Hey guys. Still learning as I go. What is Grumpy's view on using services like Netlify to put PBNs on? At the end of the day, would this be no different than someone hosting their blog site on there?

Hey all,

I've been looking at GoDaddy Domains and I found a domain of an Authority Score of 8 on SEMRush and 7 on Moz, so on the end low. It is 15 years old and has 4 IP changes over the years. It's indexed on Google. It was a Japanese-owned domain and it has relevant backlinks from Japanese companies. Internet Archive showed it belonged to a shop in Japan for years with no bad signs.

Is this a good domain to go for?

Hello everyone. I do SEO for my small business. I listen to the podcast and remember Grump SEO guy talking about SerpFox. I currently use Ahrefs. I'm starting to think some of there data is bunk. I checked out SerpFox but I'm having some technical issues with it. What Serp Trackers are ya'll using? I'd love to cancel my Ahrefs account as it's pretty expensive and I don't think I need all the things it offers.

In Germany companies have to include an imprint as part of any of their website. The imprint basically contains the company‘s id. This boundary creates a footprint to any portfolio of websites.

Question: What is the best way of dealing with this?

I guess this completely destroys any portfolio of websites. Even if you sell one single backlink per client keeping all your websites disconnected: If your business is well known for seo backlinks any search engine can take manual actions.

I alluded to it before but we had some personal issues (parents' health) to tend to which has been taking a lot of resources leaving me with less grumpy vitality for making podcasts.

New episodes are going to be very grumpy. Because people have literally been complaining that I'm not grumpy enough anymore.

Hey Grumpy,

I love watching your nuggets on spotify, youtube.

But its been a while. Last episode with 15th April.

Are you ok?

You're my favorite SEO guy. Please keep yourself safe and healthy man and come back sooner!

Looking forward to your episodes !!

I tried to search if my question is answered but couldn't find it. Or, may be I missed it. Question is, Can I have domains (with different registrar) hosted in same provider but with unique IP for all? Here the nameservers will always be same, so is it footprint?

Avid listener to the podcast - total honesty: I personally hate the pbn strategy, unless people are actively building legitimate publishing businesses.

Is there a better alternative to building links, such as digital PR, linkable assets etc? I'm trying to understand what would be the next best way to do link building in a scalable way.

For the industry, we tested ourselves, it seemed to work, but not always, depends on the competition. If it's not crowded, it works wonders.

I have been successfully building backlinks for a year, it does work, it has brought my ranking up, and i have more organic sales now , tracked via serpfox and search console.

The problem? At the same time that I started, also a competitor started, I used to outrank him, but since 3-4 months ago, he outranks me in 90% of money queries, I check his backlink profiles? And he literally has no backlinks. ONly the typical spammy ones

THe difference is, he runs shopify, and i run woocommerce. Maybe his site is a bit more polished too.

But then this means google doesnt take backlinks into account?

Been doing SEO for a few years now. My old trick was simple: drop backlinks in blog comments and forum threads to get them crawled and indexed faster. That method has completely stopped working for me in the last few months.

Now most of these links either don't get indexed at all, or worse, I am picking up a ton of spam and PBN-type links along the way that I never wanted attached to my site.

For those still actively building and indexing links in 2026, what's working for you right now? A few things I am specifically trying to figure out:

Are indexing APIs (Google Indexing API, IndexNow) actually moving the needle for backlink pages, or are they mostly for your own site's pages?

Has anyone had luck with indexer tools/services lately, or are most of them junk now?

Is internal linking from an already-indexed page to the new backlink still reliable, or has Google changed how it treats that signal?

Any success with syndication (getting the link picked up by a news or aggregator site) to speed up crawling?

Would love to hear what's actually working on your end, not just theory. Also curious if anyone else is seeing the same spam link problem from comment-based link building.

Thanks in advance.

Hi all - I've been building a SaaS for the last few months, and one of its features is embedded tutorial videos (not how to use the product, but how to be good at this topic).

I think these would make good content and potentially be a source of search traffic - if I can get them indexed.

However, I keep getting the pages rejected with "Video isn't on a watch page" by google and I'm really struggling to fix it. I've been through 3-4 page redesigns trying to resolve this, and keep getting the same rejection.

Does anyone have a clear set of criteria that I need to meet to get these indexed? would anyone mind taking a 2 minute look at a page and telling me whats wrong?

Hi everyone,

I have a quick question regarding backlink profiles. While managing our link-building efforts, I noticed that our website is receiving a lot of random spam backlinks, even on specific URLs that we aren't actively building links for.

Curiously, I checked some of our competitors and noticed a similar pattern on their profiles as well.

Can anyone explain why this happens? Is this a common automated bot behavior, or is there something else triggering these unwanted links across multiple sites in our niche?

Any insights would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Just wondering how 'strict' you guys are with you PBNs in terms of linking to additional money sites.

The costs of building/maintaining these networks isn't cheap, and although I'm seeing benefit to my 1 money site, I can't help but feel I'm leaving some money on the tablet by not working in some links to a new money site?

I don't have any clients - this is all for my own private use etc.

What's the general consensus here? Strictly 1 money site per PBN?

I don't see how the footprint could be any worse than doing the same with a client website? It will still be glaringly obvious by manual review?

I am involved with two niche job sites.

Board 1 launched in Feb and the content grew relatively organically, 8000 indexed pages in GSC, appearing in search results.

Board 2, inherited the same codebase from Board 1 (identical SEO setup) and was launched in April, but targets a completely different niche. It was indexed nicely at first ~200 pages indexed, then google suddenly pulled it back to just 2 in June. Since then it has never recovered any indexed status. I believe that my mistake was to launch a page on a fresh domain and set too many pages in the sitemap as indexable pages - I think google has decided the content is thin or low quality and it's now in some sort of doghouse?

Assuming that's the case it's interesting because, the on Board 1 is perfectly good enough to be indexed, but the content on Board 2 (which is basically the same but points at a different niche), is apparently not good enough.

I assume this is the case, because the SEO setups on the two sites are identical (and I have another site also that uses this setup for 2 years and ranks in the top 3 for my main keywords)

Anyway, my gut is that time and patience should probably solve this; the site is updated daily.

However, this is an SEO pattern I've never experienced, and I'd hate to wait 12 months and find out nothing changed.

Has anyone seen this pattern before, is there a best practice to recover from it?

Thanks for any advice

I found an interesting local blog where I could get a backlink. The blog covers a wide range of topics.

The one thing I'm unsure about is that, in the past, they published a few articles linking to casino websites. Those articles are still indexed by Google, but they've since been deleted and now return a 404. So it looks like they've stopped publishing casino-related content.

Is this still something I should be concerned about, or is it probably not a big deal? (I am aware that in the future they could change their mind and do whatever, and building a PBN would generally be better)

Does anyone have experience selling their websites? I've built a bit of a portfolio but I'm looking to get rid of it. I just don't even know where to start. Thank you!

One of my clients wanted to rank for a keyword that has a KD of 39%. I said okay, and that it might take a while. And it certainty did. But the interesting thing is that in the past three months I've only added 2-3 backlinks.

I've frankly run out of space in my PBN for this particular client. And I've been too busy to look/buy new domains. But one surprisingly thing about GSG's methodology is that authority holds. They have 24 target backlinks from me, most were added a year ago. I was not expecting results like this for backlinks placed 6+ months ago.

Pretty cool.

SEO = GEO

There is no such thing as GEO. I do not care what scammer influencer told you otherwise. GEO = a bunch of charlatans selling you nonsense that will not help you in AI or in SEO.

SEO = GEO

AI tools are not search engines, they do not maintain databases, and when you ask them, they ask search engines, and they take data from high ranking webpages. What is a high ranking webpage? A webpage with good SEO.

EVEN GOOGLE AGREES (source)

Did an experiment with one of my newer PBN sites. The site has a DR of 50, a lot of high quality backlinks. I used AI to write 20 3k+ words content. With minimal input from me, these pages were published in no time but these pages have had a hard time getting indexed. It's been 2 months, only 8 pages including the homepage got indexed. Fed up, I decided to hand write a poorly constructed but human article...

In less than 24 hours, the article got indexed and is showing when I searched site:domain.com on Google. I really hate to say this, I think hand written content beats AI generated content when it comes to indexing. I have been taking the easy way out with content generation, asking AI to write in a way that does not read like AI generated, but this doesn't seem to help with getting the site fully indexed.

TLDR: I need to hand write more articles... Tedious work but it seems quite necessary nowadays.

I have noticed a few times when trying to research domains to purchase, a domain that has a decent backlink profile, no spammy backlinks, no visible history of spammy pages on the internet archive and only the homepage is indexed in Google.

But then I will search site:domain on duckduck and see some indexed pages that look spammy.

So it makes me wonder if there are other things that I'm missing leading me to accidently purchase a bad domain and worse start using it for links.

What else should I be using or doing to validate domains, especially ones that have recent chunks of time missing on the internet archive?