Between clients for a month. Been buying links since 2014, ask me anything

Contract ended in December and the next one doesn't start until March, so for once I have time to answer things properly instead of firing off two lines between calls.

What I've actually done, so you can calibrate how much to trust any of this. Started in 2011 doing on-page for a local directory. Went full time on links in 2014, which is the year I'd say the modern version of this job began — Penguin had stopped being a bomb that went off occasionally and started being continuous, and everybody who'd built their business on directories and article spinning either adapted that year or left. I've run networks of my own, bought from everyone worth buying from and most people who weren't, done outreach at scale, done digital PR for two agencies who'd never use that phrase, and been through four penalties, two of which were mine and two of which I inherited.

I am not going to tell you a secret method. There isn't one and anyone selling you one is selling you the 2016 playbook with a new name on it. What I can do is tell you what a thing cost, what it did, and what happened eighteen months later, because the eighteen months later part is the bit missing from every guide.

Ask. I'll be in and out of here until March. Some of it I won't answer, mostly where it'd identify a client.

This is really generous, thank you for doing it.

My question is the boring one but it's the one I'm stuck on. How do you find sites that will actually take a link, in a niche where every site I look at is either a huge publisher who won't reply or an obvious link farm? I've sent maybe 300 emails since October and I have four replies, three of which were price lists. Am I doing outreach wrong or is that just the number?

That's roughly the number now, and it was one in eight in 2014, and the difference between those two figures is the whole story of this industry.

But you're framing it wrong, and the framing is why it hurts. You're treating outreach as a way to get a link. It stopped being that around 2018. Outreach is a way to find the sites that sell, and three price lists out of 300 means you found three suppliers, which is not nothing — those three are worth more to you than the link you were originally asking for, because you can go back to them for the next twelve months and the price drops after the second order. Every time.

The sites you're calling link farms: half of them are, and half of them are ordinary small sites that took money once and now show up in every seller database as a result. Look at whether the site publishes anything that isn't a guest post. If there's a human being with opinions posting twice a month between the sponsored stuff, that's a real site with a side hustle, and that's the best inventory in this business.

The huge publishers who won't reply — stop emailing the editor. Find the freelancer who has written four pieces for them in the last year and email that person. That's the one sentence in this post worth anything and it's the same trick I was using in 2015, which tells you how much has really changed.

started with the easy one i see

Does DR still matter at all in 2026 or is it completely dead as a metric??

It matters as a price. It doesn't matter as a result.

What I mean is: sellers price on it, so you have to know it to negotiate, and buyers filter on it, so a site with a high one gets more offers and charges more. That's a real market effect and you can't ignore it. But I have never, in twelve years, watched a ranking move in a way I could attribute to the third-party authority score of the linking domain rather than to what that page was about and whether anybody read it.

In 2014 we all watched a different number that also didn't do anything. There will be a new one in 2029.

so stop paying extra for DR then? or still use it to filter

Numbers question. Across your own properties, what proportion of your ranking pages have a paid link pointing at them, and how do you know the ones without them aren't the ones carrying it?

On my own stuff, five sites, about 340 pages that get any traffic at all: 61 of them have at least one bought link pointing directly at the URL. So under a fifth.

And your second question is the right one and the answer is I don't know. I've never run the experiment properly because running it properly means deliberately not building to a page for a year and watching it lose, and I've never been willing to eat that. Everyone who tells you they've isolated the effect is either lying or has one site and no controls.

What I'll say is the 61 pages produce about 70% of the revenue, which either means the links work or means I only buy links for pages I already believe in. Both are true, and that's why the number is useless.

following this one

What's the failure mode you've watched most often? Not the dramatic penalty — the boring way people's link building quietly stops working.

Buying from one place until it's most of your profile, then that place gets found.

It's never presented that way. What happens is somebody finds a seller who's good and cheap and responsive, and buying from them is easy, and buying from anyone else is a week of emails. So the ratio drifts. Month one it's 20% of their links, month nine it's 70%, and nobody notices because each individual purchase was a sensible decision. Then the seller's inventory gets scraped into a public database, or one of their sites gets a manual action and someone walks the outbound links, and the entire nine months arrives at once.

I did this in 2017. I had a guy in Poland who was excellent — real sites, fair prices, never missed. Eleven months of buying from him, 84 links, and I would have told you at the time I was diversified because the 84 links were on 84 different domains. They were on 84 different domains that had all been bought by the same person and all had the same three plugins and all pointed out to the same forty clients. When it went it went in nine days.

The boring version of the lesson: your diversification is not measured in domains, it's measured in suppliers, and most people have two and think they have fifty. Cap any single source at a quarter of what you're buying, even when it makes your life harder. Especially then, actually, because a supplier being easy to buy from is exactly what causes the concentration.

Reply rates on cold outreach. Give us the curve — what were you getting in 2016, 2020, now?

From my own sent folders, same style of email, roughly the same kind of target: 2016 around 12%, 2019 around 7%, 2022 about 3%, last campaign I ran properly was 2025 and it was 1.4% over 1,100 sends.

Half of that is saturation and half of it is that everyone's inbox now filters what I send before a human sees it. The replies I do get are worth more than they were, which is the only consolation available.

I want to push back on the supplier concentration story, not because it's wrong but because I think you've drawn the wrong boundary around it.

Your Poland example failed because the 84 domains shared a footprint, not because they shared an invoice. If he'd been a genuine broker reselling from 84 unrelated owners, the concentration in your payment history would have been identical and nothing would have happened. The variable is whether the sites are related, and a buyer generally can't see that from outside — which means "cap any supplier at 25%" is a proxy rule that happens to work rather than the actual mechanism.

Turning down good inventory to hit an arbitrary ratio is a tax you pay for information you could sometimes just go and get: reverse-lookup a sample of five of his sites before you're forty links in, not after.