In the last couple days my YouTube account has fallen victim to a new scheme by porn websites attempting to garner Google Juice. It is pretty straightforward. A generic YouTube account is created with a user name like "babiegirl123xyz" and the "user" has a single line profile with the line "all my pics are at the link below". The link is to an adult sex/dating site.
All by itself creating a bogus YouTube account with a link to your site won't get a site listed any higher in a Google search. But the clever part of this approach is the "user" subscribes to many YouTube channels. Since YouTube users often have channel pages with links to all of their subscribers, the more subscriptions the bogus user creates; the more incoming links they have to their profile and consequently to their adult website. But I'd think the Google algorithm wouldn't weigh links from YouTube too heavily anyway...
I came across this scheme because I got several subscription emails from variants of the babiegirl accounts all with the same template of a profile page and all linking to the same website. It doesn't really matter much to me that they go to this trouble, but it is strange since I don't display a list of my subscribers on my channel so they don't get any real benefit.
I guess another way this scheme could help increase traffic would be through the subscription emails. Heck I clicked on the links to see what the site was about. It could be there are enough folks who do the same in response to the subscription email. If only a few end up becoming members of the adult sites it could make this a worthwhile means for these sites to get more page hits/subscribers.
Sigh...