Hello + a bunch of questions

[Alexannix]

Hello everyone,

I'm Alex, I'm new in the forum. I've been lurking a bit in the last few weeks, reading mainly about black hat SEO, and I decided to signup because I have some questions I cannot answer just by reading existing threads in the forum.

I recently launched a magazine about mental health with a friend of mine. I am the guy in charge of bringing traffic to the website, he is the one in charge of writing detailed and useful articles about psychology and mental wellbeing.
Having close-to-zero knowledge about SEO, I started studying the topic from scratch.
So far, I've been basically buying link building services on Fiverr (with close-to-zero results), so I decided I had to double down my effort.
I started following some courses by Brian Dean on Semrush Academy, but that didn't really help, since I understood that white-hat SEO is not something for newbies and amateurs.
During my studies I stumbled upon the term black hat SEO, and I decided to give it a go.
So here I am on BHW.

What's my goal here.
First of all, to bring traffic on the aforementioned mental health magazine.
In addition to that, my goal is to build a repeatable and scalable system/process to bring decent SEO traffic on various websites optimized for medium-tail and long-tail keywords about different topics.
I'm a web designer/product manager, and I'm thinking about offering also SEO services to my clients.
Of course, by reading threads on BHW, my mind immediately found what I was looking for: pyramid link building and PBNs.
My assumption is that PBNs is the best way to build a repeatable and scalable system/process to bring SEO traffic on various websites about different topics.
First question here: am I wrong in this assumption?

So I started focusing on how to build pyramid backlink strategy based on a PBN.

My understanding is that at the base of the pyramid (tier 2) there are backlinks coming from low-quality web 2.0 websites. I understood that I can easily buy them on GSA SER, RankerX, SEO Autopilot, SENuke or any other blaster or buy them online
Second question: is it better to buy them on SEOClerk, BHW Marketplace of anywhere else for 1$/200.000links, or is it better to buy software licences and set them up autonomously?

For what I understood, in the middle of the pyramid (tier 1) there's the PBN: a bunch of blogs with articles on specific topics (not generalists) where I can post articles with outgoing links to my money websites.
Third question: did i get it correctly? Am I missing a tier? How many blogs are necessary for and effective PBN?

I was thinking of using SpamZilla to identify and buy expired domains with low SpamZilla's spam score, decent Ahrefs' DR (20-30?), Moz's DA (50-60?) and Majestic's TF and CF (20-30?) and use them as blogs in the PBN: buy them, upload Wordpress and publish a bunch of articles written with ChatGPT. But then I thought that maybe the annual cost structure (for domain fees and hosting) would skyrocket. So I looked at alternative options. I immediately though about Blogger or Wordpress.com, but then I decided to go for Altervista.org, which is an Italian free hosting provider I've been using in the past. Of course, all the blogs in the PBN would have a third-level domain (blogname.altevista.org). Pros: the annual cost for maintaining a PBN on Altervista.org is 0. Cons: I have to build the domain authority from zero, and I cannot exploit the domain authority of expired domains.
Forth question: should I use expired domains? Should I use blogger/wordpress.com? Is altervista.org ok? Am I doing this in a completely wrong way?

Ultimately, at the top of the pyramid there's the money website. In my case, my mental health magazine or my clients' websites. Links to these websites should not come from spammy web 2.0 websites, but from contextual links in original articles in topic-relevant websites (like the blogs in my PBN).
Fifth question: if I write an article with ChatGPT, does Google understand I'm using AI and gives me penalties?

I have lots of other questions, but maybe it's better to wait for answers to the ones I already expressed.

Thank you and thanks for this amazing community!

 

[RankingExpert]

Hello. First of all welcome to BHW.

ANSWER 1: No, your assumption is not wrong.
ANSWER 2: Yes yes you can buy it from here and there too.
ANSWER 3: You can use expired domains. Blogger and wordpress is ok.

 

[TheDruid]

Interested in the topic and the answers

 

[Steptoe]

Answers to questions 4 and 5:

4) You can use a combination of both. Relying on either just expired domains or just web 2.0 blogs will stick out like a sore thumb.

5) There are many opinions on this, and very few (if any) real studies I've seen that aren't corrupted by other factors involved. I don't use ChatGPT, I use the OpenAI API directly and instruct it to write to my requirements using different prompts. These articles get indexed, and many of them rank for the keywords I was targeting. Of course, this is my anecdotal evidence, others will have a different experience.

I also don't think that if Google detects that your content is written by ChatGPT (and that's still a big if) that they will hand you 'penalties' - it's far more likely that they will just ignore it. A real proper Google penalty is rare.

---

As you are dealing with just one website, it might be more worth your while to start out with a few PBN posts and maybe a niche edit or two from some of the providers in the BHW marketplace. Look for those that are in your budget and have decent reviews. If you see a positive effect from them in a couple of months time, buy some more. It'll be far easier than trying to craft an entire tiered pyramid linking structure on your own with only beginner knowledge.

 

[Alexannix]

Thanks a lot for your answers!

5) There are many opinions on this, and very few (if any) real studies I've seen that aren't corrupted by other factors involved. I don't use ChatGPT, I use the OpenAI API directly and instruct it to write to my requirements using different prompts.

Do you use Wordpress? if yes, do you use a particolar plugin to connect to OpenAI's APIs?

 

[Steptoe]

Thanks a lot for your answers!



Do you use Wordpress? if yes, do you use a particolar plugin to connect to OpenAI's APIs?

Rarely, but there's been an explosion of plugins recently that let you query OpenAI. There are several on the marketplace, and even the age-old WPAutomatic will generate via GPT.