As the third pillar of SEO, getting backlinks is traditionally challenging for most online marketers. How do you get backlinks? Especially in a country like The Netherlands? Sounds like hard work. So when an ad pops up in your stream promising really cheap AI backlinks… what”s the catch?
Pepe the frog. Promising something that’s 100 times cheaper? Something smells fishy here. Let’s deconstruct.
What does a SEO agency actually do
The company behind the ad promises: “Provide us your website and desired keywords – unleash up to 100,000 SEO backlinks monthly to supercharge your organic reach.” This sounds so simple, makes you wonder how little a SEO agency actually does? Well, not quite. This is what a SEO agency does (or should do):
- Keyword research: Just going for the juicest keywords doesn’t work: you need to research what keywords will work for you. Typically, you want to go for relevant keywords that match the customer journey with high volume and low competition.
- Competitor analysis: How is your competition ranking for those keywords? Where are there content gaps you can exploit? Which keywords will be to hard to compete on? You may think you’re doing well, but if you don’t know how the market is developing, you are working with a black box.
- SEO strategy: Do you go for easy keywords and build up a content pillar? Will your landingpages get all the SEO traffic? How does your SEO strategy tie in with your overall digital marketing strategy?
- On site SEO: Pages that Google doesn’t see or like (crawled but not indexed) will never benefit from any links. The technical side of your website in terms of speed and UX will help determine your ranking positions.
- Linkbuilding: Will you build quality leads with sponsored content? Or first build your online presence and link profile with directory links? How will you maintain the expected ratio of dofollow and nofollow?
See how many questions you will have to address before you can even consider buying “thousands of high quality backlinks”? To compare a SEO agency with AI backlinks, let’s have a look at how those are actually generated.
AI backlinks are automated and low quality
I don’t know how much money you need to earn every day to make a decent living, but $ 19,99 isn’t much in Europe let alone in the Netherlands. It covers your lunch and coffee. So how much time will there be available for building those thousands of high quality backlinks? Little. And how high will the quality be without any attention and a focus on volume? also little. This is how it works:
- These links are placed on their own websites in a PBN. As you will know yourself, maintaining a website to the level your customers expect, takes serious effort (Hi!). Their sites are not to serve real customers, but to fool Google. They use a PBN for this: a private blog network. This is a cluster of websites that are centrally managed with various tools to make it look these are legit businesses.
- Google does not like these links. Thousands of links placed on sites that appear to be legit? Google calls this manipulation and employs various techniques to hunt down PBN’s: hosting, site design, themes, site ownership, duplicate content, backlink profile, images and video, but also time of posting and profiles.
- Great way to get penalised! What happens when Google finds a PBN? Torch those sites and every site that it was linking to. Google hates automated linkbuilding like AI backlinks.
….But they promised high quality! High Authority!
High quality is a concept that varies per person. One might say, oh that’s a site with a high domain authority or trust flow! Another might say, the site looks really good. If you are not familiar with linkbuilding, then think again before you spend $ 20 or $ 29.99 on something that can actually get your site penalised.
Here are the indicators I look at when building Dutch backlinks:
- Relevance: Is the website relevant to my business?
- Traffic: Does Ahrefs spots any traffic? And is this also relevant traffic?
- Spam score: Does MOZ see spam in the backlink profile of the site? Or does Semrush see any toxicity?
- Backlink profile: Did this site get thousands of backlinks overnight? How is the ratio between do-follow and nofollow links? Are the anchors not only keywords?
- DA / DR / TF build up: How did the DA/DR/TF score develop over time? Gradually or with a big bang?
Often, a site with a high DA is called high quality while you can pimp this SEO metric with a simple Fiverr gig of $ 5. If you are a serious website owner, don’t degrade your online presence with AI backlinks.
AI Backlinks: this is how you figure it out
Follow these best practices to not burn yourself with backlinking, and you’ll see AI backlinks are just not for you:
- Trustpilot. Google reviews. Facebook reviews. Find reviews and read them to make sure these are credible. In the Netherlands, fake reviews are forbidden by law, just as fake discounts. The company that placed this ad let me to a post on blackhatworld.com stating they are a scam. On this forum, a user pointed out that a wild claim should be backed, like a low score on Trustpilot (which the company had)
- If it’s too good, it’s probably not true. High quality and cheap does not compute. You will be sure your money is gone, but how will you be sure to get high quality? For $ 20 you can only get a partnerlink or two.
- Think ahead. So you still want to try AI backlinks. Great. Before you press buy, consider how you will you proceed when these backlinks will actually result in a Google penalty. How will you undo the penalty? How will you figure out which links to add to your disavow list? If you have no clue, just don’t.
AI backlinks? Google says no.
All images are created by ChatGPT.
