Review of guest post services

I don't like to complain and this is feedback.

Let's face it, guest posting works when it's done right, however, a lot of the services on here are really just masked PBN sites. I don't mind PBN sites but I like people to be honest.

I've ordered a few services on here now and see the same pattern..


Lets me clear I'm saying SOME, not all.

If you think about it, guest posting in the way you are thinking is near impossible task to scale up and sell as a service - it would be more like the job of a VA to research in your niche, built big list of sites then contact them one by one - you might contact 100 sites and get just a couple of links in return and those might be good metrics / ok metrics / no-follow.

So I always just assume that guest posting is going to be links froma fiverr and similar - Not saying it IS, just that is what I would assume and thus normally steer away from it.

Of course you have the other end of guest posting as well - links on huffpo and places like that. I guess that is real guest posting that you are talking about BUT it has the price tag to go with it.

If I was you I would do the first option I mentioned - get a VA that can manually work on it for you - look for sites in your niche, use ahrefs to look at competitor links etc and just keep outreaching to all of them until you get replies.

Aye. I have a team that does manual outreach etc.

However, I do test services as well. I run a business and if there is a small chance of a service saving me a few hundred £ in staffing costs a month, then I will.

My main point is that some are not doing the service they promote at all.

It's ok - all feedback is useful.

Basically, when we review a marketplace thread, we check the service provided against the promises made by the seller in the OP.

If they're promising certain metrics, content quality and do follow links, then that's what we check and what we'll base the approval decision on. It's quite possible that some of these are PBN's but unless they're explicitly claiming it isn't a PBN, we won't check for this during the review.

2 reasons:

1. There's only so much hand-holding we can do. Buying blackhat services will inherently carry a certain amount of risk and buyers should have - at the very least - a decent basic knowledge of bh seo. We love good quality services but there is also a place for cheap low quality services too. As long as the buyer is able to make an informed decision about what they're getting, we won't discriminate.

2. Every service here has too many potential variables - there's no way we can check every possible scenario and rule them out. For example, if someone's promising backlinks from sites with unique C class IP's, then we'll check that this is delivered. However, if they haven't mentioned different subnets or different whois entries, then we won't check it. Someone who's buying a service might consider those aspects very important, so they need to make sure it's specifically mentioned in the thread.

Again, it comes back to the buyer knowing what they are doing. We have sellers on here, like @t0mmy, who will just refuse to sell their services to people that don't understand what they're doing, don't know the potential risks and rewards, and aren't capable of making an informed decision. I've had a couple of noobs complain that they've been refused but, honestly, turning a sale down for a buyer's benefit is great customer service and I'm all for it.

So, if it's important to you that your guest posts aren't on a PBN, then make sure you find a thread that states this explicitly. If it has been promised but not delivered, then that's a bad service from a bad seller and it needs to get resolved or we don't want them on the forum. In that case, it needs to be submitted here: https://www.blackhatworld.com/forums/dispute-resolution.31/

Apricot said:

So, if it's important to you that your guest posts aren't on a PBN, then make sure you find a thread that states this explicitly. If it has been promised but not delivered, then that's a bad service from a bad seller and it needs to get resolved or we don't want them on the forum. In that case, it needs to be submitted here: https://www.blackhatworld.com/forums/dispute-resolution.31/

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May I PM you a couple of reports of people who claim the posts are 'real'? You can decide if I'm being too harsh etc.

I totally get what you're saying but when you read the listings, then ask again if its 'outreach' to then get a list of links from PBNS etc. Its kinda annoying, that's not blackhat, that's just lying

Yes, if it's claiming that they're outreach and they're actually PBN links, then that's a bit disingenuous. Just to be aware, the marketplace is a work in progress and the rules were much less rigid a couple of years ago. We're working our way back through the threads but there are thousands of them so there will be ones that haven't been picked up yet.

If you come across any of these, please use the report link under the OP and provide as much info as you can on why the service isn't being accurately described. All the mods can check the service against the provided evidence and, if it's a clear breach, we'll close the thread and get the seller to provide an up to date review sample.

This isn't always straightforward so if you don't hear anything immediately, please be patient - we will deal with it as soon as we can. If a buyer has an issue with the service provided - again, that's a shitlist matter. We can mediate between both parties and, if it's warranted, tell the seller they need to give a refund or face being banned.

Apricot said:

Yes, if it's claiming that they're outreach and they're actually PBN links, then that's a bit disingenuous. Just to be aware, the marketplace is a work in progress and the rules were much less rigid a couple of years ago. We're working our way back through the threads but there are thousands of them so there will be ones that haven't been picked up yet.

If you come across any of these, please use the report link under the OP and provide as much info as you can on why the service isn't being accurately described. All the mods can check the service against the provided evidence and, if it's a clear breach, we'll close the thread and get the seller to provide an up to date review sample.

