When is a backlink article too "Spammy"?

I run a personal blog network for my sites - and each piece of content has only 1 backlink, and that 1 backlink is in an author box. All the content on each site is niche specific, all the domains are aged, PR, high quality and not every post is linking to content. The reason? It looks natural.

Rule of thumb I'd say is if you think it's too spammy it probably it.

You say you're having problems finding quality sites in particular to post on?

Yes ... quality is an issue when your used to doing 5-10 social backlinks for every 1000 directory submissions.

So - this time around we did a few wordpress, bloggers, squidoos etc and around 150 direcotry submissions via digixmas:

https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/ove...oblemedals.com

Per SEO Serp and manual checks we're not even in the top 1000 G Results after a few months and this blows my mind, because there is not allot of competition for these keywords (in comparison to more main stream items this is really niche).

Was also doing allot of paid advertising on B and G and seeing about 100% bounce there (no sales) - but i've seen these ads temporarily get indexed in the past and also help w/ PR on relative keywords - but no dice here.

So - in a knee jerk reaction I disavowed all link directories and am hoping to appear somewhere in the first 1000 G results at some point - the only answer in my head is that we were black-listed due to spammy back-links.

Am I wrong? (No alerts from G Webmaster Tools to this affect btw - sitemap etc is good too)

Keeping all blogger, wordpress, etc and building on that ... but it looks like Directory Submissions ruined this one for us quick (did 15 unique articles and blew out only about 100 over a 2 or 3 day period ... )

This was so much easier a few years back ... even after having only a few hundred backlinks I would still expect to be indexed somewhere and build off of that.

But in this example - NO LISTING - nowhere to be found for targeted keywords (challenge coins).

Amazing

Article directories will always leave a footprint.

Nobody creates/submits articles to article directories just because it's fun, they use those directories to spam links. Google isn't stupid they know article directories are link farms.

When your done playing games, get some quality links from relevant niche sites.

brb ... looking for relevant niche sites ...