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I think SEO blogs cooked my brain
Posted by on February 4, 2026 at 9:47 pmI think my entire SEO belief system just collapsed.
I no longer believe in “content is king”, and I am starting to suspect SEO blogs or SEO Gurus are either oversimplifying or straight-up gaslighting people with the whole “bad backlinks will hurt your site” narrative.
My competitors rank with some of the ugliest backlink profiles you can imagine. Backlinks coming straight out of an Osama bin Laden fan forums , Spammy domains, random languages, anchors that look auto-generated. Nothing happens. No penalties. Nothing. Nada.
Meanwhile SEO blogs make it sound like one bad link will nuke your site forever.
At this point, it feels like:
- Google mostly ignores bad links
- Content alone does not move the needle
- Links (even messy ones) and authority matter more than perfect blog posts
Not saying people should do trash SEO, but the gap between what ranks and what SEO blogs preach is getting hard to ignore.
Anyone else seeing this in real projects?
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1 Reply
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It’s long been known that bad backlinks are ignored by Google, otherwise you’d just pay for bad links to be placed on your competitors.
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Every link is valuable buddy. Every single one. Be it social media, sponsored , no follow, whatever. Its all a bit murky in the SEO land. With all sorts of content here and there. Focus on the basics. If you want to know about link building, go back to the great link linkmoses.
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Never listen to anyone who calls themself a guru.
It’s always good to have an paradigm shift on occasion.
You are correct. Google does for the most part ignore certain links that could be manipulative. Sometimes just one or two good links to make a difference. Content isn’t everything, but it is what people read and machines use for relevance.
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If SEO experts really knew how to crack the code? They’d be too busy counting their money to bother sharing their secrets.
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>oversimplifying or straight-up gaslighting people
they are often doing both, and some are so dumb they do it simply because they don’t know what they don’t know
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Welcome to the Matrix of truth. Now that your eyes are open start listening and think for yourself. You’re now in the good fight against SEO myths
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the gap between what seo blogs preach and what actually ranks is massive, and i think it’s because they need to sell you something or get clicks
this is what i did building zignalify, i’ve looked at thousands of google search console datasets and the pattern is pretty clear: google’s algorithm is way more forgiving than the blog content makes it sound. bad links? they’re just noise to google most of the time. one spammy backlink won’t tank you because google’s literally filtering that stuff out constantly
what actually moves the needle is domain authority and relevance, yeah. but here’s the thing people miss: you still need decent content because it’s the vehicle for authority signals. it’s not either/or, it’s just that content alone without authority is basically invisible 🙂
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Sometimes I wonder if these strawman tips mentioned come up bc SEO bloggers are running out of things to write about, so they invent something. I mean, hey- it gets the attention.
As far as content alone does not move the needle: I spent thousands of dollars on content writing for my first big project some years ago, $0 on link building. Needless to say, that that translated into zeros of sales. Hard lesson learned.
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“Osama bin laden fan forums”
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>Google mostly ignores bad links
This is true
>Content alone does not move the needle
Ignoring AI developments of that last few years, think of how hard it would be to judge content for every subject on Earth with an algorithm? It’s basically close to impossible to accurately judge content in an automated fashion.
What is possible is to determine relevance, breadth, and detail, spam patterns, whether that are loads of ads, use of dark patterns, duplication, readability scores, freshness, consistency, etc., but that is not truly the content itself.
That’s why backlinks as used a proxy: pages which other pages are naturally linking to all the time are assumed to be important for whatever the topic is. This is similar to how academia works with works cited. With scientific papers, being cited is incredibly desirable, just like being linked to, but not being cited doesn’t actually mean the paper is not important or of poor quality. Web pages suffer the same problem, and so Google *tries* to remedy this.
>Links (even messy ones) and authority matter more than perfect blog posts
Once you’ve passed a certain level of quality control (content, technical, speed, etc.), backlinks (basically authority) and other signals (e.g. user engagement) are going to be more influential if you’re competing with other websites for the same keywords.
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Bro SEO is a pain in the ass. I hate it too. I’ve found out that if you have a community you can easily use and reshare your user content. E.g: if someone in your community asked about a specific stuff, you can build a content upon that.
I acutally use comly to do it automatically so I don’t have to waste time.
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That’s because there’s easier money to be made in identifying and removing spammy links. The necessary hard work can’t be monetized at scale.
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I already knew all this, there are people who believe what Google says and people who do what works
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