Private blog networks is another term in that side of the world. They're explicitly designed to look legit even to a human but give link juice to the spam world (which also look legit to a human). And the HN crowd say "I can spot an AI website a mile away!!!". Well cool, and good for you, but many people cannot. In fact, if you can, they are glad you are so smart and are leaving. Why? Because you wont convert.
The targets in the spam world (email and seo) that want to make money want the low hanging fruit. They want uneducated people to visit the site. I remember when google was still young, these same people wanted visitors from AOL. Why? lower traffic and much higher conversion. What kind of person uses AOL when google is available? An uneducated one and a new one to the internet. Or an older person who is likely to fall for a scheme.
I suspect more and more visitors coming from google will be seen this way in the age of AI and social media searching. Easy targets. Whether it's true or not is debatable (maybe people just want to read a real webpage and have AI burnout). Anyway thanks for coming to my ted talk.
I own a single English language dictionary word .net domain that is a common word related to lawsuits/legal activity and have been offered money to sell it. If I sell it, it will almost certainly become the front page of somebody's CRM lead generator for personal injury lawyers (or a blogspam site driving traffic to same through affiliate links).
People who work in actual infrastructure building tech may not know or have any reason to pay attentino to how many shady "affiliate" networks there are in existence for click traffic.
I dont know if I would discredit those folks as not knowing "actual infrastructure". The lengths I saw some folks go to get unique class C ip ranges and maintain automation is pretty impressive.
> Private blog networks is another term in that side of the world. They're explicitly designed to look legit even to a human but give link juice to the spam world (which also look legit to a human). And the HN crowd say "I can spot an AI website a mile away!!!". Well cool, and good for you, but many people cannot. In fact, if you can, they are glad you are so smart and are leaving. Why? Because you wont convert.
PBNs are designed to look legit to a Google manual review, to remain indexed, to retain whatever value Google gave to the previous legit incarnation of the site. (The key marketplace for sourcing candidate PBN websites are expired domains that recently had strong search engine rankings)
It's a pure organic SEO play, not a human conversion play. The idea is that the PBN site has a retained link value. And that link value is used to (directly or indirectly) link to a site that is the money site, to boost the search rankings of that money site.
The money site isn't going to be an AI-slop site, it's going to be the polished well-optimised, well-performing as it can be. The PBNs that give the money site credence, that varies based on how much work the money-site owner is willing to spend on the network. The lower end is not even AI-slop, but a static website programmatically generated by content spinning and synonym replacement, where the content is scraped from other sites or perhaps even archive.org snapshots of long dead sites.
If enough independent-looking, diverse-seeming, legit-looking sites are linking to a commercial site, that suggests an element of trust and respectability. That's what PBN creators rely on, creating the appearance of authoritativeness good enough to fool/coerce Google into ranking the money site higher.
The targets in the spam world (email and seo) that want to make money want the low hanging fruit. They want uneducated people to visit the site. I remember when google was still young, these same people wanted visitors from AOL. Why? lower traffic and much higher conversion. What kind of person uses AOL when google is available? An uneducated one and a new one to the internet. Or an older person who is likely to fall for a scheme.
I suspect more and more visitors coming from google will be seen this way in the age of AI and social media searching. Easy targets. Whether it's true or not is debatable (maybe people just want to read a real webpage and have AI burnout). Anyway thanks for coming to my ted talk.