dvduval - 5:33 pm on Feb 8, 2013 (gmt 0)

What bothers me is a Pakistani hacker group has a huge million dollar operation hacking into big sites like Creative Commons, American Legion and lots of Pagerank 8, 9 and even 10 sites and then reselling that pagerank. They are making literally millions of dollars off of unsuspecting small businesses that believe google or their SEO consultants when they tell them that a site with higher pagerank will tend to appear higher in the search results.

This has wreaked havoc on the directory industry as the black hats selling pagerank totally dominate right now. Then the honest people trying to run a well edited directory are pushed to the sidelines as businesses choose to submit their listings to the black hats. Of course these sites won't keep their pagerank, but the visible toolbar rank will be there for many months and they will reap great rewards.

If you run a directory, it is increasingly difficult to say you can make money honestly. Google makes it all possible by showing pagerank gained from hacking into sites or paying for links.

I could easily document 100 sites RIGHT NOW that are hacked and the owner doesn't know, and 100s more that are paid. I am talking about PR 7+ sites. If I can do this so easily, why is google so inept?

And of course, there have been tons of reports.