SEO
Should You Buy Backlinks in 2022? It Depends
Link building is hard, time consuming, and often soul-destroying.
This is why many people turn to buying backlinks.
But if you’ve been offered links in exchange for money, should you do it? Is it worth the price? Or will it be a waste of money?
Let’s take a look at the facts.
Google considers bought links that pass PageRank to be a link scheme that violates its Webmaster Guidelines. If you’re unfamiliar with PageRank, it’s complicated—but most bought links will pass PageRank.
If Google sees what it believes to be paid links to your site, one of two things will happen:
- Google will discount the links – They won’t help or hinder your search engine rankings. Google’s algorithms will discount them, and it’ll be as though they don’t exist.
- Google will penalize you – Google has an army of human reviewers who can impose manual actions on websites. If you get one of these, some or all of your site will not be shown in Google’s search results.
Sidenote.
You’ll know if you have a manual action, as it’ll show up in the Manual Actions report in Google Search Console.
Neither of these are ideal situations. Either your paid backlinks will have no impact on your rankings or a negative impact on them.
Even if you have great content and personalize your outreach emails, many site owners will still ask for money to place a link. This makes building links on merit extremely difficult, so it’s perfectly understandable that many SEOs would rather just buy them.
Google also won’t give you a link-based penalty or demotion unless it thinks you have paid links.
Given that paid links often look no different to earned links, many SEOs believe they can get away with buying links—and plenty do.
For example, here’s a page about the best online casinos that’s thriving in organic search:
If we take a look at its backlink profile in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, it seems extremely likely to me that many of these links were bought:
If you head over to Fiverr, you’ll find packages with thousands of backlinks for just a few dollars.
But the reality is that these links are unlikely to improve rankings.
For that reason, this isn’t how most SEOs buy backlinks.
Most buy them in one of two ways:
- Niche edits – You ask a site owner to add a link to an existing page on their site for a fee.
- Paid guest posts – You write an article that contains links to your site, then pay a site owner to publish it on their website.
A few years ago, I ran a small study to investigate the costs of these types of links.
How much do niche edits cost?
$361.44, on average.
I arrived at this number after reaching out to 450 sites across nine competitive niches and asking to buy a link on their sites outright (these were effectively niche edits).
Here’s the email I sent:
Sidenote.
Admittedly, this isn’t the best outreach email ever. I didn’t pitch any particular resource or linking page. I also pitched the link in either existing or new content. These things might have negatively impacted the response rate.
Interestingly, only 12.6% of the sites I reached out to were willing to sell me a link.
Sites in some niches also seemed more willing to sell links than others.
And as you may expect, the average cost of a link correlated quite positively with the site’s Domain Rating (DR):
How much do paid guest posts cost?
Much less than niche edits. $77.80, on average.
I arrived at this number after pitching a guest post to 180 sites across the same nine niches. Interestingly, I didn’t offer to pay for placement; many site owners just sent their fees anyway.
Here’s the email I sent:
Sidenote.
I only pitched to blogs that had “write for us” pages. In other words, those looking for guest posts.
As with niche edits, most site owners didn’t respond. Of the 25.5% who did, roughly half of them asked for a fee to place a guest post.
Sites in some niches were also more willing to sell guest posts than others:
And I also noticed that the websites selling them almost all had low DR scores:
Just keep in mind that although average costs for guest post placements were lower than niche edits, you have to produce content for them. This adds to your expenses.
Ranking high for competitive terms is a lucrative business.
For example, let’s take that page listing the best online casinos I showed you earlier. It currently gets an estimated 54K monthly search visits, according to Ahrefs. And many of the links on the page are affiliate links.
Given that casino affiliate programs pay out generous commissions, I’d estimate that this page easily generates monthly commissions in the high five figures. So it’s easy to see why site owners are willing to pay big bucks for links that help them rank higher.
Over the years, site owners have caught on to the value of links for SEOs and started demanding more and more.
Unfortunately, many link buyers and sellers know next to nothing about what makes a good backlink. This has led to an industry where even low-quality site owners are able to demand high prices for mediocre links because some SEOs are willing to pay.
This is why you really need to do your due diligence if you plan to buy backlinks.
Buying backlinks is out of the question if you want to build links in a “safe” and white-hat way.
This leaves you two options:
- Create content that attracts links naturally
- Do outreach to earn links
Given that content can’t earn links unless people know about it, your best bet is to do both: create content that deserves to earn links, then do outreach to let potential linkers know it exists.
However, you should still do your due diligence even with outreach-based link building.
