Growth tactics for a news site divide cleanly into two groups: the ones that make the site more findable, and the ones that make it look more findable until someone notices. This is a note about the second group.

Automated backlinks

Posting links to your own site across other people's portals, several times a day, on a schedule, is what Google's spam policies describe as link spam. The outcome is not neutral — it is a manual action or deindexing. It is also, in most cases, a breach of the terms of the sites being posted to.

What people usually want from backlink automation is faster indexing and referral traffic. Both have legitimate mechanisms. We push new URLs to IndexNow, which notifies Bing, Yandex, Seznam and Naver on publish. We maintain a Google News sitemap scoped to the last 48 hours, which is what Google actually reads. We publish RSS per section so aggregators can ingest us properly.

Spun content

Taking a published article, replacing words with synonyms and posting it as original is copyright infringement. Google files it under scaled content abuse. It also produces text that reads like it was written by someone who did not understand it, because it was.

Posting into other people's comment sections

Same category. The traffic is negligible, the reputational cost is not, and it is the kind of thing that is difficult to stop once it is running.

What we do instead

Original writing, correct structured data, feeds that work, fast indexing, and the boring discipline of not publishing things we cannot stand behind. It is slower. It does not get taken away.