A domain name costs about $10. That is the entire marginal cost of the spam that is outranking legitimate sites in every market Timothy Malmros has checked.
I have been doing SEO for close to twenty years. I still have conversations that shift how I see the search landscape, and my Unscripted SEO Podcast episode with Timothy was one of them. He spent nearly two decades in gambling affiliate SEO, the vertical where every black hat technique gets field-tested first. He has since retired from active affiliation and now does something rare: he reverse-engineers how the current tricks work and posts the findings publicly, with nothing to sell.
If you build or maintain websites, you should understand this mechanism, because it explains a lot of what you see in the results pages right now. It also explains why a rel="canonical" tag, a thing most of us treat as boring hygiene, has become one of the most abused signals on the web.
The canonical trick, step by step
Timothy calls it the canonical trick. Here is the loop as he described it:
