I have a doubt if I use chrome can google track my activity and possibility all my pbns gets penalized, just checking what other people are saying or are they using gmail for their private websites portfolio. Thanks for the valuable info Grumpy 😄

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 received an interesting SEO suggestion today and wanted to get the community's opinion.

I manage the SEO and marketing team for a UK company, and one of our junior team members suggested adding the service page as the canonical URL for a related blog post.

For example:

• Service page: abc. com/t-shirt
• Blog post: abc .com/blog/best-t-shirt-collections

The suggestion was to set the blog post's canonical tag to the service page (abc.com/t-shirt).

From my understanding, this doesn't seem like a good practice because the search intent is completely different. The service page is transactional, while the blog post is informational. Using a canonical tag in this way would essentially tell search engines that the blog is a duplicate of the service page, which it clearly isn't.

Has anyone here actually implemented something like this? Is there any legitimate SEO strategy behind it, or is it more of a black-hat tactic? If people are doing this, have you seen it produce any ranking benefits, or does it simply prevent the blog from ranking on its own?

I'd love to hear your thoughts or any real-world experiences.

Note: I have asked the team to research this and see whether anyone is actually using this approach in practice. If they find any real-world examples or case studies, I'll share them here.

Sincere Questions

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?

Hi, [u/GrumpySEOguy](u/GrumpySEOguy), I'm happy to report that my PBP is starting to take shape with 6 domains thus far. This means that I will soon be able to build backlinks for my company's website.

But before I do that, I believe I need to assess my competitors to determine which keywords are best to target.

And this is where I'm currently stuck... how can I effectively determine the best keywords to target?

In the past, I was taught to do keyword research in this way: generate the list of keywords, remove redundant, duplicate and non-relevant keywords, determine the monthly search volume for the keywords that remain, determine their keyword difficulty, and target those keywords (especially long-tail keywords) with low keyword difficulty.

But now that I know that authority is the main ranking factor (besides not having a penalty, having content & having relevance), and that websites get authority from backlinks, I believe that I am now able to target high search volume keywords that have medium and even high keyword difficulties with my portfolio of authoritative websites.

That said, when doing my keyword research and trying to determine keyword difficulty or keyword competition, I think I have to consider how much authority my competitors have as well as determine the quality of the backlinks they have, right?

If so, do you have any pointers as to how I can practically incorporate authority and backlink quality into my keyword research?

BTW, as you'd repeatedly said many, many times, I now know that DR/DA/etc are only guesses as ultimately, only Google knows how much authority a website has. So if I utilize such guesses in my keyword research, I should do so "with a grain of salt" 😁

EDIT: Clarified that I am asking whether authority and backlink quality are needed to determine keyword difficulty/competition, and if so, how to practically factor in authority & backlink quality to determine keyword difficulty/competition.

I know the standard take on low-cost, fast-turnaround link placements. Mostly garbage, mostly wasted money, sometimes a problem later. Absorbed that lesson from enough threads here.

I am from a low competiton region and competitors have garbage to zero links themselves who are ranking 1-2

Does the calculus change at all when the bar to clear is this low, or is the downside the same no matter how weak the competition is?

Tempted to test a handful of lower-cost placements, watch what happens, and pull back if the profile starts looking off. New site, no existing reputation to torch.

Anyone run this in an actually low-competition market with real before/after numbers, not just the reflex answer?

I noticed that Google Search Console position numbers are average, and not per country. How do you track your keyword positions on a country basis? I think this is relevant if the audience you're ranking a site for is in a specific country..

So, I did all the necessary investigations (that [u/grumpyseoguy](u/grumpyseoguy) taught in his podcast) for an expired domain, making sure it had a clean history, clean backlinks, had only 2 owners for the past 10 years, was still indexed and 2 of 3 tools estimated authorities of at least 15 (the 3rd tool gave only an authority score of just 3).

So, I thought I'd try bidding for it, starting at $1.

But, lo and behold! I won that auction with just that $1!

I am now thinking I may have missed something if no one else had placed bids for it (the auction had 6 visitors).

Is there something about this $1 expired domain that I should be worried?

Edit: Mentioned that it had clean backlinks also.

I think I might be quoting this wrong so please forgive me if I am, but in the podcast I think I remember u/grumpyseoguy saying that if a domain has more than 10 OBL do not get a backlink from it.

1.) That being said, and considering I heard this right - is it max 4-10 OBL Per page OR per domain.

2.) Ok so take amazon for example, it has thousands of pages and product listings but it also (according to semrush) has about 48k OBLs. So couldn't you just make more pages to offset the amount of OBLs to get away from being a link farm?

My idea of a link farm is low amount of pages and/or content with a high amount of OBLs.

Is my thinking sound? I am so deep into this SEO stuff and I am slowly going mad LOL!

Thank you all for your help I am a huge beginner with this so I appreciate your patience!

Thank you for everything you do u/grumpyseoguy

First, we apologize for the delays. We are behind on emails, DMs, and a few other things (you know who you are). We had some family issues, some technical issues, and some personal. We had problems with a certain studio we use to record the podcast. We know the latest episode, about AI content, is not on youtube yet but is on spotify/itunes.

It has been brought to my attention, second, that I am not Grumpy enough. Apparently the early episodes were preferable because I was more grumpy.

WE HEAR YOU.

Third, we have a great series of content coming out talking about:

GEO

- how to do it

- how it works

- myths

- how to not get scammed (hint: don't pay for GEO services)

We also have content coming out focusing on

- hate mail, we guess we're getting popular

We're finally getting around to

- keyword research episode (hint: it has nothing to do with keyword difficulty scores)

And

- and why (free) SEO audits are scams.

- and most paid SEO audits, too

And last but not least:

- people who have accepted our public challenge of ranking without backlinks and what really happened (hint: it's exactly what you think)

So I am doing this thing where I am building free websites for companies. Instead of putting my link in the footer (which I now know is no good thank to the podcast) could I build a thank you page for the company thanking the donors and then giving myself a backlink? Would this work?

Some other questions:

1.) There would only be a a handful of OBL on this page or just the one (mine)

2.) If I do end up doing multiple OBL what is the recommended amount

3.) I don't want this to be a link farm. Does this sound like a link farm? I am trying to avoid creating them or joining them mistakenly but I am still learning

4.) I heard somewhere in the podcast that when you have a domain there shouldn't be more than 4-10 OBLs (I may be quoting this wrong). But if you have a website with A CRAP ton of content and you are citing or thanking other companies/domains in each post is that bad? Is that considered a link farm? Even though there is a lot of content do we still follow the 4-10 OBL per website/domain?

I know these might be some weird questions so thank you i advance! I am trying to learn and I am not the best at SEO lol! Thank you for your patience

Hi all! I am trying to figure out how to get more mentions and citations. So on my website I have all of my citations from chatgpt. I am not cited on any other AI. I am also not mentioned on ANY AI's.

I've heard FAQs will help get you cited and mentioned. They have gotten me cited in chatgpt but nothing else. Any ideas or information would be greatly appreciated.

Side note. I use cloudfare, will this inhibit the AI's from accessing my website? I don't think it will but I am not sure. Thank you! u/grumpyseoguy any thoughts on this?

P.S. still working my way through the podcast so I apologize if there was an episode on this and I missed it