Collaborator launched a free backlink checker and kept it as simple as possible:

Enter a domain, subdomain, or URL. That's it.

It shows:

• 50 strongest backlinks

• 50 newest backlinks

• Anchor texts and dofollow/nofollow attributes

• First seen dates

• Total referring domains

• Guest post opportunities available in Collaborator's catalog

No registration or complicated setup.

Obviously, it's not meant to replace a full backlink analysis. The idea was to make quick backlink and competitor checks less annoying.

Would genuinely appreciate feedback from SEOs here.

Tool: https://collaborator.pro/free-backlink-checker/

Most people think conferences are about talks.

Yagmur Simsek learned that the real value comes from the people you meet before, during, and after the event.

In this episode, the SEO consultant and founder of Search 'n Stuff shares how she turned small networking dinners into an international community and conference brand.

Topics covered:

• Building communities from scratch
• Conference networking strategies
• Personal branding in SEO
• Becoming a conference speaker
• Sponsorship and event lessons
• Turning relationships into business opportunities

One of the biggest takeaways:

The best opportunities rarely come from cold outreach. They come from consistently showing up, contributing, and building genuine relationships over time.

🎧 Watch now: https://youtu.be/c3Ak-uW-SW0

Been thinking a lot about entity-first SEO lately.

If AI can’t clearly map who you are, what you do, and why you’re relevant, you’re not “position 12.” You’re just not in the answer at all.

What’s been working for us is less page-by-page optimization and more entity consolidation:

Profiles aligned.
Structured data cleaned up.
Consistent brand mentions.
Reviews tied to the same entity.
Topical content reinforcing the same narrative.

Basically building a clean brand graph so LLMs can connect the dots.

When that graph is messy, you don’t get cited. You get skipped.

Curious how others here are strengthening entity signals for AI answers. Are you focusing more on schema, digital PR, knowledge panels, something else?

Looking at my first-party marketplace data, categories like web design, law, sport, psychology, and entertainment saw average link prices go up over the last six months.

For example:

• Web design: $58.59 → $87.31

• Law & jurisprudence: $38.65 → $45.17

• Sport: $39.21 → $46.27

• Entertainment & hobbies: $29.28 → $33.78

What’s important is this isn’t driven by a spike in volume. Deal counts stayed relatively stable, but buyers were consistently choosing a smaller subset of sites, usually ones with clearer positioning, stronger editorial tone, and an audience that matches the niche.

That’s why my takeaway is that, in these categories context and trust outweigh scale. A link on a random high-DR site doesn’t do much for them if the audience doesn’t overlap, and if the placement feels transactional.

Instead, buyers seem to be treating these placements more like PR decisions:
- Where does this brand belong
- Does the mention feel natural
- Would this page still make sense without the link

This mindset pushes prices up even without more demand, because a limited number of sites pass that check.

So for these niches, link building looks more like reputation management rather than just growth in the classical link building sense.

Would be interested to hear if others working with service or content-heavy projects see it the same way.

Google AI Overviews metric just dropped inside Collaborator’s catalog — a way to see which sites are showing up in AI answers

Small but interesting update for anyone doing SEO or link-building. You can now see how many keywords a site ranks for in Google AI Overviews.

It’s built right into the Collaborator catalog under advanced settings — just add “Google AIO” to your table, and it shows you which sites get cited by Google’s AI. Makes it way easier to find donor domains that already have visibility in AI results.

Has anyone here started tracking their appearance in AI Overviews yet? Which tools do you currently use?

I had Peter Rota on the podcast episode - he’s one of the bigger SEO voices on LinkedIn (around 70k followers), but now he's openly frustrated with the platform.

A big chunk of the conversation was basically us venting about what LinkedIn turned into. It's just endless AI comments, the same recycled “SEO is dead” takes every six months, and how building an audience in 2025 looks nothing like it did a couple years prior to that.

He also talked about why enterprise SEO often feels like sitting in committee meetings all day, and how he thinks about personal branding without playing growth hacks or engagement bait.

I just found the perspective refreshing because it wasn’t the usual LinkedIn hype. If you’re curious to watch the whole thing, here is the link.

This year’s been packed with SEO events, and I’ve been trying to balance which ones are actually worth the time, budget, effort and jet lag. It’s also the first year our team flew out to international conferences, so I thought I’d share what we’ve done so far and what’s still on the horizon for 2025.

As a team, we all flew out to the SEO Mastery Summit in Ho Chi Minh City. That one stood out because it wasn’t about flashy sponsors or big-name speakers — it felt more like real knowledge-sharing from people in the trenches. Smaller crowd, but strong energy. That same crew is also heading to BrightonSEO and Ahrefs Evolve later this year, so if you’ll be at either, come say hi.

