I’ve built and ranked sites that pushed $10-million in sales and put dull products like commercial doors and bathroom stalls—on Slate and The Wall Street Journal.
I spent a week in Istanbul a few years ago and had countless vendors try and convince me that the Rolex they were selling at an incredible price was real. Eventually one pulled me in. I knew it was fake but bought it anyway because it was cheap and the details looked right. That watch got compliments the rest of the way home. Even watch guys couldn’t tell at a distance, but I knew the truth right until the day it broke 2 months later.
Trust me: “budget” backlink your current agency gets each month are reputation grenades disguised as bargains. Links tell a story of trust and authority like a watch signals status. Why flex a fake watch when you have a Ferrari in the garage? You can do better.
If Your SEO Agency Ignored That Shiny New Award, Fire Them
Last quarter a former employer snagged a spot on Nashville’s Top 25 Fastest Growing Companies by Nashville Business Journal. Their agency or team have yet to try and coax a backlink from the awarding body’s highly trusted domain. That’s PR malpractice. Awards, trade-association profiles, Chamber write-ups—authority links begging to be claimed. If your vendor didn’t ask, they’re asleep at the wheel, and you’re paying them to nap.
Quick win: Write a 90-word blurb for the award committee; 9 times out of 10, they’ll paste it verbatim—link and all.
But They’re Getting You Links With “Good Numbers” Right?
Your agency’s monthly report brags, “We landed 5 DR-60 links!” Cool story. DR is an educated guess—not gospel. Even worse, the traffic those sites boast often comes from bots, adult queries, or AI-generated clickbait. Google’s John Mueller has said for years that it mostly ignores low-quality links—and in persistent cases will act against them.
DR is sold by the street merchants of SEO. If your monthly report touts metrics Ahrefs invented while ignoring basic trust signals, you’re paying for busywork, not results.
The Fall Enslaves Us All – The Rise of Link-Spam Penalties
“But it’s DR 70!” Ever wonder how FrugalMom-SippyCup-Lifestyle hit those heights? Two words: redirect loop—a $15 Fiverr gig chaining dead domains until a crawler faints. Even Ahrefs admits its DR can be gamed.
Google finally called time-out. The June 2024 Link-Spam Update hammered roundup posts, exact-match anchors, and “high-DR, zero-trust” sites in one sweep. Three months earlier, the Helpful Content signal merged into core ranking systems alongside new spam rules targeting site-reputation abuse—exactly the junk living on mom blogs and “business” mags moonlighting as casino-review farms.
Translation: at best Google ignores those links; at worst it drags your whole domain into algorithmic purgatory.
Traffic Drops & Fake Traffic: The Numbers Lie to You
Editorial outreach is tedious, time-consuming, and filled with rejection. Many digital marketing agencies and web designers blindly subcontract link-building to “outreach services” that promise quality sites with good DR and real traffic. But it’s a house of cards. When penalties land, traffic tanks and suddenly that backlink broker’s whole business model collapses.
To cover their tracks, these link sellers have discovered very creative ways to inflate their “total traffic” numbers, hoping and praying your agency won’t bother digging beneath the surface.
Case in point: An “business blog” my team recently came across. At first glance—great numbers. Thousands of monthly visits, solid DR metrics, and a pitch that seemed reasonable. But a quick peek at the keywords driving traffic painted a different, scandalous story:
Yes, really. Their “entrepreneurship” content was propped up by adult search traffic. A fellow SEO almost missed it when I sent the link to him.
And here’s another gem: a so-called “e-commerce site” whose analytics revealed the majority of its visitors arrived from searches for feet…
Ask yourself bluntly:
Are these really the kinds of sites you want linking back to your middle-market ecommerce brand?
Does a link from this site show Google our authority and expertise in this business? Does google trust it at all?
Is your hard-earned reputation best served appearing next to adult listings or feet-picture tutorials?
Numbers lie—aggressively. Do the research your SEO provider clearly isn’t bothering with, or risk your brand getting tangled up with traffic sources you wouldn’t dare mention at your next investor meeting.
What Drones and Doors Taught Me About Link Creativity
Flashback: I’m leading digital at CDF Doors. Commercial doors make tax law look spicy, yet I needed big-league links to get this site winning nationally. Trust comes from big names in media like Slate, Wall Street Journal etc?
Question: “Where do doors intersect the news cycle?” Construction trends. Reporters were drooling over drones on job sites. So how did we turn this into an epic link?
- Research FAA regs, insurance impacts, case studies.
- Publish an article on our site linking drone use to job-site safety (doors → egress → safety—stretchy, but legit).
- Pitch journalists starving for fresh data.
Results? Tier-one coverage, and authority money can’t buy—obliterating any link shortcut bought on SippyCupMom.com.
What Your Agency Isn’t Doing (But Charges You For Anyway)
- ❌ Leaving awards on the table – zero outreach for backlink-ready wins.
- ❌ Failing to interview your subject-matter experts – no quotable insights means zero journalist interest.
- ❌ Skipping vendor and partner pages – you buy $5M in inventory and still aren’t listed on the supplier’s site.
- ❌ Ghosting HARO / Help a B2B Reporter – your competitors answer at 7 a.m.; your agency sleeps in.
- ❌ Ignoring data journalism – no proprietary stats, no reason for editors to care.
- ❌ Reporting DR like revenue – vanity metrics over verifiable trust.
- ❌ Buying placements before pitching – pay-to-play “editorials” that Google flags as reputation abuse.
- ❌ Reusing the same guest-post template – identical bio boxes and anchors across ten domains equals footprint alert.
- ❌ Never auditing referrer traffic – can’t prove a single sale came from the links they brag about.
- ❌ Skipping disavow triage – spammy legacy links pile up while they chase new junk.
Recognize your monthly report yet?
Digital PR Moves They Forgot Existed
- Data-driven reports – commission original research; journalists need fresh numbers.
- Interactive assets – calculators, visualizations, quizzes that earn embeds.
- Conference newsjacking – piggy-back announcements on industry events for fast pickups.
- Co-branded studies – share costs (and audiences) with non-competing partners.
- Expert commentary blitzes – 48-hour turnaround quotes for breaking news beats slower competitors.
- Scholarship & grant pages done right – niche, relevant, and actually funded (not the $500 spam variety).
None of these require paying a blogger whose sidebar also sells backlinks to online baccarat guides.
Questions A CFO Will Ask When You Ask For A Real SEO Budget (and the Answers)
“Can’t Google just ignore bad links?”
Sometimes. One won’t kill you, but if you create a pattern of it you eat the ranking loss and cleanup costs.
“Press-release links are safe, right?”
Google has ignored them since 2013—spend that budget on real outreach.
“Why does this cost five figures?”
Because journalists, designers, and data analysts draw real salaries—unlike bots churning AI sludge.
Final Rant
If diaper-coupon blogs and DR-inflation gimmicks felt “good enough,” you wouldn’t still be reading. Your middle-market e-commerce or B2B brand is one sharp, creative campaign away from elite authority IF you quit measuring success in vanity metrics and start demanding trust.
Audit every backlink. Torch the junk. Earn the links you’d be proud to show a boardroom. Or keep funding SippyCupMom.com and watch competitors outrank you while Google quietly devalues your “good numbers.”
Ready to graduate from vanity metrics to verifiable authority? Book A Call With Us. Let’s build links your team can brag about instead of bury.
