Link Building Services – What to Know & What to Avoid
If you are looking to outsource link building, and this is your first time doing it, you’re probably wondering what the best link building service out there is.
In today’s article, we’re looking at what a link building service can offer you, the right SEO link building service that you can pick based on your requirements and preferences, and also several things that you should (at all cost) avoid when purchasing links.
What is a link building service?
An SEO link building service is something that can be offered by an individual vendor or an agency, and that can help you in your online marketing campaign.
There are a number of techniques that can be used by the service, such as manual outreach, broken link building, guest blogging, and several other methods.
The reason people sell links and there is a market for them is that link building still makes a difference, and unlike some SEOs might tell you, it’s not dead at all.
Naturally, you don’t have to acquire hundreds of backlinks in the first month of your site’s existence, especially since that would look suspicious, but sooner or later, if your content is good enough, you’d be able to acquire them organically.
Google thinks of sites that regularly get backlinks as valuable websites, but the link quality can make all the difference.
The essential thing to keep in mind is that a good link building service will, of course, give you the backlink you want, but they’ll also make sure that the link is good enough to indirectly increase your traffic.
What are the best link building services?
HARO
HARO stands for ‘Help a Reporter Out,’ and it’s a platform that journalists can utilize to find sources coming from actual websites. Sure, it might sound challenging to acquire a backlink using this method, but if you have an expert writing for your site, it can actually be pretty easy.
You can customize the platform so that you get notifications via email every day and see what journalists are looking for. If one of the topics matches your niche, it just so happens that you are in luck.
Ask your expert to pitch out several good answers to the journalists’ questions. If you’ve published an article that basically answers the query, it might as well be quoted.
Best of all, HARO is cheap or free, and the links you will acquire are from actual publications, so your site is definitely not going to be penalized.
Get Me Links
Get Me Links is a link building agency that specializes in anything from guest posts and niche edits to tiered links. They also do link reports, for folks who have no idea what links they’ve gotten in the past and which ones they should keep or disavow.
Plus, they have a lot of link packs that you can choose from. Some of the links get delivered in 3 to 4 weeks, but you do have to keep in mind that it takes time to find a relevant and good website your link should be placed on.
What’s more, they have an inventory consisting of over 100,000 sites, so you definitely have a lot of options. All of the sites are real and spam-checked, and they also offer good-quality SEO support.
LinksThatRank
LinksThatRank is another great link building service that you can use to your advantage. The best thing about it is that it makes sure that your site doesn’t get any backlink from PBNs, guest post farms, or any other such suspicious pages or websites.
You have the option of picking the right anchor text, so that’s one less thing to worry about, and you also get a 1,000-word guest post on the site of your choice. All of the posts contain both internal and external links so that they appear completely natural.
From the Future
This one’s a winner when it comes to acquiring highly relevant and high-authority links for their clients. They operate using a simplified process that involves taking a look at your niche, analyzing your competitors, and the link profile that you already have.
Then the service relies on the use of a unique software for scraping the web for relevant link opportunities alone. They present them to you every month, and when you’ve picked the ones you prefer, they will do manual outreach for guest posting to broken link building practices.
Page One Power
Page One Power also focuses on relevance, which is definitely something you need if you do not want to get in trouble over time. Many clients get confused and start thinking that DA and DR make all the difference when in fact, it’s better to get average DR links from sites that are relevant and that are getting tons of traffic.
They have a range of services available from custom link building to link building training.
Higher Visibility
This is another pretty decent link building service whose primary focus is relevance. The team does its best at finding the right websites that can actually offer value to your metrics, but that can even increase traffic to your own site.
If you pick one of their subscriptions, you will also receive monthly reports of what new links you have acquired.
Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is, without a doubt, one of the best-known tools in the SEO industry, but what some folks might not know is that they also have a link building team. Their creative content marketing efforts and PR experts can help you achieve your goals link building-wise.
What makes the difference between the services offered by other vendors and what the Screaming Frog team can provide you with is that they’re focused on finding influencers in your space.
This means that you’ll be getting your backlinks from people that have a good enough following so that you never get in trouble. Journalists, bloggers, and even vloggers can all help you a lot more than guest post farms or PBNs.
Sure Oak
This one is perhaps one of the most popular agencies in the United States right now, but that’s mostly due to the high-quality links that they can acquire.
When it comes to what services they offer, they concentrate their efforts on getting backlinks that have the right metrics, but they also focus on relevance, anchor text, and number of other factors that can make a difference.
FATJOE
FATJOE is a full-service agency that offers anything from link building to content creation. It has an excellent blogger outreach product with the help of which you can get high-quality mentions on relevant websites and blogs.
Also, what’s pretty neat about FATJOE is that it keeps a history of all of your previous link placements. So, if you see a weird link you seem to have acquired, you can always check whether it’s from them or not.
Authority Builders
Although they aren’t cheap, especially for someone who’s just starting out, Authority Builders is one of the biggest players in this field.
The reasons you should at least look into the service is that you get to manually check and pick from all of the websites they have available, so you have full control over everything, including the anchor text.
They also offer a money-back guarantee in case you are dissatisfied with their services.
Love to Link
This one also comes with a hands-on approach, in the sense that you’ll be the one to pick the websites you want quality links built on. But the nice thing about their platform is that you can filter out the websites you’re not interested in based on metrics, niche, traffic, and even based on price.
What to avoid in terms of SEO link building services
Fiverr
Fiverr can be pretty great for someone who’s just starting out and might not have a huge budget for content marketing, content writing, even website design, and a lot of other such things.
But when it comes to finding a link building expert, it’s practically impossible to do it on Fiverr. If you take the time to look at what people are offering, they’ll almost always note in the description of their gigs that their sites have high DA or DR and even a lot of traffic.
