Muhammad Ali

Off-Page SEO & Link Building Specialist
Guest posts · Niche edits · Digital PR · Local Citations
Backlinks that move rankings, not just reports

[Muhammad Ali @iamcreativeali]

A link report with 20 domains listed on it tells you nothing.

Domains are easy to type into a spreadsheet.

Live URLs are the only part of the report worth reading.

Five things to check, and it takes about twenty minutes a month.

Are the links clickable. If the report lists domain names rather than full URLs, ask why. There is no good reason to withhold the exact page your link is on.

Where does each link sit on the page. Open a few and search for your brand name. Body content is what you paid for. An author bio at the bottom is a different thing being reported identically.

Which of your pages does each link point to. Count how many go to the homepage versus the pages you actually need ranking. If it is 17 homepage links out of 20, the campaign is not doing what you hired it for.

What are the anchors. Look for the same commercial phrase repeated across placements. Natural profiles are messy. Brand names, URLs, half sentences.

Are the linking pages themselves indexed. Copy the URL into Google with site: in front of it. A page Google has not kept cannot pass anything to you.

The practical test is simpler than all of that. Ask your provider to send the live URLs for last month's links.

If they arrive the same day, someone is doing the work. If it takes a week and comes with explanation, you already have your answer.

[Muhammad Ali @iamcreativeali]

The most common way a link building campaign fails is not bad links.

It is good links pointed at the wrong pages.

Relevant sites, real traffic, contextual placements, and six months later the category pages have not moved.

Here is the usual explanation. Almost every link went to the root domain. Not deliberately. Homepages are simply easier to pitch. An editor will link to a brand naturally in a sentence and never has to be persuaded that a homepage deserves it. A deep link to a category page takes a reason.

So the easy yes gets taken, over and over, and the report looks healthy every month. Referring domains climbing, placements on sites anyone would be pleased to have earned.

Meanwhile the pages that needed the authority got almost none of it. The campaign optimised for the metric that was easy to hit rather than the outcome the client was paying for.

The fix is slower and less comfortable. Map every planned link to a specific target URL before any outreach goes out. Then decline placements that will only take a homepage mention, even when that means a lighter month.

Fewer links, pointed at the pages that need them.

A link report that looks good and a campaign that works are two different deliverables, and it is entirely possible to produce the first while failing at the second.

[Muhammad Ali @iamcreativeali]

Your competitor has 180 referring domains. You have 600.

They are on page one and you are not.

Link count was never the deciding variable.

Here is what usually explains it.

Their links are more relevant. Fewer links, but from sites whose readers are plausible customers. Twenty relevant domains outweigh a hundred that have nothing to do with the subject.

Their links point at the right pages. They earned links to the service page, the category page, the guide that actually ranks. Yours mostly point at the homepage, because homepage links are easier to get and easier to sell.

Their page matches the intent better. Someone searching a commercial term wants a page that lets them buy or compare. If they land on your blog post and bounce back to the results, no amount of authority fixes that mismatch.

Their site is fully indexed. Yours might not be. A page Google has crawled and declined to keep cannot rank regardless of what points at it.

And their content answers the question. Plainly, early on the page, without three scrolls of preamble.

So check things in this order. Indexation first, because nothing else matters if the page is not in the index. Then intent, whether your page type matches what the query is asking for. Then the content itself against the pages already ranking. Then which URLs your existing links point to.

Link count comes last. By the time you get there, you usually already know what the real problem was.

[Muhammad Ali @iamcreativeali]

Drop your domain in the comments.

I will look at your backlink profile and reply with one specific observation.

The biggest gap I can see between you and whoever is outranking you.

Not an audit PDF. Not a sales call. One real observation, written by me, in the reply.

First 15 domains only. No DMs afterwards, nothing follows this.

If you want the useful version, tell me the keyword or page you care about most. Vague domains get vague answers.

[Muhammad Ali @iamcreativeali]

Most link building sales calls are the provider asking you questions.

It should run the other way for at least ten minutes.

Five questions, and the answers tell you almost everything.

Can I see 10 live links you built in the last 90 days. Not a case study, not a screenshot of a report, actual URLs I can open. Anyone doing real work has these ready. If they cannot produce them, walk away.

How do you decide a site is good enough. If the whole answer is DA or DR, they are buying from the same brokers everyone else buys from, and you are paying a markup for it. Listen for traffic, topical fit, publishing patterns, who the audience actually is.

Will links point to my money pages or only my homepage. Homepage links are easier to get and easier to justify to an editor, which is why so many providers default to them. Ask how they plan to earn links to the pages that make you money.

What happens if a link gets removed. Sites go down, editors clean up old posts, owners change. A good provider replaces it. Ask whether that is written into the agreement or just a friendly assurance.

