Keyboost Linkscheme still working well despite Penguin 4.0

Last year I wrote an article with the title: Keyboost proves scraping, cloaking and other Black Hat SEO Techniques still work. The article is about a linkscheme called Keyboost.

Its a service of the Belgian company “iPower”. You can find it by typing that company name in your address bar and adding .eu behind it. They operate in multiple countries on multiple domains under the name Keyboost (you can also find it by typing that words with .eu behind it).

I found websites in Dutch, French and English. I hoped Penguin 4.0 would kill them off but it didn’t. Their website is doing very well in Google.

Go ahead and check them on Semrush. They are ranking well on multiple keywords with lots of competition. And the same can be said for their Keyboost domains.

What is Keyboost?

Keyboost is a private network of scrapersites spread over multiple IP’s and using variating anchor texts. They are probably buying expired domains with a high DA for this. The main content of the websites in the network consist out of scraped texts and “nofollow” links. I suspect this content is directly scraped from the Google SERPS.

On each site in the network you can find hidden blocks of code containing links to their own sites and sites of their clients.  The visible links are all “nofollow”, but the hidden links are not.(You can view these blocks in the source code or in the cached version of Google.)

So they are basicly Scraping content, Cloaking Googlebot and using rel=”nofollow” to guide the link juice where they want. And Penguin 4.0 does not detect it.

I hate to admit it, but it seems to work very well. I wouldn’t encourage you to participate however. It might damage your site later on. Want to see it for yourself? Google this and you will find lots of scrapersites.

And here you can also download an excel document with a number of links I extracted from Google with SEO Quake. They are all very spammy domains. I found a lot more of them by the way. This is just a small part. Their network is very big. They have at least 3000 domains at this moment.

Conclusion: Some Black Hat SEO Techniques still work despite Penguin 4.0

Its really frustrating to see that these simple Black Hat SEO techniques still work and are rewarded by Google despite Penguin 4.0. I believe that most Dutch SEO experts are trying to do a good job. By promoting their clients in a safe way, by creating good content that people like and will link to.

But if this shit also works why even bother? This is much cheaper and it also works, how do you want us to compete with that? I hope someone at Google will look into this now. Because I already mentioned it last year on Twitter and nothing has changed despite Penguin 4.0 being launched.

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