Success stories of theme sponsored sites

[Bull135]

It's widely known that links from theme sponsorshare do not work well as it was a few years ago. And footer links are kind of useless or even risky.

But take a look roofline link profile and traffic chart of mafiashare.net, you will find different worth more research.

1. Most back links to mafiashare.net are from crappy Wordpress themes with various anchor text and even embedded in mis-used "scroll to top" button.

2. OSE shows linking root domains in 1,000+, ahrefs shows ratio of sitewide links is not too high.

Does mafiashare.net survive but using above two tactics combined? It has been in alexa top 10,000 for nearly half year. Maybe keep black/gray hat in a small scale is good to avoid the radar while benefit the rankings?

Any thoughts are welcome. If you happened to know other websites being successful by sponsoring theme links, please share here.

[NakulGoyal]

All kinds of link tactics work. Atleast to some extent, for sometime. The question is, what you are seeing is it something they are doing ? Or is it something a competition did for negative SEO. Regardless, let's presume they did it at some point. What if they disvowed those links. We may never know.

So all kinds of links, whether comment spam, hidden links, etc etc, work to some extent, but at some point, they get filtered by the algorithm and they get caught or penalized or the value of those links discounted.

Does that answer your question ? Does it help ?

**I wouldn't recommend doing those kinds of links. The only people that do them are mostly people with throwaway websites. **

[Bull135]

Thanks for your answer. If you looked into mafiashare's link report by ahrefs.com, you will not see any natural links. I am sure if they have made any white hat efforts, it's pretty much under Ahrefs's radar.

The sudden traffic surge of mafiashare.net is unnatural by any means. The most surprising is it has maintained its traffic for half year.

Obvious spammy sites with sudden traffic surge are likely to be filtered in 3 months.

[NakulGoyal]

I agree. These kinds of sites with similar link profiles mushroom towards the top of the SERPS all the time. But then as Google catches up with algorithm updates and applying them to their indexes, those kinds of sites disappear for ever.