Throughout most of their existence, Google has fought against black hat SEO. Multiple Google search updates have intentionally focused on punishing black hat techniques and promoting quality content. Yet black hat techniques are still used.
While doing research for my website, custommade.games, I searched for “bingo card generator” on Google. Out of curiosity, I put the top result, myfreebingocards.com, into SEMrush’s backlink analytics tool. What I found was shocking: 82,000 backlinks, most of which were suspicious.
Blackhat SEO Successes
Analyzing the backlinks to myfreebingocards.com revealed that 52,000 of the backlinks pointing to the website had the anchor text “backlinks for myfreebingocards.com” or “backlinks for mfbc.us,” another domain owned by them. The sources of these backlinks were random blog domains or subdomains with absolutely no authority. When it comes to legitimate backlinks, they have about 22,000 at best.
Before making judgements about the effectiveness of their black hat techniques, we should compare the backlinks to other top ranking bingo card generators.
Bingo Baker is another top-ranking bingo card generator. SEMrush’s analysis shows that they have nearly 118,000 backlinks. Just like myfreebingocards, many of these have the anchor text, “backlinks for bingobaker.com” and are coming from sites with no authority ranking. Another top result, bingocardcreator.com, is exactly the same.
Conslusion
Out of the top four results for “bingo card generator” only one, Canva, has a reputable network graph according to SEMrush. The other three have most of their backlinks coming from unreputable sites with thousands of outgoing links.
The commonly held belief is that black hat SEO is bad practice, and ethical SEO is better over the long term. However, these results suggest this belief may not entirely be true. For the websites covered, they were able to make it to the top results, even beating out sites with more legitimate and reputable backlink sources. Clearly, Google has much more work to do if they truly want to put an end to black hat SEO.
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