I used to chase any backlink I could get, now I turn down 80% of them

A few years back I was grabbing links from random directories and spammy blogs just to build numbers. Then Google hit my site with a manual penalty in March 2022 after I got a link from some garbage furniture site. Now I only go after links from sites with real traffic and an actual audience, even if it means getting half as many. Anyone else clean up their link profile and see rankings jump after dumping the junk?

2 comments

2 Comments

olivia_harris1911d ago

Took you long enough to learn that lesson. But how do you actually check if a site has real traffic? I used to just look at Domain Authority or whatever and assume it was good, but I found out some of those high DA sites are just ghost towns with nobody reading them. Now I use Similarweb and check their estimated monthly visitors, plus I look at whether they actually get comments or shares on their posts. Do you have a specific metric or tool you trust for this?

abby_wilson5111d ago

Funny you mention ghost towns, my sister once bought ad space on what she thought was a big gardening site. Turned out the whole thing was held together with stolen content and a botnet for clicks. She paid good money for zero actual eyeballs. Now I take a different route entirely. I check if the site has a real community by seeing if people are linking to it naturally in forums or on social media, not just paid promos. If a blog about vintage cameras has folks in a Facebook group actually arguing about a post, that's traffic that matters. Similarweb is fine, but I like checking Reddit or even niche groups to see if real humans talk about the site.