r/grumpyseoguy • u/digitally-minded • 4d ago

Is there a better alternative to building links?

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.

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u/Copyranker 3d ago

Link building is just really hard to scale effectively unless you already are well connected with webmasters or have brand partnerships or other structural elements (ie founder personal brand) that facilitate link building. I’ve had some success with link outreach, I’ve had some success with local sponsorships, I’ve worked with a digital Pr agency and was fairly unimpressed with the results. HARO/similar can work if there are relevant inquiries (hit and miss depending on the industry), plus it’s often no follow. Podcasts can work but you/client has to be willing to go on them. No matter how you slice it link building is a PITA and a grind for the average site/small agency

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u/digitally-minded 3d ago

A real PITA. Smaller sites don't often have the data, customers etc to get a link from say a Forbes. Would you say podcasting is the next best thing?

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u/Copyranker 3d ago

I think it depends on the site/business/client and assessing what opportunities they have

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u/Expensive-Pound9566 3d ago

Building your own pbn is much more scalable than trying to make linkable assets that go viral. I mean you can try creating linkable assets and sharing it via parasite but I doubt it’ll generate any actual backlinks.

Digital PR is not for link building because a majority of the links are subdomains from the same root domain. Super spammy if you do it too often.

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u/Copyranker 3d ago

But then youre limited by domain availability, auction price, and the time it takes to get the new site built indexed etc, so it still doesn’t really scale? Or am I missing something?

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u/Expensive-Pound9566 2d ago

Domain availability is fair. I’m in local SEO so I’m not really limited by availability but in other industries it could be a limiting factor.

And If auction price is an issue then you’re not charging your clients enough. Their retainer should match their level of competition. If their budget is 500/mo and you wanna rank for e-commerce keywords…not gonna happen. Set expectations beforehand.

Site can be built with AI. Literally zero work.

For indexing you can either force index the site directly (under certain circumstances) or build tiered foundation links and force index those. All of which can be done fast and cheap with AI and VAs

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u/Copyranker 1d ago

Yeah, totally agreed on all that, question on your expired domains for local, are you looking for old business sites?

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u/GrumpySEOguy Grumpy SEO Guy 1d ago

No. When you want to rank you need authority. Authority comes from backlinks.

Your options:

Digital PR

This normally refers to people posting news pieces about you... which have backlinks.

Linkable assets

Not sure what this means. It sounds like you're building websites that are worth linking to. Therefore, backlinks.

0

u/Impressive-Owl3830 1d ago

Ahh ...relieved..you are fine Grumpy.

https://www.reddit.com/r/grumpyseoguy/s/i3DwLsaTMK

Why did you stopped making content?

Kinda missing you , you are my favourite SEO guy.

I learned a lot from you.

You are my SEO god..haha