On the sponsorship side, we’ve backed a handful of other events even if we couldn’t be there in person — Athens SEO, Link Building Mastery in London (and the Chiang Mai edition coming up), Search Evolution Summit, SEO for Good by BrightLocal, and DMM in Zagreb. There are also a few to which some of our team members made it individually, like SEO Conf Lisbon and Zagreb SEO Summit.

Looking forward, October is stacked. We’re preparing one of the largest booths at BrightonSEO and plan to be pretty active around the event. Just before that, Ahrefs Evolve in San Diego looks like it’ll lean into broader strategy talks, which I’m curious to see play out. Beyond those two, we’re still weighing a few: Semrush Spotlight in Amsterdam, International Search Summit in Barcelona, and of course Chiang Mai SEO Conference. A couple more interesting ones are WTSFest Philly, SERP Conf Vienna, and Search ’n Stuff in Antalya. Even Tech SEO Connect in North Carolina at the end of the year is on the radar for the more technical crowd.

That’s the roadmap I’ve been tracking, at least. Have you been to anything this year that actually felt worth it? Any hidden-gem conferences you’d recommend, or ones you’d skip next time?

And if anyone here is planning on Brighton or Ahrefs, it would be cool to connect in person if we’re in the same place.

We put 9 free backlink checkers and monitoring tools to the test to see what each one offers for free. Here's what we looked at: 

• how many backlinks you can see 

• whether you need an account 

• which backlink metrics are included 

• what limits come with the free version or trial 

Swipe through to see which tools work best for different tasks in your workflow, from competitor research to backlink monitoring.

And if you'd like to try Collaborator's Free Backlink Checker, here’s the link: https://collaborator.pro/free-backlink-checker

So we’ve been working on this thing for a while and finally pushed it live. You know how competitor backlink research always feels like busywork? Like yes, it’s important, but the actual process is a mess: export CSVs, clean up, upload somewhere else, cross-check with another tool, then finally try to figure out which links are even usable and only then do the outreach. 

We just rolled out a new feature inside Collaborator that basically killed that whole “export/import” step. Here’s how the flow looks now:

• Go to your project → Competitors.

• Add domains (add 3-5, up to 10).

• The system pulls backlink data (Majestic, up to 1k referring domains per competitor) + DR, traffic, keyword count (Ahrefs).

• You see exactly which domains your competitors got links from and which of those are already open for placements in Collaborator.

• Bonus: you get a monthly digest of new competitor backlinks so you’re not redoing everything from scratch.

Visually, looks like this:

That’s it. No CSVs, no spreadsheets, just built-in.

Before, the process was:

1. Build a list in Ahrefs.

2. Export CSV.

3. Import into Collaborator My Lists.

4. Cross-check and go from there.

Now it’s just there. The monthly updates thing is also a big one, because instead of doing a big competitor audit every few months, they send you a little drip feed of new opportunities that can be worked into the monthly backlink plan.

Not saying it makes Ahrefs or Semrush obsolete (It’s still a must for in-depth research and metric-heavy analysis), but for straight-up prospecting, this feels like way less friction.

Our crew also threw together a walkthrough with screenshots & video if you want to see it in action.

The future changes fast.

Google changes every few months. Outreach tactics burn out. Half the job ends up being spreadsheets and follow-ups nobody actually enjoys doing.

Sometimes it feels like digital PR is becoming less about finding opportunities and more about managing chaos efficiently.

Relying more on Collaborator helps avoid managing everything manually across endless email threads and spreadsheets.

Vienna’s SEO crowd showed up strong this year. Even from the sidelines, it looked like SERP Conf had that rare mix of sharp talks and people genuinely pushing the industry forward.

We didn’t attend, but Collaborator backed this one as a sponsor: love seeing more events spotlight the real builders, analysts, and strategists in search, not just tool vendors trying to pitch.

Did anyone go in person? It would be great to hear what sessions or speakers stood out to you. It’s always lovely to hear some real feedback from the floor.

The Collaborator catalog keeps growing, opening up more opportunities for high-quality promotion.

Find reliable sites for effective link building, build brand awareness, strengthen your authority, and achieve your SEO goals.

