Why is Outbid getting labeled as spam by Ahrefs?

Is Ahrefs really labeling Outbid as spam right now?

Yes. A recent Ahrefs screenshot shared by SEO marketer Connor Showler shows an Outbid backlink carrying Ahrefs’ SPAM tag.

That tag is a real Ahrefs feature. Earlier this year, Ahrefs added a way to filter backlinks coming from what it calls “Known spammy domains,” and backlinks caught by that filter appear with the SPAM label. Ahrefs’ current API documentation uses the same definition: is_spam means the backlink comes from a known spammy domain.

There is one limit to what we can verify publicly. Ahrefs does not offer an open database where anyone can search every domain on that list, so the Outbid-specific evidence comes from the recent Ahrefs screenshot rather than a public Ahrefs profile for outbid.lol. We can verify that the label exists, what it means technically and that Outbid is currently showing up with it. We cannot inspect the private rule that put Outbid on the list.

The obvious interpretation - “Ahrefs detected that Google thinks Outbid is spam” - goes much further than the evidence.

What does Ahrefs mean when it marks an Outbid backlink as “SPAM”?

Ahrefs is saying it distrusts Outbid as a backlink source, not that Google has penalized Outbid or the website receiving the link.

Ahrefs actually updated its help documentation this week to make this distinction unusually clear. The company says it does not have a Google-style “spam score” because nobody outside Google knows every factor Google uses to classify link spam or how heavily those factors are weighted.

At the same time, Ahrefs does maintain its own “Known spammy domains” filter. Those two statements may look contradictory at first, but they describe different things. Ahrefs does not claim to calculate the probability that Google considers a backlink spam. It can still decide that a source domain is low quality enough to flag inside Ahrefs.

The API makes the distinction even clearer. is_spam, is_sponsored, is_nofollow and is_ugc are separate fields. Ahrefs can therefore see a link as properly marked advertising and still classify the domain hosting it as spammy.

What you see	What it tells us	What it cannot prove
Ahrefs SPAM tag	Ahrefs puts the referring domain in its known-spammy group	Google penalized the domain
rel="sponsored"	The link is marked as a paid placement	The source website is high quality
High Domain Rating	The domain has a strong inbound backlink graph by Ahrefs’ formula	Google trusts every outbound link
Google manual action	Google has explicitly acted against a site	Something Ahrefs can declare on Google’s behalf

Why did Outbid trigger Ahrefs so quickly?

Outbid gave a backlink-quality system an unusually easy pattern to recognize: people pay money, receive a public outbound link and move higher when they pay more.

Outbid does not hide that mechanic. Rank is determined by money. A company enters its URL or X handle, chooses a category, pays, and appears on the board according to how much it has spent. There is no editor deciding that the #1 result deserves a citation more than the #20 result.

These days the scale is large enough that this looks very different from a founder putting ten sponsors on a newsletter. The live Outbid board has positions running well beyond #1,000, while the top entries span AI agents, marketing, SEO, crypto, compliance software, hiring, healthcare and social-media tools.

Ahrefs has spent years telling users to look carefully at websites whose main linking pattern involves sending visitors to large numbers of unrelated domains. Its own guide to unnatural links specifically points to an unusually large number of linked domains as one characteristic of websites created to sell links.

We cannot say which private Ahrefs threshold Outbid crossed. Maybe the number of linked domains matters heavily. Maybe payment patterns, link neighborhoods, site structure or other data are involved. Ahrefs does not disclose that.

Still, we do not need to know the exact formula to understand why Outbid stands out. A site where payment directly creates thousands of unrelated outbound placements is almost designed to test the difference between “popular website” and “trustworthy backlink source.”

Is Outbid actually selling backlinks?

Outbid currently looks much more like a paid advertising marketplace than a conventional backlink marketplace.

That distinction comes from the link HTML itself. SEO Journal inspected the live Outbid board and found the advertiser links carrying rel="sponsored noopener noreferrer", along with Outbid tracking parameters.

For Google, rel="sponsored" is specifically meant for advertisements and paid placements. Google tells publishers to use it when money changes hands for a link.

So when somebody spends $10,000 to rank on Outbid, the product they are clearly buying is visibility: a higher position, clicks, attention and the social proof of sitting near the top of a viral board. The link is needed to deliver that traffic, but it is qualified as advertising.

