How Lillian Purge Builds Backlinks for Clients
Twenty three guides setting out a position are worth very little on their own. This page states what we actually do, in terms you can check while we are doing it, including the things we will not do and the things we cannot promise.
Why This Page Exists
Anybody can publish a set of guides arguing that links should be earned rather than bought. Positions are cheap to hold in writing. What matters to somebody deciding whether to work with us is whether the way we operate matches what those guides say.
So this page is deliberately specific. It names what we refuse to do and why, what we do before proposing anything, where we look for references, what our reports contain and what they do not, plus the point at which we would tell you this work is not the right spend.
It is written on the assumption that a client will read it again in six months and check. That is the correct way to read it. It is also why nothing here is phrased as a general aspiration. Every commitment below is either something you can verify while we work or something you can hold us to afterwards.
Where something is a judgement rather than a rule, the page says so, because a page of absolutes would itself be a warning sign. The questions we think any buyer should put to any supplier, including us, are in questions to ask before buying backlink services. The full series sits in the complete guide to backlink building.
What We Will Not Do
Stated before anything else, because what a supplier declines to do is more informative than what it offers.
We do not buy placements. No payment for a link itself, on any site, at any price. Google's guidance identifies paying for links that pass ranking signals as a violation. The exposure also sits with the client rather than with the seller.
We do not use networks. No properties built to host links, whoever owns them.
We do not arrange link exchanges for the purpose of links. Reciprocal references documenting a real relationship are ordinary and we will happily claim those, as set out in is link exchange good for SEO.
We do not guarantee a number of references. Nobody can guarantee decisions other people have not made yet.
We do not specify anchor text to publishers. Whoever writes the sentence chooses the wording. We may suggest something natural if asked. We will not supply a phrase and require it.
We do not price per link. Per link pricing pays a supplier to find cheaper sources, which is the opposite of the objective.
We do not report a vendor score as a result. Those metrics are estimates produced by companies with no access to Google, covered in what Domain Authority is.
What We Do First
We establish whether links are actually the thing holding the business back. This happens before we propose any link work at all.
The sequence is the one published in when backlinks are not the right SEO investment. Are the commercial pages indexed. Is the demand local. Do the pages answer their questions as well as the results above them. Does existing traffic convert. Is the field genuinely contested. Only a business passing all five has a plausible link constraint.
Frequently the answer is that something else is the constraint. When that is what we find, that is what we say. It is worth being clear about why we can afford to: our fee is a single monthly amount covering Google Maps optimisation, website management, the SEO campaign, AI optimisation, social channels, audits and reporting. If links turn out to be the wrong priority, the work moves to whatever the right priority is and the fee does not change.
That structure is the reason this page can make the commitment it does. A supplier paid specifically for links has an obvious incentive to find that links are needed. We are not in that position, which is a structural fact about the arrangement rather than a claim about our character.
For local businesses in particular, the answer is usually that the money belongs in our local SEO services instead.
The Audit
Where link work is warranted, we establish a baseline before touching anything, because a change can only be judged against a starting position.
What we record. Total references and referring domains. The spread of anchor wording. Which pages receive references, ranked. Which sources are genuinely relevant to the field. Visibility on terms that do not contain the business name. And the date, exported rather than left in a dashboard, since vendor indexes are recalculated.
What we look at. A sample across strength bands rather than a score against every link, assessed page by page: is the page real, is it read, was the reference editorial, is the source in a related field. The reasoning is in how to audit your backlinks.
What we hand back. Findings sorted into four groups with an owner against each: fix now, pursue, leave, investigate. Leave decisions are recorded in writing so the same items are not re-examined at every future audit.
The finding that most often produces the largest return sits in the first group and has nothing to do with new links. Existing references pointing at pages on the client's own site that no longer exist, where everything those references were contributing is being discarded at our end rather than theirs. Nobody else has to agree to that being fixed.
Where We Look For References
Four categories, worked through in this sequence, because the earlier ones are cheaper and more certain than the later ones.
Relationships you already hold. Always first. Suppliers and manufacturers with approved installer or stockist pages. Clients willing to describe the work. Partners you exchange referrals with. Sponsorships you already fund, which are frequently unclaimed online. Local organisations you are genuinely involved with. This category costs nothing and is available immediately.
Memberships, registers and accreditations. Trade bodies, professional registers, certification schemes and insurers that publish member lists. Anything you qualify for and have not claimed.