Let’s go through a few questions worth asking before reaching out to a website.
1. Does the site look legit?
Based on your first impressions of the site, does it look trustworthy? Would you stick around to read the content if you landed on it?
If the answer is no, it probably isn’t worth pursuing a link from.
In case you’re struggling to answer, here are a few telltale signs of a less-than-legit site:
- Poor design
- No links in the content
- No images in the content
- Vague or non-existent author bios
Here’s an example:
Although this site could be legit, it doesn’t fill me with confidence for a few reasons:
- The logo looks like a Fiverr job.
- The only two images on the page are stock photos with no attribution.
- There are no links in the content.
- The author bio is simply “Bridget.” But Bridget who?
My guess: This website is part of a private blog network or set up for the sole purpose of selling backlinks.
2. Does it get consistent search traffic?
If a website gets organic traffic, Google must see it as at least a somewhat valuable resource.
To check this, plug the domain into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and go to the Overview report.
However, relying solely on a website’s current organic traffic isn’t the best idea.
If traffic has recently fallen off a cliff or seems to fluctuate dramatically, it may have been hit by a Google update. For that reason, it’s worth scrolling to the “Performance” graph on the Overview report in Site Explorer to see the site’s organic traffic over time.
Here’s the graph for the site above:
Despite still getting an estimated 4.8K monthly search visits, you can see that it used to get much more in 2018. In fact, traffic dropped by ~95% pretty much overnight.
If we hit the toggle to overlay Google updates on the graph, we see that the traffic drop coincided with the Core Update in August 2018.
This is the update that Barry Schwartz dubbed the “medic update” because it seemed to have the most impact on health and medical sites.
To conclude, don’t bother pursuing links from sites like these—paid or otherwise.
3. Has the site been selling links?
Never pursue links from sites that are obvious link sellers because a Google penalty is probably just around the corner. At which point, the links you got from the sites will become worthless or worse.
You can usually tell if a site has been selling links by checking recent posts for oddly placed links with lucrative keywords in their anchors.
Here’s an example:
Both of those links are quite unnatural, have exact-match anchors, and lead to commercial pages on the same website.
An often faster way to do this is to check the Outgoing Link Anchors report in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer for followed external links with odd anchors.
4. Has the site been buying links?
If there’s obvious evidence of a link prospect buying links, it’s yet another reason to avoid pursuing links from that site. After all, it could get penalized for buying links at any point.
To check, use the Anchors report in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer to look for followed links with unnatural anchors to its homepage.
Here’s an example of a site with many suspicious links:
If you’re unsure whether an anchor is suspicious or not, hit the caret in the “Links to target” column to see its context:
In this case, I’d say the link looks suspiciously like a paid one because of the exact-match anchor text.
5. Are you proposing a useful link?
Making sure this is the case comes down to two things:
- Creating unique and valuable content
- Pitching contextually useful opportunities
For example, this very article contains unique data on the cost of buying backlinks. That’s valuable information for most SEOs. But this doesn’t mean we should pitch to every SEO article on the web. We need to look for contextual opportunities where our link will add value.
Here’s an example:
This article already advises its readers not to buy backlinks because they’re often irrelevant, of low quality, and come from scammers. But it doesn’t say anything about the high costs of buying links.
In my opinion, this will be a useful addition to the page (with our post linked as the source).
Final thoughts
Buying links is risky. Very risky.
Unless you fully understand and accept the risks of link buying, this SEO tactic shouldn’t even be a consideration. It’s certainly not something I’d recommend to legitimate business owners whose livelihoods rely on their Google rankings.
Got questions? Ping me on Twitter.
SEO
4 Ways To Try The New Model From Mistral AI
In a significant leap in large language model (LLM) development, Mistral AI announced the release of its newest model, Mixtral-8x7B.
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:5546272da9065eddeb6fcd7ffddeef5b75be79a7&dn=mixtral-8x7b-32kseqlen&tr=udp%3A%2F%https://t.co/uV4WVdtpwZ%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=http%3A%2F%https://t.co/g0m9cEUz0T%3A80%2Fannounce
RELEASE a6bbd9affe0c2725c1b7410d66833e24
— Mistral AI (@MistralAI) December 8, 2023
What Is Mixtral-8x7B?
Mixtral-8x7B from Mistral AI is a Mixture of Experts (MoE) model designed to enhance how machines understand and generate text.
Imagine it as a team of specialized experts, each skilled in a different area, working together to handle various types of information and tasks.
