Timothy Malmros spent two decades in gambling affiliate SEO. He’s seen every tactic, run a few, and retired from the game. Now he does something unusual: he investigates how black hat methods actually work and posts his findings publicly on LinkedIn. No gatekeeping. No course to sell. Just forensic curiosity.
We had a long, honest conversation on Unscripted SEO. Here’s what stuck with me.
The $10 Infinite Loop
Timothy calls it the canonical trick, and it’s the dominant black hat method he’s tracking right now.
The playbook: buy an expired high-authority domain — an old healthcare clinic, a defunct retailer, anything with a real backlink history. Bomb it with spam links around your target keywords to build topical relevance. Set a canonical redirect to a fresh gambling or sweepstakes domain. It ranks for about a week. Then you do it again with a new $10 domain.
He’s confirmed this across the US, Sweden, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands. Every market he checks.
The frustrating part isn’t that it works. It’s why it keeps working. Google announced an expired domain penalty years ago. But the enforcement lag is now running five to six years behind the tactic — and Timothy believes he knows why.
When ChatGPT launched, Google panicked. A genuine AI competitor was taking market share. Every resource got redirected. The anti-spam team — the one that used to shut these things down within weeks — is effectively gone. What’s left is automation that’s clearly not keeping pace.
Links Still Win — But Not All Links
We got into Trust Rank theory and the Medic update, and this is where I think there’s real signal for legitimate SEOs.
My argument to Timothy: it’s not just link quality in the abstract. It’s proximity to seed sites within your vertical. Healthline beat Dr. Josh Axe overnight not because it had better content — it didn’t — but because it had links from hospitals and medical institutions. Dr. Axe’s content was excellent. But his business model structurally prevented him from earning the links that mattered in that niche.
Timothy found this mostly credible, but complicated it with something worth sitting with: he’s seen plenty of drop domains with impressive, niche-relevant backlink profiles that still don’t work. Some UV armband detector store from Sweden randomly dominates with the canonical trick. Meanwhile, an AIDS resource site with legitimate medical links? Nothing.
The honest answer is: we don’t fully know. And anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
Originality Doesn’t Pay Anymore
The most unsettling part of the conversation had nothing to do with black hat tactics.
Timothy’s observation about AI overviews was simple: “If you have no incentive, you’re not going to do it. It’s like they’re killing the internet without realising it.”
He’s right. The content economy was built on a feedback loop — produce good content, earn traffic, earn revenue, produce more. AI overviews short-circuit that loop. They take the content, surface the answer, and cut the publisher out entirely.
And Google built this problem itself. It rewarded verbose recipe posts with life stories. Then HCU penalised those same publishers. Now AI consumes the publishers who survived HCU. The pattern is consistent: Google creates the incentive, extracts the value, then removes the incentive.
For publishers who want to survive this cycle, the conclusion is uncomfortable but clear: build audience ownership that doesn’t depend on search. Email lists. Communities. Anything where the relationship is yours.
SEO still matters. But as the only channel? That window is closing.
The Takeaway
Timothy ended the episode with something I keep coming back to:
“Whatever works, you see it in gambling first — because that’s where the money is. The more lucrative it is, the shadier it gets.”
The canonical trick will eventually get shut down. Five or six years from now, probably. But whatever replaces it is already being tested somewhere in a gambling SERP right now.
That’s worth knowing.
🎙️ Full episode: unscriptedseo.com 👤 Follow Timothy: linkedin.com/in/timothy-m-59a216b/
