Buying Fake DR for New Sites to Dissuade Competitors

[tyealia]

Lately, I have been seeing a bunch of services to artificially pump up your dr in a few weeks. These use holes in the ahrefs algo to pump up your dr while google mostly ignores these links.

I have a new site currently getting 500 visitors a day with 0 dr, it's 4 months old and has a lot of great content I have painstakingly spent time keyword researching and producing with my writers, I already see someone trying to copy my keywords and replicate them. To avoid this I am considering using one of these services, for about $50ish to get me to a dr of 30 through ahrefs algo holes to dissuade competitors.

Almost any course you find out there says to target low-dr keyword sites and follow ahrefs metrics, so this seems like a legitimate way to dissuade competitors from replicating your site, especially while it's new.

Pros - Dissuade competitors from replicating a new site and stealing your keyword research

Cons - Possibility of algo penalty if bad vendor using bad links

Before anything gets said, I know DR is a vanity metric and means nothing, I am not expecting anything from a higher DR other than a means to dissuade people from copying my site and content as is incredibly popular right now, especially with AI.

Also as much as John Mu contradicts himself he did say the algo currently just ignores spammy links and is not penalizing you. I know I know everyone in SEO says John Mu is a liar .
For this particular site I have stopped outreach after getting 15 dr50+ guest post links and the dr not moving a decimal, its not worth it for this particular niche, I would MUCH rather invest that money into content where the ROI is much higher than link building (again I mean for this particular niche),

Some responses from asking 3 vendors on fiver what they will use...

"I can understand sir, don't worry about it. My work would be spam-free and you'll be 100% safe from Google Penalties" (barely any info, just keeps saying he's spam-free so big red flag)
"hi bro we use only contextual do follow backlinks we do not use any google or redrict links we use white hat seo google save method" (no redirects opposite of another vendor, good if you believe redirects can transfer over penalties)
"am using 100% good redirect links and pbns" (seems like the most risky service, openly says hell use redirects and pbns to your money site)

The more I read the responses the scarier the risk of getting flooded with some crap links gets although the second vendor seems like he may be legitimate.

Also found a service on upwork with 60 positive reviews, but the vendor responded with the worst English I have ever read without answering any of the questions.

 

[Philip J. Fry]

That's exactly why I don't use Ahrefs and use majestic instead. Ahrefs shows wayyyy too many spam links whereas Majestic shows you mostly good links. Their TF algorithm allows you to filter out most spam links too.

But, to answer your question, don't worry about fooling potential competitors and focus on making a business. You gotta get product/market fit, positive cash flow, and break even first before anything else. Sounds like you're losing focus.

 

[tyealia]

That's exactly why I don't use Ahrefs and use majestic instead. Ahrefs shows wayyyy too many spam links whereas Majestic shows you mostly good links. Their TF algorithm allows you to filter out most spam links too.

But, to answer your question, don't worry about fooling potential competitors and focus on making a business. You gotta get product/market fit, positive cash flow, and break even first before anything else. Sounds like you're losing focus.

Yeah if it was a site with almost no traffic I would be inclined to agree, but now that its hit $500 a month although small compared to my other projects I feel like I want to protect its future. I can see a slightly higher DR site copying all the content and overtaking me on everything, but if they see me as a threat on the metrics they may stay away from this site.

 

[Sutra]

What are you even talking about? You know the issue is your lack of authority, and that because of it you have a target on your back. Yet, instead of actually putting the time/money into acquiring links to increase your authority you're considering some hokey stupid shit. Do you want to make money?

For this particular site I have stopped outreach after getting 15 dr50+ guest post links and the dr not moving a decimal, its not worth it for this particular niche, I would MUCH rather invest that money into content where the ROI is much higher than link building (again I mean for this particular niche),

It's not that it's not worth it. It means that you suck ass, thus need to improve your skill or hire someone who knows what they are doing so they can get the links for you.

but now that its hit $500 a month although small compared to my other projects I feel like I want to protect its future. I can see a slightly higher DR site copying all the content and overtaking me on everything, but if they see me as a threat on the metrics they may stay away from this site.

Exactly, so use the money you're making from the site to get links, you dummy.

