This interview is with Magnus Løv Schmidt, Co-founder and SEO Specialist, LinksasaService.com.
To kick us off, could you introduce yourself and outline the types of SEO programs you lead today as a Co-founder and SEO Specialist?
I’m Magnus Løv Schmidt, a freelance SEO specialist based in Denmark and co-founder of LinksAsAService.com (LaaS).
My SEO work spans three main areas:
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Freelance SEO consulting — I work with Danish and international clients on technical SEO, content strategy, and link acquisition. Projects range from local businesses to e-commerce brands, where I handle everything from schema markup implementation to long-form content production targeting competitive keywords.
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Link building at scale through LaaS — Together with my co-founder Kristian, I built LaaS as a transparent alternative to existing link marketplaces. We run a verified inventory of 65,000+ domains across 42 countries, with a fixed visible margin of 25% and a 12-month link guarantee. Transparency is the core differentiator — buyers see exactly what they pay for with no hidden markups. I lead the SEO and growth strategy for the platform itself, including directory presence, affiliate infrastructure, and content marketing.
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Before going independent, I served as SEO Lead at Search Royals, where I produced long-form articles on advanced link building topics including HARO, parasite SEO, link bait, and broken link building.
In your work, how do you define a “premium backlink” beyond DR and traffic metrics?
DR and traffic are starting points, not conclusions. A site can show DR 60 and 10,000 monthly visitors while being completely worthless as a link source. The metrics tell you about authority and reach — they tell you nothing about intent or relevance.
My definition of a premium backlink rests on two criteria above everything else.
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Topical relevance first. The linking domain, the specific category, the article, and the surrounding content all need to connect meaningfully to the target site. A link about cycling gear placed on a finance blog is not a premium link regardless of its DR. Relevance has to run through every layer — from the website’s core topic down to the paragraph the link lives in.
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Design and editorial quality second. This one is underrated. If a website looks neglected — outdated layout, cluttered pages, no clear editorial identity — it exists to sell links, not to serve readers. Google understands this. A site that does not invest in its own user experience is not a site worth being associated with. I reject placements on visually poor sites regardless of their metrics.
Beyond those two, the link must be contextual. Footer links, sidebar widgets, and forced insertions do not count. A premium backlink sits naturally inside relevant content, where a real reader could follow it and find it useful.
When all three align — topical fit, editorial quality, and contextual placement — that is a premium backlink. DR and traffic confirm the value; they do not create it.
Before pursuing a placement, what is your verification workflow to confirm a website and its link will be real, safe, and durable?
Verification starts before any tool is opened. I contact every supplier directly and have a conversation. A real publisher who cares about their site responds differently than someone running a link farm. That human filter comes first.
From there, Ahrefs is my primary tool. I check DR trajectory — not just the current number, but whether it has grown organically or spiked artificially. Traffic patterns matter, too: a site with strong DR but near-zero organic traffic is a red flag regardless of what the domain looks like on paper.
The disqualifying signals I look for are consistent:
- Thin content. If the majority of articles are short, generic, and clearly written to host links rather than inform readers, the site fails immediately.
- Broken infrastructure. Broken pages, missing images, and neglected site health signal a publisher who is not maintaining their asset. That link will not stay live.
- Absurd outlink ratios. A single article linking out to 30+ external domains is not editorial — it is a directory. I walk away.
- No identity pages. A website without an About page or clear editorial team has nothing to lose by removing your link tomorrow. No accountability means no durability.
- Generic front page. If the homepage reads like a template with no real brand, the site exists solely to monetize placements.
Every domain entering the LaaS inventory passes this verification. We require a minimum 12-month link guarantee from all suppliers — and we are currently moving toward a 24-month standard — because durability is part of what we are selling.
When a client asks about backlink buying, how do you balance upside and risk while staying aligned with Google’s guidelines?
I will be straightforward here: most clients who come to me asking about backlink buying already understand the landscape. They are SEO professionals who know how the industry works and have made an informed decision to use paid placements as one tool among many.
For that audience, the conversation is not about whether to do it — it is about how to do it without creating unnecessary risk.
The core advice is simple: do not rely on a single method. Paid placements work best as part of a diversified link profile. Clients who buy links exclusively, at scale, with repetitive anchor text and no other off-page activity are the ones who run into trouble. Google’s systems are looking for patterns that signal manipulation. A natural link profile does not look like one thing done repeatedly.
So I always recommend combining paid contextual placements with other methods — digital PR, genuine partnerships, linkable assets, organic mentions. Not because paid links do not work, but because a healthy link profile looks like a website people actually want to link to. Paid placements accelerate that profile; they should not be the entire foundation.
The quality filters I apply on the supplier side — topical relevance, editorial quality, contextual placement — also reduce risk significantly. A well-placed link on a real editorial site looks nothing like a link farm placement. That distinction matters both for results and for longevity.
Risk in link building is rarely about any single link. It is about patterns. Build a varied, high-quality profile and the risk becomes manageable.
