Managed Link Building for an Adult Platform

Cooperation Link Building Results

The profile no longer rests entirely on adult directories. Before, most of those domains weren’t passing traffic or authority, and there wasn’t a single major Brazilian publication in the mix. Over the course of the project, we added 250 links: 50 guest posts on sites with a genuine Brazilian audience, and 200 placements across forums and niche communities. Referring domains now sit at 240. The anchor profile on the new links looks safe: 64% branded/naked URL, 27% mixed/diluted, and just 9% commercial.

The Client and Their Market

Let’s start with how the product works. A creator sets up a profile and a monthly subscription price, and subscribers pay for access to gated content. Creators span fitness, lifestyle, and 18+ content. It’s that last group that shapes how ad platforms see the whole site, since Google Ads and Meta won’t touch projects like this.

Affiliate traffic and creators’ own social channels bring in results, but they’re hard to scale with a budget. Organic search is the only channel here where you can actually invest money and forecast an outcome. The market itself is strictly Brazilian: payments through Pix and boleto, Portuguese-language support, local creators. And there was already a market leader with a substantial lead over our client in link count.

Where We Started and What We Agreed On

The client had three problems, and they compounded each other. Paid channels were off the table, so all the weight fell on organic. The link profile that was supposed to carry that organic growth wasn’t doing the job. And the market leader had a serious head start.

The client figured there was only one path forward: scale up what already existed and add PBNs on top. But “what already existed” turned out to be exactly the problem. The bulk of the profile was made up of roundup pages like “melhores sites de conteúdo adulto,” useful for padding out a referring-domain count in a report and not much else. The rest was creators’ own pages, affiliate sites, and a handful of tech blogs that had covered the launch. Adding PBNs into that mix would’ve meant reinforcing the weakest part of the profile. So we agreed on a different plan instead:

• Audit all 128 domains and identify what was actually doing any work.
• Analyze competitors’ donor sites.
• Select donors based on traffic geography.
• Build an anchor list weighted toward branded and anchor-free links.
• Use forum placements as a diversity tool.
• Track, index, and report on every link, month by month.

We scoped the engagement at five months and 250 placements: 10 guest posts a month (50 total, DR 30–40), plus two batches of 100 forum links each.

What We Did Over Five Months

1. Auditing the Profile

Before adding anything new, we needed to understand what was already hurting the profile. After review, 58 domains landed in the “doesn’t hurt, doesn’t help” bucket: directories and aggregators with zero traffic.

We dug deeper into 22 suspicious domains. In Brazil’s .br zone, owners register using their CPF or CNPJ, and WHOIS displays that information without masking it. So a network of several sites under one CNPJ has nowhere to hide. In the end, 19 domains went into disavow, and 3 stayed after manual review.

2. Gap Analysis 

We ran a gap analysis against the two leaders in Brazilian search results, starting with 190 donors linking to them but not to our client. After filtering out everything without genuinely Brazilian traffic, we were left with 85 candidates.

We expected this list to be dominated by adult directories. Instead, we found Brazilian publications covering finance, business, and technology writing about how creators handle their taxes, how they protect themselves from leaks, and how much they earn. Barely any mention of the platform itself, plenty about the creators. We still kept niche adult sites as the backbone of the profile, but these media outlets became our source of volume and trust.

3. Building the Anchor Plan

The client’s ask was straightforward: more commercial anchors to move key pages faster. But a profile already sitting at 41% direct commercial anchors was risky enough as it was; adding more would have meant working directly against Google.

We showed the client a real example of a domain that lost visibility because of aggressive anchor text, and proposed a different split instead. For the 250 new links, that came out to: 64% branded/URL, 27% mixed/diluted, and 9% partial-match commercial. That last category only went on donors with no sponsored attribute.

4. Selecting Donors

We ran each of the 85 candidates through four filters, and every single one eliminated somebody:

1. Ownership: 14 domains were registered under the same CNPJ as other sites already in the pool, clear signs of a network.
2. Audience: 9 domains turned out to have traffic from Portugal or globally, not Brazil specifically.
3. Editorial policy: 7 publications flatly refused anything touching 18+ content.
4. Link attributes: 5 sites tag every single outbound link as sponsored.

This was the longest stage of the project. The client asked us more than once to speed up the selection process, but this step was what would ultimately determine the quality of the final profile, so we didn’t rush it.

5. Content

If we’d pitched editors on platform reviews, most of our outreach emails would’ve gone unanswered. So instead, we built topics around the creator: taxes and reporting income, MEI status and when it makes sense to register for it, protecting against leaks, and the economics of Brazil’s creator economy.

Each article ran around 1,200 words, written by the client’s own team of writers, all native Brazilian Portuguese speakers. The client insisted on this themselves, and we were fully on board. An editor spots a non-native Brazilian Portuguese speaker instantly, and the odds of publication drop to zero.

6. Forum Placements, Indexing, and Reporting

Guest posts gave the profile authority and trust; forum placements solved a different problem: making the profile look natural. 200 placements went out across Brazilian forums and communities, where people compare platforms and ask each other where creators should go.

Alongside that, we checked every single link: correct attribute, placed within the body text, matching the anchor plan. Only then did we submit it for indexing. Every month, the client got a report with the donor URL, the published post, the anchor used, a screenshot, and Ahrefs metrics as of the placement date.

Project Takeaways

A restricted niche doesn’t automatically mean you have to buy grey-hat links. The market leader had built trust through Brazilian media covering money and the realities of creators’ work.

We took the same path and brought editorial teams genuinely useful topics for their readers instead of advertising. Over five months and $18,730, the client walked away with 250 new links, 240 referring domains instead of 128, and an anchor profile where commercial anchors make up just 9% of the new placements. That’s a foundation they can keep building on.

Yevhen Humeniuk, CEO of NeedMyLink

When a client asks for a faster and more aggressive approach, it's easy to just say yes. But the problems show up later, and by then it's on them to deal with it. On this project, we said no to the client more than once – on PBNs, on commercial anchors, on moving faster. Those aren't always comfortable conversations, but our job is to build a profile the client can rely on for years.