Well that went from 0-60 in no time. Society has much larger fish to fry.
No one was harmed in this endeavor. Sure it "polluted the web" and was against Google's guidelines, but we definitely weren't hacking or doing other true "black hat" things.
Ultimately it was shut down in 2012 and in the entire time I was involved in this 2 people requested their domain back and we sent it their way no questions asked.
Content was generated with our internal equivalent of a markov chain, so there wasn't content piracy either.
Sure, this project added no value to the web and we should have spent our time building an awesome service that generated links naturally... but as they say hindsight is 20/20.
No one was harmed in this endeavor. Sure it "polluted the web" and was against Google's guidelines, but we definitely weren't hacking or doing other true "black hat" things.
Ultimately it was shut down in 2012 and in the entire time I was involved in this 2 people requested their domain back and we sent it their way no questions asked.
Content was generated with our internal equivalent of a markov chain, so there wasn't content piracy either.
Sure, this project added no value to the web and we should have spent our time building an awesome service that generated links naturally... but as they say hindsight is 20/20.