The type mattered less to me than where it sits. Guest posts and niche edits at the money site, a handful a month, and the rest of the budget goes to keeping those alive. That second part is what nobody has mentioned yet. A niche edit on a page that drops out of the index in three months is a niche edit you paid for and no longer have. So behind every placement I put automated tier 2 from a verified list, forum profiles, web 2.0s, article sites, pointed at the placement and never at my site. Crawled weekly, stays indexed, keeps passing. That combination has outperformed any single link type I have bought since 2022, and the tier 2 costs less than one guest post a month.