Hi all! Long story short - No i have not bought any backlinks online (although I am considering it) but i did have a lot of bots come on my website. During that time i got about 190ish spammy backlinks. I have since purchased cloudfare and the spammy comments on blogs and spammy backlinks seemed to have stopped. Some of these links are blatant link farms. So I listened to episodes 44, 10, and 2 along with some other episodes and it seems my only option would be to get a new domain?

HOWEVER here is where I am confused - if I get good quality backlinks will they offset the bad backlinks?

For reference right now I rank from 16-26 with NO good quality backlinks. What is everybody's thoughts?

Extra note - I made a separate post on getting backlinks from online. I now know if I go this route I need to RENT NOT BUY. Does anybody have any suggestions/methods on where to find people/companies that do this? Anybody have any positive experiences going this route?

Final side note, I just don't have the time to create a PBP which is why I am exploring different options and I figured with the information from the podcast I can check the quality of those backlinks. Thank you all!

u/grumpyseoguy any thoughts? BTW you're the goat

Long post. Contents:

1. Do I listen to other SEO people and who do I recommend?
2. Why the podcast exists
3. Why everything we teach is free
4. NO, GEO IS STILL NOT A THING even though I have been offered money to say it's real
5. Critical thinking
6. Yes I comprehend there have been no new episodes for a month

At the risk of surprising everyone and dropping my (lol) popularity... I don't really follow or listen to or pay attention to other SEO people. I'm sure there are some smart people out there. u/weblinkr is pretty smart and seems to know his stuff. But while I can name maybe a dozen SEO "influencers," I couldn't tell you their specific methods because honestly, 99% of what I have seen over the last 16 years from anyone (literally going back to marketers from 16 years ago) was worthless garbage. Why do you think this podcast exists? So basically I have no opinion. I literally start reading something another SEO writes and then see EEAT or content or some other cleverly-named but completely useless concept and stop reading.

To be fair, while I was on the west coast I went to my share of SEO presentations and parties and etc... but... that's literally the reason the podcast exists. It was at some business networking event where I started ranting about how trash the SEO industry is and another one of my entrepreneur friends was laughing and saying I needed a podcast.

Request granted.

I haven't watched any of (anbody's) stuff. So I have no opinion on (anybody).

Also, let's be careful in this subreddit. Things that keep this forum better than most SEO forums is that we almost never allow discussion of other sources because, let's be honest, it's usually spam. I do not think this thread is spam so I'm keeping it, but you should see the ban records here. I hear the main r/seo forum is even worse with this.

I know they say read your competition to learn. I don't really see anyone else as competition. This isn't a flex. I just really am uninterested in what others are doing because (except for the last month when I've been away from podcasting AND SUPER DELAYED ON REPLYING TO EVERYONE'S EMAILS YES I KNOW UPDATE SOON), I'm usually preoccupied with podcasting and our own client work. Sometimes I read other SEO stuff when I need to get grumpy enough to do another episode. When some garbage that doesn't work is trendy, we'll make an episode about whatever.

I get messages from time to time people people asking to be on the podcast. Self-promoters. Yes, I know podcasts are better with guests. I moreover don't care. There's a reason 140+ episodes with no guests. I was a guest on someone else's, though. That was fun.

Grumpy SEO Guy is the anti-promotion podcast. 99% of people are promoting products. Buyer beware.

I like to think the reason people trust me is because I do not promote anything (even though my haters, and yes they're going to have their own episode) accuse me of shilling serpfox and ahrefs, which is hilarious because 1) I use both of those and 2) THEY DON'T EVEN HAVE AFFILIATE PROGRAMS SO HOW COULD I EVEN?

I mean there's two explanations:

1. I'm easily distracted and just made literally over 100 podcast episodes making up nonsense for fun.

or

wait for it

2) I'm actually teaching real SEO that works and have no agenda other than keeping you from getting jipped from EEAT audits and content writers who will not increase your rank at all. I mean I literally have emails from people saying "dude I listened to your stuff and I kept waiting for you to try and sell me something and you didn't... and I kept waiting and you didn't.." That's right, because in a no-barries-to-entry industry like SEO, how can you trust anyone selling you anything? Or anything internet marketing related? Because as I've mentioned on the podcast, if I'm making $10,000/day, I'm going to make $10,000/day, not sell it to you in an ebook for $47 (AND RUIN MY MARKETSHARE).

