Behind the Scenes- Regardless of exactly how advanced Google’s browse formulas end up being, there‘re constantly some smart SEO people using technicalities, and gaping ones at that, to advantage their websites and produce 6, as well as 7 number incomes. Today, we’re mosting likely to take a take a look at one such website.

Before anything else, let’s take a look at its Ahrefs overview:


 You can tell from their organic traffic graph that their traffic was almost zero before July 2017, and they’ve seen experienced a few big spikes in organic traffic after that.

But… they claim to be in existence since 1998?
In reality, the original brand was having the domain: music-critic.com, which the current owner likely bought after it expired (or through a domain auction), and redirected to a newly registered domain, i.e. musiccritic.com (without the dash in the original domain).

 Here’s how the original website looked, according to this Archive.org snapshot from 2008:

See, no existence of ‘gear reviews’ (i.e. actual money-making posts of the current site, that are filled with affiliate links to Amazon). The old (and actual) site looked like a genuine website dedicated to reviewing music itself from bands and solo artists, whereas the current one is full of typical ‘best blah blah’ affiliate reviews:



Apart from this blatant misrepresentation and abuse of the reputation of the old brand by them, let’s take a look at a specific type of link building being extensively used by them which is nothing short of pure spam (and should even be illegal).

Enter, Hacked Links — these are links placed within existing articles/pages of established websites (usually powered by WordPress), obviously without the knowledge of the respective site owners. Example below:

 Anyone can tell the “Music Critics studio headphone guide” link was inserted later in place of what the author actually read. And sure enough, the following Archive.org snapshot from 2015 confirms the same:

 This is just 1 hacked link, and there are hundreds, according to Ahrefs.

So, are these hacked links working? Surely! As of now, MusicCritic.com is occupying the #1 spot on Google for the search term ‘best studio headphones’, which has an average monthly search volume of a whopping 6,600 according to Ahrefs!

 I could go on and list a ton of other similar backlinks that point to various pages of their site, but since anyone with access to Ahrefs or any other competitor analysis tool can do the same, let’s analyze why they bothered to:

    Purchase an expired (or auction) domain and exploit the existing reputation of what was once a legit website on music reviews.
    Publish hundreds of affiliate content targeting extremely lucrative keywords with high profitability.
    Engage in one of the shadiest forms of link building (hacked links), which should also be illegal.

Short answer: the revenue generated from the combination of all this.

Let’s do some quick calculation:

Total monthly visitors (according to Ahrefs): 275,000
Average conversion rate (Amazon): 5% (13,750; fairly conservative)
Average price of product sold on Amazon: $50 (fairly conservative)
Total gross sales on Amazon in a month: $687,500
Total estimated earnings in a month (6% commission rate for musical instruments): $41,250!

In reality, they’re likely making quite a bit more than that, as Ahrefs tends to report lower traffic than what sites actually get, plus Amazon affiliate sites get credited for all random sales as well, apart from the products being recommended.

I hope it all makes sense now.

written by cwingz BHW


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