Quick question for SEOs & agency owners...

What's the biggest headache when sourcing guest posts these days?

• Fake traffic?
• Overpriced websites?
• Sponsored tags?
• Slow publishers?
• Something else?

I think fake traffic and overpriced websites are both valid points, but there is another problem behind both of them.

As buyers, we don't really have access to the actual Google Analytics or GSC data of a site. we mostly have to rely on screenshots or tools like Ahrefs and Semrush, and such tools are working with their own estimates.
So sometimes a site can look great in the tools but the real traffic can be very different.
I sometimes wonder how much of this business would change if Google made the actual Analytics/GSC data publicly available.

Good question. I think SEO can look very different depending on the type of agency and the clients they work with. I’d be interested to hear how other agency owners approach this and what has worked best for them.

Fake traffic is probably the biggest headache for me. Some sites look great on paper, but once you dig a little deeper, the numbers just don’t add up.

Fake traffic and overpriced placements are probably the biggest issue for me. Some sites charge a lot just because they have high DR, but the actual traffic, rankings and relevance don’t always justify the price. I usually check the traffic trend, top pages, relevance and backlink profile before deciding if the placement is worth the cost.

Definitely overpriced sites for me...

I'm currently working on 3 link-building projects and the prices I'm getting are just ridiculous for some of the sites I'm reaching out to.

The issue is that once some people actually pay those prices, it sets a standard rate for the publishers and makes the pricing seem justified to them.

But in reality, some of those sites just aren't worth what I'm getting quoted for them, even after negotiating for a better price

i guess we all agree to fake traffic and overpriced website

for me its when the domain looks great but the actual page they give you is basically dead.

seller shows good traffic/dr for the whole site, then your post ends up buried somewhere with no internal links and never gets any traffic itself.

these days i check a few of their recent guest posts first and see if those pages are indexed/getting anything. saves a lot of bad buys.

Fake traffic represents, without question, the most significant challenge at present. Numerous low quality websites manipulate their organic metrics by ranking for irrelevant keywords, solely to inflate traffic figures and justify inflated pricing.

imedtchiv said:

What's the biggest headache when sourcing guest posts these days?

• Fake traffic?
• Overpriced websites?
• Sponsored tags?
• Slow publishers?
• Something else?

Click to expand...

Yep, biggest headache usually be fake traffic nd overpriced sites based on DR r DA. those numbers look great on paper, but checking linking page, topical relevance, indexing, nd outlink pattern gives much clearer pic.

For the most part, it's always been the price

fake traffic one of the biggest problems for me too.some sites look really good from outside but when you check data deeper traffic numbers dont really make sense

imedtchiv said:

What's the biggest headache when sourcing guest posts these days?

• Fake traffic?
• Overpriced websites?
• Sponsored tags?
• Slow publishers?
• Something else?

Click to expand...

My biggest challenge is deceptive data. A website may display high DR and traffic estimation data but poor relevance or minimal presence in the market.

I normally examine the following before making a decision for any placementt trends of traffic, ranking keywords, relevance, content quality, indexing, and the linking page.

For me it s fake traffic and inflated metrics a site can look great on paper but once you dig into the traffic sources and actual engagement things can be very different finding publishers with genuinely relevant audiences is becoming the real challenge

I think it has to do with fake traffic. If you have a quality site in your niche which can help increase topical authority it won't come cheap. DR and AHREF traffic don't lie in most parts.

the ad promise against the page. i had ads saying "quote in 24 hours" and a page with a 12 field form. cut it to 4 fields, conversions doubled, nothing else changed. check what the ad promises and whether the page delivers it in the first screen

imedtchiv said:

What's the biggest headache when sourcing guest posts these days?

• Fake traffic?
• Overpriced websites?
• Sponsored tags?
• Slow publishers?
• Something else?

Click to expand...

Fake traffic one of biggest headache IN SEO!

slow publishers are the one that gets me, pay for a placement then chase them for 3+ weeks just to get it live. now i put a hard deadline in the invoice terms and if a site blows past it once i just dont go back to them.

fake traffic and high priced placements are a big problem for me some sites ask a lot just because the dr looks good but the real traffic rankings and niche match may not be there i normally look at traffic history top pages relevance and the backlink profile before paying for a placement

Yeah, it's definitely overpriced. I think, with the prices they're getting now, there is no room for you to be an agency and try to give a markup, which is going to cover your cost as well. It's definitely overpriced and fake traffic.

One easy way to detect fake traffic is when you go ahead and audit the top pages. You would see the kind of keywords that you're ranking for. Most of the time, people just try to run for keywords of the same domain name or a different eyesight volume domain name. You see a lot of the keywords that they're ranking for are something like www.x.com, and you see different variants ranking for this keyword. Then this is really fake. It's easy to detect. You can know that this is really fake, and the price they charge for this kind of guest posting on such a website is really, really terrible. I wouldn't honestly advise to anyone.

Secondly, we also find some of the website owners taking down our URLs, maybe after a month or two. I think it's just like a snake business. you've paid the full lifetime price for a guest post or niche edit links on their pages, and you find out that they remove it. You have to reach out back again, and then they have to replace it. It's really a terrible situation that we get to find ourselves in lately, and I think most also don't understand that it's business. In fact, most probably just want to get the money the minute the link is live. I think, as a business, you just want the link to settle in first and probably make the payments within 24 to 48 hours to confirm that, yeah, right, this is really a good link that you're buying.

I think these are the top three from our agencies and some of the issues that we're facing. I guess with time, we've been able to know where all these problems are coming from, how they are trying to manipulate the organic system, and how we can see all these flag miles ahead.