It's been about a decade since I did anything serious with SEO. I knew it was sleezy garbage then, but did it for the money. I would outright lie to non-profits to get links from their sites to my seemingly legit site. After a few weeks I'd 301 it to my main site. I really feel bad about this. I did a lot of other underhanded shit to rank highly and it all worked.

The biggest problem was feeling like a bad human and not wanting to tell my friends about how I made money on my side hustle. I am really glad I sold those sites and left SEO behind.

My side hustle now is writing FOSS.