If you're anything like me, you've developed a habit when searching for information on the web. You append site:reddit.com to your searches.

Reddit, for all its flaws and quirks, has historically been a very good way to find information on pretty much any topic. You name a problem, someone on Reddit has already had it and others have jumped in to their aid. Not to mention the abundance of reviews, FAQs and buying guides for all manner of products. That's what led me to search for electric toothbrushes with my trusty Reddit suffix.

And lo and behold, there were answers.

A Google search for “best electric toothbrush” with results limited to Reddit posts.

As we can see, there are plenty of results. But hold on. Those post titles look unusually... SEO-ish. What's going on here?

Following many of the links will take us to a couple of subreddits, including r/ElectricToothbrush and r/MyElectricToothbrush. That's odd. I can imagine that a subreddit set up to discuss electric toothbrushes may exist. But two? What kind of debate inside the moderation team of an electric toothbrush forum could cause such a schism? Let's take a look at what the posts actually say.

A Reddit post describing the “Best Electric Toothbrush For 2022”. It, and the subreddit it's on, look suspiciously like SEO spam.

Well, there's a surprise. These posts are actually spam. Out of the 10 posts featured on the first page of Google, only three were (at least on the surface) legit, coming from r/BuyItForLife, r/BestOfTech and r/AskReddit respectively. The rest are largely from our two main offenders already listed, with some cameo appearances from r/BestRedditProducts (what does that even mean?) and r/TechGods2021 (apparently the spammers are trying to appeal to ten-year-olds.)

The subreddit itself also smells fishy. Instead of a customised Snoo (the weird alien mascot that most subreddits spin off), this place just has a marketing photo. It goes without saying that the description is also clearly written in SEO-ese. If this were really a subreddit for electric toothbrush enthusiasts (hey, you never know) you'd also expect a creation date a bit later than December of 2020. And sure enough, the subreddit's front page has a pinned moderator post with the following text, which I must say is a true masterpiece:

Let everyone help you. Read everyone!

Share your ideas and also experiences inside this community. This Reddit is an unknown place. You can post and present any matter inside this community. any matter you post here we don't know who you are. So you can post here anything about electric toothbrush-related things like experiences, ideas, and also funny things. if anyone posts any unrelated post here like harassment or bullying we will surely remove them. So please be careful when you post and comment here.

Whatever your post here, experienced people will help you to solve that.

So happy posting!

Exactly what possible "funny things" related to electric toothbrushes the moderator, u/lyssrafealla, believes may crop up is not clear.

But hold on. What's the goal of this whole exercise? Normally, this kind of SEO garbage serves mostly to drive clicks and gain ad revenue. But this is Reddit. The ads (and, on desktop and viewing one post, there aren't many) only give money to Reddit itself. Well, it becomes clear when you actually click on one of the links within the post.

A website called “Best Tech Zone”, with a low-quality article about electric toothbrushes.

The posts link to a website hosting equally spammy articles about everything from electric toothbrushes to portable speakers to beach chairs. Apparently the definition of "tech" is broader than I thought. But this website, too, is remarkably ad-free. So where does the money actually come from? Well, throughout each post is strewn a number of Amazon affiliate links. These links are part of Amazon's affiliate program, where registered accounts can create links to Amazon product pages and recieve a cut (20% in Amazon Games, 10% in Fashion and Handmade, much less in everything else) of any purchases made through that link. Curiously, these profits will apply to any product purchased through the link, not just the product directly linked to: you can navigate to other pages on the site and the link creator will still get a cut, which is greater if the category of the product matches the category of the product linked to.

So, to recap:

  1. An unwitting individual wants purchasing advice.
  2. They search for existing material on the topic in a way they expect to serve quality results.
  3. They click on a link to a post created by the bad guys.
  4. That post contains further links to the bad guys' website...
  5. Which in turn contains yet further links to Amazon...
  6. From which the bad guys turn a tiny profit.

Seriously? All this for an affiliate link and a few cents for everyone dedicated enough to follow through this entire process?

Yep. The thing that gets me is: why not just post the Amazon affiliate links directly? The only thing I can think of is that Reddit might automatically flag posts containing too many affiliate links, but I can't find this behaviour documented anywhere, and since the people making the posts are the same as the people running the subreddit it can't be a local, moderator-actionable issue. This seems like a lot of effort to go through all to make a very small amount of money, but I guess it's worth it for whoever's doing it.

So what can you do? Well, I'm working on a search engine to cut through junk search results and just show what's important (fully open-source and private, obviously). In the mean time, it may be worth it to be a little more vigilant when it comes to search results, even when they're from Reddit. █