Introduction
This site is educational. Everything on it is written to teach a discipline, not to advise you on your particular situation. Before you act on any of it, there are several things I would rather state plainly than bury.
This is education, not advice
Reading this site does not create a client relationship, a professional engagement or any duty on my part toward your business. Nothing here is legal, financial, tax or regulatory advice. Several subjects the course touches — disclosure of paid arrangements, advertising claims in regulated professions, contracts with vendors — have real legal dimensions that vary by jurisdiction and by industry. Where a page notes a possible compliance question, that is a prompt to ask a qualified professional rather than a substitute for asking one.
Where the numbers come from
The figures cited throughout this course come from an analysis of link data for my own properties, principally Hartzer.com, measured in Majestic: 1,301,839 links from 22,260 referring domains, on a profile where no link was ever bought.
That last characteristic is what makes the data worth publishing and also what limits it. It is one profile, in one industry, built over roughly twenty years by one person with an unusual publishing history. It is not a study, not a sample of the web, and not a benchmark your own site is failing to meet. When it shows that the median referring domain stops linking after about 1,080 days, or that 69.3 percent of those referring domains are Trust Flow 0, the right reading is "here is a mechanism, demonstrated on a real profile" — not "here is a law of the web." Your profile may differ substantially and still be perfectly healthy. Where the patterns match what I have seen on other sites I say so; where I only have my own data, I say that too, and one profile is never a general law.
Search behavior and guidelines change
Google revises its guidelines, tightens or relaxes enforcement, and occasionally changes how an entire class of link is treated. Searcher behavior moves too, and a growing share of it now runs through interfaces that summarize rather than list. Everything here describes mechanisms as they operated at the time of writing. There will always be a gap between what has changed and what has been updated on this site, and during that gap some page here is wrong. If you find one, tell me through the contact page.
The risk grades are judgments with a date on them
Every risk grade — safe, situational, high risk, obsolete — is my assessment of a mechanism at a point in time, not a certification. A tactic graded situational today could be reclassified after a single policy update. A tactic graded safe can still hurt you if it is executed carelessly or pushed to a volume nobody would call natural. Treat every grade as informed opinion with a date on it, and read it alongside the reasoning on the profile, which is published precisely so you can argue with the conclusion rather than take it on trust.
No outcome is guaranteed
Nothing on this site promises a ranking, a link, a volume of traffic or a revenue result. Link building is one input among many, its effects are delayed and partial, and its results depend on your market, your competitors, your existing profile and a great deal you do not control. Any specific outcome mentioned anywhere here describes something that happened in a particular situation, not something you should expect. You decide what to do with your own site, and the consequences of running a campaign, hiring a vendor, buying a placement or uploading a disavow file are yours.
My commercial interests, stated plainly
I am not a disinterested party and it would be dishonest to present this site as though I were. Three disclosures:
- I have been a Majestic Brand Ambassador for over fifteen years. Majestic maintains one of the two large independent maps of the web's link graph, and this site cites Majestic data heavily — the entire evidence base above comes from it, and Trust Flow, Citation Flow and Topical Trust Flow appear throughout the course as working concepts rather than as one vendor's proprietary metrics among several. That is a relationship a reasonable person would want to know about before weighing my opinion of Majestic's data, so here it is, in the open, rather than in a footnote. The reason I use that data is that I have had access to link data at scale, continuously, for longer than most link building agencies have existed. You should still read every Majestic figure on this site knowing the connection exists, and the guides make a point of explaining what the competing vendors' metrics do differently and where each of them, Majestic included, cannot see.
- I founded Hartzer Consulting, which does SEO consulting, link profile audits and expert witness work — some of the same work the hiring section teaches you to buy. That section is written as buyer education, it names no vendors including mine, and Hartzer Consulting is mentioned once on the hiring index where the conflict is relevant and nowhere else on the site.
- I founded DNAccess, which handles domain name recovery and related work. Domain names come up in the course where they bear on links — expired domains, redirects, domain history — and that interest exists whether or not it changes anything I wrote.
Nobody has paid for placement
No vendor, tool, agency, marketplace or publisher named anywhere on this site has paid to be included, ranked, described favorably, or left out. There are no affiliate links, no sponsored sections, no paid reviews and no arrangements of any kind behind the tool comparisons, the tactic grades or the guides. Where a tool is named, it is named because it is the one practitioners use for that job. Where a tactic is graded high risk, it is graded that way despite being sold commercially by real companies, and none of those companies were consulted or compensated.
The reason to state this is not modesty. A site that grades thirty-four tactics and discusses what vendors charge is exactly the kind of site where money usually changes hands invisibly, and the only defense against the suspicion is to say so directly and to keep it true.