For some reason members here do everything they can to avoid getting links. Come up with every excuse possible. Links are one of THE most important things. GET FUCKING LINKS. GET LINKS GET LINKS GET LINKS.

 

[illmasterj]

Reminds me of some ex-colleagues. They used to spend so much time/energy trying to not do their job, that I could rock into work, get my shit done and leave before they were finished faking it.

DR30 ain't hard man. 25 HARO links and a dozen niche edits and you're there. You won't jeopardize your site either.

 

[tyealia]

Reminds me of some ex-colleagues. They used to spend so much time/energy trying to not do their job, that I could rock into work, get my shit done and leave before they were finished faking it.

DR30 ain't hard man. 25 HARO links and a dozen niche edits and you're there. You won't jeopardize your site either.

Not sure the comparison applies as I mentioned i rather spend that time and budget on content, not saying I rather sit on my behind for a month. Currently pumping out 150 high quality articles a month on all sites and 25 haro and niche edits about $5000 worth of links can buy an awful lot of content which in the long term would bring my Dr to 30 regardless. My question was for a short-term stopgap while I waited for site to mature.

 

[Ryuzaki]

I wouldn’t do it. You won’t really stop anyone who notices you have traffic. Every site, no matter the DR score, has easy keywords to plunder. All you’re doing is rendering Ahrefs unusable for you. And people may target you from Semrush or others anyways. Iin my opinion it’s not worth your time or screwing your data when you’ll hit a higher DR score anyways in time.

 

[tyealia]

I wouldn’t do it. You won’t really stop anyone who notices you have traffic. Every site, no matter the DR score, has easy keywords to plunder. All you’re doing is rendering Ahrefs unusable for you. And people may target you from Semrush or others anyways. Iin my opinion it’s not worth your time or screwing your data when you’ll hit a higher DR score anyways in time.

Thanks, Ryu, great stoic advice, as usual, I agree the semrush and other tools were a fear but apparently those were covered in the package, my final thought though was me not being able to sleep soundly always thinking any an update or drop in traffic was because of what I did, I essentially would never again be able to have good data on whether I had a drop because of these pbns or an SEO technical issue.

Even though you own a link service your not pushing buy buy buy links down my throat, man you're a treasure here.

I'm going to table the idea and stick with my differentiator and what I'm good at which is large amounts of good quality content and ignore the copycats.

 

[thisishatred]

Not sure the comparison applies as I mentioned i rather spend that time and budget on content, not saying I rather sit on my behind for a month. Currently pumping out 150 high quality articles a month on all sites and 25 haro and niche edits about $5000 worth of links can buy an awful lot of content which in the long term would bring my Dr to 30 regardless. My question was for a short-term stopgap while I waited for site to mature.

Just to comment on this - you do know HARO is completely free to do right? It's rather time involved and success is dependent on niche but it's still free.

Even cold outreaching is a free process - granted most folks aren't apt to give you a free link. With that said, it's also much cheaper to do the cold outreach yourself and pay the webmaster directly than it is to pay someone else to negotiate the link for you.

There are quite literally an endless supply of people to outreach to yet most folks are borderline scared to do it. The worst they can do is say no or not even bother replying; After which you move on to the next person to email.

In a lot of cases your competitors have done the work for you too - just dump their link profiles and see if they have links you could acquire.

Any time I see a potential opportunity to work with someone I save their site and contact page in a sticky note. I send them a customized email eventually and pander to them in order to get a link. Sometimes it works, other times it doesn't.

Links are a big part of the algorithm, that's why it's being echoed here.

 

[tyealia]

you dummy.

you suck ass

GET FUCKING LINKS

Mom, is that you?

Just to comment on this - you do know HARO is completely free to do right? It's rather time involved and success is dependent on niche but it's still free.

Even cold outreaching is a free process - granted most folks aren't apt to give you a free link. With that said, it's also much cheaper to do the cold outreach yourself and pay the webmaster directly than it is to pay someone else to negotiate the link for you.

There are quite literally an endless supply of people to outreach to yet most folks are borderline scared to do it. The worst they can do is say no or not even bother replying; After which you move on to the next person to email.

In a lot of cases your competitors have done the work for you too - just dump their link profiles and see if they have links you could acquire.

Any time I see a potential opportunity to work with someone I save their site and contact page in a sticky note. I send them a customized email eventually and pander to them in order to get a link. Sometimes it works, other times it doesn't.

Links are a big part of the algorithm, that's why it's being echoed here.

I had an outreach team of 3, I had a great outreach sop, an amalgamation between 3-course methods and learning over time, and was getting a ton of good vetted links, but it just wasn't moving the needle-like days past when I used to outreach and would get immediate results. I was peaking at about $75 dollars per link when you averaged the free and paid (no links under dr30 traffic 1000+ the usual vettings, etc). (Could be I just suck as mentioned above haha, but I had multiple consulting calls with MattD, and Jay Yapp, who work in one of the biggest link agencies, they both helped me round out and went through my methods vetting for issues.)

I scrapped the team after a few years and reinvested that money into just good content which has seen my portfolio grow beyond my dreams, so for me, the ROI is much higher on my content which I have 12 years of experience making with my team, for others and other niches its probably different. There are also niches that are notoriously hard to get links in so that plays a role as well.

Personally, I would love to spend my day responding to Haro requests and getting links, but I work as my own editor for writers and as a manager of a team of 3 VAs and 8 writers, so I would have to hire someone for this, and again as mentioned I feel like I would get a better bang for my buck pumping that money into more content rather than a Haro team.

I did though ask for advice here and the majority of people are screaming get links, so I will explore the Haro route, AH pro has an interesting Haro blueprint in their course, and ill take a look if there are any decently priced services.

 

[bernard]

Ahrefs shows wayyyy too many spam links

Yes and its a real issue now, but it didn't use to be like that, so I wonder what happened.

DR also seems like it hasn't budged in a while, so I wonder if they're having some issues.

Not the best start for their steep price increase.

It's there for the taking, good thing I chose monthly instead of the yearly I had before.

 

[Davin]

I know new sites that find low-comp kw are sitting ducks for higher authority sites that are using tools that find low-authority sites ranking in the serps.

Would it be worth purchasing a domain rating boost service to get off the radar of tools that show low DR/DA?

Assuming there is a risk in doing so..?

 

[secretagentdad]

No. Absolutely not. What a goofy plan.
Don’t do it. You’re basically just neg seoing yourself.

 

[harrytwatter]

Have tested, can confirm in the short term it adds nothing and in the long term it will likely tank your site. The reason is the links these folks use for "boosting" are always trash.. either worthless web 2.0s and university profiles or ccTLD Google search query redirects.

It's better to have a low RD count but consisting of QUALITY links than it is to have a high RD count with low-quality links.

 

[Davin]

I've been confused on neg seo. As some people say G just ignores bad links.. otherwise everyone would be spamming their comp to boost their own ranking (even dont really need to disavow anymore?). What do you make of neg seo? Is it possible then someone could buy these packages and drop their competition (not doing.. just throwing it out there to understand better)

 

[Ryuzaki]

I've been confused on neg seo. As some people say G just ignores bad links.. otherwise everyone would be spamming their comp to boost their own ranking (even dont really need to disavow anymore?). What do you make of neg seo? Is it possible then someone could buy these packages and drop their competition (not doing.. just throwing it out there to understand better)

My opinion veers from some of what's been said already. I don't think these links harm you or benefit you in terms of Google ranking. Google ignores them all. Ahrefs doesn't, which is a travesty after all this time.

The links are crap like:

• Exit Redirects from every local Google site
• Exit Redirects from any site using certain self-hosted ad placement software
• Profiles on forums and self-register sites
• Sub-domains links (Ahrefs still counts the parent domain's DR score)

Find a single one of these links indexed in Google, you know. You can't. Ahrefs wouldn't even find them if they weren't dropping them all on a single page and then getting Ahrefs to crawl it.

Everyone with weak sites are asking about it to protect their keywords, but that's not why it's being used. Two reasons it's being used: 1) to scam dumb link buyers and 2) to make such a mess of your own backlink profile that it's time-intensive for anyone who wants to dig through it and find the real links and interfere with them or whatever may happen.