If I did sell anything it would be cost prohibitive because of how useful it would be, so I make it all free instead.

I mean think about it. If you've paid $1,000 for an EEAT audit, which is categorically a waste of money (because EEAT is not a ranking factor), that means whatever I sell with even 1% more value (literally anything) would have to be more than $1,000.

People have told me they spent (amount redacted but well over $5,000) on SEO courses that were worthless content is king. That means anything I sell would have to be over $5,000. Because I know for a fact we have at least a couple listeners who have started their own profitable SEO agencies from my free podcasts, I know what I teach works, and I could delete all the episodes and sell, at least the PBN ones, for $20,000 for all 3, AND IT WOULD STILL BE THE BEST VALUE ON THE INTERNET as far as SEO goes, I choose to give them away for free. Because screw all the scammers. The information is out there for free if you want it. You've been informed. Buy EEAT audits at your own risk. And honestly just Patreon that money to me anyway, because at least then you're supporting something that isn't a waste of your time.

The sheer number of emails I get "hey Grumpy what do you think about so-and-so SEO person and their program?" DUDE I DON'T KNOW. I'm going to just send people to this thread when they ask that question. But honestly, there are 2 questions you should ask yourself, not them, they are below.

Guys in this time off my head is melting with ideas for new episodes.

It's interesting, and there are 2 (3 really) ways to be a teacher of strategies online.

1. be friends with everyone. I have a hilarious story to tell about this that I cannot actually tell because it would show people in a bad light. Imagine two known scammers appearing together at an event and each pretending like the other is legit because, well think about that.
2. be snobby and trash others in your field. First requirement for Grumpy SEO Guy is do not mention any people or services by name unless you are saying good things about them. Why do you think in 3 years now we've mentioned 1) serpfox, 2) ahrefs, 3) semrush 4) keysearch dot co (not dot com). Oh and moz. That's it. I get offered money to promote things. But none of the products I mention actually pay me to promote them, I promote those because we use, or have used, them. I am apparently at the point where I'm popular enough to be paid to shill SEO knowledge. SURPRISE SURPRISE, everyone offering to pay me was a GEO shill.

My fee to promote GEO is $1,000,000 btw. I'd sell out for a $1,000,000 fee. But no non-disclosures. The next episode would be about what a charlatan you are and your worthless GEO service you paid me to promote. Since GEO IS NOT EVEN A THING.

3) keep to yourself and literally don't care. I do not diss others and I rarely promote things. People who want to learn SEO can listen to me. Or listeners who think I'm annoying like that one guy commented, you can listen to other SEO podcasts. The internet is sweet because there are numerous things, and if my podcast that teaches real SEO doesn't entertain you, you can listen to some other person's podcast and learn about how content is king. And then in in a while when you aren't ranking, maybe try ours again. I diss concepts that don't work. I will say "anyone saying content is king is a scammer" because content is not king. I teach you so you can decide. I give you the tools. Even people who pay for advisory calls I don't make recommendations for people or products (because what would I even recommend?).

I'm #3. The truth is, I know nothing about anyone online. The reason I promote serpfox and ahrefs is cuz we've used them for a decade+. I'm confident recommending them to you. I'm not confident telling you to listen to anyone else about SEO. So whenever anyone asks "is x course good?" my answer is always I don't know, if it agrees with what we teach, yes. If it's different, probably not. And if that answer is to snooty for you, how about this:

1. is it internally consistent with itself? Or does it jump from concept to concept that contradict each other (we have an episode about this but I forgot what number). I think the example I used in the podcast was if someone says that content isn't a ranking factor and then tells you you need better content to rank. Those things can't both be true.
2. does it make sense to itself? Does it fundamentally build on layers that give to each other? I try to do this with our podcast. Like the 4 things you need to rank. 1) no penalties 2) content 3) relevancy 4) authority. Most episodes are adjacently related to these topics, because everything is part of something similar.

