How to spot a bad links

March 2025

My screen flickers as the meeting connects. Two boxes appear: mine and a blank square with "Tim Johnson."

"Hello? Tim? Can you hear me?" I adjust my laptop, tilting the screen back to catch better light.

The blank square lights up. A man in his fifties appears, white collar shirt, no tie. 

"Yeah, I can hear you." Tim shifts in his chair, the leather squeaking. "What can you do for our company that our current agency can't?"

I share my screen. "Before I get into that, I want to show you something."

My Ahrefs dashboard loads. I type in one of the URLs from Tom's backlink profile.

He leans toward his camera. "What am I looking at here?"

I open the websites up in Ahrefs. High domain authority and traffic show for each one. 

I click into the keywords tab. All traffic is coming from "branded" searches.

"These PBN owners trick SEO tools into thinking their sites are getting traffic. They use automated software to search their brand names," I explain. "Since they rank number one for their name, Ahrefs thinks all those searches are going to the sites, thus artificially inflating their traffic."

Tim's mouth tightens. He squints at the screen.

"These links aren't helping you," I say. The words hang in the digital space between us

He lets out a heavy sigh. 

"We've spent over $10,000 with this agency," he says.

"Let me show you another example." I click to a different URL. 

The site loads slowly—garish colors, pop-up ads, blocks of nonsensical text. The homepage displays articles about celebrities next to guides on home repair. 

A sidebar features posts about casinos.

"Look at this," I say, scrolling down. "They're writing about everything under the sun. No clear focus. Just a hodgepodge of random topics set up to accept links from any niche."

I scroll down the page. 

"This is what your money is buying. Content that no real person ever reads, on sites that only exist to sell links."

Tim's face flushes. He runs a hand through his hair. "But their reports show these links are high quality. Domain authority in the seventies."

"It's all manipulated." I pull up another dashboard. "They drop comments on big websites and link back to their PBN. It inflates their DR."

Tim's jaw clenches. He looks away from the camera.

"So, our rankings aren't improving because these links are worthless?" Tim looks directly at me now.

"Exactly. They look good on paper, but Google knows they're fake." I switch to another screen. "These PBNs leave footprints that search engines can detect."

Tim's nostrils flare. "How many of our links are like this?"

"At least 90%." 

I highlight several rows on my spreadsheet. 

Tim stares at something beyond his camera. His jaw works back and forth. 

"What would you do differently?"

"Real outreach. Relationships with publishers. It takes longer, but the results last." 

"How long to see improvement?" he asks. His fingers drum once, twice on his desk.

"Three to six months.”

"Three months." Tim's voice is quiet now. He looks at the ceiling. His eyes return to the camera. They're red at the corners. "Send me a proposal. Include this audit you've done."

"You’ll have it by end of day tomorrow."

Tim nods once. The movement is sharp. "I appreciate your honesty."

The call ends. The meeting window closes.

My office is silent except for the hum of the laptop fan.

What this means

Tim is fictitious, but his story is not. I've seen far too many well-intentioned site owners get hoodwinked this way.

When building links, don’t just look at DR. And don’t rely on traffic either. 

You have to dig deeper if you want your backlinks to matter:

• Check the keywords they get traffic from. 

• Check their outbound link profile.

• Make sure the site has a focus.