First Published: 2020-05-18

I Tried Boosting SEO for My Blogs

I wrote a few articles that ranked high on news aggregators, but I'm not getting much traffic from Google for them.

After watching Blogging for business by Ahrefs I was psyched and wanted to give SEO a try. I was lead to understand that the remedy to my problem was increasing my domains' low ratings. I bought the 7 days for $7 Ahrefs trial and went to work.

I wanted to boost the Domain Ratings of these two domains:

Asking for backlinks

The way of SEO is asking for backlinks. The course even provided a convenient template for outreach:

I set aside one week for SEO and sent 20 emails each day. I mainly targeted people who linked to products similar to Syften that either offered less attractive functionality or were dead.

And all I got to show for it is this writeup.

I received a few replies, but most of them left me with a feeling of disgust. Here is an example:

This was the nicest reply I got:

Professional help

So I asked a professional for help. Here was his offer:

$200 for a backlink? It turns out that's actually cheap. Here is the price for a guest post in Forbes:

Seeing how corrupt and soul crushing the world of SEO is I can understand how they can justify the price.

Summary

Given the choice between spending vast amounts of time and money on doing things that bring no value to humanity whatsover and improving my product, I'll stick to the latter.

Here is to word of mouth!