But if you ask the seller for the URL so that you can check it in Ahrefs or SEMRush, you’ll more often than not realize that that website has no organic traffic at all.
What’s more, some of these sites are really old, which can be extremely suspicious if they have a DR50 and they’re getting no traffic at all. We’d suggest utilizing the Wayback Machine (web.archive.org) to check on the history of the site someone’s trying to get you to place a link on for a fee.
It’s not uncommon for you to come across a number of websites in dangerous niches like gambling or adult, which Google and the rest of the search engines will never favor.
Plus, there are heaps of PBNs on Fiverr, which you should stay away from unless you’re trying to use tiered linking – but that would be bad for the person you’ve initially bought a good link from.
Private Blog Networks
PBNs used to work very well, and if they are done smartly, they still can. However, back in 2017, Google effectively killed them or any of the sites that had received such links.
Most search engines now have an excellent algorithm, which can filter out the majority of PBN backlinks out there, but what you might not know is that Google can actually manually deindex them.
So, you’d be effectively wasting your hard-earned cash if you were to build links from PBNs or start building your own PBN network (which takes a lot of time, effort, and money).
There are some ways to tell whether a blog or website is part of a private blog network, but looking at the DA or DR nowadays is not the right way of going about things. You should check them in the Wayback Machine, look at the WhoIs data, check their traffic, and see if all of the sites that a vendor is trying to pitch to you have the same IP.
“Write for Us” pages
Not all ‘Write for Us’ pages are created equal – some decent sites actually accept guest posts, but they have to be really good quality and they shouldn’t ask you for a fee.
That’s right, paid guest posting still goes against Google’s policies, and even though everybody knows that links do cost money, it’s still better to pitch guest post ideas only to sites that do not ask you for anything.
But that’s very difficult to do – only experts in a certain field manage to get their posts published without a fee, so only content marketing agencies can help you in this sense.
Also, a lot of websites take down their ‘Write for Us’ pages after a while, especially since they start to get scammed. After all, it’s pretty easy to find these pages in Google, so they are likely to get thousands of emails from link building services.
Sites with no organic traffic whatsoever
If you don’t want to waste your time checking whether a site is a part of a private blog network or whether there was some weird content published on it ten years ago, you can simply run it in Ahrefs and look at its traffic.
If it has a DR of 60 and it’s getting 0 traffic, it’s pretty clear that something is wrong with it and that you do not want that link to point to your site. It should at least rank for 1,000 words in order for you to rest assured that it might be good to get.
Plus, you have to ask yourself this question – what are the chances of folks actually clicking on your link and you getting a visit from them if no one goes on that site, ever?
Cheap links
It’s actually a better idea not to pay for links at all and only use outreach as a white label link building technique if you want to stay on the safe side of things.
We previously mentioned Fiverr, and for good reason, too. It shouldn’t cost just $5 to get a backlink from a really good-quality website. Expect prices above $70 and more – and that’s only if you get them directly from that site’s owner.
Bad anchor texts
When it comes to your anchor text strategy, it can be good or bad. Some people over-optimize everything, so they tend to think that getting backlinks with highly specific anchor texts is the only way they can get their site to increase its rankings.
Well, over-optimizing your anchor text can be bad.
For example, if you are an affiliate and you mediate the sale of golf shoes and you’ve written plenty of articles about the ‘best golf shoes’ for men, women, children, or anything like this, you do not want all your anchor texts to be ‘best golf shoes for men’ or whatever main keyword you’ve focused on.
There are lots of other anchor texts you can use, such as ‘click here’, ‘find out more’, ‘comfortable shoes for golf’ and so on. Plus, you do not necessarily have to build backlinks to your money pages all the time.
The most valuable page that you have on your website is, in fact, your homepage. So there’s nothing wrong with you getting links to it, using your site’s name as the anchor text, or a generic text of the niche you are in.
For example, if your site’s called ‘Golfing Gear Expert’, you can use anchor texts with that specific name, but you can also opt for similar or related terms, such as ‘golf equipment’, or ‘golfing experience’ or whatever else might be a good enough keyword.
Not focusing on relevance
Whenever you get a link building service, you have to pay attention to what the vendor or agency is specifically offering you.
What we mean by this is that if you’re in the sports niche, it’s always a good idea to have 80-90% of your backlinks coming from sports websites, whether outdoor or indoor sports.
Even if you have a website about basketball equipment, for instance, you might be able to rest assured that if you get a link from a site that deals with sports in general, it will still be okay for you. That includes publications like Yahoo Sports, magazines in the same niche — in a nutshell, PR links.
Even if there are dozens of pages on that site dealing with other sports like football, soccer, or swimming, if there is a category about basketball there, you probably have nothing to worry about.
But, to give you an example of what a bad link might be for you relevance-wise, if you’re in the basketball niche, you probably don’t need to get a backlink from a cocktail or CBD website.
Use your common sense to tell what services the link vendor is offering and that might actually help you or do your website even more harm than good.
Not having the agency check on your new backlinks regularly
If you got a subscription and people are building good links to your site but they’re also managing your SEO campaign on the whole, you have to be clear about your expectations and also tell them to check on your new backlinks.
Tiered link building is great and all, but some other people might do it, too, especially if you’ve linked to other websites before. That means that you could end up with a PBN link even if you haven’t acquired it yourself.
Besides, your competitors might organize negative SEO campaigns, where they either point out thousands and thousands of nofollow links to your site (and your rankings can nosedive if this happens) and they can effectively send out hundreds and hundreds of spammy links to your website every month.
It’s hard to keep up with the process and make sure you disavow every single bad link you’ve accidentally acquired, but you have to do it.
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Craig Campbell
I am a Glasgow based SEO expert who has been doing SEO for 22 years.
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