I worked in SEO for ages, and it's shady as f. You can buy links from anyone, the BBC the guardian, the times... It just costs money. You can ask/force people to take links down (copyright scare, sue, threaten). Fake blogs, we used to run a bunch, some became so popular they became actual blogs on that subject. We'd get money from competitor SEO companies for links on it. There are tons of niche subjects with no info on the internet. We'd often put it up for SEO purposes. Wikipedia was started by an SEO company. The rumour was that Wales started it as a cheap way to get high page rank links to sites he owned. But the rewards were huge. Get a struggling car insurance site from position 11 in Google to position 2 or 1 and their profits would be 10x. They would show us numbers from each advertising sector, SEO, radio, TV, newspapers, etc. Super interesting. Break that down by age / gender ... Very interesting. No wonder the internet is a shit show. So much money involved and zero regulation.