Could you walk us through one campaign where your podcast syndication + Web2.0 + targeted anchor stack materially lifted rankings or traffic?
One campaign that illustrates this well involved an international art-print webshop operating across eight languages and markets. The goal was to build authority in multiple local search landscapes simultaneously without the link profile looking uniform or artificial.
The strategy combined three link types in a deliberate ratio: 60% paid contextual placements on topically relevant editorial sites (art, interior design, home decor) in each local market; 20% podcast syndication, where I produced episodes based on the client’s existing content and distributed them with a link in both the episode show notes and the URL box; and the remaining 20% covered other non-paid methods to add further diversity.
The anchor text strategy varied by link type and market. Across all eight languages, I mixed near-exact-match anchors, naked URLs, and semantic variations. Keeping all three anchor types active prevents the kind of over-optimisation pattern that makes a paid campaign visible to Google’s systems. Each market received anchors that felt natural in that language rather than translated versions of the same English phrase.
The result was a 20% increase in both organic traffic and revenue across all markets within two months.
What made this work was not any single tactic in isolation. The paid placements built authority quickly. The podcast links added a genuinely different link type from a different distribution channel. The non-paid layer created the profile diversity that made the whole campaign look organic. Each element did a job the others could not.
For local businesses like dealerships or service providers, which locally rooted or premium backlinks have moved the local pack most in your experience?
Local SEO is one of my favourite areas to work in because the feedback loop is fast and the results are practical. A business either appears in the local pack or it does not. That clarity makes link building decisions easier to evaluate.
In my experience, three link types move local pack rankings more than anything else:
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Local news and media sites. A mention or feature in a regional newspaper or local news outlet carries significant weight. These sites have strong geographic relevance signals baked in — Google associates them with a specific city or area by default. Getting a local business cited in that context sends a very direct signal about where the business operates and who it serves.
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Geographic proximity links. Links from sites covering neighbouring cities, regions, and areas reinforce the geographic footprint of a business beyond its immediate location. For service providers whose customers come from a wider radius — a dealership, a contractor, a clinic — this approach extends local authority without leaving the relevant geographic context.
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Industry-specific local sites. These carry the most combined weight because they signal both topical and geographic relevance simultaneously. A link from a local trade association, an industry directory with regional structure, or a niche blog covering that specific sector in that specific market is hard to replicate and difficult for competitors to copy quickly.
The combination of all three — media, geography, and industry — is what consistently moves businesses into and up the local pack.
How do you engineer anchor text and internal linking so premium links push authority into deeper pages rather than only the homepage?
The approach depends on where the domain stands before the campaign starts.
For domains with a thin backlink profile, I put more emphasis on the homepage first. Building overall domain authority creates a foundation that every page benefits from. Once that base exists, deeper pages can absorb authority and rank with fewer links pointing directly at them.
For domains with an established link profile and reasonable authority, I shift toward deep linking more aggressively. Product pages, category pages, and specific service pages compete on their own merit, and a contextual external link pointing directly at the right page with the right anchor moves rankings faster than waiting for authority to trickle down from the homepage.
Paid placements are my primary tool for deep linking because they are controllable. I choose the target URL, the anchor text, and the surrounding context. Organic and non-paid tactics are valuable for diversity but tend to attract homepage links naturally — which is fine, but it means deep page authority has to be engineered deliberately through paid and internal linking.
On the internal side, my approach depends on the engagement model. When I manage only off-page SEO, I advise clients on the internal structure they need to distribute the authority that arrives from external links. When I manage the full SEO scope, I use the homepage, mega menus, and footer navigation to channel authority directly toward the money pages — the pages that generate revenue or capture the most valuable search intent.
External links bring the authority in. Internal linking decides where it goes.
Looking toward 2026, how will AI and verification tools change how you source, vet, and track premium backlinks?
AI has already changed how I work — and 2026 will accelerate that, not introduce it.
I currently use AI across every time-consuming layer of the link-building process: content production, prospecting, outreach, negotiation, and admin. The tasks that follow a repeatable pattern and do not require human judgment at every step are candidates for AI assistance. That frees up time for the work that actually requires experience — evaluating a site’s quality, reading a publisher relationship, or deciding whether a placement is worth pursuing at all.
Content production is where I apply the most structure. AI generates within a rigid framework that requires approval at key stages. The output is never published without human review. That balance — AI for speed, human for quality control — is where I see the industry settling.
On the verification side, AI-generated content on publisher sites is not a disqualifying signal for me. The questions I ask are practical: does the content serve the reader, does the site attract organic traffic, and does it carry the right editorial feel? A well-run site using AI to scale its content is not inherently worse than one writing everything manually. What matters is whether the result is good enough to be worth a reader’s time.
Where I see AI making the biggest difference in 2026 is in sourcing and vetting at scale. Screening 65,000+ domains across 42 countries manually is not sustainable long-term. Better AI-assisted verification tools — flagging thin content patterns, unnatural outlink ratios, traffic anomalies — will make that process faster without sacrificing the human judgment that the final call still requires.