Selling links on Reddit r/gamedeals and Spanish media

Today I'm going a bit off the beaten path with deals and writing an article that will sound like Klingon if you're not familiar with the webmaster world. It's about so-called backlinks, about how they've wiped out a Reddit sub with almost 1 million followers and how it's impacting the Spanish video game press.

I'll explain how a backlink works. Let's say you have a website with very good rankings in search engines like Google (what's known as SEO). Any article with a link or a comment with a link that you write immediately appears on Google, even above ads. As a user, you don't know if that link is genuine or if there's a financial interest. A website like this in the wrong hands is a huge problem, and search engines basically ignore it.

I'll start with Reddit. It's arguably the only social network today that allows search engines to index its content. This has made it a go-to source for content searches, but for a few years now, several sub moderators have been taking advantage of the situation financially, to the point that selling backlinks has become professionalized:

I'm aware that this is an endemic problem on Reddit, but I'm going to focus on the r/gamedeals sub because I was a former participant and because I know several community managers from official stores through managing my website. Currently, the official stores that post on that sub are paying around $400-$500 monthly to post the content they see fit. The three community managers I've spoken with about this have given me similar numbers, and although the sub is dead in terms of active users, its Google ranking is very attractive. Here's an example: this post with only 7 human comments:

It's the second result on Google when applying a last-week filter, despite no one being interested in it on Reddit:

With that ranking on Google, I completely understand why official stores pay Reddit moderators. Originally, r/gamedeals was only interested in good deals for users, but since they've focused on selling links, users have obviously left. In the past, a post with a free game would get 10,000 votes, but today, if you're lucky, it gets 1,000 votes. It's a disaster in terms of visitors, but they're earning thousands of dollars a month by moderating a wasteland.

Unfortunately, this backlink thing isn't limited to Reddit. Since many of you reading this are from Spain, I can tell you that the Spanish gaming press is also contaminated. Here are screenshots of the prices that well-known media outlets are asking for backlinking:

I've only provided screenshots of five Spanish media outlets taken from two portals dedicated to backlinking, but this is spreading like wildfire, affecting mainstream media and making you question everything because media outlets aren't required to disclose whether a link is paid for. Honest projects are almost impossible to get off the ground online these days. I'm not just talking about my website, but if you know of other projects run by honest people, you should be aware of what they're up against, and any help, no matter how small, will be of great help.