Yep - not uncommon for spammers to create powerful link networks by buying up a bunch of quality domains, and then spamming links at what they want to rank for.
It normally takes Google a few weeks/months to catch this stuff, so for super competitive terms, it's easy to make it worthwhile by ranking for something like "fast payday loans." Then when the domain gets penalized, rinse/repeating.
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Yep - not uncommon for spammers to create powerful link networks by buying up a bunch of quality domains, and then spamming links at what they want to rank for.
It normally takes Google a few weeks/months to catch this stuff, so for super competitive terms, it's easy to make it worthwhile by ranking for something like "fast payday loans." Then when the domain gets penalized, rinse/repeating.
Someone teased Matt Cutts with this a while back:
http://www.seroundtable.com/google-payday-loan-cutts-16940.h...
It consistently blows my mind how effective spamming actually is, given how much money, effort, and time spammers are willing to throw around.
It's easily one of the best illustrations of how naturally skewed our worldviews are.