A report published in June reportedly shed light on the intricacies of OpenAI’s GPT-4, highlighting that it employs a similar approach to MoE, utilizing 16 experts, each with around 111 billion parameters, and routes two experts per forward pass to optimize costs.
This approach allows the model to manage diverse and complex data efficiently, making it helpful in creating content, engaging in conversations, or translating languages.
Mixtral-8x7B Performance Metrics
Mistral AI’s new model, Mixtral-8x7B, represents a significant step forward from its previous model, Mistral-7B-v0.1.
It’s designed to understand better and create text, a key feature for anyone looking to use AI for writing or communication tasks.
New open weights LLM from @MistralAI
params.json:
– hidden_dim / dim = 14336/4096 => 3.5X MLP expand
– n_heads / n_kv_heads = 32/8 => 4X multiquery
– “moe” => mixture of experts 8X top 2 👀Likely related code: https://t.co/yrqRtYhxKR
Oddly absent: an over-rehearsed… https://t.co/8PvqdHz1bR pic.twitter.com/xMDRj3WAVh
— Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) December 8, 2023
This latest addition to the Mistral family promises to revolutionize the AI landscape with its enhanced performance metrics, as shared by OpenCompass.
What makes Mixtral-8x7B stand out is not just its improvement over Mistral AI’s previous version, but the way it measures up to models like Llama2-70B and Qwen-72B.
It’s like having an assistant who can understand complex ideas and express them clearly.
One of the key strengths of the Mixtral-8x7B is its ability to handle specialized tasks.
For example, it performed exceptionally well in specific tests designed to evaluate AI models, indicating that it’s good at general text understanding and generation and excels in more niche areas.
This makes it a valuable tool for marketing professionals and SEO experts who need AI that can adapt to different content and technical requirements.
The Mixtral-8x7B’s ability to deal with complex math and coding problems also suggests it can be a helpful ally for those working in more technical aspects of SEO, where understanding and solving algorithmic challenges are crucial.
This new model could become a versatile and intelligent partner for a wide range of digital content and strategy needs.
How To Try Mixtral-8x7B: 4 Demos
You can experiment with Mistral AI’s new model, Mixtral-8x7B, to see how it responds to queries and how it performs compared to other open-source models and OpenAI’s GPT-4.
Please note that, like all generative AI content, platforms running this new model may produce inaccurate information or otherwise unintended results.
User feedback for new models like this one will help companies like Mistral AI improve future versions and models.
1. Perplexity Labs Playground
In Perplexity Labs, you can try Mixtral-8x7B along with Meta AI’s Llama 2, Mistral-7b, and Perplexity’s new online LLMs.
In this example, I ask about the model itself and notice that new instructions are added after the initial response to extend the generated content about my query.
Screenshot from Perplexity, December 2023While the answer looks correct, it begins to repeat itself.
Screenshot from Perplexity Labs, December 2023The model did provide an over 600-word answer to the question, “What is SEO?”
Again, additional instructions appear as “headers” to seemingly ensure a comprehensive answer.
Screenshot from Perplexity Labs, December 20232. Poe
Poe hosts bots for popular LLMs, including OpenAI’s GPT-4 and DALL·E 3, Meta AI’s Llama 2 and Code Llama, Google’s PaLM 2, Anthropic’s Claude-instant and Claude 2, and StableDiffusionXL.
These bots cover a wide spectrum of capabilities, including text, image, and code generation.
The Mixtral-8x7B-Chat bot is operated by Fireworks AI.
Screenshot from Poe, December 2023It’s worth noting that the Fireworks page specifies it is an “unofficial implementation” that was fine-tuned for chat.
When asked what the best backlinks for SEO are, it provided a valid answer.
Screenshot from Poe, December 2023Compare this to the response offered by Google Bard.
Screenshot from Google Bard, December 20233. Vercel
Vercel offers a demo of Mixtral-8x7B that allows users to compare responses from popular Anthropic, Cohere, Meta AI, and OpenAI models.
Screenshot from Vercel, December 2023It offers an interesting perspective on how each model interprets and responds to user questions.
Screenshot from Vercel, December 2023Like many LLMs, it does occasionally hallucinate.
Screenshot from Vercel, December 20234. Replicate
The mixtral-8x7b-32 demo on Replicate is based on this source code. It is also noted in the README that “Inference is quite inefficient.”
Screenshot from Replicate, December 2023In the example above, Mixtral-8x7B describes itself as a game.
Conclusion
Mistral AI’s latest release sets a new benchmark in the AI field, offering enhanced performance and versatility. But like many LLMs, it can provide inaccurate and unexpected answers.
