Link building, partnerships, and SEO ops

We do not write about spam automation, and we do not build for it. That means no guides to blasting thousands of unsolicited emails from rotating domains, no tactics that depend on hiding who you are, and nothing about building networks of sites whose only purpose is selling links. Partly this is a values position. Mostly it is that those tactics have a poor and worsening return, and writing about them would mean pretending otherwise.

What we do write about is outreach that a real person reviews before it sends, from a mailbox that belongs to you, where the recipient can tell who is asking and why, and where somebody who asks to be left alone is actually left alone. That last point is worth stating as a rule rather than a preference: a removal request that only applies to the current campaign is not a removal request.

We also try to be careful about the difference between what we have tested and what we have only read. If a post describes how a competitor's tool behaves based on their documentation, it will say so rather than implying we ran it. That distinction gets blurred constantly in software comparisons, and once you notice it you cannot unsee how much of the category writing is built on vendor pages rather than usage.

One consequence of all this is that some obvious posts are missing. There is no ultimate guide to link building here, because that page exists a thousand times over and adding one more would be filling space. If a topic is already well covered elsewhere and we have nothing specific to add, the honest move is to not write it.