No, there was more to it than that. I spent some time, last year, looking into those pay-for-rating VPN "review" sites. And Google displayed some very odd behavior in searches involving TheBestVPN.com and VPN services that had paid it for top rankings.

I'm no SEO guru, but I suspect that some of those VPN services created numerous clones, which all linked to TheBestVPN.com, and so improved its ranking. For example, ExpressVPN had at least 128 clones. Such as expressvpn..., buy-express-vpn-..., get-xpress-vpn...., and xpress-vpn.... I used myip.ms to get hosting information, and they were linked. Also, I bought subscriptions from a few of them, and they all provided working ExpressVPN apps, with the right certificates. And I found no evidence of affiliate codes in the traffic.