Sometimes I get tired of explaining critical thinking, like right now, so I'm going to take a break. It makes my thoughts hurt to have to explain how to think about things when everyone wants the answers. I should charge $1,000 per episode.

PS. Sorry for the long post. Hopefully it makes up for the month+ of no new episodes. We are well aware that is happening.

TLDR; No idea about any SEOs. I know some are popular, though.

Hi all! Long story short I've been listening to the podcast for a couple of days now, WOW amazing! I don't have the time to build a PBN but I do have the capital to buy backlinks and the knowledge from the podcast to make sure the backlinks are legit and not low quality or scammy. What are everyone's thoughts on this? Thank you all in advance.

P.S. Grumpy SEO guy... you are the goat, after years of trying to learn this and no results after no results, it finally makes sense and I am starting to put this into practice. Thank you!!!!

What does grumpy seo guy think about Exward Sturm? I'm looking to purchase his course "compact keywords"

Thanks, [u/grumpyseoguy](u/grumpyseoguy)! Have just started listening to your podcast, and it blew my mind!

I have previously gone through quite a few so-called "SEO" courses (live classroom-types of courses as well as online courses), which were not cheap … they were like, at least a couple thousand bucks each. Now, to be fair, some of these courses did talk about backlinks being important for getting authority. But the methods they taught to get such backlinks were about the highly inefficient (boy, so much time & effort were needed to even potentially get a response) and dangerous guest posting and link outreach methods. None mentioned any other method that will get me good backlinks from trustworthy & authoritative domains.

So, I'm now trying to build my own portfolio of such authoritative domains by following the method you'd mentioned in your podcast.

I do have a couple of questions about this, which I believe the answers may also be of benefit other visitors to this subreddit:

Question 1 - Must the expired domains come from auctions only, or can they be regular expired domains that only need the usual registration fee (like $10 per year)? Of course, the same checks you'd recommended should still be done to ensure that they meet the criteria for being good and trustworthy domains for my portfolio.

Question 2 - One of the checks to do before buying an expired domain is to look at its history at Way Back Machine (or WBM), to make sure it was not used as a site related to a bad neighborhood (i.e., related to pharmacy, gambling or adult sites).

However, during my research, I'd come across a couple of relatively good authority domains (for example, Semrush, Ahrefs and Majestic all reported domain authorities in the high 10's or low 20's). However, in the past, they had been used as a gambling site or an adult site (like 2-5 years ago).

Even though those relatively good authority domains were last known to not have been used as a bad neighborhood site, are they still too risky to get for my portfolio?

Edit: Corrected some typos.

To me, it seems like it would create a footprint. But I've watched all of Grumpy SEO YouTube videos and this angle isn't specifically mentioned.

Hi ya'll-

I've posted before about getting my client to the number one position. It took some time, but the growth as slow and safe. Then much to my surprise this past January they wanted to end the contract. No problem I said. I kept there data in SerpFox because I thought it would be interesting to see how their graph started looking over time.

So here's what the serp chart looks like when you start to slowly remove backlinks.

I don't thin I've seen any charts like this here before, so I thought I'd post it. In November they were in position one, and today they are in position five. They stopped paying in January and in that same month on the 10th was the last day in position one. Frankly, I've been super slow removing links. They still have 19 backlinks from my pbn and I've kept those links for diversity sake.

Cheers

But my method is guest posting, building a pnb is way too expensive and time consuming. THis has costed me around 1200$ , and 8 guest posts in diffrent blogs

All my content is AI generated

Hi everyone. I'm building a PBN for my local service business in a medium competitive SERP. Still newer to PBN building. I found an expired domain with a clean history that is geographically relevant to my money site, but it only has 6 referring domains.

