Questions to Ask Before Buying Backlink Services
Nine questions a supplier with nothing to hide can answer in a sentence. A package seller cannot answer them at all. Each one comes with what a straight answer sounds like and what evasion sounds like.
Why This Needs Its Own List
Buying link work is unlike buying any other marketing service, because the thing being delivered does not sit on your website and you do not control it. It sits on somebody else's site, at their discretion. It may not survive the year.
Compare it with anything else you might commission. A new website is yours when it is built. An advertising campaign runs where you paid for it to run. A piece of content lives on your own server. In every case the deliverable is either an asset you hold or a service that visibly happened.
A link is neither. It exists because a third party is allowing it to exist. That third party may redesign, may rewrite, may close, may remove the page, may decide the reference was never appropriate. None of that is within your supplier's control either, whatever they told you.
Which is why the ordinary questions about agency selection do not reach the things that matter here. Those belong in our guides on choosing an agency. The nine below are specific to this purchase. The full series sits in the complete guide to backlink building.
Where Will The Links Come From?
The single most important question. It is also the one that ends most conversations early. Ask it first.
What a straight answer sounds like. Named categories. For editorial work, named targets. We will approach these four trade publications and these two professional bodies. Here are three placements we obtained for other clients, with their permission. These are the memberships you already qualify for that we would claim.
What evasion sounds like. Our network. Our publisher relationships. We cannot disclose our sources for competitive reasons. High authority sites in your sector. Premium placements. Any answer describing a quality rather than a place.
The reason the evasive answers matter is worth understanding rather than merely noting. A supplier doing genuine editorial work has no commercial reason to hide its targets, because the value it adds is the judgement and the relationship rather than possession of a secret list. Anybody can find out which publications cover your trade in ten minutes.
So when a supplier cannot name sources, the usual explanation is not competitive sensitivity. It is that naming them would reveal what they are. The arrangement depends on you not looking. Our guide to DA90 backlinks covers what tends to arrive when nobody names anything.
Will You Show Me Before It Goes Live?
Whether you approve the page and the content before publication, rather than discovering both in a monthly report.
A straight answer. Yes. You see the publication, the draft and the intended page before anything appears. Nothing goes out without your agreement.
Evasion. We handle placement for you. It will be in your report. Our publishers require confidentiality about upcoming content. Approval would slow the programme down.
Two reasons this question matters. The first is not about search at all. Your business name is going to appear on that page, alongside whatever else is on it, permanently and in public. If you would not be pleased to be seen there, you should not be there. You cannot make that judgement retrospectively.
The second reason is structural. Pre-approval makes volume placement impractical, because somebody has to look at every page and agree to it. A supplier working through a handful of genuine publications finds approval trivial. A supplier placing at volume finds it fatal to the model, which is why the objection usually arrives dressed as a concern about efficiency.
Who Owns The Relationship?
What happens to the links when the contract ends. This question catches more than any other on the list. Buyers almost never ask it.
A straight answer. Links we earn are yours. They stay because a publisher chose to publish something. That decision does not reverse when you stop paying us. Nothing is removed.
Evasion, plus the phrasing to listen for. Links are maintained for the duration of the agreement. Placements remain active while the account is live. Continued hosting is included in the monthly fee. Each of those sentences is an answer. The answer is that you are renting.
A rental is not automatically a fraud, provided everybody understands it. What makes it damaging is a business believing it has been building an asset for three years, then cancelling and discovering that most of what it paid for disappears within weeks. The visibility built on those links goes with them.
So ask the question in its blunt form and write the answer down. When I stop paying you, does anything come down? A supplier earning editorial references answers no without hesitating, because they could not remove them if they wanted to.
What Happens If A Link Disappears?
Links vanish routinely. Pages get deleted, articles get rewritten, sites close, redesigns discard references. Ask what the policy is.
A credible answer. We cannot guarantee that a publisher keeps a page live, because we do not control their site. If we notice a loss we will tell you and attempt recovery where the page still exists. That is all anybody can promise.
An answer that tells you something else. Every link is guaranteed for twelve months. Any lost placement is replaced free of charge. We warrant the links for the life of the contract.
Notice that the second set sounds better and means something worse. A supplier can only guarantee replacement if it controls the placements. Controlling placements means the links are not editorial decisions made by publishers. The guarantee is therefore evidence about the method rather than reassurance about the service.
This is the pattern running through the whole page. On this particular purchase, the more confident and comprehensive the promise, the more it reveals. A supplier who tells you plainly that parts of this are outside anybody's control is describing the actual situation.
Who Chooses The Anchor Text?
The visible words a link is attached to. Ask who decides them, because the answer is unusually revealing for such a small detail.
