Ahrefs hacked Medium to get 200K views for a low search-volume keyword (opens in new tab)

(bip.so)

4 pointsChirag3y ago13 comments

13 comments

What is Ahrefs' business? Sure "SEO", but what does that mean, exactly?

They seem to have a poorly coded web crawler. I wrote an "infinite web site" PHP program that Ahrefs reacted to very poorly: https://github.com/bediger4000/infinite-fake-website

Since SEO is a major contributor to lousy search results, I'm now just trying to ban them all via robots.txt, but it doesn't seem mean enough.

Infinite web site is interesting!

Most of the time keywords with low search volume translates to lower competition as well. Its a great hack to get views in cost effective way.

But here they got traffic by using Medium's publications, recommendation engine and getting featured in editorial content, not through search!

Wow! This is a cool hack!

My content strategy always revolved around looking for high search keywords.

ChiragOP3y ago

True. I think building a good repo of keywords would be interesting. Want to see how can we using the ML for building these keywords repositories.

Good hack to generate traffic on your articles.

Wow! This is interesting

Wow! Interesting

nice hack for getting better reach.

nice article!

Interesting

Very cool

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