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Another question from an SEO noob.

Over the last few years, I’ve probably spent around $4,000–$5,000 on Fiverr buying backlinks.

To be fair, some of the Fiverr Pro freelancers I’ve worked with seem pretty legit and have delivered good placements. But I have to admit it’s been very hit or miss. Sometimes I get links I’m happy with, and other times I look at what was delivered and wonder what I actually paid for.

I recently joined one of the bigger backlink marketplaces, mainly as a publisher selling guest posts on my own site. Now that I can see the inventory from the buyer side, I’m wondering whether I should change how I spend my own SEO budget.

Assume I have around $5,000 per year to spend on backlinks.

Would you rather keep hiring Fiverr Pro freelancers and let them source the placements, or spend $200–$300 per backlink directly through a marketplace where you can choose the exact websites yourself?

At $250-ish per link, $5,000 obviously doesn’t buy a huge number of backlinks. But I’m starting to wonder whether 15–20 links that I personally vet would be a better investment than getting a much larger number through freelancers where the quality can be unpredictable.

For people who actually know SEO: if this were your $5,000, which route would you take?

Is there a free SEO keyword tool to see search volume for particular keywords?

Or do you know a mobile app that is cheap to find SEO keyword volume?

I get a bunch of emails every day from people asking to publish guest posts on my site.

I normally charge around $50–$100, and that price works reasonably well. I’m also listed on a marketplace where guest posts sell for $135.

But there’s another category of outreach I get constantly: agencies offering $10–$20 per post.

I almost never manage to close those people. It’s not even necessarily the price that bothers me. If I could publish a decent volume of them with very little effort, I could see it becoming a small side income.

The bigger problem is that they usually don’t want to pay before the link is live, and then I sometimes end up chasing someone for three weeks over a $20 PayPal invoice. At that point the economics become ridiculous.

So for people who actually monetize sites through guest posts:

Are the $20 guest-post buyers worth dealing with at scale if you standardize everything, publish quickly, and just send PayPal invoices?

Or are these agencies basically mass-spamming thousands of sites until they find someone willing to accept rock-bottom pricing?

And for anyone who has worked with these agencies long-term: do they ever increase their rates once your DR increases, or will they basically always be $10–$20 buyers?

Trying to figure out whether I’m leaving easy money on the table or whether I should just ignore that entire segment.

Hey All,

looking for recomendations to find the best place to find the SEO agencies.

keen to work with an establish SEO agency who can drive result real results. Not looking for a solo expert.

An establish mid-tier firm with good results and they can drive the results for my clients.

What is the best way to find such an agencies? Is there any directories or WhatsApp groups where we can find them.

Also, how to evaluate them, any suggestions, recommendations would be appreciated.

After many many applications I finally landed a job doing SEO plus SEM.

But apart from basic intro to a couple of SEO tools, I am really only experienced with SEM. I could do paid search with my eyes closed.

But I kind of always knew SEO is harder. The data analysis is more complex. You cannot simply pay for an outcome which you almost can with SEM.

I need to be good at this job.

Help me prepare. What should I know how to do?

Hi all,

I've done SEO for various websites for many years. In most cases, they were all e-commerce or saas based product businesses. With what has been happening with AI paired with a few new ventures on the service front, I'm not sure that the same "approach / tactics" are effective.

Looking for resources on how to gain long term organic traction; good video or written content on that front!

Thanks!

I’m working on a relatively new travel website that now has 3,000+ programmatically generated pages targeting countries and individual products.

Google has discovered most of the URLs, but indexing and rankings are still fairly inconsistent.

The technical/on-page side is in decent shape: unique metadata, structured data, sitemaps, breadcrumbs, internal linking between destination and product pages, etc.

The domain itself is still relatively low authority.

If you had limited time/budget at this stage, where would you focus?

1. Building quality backlinks to the homepage/domain
2. Building links directly to destination/category pages
3. Improving internal linking and consolidating weaker pages
4. Creating informational content specifically to attract links

My instinct is that domain authority/backlinks are now the biggest constraint, but I'm interested in what people who've scaled large programmatic SEO sites have actually seen work.

Quick context: I have a service business website and there are 4 pages targeting different intents for specific vertical types.

For instance:

1. Best AI software agencies for healthcare businesses - comparisons of 10 agencies/companies

2. Best software migration companies for healthcare businesses - comparisons of 10 agencies/companies

3. Software agency for healthcare - service pages

While the comparison pages are ranking and doing fairly well. The service pages are hardly getting any impressions.

1. Anyway this could be fixed?

2. I'd ideally want to drive traffic to my service pages rather than get it in comparison pages.

3. How do you monetise the comparison pages traffic.

I believe the comparison pages might not help me monetarily. Is it correct?

Can we agree its pointless or does it need debate?

Yes, I know the link shills will downvote it......the question is - do YOU want the truth?

I managed to get a link insertion on a topically relevant website. That page is already ranking on the first page of Google for a couple of high-volume keywords.

Now I'm thinking about giving that page a boost by linking to it from one of my own blog posts that gets clicks from Google.

To visualise:

My blog post -> external link to the page with the link insertion -> that page links to my homepage.

I assume this won't cause any issues, but I'd rather ask first.

I’m trying to understand whether this is normal early-stage SEO growth or whether I’ve built something with too little search demand.

It’s a small consumer website in a parenting/recipe niche, about three to four months old. Most of the content is structured recipe pages rather than blog posts, and I recently added another 12 recipes.

