind of unrealistic though. But the numbers (and the demand) is there. I am sure the actual market is in the hundreds of millions for this kind of a scheme.

And even though it is easy money, I think Google probably has a good grasp on identifying that a mommy blog is linking out to a gambling network.

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IME a lot of these people are middle men -- though it looks like it, they aren't actually offering to buy a link; they'll just add you to the list of sites willing to sell links that they hawk around to other site operators (via spam, natch)

Also, when I see prices mentioned, they tend to be in the $10-$50 range. But that could just be the tier my sites are in, I guess.

All that aside, it's an absolute no from me. Lie down with dogs, get fleas.

I've actually jerked a lot of them around, I don't do it much anymore as I had my fun, but you're right. A lot of them will start with extremely lowball offers. I've had one guy email me once and I played with him for a while, he went from $25 per link to around $300 over the course of 5-6 emails.

For him, the middleman, it makes no sense to start with the real offer because in his mind he is thinking, "If I go as low as possible below the baseline, I get to keep the rest.".

Yeah, it's a no from me also. I mean it would not make any sense for me to write an article like that on my site even though it is about tech. It would be like lighting a fire in my living room and asking, "What's wrong?".

So basically they have to do this manually like that because they are shut out from traditional ad networks?

No, they pay for placing do-follow links to their (or their customers) site, something you can't do with ad networks per se.

I would never, ever sell out to link farming but I am kind of insulted that I have never been offered that kind of money for a link. What is the point of principles if you never have the opportunity to test them?

Maybe it has something to do with the fact nobody reads my blog.

I think a lot of them use tools like Ahrefs and Semrush to scan the "authority" of a website. The bigger the number (these tools go to 100) the higher the likelihood that you'll get pestered with these emails. For one of my domains, the one I was talking about, my rating is 70 and I have very good incoming links from various reputable sites.

I'm an "easy" target in that regard.

Sometimes I get curious to see what these tools think of my site but they always want me to sign up. Fair enough, I guess, but I don't care enough to give them an email address.

> At 200$ per link (low end) thats 10k per month.

10k for one month. Then nobody will want to read you blog anymore.

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