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Search Engine Ads - click-throughs generate revenues for the search engine (with little control of clicking trickeries seemingly).

Link Farms - amasses links for a variety of revenue generating intent often through search engine ads click-throughs.

Dumpster Directories - accepts links haphazardously for profit in one fashion or another often with the intent of generating revenues through search engine ad clickthroughs.

Link Brokers - is a fraud in some states, blatantly sells hyperlinks for search engine ranking value often for the awarded web page to generate click-through revenues.

Link Building Strategists - generate income by creating hyperlinks for the intent of manipulating the search engine.

Scraper Sites ...

Purposeless Forums ...

banner ads, phony yellowpages ...

(sole purpose of existence revolves around capitalizing on hyperlinks)

My point? Oh ya. It's a ... a ... it's this: It's a big machine. The corporate giant has no conscience. Internet marketers globally pick away at pennies. Delusions and illusions amount and infest ... ya. That's my point.

Where does the money come from to support this industry revolved around the hyperlink?

Edited by canadafred
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  • Latest Post Latest Post by Member #949455

Dani AI

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Good taxonomy from — the money that powers “ads, farms, dumpsters, brokers, strategists” mainly comes from a few predictable buyers: advertisers (programmatic and search ads), affiliate programs that pay for referred sales, lead buyers who pay for contact data, direct-sold sponsored placements (paid links or native content), and low-friction plays like domain parking or scraped pages that collect ad impressions. See Google’s publisher/ad guidance and a large affiliate example for how those publisher payouts work: . Amazon Associates overview. ()

Where the thread’s “big machine” and the search-side risk meet: advertisers pay for attention, so bad actors optimize for cheap clicks or ranking signals (links). Buying/selling links to manipulate rankings is explicitly discouraged by Google and can lead to devaluation or manual action; paid links should be disclosed or qualified with link attributes like rel="sponsored" (UGC = rel="ugc", legacy rel="nofollow" still valid). Use these attributes and follow Google’s guidance to avoid link-scheme problems. Also treat disavow as an advanced cleanup tool only after good-faith removal attempts. [Buying/selling links guidance] and [Qualify outbound links]. (developers.google.com)

Practical next steps (audit + clean):

  1. Check Search Console for manual actions and export your link list.
  2. Run a backlink audit (Ahrefs/Moz/Search Console) and flag paid/low-quality sources.
  3. Ask sites to remove paid links or add rel="sponsored"; if the link is a paid endorsement, disclose it clearly per FTC rules.
  4. If removal fails, prepare a careful disavow file and upload to Search Console.
  5. Shift long-term to audience-first monetization (quality content, real affiliates, direct sponsorships with disclosure). Relevant official refs: Google’s disavow/tool guidance and the FTC endorsement/disclosure resources. (developers.google.com)

Thanks for the thread — it correctly spots the incentive structure. For anyone researching this, start with the official Google and FTC pages above and document every monetization stream you find on suspect sites (ads, affiliate IDs, lead forms, “sponsored” text, contact forms that sell leads).

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Thanks for sharing your research!

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