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

Biggest waste of money in twelve years?

A PBN. Not the one you'd expect — not one that got caught. One that worked perfectly and that I maintained for four years.

26 domains, aged, decent, cost me about £14k to build and roughly £400 a month to keep alive. It did what it was supposed to do. The sites it pointed at ranked. I could not tell you today whether they ranked because of it, and here's the thing that actually stings: I spent four years of Sundays on it. Renewals, updates, hosting, writing filler so the sites looked alive, moving one off a host that got flaky. Call it 300 hours.

If I'd spent 300 hours on outreach at even 2019 reply rates I'd have had relationships with maybe sixty site owners, and those would still be worth something now. The network is gone — I let it lapse in 2021 — and it left nothing behind. No asset, no contacts, no leverage. Money I could have wasted twice over and not minded. It was the Sundays.

That's the answer, and it's the one thing in this thread I'd want a beginner to read twice.

The Sundays. Twelve years in two words.

At what monthly volume does buying direct stop scaling and you have to bring it in house? Asking for a client operating at a certain size.

is this still going? had a question about tiered links

Barely. Client work ate March onwards and I've left a couple of good questions sitting up there unanswered, which I'd apologise for except that everyone who runs one of these does exactly the same thing.

Tiered links: I stopped in 2019 and I've never seen a reason to start again. There's a thread on this board arguing about it that's more useful than anything I'd write.

Thanks to everyone who asked something real. The two exchanges I got the most out of were the supplier concentration one, where I think I ended up agreeing with hexforge more than I let on at the time, and being asked what percentage of my own pages have bought links pointing at them — I'd never worked that number out before and it was lower than I'd have guessed. Twelve years in and the AMA taught me something, which is either encouraging or damning.

Worth bookmarking for the Poland story alone. Everybody thinks their supplier is the exception.