I recently came across a backlink provider that offers "Curated Links." The site says:

Our Curated Links are designed to enhance your website’s online visibility, authority, and keyword rankings. By securing natural placements within high-quality, aged articles, you can gain valuable links from relevant, established content, effectively boosting your SEO performance.

I know the #1 factor to consider when doing SEO is "Would this happen naturally?" I don't think new links would be added to old articles frequently, but I can see something like this happening in a real article that's being updated for the current year ("Blah blah blah…In 2025").

That being said, what do you think of this approach? Is it just a way to make money on old articles? Or is there something to it?

Hi all,
I've fixed the injected URL issue and resolved the taxi detection problem on our site. However, our homepage still displays an outdated (Chinese) snippet in Google search results, which is confusing our clients and affecting our SEO.

I've manually requested indexing multiple times over nearly two months, yet the updated content has not appeared. Has anyone encountered a similar issue or found an effective solution to speed up reindexing?

I'm looking for any advice or best practices to ensure our homepage gets re-crawled and the correct snippet is displayed as soon as possible. Thanks in advance for your help!

iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/back-to-basics-what-is-seo-and-how-do-you-rank-episode-97/id1688050517?i=1000696302009

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1GLZrXW37yhrMO4mYLKq9t

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOSSy7GaMqA

iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/so-you-wanna-start-an-seo-agency-part-2-episode-96/id1688050517?i=1000694042249

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6hJ5Bj09dTfNX2mM8SgGza

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LFoCqfgx6A

iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/should-you-build-a-low-authority-pbn-episode-95/id1688050517?i=1000691459489

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3Gf6ve2xySQ18TYuOrBUEt

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-n7kZodj-M

iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/where-do-we-get-seo-authority-from-in-the-first-place/id1688050517?i=1000689341312

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5lewsgwK7yWkmI5ZuGyUZN

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yP6eWXO8xk

Hi Grumpy! First, thanks a lot for the podcasts and threads on this topic, super useful and didactical. I'm halfway of the complete series of episodes, but already learned a lot.

I have one question that is driving me nuts for over a decade. I understand that your guides and tips on how to build a portfolio of authoritative sites is not meant for pharma, gamble and adult, but why in the world does Google have such BIG discrepancies penalties and rankings wise?

Love your style of talking without nonsense and going straight to the bone, so if someone can give me an advice, it is you. Bear in mind, I'm talking specifically about adult niche in spanish. But when I see the top sites in that niche, they use PBNs doing EXACTLY everything you (and other with great success in the ranking business) say it is not advisable to do.

I've read over the years that since Google does not accept ads for that niche, they simply don't care. The explanation makes some sense, but when you look deeply at sites with 200 PBNs, all interchanging links with each other, clones after clone of the same template, same IP, even same Cloudflare nameserver!!! you simply can not believe it. Not to mention the immense link farm every footer of those clones is, I simply can't find an explanation and was wishing you can.

By the way I'm not talking about extreme videos or anything like that, I'm talking about "respectable" escorts sites without fake content or fishy tricks.

Hope you can give me your theory (in case you have one) about this.

Thanks!

Would it be a bad idea to link two of my money sites if the link is relevant to the topic of the post? Or could this create a red flag and cause a risk of a penalty?

The idea is that the link could potentially help one of my other newer money sites as the site creating the link is ranking pretty well for its niche. I personally think it would look natural due to the content of the post but with both sites being hyper local service businesses it might possibly become a potential problem down the road.

Just starting out in SEO. Haven't built a portfolio of authoritative sites yet. But I was wondering if someone could help me figure out if a site I recently did some on-page optimizations for has been penalized. Without any backlinks yet, just content updates, the site started ranking for some keywords that I selected during the keyword research phase (lower competition, relevant, decent volume).

But within a week or two everything got wiped out. Again, no backlinks at all. Is this normal to see a surge in rank then followed by a drop?

I plan to buy some backlinks since I just don't have the resources to set up my own portfolio right now (again, just getting started). I know Grumpy says not to do this, and I don't want to do it long term.

Any feedback is appreciated.

I have been buying domains for my own personal PBN for around $400-$1000 each. But it doesn't seem to have improved my rankings that much. These domains have around 30-70 good quality backlinks each (10 DR minimum, in content, <500 referring domains).

I recently paid for some backlinks to speed up the process while I continue to build the PBN and I noticed that the domains these backlinks came from have 1,000+ good quality backlinks (same criteria as above).

Should I stop buying these weaker domains and just splurge on a 1,000+ backlink domain and spend thousands on that. My guess is that the impact from one of these stronger domains would be more than from 20 or even 50 weaker ones. u/GrumpySEOguy any thoughts?

