Bill Hartzer

Got a few copies of my books today.

I downloaded twenty years of my own backlink data and ran a survival analysis on it. 1,301,839 links. 22,260 referring domains. Not one of them bought (I don't pay for links). Three things came out that I did not expect. First: the median referring domain stops linking after 1,080 days. Just under three years. Half of everything I have ever earned is already gone. That is not a failure — it is what links do. But it means a link building program that stops is not a program that plateaus. It reverses. Second: links from strong domains last about four times longer than links from weak ones. @Majestic Trust Flow 61+ domains hold a link for a median of 9.2 years. Trust Flow 0 domains manage 2.4. We price links on the authority they pass today and completely ignore how long they will exist. Cheap links are cheap twice over. Third, and this is the one that changed how I think about reclamation: 97.4% of my lost links disappeared while the source page was still perfectly reachable. Four links out of 645,202 were lost to a 404. Links do not die because pages die. They die because someone edited the page, or redesigned the site, or migrated the CMS. The page is still there. The editor is still there. That is a warm prospect, not a dead one — and it means monitoring for 404s to catch link loss catches essentially nothing. Full case study, including the parts where I found broken links on my own site: advancedlinktraining.com/cas…

After 20 plus years of doing SEO, I thought I’d give back to the community. I’ve created Advanced Link Training advancedlinktraining.com which is 50 link building lessons across 9 different Modules. All for free. No signups, I don’t collect your email. Just free.

The SEO industry may be entering another familiar cycle. This time, instead of companies buying backlinks to manipulate traditional search rankings, marketers are beginning to experiment with buying brand mentions intended to influence AI-generated responses in Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and other large language model systems. At the Search Central Live Shanghai 2026 event on May 15th, Gary Illyes from Google reportedly warned against buying or manipulating brand mentions for the purpose of appearing in AI-generated answers and AI search experiences. Why Paid AI Mentions Could Become the Next Google Penalty billhartzer.com/seo/paid-ai-…

Link sellers are getting desperate. Has anyone else noticed that the link sellers are getting desperate and just creating huge sites with tons of outgoing links? They’ll hope you notice the influx of new low quality links to your site and contact them. At least that’s what it seems like they’re doing. I’m noticing this across multiple sites and multiple industries. Even clients are noticing it, asking if they should disable those links or not. I’ve looked at a bunch of these sites using @Majestic link graph that shows multiple tiers of links. It appears that it’s mostly PBNs that these link seller are creating. And no, I wouldn’t bother disavowing them. It’s just rather annoying to see them show up when you’re trying to analyze a link profile. As for getting desperate, I’ve seen various tactics like this, like one agency doing google analytics referrer spam several years ago. It’s not marketing, it’s just someone getting desperate.

Wow, they’re adding protein into everything nowadays.