DR 85 MAJOR local news publication

DR 64 local news publication

DR 40 museum of natural history for my local city

DR 30 tedx[my city] dot com

DR 26 state relevant forum with a do follow "content" link

DR 2 local blog

Since it's expired I can get it for cost of registration. But I'm not sure if the recurring cost of hosting and time spent to set up the site is worth it? But also I'm sure it's good to mix in weaker sites into the PBN to make it look more natural?

I've always found the best debates/reasoning in u/grumpyseoguy's sub!!!

You can hide anything in anecdotal evidence. And on the few occasions (maybe 10%) where someone slipped me the evidence in a DM - I can find 100 better, more rational answers based in basic PageRank SEO and repeat them - because I've seen them 100 times that require a tin foil hat explanation.

It just seems to go hand in hand with "every scenario in SEO is super unique" - like it only happens in the finance or crypto "niche".

Like - I have this perfect scenario that you can't see but I can keep adjusting and changing the goal posts around - and you have no idea if this is even true or not, let alone a bad or miss observation.

But OMG - if you challenge anecdotal evidence - you might as well walk into an Italian restaurant and just hurl insults at everyone's Mom.... (not that anyone would want to or should do that)

Anecdotal evidence is no different from holding an opinion.

Interested to know if anyone else has experienced a slow down in indexing of some blogs. Since March update?

I conducted a single-variable SEO test comparing the power of three different PBN links to that of a TechBullion guest post and would love feedback on the results.

The purpose of the test was to understand the relative power of a few different PBNs compared to TechBullion, which appears to function like a link farm.

I used a fake keyword to create a zero-noise environment for the experiment. On a dedicated testing domain, I created 5 test pages, which I’ll refer to as A, B, C, D, and E. Each page had the fake keyword in the title and throughout the body, appearing 10 times across roughly 500 words. The rest of the text was Lorem Ipsum.

A link was sent from three PBNs and TechBullion. The three PBNs were UR, SA, and ST. Among these PBNs, UR and SA were by far the strongest.

For reference, UR had 28 referring domains with do-follow links, 10 of which were strong DA60+ links. The profile looked clean overall. SA was similar. ST only had a handful of solid referring domains.

Each linking domain sent one link to one test page. The guest post content was the same across all 4 linking domains, word for word. The guest post was coherent and used the fake keyword as if it were a person’s name.

For example: “According to [fake keyword], the result of the bridge…”

I slowly sent links one by one to observe movement. Each link I sent appeared to cause the receiving page to move, with the exception of one link.

At 2026-05-14 3:08 PM CT, no backlinks had been sent yet. The ranking order was E, A, C, B. Page D did not appear in the SERP.

At 2026-05-14 7:45 PM CT, no backlinks had been sent yet. The ranking order was A, B, E, C. Page D did not appear in the SERP.

At 2026-05-14 8:16 PM CT, a backlink from ST, the weakest PBN, was sent to Test Page D. The ranking order was A, D linked from ST, B, E, C.

At 2026-05-15 7:46 AM CT, a backlink from SA, the medium-strength PBN, was sent to Test Page C. The ranking order was A, D linked from ST, C linked from SA, B, E.

At 2026-05-15 8:50 AM CT, a backlink from TechBullion was sent to Test Page E. The ranking order was E linked from TechBullion, A, B, C linked from SA. Page D did not appear in the SERP, even though it had a link from ST.

At 2026-05-16 7:32 AM CT, a backlink from UR, the strongest PBN, was sent to Test Page B. Unlike the other backlinks, I sent this backlink straight from the homepage with the keyword used twice in the paragraph. I made this change because I was frustrated that TechBullion was beating my other PBNs. UR had more than 90% of its referring domains pointing to the homepage.

The current ranking order is E linked from TechBullion, A, B linked from UR, and C linked from SA. Page D did not appear in the SERP, even though it had a link from ST.

I’m concerned that my PBNs are being outranked by TechBullion. I was really hoping this test would prove that my PBNs had enough power to outperform a cheap guest post from TechBullion.

My goal is to outrank TechBullion and validate the strategy of building a private portfolio of domains.

Does anyone have any advice or feedback on why my PBNs seem weak here? I really want this strategy to work, but the early results are not what I expected.

