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I smell bacon.

"A little about me... I am a search marketing consultant,and I love everything about marketing and emerging technology. Growth Hacking is my strongest skillset, especially when leveraging search engines."

While I'm not sure that what you're doing is technically astroturfing, it's still equally as dishonest.

First, none of the links described in TFA match your "guidelines" to "Good offsite SEO", so even by your own admission this is not "Good offsite SEO".

Second, there is no such thing as "Good offsite SEO", since any "offsite SEO" is by definition either link farming or gaming the system. The entire point of the Penguin update (if I'm not mistaken) was to prevent quite literally all "offsite SEO" so google can rank your page according to your content, and so they can reliably weight incoming links. If an incoming link (that is not on your site!) has been SEO'd then by definition it is not an organic, quality incoming link.

Third, you state "this is legitimate link acquisition and its what all SEOs do today", which undermines the entirety of your post since link acquisition is by definition not organic, nor does it produce "quality" inbound links.

But hey, since "its what all SEOs do today" it must be kosher.

Edit: Just to address your last point (not to pile on or anything, but I feel like it's important), I'm pretty sure this is a willful conflation of two totally separate concepts. Since, you know, everyone who's ever done any sort of SEO knows that if you want to drive traffic, but not pay the penalties for link farming, you use rel="nofollow". Which Expedia/ the blogger did not do.

"While I'm not sure what your doing is astroturning, its equally dishonest"

I don't even know what that means. But, that was written close to two years ago... I have since moved on to content development and traffic strategy. Still, Whats wrong with being a search marketer and knowing about link building strategies that are legit. Why is building a site that inherently attracts links, not both legit to google, and a growth hack?

I think your understanding of Penguin, or Offsite SEO are misinformed. Creating great content and proactively seeking exposure to that content is perfectly white hat and within Googles guidelines. Using No Follow is for PAID placements, advertising and advertorials. These posts were none of the above. Blogger outreach without incentive (i.e. content they chose to feature because it adds value to their audience.) is a bedrock of content marketing and inbound marketing, and traffic generation, and I would do these things even if Google and Search Engines never existed.

Bottom Line, distributing quality content through outreach is a legitimate practice that all GOOD seo's engage in, and whether you like it or not, its in Googles best interest as well for content creators to be incentivized to create more content, which comes about through growing an audience, which comes from exposure to other publishers audience, and search engines.

If you really don't want to take my word for it, Google explicitly states how the links that TFA addressed are clearly in violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356

"Here are a few common examples of unnatural links that violate our guidelines..." (3rd bullet point)

I dont see any evidence that this was a large scale effort.

As another poster pointed out as well, these might be affiliate links dropped by a widget like skimlinks,etc...

If only there was a way to check and see if these links were generated by a widget and not actually part of the article's HTML.

Oh wait... there is!

Viewing the source from the "6 of the Most Enjoyable Theme Parks in the Nation" [1] article referenced in the parent article shows that the phrase "guaranteed best price on airfare" indeed is a straight link to Expedia.

[1] - http://www.cheaptravelblog.net/6-of-the-most-enjoyable-theme...

[2] - http://i.imgur.com/gGoo9jL.png

you can use NerdyData to search links like those directly on the sites source code: http://d.vncs.me/T864 [short link, HN mess the full link]

Wow, NerdyData seems like it can be very useful sometimes, thanks for sharing!

So you used to claim "Growth Hacking is my strongest skillset, especially when leveraging search engines." Now you do "content development and traffic strategy." More concisely, you've been a web spammer the whole time.

StackedMidgets: You've been banned for about 6 months.

stackedmidgets 3 hours ago | link [dead]

You're hilariously wrong, due to your ignorance. As someone who has written thousands of black hat articles just like these, even in the same vertical as discussed in the article, except more specific (certain niche European destinations) -- well written, for what I was paid -- I can say that articles like these are paid for, and violate Google's guidelines.

There's on article that I'm particularly proud of that involved inventing all sorts of fictional romantic adventures on an island off the coast of Spain that included specific anchor text about cheap hotels for that destination. Creative? Sure! It was almost as good as a print ad, even though it's likely that few real readers actually read the thing. Violating Google's guidelines? Fuck yes!!

Google has no access to the bank accounts of these writers to verify that the links were paid for. The search quality team can't plum the e-mail accounts of everyone involved to see that said articles were commissioned to include specific anchor text.

It's quite difficult to establish objectively whether or not the writers were paid for this. However, I can say that whenever black hatters write these kinds of articles, we're instructed by the client to include certain anchor text types, and to vary the anchor text for different articles in the same campaign.

Further, botted traffic adds another ugly layer to gaming SEO. The publisher just has to 'look' legitimate. The traffic can even be semi-botted by offices full of Indians using software for that purpose.

No. These "guest posts" are not quality articles. Typically they are written from third world countries to pump out as many articles as possible. They are tricking bloggers pretending it's a guest post but in reality it's being used for link bait.

These links and posts could just as easily be traffic generation strategies, not SEO strategies.

Are these not essentially the same thing? I understand that in the SEO business this has all been carefully nuanced, but in the general world the idea behind pagerank was that it made the web a democracy of sorts[1], where authentic, honest links organically demonstrate resources that users find most useful. That is the antithesis of "whoever can pay the most to have the most pages full of rote text created with paid links tops".

[1] - I should mention that organic linking is virtually dead, so perhaps it really doesn't matter. Blogs are, by and large, dead (and the few that persist engage in a circle-link pattern that is intended to essentially keep it in the family), and they (and personal websites) accounted for the overwhelming majority of legitimately organic links. Outside of that source of links, sites like Reddit and even probably HN are overwhelmingly gamed and manipulated, because the majority of users simply don't "vote" at all, leaving the manipulators an easy course to ply.

The web has been bought and paid for for several years now.

> Are these not essentially the same thing?

Not quite. SEO is about optimizing PageRank, which is a false proxy for a website's popularity. "Traffic generation" means actually increasing the site's popularity, for real users.