As AI continues to evolve, models like the Mixtral-8x7B could become integral in shaping advanced AI tools for marketing and business.
Featured image: T. Schneider/Shutterstock
SEO
OpenAI Investigates ‘Lazy’ GPT-4 Complaints On Google Reviews, X
OpenAI, the company that launched ChatGPT a little over a year ago, has recently taken to social media to address concerns regarding the “lazy” performance of GPT-4 on social media and Google Reviews.
This move comes after growing user feedback online, which even includes a one-star review on the company’s Google Reviews.
OpenAI Gives Insight Into Training Chat Models, Performance Evaluations, And A/B Testing
OpenAI, through its @ChatGPTapp Twitter account, detailed the complexities involved in training chat models.
Screenshot from X, December 2023The organization highlighted that the process is not a “clean industrial process” and that variations in training runs can lead to noticeable differences in the AI’s personality, creative style, and political bias.
Thorough AI model testing includes offline evaluation metrics and online A/B tests. The final decision to release a new model is based on a data-driven approach to improve the “real” user experience.
OpenAI’s Google Review Score Affected By GPT-4 Performance, Billing Issues
This explanation comes after weeks of user feedback about GPT-4 becoming worse on social media networks like X.
Idk if anyone else has noticed this, but GPT-4 Turbo performance is significantly worse than GPT-4 standard.
I know it’s in preview right now but it’s significantly worse.
— Max Weinbach (@MaxWinebach) November 8, 2023
There has been discussion if GPT-4 has become “lazy” recently. My anecdotal testing suggests it may be true.
I repeated a sequence of old analyses I did with Code Interpreter. GPT-4 still knows what to do, but keeps telling me to do the work. One step is now many & some are odd. pic.twitter.com/OhGAMtd3Zq
— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) November 28, 2023
Complaints also appeared in OpenAI’s community forums.
Screenshot from OpenAI, December 2023The experience led one user to leave a one-star rating for OpenAI via Google Reviews. Other complaints regarded accounts, billing, and the artificial nature of AI.
Screenshot from Google Reviews, December 2023A recent user on Product Hunt gave OpenAI a rating that also appears to be related to GPT-4 worsening.
Screenshot from Product Hunt, December 2023GPT-4 isn’t the only issue that local reviewers complain about. On Yelp, OpenAI has a one-star rating for ChatGPT 3.5 performance.
OpenAI is now only 3.8 stars on Google Maps and a dismal 1 star on Yelp!
GPT-4’s degradation has really hurt their rating. Hope the business survives.https://t.co/RF8uJH1WQ5 pic.twitter.com/OghAZLCiVu
— Nate Chan (@nathanwchan) December 9, 2023
The complaint:
Screenshot from Yelp, December 2023In related OpenAI news, the review with the most likes aligns with recent rumors about a volatile workplace, alleging that OpenAI is a “Cutthroat environment. Not friendly. Toxic workers.”
Screenshot from Google Reviews, December 2023The reviews voted the most helpful on Glassdoor about OpenAI suggested that employee frustration and product development issues stem from the company’s shift in focus on profits.
Screenshots from Glassdoor, December 2023This incident provides a unique outlook on how customer and employee experiences can impact any business through local reviews and business ratings platforms.
Screenshot from Google, December 2023Google SGE Highlights Positive Google Reviews
In addition to occasional complaints, Google reviewers acknowledged the revolutionary impact of OpenAI’s technology on various fields.
The most positive review mentions about the company appear in Google SGE (Search Generative Experience).
Screenshot from Google SGE, December 2023Conclusion
OpenAI’s recent insights into training chat models and response to public feedback about GPT-4 performance illustrate AI technology’s dynamic and evolving nature and its impact on those who depend on the AI platform.
Especially the people who just received an invitation to join ChatGPT Plus after being waitlisted while OpenAI paused new subscriptions and upgrades. Or those developing GPTs for the upcoming GPT Store launch.
As AI advances, professionals in these fields must remain agile, informed, and responsive to technological developments and the public’s reception of these advancements.
Featured image: Tada Images/Shutterstock
SEO
ChatGPT Plus Upgrades Paused; Waitlisted Users Receive Invites
ChatGPT Plus subscriptions and upgrades remain paused after a surge in demand for new features created outages.
Some users who signed up for the waitlist have received invites to join ChatGPT Plus.
This has resulted in a few shares of the link that is accessible for everyone. For now.
Found a hack to skip chatGPT plus wait list.