Some directory websites still describe Outbid as selling “dofollow backlinks.” We would not rely on those descriptions. Several of them also show badly outdated Outbid metrics, including DR 0 figures from around launch. Direct inspection of the current link implementation is much better evidence.

Calling Outbid a “link farm” without qualification feels slightly off. A traditional link seller wants buyers to believe the backlink will transfer search authority. Outbid’s current implementation deliberately tells Google that the placement was paid for.

Can a sponsored Outbid link still get the Ahrefs SPAM label?

Yes. Ahrefs can simultaneously identify an Outbid link as sponsored and flag the source domain as spammy.

This is visible directly in Ahrefs’ data model. The API has one field for whether a link has the Sponsored attribute and another for whether it comes from a known spammy domain.

So the two labels can coexist without contradiction. Ahrefs does not need to believe Outbid is disguising paid links as editorial recommendations. It can simply decide that links coming from Outbid are poor candidates when an SEO asks Ahrefs to surface their most useful backlinks.

Imagine a company buying an ad on a gigantic directory. The ad can be properly labeled, generate customers and follow Google’s rules. An SEO tool can still decide that the resulting backlink should sit in its low-quality bucket.

Outbid appears to be living in exactly that gap.

Are low-quality Outbid buyers the reason Ahrefs calls it spam?

Probably not on their own. Outbid attracts plenty of tiny websites, but the board also contains established companies, so the repeatable pay-for-placement mechanism explains the Ahrefs label better than the quality of any individual advertiser.

LinkDR captured an interesting snapshot near the beginning of the Outbid wave. It analyzed 842 websites taken from the leaderboard and, after removing major platforms, found that 61% of the remaining sites had DR below 10. Among 828 builder domains, 305 were at DR 0 and 543 had no estimated organic traffic.

That is an unusually weak group compared with the backlink profile of a normal established publication, but it would be wrong to conclude that everyone buying Outbid is junk. The current board includes companies such as Outrank, FatJoe and other businesses with substantial existing backlink profiles, alongside brand-new indie products.

From an editorial perspective, the broader mix is pretty strange. Current top positions include an AI website builder, a creator marketplace, an AI computer, an SEO product, a crypto platform and compliance software. Recent activity has included domains as different as apple.com, tiny.cc and a computer-repair company.

There is nothing inherently bad about that mix if Outbid is an advertising board. Advertisers do not need to share a topic.

For backlink authority, though, the lack of editorial connection makes the links much harder to interpret as recommendations. Payment explains why the links exist far better than expertise or topical relevance does.

How can Outbid have DR 72 and still be labeled spam by Ahrefs?

Outbid can sit around DR 72 while Ahrefs labels its backlinks as spam because Domain Rating measures the strength of links coming into Outbid, not whether links going out of Outbid deserve SEO trust.

Public DR monitors have recently put outbid.lol around 72, and Jonathan Wilke himself reacted publicly when the score jumped to that level. Given how quickly Outbid went viral, the rise makes sense. Publishers, directories, founders and people writing about the experiment all started linking to the site.

Ahrefs’ own explanation of Domain Rating removes most of the mystery. DR is a link-based metric. Ahrefs finds domains with followed links into a website, looks at their strength and their outbound-link distribution, then calculates a relative score from 0 to 100.

Ahrefs also says something people often miss: DR itself does not account for backlink spam. Large amounts of poor-quality links can sometimes raise DR rather than lower it.

A newer Ahrefs analysis published this year reinforces how loosely DR should be interpreted. Ahrefs found only a 0.131 correlation between Domain Rating and SERP positions in its study. The company explicitly says DR is its metric, rather than a Google ranking factor.

So Outbid reaching DR 72 says something real: its launch attracted a surprisingly strong inbound link graph very quickly. It says almost nothing about whether a company should pay Outbid to acquire SEO authority.

Does an Outbid link pass that DR 72 to the buyer?

No, we should currently assume an Outbid placement passes little or no useful DR to the buyer because the paid links are marked as sponsored.

Ahrefs says links carrying sponsored, UGC or nofollow attributes do not increase Domain Rating. Only followed links enter that part of the DR calculation.

That kills one of the most tempting pitches around Outbid: “You can now buy a backlink from a DR 72 website.”