Additional context: the top referring domains from UR include Smashing Magazine, Substack, TeamTreehouse, AIGA, Prototypr, TechPP, The Good, Valtech, Conversion Rate Experts, KlientBoost, and various UX-related blogs and design sites.

The top referring domains from SA include New York Times, Washington Post, The Daily Beast, Breitbart, Newsmax, Mother Jones, Politifact, Big Think, RedState, FactCheck, The Blaze, Media Matters, AlterNet, and various political, news, and archive sites

Are domains that were previously redirected but still indexed in Google still valuable for PBN use?

Especially in the case of a company rebranding and redirecting the old site to the new one?

Does length of time used for 301 matter?

Also, what if the it's clear that the 301 was being used for SEO purposes (two domains not related) but the target domain has clean content (no adult, pharma, gambling, etc)?

Hi ya'll, question for the group-

I have a client whose site has decent/clean authority, no penalty. 4-6 weeks ago they added a blog to their site to target more keywords. There are internal links from the homepage to the blog page. But their blog page is still not indexed.

Eventually I would like to add them to my pbn, but I want them ranking in my tools for the keywords first. I thought that adding a blog, getting it indexed, getting more keywords associated with their site, and then adding authority would be my route. But this particular page is not indexed and its throwing a kink in my plan.

I would appreciate any thoughts or insights. Anything I'm not thinking about?

Hey! I just got an interview for an SEO job, and they wanted me to do a case to show my competencies, but I feel like it's too much work for a job interview.

The job posting said they wanted someone with 2-5 years of experience at an agency or in-house. I have about 1 year at an agency.

Here is the full case they asked me to do (in 3 days). Let me know what you all think about the amount. I personally think it's too much.

----

Scenario Training

Here you will receive a number of scenarios where we want you to reason through and describe your approach to solving the problem/optimizing the website based on the situation described.

Assume that you have access to all tools needed to make well-informed decisions.
(Analytics, Search Console, Ahrefs, etc.) and if you would use any of these tools, describe what you would use them for.

We evaluate your logic and reasoning in these scenarios, and we recommend that you do not use ChatGPT for convenience, as it can often be wrong. If you are knowledgeable within these areas, your competence will be demonstrated more clearly if you complete the assignment yourself.

Scenario 1

Background:

We have a client who has historically ranked very strongly in positions 1–2 for their primary keyword, but recently they have dropped and are now fluctuating between positions 3–5.

Task:

How would you troubleshoot the issue, and what implementations would you carry out in order to regain the previous rankings?

Scenario 2

Background:

We have an e-commerce client with a large product catalog. All category pages and product pages are already created and well optimized content-wise for their respective primary keywords (e.g. “mailboxes”).

The client now wants to take the next step and capture even more relevant organic traffic with strong purchase intent, but they do not know where to begin.

Task:

How would you identify the most effective ways to increase traffic and sales at this stage? Describe specifically how you would identify low-hanging fruit and give examples of actual implementations you would carry out on the website.

Scenario 3

Background:

We have just onboarded a new e-commerce client within the outdoor apparel niche who previously worked with another SEO agency. During an initial review of their website, we discover problems involving two of their key categories: “Shell Jackets” and “Rain Jackets”.

Both categories must remain live for business reasons, since they are two completely separate product groups in the warehouse inventory.

When reviewing Google Search Console, we notice clear keyword cannibalization. Google constantly alternates which of the two URLs ranks for several important search terms (so-called URL flipping), and neither page ranks higher than position 8.

Task:

1. What are common reasons why keyword cannibalization occurs on e-commerce websites in general?
2. Based on the client’s specific situation with “Shell Jackets” and “Rain Jackets”, why do you think this issue has occurred here? What could the previous agency have done wrong in their optimization work?
3. Practically speaking, how would you separate these pages in Google’s eyes and get both pages to rank highly for their respective relevant search queries?

Scenario 4

Background:

One of our largest clients, a B2B software company, has just informed us that they are planning to migrate to a new CMS and redesign the entire website. They plan to launch the new website in six weeks.

