The Difference Between Good Backlinks and Bad Backlinks - Episode 37

Author: Grumpy SEO Guy | Published: 2024-01-03 | Source: transcript (32:00, 3.1K views at ingest)

Summary

This January 2024 podcast is the wiki’s first independent, non-Caleb source on backlink types (as opposed to local-authority tactics). Grumpy SEO Guy — a 14-year agency operator — opens with a standing thesis that content is not king; authority is king, and authority comes from backlinks from authoritative sites. He attributes the opposite view to “basically every SEO course,” and treats that disagreement as the foundation of the series.

His primary filter is quality over quantity. One high-quality backlink will outrank thousands of spam links; packages selling hundreds or thousands of links for a few dollars are “literal trash” that will likely hurt you. The common puzzle (“my site has 10,000 backlinks but we’re outranked by a site with 500”) is resolved by quality, not count. This episode is about type, “irrespective of how much Authority a website has.”

He ranks types from worst to best. Blog-comment, forum-profile, footer, and blogroll links are all devalued because they can be automated or placed sitewide — “anything that can be automated will be devalued.” Comment and forum-profile links are so spammy he says they can be used for negative SEO. A single organic forum-profile URL is “totally fine”; using profiles as a ranking strategy is not. Footer and blogroll links were useful a decade ago (web-dev “designed by” footers; blogrolls inherited 1990s webrings) but were overused by spammers and now “might hurt you.” If a seller’s package is any of these four, don’t buy it.

Citation links (sources at the end of an article) are “pretty good”: topically relevant, one page, not sitewide. Contextual links — in the body, logically placed, related topic, relevant anchor text — are “by far the best,” and he says his agency only builds these for clients (see his episode 29 on anchor text).

Two exceptions override type. (1) A spammy, penalized, or link-farm site — or one that links to pharmacy, gambling, or adult — poisons even a perfect contextual link. (2) A super-authoritative domain (ibm.com) is worth taking even as a footer. Side caveat: paid “media” placements are worthless for SEO if the page never gets indexed. He downplays follow vs. nofollow for now (teased next episode).

Treat the ranking of link types as creator-opinion from a practitioner who sells link-building, not as Google documentation. He states the disclaimer himself: 14 years of experience, hypothetical, “what worked for me may or may not work for you.”

Key Claims

Authority is king, not content; authority comes from backlinks on authoritative sites. (Grumpy, series thesis)
Quality beats quantity: one good link outranks thousands of spam links; cheap bulk packages likely hurt.
Anything that can be automated will be devalued — his general SEO rule, applied here to comments and forum profiles.
Worst types: blog-comment, forum-profile, footer, and blogroll links — spammy, often sitewide, historically abused; can be used for negative SEO.
Better types: citation links (single-page, topically relevant) are “pretty good”; contextual in-content links are the best, and the only type he builds for clients.
Exception 1: spam / link-farm / penalized / toxic-neighborhood sites poison any link type, including perfect contextual.
Exception 2: a super-authoritative domain is worth taking even as a “bad” type (footer).
Unindexed pages pass no link value, regardless of domain fame; paid “media” links that never index are wasted SEO spend.
Follow vs. nofollow is deferred; “don’t worry too much” in this episode.

Notable quotes

“Content is not king. Authority is king, and authority comes from backlinks from authoritative websites.”

Why citable: The sharpest statement of a links-first philosophy in the wiki — the opposite pole from “just write great content,” and a useful contrast with both Caleb’s local-authority framing and Dooley’s “links are diminishing.”

“Anything that can be automated will be devalued.”

Why citable: A compact, testable rule that explains why he bins comments, profiles, footers, and blogrolls together — not “Google said so,” but “spammers scaled it.”

“If a page is not indexed, the links on that page have no value. It does not matter what domain they are on.”

Why citable: Practical due-diligence that survives the rest of the debate: domain prestige is irrelevant if the linking URL is not in the index.

Connections

Entities mentioned: Google, Reddit (his username/subreddit as a contact channel) · Grumpy SEO Guy (NEW), IBM (example) Concepts referenced: Local Link Building & Authority, Entity-Based SEO (contrast: he never uses entity language), Brand & User Signals as Ranking Drivers (contrast: he does not treat traffic as a ranking lever)

Contradictions / Tensions

vs. Caleb Ulku on what a “good” link is: both reject comment spam, footers, and bulk garbage, and both prefer editorial / in-content links. They diverge on the replacement: Grumpy still treats raw off-site authority (including buying contextual links, with PBN due diligence in ep. 39) as the ranking engine; Caleb wants local authority (chambers, sponsorships) plus cheap “not AI slop” links. Different markets (national/generic vs. Local SEO) and different products.
vs. James Dooley: Dooley, who owns link agencies, says traditional link-building is diminishing and PBNs/manipulated-DR links now harm. Grumpy is still teaching a buyer’s guide for good vs. bad backlinks in 2024 and will discuss PBNs as a normal tactic in part 2. Direct disagreement on how much links still matter.
vs. Caleb on “content is not king”: Caleb’s Core 30 is a content architecture (pages that declare entities). Grumpy’s slogan is about what ranks you (links), not “don’t publish pages.” Don’t flatten this into “Grumpy vs. content.”
Commercial bias: he builds contextual backlinks for clients and runs Patreon. The “only contextual links work” conclusion matches what he sells.

Notes

NEW entity (do not create this ingest): grumpy-seo-guy — 14-year SEO agency operator; podcast + r/grumpyseoguy + Patreon. Independent of the Caleb corpus; useful as a links-first counterweight.

Ahrefs is not named in this episode (it is in part 2). No watermarking, no topical-authority thesis. Companion: The Difference Between Good Backlinks and Bad Backlinks Part 2 - Episode 39.