Every One of Them Scored 42. None of Them Are Real.

TL;DR

Those sites aren’t businesses. They’re one operation running hundreds of throwaway domains, and the product it sells is the link itself.
The identical score is the tell. Every domain rates the same because they all link to each other. They’re gaming the tool you’re using to look at them.
Do nothing. Google ignores this kind of link. The disavow tool is for sites under a manual penalty, and that’s rare.
Never pay for a link. Pay for an audience. If the placement is only worth it because of the link, walk away.
Backlinks are the wrong first number anyway. Watch indexed pages, then impressions, then queries. Links come last, and they come on their own.

I opened Ahrefs, the tool I use to see who links to my sites, one morning this week and scrolled through the list for one of them. Page after page. kawaiishop.shop. theguestposts.shop. link-baron-pro-press-release.store. outrank-hq-legendary-white-hat.store. Every one of them with the same Domain Rating, 42, sitting in the right-hand column like a row of identical stamps.

For about a minute it felt like something was happening. Then I looked closer.

What You’re Actually Looking At

Those aren’t businesses. That’s one operation, and it owns every domain on the list.

The names give it away. Take a short list of words from SEO sales pitches (link, rank, outrank, guest post), add a few that sound impressive (baron, forge), and let a script glue them together with modifiers like “pro”, “elite”, “legendary” and “white hat”. Then register the results on .shop and .store, because those extensions often cost under a dollar for the first year. A few hundred domains for the price of a nice dinner.

Hosting is just as cheap. Hundreds of templated sites with auto-generated pages can sit on one server for pennies apiece per month.

Now the score. Ahrefs’ Domain Rating grades a site’s backlink profile from 0 to 100, based on how many sites link to it and how strong those sites are. Point a few hundred domains at each other and every one of them gets a few hundred backlinks. The score climbs to the same number for all of them, because they’re all in the same closed loop and nobody outside it links in. The 42 isn’t a measure of anything real. They manufactured it.

How They Make Money

They sell links. The pitch shows up on Fiverr, in SEO marketplaces, and in the spam folder of anyone who owns a domain. “100 backlinks from DR 40+ sites, $30.” A buyer pastes a few of the domains into Ahrefs, sees 42, decides it checks out, and pays.

Some of them also sell the domains themselves. “Aged domain, DR 42, ready to build on,” for a few hundred dollars. Same manufactured number, different buyer.

Ads aren’t the business. There’s no traffic to show ads to.

Why They Link to You

None of the likely reasons are about you.

Mostly it’s camouflage. A network that only links to its paying customers looks exactly like what it is, and Google’s spam systems are good at spotting a closed ring. So the network scrapes real sites and links to them too, to make the whole thing look like a normal part of the web. You’re set dressing.

Sometimes it’s just padding, because someone bought 500 links and the seller needed random targets to hit the number. And sometimes the link is bait. They link first, then email you. “We are already ranking you. Upgrade to the premium tier.” The link is the free sample.

What to Do

Nothing. Google has said for years that it can tell which links to trust on its own, and that most sites will never need to do anything about links they didn’t ask for. The disavow tool exists, but Google’s own guidance is to use it only when you have a large number of spammy links and they’ve caused a manual action, or clearly will. A manual action is a notice in Google’s Search Console, written by a person at Google, and it’s rare. If you don’t have one, a disavow file is busywork.

What is worth doing is fixing the view. In Ahrefs, open the referring domains report and filter by domain traffic, anything above zero. The wall of 42s disappears. What’s left is the actual list of sites that link to you, and that list is short enough to read. Mine is short. I’d bet yours is too.

Should You Ever Pay for Links?

Google’s rule here is simple. Buying links to move your ranking is against its spam policy. Paying for a placement is fine, and a normal part of advertising, as long as the link is marked as sponsored, which tells Google not to count it.

That gives you a test. Would you still pay if the link counted for nothing?

If the answer is yes, you’re paying for an audience. A sponsorship in an industry newsletter people actually open. A listing in a directory your customers actually use. A talk, a podcast, a guest post on a site with real readers. Those are worth paying for because of who sees them, and the link is a side effect. Mark it sponsored and sleep fine.

If the answer is no, you’re paying for the link itself, and the link itself is worth nothing. Any seller who leads with a Domain Rating is selling you the link, not the audience. The sellers on my list fail that test on sight.

The Number I Should Have Been Looking At

The bigger mistake was opening the backlinks tab at all as if it were a scoreboard.

Backlinks are an input to organic search, and they’re the input you control least. They also move slowest. You can do everything right for six months and watch the count sit still.

Organic search runs in order. Google has to index your pages first, and Search Console tells you whether it has. Then you start showing up in results, which is what impressions measure, and that moves in weeks. Then you can see which searches you show up for and how far down the page. Then people click, which mostly comes down to your titles. Backlinks come after all of that. They’re what happens once people find you and decide you’re worth citing.

For a site with thousands of pages, indexing is the whole game. For a small marketing site like this one, impressions are the first number that moves. Either way the weekly number lives in Search Console, not in Ahrefs.

Why It Feels Worse Than It Used To

The open web really did shrink, and spam got almost free.

When I was a kid, someone with an opinion put up a site and linked to the things they liked. That person now posts in a Discord, a subreddit, or a group chat. Tools like Ahrefs can’t see most of that. The real conversations moved somewhere the crawler can’t follow. Meanwhile a script can register and fill a few hundred domains in an afternoon.

So when you open your backlinks and see a wall of identical scores, that’s not a verdict on your site. It’s what the web looks like now. Filter it out, close the tab, and go look at the number you can actually move.

David Kerr is the founder of Kerrberry Systems. He builds custom software for businesses. Find him on LinkedIn or GitHub.