Complete Link Building Services, Judged on Evidence

Agencies with a verified published price

How to shortlist a link building agency

1. Make them name the acquisition method. There are only a handful of ways a link gets built: digital PR and data stories, expert commentary, guest contributions, resource and partner pages, broken link replacement, and paid placement. Ask which of these produced their last twenty links, in those words. A provider who will not name the method is describing paid placement without saying so.
2. Read the spam policies before the proposal. Google's spam policies define link schemes, including buying or selling links that pass ranking signals and large-scale exchanges, as a violation. Read that page first, then read the proposal, and note anything the proposal describes that the policy names. That comparison takes ten minutes and settles most shortlists.
3. Ask for live examples, not a sample report. Request five links they built in the last quarter as live URLs. Open each one. Does the page have an author, an audience and other content that is not link inventory? Is your kind of business a plausible mention in it? A real placement survives that inspection easily, which is precisely why some providers offer only anonymised reports.
4. Fix the target pages before buying any links. Links point at pages, and a link aimed at a thin page wastes the acquisition cost. Decide which pages the campaign will strengthen and make sure each one deserves the attention first. Agencies that ask which pages you want to move, before quoting a link volume, are working the right way round.

What complete actually means in a link building scope

The word complete is doing a lot of work in this market. In a genuinely complete engagement it should mean four things: an audit of the existing link profile, a defined set of target pages, an acquisition programme with named methods, and reporting that shows the page each link points at and the query it was meant to help. Anything less is a link count, and a link count can be produced by anyone at any quality level.

The audit half matters more than buyers expect. Sites that have been marketed before frequently carry inherited placements from earlier providers, and the first useful piece of work is knowing what is already there. That is not glamorous and it does not appear on a monthly scorecard, which is why it is often skipped by exactly the providers whose links you would most want audited.

How the pricing works, and what the cheap end really is

Prices are driven by the method, not by the number. Editorial coverage earned through original data or expert commentary requires research, outreach and a lot of unanswered emails, so it is priced per campaign or per month and the volume is modest. Placement on sites that accept contributions requires far less work and is priced per link, cheaply, because the supply is effectively unlimited.

That is the whole explanation for why one provider quotes a monthly retainer for a handful of mentions and another offers a fixed price per link at a fraction of the cost. They are not competing on efficiency, they are selling different products. Before comparing two quotes, establish which product each one is, then decide which risk you are willing to hold. The cheap end is cheap because the placements carry no editorial judgement and, per Google's spam policies, no protection either.

Questions people actually ask

How many links do we need?

There is no threshold number, and any provider who quotes one has not looked at your market. What matters is the gap between your target pages and the pages currently ranking, in both quality of references and depth of content. A useful engagement starts by describing that gap for specific queries, then proposes a programme sized to it.

Is buying links ever safe?

Google's spam policies explicitly name buying or selling links that pass ranking signals as a link scheme violation, so the honest answer is that it is a risk you are choosing to carry, not a safe tactic. Sponsored placements are legitimate when the link is marked appropriately, but a marked link is not the thing most link vendors are selling.

What about disavowing bad links?

Google treats most unnatural inbound links as something it ignores rather than penalises, so disavowal is rarely the first tool to reach for. It matters most where a site has a history of paid link campaigns it can identify. Any provider recommending a large disavow file on day one should be asked to show the specific pattern they found.

How is link building reported honestly?

Live URLs for every placement, the target page each one points at, the method used to obtain it, and whether it was paid. Anything reported only as a count, a domain metric or an anonymised list is a report designed to be uncheckable. Ask for the format in writing before signing, because it is much harder to change afterwards.

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