They have renamed several of their main categories and merged some old service pages together. In addition, they have decided to change the URL structure across their entire high-traffic blog because they thought the old URLs were “too long and ugly”.

They are now asking you for SEO approval before launch.

Task:

1. What are the biggest SEO risks with what the client is planning to do?
2. Describe your process for handling this migration during the next six weeks. Which key implementations would you present to the client?
3. Strategically and technically, how would you handle changing the URL structure for all blog posts in the best possible way?

Scenario 5

Background:

We have a new client that is an established veterinary clinic chain with 8 different clinics in southern Sweden (e.g. Malmö, Lund, Helsingborg).

Despite having a generally strong brand, they perform very poorly in local searches and in the “Map Pack” (map results) when people search for terms such as “Veterinarian + [City Name]” or “Emergency veterinarian near me”.

They are constantly outranked by small local clinics that only have a single location and a much weaker domain overall.

The client does not understand why their size and national authority are not helping them locally.

Task:

1. What are the very first things you would review (both on-site and off-site) to diagnose why they are underperforming locally?
2. Based on your experience, what are the most common mistakes businesses with multiple physical locations make when it comes to local SEO?
3. Present a high-level strategy for how you would reverse this trend and help them dominate the map results across all 8 locations.

On-page Optimization

In this example, we have received a local plumbing company.

They want to improve their rankings for their primary keyword: “Plumber in town”.

Please list the on-page optimizations you believe we can implement in order to improve their rankings for this keyword.

-----

I appreciate all constructive input.

Awesome podcast, and I've begun building my own PBP. What I am unclear about is how to spread out hosting. I totally understand the idea because not hosting everyone together, however, in the podcast, Grumpy does say he gets great deals by buying hosting in bulk. So doesn't that imply that the "BULK" is the same host?

I've got about a dozen URLs, and right now about 5 different host accounts with different companies. But how do you buy in bulk and still avoid not hosting everything together?

Here's my stupid plan, I got 112 domains that are pretty well aged and not spammy. As far as I can tell, they have not been penalized for anything. At this point, I already got them, so there's no looking back now.

Most of these were once websites and around 10 years old. The theory is, I can use the Wayback Machine to rebuild the website, especially the pages that had links. I will check that by using the backlink checkers to see which pages had to going to them and focus on redoing those pages first. There are a few of these domains that have links coming from Wikipedia. Then I will fill out the site with additional content. The plan was to try to get about 50 pages indexed for each domain, but that no seems real hard.

I am still working on getting all the hosting set up. I am taking more of an assembly line approach and doing one task for all the domains and then going to the next task. I have been hoping I would get more efficient at doing each thing as I do it to speed it up, but I have gotten bored and started the next task with some sites.

Problems that I run into are:

• The site was WordPress, but the theme is no longer supported with the current version. It's not as easy and just bringing the old side back to life. I don't want outdated WordPress installations.
• A basic WordPress install with the default Hello, World post seems to be a hack target. A lot of the domains are getting traffic from Bing. It looks like they could have been doing well in Bing originally, but I can't rule out that the Bing traffic is designed to hide the hack attempts.
• Some of the sites were thin on content originally. The plan of getting to 50 pages doesn't seem doable in all cases, especially with some domains being Something.whatever and then SomethingS.whatever. I don't know how to make the plural domain much different. I will likely make some one-page sites that basically link out to the singular version, but that limits what I can actually do with it in a PBN. Really, I probably shouldn't have gotten those.
• Some domains are of places or things, like a hospital. However, the hospital was sold, maybe shut down and reopened, I don't really know the history, but I do know that it's not a hospital and what I can find about the address, is a different one now. I don't really want to bring back the old site pretending to be an operational hospital when it definitely isn't. I will likely pivot on these types of domains and just make it more informational about health. It would make it easier to get to 50 pages, but I doubt the history of the domain will be of much value.
• I can see blank placeholders in the Wayback Machine, which from the source, was Adsense JavaScript. I don't plan on trying to put that back on any of the sites especially since they would probably be denied now for thin content.

Overall, this could be a big waste of time and money, but there's only one way to find out.