Recent content by Hetneo

Someone in Link Building this week asked where outbound link count stops being worth it on a guest post page. It is the one number almost nobody checks before paying, so here is how I look at it. Two things get mixed up in that question. The site-wide link count, and the count on the exact page...

The count on your own page is the smaller half of it. Look at the site's last 10 published posts, not just the one you are buying -> if every article ships with 15 commercial links, the domain is a placement feed and your page inherits that, however clean your own article reads. The thing...

The whole thread has gone DR 30, so I will take the other side for a minute -> both numbers are domain level, and the link does not land on a domain. A DR 70 with thin traffic is not automatically a link farm. Old regional papers, trade bodies and dead-ish industry directories stop publishing...

The question that lands in my PMs more than any other, and the fairest one anybody asks me: if the homepage placements are cloaked, how does a buyer know the link is really there? It is a reasonable thing to be suspicious about. You open the host site in your browser, you see nothing, and all...

Agree with the shift, with one addition. Topical fit of the page is step one, but what quietly kills placements is the company that page keeps. If every recent post on a site carries two or three commercial links into unrelated niches, your link can sit in a perfectly on-topic paragraph and...

Someone asked me last week how to split anchors across a small Canadian order, so here is how I actually plan one. Say you buy four homepage placements. The instinct is to point all four at the page you want ranked, with four variations of the money phrase. That is the quickest way to make a...

Traffic is a proxy for crawl attention, not for link value. Before I look at DR or an Ahrefs traffic number I check two things: is the page hosting the link actually indexed, and does the site rank for anything at all, even ten long tail terms with no volume attached. A flat line with 40 indexed...

Yes, but only on one kind of flat site. The ones that still work are sites whose traffic slid because the owner stopped publishing, not because an update hit them. Dead inventory with a live profile still passes something. The cliff ones are the dead weight. If the drop lands on a core update...

Most of the checks in here are on the link source. On a brand new site the ones that save you money are on your own side first. Three I do not skip: Is the target page actually indexed? Pointing links at a URL Google has not picked up yet means you spend weeks measuring nothing. Lock the URLs...

Asked in here and twice by DM this week: can you show me a few live .ca examples so I can check the sites first? Fair question, and the answer is no. Here is why, because "no" on its own sounds like I have something to hide. A public list of placement URLs is a footprint handed to anyone who...

Yeah, and the bit that gets people is that you never find out it happened. No notice in Search Console, nothing to appeal. The domain still looks healthy in Ahrefs, because Ahrefs has no idea which of those links Google quietly stopped counting. I buy these for a living and I reject most of...

Something buyers here keep getting wrong about how a bad link dies in 2026. It does not get you penalised. It gets ignored. SpamBrain handles most low-quality link stuff algorithmically now. No message in Search Console, no manual action, nothing to appeal, no notice that anything changed. Your...

The 70/30 split is sensible, but I think relevance keeps getting measured at the wrong level. Most people check the site's niche and never look at the page the link actually sits on. A "niche relevant" site that publishes guest posts on every subject under the sun is a general site with a niche...

Fair question, and yeah, the surface stuff is easy to fake now. The one that catches sites out for me is the indexation ratio. Pull their XML sitemap, count the URLs, then go see how much of that is actually in the index. I passed on one last year that looked fine on every metric you listed...

On separating the link's effect from content or general page quality: you don't get clean attribution unless you build the test for it. What I do: freeze the page while the link is in flight. No content edits, no new internal links, no new pages in that cluster for the window. Then track the...