Editorial approaches. Publications that genuinely cover your field, approached with something specific to them. We tell you which titles we intend to approach before we approach them. Nothing is published without you seeing the publication and the draft.
Resources worth citing. Material built on your own site that gives somebody a reason to reference you. Slowest, least predictable and the only category that keeps working without further effort.
You will notice this list runs from certain to uncertain rather than from impressive to modest. That ordering is deliberate and it is what a defensible profile is built from, per how Google detects unnatural backlink patterns.
How We Report
Every reference we obtain is reported as a live web address with the date it appeared. You can open it, find your link on the page and confirm it is there. Nothing in the report requires taking our word for anything.
What our reports do not contain. Vendor authority scores presented as results. Counts presented as achievement. Screenshots in place of addresses. Domains listed without the specific page. Any figure about search behaviour that we cannot attribute to a named source.
What we would encourage you to do with them. Open the pages. Search a distinctive sentence from each in quotation marks to confirm the page is indexed, because an unindexed page contributes nothing whatever it looks like. Then check the same addresses again three months later, which is how quiet removals and rental arrangements reveal themselves.
We say this knowing it invites scrutiny. That is the point. A supplier confident in its work should be suggesting these checks rather than waiting to be asked. A supplier that resists them is telling you what the checks would find.
Reporting is monthly. Judgement about whether the programme is working is quarterly, for the reasons in how long a backlink takes to affect rankings.
What We Cannot Promise
These are outside anybody's control. A supplier promising them is either mistaken or arranging the outcome in a way we have spent this cluster arguing against.
That a publication will run something. Editors decide. That is what makes their decisions worth having.
That a publisher keeps a page live. Sites redesign, rewrite and close. If a reference disappears we will tell you and attempt recovery where the page still exists.
A ranking position. Nobody outside Google decides what its systems reward.
A timescale for effect. A link passes through discovery, indexing, evaluation and competitive movement. Any stage can stall.
A number of references per month. A guaranteed count would mean the references were arranged rather than earned, which is the whole distinction this cluster rests on.
What we do commit to is the work rather than the outcome: what will be done, in what order, to what standard, reported how, plus telling you plainly when something is not working. That last one has a defined threshold, which is the next block.
What Happens If It Is Not Working
We agree a threshold at the start rather than deciding retrospectively what counts as progress. It is the same one published in our guide to timescales, applied to our own work.
The threshold. Two quarters of consistent, relevant references, with no movement in impressions for the target pages, no movement in average position across their term sets and no movement in enquiries.
The four checks we run before concluding anything. Were the references actually indexed, since if a large share were not then the approach was never tested. Were they relevant at page level rather than only at domain level. Is the target page genuinely competitive on content against what ranks above it. And has the competitive set changed.
What happens then. If those check out and nothing has moved, we tell you links are not your constraint. The work then moves to whatever is. Since the fee is fixed and covers the whole service, that conversation costs us nothing, which is precisely why we can commit to having it.
Setting the threshold in advance protects both sides. It stops a client abandoning something in month two that was always going to take longer. It also stops us extending indefinitely on the promise that results are coming.
What This Costs
One fixed monthly fee of £350. No setup fee. No price per link, no price per placement and no charge that varies with how many references appear.
What the fee covers. Google Maps optimisation, full website management, the SEO campaign, AI optimisation, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn, quarterly audits and monthly reporting. Backlink work sits inside that rather than alongside it.
Why there is no per link price. Because of what that pricing model pays a supplier to do. If income rises with the number of links delivered, the rational supplier finds cheaper sources and more of them, which is the opposite of what a client wants. The model produces that pressure regardless of anybody's intentions, which is why we do not use it.
What that means in practice. A month in which we conclude that no new references are worth pursuing costs the same as a month in which several arrive. We are not paid more for finding links, so there is no reason to find links that are not worth having.
That is the whole commercial argument for the structure. It is also the reason every position in this cluster is one we can actually afford to hold.
Hold us to
this page.
Named targets before we approach them. Nothing published without your approval. Every reference reported as an address you can open. A threshold agreed at the start for concluding it is not working.
Included every month:
One fixed monthly rate. No setup fee. No price per link.
Twenty four guides.
One subject.
Every position on this page is argued at length somewhere in the series, including what makes a reference valuable, how patterns are recognised, what to ask any supplier and when this work is not the right spend at all.
