Saw a local bakery's site drop off after a guest post swap

I was at a coffee shop in Austin last week and overheard the owner saying her traffic fell by half after she traded a guest post with some food blog. She didn't check the blog's domain history, turns out it got hammered by a spam penalty the month before. Anyone else gotten burned by a link partner who looked fine on the surface but had hidden baggage?

1 comments

Log in to join the discussion

Log In

1 Comment

the_jana17d ago

Oh man this hits home. I did a link swap with a "lifestyle" blog two years ago that looked totally clean, nice design, decent socials, the whole thing. Found out later the guy had been buying links for years and got hit with a manual action like a week after we traded. My rankings tanked for months and I basically had to beg Google to reconsider. Now I run every single domain through a backlink checker before I even reply to their email, and I check the domain history too. That part takes like five minutes and saves you a whole year of pain.

3