You can certainly buy a placement on a website that has reached roughly DR 72. That does not mean the backlink behaves like a normal followed editorial link from a DR 72 publication.

Even without the sponsored attribute, the economics of Ahrefs’ DR formula would become less attractive as Outbid linked to more domains. Ahrefs explains that the strength passed from a referring domain is diluted according to how many unique domains that website links to. A site sending links to thousands of destinations cannot pass the same concentrated amount to each one as a site linking selectively.

As pointed out above, the sponsored attribute already settles the more immediate DR question. Outbid’s growing authority belongs to Outbid. Buyers should not assume they inherit it simply because they appear on the leaderboard.

Is Outbid still valuable if the backlink has almost no direct SEO value?

Yes. Outbid currently has much stronger evidence as a traffic and customer-acquisition channel than it does as a link-building channel.

We checked the live board again rather than relying on launch-week screenshots. The current top seven positions have accumulated about $95,460 in bids and roughly 140,600 recorded clicks between them. A crude division gives about $0.68 of bid value per recorded click across those seven listings.

That is not a proper CPC calculation. Bid totals accumulate over time, advertisers move between ranks and the public click counter is not an independently audited attribution platform. Still, the scale is too large to dismiss the board as an SEO page nobody visits.

The better evidence comes from what several buyers said happened after the clicks arrived. CrowdReply reported that its $12,700 push produced more than 6,550 clicks, 1,800 signups and over 50 booked demos, with $50,000 per month sitting in its pipeline shortly afterward. Outrank said its $12,000 bet produced 113 trials over three days against a normal baseline of roughly 60, implying around 53 extra trials. Comp AI said one converted demo could represent more than $40,000 in expected lifetime value.

Those are advertiser-reported figures, so we should not treat them like an audited experiment. They do show why founders kept bidding even if Google ignores the backlink.

Outbid example	Spend	Reported result	What we can reasonably conclude
Current top 7 combined	$95,460	~140,600 public clicks	Outbid is producing substantial referral activity
CrowdReply	$12,700	1,800 signups, 50+ demos, $50k/month pipeline	Strong self-reported B2B acquisition
Outrank	~$12,000	~53 trials above its normal three-day baseline	The traffic plausibly created incremental trials
Comp AI	$10,000	$40k+ expected LTV from one win	A few conversions can justify high bids in expensive B2B categories

Do the 472 Outbid clones make Ahrefs’ reaction easier to understand?

Yes. The clone wave turned Outbid’s pay-to-rank idea from one weird viral website into a recognizable web pattern almost overnight.

A live census of the ecosystem has now verified 472 pay-to-rank boards. Among the domains whose registration time could be established, 22 appeared within one day and 189 within two days. During the busiest hour, 20 new domains were registered - roughly one every three minutes.

The money tells an equally interesting story. Of 324 boards with readable totals, around $330,771 has changed hands. Outbid itself accounts for $254,213, or 76.9% of all measured spending. The other 323 readable boards share only $76,558.

The median clone has made $20.88. Nearly 80% have taken less than $100, while 32 have recorded no payment at all.

So the format spread much faster than the actual customer demand. That is relevant to SEO because automated systems suddenly have hundreds of domains producing similar payment-driven outbound-link structures. We found no evidence that Ahrefs explicitly uses “number of Outbid clones” as a classification feature, and we should not invent one. But the wider pattern makes the underlying behavior far easier to recognize at web scale.

Current pay-to-rank ecosystem	Measured figure
Verified boards	472
Domains registered within 48 hours	189
Boards with readable revenue	324
Revenue across readable boards	$330,771
Outbid’s share	76.9%
Median measurable clone revenue	$20.88
Clones under $100	257 of 323

Could Google actually penalize Outbid?

Google could have a problem with Outbid if its paid placements started passing ranking credit, but the current sponsored-link setup follows Google’s published guidance for advertising.

Google’s spam policies are straightforward on paid links. Exchanging money for links intended to manipulate search rankings counts as link spam. Google also lists text advertisements and advertorial links that pass ranking credit among the problem cases.

For legitimate advertising, Google recommends qualifying the link. Its current documentation specifically says publishers should mark advertisements and paid placements with rel="sponsored", with nofollow still accepted as an alternative.

That is how the Outbid links were configured when the live board was technically inspected.