What would make you tell me not to hire you. Anyone who cannot name a single scenario is selling rather than consulting. Real answers exist. Indexation problems, a site with nothing worth linking to, a budget too small for the market they are in.

Ask all five on the first call and take notes on how quickly each answer comes. These five answers tell you more than any case study will.

[Muhammad Ali @iamcreativeali]

I work from Lahore, and for a long time I assumed that meant competing on price.

Not because anyone told me that. I just believed it.

So I quoted low, and I was surprised when people still hesitated.

The logic seemed obvious at the time. A client in the US or the UK can hire someone in their own city, in their own timezone, who they can meet for coffee. What do I have except a cheaper rate.

Looking back, the thing I was competing on was the thing that made me interchangeable. If price is your argument, there is always someone willing to go lower, and you meet them at the bottom.

What actually changed it was narrowing down. Once I was doing off-page and nothing else, the comparison stopped being Ali versus a freelancer in Chicago. It became someone who does link building all day versus someone who does a bit of everything and fits outreach in on Thursdays.

Geography stopped being the interesting variable. Depth was.

The practical side has not changed much. I still take calls at odd hours, still work around timezones that do not line up with mine, still write a lot of emails at night. That part is just the job.

What has changed is that nobody has asked me for a discount because of where I live in over a year. The conversation goes straight to the work.

If you are somewhere outside the markets you sell into, my honest suggestion is not to get cheaper. Get narrower. The narrower you get, the less your location has to do with anything.

[Muhammad Ali @iamcreativeali]

A DR 70 site can still be the wrong place for your link.

If its readers have no reason to care about what you sell, the number does not matter.

Relevance is not "we are both business websites".

Think about who reads the page your link sits on.

A payroll software company gets a link from a blog for small business owners. The reader runs a company, pays people every month, and is the exact person who might buy. That link makes sense to a human, and it makes sense to Google.

The same company gets a link from a travel blog. Both sites are professionally run, both have traffic, both might have similar authority scores. But nobody reading about hotels in Lisbon is in the market for payroll software. The link is decoration.

A local roofing company gets a link from a regional home improvement site. Right topic, right area, readers who own houses. That is a real signal.

The same roofer gets a link from a general news aggregator that publishes anything. High DR, huge traffic, and no reader who was thinking about their roof.

An eCommerce brand selling running shoes belongs on running blogs, race event sites and fitness publications. It does not belong on a personal finance site, even a good one.

Relevance can be looser than exact niche. Adjacent works. A running shoe brand on a sports nutrition site is fine because the audience overlaps.

The test you can apply without any SEO knowledge is this. Read the article your link would go in, picture the person who chose to read it, and ask whether that person could ever become your customer. If the answer takes explaining, the link is not relevant.

[Muhammad Ali @iamcreativeali]

The problem with "10,000 backlinks for $50" is not that they fail to deliver.

It is that they deliver.

The links appear, they are real URLs, and they are pointing at you.

Here is the mechanism. Those links come from a network that also points at thousands of other buyers. Same hosting, same templates, same footer patterns, same posting behaviour, same set of outbound targets. Your site joins a group of sites that all look identical from the outside.

That group is not hard to identify. Once it is identified, everything in it gets treated the same way.

The anchor text makes it worse. A seller working from a spreadsheet has no idea which of your pages needs what. So you end up with the same commercial anchor repeated hundreds of times, in a ratio no site earns naturally.

What follows is usually not a manual action. Manual penalties are comparatively rare and at least they come with a notification and a path to fix them.

The common outcome is quieter. The links get discounted to nothing. You paid for 10,000 votes and received zero, and the pattern stays attached to your domain for years while you wonder why nothing you do afterwards seems to move.

If you have already bought a package, start by pulling the full referring domain list and separating what you bought from what you earned. Look at your anchor text distribution and see how skewed it actually is. Disavow the obvious network domains, not everything cheap, and then leave it alone.

The recovery is slow and it comes mostly from building a real profile on top of the old one.

[Muhammad Ali @iamcreativeali]

A guest post starts a page from zero.

A niche edit puts your link on a page that already ranks and already has links pointing at it.

That difference decides which one you should be buying.

Niche edits go into content Google indexed months or years ago. The page has crawl history, it has its own backlinks, and it usually sits somewhere in the results already. Your link inherits that. It tends to get picked up faster because Google is already returning to that URL on a schedule.

The trade is control. You are asking an editor to add a sentence to something someone else wrote. You get the anchor you negotiate and the paragraph they allow, and the surrounding content is fixed.

Guest posts give you the opposite. You write the piece, so you decide the topic, the depth, the internal context around the link and where in the article it sits. Nothing constrains the anchor except what reads naturally.

The cost is time. A brand new URL has no history, so it can sit unindexed for weeks, and it has no links of its own until it earns some.

