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It's not 2010 anymore.
It's not 2012.
It's not 2015.
I'm seeing the SAME crap pedalled year on year, it's 2025 for god sake.
10 Years ago Google INDEXED anything that it found on crawls.
Now it does not.
Do you think Google is going to pass page rank through guest post sites that have been on seller lists for the last 5 to 10 years?
Do you think that years of content abuse and artificial DR manipulation with tiered links makes a link from a site like this worth paying £100s of pounds for?
90%+ of the link building market is based on shit, and the worst part?
You NEED shit at scale to see ANY benefit, because some rubbish sites can pass page rank for a period of time until the domain gets wiped out, so often links at scale still work but are totally unsustainable.
BUYING CRAPPY LINKS WORKS and that's why annoying link builders still exist, that's why they continue to pillage mailboxes across the globe with Hello, Hi Dear, Hi Sir.
BUT it's NOT SUSTAINABLE and in an era where AI & BRAND TRUST are exploding, crappy links will continue to offer less and less value for less and less time.
PEOPLE DRESS UP a lot of link building by:
1. Calling it digital PR when a majority of it is just buying links from pre-existing contacts.
2. Giving fancy names, abbreviations etc. to link metrics or process checks – in reality a majority of it is all the same.
I hate the link building industry because it's the ONE area of SEO driven by greed.
Who the fuck pays £250-£500 for a LINK? a piece of text on a page with a link?
How is a link worth so much when in general SO MANY are needed?
LINKS are like the property market, over inflated and driven by lies/misrepresentation.
I'm SO fed up with people trying to sell me link garbage, I'm going to make a video series and deck on HOW TO BUILD PROPER links and how to keep your distance from what is a toxic marketplace.
- Wild west.
- Dodgy guest posts.
- Crappy niche edits.
- Domain abuse.
- Link spam & tiered links.
For EVERY £1000 you spend using traditional link building tactics probably returns less than £100 of value back in potential link value.
And that's why businesses can easily spend £100,000s on links over the years.
- Good links are HARD TO GET – it's not easy.
- Cheap links are rarely good.
- Link sellers often add significant markup.
- AI generated content abuse is growing for guest posts.
- Google is indexing LESS and LESS of it anyway.
Google is partly to blame for this as it has facilitated the growth in these markets when it COULD of invested more into quality raters to catch more link abuse.
But, with Google's indexing policies now CLOUTING sites with low value / low quality content – getting links from them is even MORE pointless.
I've got to do an educational series on this, partly because it's SUCH a large part of SEO and yet the dirtiest part of the industry – one that's given me many sleepless nights and YEARS of creating outlook rules to stop guest post spam ruining my inbox.
Author: «Daniel Foley Carter»
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