A legit DR60 site that gets targeted by competitors may buy one of these DR boosting packages that would have pumped them to a DR50. In this case it does nothing to their DR score, it just prohibits bad guys from plundering their backlink data. If you're buying links and you see this kind of crap going on, you just need to take the time to verify there's real links and that they're validated by their traffic. There's comfy thresholds that can help you figure it out much quicker, but I won't go there.

It won't protect you from having your keywords taken though. If I'm plundering keywords, I don't care what your DR score is. I care what your niche is and if it matches mine. If it matches, I know you likely have some keyword I'm interested in that's of the appropriate competition level for me or lower. Nothing will save you from this, because it's simply not how it works. DR50 sites rank for KD10 and less keywords all the time, the same as a DR10 site does.

But back to negative SEO. Google is very good at ignoring nearly everything, including PBN links now. They don't sling penalties left and right any more, they just let you waste your time and money as they ignore the links. They don't even deindex the PBN sites like they used to. They just flag them for "ignore" and let everyone keep guessing.

I haven't seen a legitimate manual penalty in a loooong time. I saw one a few days ago though, and it was especially egregious. It was a moron SEO who was doing a public case study on his blog who posted exactly which company he bought links from, linked to them, and then a couple months later acted surprised when he received a manual penalty.

Like I always say, Google only acts when you threaten them with embarrassment. As long as the public doesn't find out, Google will let so much crap slide. If you start drawing attention to something Google is doing wrong, they'll fix it with enough hooplah surrounding it. If you start drawing attention to how you're cheating the system and telling other SEO's, they'll be forced to drop the hammer.

But I'd say 99.9% of the time now, they're happy to ignore links and let everyone keep scurrying around doing silly stuff.

 

[secretagentdad]

My opinion veers from some of what's been said already. I don't think these links harm you or benefit you in terms of Google ranking. Google ignores them all.

But back to negative SEO. Google is very good at ignoring nearly everything, including PBN links now. They don't sling penalties left and right any more, they just let you waste your time and money as they ignore the links. They don't even deindex the PBN sites like they used to. They just flag them for "ignore" and let everyone keep guessing.

I haven't seen a legitimate manual penalty in a loooong time. I saw one a few days ago though, and it was especially egregious. It was a moron SEO who was doing a public case study on his blog who posted exactly which company he bought links from, linked to them, and then a couple months later acted surprised when he received a manual penalty.

Like I always say, Google only acts when you threaten them with embarrassment. As long as the public doesn't find out, Google will let so much crap slide. If you start drawing attention to something Google is doing wrong, they'll fix it with enough hooplah surrounding it. If you start drawing attention to how you're cheating the system and telling other SEO's, they'll be forced to drop the hammer.

But I'd say 99.9% of the time now, they're happy to ignore links and let everyone keep scurrying around doing silly stuff.

I’m reading this And thinking a lot.
I don’t want to disagree with you cuz you’re usually way more right about stuff like this than I am and you have some big some surrounding points that are relevant.

I think they do sneaky stuff with network effect and aren’t quite as good at ignoring spam as you think. I’ve lost some really big shit to assholes buying me links over the years. Ranked number 1 for water heater. Got some porn links and bots chucked at it Deranked in under a month.

Recently had really great organic inserts exposure ruined really by what appears to be some click fraud bots. Or google feeling weird. Or bad on page. Never totally sure.
Never bought a link for the site, grew the audience with word of mouth a lot of prominent google exposure and some really basic platform posting. Now it can barely rank its own brand name some days despite having a sick link profile.

Of course search console says no penalties.....

 

[Fat Harry White]

I get it.

I have a low DR niche site that punches above its weight due to meticulous KW research.

And the concern is the more powerful sites spot my rankings and steal all of them.

Buying DR boosters doesn't make sense IMO way to easy to self-harm.

But building manual, follow links from high DR sites that Ahrefs crawls, and lists in backlink reports does make sense to me.

Have a look for some high-quality, manual, high DR directories (eg - ontoplist.com), get a follow link from Reddit, and check other sites Ahrefs backlink reports for the type of links you are looking for.

One hour's work could get you from DR0 to DR20 if you do it right.

HARO can also work but I hate it and it can be slow.