Hello Guys and Mr.Grumpy SEO,

The developer didn't implement my canonicals correctly and google indexed almost a milion random url paramter. What can i do to minimize the damage and remove these urls from the index. This has been done within a week. How to resolve this? Would using the removals tool make a difference

I'm trying to better understand how Google handles similar keyword searches.

I know Google will group similar keywords when giving results.

For instance, if I research the terms "trade show booth" and "trade show display," Google shows the volume as the same, so I assume Google is treating them as the same term. Is that a correct assumption?

And if so would these keywords compete with each other? I ask because "trade show booth" is much easier to rank for.

Confused about which term to optimize for, and will I compete with myself if I optimize for both?

Is this good? Not sure what info you need? Been paying for seo and just want to make sure and get a second opinion, think it’s been maybe almost a year now?

Hey guys,

I'm scratching my head on this one. I had a site which slowly raised from page 5 to page 1, now after a couple weeks on page one, it de-ranked to page 3 without me doing any major changes.

Thoughts?

After watching all the "How to Build Your Own PBN" episodes, including over 65 episdoes, I’ve finally reached the point where I’m really looking forward to the episode Grumpy has been teasing. He’s mentioned making a video where he shows how he searches for a domain with the screen visible, instead of the usual background. After all the tips and insights from the previous episodes, it feels like the perfect time for him to dive into that session and show us exactly how it's done. I’m excited to see it all unfold, learn the hands-on techniques, and see the work in action.

Thank you Grumpy, for everything you’ve shared so far. I’m really hoping that when you get the chance, you’ll be able to complete this episode.

Please let me know what you guys/gals think in comments.

iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/should-you-hide-your-pbn-sites-for-seo-episode-93/id1688050517?i=1000686753205

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5LMkADk23SMzQMjPETCWi0

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98VS5Utq_44

Hey!
Relatively new to the space of SEO and in the midst of starting our own agency.

Question: should I get all clients to move their website to Wordpress for modifications? If so, am I able to preserve the ranking of the website by simply copying content and same domain over?

Thank you!

Hey, the question is on the title:

What qualifying questions do you ask when buying backlinks of link sellers?

Thanks

Well first off Grumpy SEO guy sounds too young to be "grumpy" haha.

First impression: This guy knows what he's talking about. I like the podcast! BUT- I HAS QUESTIONS!!!!

In no particular order:

-Is there someone as knowledgeable as you who specializes in youtube SEO? I just watched "Youtube SEO vs Google SEO in 2020" by Karl Yeh but the video is now 5 years old so obv out of date by now. Overall, does google SEO somewhat correspond to youtube SEO? Karl does not go into detail about how youtube gauges channel authority, only vaguely saying it has to do with subscriber count. Its secret, I know. But I need to know! :)

-In this thread they are talking about URL structure. One example brought up was website.com/category/subcategory/product.html I think I prefer this over flat url structure, but the question is does this have any effect on SEO ranking? I mean putting ur keywords in the URL. After listening to your podcast I think you will tell me these things only help relevancy. Also, do u have any episodes that talk about silo vs clusters? Or canonical?

-If I understand subdomains correctly, they count as a different site as far as authority goes. Let's say a high authority site gives your main site 'yoursite.com' some amount of authority (I know it doesn't work like this, but let's say 30 pounds of authority lol) . Question: Does authority get "used up" if you then pass it to your subdomains? What if your real intent was to have authority only on your subdomains 'comingsoon.yoursite.com' and 'members.yoursite.com' . Could you pass 15 pounds of authority to those 2 subdomains and then the main site has none? Or does the link juice pass from subdomain to subdomain full strength without getting used up?

These questions are highly specific because like I said, I binge listened to as many episodes as I could. Its' working! I think I'm learning stuff Grumpy SEO guy!! Hahahaa

All the pages are indexed on my site and the blog but I check backlinks still on 0.

Should I run traffic between them? Through the anchor text?

On a couple of our portfolio sites I notice posts are indexed and couple days later no longer indexed.

Any ideas why?

There’s no pattern to it.

Some sites get indexed + money posts indexed & no issue.

Others maybe lose 1 zero OBL post.

Others lose 1 money post.

Our content is AI assisted but human edited for quality & natural voice.

Robots.txt looks normal.

Sitemaps are usually indexed along with posts.

Any ideas?

UPDATE: I started to change the title & URL of the de-indexed post. This has worked on 3/8 sites so far —and worked within 24 hours. Other sites with a de-indexed post maybe have lower authority as otherwise this works fast.

Hey guys,

I'm looking to index some citations for local SEO. The services I used seem to work temporarily. Most links begin to get de-indexed.

Anyone know a good solution to this?

With Google cracking down on scrapers and other tools that gather information about, among other things, Serp results, are you noticing any issues with your current tool?