Great question,
@karenparkerr. It’s incredibly frustrating to spend time doing outreach only to see a competitor ranking above you with a wildly messy, automated link profile.
But here is the reality of what we're seeing in the 2026 SERPs:
You are looking at a snapshot in time. A lot of those sites with messy profiles are dancing on a tightrope. Google’s algorithm still has blind spots, and sheer link velocity can temporarily overpower spam filters. But ask yourself: will that site still be there in 8 months? Probably not. If you are doing churn-and-burn, quantity works. But if you are building an asset to sell for a 40x multiple, you can't afford that risk.
@ezgamexdx hit the nail on the head regarding relevance. As a strict whitehat guy, my entire link-building strategy right now revolves around one question:
"Does this link actually drive real human traffic?"
If a site has a DR of 80 but zero organic traffic, a link from them is practically useless to me. I would much rather have 5 contextual links from niche-relevant blogs with 2,000 monthly visitors than 500 links from massive, irrelevant link farms.
For audits, I still use Semrush, but I've stopped obsessing over the "Toxic Link" tools and i don't even disavow anything anymore. Google has gotten pretty good at just ignoring low-quality spam rather than penalizing you for it (unless you built it yourself at scale). Keep your tier 1 clean, hyper-relevant, and traffic-driven. Let the blackhats deal with the stress of the next Core Update.
Messy profiles survive temporarily but Google always catches up 
