About Tim Walker

Hi, I’m Tim. This is a working notebook for the way I actually do link building in 2026 — published partly as my own reference, partly because most of what gets written about GSA Search Engine Ranker, Money Robot, and the surrounding tooling is dated, vague, or written by people who have never opened the software.

Background

I have been doing SEO work as my primary income since around 2014. Before that I was a junior developer at a small agency in Bristol, UK, where I picked up the technical side of how search engines actually work and noticed how much of what passed for “SEO advice” was guesswork.

Since 2016, my main work has been building and operating niche affiliate sites. I currently run a portfolio of about 30 sites in various stages of development — some launched last month, some six years old. None of them are massive — the largest does about 80,000 monthly sessions — but collectively they pay the bills and let me run experiments at scale that I could not afford to run on a single big site.

GSA Search Engine Ranker has been a daily tool for me since 2016. RankerX since 2019. Money Robot since 2020. The combination of these three tools, layered properly, is the link building infrastructure that powers every site in my portfolio.

Why this blog exists

Three reasons:

First, I keep getting the same questions over email. Writing answers down once is more efficient than writing them out repeatedly.

Second, the SEO automation niche has a serious quality problem online. Most of the top-ranking content for “GSA SER tutorial” or “best proxies for SEO” is either copy-pasted from older sources, written by AI tools without first-hand experience, or thinly disguised affiliate marketing. The handful of genuinely useful sources are forum posts on BlackHatWorld and the GSA forum. I wanted to make a clean, regularly-updated reference that does not require digging through 200-comment threads.

Third, the AEO era is genuinely changing the calculus on link building. Most blog content I see is recycling 2018 takes about whether automation tools still work. The honest 2026 answer is more interesting than the 2018 answer was, and worth writing down.

What this blog is not

It is not a beginner SEO blog. There are dozens of those, written by people more patient than me about explaining what a backlink is.

It is not a white-hat-only resource. Most of what I write about lives in the gray-hat territory between strict adherence to Google’s webmaster guidelines and obvious black-hat tactics. If your sites cannot tolerate gray-hat risk, this is the wrong blog for you. (Read my editorial standards for the long version of this disclosure.)

It is not free of bias. The tools and services I recommend are the ones I personally use. Many of them are affiliate partners — see the privacy and affiliate disclosure page for the policy. The recommendations are based on what I actually pay for, not on commission rates, but the affiliate relationships exist.

How this blog is organized

Five pillar topics, each with deep-dive spoke articles:

Plus a resources hub with downloadable templates, comparison tables, and shopping lists.

Get in touch

Email is open at the contact page. I read every message and reply to most within a week. If you spot an error in any of the articles, please send it over — I would rather fix it than let it sit.