Portal Link Building Strategy - Very Agressive?

[SEOold]

I recently came across an SEO project where I met someone who has been working on a portal link building strategy, which is very aggressive and raises red flags through out the conversation in my mind as he provided me his concept. I would like to hear what some of your thoughts are and if you have come across something similar to this concept in your experince. BTW, The site being linked to is a well known branded site.

Concept:

The idea is to create hundreds of entertainment portals. Purchase Expiring domains for $10 - $70 dollars and each domain and its pages will contain a combination of hard coded script generating Google API calls for news, blogs, and video, rotating articles, RSS feeds, ad blocks containing links, and some other un-unique content. (Basically no unique content). Each domain will have many inner pages that will hold similar content from news, and blogs. The differnt portal sites will be linking to each other and of-course linking to the branded site as well.

Again, there are a lot of questions that raises concern to this concept for me, but when you have a branded site why do people even bother doing this. I see no point in this other then trying to inflate link popularity by manipulating the algorithm. Apparently he has been doign this for a few months now and I'm wondering since the site is so well branded that does Google not even consider these bad links to the site because other high PR sites are linking in as well.

[Quadrille]

It's so 2002 - and it's still a popular 'trick'.

Until Google bans them.

It may happen tomorrow, maybe not for a while; but sooner or later, all the cr*p sites will have their links discounted.

The core site may escape - Google is known to fear hurting 'famous' sites, on the logical basis that 'people want to find them' - but that won't protect the spam supporting sites, which will end up as just more pointless pollution - and a waste of cash.

Not a 'trick' I'd recommend for any but the famous (noted for more money than sense), as your rivals will spot it and report you, even if Google doesn't catch on straight away.

[ZydoSEO]

Google has gotten good at figuring out 1) link networks like you describe and 2) sites that don't have any unique content. While they may get some minor short-term gains, Google will likely eventually discover the 'master plan' and devalue all the links.