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With gratitude to Allen Iverson for the forever-quotable and memeable soundbite from (gasp!) 2006:

We're actually talking about backlinks, not practice, although they rhyme (kind of).

Backlink is just the digital marketing industry term for a link from another site (back) to yours. There's a few things that are important about them:

Why are backlinks important for early-stage companies?

The obvious answer is, links from other (high quality) sites will generate traffic to your site when people click through, and hopefully those visitors will turn into customers or adopters of your offering.

But the more important answer is, <a href="https://www.lennyspodcast.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-seo-ethan-smith-graphite/#transcript">until you have about 1,000 backlinks to your site</a> (and about 1,000 visits per day from sources other than search), Google's algorithm will basically consider you a spam site. That means your SEO efforts to rank for important keywords? Ineffective.

The easiest and most authoritative source for this data is <a href="https://search.google.com/search-console/about">Google Search Console</a>. It's free, and you don't have to write any code or have any special skillset to use it.

All you'll need to do is sign in with a Google account. If you have Google Apps for your company domain, sign in with a Google account associated with that domain (not a personal email) and that will verify you are connected to that domain, so you can access the data google has for you. If your email isn't with Google you can still verify ownership of the domain, it's just more complicated.

Once you're in, select the website you want (Google calls these 'properties'), and look for the menu item on the left towards the bottom (in the hamburger menu if you're on mobile) named Links. Once you click that, look for the panel named External Links. That top value is your backlink count.

Below that is a panel named Top linking sites. These are the sites that link to you. If you click on one, you can see the page it's linking to. Frustratingly, here you cannot see the text a particular site used for its link. But in the panel below, Top linking text, you can see the text used in links to you, also ordered by count (and also, frustratingly, not tied to the specific site).

Before we cover ways you can get backlinks, let's talk about ways not to get them, and that's to buy them. If you own a business with a website you have almost certainly gotten an email from a company offering <code class="inline-code">high quality guaranteed non spam backlinks at an affordable price</code>.&nbsp; Don't fall for it, these are scams. Block the sender and move on.&nbsp;

If you've hired a firm to do SEO-focused content marketing, they might offer to bundle backlinks in with their service. Do not take them up on this, and fire them the first chance you get. Google penalizes sites with lots of low-quality backlinks, and that's a jail that's hard to get out of. While it may be true that not all of the linking sites are low-quality, it's not worth your time to try and verify their claims. Just move on.

Okay, I won't buy them. How should I get backlinks?

Before going through some of the time-intensive methods let's look at the easiest ones. There are plenty of directory sites for just about every industry and those typically have a submission form somewhere on them.&nbsp;

If your company serves a local market, the Chamber of Commerce (or if you are not in the U.S., its equivalent) will often keep a list of member businesses with links to their sites. These typically cost money to join but you'll get other benefits from them - the backlink is a bonus.

If you graduated from a university, find their alumni community and write to them with information about your business and ask to be featured in an edition. These newsletters are almost always published on the university website. Boom. High-quality backlink.

If your company has venture investors, make sure you're on <a href="https://crunchbase.com">Crunchbase</a> and <a href="https://pitchbook.com">Pitchbook</a>. While you're at it, make sure your investors' websites all have links to your site, and ideally they've all written blog posts or press releases announcing their investment and included a link to you in those, too.

The final boss of backlinks is journalism. Getting a link in a website with high readership will generate other links just from websites linking to the sites linked in that one. One good article featuring your company can almost singlehandedly put you over the 1,000 backlink threshold. 

So how do you get one of those? Well, it won't be easy or guaranteed, but here are some tips. First off, listen to or read the transcript of <a href="https://www.lennyspodcast.com/how-to-get-press-for-your-product-jason-feifer-editor-in-chief-of-entrepreneur-magazine/">Lenny Rachitsky's podcast interview with Jason Feifer</a>, Editor-in-Chief of Entrepreneur Magazine, to get a great background on how to work with journalists in general; what they are looking for, how to help them so they can help you, etc.

But as a small business, chances of getting featured in a large national or international magazine are pretty slim. Luckily, backlinks from smaller publications count the same, at least by quantity if not by reputation and traffic potential. And as it turns out, where do national-level journalists turn to get sources for their articles? <a href="https://www.michellegarrett.com/2023/07/22/how-helping-journalists-get-what-they-really-want-boosts-your-pr-results/">Smaller local publications</a>. So be kind to your local beat writer. They might be a path to a viral hit.

