Wow, what in-depth and insightful responses you got in this thread OP!
To actually add to this discussion, I can’t imagine there would be any way for this to be an effective SEO strategy. If anyone even actually gave someone a free backlink in response to begging, it would likely be a garbage link at best and a harmful link at worst.
That said, apparently begging for free shit is a thing people will do a lot, particularly on Reddit. I would imagine it’s almost entirely out of either desperation or laziness, but I suppose there’s a slim possibility that someone might give a nice free backlink out of the goodness of their heart.
Did you see the comments in the thread? I’d assume most of them were telling OP off for being lazy, but I guess I could be surprised.
Oh, excuse me if the reply sounded too blunt to you
Just in case anyone, like any newbie is wondering why this is stupid ie a bad idea, but still warrants a more thorough response:
You'd just know if someone has a shit site if they are 'begging' for backlinks. Because anyone with even a half-decent site you know knows the biggest problem is not aquiring 'backlinks' (and i'm using that as generically as indicated in the opening post) but rather, keeping the bad ones away from your site. The main concern at that point is identifying how toxic any organic backlink might be and whether you can afford a professional solution to identify these risks. In my experience, this all comes before even thinking about making the most of link juice from third-party high quality sellers you might start buying from. Backlinks are part of a strategy not means to an end.
And on the other hand you know anyone 'donating' backlinks knows their backlinks are worth nothing at best, and malicious at worst. Why would anyone give anything worth any juice and also put a part of their brand and site reputation on the line to vouch for you, away for free? It costs a lot of money to buy top tier guest posts. And an elite piece on your site would require significant promotional cost and effort. Even if you're setting up personal blog networks as an alternative strategy or private ones to sell link packages, it costs a lot of time, money and effort to set one up.
This just shows that whoever is doing the begging doesn't have the first clue about SEO, or site or brand safety. And likely no budget either. Real question is is it coming from a small business or project owner or a marketer who poesses evidently no knowledge of the game whatsoever. If it's coming from a small business owner, as explained aboved, it's a stupid question for anyone invovled in SEO. Simple as that. And that's fine. I'd probably look stupid asking a question about random shaped pipes and tools to fix my own house as someone who is not a professional plumber and knows nothing about it. Stupid, but permissable I imagine to the professionals that might be reading. I'd give up and call one just these people might contact an agency when they can't figure it out. But if it's coming from a marketer, then just to add to my earlier post, not only is it a stupid question, but a dangerous one if they are in charge of client sites or SEO strategies. Just as someone pretending to be a plumber asking said question would be dangerous to the work on customers houses.
That is all assuming this isn't some kind of neg SEO shenanigan.
Nah I think begging like most things comes off as desperation.
As the content boom has increased and people are looking to add a link out to articles to verify their own content
(not sure if anyone else seen a trend in this I have recently more so when someone else publishes AI or AI edited content)
If found if you start writing about topics that have 100-150 search results based on the "traffic predictions" and there is actually little information in the SERPs that answers that query or question I've started to see a incline in naturally acquired backlinks to our own resources or article.
I think that's down to my above assumptions as to why it's happening.
Id rather put effort into that and hope you get a link because even if you don't you built something thats going to help build up your own sites traffic and authority on a subject anyway. The old if you build it they will come, tends to apply.
Vs emailing and begging for a link. The whole begging side of it is pretty much on par with marketing companies reaching out with the
"we wrote this and we think your viewers or members will like it so link to us"
In my opinion.
I think this ia a very valuable observation.
As for what you said about the AI Copywriting epidemic.... Since ChatGPT really started going mainstream amid all the other later LLMs, I hoped I wouldn't have to say, but if's looks like it's all here to stay. And with that being said, if you have a limited budget, in 2026, you should probably focus less on backlonk strategies and more back on semanticaly meticulous sites and site scripting , optimised for SEO, as well as more careful handling of AI bot traffic. Not too much that you have to remortgage your house on hosting bills bit also not throttle them as they might infact be paying divends in the way of direct GEO traffic as you have observed if I understood correctly.
Don't get me wrong. Backlinks are still important, but i'm not seeing them being appreciably relevant for anything other than manual SEO ranking, empirically or otherwise. And yet there are essentially a number of search platforms now; every LLM platform has become one. No one took Bing seriously and it was like a nightmare of search professionals to have to worry, seriously, about a 'proper' second search engine to optimise for. Well now we essentially have about half a dozen. And they all drum to a slightly different beat that is based on the volatile decision making processes of DL compared to traditional ML of traditional SEO ranking factors. So it's probably more important than ever they can all read your sites properly. Not just about Googlebots anymore!
