Search and the web
Tactics that manufacture ranking signals rather than earn them — cheap to buy, effective for a while, and the penalty outlives the supplier.
Also called Paid links · PBN · Накрутка ссылок
The recognisable forms are paid link networks, pages written for a crawler and hidden from readers, doorway pages built per city with the same content, mass automated content, and buying an expired domain for the links pointing at it. All of them work by asserting a signal the engine intended to be evidence of something.
Two properties make it a poor trade for a business that intends to keep trading. The correction is retroactive: a manual action or an algorithmic demotion removes the rankings the tactic bought and often more, and recovery is measured in months of disavowal and rewriting. And the liability stays with the domain, not with whoever placed the links — the supplier moves on, the penalty does not.
It is also increasingly visible. Link networks are recognisable in the aggregate, and generated content at scale is a solved detection problem. The window in which any of it works is shorter every year, and the cost of unwinding it does not shrink to match.
The most common exposure is not a decision to buy links; it is buying a site, or a vendor, that already did. Before an acquisition or a migration, read the backlink profile and the indexed page count. A domain with thousands of links from unrelated sites in unrelated languages is carrying a liability the previous owner is not going to mention.
The definitions are the easy part. Whether the figure on your dashboard was computed this way is a different question, and usually the more expensive one.