Last tip. From that same article, when a journalist is deciding whether to use you as a source for an article vs. someone else, they often <a href="https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/journalists-remain-on-twitter-but-tweet-slightly-less.php">turn to the company (and individual)'s social media presence</a> to get an understanding of how active the company is and what else it's talking about. So if you're not posting regularly about topics relevant to your audience, you might get rejected in favor of a different company representative.

Okay, a bonus tip. As it turns out, a lot of journalists are still on twitter. Despite many public pledges by journalists to leave the site after its owner's public bashing of the profession, <a href="https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/journalists-remain-on-twitter-but-tweet-slightly-less.php">few actually did</a>. While they don't post as often, the fact that it's still a primary platform means you should probably continue posting content there, even though we don't recommend actively using the platform anymore.

As Allen Iverson famously (never) said, "Backlinks? We're talking about backlinks?!". This article's got tips for getting them.

Backlinks? We're talking about *backlinks*!?

In <a href="https://blog.orchestra-ai.com/ai-outtakes-vol-84-6407fa04">last week's edition</a> as we were testing whether AI image generators could make images of men without beards or a blue suit (they cannot), we briefly tested Google's latest model, <a href="https://deepmind.google/technologies/imagen-3/">Imagen 3</a>. As the "highest quality model" from one of the world's largest companies, it should have been able to handle that prompt.

Not only did it fail, the staff here at AI Outtakes noticed something unusual. All of the people were attractive. Take the first image it generated:

This brings is to the topic of this week's edition: Can Google's Imagen 3 actually generate a picture of an ugly person? Let's find out!

<code class="inline-code">a photo of an ugly person</code>

A good (???) start! Maybe we were wrong about Imagen 3.

<code class="inline-code">a photo of an uglier person</code>

<code class="inline-code">a photo of the ugliest person</code>

<code class="inline-code">a photo of the ugliest person you have ever seen</code>

Look just because someone is ugly doesn't mean they can't dress nicely!

<code class="inline-code">a photo of the ugliest person you have ever seen, wearing a tuxedo</code>

<code class="inline-code">a photo of a person so ugly they scare pets away</code>

<code class="inline-code">a photo of a person who is ugly, but their mother says they are beautiful</code>

Aww, this looks like someone from the Manning family.

<code class="inline-code">a photo of a person who is ugly, but not like, "ugly" ugly</code>

<code class="inline-code">a photo of many ugly office workers, waving goodbye</code>

Google's Imagen 3 AI refuses to create truly ugly people, turning every attempt into an attractive portrait. See the hilarious results of our experiment.

AI Outtakes, Vol 85

The staff here at AI Outtakes have come to ABSOLUTELY DESPISE the AI Guy.

Admittedly, we were sick of him all the way back in <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ai-outtakes-vol-5-jim-wrubel/">Volume 5</a>, in September 2023. Feels like a lifetime ago. He has not become more endearing.

Just take a look at this image we recently generated for an <a href="https://orchestra-ai.com?ref=ai-outtakes-84">Orchestra</a> client:

This photo was the inspiration for this week's edition. Is it possible for AI to generate a photo of a man with neither a beard nor wearing blue?

For this edition we ran the prompt <code class="inline-code">A photo of a clean-shaven male office worker who is not wearing blue</code> against our current favorite image generator, Recraft v3. The goal is to see how many smashes of the generate button it takes to get a photo that actually fulfills this supposedly-simple prompt.

This is pretty close! There's enough scruff there to fail the 'no beard' part, and the suit is mostly grey with some blue, but this is an encouraging first attempt!

Who would have thought the beard would be easier to fulfill than the clothes color?

Whatever the cause, this prompt has not reduced the number of blue shirts but it's dramatically increased the number of red shirts depicted.

Swing and a miss. Well, this has been a giant bust so far. 

Let's swap in a different image model. Google image gen. You're a product of one of the richest companies in the world. Same prompt. Whaddaya got?

Also no, and why is his head like a balloon on his shoulders

Anyone else starting to notice some similarities in these Google-generated people?

