The State of SEO in Indonesia (2026): A Reflection

Recently (in late 2025), we introduced the YPYM brand to the public, primarily sharing our roadmap on LinkedIn, which was followed by our legal incorporation as a PT on February 26, 2026. The response from the local industry was immediate. Within two weeks, our profile pages and founder's feed saw a massive surge in visits from various SEO agencies across Indonesia. For official updates, please refer to our press releases.

However, shortly after this spike in professional curiosity, something else happened. We noticed a sudden flood of spam backlinks pointing directly to our domain. In the days that followed, the site continued to receive between 1 and 5 low-quality spam backlinks every single day.

An Outdated Playbook

If we were looking at the SEO industry 10 or 15 years ago, this kind of negative campaign was considered normal. Back then, practitioners used raw backlink blasts to try to trigger automated search engine penalties for competitors. It was a simple, aggressive strategy: either grow significantly or try to kill the competition before they get off the ground.

But seeing this happen in 2026 is genuinely embarrassing. Why? Because search engines have spent the last decade developing advanced spam filters. Today, Google's algorithms easily identify, isolate, and ignore toxic backlink patterns without penalizing the target domain. Knowing that people are still active in this spam strategy is disappointing.

Choosing Partnership over Friction

We are not worried about our rankings. In fact, with the monitoring infrastructure we have built, it took our team less than 60 seconds to identify the exact footprint, locate where the spam originates, and understand who is behind it.

However, we choose to look forward. We want to be a partner that elevates the entire ecosystem. We have no interest in starting public arguments or calling out individual actors, which only creates negative noise and complicates operations for local businesses.