Read this the whole way through before you reply. I am not looking to have a go at you, and there is a section in here where the data says the work has genuinely moved something. But there is also a client about to walk, and they worked out something about our link building before we did, so I need to understand what happened.
The client-facing version of this is live at will-and-wind-report.teamempathy.co.nz/update. That one is written carefully. This one is not, because it is for us.
This is the part I most need you to respond to, so I want to be exact about what we checked and what came back.
The platforms are Medium, Notion, Penzu, Diigo, Tumblr, Blogger, Sutori, GoConqr, LiveJournal and Slides.com. Every one of them is a free publishing or bookmarking site where anyone can create a page. The domain has a high domain rating, so on a report the link looks strong. The page itself carries nothing.
We pulled the full referring domain history for the site and checked each platform individually. Not one appears. They are nofollow, or Ahrefs dropped them as low value. Either way nothing is passing through them.
The client got there before us. Anna ran the backlink profile through Claude herself and came back with a scathing review. Joachim's words to me on Monday were "they aren't moving the needle and they may actually be hurting us."
Why have we been building this type of link for years? That is a genuine question, not a rhetorical one.
If you have ever seen evidence this works, on this account or any other, show me and I will happily take it back to the client. If we have not, I need to know that too, because this same link building sits inside the Care Package for a lot of clients and I am the one who sold it to them.
Also: was this your call, an inherited process, or something you were asked to do a volume of each month? I want the real history, not a tidy version.
I want to be fair here, because it matters for how we read the rest. I stripped out every branded search and the entire car seat towels range, which is a category the client launched themselves and which Joachim rightly pointed out is carrying most of the headline growth. What is left is the part we can actually talk about.
April to July this year against the same months last year:
| Where they rank | Shown 2026 | Clicks 2026 | Shown 2025 | Clicks 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Positions 4 to 10 the money | 22,381 | 237 | 7,534 | 88 |
| Positions 11 to 20 | 27,891 | 97 | 43,614 | 143 |
| Positions 21 to 50 | 19,693 | 14 | 48,478 | 33 |
| Positions 51+ | 2,065 | 0 | 19,854 | 4 |
Impressions at positions 4 to 10 are up 197% and clicks from that band are up 169%. Average position across everything non-branded went from 30.7 to 17.6. Total impressions look like they fell 40%, but almost all of that loss is at position 21 and beyond, which produced 37 clicks in the entire prior year. They stopped being shown on page four for rubbish and started being shown on page one for real terms.
That is a genuine result and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Something in the on-page and technical work moved them into the zone where clicks happen.
Their click-through rate at positions 4 to 10 is 2.24%, roughly a third of what those positions should return. Specifics:
| Search or page | Position | Times shown | Clicks |
|---|---|---|---|
| "quick dry towel" | 6.5 | 3,535 | 31 |
| "fast drying towels" | 10.0 | 468 | 0 |
| "hair wrap" | 18.3 | 504 | 0 |
| /products/hair-wrap | 19.4 | 15,117 | 18 |
| /products/kalbarri | 12.3 | 8,190 | 0 |
| /collections/tea-towel | 13.7 | 9,950 | 13 |
That is titles and meta descriptions. It is the cheapest work there is and we are nine months in.
There are 1,433 non-branded searches sitting at positions 11 to 20, drawing 115,384 impressions a year and returning 658 clicks. On their own revenue per organic click of $4.09, just getting those onto page one is worth about $7,900 a year to them.
| Search | Page Google shows | Shown | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| adult hooded towel | /products/ningaloo-adult-hooded-towel | 2,188 | 15.3 |
| /collections/hooded-towels | 464 | 9.8 | |
| hooded towels for adults | /products/ningaloo-adult-hooded-towel | 942 | 19.1 |
| /collections/hooded-towels | 754 | 8.9 |
The product page is taking most of the impressions at position 15 while the collection sits at 9.8 and barely gets shown. The stronger page is losing to the weaker one, and nobody has decided which page should own which search.
What was the monthly on-page process on this account, and how did none of this surface in nine months?
I genuinely want to know whether it was out of scope, not looked at, or flagged and never actioned. If you raised any of it and it went nowhere, say so and I will wear that.
Bruna told Anna on the call that the toxic links were already disavowed. I went to check today and we cannot submit a disavow for this site at all.
Google only opens the disavow tool to verified owners of a property. We have user-level access on willandwind.com.au, not owner, so the site does not even appear in the tool. Ben's own Google account does not have the property at all. There is no account of ours that could have done it.
So either it was submitted from an account I do not know about, or the client did it themselves, or it never happened. There is an unanswered client comment in the SEO Work doc asking exactly this, and Anna will check.
Were you the one who handled it? If you submitted a disavow, which account did you use, and can you send me a screenshot today. If it was never submitted, tell me now so I am not blindsided tomorrow.
Bigger picture: of the 51 properties on our client Google account we only own 9. If we are promising disavow work on accounts where we only have full-user access, we cannot actually deliver it. That is a process problem well past this one client and I want your read on how many others it affects.
Put together your own analysis of this account across the nine months and send it to me. Build it out properly and showcase it the way you would to a client, so I can actually work from it rather than piece it together from a chat thread.
Be straight in it. I am not after a defence, I am after a real post-mortem I can learn from and act on. If the process was wrong, say the process was wrong. Cheers mate.