a few weeks ago, a lot of people on here called Outrank a link farm

I was annoyed, but then I went and read every single reply

and some of it was fair

to get backlinks from our exchange, you had to host other people's links on your own site

and SEOs don't trust that kind of loop for good reason 👀

so for the last 8 weeks we've been building the opposite

you don't host a single link anymore

a real site writes a full article on its own blog with your link in it, and we pay that site in cash through Stripe, not credits

you can even get a listicle on a real blog with your product ranked #1

the hardest part was deciding who gets to sell

1,625 sites signed up but only 138 made it in

to qualify, a site needs:
- DR 30+
- 100+ clicks a month for at least 3 months
- Search Console connected, so we can see its real Google traffic

then it has to pass a content check, and 220 sites failed that one alone

since August we've done 222 placements

159 are live, and 158 of those are dofollow
the median time from order to published is 2.1 days

I care this much about "real" because ChatGPT and Perplexity cite the sites people actually read. nobody reads a PBN, so nobody cites one either

my bet is that AI search ends up rewarding fewer links from sites with real readers

http://outrank.so/backlinks