ok I saw that thread about price ranges and honestly it made me think of how crazy the pricing has gotten. Like back in like maybe 2003-2004 when I started, you could buy a basic guest post link for like $50 tops and these were on legit hobby blogs not pbn nonsense. Today people charge $300+ for what looks exactly the same but with inflated metrics from some tool and ymmv huge variance.
The thing is the quality tiers used to be simple: article placement vs homepage link vs directory whatever. Now there are like seven layers: niche edit, portal inclusion, featured article, sidebar widget it feels stupid. Everyone is just making up new terms to justify higher prices because they know buyers want keywords spread out.
I remember buying direct wp blog admin access for $100 flat so I could put up my own posts without any outreach btw those sites were totally real with genuine traffic not fake ahrefs numbers. That was the sweet spot before pbns got popular around 2010-ish. After that everything turned into tiered packages where you have to buy bundles even if you only need one good link.
Anyway my take is that white hat vs black hat debate doesn't really apply anymore to purchased links because most sellers operate in gray area where they control editorial but pretend its organic acquisition which is silly lol if you pay money it's paid period no matter how many emails they send during process.
The thing is the quality tiers used to be simple: article placement vs homepage link vs directory whatever. Now there are like seven layers: niche edit, portal inclusion, featured article, sidebar widget it feels stupid. Everyone is just making up new terms to justify higher prices because they know buyers want keywords spread out.
I remember buying direct wp blog admin access for $100 flat so I could put up my own posts without any outreach btw those sites were totally real with genuine traffic not fake ahrefs numbers. That was the sweet spot before pbns got popular around 2010-ish. After that everything turned into tiered packages where you have to buy bundles even if you only need one good link.
Anyway my take is that white hat vs black hat debate doesn't really apply anymore to purchased links because most sellers operate in gray area where they control editorial but pretend its organic acquisition which is silly lol if you pay money it's paid period no matter how many emails they send during process.