When I recorded the original show, the conversation kept coming back to backlinks. Meanwhile, bloggers were publishing useful material and overlooking problems on their own sites.
That was the point behind calling Googlebot a neglected buyer persona. It isn’t a customer and it won’t buy anything. The question was whether the site made sense to the crawler as well as the person you wanted to reach.
Start with the customer, then check access
Work out what your customer needs to understand, compare or buy. Give that information a clear home and link to it from relevant pages. Then check whether search engines can reach the pages you actually want found.
Review internal links, unexpected duplicate URLs and indexing directives. Fix broken links to useful content. Don’t treat every 404 as an error: a genuinely removed page without a replacement can correctly return one. Don’t delete useful pages just to make an index total smaller.
For a practical review, use the SEO audit checklist.
Look for the audience, not a backlink quota
The useful outreach question from the original discussion still stands: where do your customers spend time, and what could you contribute there?
A relevant publication, community or local organisation may be a better fit than a site chosen for a metric in an SEO tool. Help the audience. Don’t spam a forum or commission a page whose only purpose is to place your link.
Raw backlink counts won’t tell you why a competitor ranks. Nor does one title change prove that all its existing links suddenly started working. Review the page, the search and the wider evidence before assigning a cause.
Sponsorship is not a loophole
The old transcript suggested that links obtained through equipment donations or scholarships would be safe because Google wouldn’t notice. That is not advice to follow.
Support a community organisation because the relationship makes sense. If a link is an advertisement or paid placement, qualify it appropriately. Google’s outbound-link guidance recommends rel="sponsored" for advertisements and paid placements. Guidance checked 10 September 2026. A good cause does not remove that distinction.
Get the site useful and accessible first. Then judge outreach by the relevant people it reaches and the business it helps, rather than the number of links delivered. See our SEO service if you need help separating those jobs.
This historical article has been updated to remove an old paid-link loophole and keep the focus on useful access, relevant audiences and properly qualified sponsorships.