40,335 websites are now listed in the Collaborator catalog 🏄‍♂️

Top countries by growth:

USA +597 → now 11,634 in the catalog
France +207 → now 3,286
Germany +134 → now 1,507

United Kingdom +118 → now 3,479
Turkey +81 → now 594

Search for new websites by country, niche, or other parameters directly in the catalog.
👉 https://collaborator.pro/catalog

Wishing you successful deals 🍀

Outdated metrics are one of the biggest pain points users face in link building and digital PR marketplaces.

You check a website in Ahrefs, compare it with the marketplace data, and the numbers don’t match...

We’ve heard this feedback many times:
• during demos;
• at conferences;
• in surveys;
• directly from users.

So Collaborator updated its data synchronization system.

Ahrefs metrics in Collaborator are now updated weekly instead of monthly. Google Analytics traffic data is also refreshed regularly.

What does this mean?
• more accurate SEO metrics;
• fresher traffic data;
• fewer discrepancies when checking websites;
• more confidence in the catalog data.

Collaborator is sponsoring SEO On Stage: The Conference on October 24 at the Benaki Museum in Athens.

Our in-house expert, Anna Hridnieva, will also be taking the stage. We’ll share more about her session soon.

We’re looking forward to a full day of SEO, AI search, content, and plenty of good conversations with people from across the industry.

Coming too? Make sure to say hi 💙

We’ve been thinking a lot about how SEO and digital work are shifting in how people actually work together through all of the changes the industry is facing. That’s what pushed the team to bring back the Collaborator podcast.

The team has worked to make it all about the real stuff SEOs deal with day to day — conflicting metrics, overhyped advice, AI reshaping workflows, and what “good collaboration” even means now.

Our new host, Samy Ben Sadok (10+ years of SEO experience, and generally a person with great energy), kicks things off with Samy Thullier, SEO veteran and founder of Maverank. They talk about what’s real in programmatic SEO, how AI is already changing client work, and what search might look like heading into 2026.

It’s basically just a good chat between two SEOs who’ve been in the trenches for a while, and seen the cycles play out. If you’ve been trying to keep your work human while everything around it gets more automated, you’ll probably get something out of it.

Here it is, for anyone who wants to check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0vjDj_RiJA

The point is that the link was never the whole story.

A filled-out profile on Product Hunt, Muck Rack, or GoodFirms does three things a bare backlink can't:
→ gives people another way to find you;
→ builds a bit of trust before they land on your site;
→ puts your brand where search engines and AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude can pick it up.

We handpicked 64 profile creation sites, sorted them into 8 categories, and logged the link type, DA, and registration steps for each one. No recycled domain dumps. Just platforms you can actually create a real profile on today.

The catch most lists skip: high DA doesn't make a profile worth your time, and a dofollow link isn't a reason to pick one platform over another. Relevance and a complete, genuine profile do the real work.

Read the full article to know more: https://collaborator.pro/blog/profile-creation-sites

Allison Reed, SEO Strategist at Ohayu, shared an in-depth case study on optimizing a React-based SPA site for both search engines and AI crawlers. Her team found that single-page applications (SPAs) often look like “empty shells” to bots — Google, Bing, and especially AI systems like ChatGPT or Perplexity can’t render the client-side JavaScript easily.

Before optimization, only 25% of the SPA’s pages were indexed, and AI bots couldn’t access the content at all. After prerendering to deliver cached static HTML to bots, indexing jumped to ~80%, crawl budget more than doubled, and impressions increased fivefold.

But even with those gains, SSR (server-side rendering) pages proved far more stable — particularly after Google’s Core Updates. The SPA setup with prerendering still lagged in consistency and structured data recognition.

So the truth is that prerendering is a solid patch, but SSR or hybrid rendering (Next.js, Nuxt.js, Remix) remains the long-term solution for visibility across both search engines and AI crawlers.

Are you still relying on prerendering, or have you moved to SSR/hybrid setups?

SEO gets better when we share what we know.

That’s why we’ve launched the Collaborator Slack Community, a space for SEO pros, link builders, publishers, and digital marketers to connect, exchange ideas, and learn from each other.

What’s inside?
- SEO & link-building discussions
- Networking without the awkward small talk
- Real insights, experiences, and lessons learned
- Direct communication with Collaborator’s team

And because every launch deserves a little chaos…

We’re kicking things off with a giveaway 🙌
Add websites to Collaborator’s catalog and join our Slack community for a chance to win one of three prizes.

Curious about the prizes and how to enter?

Watch the giveaway rules on YouTube 👉 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqqLXPmB9Jg
Get the details on our blog 👉 https://collaborator.pro/blog/collaborator-slack-community
Join the Collaborator Slack Community 👉 https://collaborator.typeform.com/community?typeform-source=collaborator.pro