Fake scholarships spam?

[jambam]

Has anyone else noticed this spam techinique involving creating a "fake" scholarship comptition pages and then contacting universities tricking them into including links to the fake comptition?
A compititor in my niche is using it and is it seemingly working for him (on multiple sites) because the only real backlinks that his site gets is to his fake scholarship comptition which he then stuffs full of keyword rich links to his affilaite "reviews" which then bumps these to the top of the search results.

[goodroi]

I've seen this but I don't think it is common. It can be quite effective till Google catches on which can be some time. When Google does realize the fraud they usually bring the hammer down extra hard so I wouldn't suggest this method. There are less risky ways to trick people into linking back to you. I have a friend that does this and actually gives out small but still real scholarships. Being legit keeps the links up longer with less link rot and attracts more websites to link back. Yeah it costs money but often the long con is more profitable than being greedy with a short con.

Probably also good to mention for the rookies that links from .edu are not inherently more powerful than .com sites. It is better to target relevant pages with heavy link juice regardless if they are on .edu or .com domains. A .edu link that is on a temporary student page with no inbound links isn't worth too much to me.

[tangor]

As noted, when g drops the hammer, it is usually permanent (all across the whois, too!) Not recommended for the faint of heart, nor during these days of fake news being the headlines. Fake anything is getting an extra look and even FB just nailed a bot group generating fake users and likes.

We're heading into yet another change where g (and other search endings) and social media are going gang busters against the Do Evil crowd ... to protect themselves from law enforcement and possible government regulation.

What spam is working right now is on the chopping block, and those trying to play will get chopped, too.

[Montresor]

It's not the edu links. It's about YOU. If someone else outranks you the reason is always YOU.