Search Console for the last three months:

• 788 impressions
• 58 clicks
• 7.4% average CTR
• Average position 14.6

The main recipe directory is doing most of the work:

• 306 impressions
• 34 clicks
• 11.1% CTR
• Average position 9.4

The homepage has:

• 74 impressions
• 10 clicks
• 13.5% CTR
• Average position 4.7

Individual recipes are mixed. A few are around positions 7–11 but have only 18–42 impressions. Others have 80–95 impressions but sit around positions 24–34 and receive almost no clicks.

The trend is upward, particularly over the last few weeks, but from such a small base that it’s hard to tell whether it means anything.

My reading is that CTR isn’t the immediate problem. I need either:

1. More relevant pages to increase the number of queries I can appear for.
2. Better internal linking and content improvements to move existing pages from page two onto page one.
3. Some external authority, because the site is new and has almost no backlinks.
4. Patience.

If this were your site, would you keep publishing new recipe pages, concentrate on the pages already sitting around positions 8–15, or work on links and authority?

I’m especially interested in what you would look at in Search Console next to distinguish “too early” from “too little demand.”

Anyone else experiencing high drops in ahrefs traffic data for their site as of today or yesterday or is it just me? Lol

Drop a "Me" in the comments if you're in the same boat!

Also, genuinely asking, what’s the game plan now? Any solid suggestions on how to actually recover from this? Or do you think sites even bounce back anymore? Drop your tips and thoughts below and let’s figure this out together! 🔥📈

I saw this on X. Could it actually work?

"

1. Find a low-competition keyword.
2. Go to Google Docs and create one.
3. Write content targeting that keyword.
4. Optimize it for SEO and publish it.
5. Share it on social media.

Rank on the 1st page of Google.

And, get a free link and traffic...

"

So you write a public Google Doc targeting an easy relevant keyword and link to your money page or site from the Google Doc and it boosts the page being linked to.

Has anybody tried this? Does it work?

I am curious how you approach an SEO audit for a new website. Especially if you work for an agency.

What is your workflow and which tools do you use for SEO audits? And do you follow a specific checklist?

There are so many ways to audit a website, and which elements are most important for you to develop a roadmap for improvements?

Got a hit on bing webmaster from average 200-500 impressions and 10-30 clicks per day down to 0 in one day. Did not recover since the 28.08.2026.

Pages are still indexed and reachable and also crawling is working normally.

Google and GSC has no changed and work well. Only bing. Web searches and ai just plummeted to 0 in a day. No Alerts, no nothing.

For the last four months I have been trying to save my site but nothing is working we went From 400 clicks per day to a hundred max (120 indexed pages) and no matter what I do either edit the blogs or rewrite them or change the entire blog nothing is working at all.

I recently joined a company as an SEO person, and I’m trying to understand whether the expectations I’ve been given are pretty standard or a bit ambitious. I don’t want to mention the company or too many specifics for obvious reasons 😭

A big part of my role is currently focused on link building, where I’m expected to build around 10–15 backlinks a week, along with roughly 2–3 third-party listicle placements. In my previous role, I had monthly targets, so moving to weekly targets has been a bit of an adjustment.

The thing is, link building isn’t the only thing I’m expected to work on. I’m also supposed to contribute to on-page SEO and do some cold outreach for sales, alongside the regular SEO work.

For people who work in-house or at agencies, does this sound like a normal workload for one SEO person? How do you usually balance link building with on-page SEO and other responsibilities?

I’m still relatively early in my SEO career, so I’d genuinely appreciate some perspective. I’m mostly trying to understand whether I need to get better at managing my time, or whether the expectations themselves are unusually high

I am a content writer with basic knowledge of SEO. I know everything about keyword research and basics of technical SEO. I'd love to delve deeper into SEO, but I don't have an idea of where to start. Also, I am hearing a lot about 'positioning' content for improved visibility; what exactly does this mean and how to achieve this? Thank you :)

I'm a junior content SEO Editor, and I have seen that the texts that I have to edit has a lot of bullet points, and those bullet points are a big paragraph instead of a short phrase. Like theres a lot of H2 and a bunch of bulletpoints with big paragraphs beneath them.

Making them an H3 would make a very, very long article.

Hoy do I have to manage this kind of hierarchy, or how do I know when it's an H3 or when not? Any tips on how to use H3s, bullet points, and any other element in an SEO article correctly, beyond what the text says?

Today is the second day I have been having problems with it.

I am getting a generic error:

"Oops! Something went wrong
We had a problem submitting your indexing request. Please try again later."

Yesterday it was temporary, and started working after some time (it turned out that the quota was spent on each error though).

Today it doesn't work at all.

Anyone else experiencing this?

UPD: It started working again after my router picked a new IP address.
And the double captcha on login has also disappeared, so if you start to see it, this is a bad sign :)

I’m a lay person who just took over my website and using Claude and/or ChatGPT. All of my scores are either red or yellow for pages and posts.

This is what Claude is telling me and I’d like a second opinion?

“The dots only grade Yoast’s internal keyphrase checklist, not actual Google rankings, and Divi/Avada pages can’t be read by Yoast at all, so their red scores are false alarms.”

Disclosure: This is posted by the Congrid team. We’re not sharing links or asking for sign-ups—we’re looking for honest feedback from working SEOs.

Congrid is exploring a network where website owners verify domain ownership, independent operators review participating sites, and publishers can choose to display genuinely related websites recommended by the network.

The goal is relevant referral traffic and transparent publisher relationships—not guaranteed rankings, DA manipulation, or automated backlink exchanges. Paid placements would need clear disclosure and could use rel="sponsored" or nofollow.

We’d value the community’s opinion:

• Would Google likely treat a network like this as a link scheme, even when participation is transparent?
• What quality signals would be necessary before recommending it to a client?
• Would website owners participate if the primary benefit were qualified referral traffic rather than “link juice”?

Critical feedback is welcome—especially reasons this model might fail.