How to Choose the Right Link Building Agency and Recognize Scams

Learn how to choose the right link building agency for your business and avoid scams with this comprehensive guide. 

When you run an ecommerce business, your website’s traffic and ranking are directly tied into your profits. These metrics will depend on your website’s backlink profile, and if you don’t have the time to work on it, you may want to hire link building professionals.

However, the internet is filled with poor-quality agencies that can take your money for meager results, or even worse, harm your ranking and business.

Here’s how to choose the right link building agency, and more importantly, avoid shady companies.

Choosing the Right Link Building Agency

Getting links isn’t just about reaching out to publishers or writing content. What you create should also be optimized and tied to your overall business goals. The company will streamline your optimization efforts, make use of its connections, and give you clear answers about its services. Here are the main signs of a good backlink provider:

• Transparency – A decent agency will tell you how it builds links (organic, outreach, or a combination), which websites it targets, and what its track record so far has been. It will also let you approve or review links.

• Quality control – Ask about the company’s quality criteria. They should include metrics such as Domain Authority (DA), publisher website traffic, Domain Rating (DR), Trust Flow and Citation Flow.

• Price – Overly cheap links are a red flag. The pricing should be transparent and in line with industry standards.

• Types of links built – The company should offer diverse links. This can include HARO, editorial links, link inserts, niche edits, and others. PBNs and links from link farms and sites like Quora and Reddit are usually a bad sign.

• Success metrics – Reports on the success of your campaign typically cover organic traffic, organic keywords, DR or DA increases, and sometimes impressions and clicks.Look for companies that offer detailed reports.

• Reviews and case studies – Check testimonials, public case studies, and company reviews. Good companies have long-term clients that are happy to recommend the service.

Questions to Ask Before Hiring a Link Building Agency

If you want to find trustworthy link building agencies, ask them the following questions:

• Can you provide examples of past campaigns and their results?
• What niches have you worked with before?
• What types of links will you build for my ecommerce business?
• How do you ensure link quality and relevance?
• What reporting do you offer, and how often?
• Do you guarantee rankings? (A legitimate agency should say no.)

Recognizing Link Building Scams

SEO is a popular marketing strategy, so it’s attracted a lot of scammers over the years, especially among freelancers.

Unrealistic Promises

Beware of overly tempting promises. A common one is that you’ll get high-DA links really fast, which is not possible — the process has to include content planning, outreach, content creation, and editing, all of which takes time.

It’s also possible to manipulate DA scores or use sites that are irrelevant to your niche. They could also be sites that have a high DA but no real (human) traffic. Tools such as Ahrefs can help you analyze the backlinks that the company’s getting you.

Scammers also like to guarantee rankings. If that was possible, SEO and link building wouldn’t exist in the form that they do. Not even experienced SEOs know all the parameters that search engines use to rank content, as they’re mostly hidden.

What a good company will focus on is quality and relevance to your niche. In other words, something human readers would appreciate or find useful, too.

Obvious Paid Links and Link Farms

Link farms and Private Blogging Networks (PBNs) exist only to create backlinks and earn from it.

Link farms don’t really have any other value, nor are they relevant to your target audience. You can recognize them by their bland design, keyword-stuffed generic content, and a high number of links to unrelated industries. On tools such as Ahrefs, these site networks don’t have any real traffic.

Many link farms also rank for random keywords that have nothing to do with their niches, with anything from error codes to simply weird queries.

PBNs are groups of websites created to manipulate search rankings and sell backlinks. You can recognize a PBN scan by the following signs:

• Promising fast results or a guaranteed number of high DA links
• Cheap links sold in bulk
• Very little control, you can’t reject or approve publisher websites yourself

Other Black-Hat Tactics

Other things to look out for are fake guest posts, hidden links, and forum or blog comment links.

Guest posting services are legitimate ways to get backlinks, as they provide genuine value to users. However, they are sometimes exploited by scammers who offer extremely cheap posts, unrealistically fast turnaround times, and guaranteed placements — reputable websites will say no to bad or irrelevant content.

Hidden links are links that cannot be seen by regular readers, but they can be seen by search engines. They make it seem like your website has more backlinks, but they hold no value, and can even get your website penalized.

Forum or blog comment links are not bad per se. If someone mentions your website in a comment naturally and links to it, it won’t do any harm. However, companies that sell you links from Quora, Reddit, or blog comments are making your backlink profile look unnatural, which can be picked up by search engines.

Pressure Tactics

Some agencies use pressure tactics to coerce you into signing or renewing a contract. These tactics can include overly low prices and time-limited offers that may coax you into signing up before you properly vet the agency.

Another common pressure tactic is exaggerating the consequences of not working with the agency. This can sound like “your competitors are outranking you every day you delay.” If the agency or a freelancer is trying to make you anxious about your website’s success, they may be trying to rush the process.

Any reputable agency will give you time to consider its offer, review and accept or reject the links, and negotiate some terms of your business offer. An agency that sends you an unpleasant number of emails asking you to sign the contract is pressuring you and is more worried about closing the sale than providing a good service.

Finally, the contract you’re signing should be clear and to the point. If it reads like your typical Terms and Conditions and tries to obscure the terms by using generic language, you should reassess your deal with the company before you sign it.

Another particularly predatory tactic is website spoofing — editing another site to make it look like yours and getting backlinks for it, instead of your own site. Then, if you choose not to renew the contract, the company will shut the website down, making you lose money, time, and effort.

Inexperienced Link Builders

Ecommerce businesses sometimes choose link builders with less experience to save money. While it may seem like a good deal, it’s a major risk that could lead you to losing money, ranking, and customers.

There are ways to spot link building agencies wit little to no experience. Look out for these signs:

• Lack of track record – A lack of specific case studies with metrics, examples of links, client names, screenshots, and evidence of how the client’s traffic increased.
• Their website – Use Ahrefs or other tools to inspect the agency’s own backlink profile. If they couldn’t build quality backlinks for their own website, they won’t be able to help you either.
• Generic reviews – Testimonials and reviews that don’t show any real details or brands or aren’t verified point to a company with few satisfied clients.
• Lack of transparency or clarity – This is a red flag in general, but it’s more common with inexperienced link builders. The company representative should be able to answer all your questions and provide specifics.

Automated Link Building

Automation tools aren’t an issue in itself, but they can be used to produce spammy links. This is a black hat strategy that can even be used to harm a competitor’s ranking. Mass produced links in comments with identical content are a sure sign of this, and they should concern businesses.

Hopefully, you won’t come across this tactic, but if you do, make sure to clear these links from your profile using tools like Semrush or Ahrefs. Otherwise, your site can get penalized.

Bottom Line

Your safest bet is an agency that has been in the business for a long time, with enough positive, verified reviews, case studies with clear metrics shown on its website, and pricing that’s neither too high nor too low.

This agency won’t offer any guarantees about rankings or placements. However, it will let you control the quality of the links, see link examples, and see related content.

Finally, if you’re not sure about the services, start with a small sample of links and then check if they’re relevant to your niche, if they fit the context they’re placed in, and if the pages have any real traffic