Quick eye test
Is your agency selling you empty links?
Submit 3 URLs from your last link-building report. I’ll tell you if those links are helping your domain or just inflating your metrics.
The most common traps
These are the patterns I see most often when a report looks healthy on paper and dead in practice.
Botted or irrelevant traffic
Sites ranking for inflated brand + industry keywords to fake Ahrefs traffic numbers. Some also rank for random porn, casino, or illegal medication keywords.
Empty DR
High domain rating bought for $50 on Fiverr. Looks fine on a spreadsheet. Carries zero actual authority or link power.
Orphaned pages
Placements sitting on pages the internal link structure skips over. Google struggles to find them, so it struggles to value them. Often buried deep in the site structure, a dozen clicks from the homepage.
Proof of work
Placements on pages with real traffic.
A homepage logo proves nothing on its own. What matters is whether the exact page holding the link lives, gets crawled, and brings in search traffic.
| Domain | DR | Page US traffic/mo |
|---|---|---|
| surferseo.com | 84 | 2,900+ |
| storychief.io | 74 | 1,500+ |
| zeeg.me | 80 | 1,100+ |
| superside.com | 78 | 98+ |
| zenbusiness.com | 84 | 92+ |
| certifyme.online | 48 | 242+ |
| bwea.com | 56 | 173+ |
iThese are linking page traffic numbers, the specific URL the link appears on. Domain-level traffic is usually orders of magnitude higher.
Numbers I work to
From six years of client campaigns, not from a vendor deck.
500 → 1links from one domain still count as a single referring domain
5 to 15quality placements a month; faster is a red flag, not progress
15 to 20%the response rate I budget for on cold outreach
40 to 50backlinks on a well-established homepage, as a baseline
I would rather see 40 backlinks from 35 different site owners than 400 repeating across the same domains.
On reading a competitor's link profile · the gap analysis →
Services
You can bring me in for one blunt review or ongoing work.
The goal is simple: fewer vanity metrics, better placements, and content that keeps earning its place.
Post-contractor audit
500 PLN
Blunt assessment of your current backlink profile. I tell you what your previous agency or freelancer did versus what they charged for.
Link building
quote on request
Targeting websites with real organic traffic. I approve each placement myself based on your requirements and my own know-how, or I work from your list of desirable pages.
SEO content
quote on request
Written for tech brands. Many of these articles still hold top 10 positions years after publication.
About
I can usually tell in one look whether a link is worth keeping.
Jan Suski
6 years building backlinks and SEO strategies for tech companies. One look at a URL is usually enough to tell if a link is an asset, a liability, or a waste of money.
And I can explain exactly why in plain terms, with real reasons and links you can check yourself.
What I check before a link goes in a report
Nine checks, run against the exact linking URL rather than the domain.
- Open the exact linking URL. Skip the homepage.
- Page-level traffic and the keywords driving it, filtered to that one URL.
- Indexation and cache date. A cache from months ago means Google barely crawls the page.
- Internal links pointing at that page from elsewhere on the site.
- The surrounding copy. Written for humans, or stitched together around an anchor.
- Outbound links on the domain, counted by volume and read by niche.
- Referring-to-linked domain ratio. I want around 3:1 or better.
- Shared IP or hosting with other referring domains, a common PBN signal.
- Traffic trend over time. A chart in freefall says more than the current snapshot.
None of this takes more than a few minutes per link. the full checklist →
Real work
Manual vetting, real editorial relationships, and pages that make sense for the brand they link to.
Data over decoration
I care about page-level traffic, crawlability, internal links, and whether the placement can carry weight.
Experience that holds up
From backlink profiles to ghostwritten SEO articles, the goal is the same: work that still looks good months and years later.
How I read a placement offer
Two real offers. A DR floor picks the wrong one.
The common read
DR 85 with 5,000 visits a month beats DR 10 with 500. Buy the first one.
What the page said
The DR 85 page carried 50,000 outgoing linked domains, sat deep in the site and pulled no traffic of its own. I took the DR 10.
DR is one number: link equity. Legitimacy, traffic and trust live in the page-level checks. why DR misleads →
Published writing
Work I've published on major platforms.
Original research, deep technical work, and tools for teams building link profiles and SEO strategies.
vivianagency.com
Influencer Whitelisting & Usage Rights: What Brands Are Paying for
surferseo.comIs ChatGPT a Search Engine? What it Means for your SEO Strategy
surferseo.comBLUF for SEO: How to Write Content AI Crawlers Can Use
marketintelligencetools.comPositive Surfer Review (2026): Pricing, Content Editor and AI Visibility
Straight answers
The questions clients ask before they hire me.
Short versions here. Each one links to the post where I show the working.
How many backlinks do I need to rank?
A well-established homepage typically carries 40 to 50. A single page competing for a specific keyword might need anywhere from 0 to 100+, depending on how contested that keyword is. run the link gap properly →
How many links can I take from one website?
Two or three placements, spread across different pages over time, read as normal editorial behaviour. Ten or twenty landing in a single month read as exactly what they are. 500 links from one domain still count as one referring domain. referring domains vs raw backlinks →
Is a low Keyword Difficulty score good news?
Not reliably. A KD of 0 can be ten established domains that haven't turned over in years. A KD of 70 can be nine pages with almost no backlinks pointing at them. why KD scores lie →
Should I disavow my toxic backlinks?
Ask the site owner to remove the link first. Disavow is the last resort. I've seen accounts kill legitimate links by disavowing their whole referring-domain list after one scare, and the file takes 1 to 3 weeks to process. removal before disavow →
What response rate should cold outreach get?
I budget 15 to 20% and treat anything above it as a good month. One follow-up, sometimes two, spaced a week apart. I stopped sending a third entirely, because it does more harm than good. the outreach process →
Which competitors should I pull backlinks from?
The URLs sitting in positions 1 to 10 for your money keyword, not the competitor set from a slide three years ago. Page-level competitors, not domain-level. finding the real gap →
Contact
Need a blunt second opinion?
If you want me to review a backlink profile, clean up past work, or build something better from scratch, send the basics. Name, email, target URL if there is one, and what is going on.
Check three things before you write
Ten minutes with the free tools answers most of what I would ask you anyway. Bring the output and I skip to the useful part.
- Score one placement from your last link report against the nine checks. backlink quality scorer
- Paste your anchor list and see whether the mix reads earned or engineered. anchor text scorer
- Check when Google last crawled the page your link sits on. page freshness checker
All three run in your browser. Nothing is stored, logged for marketing, or shared.