Could Google still dislike other aspects of Outbid one day? Of course. Search policies cover far more than one HTML attribute, and nobody outside Google can promise that a site will never face an algorithmic or manual action.

We found no public evidence of a Google manual action against Outbid today. More importantly, an Ahrefs SPAM badge cannot establish one. Google manual actions live in Search Console and come from Google.

For now, the claim that “Ahrefs labeled Outbid spam, therefore Google is about to penalize Outbid” runs ahead of the available evidence.

Could buying an Outbid placement hurt your own website?

A normal Outbid placement is currently more likely to be ignored for ranking purposes than to get the buyer penalized.

Google reserves its strongest warnings for deliberate attempts to manipulate rankings through artificial links. Its own disavow documentation says most websites do not need the disavow tool because Google can usually decide which incoming links to trust.

Google recommends disavowing only in a much narrower situation: a website has a considerable number of artificial or low-quality links and those links have caused, or are likely to cause, a manual action.

One paid placement that is explicitly qualified as advertising is a very different setup.

As seen above, the current Outbid implementation uses the relationship attribute Google asks publishers to use for paid placements. We would therefore not see an Ahrefs SPAM badge beside one Outbid backlink and immediately disavow the domain.

The risk would look different if somebody started buying hundreds of followed links across Outbid-style clones specifically to push rankings. Google’s spam policy explicitly covers automated link creation, paid links that pass ranking signals and other manipulative schemes. Turning a viral advertising format into an industrial link-building network would give Google much more to object to.

For an ordinary Outbid buyer today, the bigger SEO danger is simpler: paying for “link juice” that the sponsored link was never designed to provide.

Is Ahrefs being too harsh on Outbid?

The word “spam” is harsher than the full story, but Ahrefs has a good reason to keep Outbid links away from the backlinks it wants users to value most.

Imagine opening Ahrefs and seeing a DR 72 backlink from a viral website. Without another warning, an SEO could easily assume they had acquired an unusually strong endorsement.

That interpretation would be badly misleading here. Outbid lets advertisers buy their presence directly, the board links across almost every topic imaginable, and the current link implementation tells search engines that money was involved.

Ahrefs therefore has a sensible product reason to downgrade those links aggressively.

Where the wording causes trouble is outside Ahrefs. People see a red SPAM badge and jump from “Ahrefs does not trust this backlink source” to “Outbid is a spam website,” then from there to “Google is penalizing it.” Neither jump is supported by what Ahrefs itself says.

In fact, Ahrefs’ help center now explicitly warns against pretending a third-party metric can reproduce Google’s spam judgment. That caveat deserves almost as much attention as the red badge.

We would take the Ahrefs classification seriously for backlink analysis. We would not use it as a verdict on Outbid’s legitimacy, its advertising ROI or its status with Google.

So why is Outbid getting labeled as spam by Ahrefs?

Outbid is getting labeled as spam because its backlink pattern looks exactly like something Ahrefs does not want users mistaking for editorial SEO authority: money directly creates public links to huge numbers of unrelated websites.

It fits the evidence better than the more dramatic alternatives.

Outbid went viral and earned a surprisingly strong inbound backlink profile, which explains why its DR rose so quickly. Meanwhile, its outbound side behaves very differently: advertisers pay for placement, ranking follows spend rather than editorial judgment, and the board now connects to a huge range of unrelated destinations.

Ahrefs currently puts backlinks from domains it classifies as “known spammy” behind the SPAM tag. As seen previously, the company does not publish the private criteria that put a particular domain into that group, so we cannot honestly say that one metric or threshold caused Outbid to be flagged.

The judgment itself is still easy to understand.

Our conclusion is that Ahrefs is mostly right about the SEO value and easy to misread about everything else. An Outbid placement should not be treated like an earned backlink from a DR 72 publication. The current sponsored implementation makes the direct SEO-authority pitch particularly weak.

At the same time, there is no good evidence that the Ahrefs label means Google has penalized Outbid. There is also plenty of evidence that the board can send real traffic: the current top seven alone show roughly 140,600 recorded clicks, while several advertisers have reported signups, trials and sales pipeline after bidding.

So the red SPAM badge tells us something useful, but much narrower than the word suggests. These days Outbid makes far more sense as a strange, high-attention advertising marketplace than as a way to buy search authority.