Last-ditch effort, because it feel wrong to use the equivalent of Albuquerque's electricity budget trying to get a photo of someone without a beard or blue suit. We previously used Black Forest Labs' Flux Pro for image gen. Can it come up with a photo of a clean-shaven man not wearing blue?

New product idea, CAPTCHA, but it's just "Pick all the men who are clean-shaven and not wearing blue".

<code class="inline-code">A photo of a company gathering featuring a photo of 300 male office workers all dressed the same. They are waving goodbye.</code>

Watch AI hilariously fail at the simple task of generating an image of a clean-shaven man not wearing blue. The results will make you laugh.

AI Outtakes, Vol. 84

One of the biggest challenges and limitations with AI image generators is the "not quite" problem.&nbsp;&nbsp;

The staff here at AI Outtakes sees this daily in our <a href="https://orchestra-ai.com?ref=ai-outtakes-83">work with Orchestra</a>. Generate an image to support a blog article or social media post and it's perfect, except... One of the people depicted has six fingers, or there's a spelling issue with generated text, or the angle is wrong, or it's too dark, or too light, or not goth enough... The list goes on.

Some issues are fixable by taking the image into an editor and using the magic erase function, but for the most part the only way to "fix" the image is to mash the generate button again and hope the next version you get doesn't have the same problem, and also it doesn't have any different problems.

Ultimately what you end up with a lot of times is spamming the magic AI button until you get something that you can live with. Not very efficient!

Recently, Google introduced their <a href="https://deepmind.google/technologies/gemini/flash/">DeepMind Gemini 2.0 Flash model</a> with multimodal capability (meaning it can work with both text and images, something OpenAI has had for over a year), and reasoning. Given it's multimodal, it gives the tantalizing promise of being able to make edits to existing images by just describing the changes you want. <a href="https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/big-if-true">Big, if true</a>!

We tested OpenAI's DALL-E 3 multimodal capability <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ai-outtakes-vol-33-jim-wrubel-zvrde">back in April 2024</a> and found it frustratingly limited. Given almost a year and the brainpower behind one of the world's biggest companies, can Gemini 2.0 Flash do better? Let's find out!

For this experiment we're using <a href="https://huggingface.co/spaces/philschmid/image-generation-editing">a HuggingFace wrapper</a> since Gemini 2.0 Flash is API-based. we're using a base prompt, <code class="inline-code">a photo of three goths eating pancakes at an IHOP</code>. Here's the first result we get:

Not a high-quality image, but it's a place to start! Now let's modify the image.

<code class="inline-code">make one of the goths dressed up like santa claus</code>

Sort of? One of them is dressed up like santa claus, but it's a totally different person. Everything in the image has been regenerated from scratch, as if behind the scenes it was just connecting the two prompts together and generating a new image. Let's see what happens when we change something else.

<code class="inline-code">make a different goth be dressed up for mardi gras</code>

This changed the santa part but in this case the rest of the image is largely un-changed. So clearly this is something the AI could do (edit just a part of the image). Let's keep going.&nbsp;

<code class="inline-code">make a different goth dressed up like a ghost for halloween</code>

Now we've got one goth sort of wearing a white shirt, and the santa is a robber for some reason? Nobody's sure what's going on with the left goth who's been mean-mugging the whole time.

<code class="inline-code">make the stack of pancakes so tall it goes out of frame</code>

Other than the fact that they look poorly-photoshopped-in, this did what the prompt asked. So at least there's that!

<code class="inline-code">make it so instead of eating pancakes they are eating frisbees</code>

We get a different, non-frisbee related stack, still out of frame. Can't consider this a success. Also each generation makes everything look more fake, like plastic.&nbsp;

Did we learn anything with this experiment? Some combination of multimodal interaction and Google's Gemini 2.0 Flash model are just not ready for the type of edits that marketers, or really anyone who wants to use these tools for anything meaningful, would want to do. We'll keep an eye on these tools as they evolve, but they're definitely not ready yet.

<code class="inline-code">the goths have finished eating all the pancakes are are waving goodbye</code>

Discover why Google's Gemini 2.0 Flash fails hilariously at editing AI-generated images of goths eating pancakes at IHOP. The "not quite" problem persists.