So the choice comes down to what you need. Speed and existing authority, go for a niche edit on a page that genuinely ranks for something related. Control over the message, or a publisher you want an ongoing relationship with, write the guest post.

In practice I run both. Niche edits for momentum on pages already performing, guest posts on the five or six sites worth being a regular contributor to. Check the host page's own traffic before agreeing to any edit. A link on a page nobody visits is a link on a page nobody visits, no matter how old it is.

[Muhammad Ali @iamcreativeali]

Most guest post pitches read like this.

"Hi, I'd love to write a guest post for your blog. Here are 5 topic ideas. Let me know."

That email asks the editor to do all the work.

They have to evaluate whether you can write, pick which of your five ideas fits their site, decide if any of them duplicate what they already published, then reply and start managing a stranger. All of that for someone they have never heard of.

The version that gets replies does the work first.

Name a specific article on their site and say what stood out about it. Not flattery, a real reason. It proves you opened the site.

Propose one topic. One. Five ideas signals you have no view on what their site needs and you are hoping something sticks.

Explain the gap it fills. They have a piece on the broad topic but nothing on the specific case. They covered the what and never the how. Say which of their posts you would link it to.

Include one link to something you have written. One. Enough for them to judge the writing in thirty seconds.

End with a question they can answer yes or no. Not "let me know your thoughts". Something like "want me to send a draft".

The whole email fits in a phone screen.

Outreach is not a volume problem. It is an empathy problem. You are writing to someone with 200 unread emails and no reason to care about you yet, so the pitch has to be worth the ninety seconds it costs them to read it.

[Muhammad Ali @iamcreativeali]

For years I said yes to everything.

Websites, WordPress builds, on-page audits, whatever the client had a problem with. I called it being versatile.

Looking back, it was mostly fear of turning work away.

The advice you hear is not to niche down too early. There is something to it. You do need a few years of touching everything to know what you actually like.

The problem I ran into was the other one. I stayed broad long enough that I was never the obvious choice for anything.

People would ask me what I do and I would give a paragraph. A paragraph is a bad answer. Nobody remembers you for a paragraph, and nobody refers you for one either.

Off-page was the part I kept coming back to anyway. Outreach, finding the sites worth pitching, working out why one editor replies and ten don't. It is slow and it is unglamorous and most of it is email. I liked it more than any of the rest.

So I stopped listing the other things. The list was doing me no favours.

What changed was not the volume of work at first. It was the kind of conversation. People started coming to me already knowing what they wanted from me, which meant the call was about the work instead of about whether I was the right person.

I think the fear of narrowing down is really a fear of being findable. Once you say clearly what you do, people can tell whether they want it. Staying vague spares you that, and it costs you more than it saves.

[Muhammad Ali @iamcreativeali]

Ten thousand backlinks from twelve domains is twelve votes.

The other 9,988 are the same twelve sites repeating themselves.

That number still shows up at the top of pitch decks, because it is the bigger one.

Here is where the inflation comes from. A footer link on a site with 8,000 pages counts as 8,000 backlinks in most tools. Same for a sidebar link, a blogroll link, a widget link. One placement, one decision by one publisher, thousands of rows in the report.

Referring domains counts how many separate sites decided to link to you. That is the number closer to what Google is actually weighing. Each new domain is a fresh source. The tenth link from a domain you already have adds far less than the first link from one you don't.

This is why the two numbers drift apart so badly on cheap campaigns. Site-wide placements are easy to buy in bulk and they move the total backlink count fast. Referring domains barely shift.

When an agency leads with total backlinks, it is usually because referring domains tells a duller story. Ask for both. Ask for the ratio.

A campaign with 40 referring domains and 55 total links is doing outreach. A campaign with 40 referring domains and 200,000 total links is buying footers.

Check referring domains first, then check how many of those domains are new since the campaign started. That second number is the one that tells you whether anyone is actually pitching sites on your behalf.

[Muhammad Ali @iamcreativeali]

Domain Authority is a Moz metric.

Google has never used it.

DR is the same thing from Ahrefs, built with different data and the same limitation.

Both are third-party predictions of how well a site might rank. They are guesses about ranking ability, produced by companies with no access to Google's systems. A number that predicts an outcome is not a measure of that outcome.

The problem starts when a score becomes the buying criterion. Metrics that can be predicted can be gamed, and a whole market exists to game them.

So you end up buying from sites that inflated their numbers on purpose. Sites that sell to anyone with a budget. Sites with no readers, no returning audience, no reason anyone would visit them except to place a link.

Those sites also carry a footprint. The same domain sits in hundreds of other clients' link profiles, all pointing at commercial pages, all acquired the same way.

The link looks fine in the monthly report. The row says DA 58 and the client sees a number going up. Nothing moves, because nothing real happened.