This isn't always straightforward so if you don't hear anything immediately, please be patient - we will deal with it as soon as we can. If a buyer has an issue with the service provided - again, that's a shitlist matter. We can mediate between both parties and, if it's warranted, tell the seller they need to give a refund or face being banned.

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All good. Once again, my comment is feedback and nothing more

I use the market place as a testing ground, rather than paying staffing costs, if it works then I scale on my own but it would be nice to actually get what I'm paying for.

I'll start reportng

That is why you ask sample before buying anything and if you see that their sites are not real just cheap looking masked PBN with no traffic and all that run away.. there are other things that not right in marketplace too where sellers claim not allowing hacks, pharmacy links.. but in the sample if they send you see that there are many of such links and trash in their PBN so you will get trash results too. Maybe when admins review their network is fresh and looks good but later they allow everything just to make more money, and if BHW is okay with that then no problem, maybe only couple sellers in marketplace are good and sell what they say in thread.

luc1fer said:

That is why you ask sample before buying anything

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Agreed and done. I expect that mods only get the 'samples' in their own tests as well.

luc1fer said:

That is why you ask sample before buying anything and if you see that their sites are not real just cheap looking masked PBN with no traffic and all that run away.. there are other things that not right in marketplace too where sellers claim not allowing hacks, pharmacy links.. but in the sample if they send you see that there are many of such links and trash in their PBN so you will get trash results too. Maybe when admins review their network is fresh and looks good but later they allow everything just to make more money, and if BHW is okay with that then no problem, maybe only couple sellers in marketplace are good and sell what they say in thread.

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Yes, we're aware that some sellers might provide a good review sample and then the service degrades after it goes live. This is something we're tackling by enforcing the yearly thread renewal fees - once we've got the process working smoothly, the next step will be to carry out annual reviews to check that the service is of the same quality as the one we saw in the review.

Maybe when admins review their network is fresh and looks good but later they allow everything just to make more money, and if BHW is okay with that then no problem,

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No, we're absolutely not ok with this. Couple of misconceptions I need to correct here: yes, we're obviously a business and not a charity so charges are inevitable to cover running costs, staffing etc. However, this does NOT mean that we'll overlook rule breaking and scammers just to make a quick buck.

All the people that work for blackhatworld, from Diamond Damien, paid staff and developers, through to the mods who are the backbone of the forum and make this place what it is by volunteering their own time.. All of us love this place and are heavily invested in making the community the best it can possibly be. No-one gets to break the rules without there being consequences.

And, from a pragmatic point of view, if we don't care about bad sellers scamming people on the marketplace, then people will stop buying from the marketplace. Once that happens, sellers will stop selling and members will start leaving. So, even more importantly than us having good intentions - it just doesn't make any business sense to allow bad practices.

The security and trust of our members is absolutely our top priority. Are we perfect? No - we're human. But we'll always give our best effort to continuously improve the forum and fix problems as they come up. That's why we need your help to report problems and always want suggestions on how to improve things.

Apricot said:

No-one gets to break the rules without there being consequences.

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A quick check of the shit list and certain reviews of moderator accounts will prove that, quite clearly.... One who is most likely known just as much as BHW by the looks of it.

ThatSEO said:

Agreed and done. I expect that mods only get the 'samples' in their own tests as well.

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Nope, we don't accept samples in the reviews. We expect the seller to give us their top level package to our specifications as if we were a customer. We have lots of test sites and accounts for this purpose, so the seller is given this information when they submit the thread.

The services we get as part of the review go back into the testing cycle - eg a website provided by a designer will be used as a site to test backlinks. We reject far more services than we approve, so I'm sure you can imagine the average life-span of a test site isn't very long before it's rendered useless, hence the constant recycling (and occasional delays) while we find or buy services necessary to carry out a fair review.

This is an issue I've brought up with other staff members just recently after receiving a PM from a concerned member (not the OP)

It seems that a lot of sellers all of a sudden decided to start selling "outreach" posts, funnily enough it wasn't long after I started myself actually. Now I'll tell you one thing about legit outreach - it takes a LOT of man power.. a full team of well educated people, forget about cheap VAs doing this.. the results will be minimal, it takes solid English writers and it takes connections.

If a service is using the words "outreach" but then giving you PBN links please forward the details to myself or any other member of staff.

A fake outreach post is very easy to spot.. It may have all the metrics advertised but it'll be missing some crucial elements that fake sites just won't have - traffic, a legit looking Alexa record, user engagement on articles.. comments, shares and so on, social profiles with engagement and basically real people that are clearly using the site.

Some of the sites I was sent recently in that PM I mentioned were very very good, the seller did his job well when building his network.. but it was just that, a network... there was zero interaction from anyone and zero traffic going to said sites.

So yeah it's an issue that's known and one I obviously agree with looking in to because I'm selling real outreach and these fake ones clearly do damage to legit sellers when they can undercut while pretending to sell the same legit service.