Off site SEO services, compared on published evidence

Agencies with a verified published price

How to buy off site SEO without buying a penalty

1. Ask how a link is expected to be earned. There are only a few honest mechanisms: original research or data, a genuinely useful free resource, expert commentary offered to journalists, real partnerships and sponsorships, and digital PR. If a candidate cannot describe which mechanism produces the links, the mechanism is probably payment, and that is what Google's spam policies address directly.
2. Read Google's link spam policy before the first call. Google states that buying or selling links for ranking purposes, excessive exchanges and large scale automated link building violate its spam policies. Reading it takes ten minutes and turns a vague worry into specific questions you can put to a provider, with the policy language in front of you.
3. Separate listings and reviews from link work. Business listing accuracy and a genuine review flow are off site work too, and for a local business they usually move enquiries faster and cost less than any link programme. Ask a candidate to price them separately so you can buy the cheap effective part first rather than as a bundled extra.
4. Fix reporting on placements you can open. The deliverable should be a list of live URLs with the date placed, not a count. Anything you cannot open and read is not a placement. Agree that the report contains links you can click, and that anything removed within the term is reported rather than quietly left in the total.

The legitimate work and the shortcut, told apart

Legitimate off site work is slow and looks like publishing or public relations. Somebody produces something worth referencing, then puts it in front of people who might reference it, and a fraction do. The pace is set by real editorial decisions, which is why honest providers quote in placements per quarter rather than links per month, and why the price per placement looks high compared with the alternative. The alternative is buying links from sites that sell them, running guest post networks or paying for placements dressed as editorial, all of which are cheap, fast and against the policies of the search engine you are trying to influence.

The commercial risk is asymmetric. A good link programme improves your position slowly and defensibly. A bought link programme can improve it quickly and then cost you the position, the spend and a remediation project. Since the two are sold with the same vocabulary, the only reliable filter is the mechanism question: how, specifically, does the site owner decide to publish this link, and what do they get. If the honest answer is money, you now know which product you are buying whatever the proposal calls it.

What to compare between providers

Compare the disclosed minimum, the unit of delivery, whether outreach is done by named people or by an automated tool, and whether the provider will show live examples from the last quarter rather than a portfolio of their best ever placements. Our index records what each agency publishes about price and minimums on its own site with the date checked, which lets you establish a reference range for the scope you want before anyone quotes you.

Ask two more questions that rarely appear in proposals. What happens to placements that disappear, since a proportion always do, and whether any part of the delivery is resold to a supplier who also serves your competitors. Neither answer is disqualifying by itself. Both change how you should read the price, and a provider comfortable answering them is usually the one running the programme rather than reselling it.

Questions people actually ask

Is buying links ever safe?

Google's spam policies state that buying or selling links for ranking purposes violates them, which means the practice carries a risk that is entirely on you as the site owner rather than on the agency that arranged it. Some buyers accept that risk knowingly. The failure mode is buyers who accept it unknowingly, because the proposal said outreach and the delivery was purchase. Ask the mechanism question and get the answer in writing.

How many links do I need?

It is the wrong unit. What matters is whether credible sites in or adjacent to your field reference you, and whether the pages you want to rank are the ones being referenced. Ten relevant references from sites your buyers recognise are worth more than hundreds from a network. Ask a provider to describe the profile they are aiming for rather than the count, and to name the kinds of publication they expect to place in.

Does digital PR count as off site SEO?

It is the most defensible version of it. Digital PR produces references as a by product of being newsworthy, which is exactly the mechanism search engines are trying to reward. It is also less predictable and usually more expensive per placement, and it requires something genuinely worth covering, which not every business has at any given moment. Ask what the story would be before agreeing to fund the campaign.

Should off site work start before the site is fixed?

Usually not. References pointing at a site that loads slowly, does not convert or has thin pages waste the hardest part of the work. The normal order is technical health, then the pages worth referencing, then the off site programme that promotes them. A provider who wants to start with links on a site that is not ready is optimising the deliverable that is easiest for them to count.

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