A sensible answer. Whoever writes the sentence. A publisher choosing how to describe your business in their own prose will use your name, a plain description or a bare address. We might suggest something natural if asked. We would not supply a phrase and require it.
A warning. We optimise anchor text to your target keywords. We use a distribution model across your commercial terms. You provide the anchors you want ranking.
The reason to be wary is not squeamishness about optimisation. It is that specified commercial anchor text is among the most visible properties of an arranged profile, precisely because no writer describing a page for their own readers reaches for a phrase that reads like a search query. A supplier proposing to control the wording is proposing to produce that property deliberately.
Why that matters is set out in how Google detects unnatural backlink patterns. For this conversation the relevant point is narrower: a supplier volunteering anchor control has told you which category of work it does.
How Will I Verify It?
Whether you can check the work yourself without depending on the supplier's account of it.
A straight answer. Every reference is reported as a live web address you can open, with the date it appeared. You can see the page, find your link on it and confirm it is still there. Nothing in the report requires taking our word for anything.
Evasion. A monthly document listing domains without addresses. Screenshots rather than links. A dashboard showing counts and scores. Reporting that describes what was done rather than showing where.
Three checks turn a verifiable report into an actual verification. Each takes about a minute. Open the page and find your link. Search for a distinctive sentence from that page in Google to see whether the page itself is indexed, because a page nothing has indexed is delivering nothing. Then check the same addresses again in three months, which is how rental arrangements and quiet removals reveal themselves.
A supplier confident in its work will suggest you do all three. One that resists is telling you what the check would find.
Guarantees, And Why To Distrust Them
Ask what is guaranteed. Then consider whether the supplier is in a position to guarantee it.
Two things sit outside any supplier's control. Other people's editorial decisions, since no agency can compel a publisher to publish. And Google's response to anything, since nobody outside Google decides what its systems count.
A guarantee of rankings therefore promises something the supplier does not control. A guarantee of a metric promises movement in a third party vendor's score, which is not the same as movement in your business. A guarantee of a number of placements promises editorial decisions that have not been made, which is only deliverable by removing the editorial element.
So each guarantee resolves into one of three things. It is unenforceable in practice. It is achievable by choosing targets nobody competes for, which is the commonest version. Or it is achievable because the placements are controlled rather than earned.
What can legitimately be committed to is work rather than outcome: what will be done, how often, to what standard, reported how. Our own commitments are set out in how we build backlinks for clients. None of them is a guarantee about anybody else's behaviour.
How Is It Priced?
Four models are common. Each one pays the supplier to do something slightly different. Knowing which behaviour you are funding is more useful than comparing totals.
Per link. Pays for quantity. The supplier's return improves by finding cheaper sources and more of them, which is the opposite of what you want. The model itself pushes towards volume regardless of anybody's intentions.
Per campaign. Pays for completion. Suits a defined piece of work with an end, such as a research led programme. The risk is that a campaign is treated as a substitute for continuity.
Per month. Pays for continuity, which matches how this work actually accumulates. The risk is scope quietly thinning while the fee stays the same, which is why a monthly arrangement needs the work defined rather than described.
By results. Sounds as though risk has moved to the supplier. Ask what counts as a result. If it is a ranking on a term nobody searches, the model pays for finding easy terms. Also ask what happens to the links if you stop paying, because payment on results and rental arrangements frequently travel together.
We price this inside a fixed monthly fee and never per link, for the reasons in the first model above.
And One To Ask Yourself
Before any of the previous eight matter, one question belongs to you rather than to a supplier. Are links actually the thing holding this business back?
A great many businesses that arrive at this decision have a different constraint entirely. Pages that do not answer the question being searched. A site that loads slowly or gives no obvious route to enquire. A technical fault capping what can be indexed. A local ranking problem, where proximity, the business profile and reviews carry most of the weight and links carry almost none.
In any of those situations, a link programme is money spent on the wrong half of the problem. The links may even be perfectly good. They will be pointing at a site that cannot convert what they send, perhaps competing on a term the page does not deserve to rank for.
The reason to ask this before the other eight is sequencing. If the answer is that links are not the constraint, the other questions never need to be asked. The budget is then available for whatever the actual constraint turns out to be.
Working through that diagnosis properly is the subject of when backlinks are not the right SEO investment. It is the page we would rather you read before commissioning anything, including from us.
Ask us all nine.
We answer in sentences.
Named targets before we start. Nothing published without your approval. Everything reported as a live address you can open. Anchor wording left to whoever writes the sentence. Nothing comes down when you leave.
Included every month:
One fixed monthly rate. No setup fee. No price per link.
Twenty four guides.
One subject.
This page covers the purchase. The rest of the series covers what makes a link valuable, what a metric is worth, how patterns are recognised, how we work and when links are not the right spend at all.