I would rather ask three questions than read a score.

Does the site have actual readers, meaning organic traffic spread across many pages and some sign that people return to it.

Does it publish content someone made an effort on, with a real editorial process behind it.

Would you be pleased to see your brand mentioned there if the link were removed entirely.

If a site fails that last one, the link is not worth having regardless of what the score says. Run those three checks before you look at any metric, and most of the bad options remove themselves.

[Muhammad Ali @iamcreativeali]

Every link that goes on a client site clears seven checks first.

DR is not one of them.

Here is what I actually look at before I approve a placement.

Topical relevance. The site should already write about the subject the link sits inside. A link from a general lifestyle blog into a B2B software page is a mismatch no metric can fix.

Real organic traffic. I want to see search visibility across a range of pages, not one viral post carrying the whole domain. Traffic tells you people find the site. DA and DR only tell you other links point at it.

Outbound link patterns. If every post links out to a different unrelated industry, that site is a placement service with a blog attached.

Indexation. If the page my link lands on never gets indexed, the link does nothing. I check whether the site's existing posts are actually in the index before I commit.

Editorial standards. Does someone read submissions and push back on them? Sites that publish anything sent to them attract the kind of neighbours you do not want.

Placement in the page. A link inside body content, surrounded by relevant writing, sits differently to one buried in an author bio under a filler post.

Whether they openly sell links. If the site advertises paid placements on a public page, that page is visible to everyone, including the people writing spam detection systems.

A site can be DR 65 and fail five of these. A site can be DR 22 and pass all seven. I take the second one every time.

[Muhammad Ali @iamcreativeali]

I used to call myself an SEO consultant.

That title told clients nothing about what they were buying.

One person heard technical audits. Another heard content strategy. Another heard local map rankings. I spent the first half of every call correcting whatever picture was already in their head.

So I narrowed it down. Off-page SEO and link building. Guest posts, niche edits, blogger outreach, digital PR. Real outreach to real sites, no PBNs and no guaranteed rankings.

Narrowing cost me work. The people who wanted one person to handle everything stopped calling. That was the trade.

The clients I get now already know what they need. Their content is solid, their technical setup is fine, and growth has flattened. They can see the gap sitting in their backlink profile. They read what I do and decide in a few seconds whether I am the right call.

That filtering is worth more than the volume I lost.

I think this applies to most people selling a service. A broad title feels safer because it keeps every door open. It also leaves a stranger with no way to tell whether you solve their specific problem.

Here is what I will be writing about from now on. How links actually get acquired. The outreach that gets replies and the outreach that gets ignored. How I qualify a site before I pitch it. The slow, unglamorous parts most people skip.

If someone reads your title today, do they know whether to contact you?

[Muhammad Ali @iamcreativeali]

Two guest posts. Same site. Same DR. Same month.

One link in the author bio. One link in paragraph three, wrapped in relevant copy.

Not the same link. Not even close. And the difference is bigger than most guest-post sellers admit.

Here's what separates them.

Context.
An in-content link lives inside the topic. Google reads the words around it and understands what the page is about.

A bio link sits under "Ali is an SEO consultant based in Lahore", which tells Google nothing about the page you're trying to rank.

Position.
Links near the top of a page carry more weight than links buried at the bottom. Bio links are bottom-of-page by definition, inside a section built for the author, not the reader.

Site-wide patterns.
Every guest author gets a bio link. Google sees the template: identical placement, repeated hundreds of times, often pointing to commercial pages. That's an easy pattern to spot, and an easy one to discount.

Clicks.
The part everyone forgets. In-content links get clicked because they show up at the moment the reader cares. Bio links rarely get clicked at all. No clicks means no traffic value, regardless of what it does for rankings.

Now the uncomfortable truth: bio links are easier to get. Editors approve them without thinking, because a bio link costs the site nothing. That's exactly why some providers deliver a lot of them and report them like they're the same as in-content links.

Fifty in-content placements and fifty bio placements don't produce similar results. They just look identical on a spreadsheet.

Check where your links actually sit. If your provider can't tell you without looking it up, you already have your answer.

[Muhammad Ali @iamcreativeali]

Off-page is what I do. It still isn't always the answer, and I'd rather say that on the first call than eight months into a retainer.

If you haven't looked at your coverage report recently, look at it before you sign anything with anyone.

[Muhammad Ali @iamcreativeali]

Before I quote anyone for link building, I open their Search Console and look at one number.

Indexed pages versus total pages.

Not their DR. Not their keyword rankings. Not their competitor gap. That one ratio, first.

[Muhammad Ali @iamcreativeali]

The fix was unglamorous. Differentiate the templated content. Flatten the internal link structure. Prune the pages that genuinely had no purpose.