Follow the steps
– login to ChatGPT
– now if you click on upgrade
– Signup for waitlist(may not be necessary)
– now change the URL to https://t.co/4izOdNzarG
– Wallah you are in for payment #ChatGPT4 #hack #GPT4 #GPTPlus pic.twitter.com/J1GizlrOAx— Ashish Mohite is building Notionpack Capture (@_ashishmohite) December 8, 2023
RELATED: GPT Store Set To Launch In 2024 After ‘Unexpected’ Delays
In addition to the invites, signs that more people are getting access to GPTs include an introductory screen popping up on free ChatGPT accounts.
Screenshot from ChatGPT, December 2023Unfortunately, they still aren’t accessible without a Plus subscription.
Screenshot from ChatGPT, December 2023You can sign up for the waitlist by clicking on the option to upgrade in the left sidebar of ChatGPT on a desktop browser.
Screenshot from ChatGPT, December 2023OpenAI also suggests ChatGPT Enterprise for those who need more capabilities, as outlined in the pricing plans below.
Screenshot from OpenAI, December 2023Why Are ChatGPT Plus Subscriptions Paused?
According to a post on X by OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman, the recent surge in usage following the DevDay developers conference has led to capacity challenges, resulting in the decision to pause ChatGPT Plus signups.
we are pausing new ChatGPT Plus sign-ups for a bit 🙁
the surge in usage post devday has exceeded our capacity and we want to make sure everyone has a great experience.
you can still sign-up to be notified within the app when subs reopen.
— Sam Altman (@sama) November 15, 2023
The decision to pause new ChatGPT signups follows a week where OpenAI services – including ChatGPT and the API – experienced a series of outages related to high-demand and DDoS attacks.
Demand for ChatGPT Plus resulted in eBay listings supposedly offering one or more months of the premium subscription.
chatgpt plus accounts selling ebay for a premium 🫡🇺🇸 https://t.co/VdN8tuexKM pic.twitter.com/W522NGHsRV
— surya (@sdand) November 15, 2023
When Will ChatGPT Plus Subscriptions Resume?
So far, we don’t have any official word on when ChatGPT Plus subscriptions will resume. We know the GPT Store is set to open early next year after recent boardroom drama led to “unexpected delays.”
Therefore, we hope that OpenAI will onboard waitlisted users in time to try out all of the GPTs created by OpenAI and community builders.
What Are GPTs?
GPTs allow users to create one or more personalized ChatGPT experiences based on a specific set of instructions, knowledge files, and actions.
Search marketers with ChatGPT Plus can try GPTs for helpful content assessment and learning SEO.
Two SEO GPTs I’ve created for assessment + learning 👀👇
1. Content Helpfulness and Quality SEO Analyzer: Assess a page content helpfulness, relevance, and quality for your targeted query based on Google’s guidelines vs your competitors and get tips: https://t.co/LsoP2UhF4N pic.twitter.com/O77MHiqwOq
— Aleyda Solis 🕊️ (@aleyda) November 12, 2023
2. The https://t.co/IFmKxxVDpW SEO Teacher: A friendly SEO expert teacher who will help you to learn SEO using reliable https://t.co/sCZ03C7fzq resources: https://t.co/UrMPUYwblH
I hope they’re helpful 🙌🤩
PS: Love how GPT opens up to SO much opportunity 🤯 pic.twitter.com/yqKozcZTDc
— Aleyda Solis 🕊️ (@aleyda) November 12, 2023
There are also GPTs for analyzing Google Search Console data.
oh wow. I think this GPT works.
Export data from GSC comparing keyword rankings before and after an update and upload it to ChatGPT and it will spit out this scatter plot for you.
It’s an easy way to see if most of your keyword declined or improved.
This site was impacted by… pic.twitter.com/wFGSnonqoZ
— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) November 9, 2023
And GPTs that will let you chat with analytics data from 20 platforms, including Google Ads, GA4, and Facebook.
Google search has indexed hundreds of public GPTs. According to an alleged list of GPT statistics in a GitHub repository, DALL-E, the top GPT from OpenAI, has received 5,620,981 visits since its launch last month. Included in the top 20 GPTs is Canva, with 291,349 views.
Weighing The Benefits Of The Pause
Ideally, this means that developers working on building GPTs and using the API should encounter fewer issues (like being unable to save GPT drafts).
But it could also mean a temporary decrease in new users of GPTs since they are only available to Plus subscribers – including the ones I tested for learning about ranking factors and gaining insights on E-E-A-T from Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines.
Screenshot from ChatGPT, November 2023Featured image: Robert Way/Shutterstock
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