Anecdotally, my website has apparently cracked some SEO metrics threshold, as I'm enjoying the questionable honour of receiving various offerings on a daily basis. These are from agencies either directly asking for link placements, or offering payed posts, or, the other way round, offering ready made content (which may or may not contain an endorsement of some kind, most probably the latter). One thing these have in common is that those are the most stubborn cold call campaigns, I've ever seen. They do not give up, there's a 7th and 8th followup on an answered mail, eventually turning towards the passive-aggressive side. (While, clearly, they couldn't be bothered to have just a quick look at the site in question, just to recognise, how inappropriate and meaningless their advances are.) There seems to be quite a flourishing industry behind this.
(Not so serious theory regarding overconfident influencers: Maybe they are just copying the style of the agencies, they get their pay checks from.)
Without naming your site or sharing any details, would you be willing to share how many daily unique visitors you are getting that it has reached over this threshold?
It's just a small site that has been out there for some time. I kicked out any analytics for good some time ago, so I do not have any reliable data myself. There have been times with hyped content collecting millions of hits in a few days, but those have been years ago. (Then, this only resulted in offers for buying the domain, for, what I can only guess to be business of varying trustworthy.) I added a blog two years ago with rather infrequent post activity. The content is quite specialized and probably far from general interest. Ad revenue from a few Google adds sprinkled here and there is about nil. Currently, Google search stats indicates varying performance from 1 to 1.5 M impressions and about 20 to 30 K clicks at the beginning of the year and a rather steep decline towards the summer. (Only estimated pages with first impression are slightly up. I've actually no idea what these figures do indicate nowadays, whether there's anything noticeable about them or not.) Ironically, the mails started, when the performance was going down. (Full disclosure: https://www.masswerk.at/)
Do you happen to know if the follow-up emails were manual or scheduled/automated? I think it'd be interesting if someone actually wrote 8 automated follow-up emails and deliberately went aggressive in the later automated steps. Maybe that actually works enough times to be worth it?
It's mostly automated. They'll use tools to dump out data based on search metrics into an Airtable or Google spreadsheet, then templates for the mail stages and tools to send and track opens.
(Not so serious theory regarding overconfident influencers: Maybe they are just copying the style of the agencies, they get their pay checks from.)