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"buy a subscription to a tool like Ahrefs and see how people manipulate links for SEO purposes" Can you please provide an example? I'm genuinely curious, I've

• skilled 5y ago
  I cannot because I don't have a subscription (it's quite expensive and for my needs I only need to buy it few times a year). I can tell you this though: - Brands buy paid guest posts on "established" sites. (Using a stuffed keyword for their money site, service or whatever.) - They wait until Google indexes their sponsored post. - They then go ahead and buy links that link to the sponsored post instead of their service / brand site. - The idea is that they can avoid a penalty in long-term. And Google largely looks past it because the sites doing such tactics (buying hundreds of private network links) are still on page 1 of Google results. Past a certain point (5,000+ referring domains?) Google isn't going to penalize your site because it can't differentiate between legitimate or spammy links, or even care for matter[0]. Though the internals on the algorithm are very scarce in this regard. If you do use the tool (Ahrefs) you have full freedom to analyze sites you suspect are doing shitty tactics. And you will find inconsistencies like the one I mentioned above. Needless to say, because Ahrefs is a crawler, it can be blocked and I imagine quite a few blackhat networks do this to avoid further detection. Lastly, this is a big problem for smaller niches / keywords because all you need is 20-30 links pointing towards an article and Google will assume you have a PhD on that topic. [0]: https://twitter.com/KrisHolten/status/1412396082835906563 https://twitter.com/KrisHolten/status/1412396082835906563