How to Vet a Link Building Agency Before You Pay Them

Short version: to choose a link building agency, ask where every link comes from, get five recent live placements you can open yourself, and read what the contract says about links that vanish. If they guarantee rankings or won’t show you the sites? Next.

I work in the link building industry for more than a decade. So, I clearly know the exact moment a pitch goes vague. I’ll explain how you can hire the most suitable backlink agency. You can also use these formulas on us as well to know whether Linkscope is the right choice for your business. 

Let’s begin. 

Start With the Brief, Not the Agency

Most bad hires I’ve seen start with a two-line brief. “We need backlinks.” That’s it. And the quote that comes back is just as lazy: twenty links a month, sites unnamed. Before any call, know which pages you want ranking and roughly how many links you actually need to get there.

Also ask yourself whether you need an agency in the first place. A managed service saves you hours, but you pay for that in the per-link price. Buying through a marketplace usually costs less, and you pick every site yourself. The catch? Now the vetting is your job.

Sales Lines Worth Questioning

If you’re trying to figure out how to choose a link building agency, start by listening to the pitch. Really listening. Almost every pitch leans on the same handful of lines, and none of them are lies exactly. They’re just vague enough to hide almost anything.

That last row? Not a joke. Google’s own page on hiring an SEO says flat out that nobody can guarantee a #1 ranking. If Google itself can’t promise you that spot, a link seller with a booking link and a nice deck certainly can’t.

Questions Most Buyers Forget to Ask

Everyone asks where the links come from and how long it’ll take. Fine, ask those. But the questions below are the ones I almost never hear from buyers, and they tend to be the ones that make a salesperson go quiet for a second.

Who Else in My Niche Do You Work For?

Say the agency also builds links for three of your direct competitors. Same niche, same publisher list, same pitches going out. Not always a deal-breaker, to be fair. But you’d want to know before the best sites in your space start linking to the shop down the road.

What Do You Pay the Publisher?

Almost nobody asks this. Your fee gets split between the site owner, whoever writes the article and the agency’s margin. A good agency can talk you through that split without squirming, even if it keeps the exact numbers to itself. A bad one changes the subject.

Are Any Placements Paid, and Are They Labelled?

Just ask it. Lots of agencies pay publishers, and Google’s link spam policy counts paid links that pass ranking credit as spam unless they’re tagged rel=”sponsored” or rel=”nofollow”. Maybe you’re fine with that risk. Plenty of people are. You just can’t make that call blind.

Can You Name a Site You Turned Down?

My favourite question, by a distance. An agency with actual standards has a reject pile, and someone there can tell you why a site got binned. Traffic fell off a cliff. Every post was sponsored. Whatever. An agency that sells everything it finds won’t have an answer.

What Counts as Delivered?

Some contracts call a link delivered the second it goes live. Nofollow? Still counts. On a page Google never indexed? Counts. Pointing at the wrong URL? You get the idea. Get the definition written down, including the anchor, the target page and the follow status you paid for.

What Does Your Reporting Look Like?

Ask for a real monthly report they sent another client, names blanked out. You’re looking for every live URL, the anchor, the target page and the date it went up. If it’s a dashboard of averages with no URLs anywhere, you can’t check a thing. Which is usually the point.

The 20-Minute Test on Their Sample Links

Get five live placements from the last few months, ideally from a niche near yours. Then, before the next call, give them twenty minutes. That’s genuinely all it takes. You don’t need paid tools for most of it either. Google and any free traffic estimate will do.

First, the page. Type site: and paste the exact URL into Google. Nothing comes back? Then Google hasn’t indexed it, and a link on a page Google ignores is worth roughly nothing, no matter how shiny the domain metrics look in the agency’s spreadsheet.

Next, scroll the site’s last twenty posts. Real publications have a beat. Inventory sites don’t. You’ll see a crypto exchange review on Monday, a kitchen remodel guide on Tuesday and some CBD gummies roundup by Thursday, each one stuffed with two or three commercial links.

Then pull up the traffic trend. Flat at zero is bad. A cliff is worse. In March 2024 Google added expired domain abuse to its spam policies, so if a domain switched topics recently and then lost its traffic, look very hard at what happened there.

Click the author’s name, too. Byline only exists on that one site? Writes about forty unrelated subjects? Stock-photo headshot? Then you’ve learned most of what you need to know about how that content gets made, and who it’s really made for.

Why do I care this much about traffic? Because most of the web gets none from search. Ahrefs found that 96.55% of pages get no traffic from Google. A link on one of those pages can look perfectly tidy in a report. Google just isn’t sending that site anyone.

Last step. Point the same checks at the agency itself. Does its own site rank for the service it’s selling you? Does its backlink profile look anything like what it’s promising? If not, ask why. And yes, run all of this on Linkscope too. I’d rather you did.

Red Flags That End the Conversation

Part of knowing how to choose a link building agency is knowing when to hang up. Guaranteed rankings are the obvious one. Here’s a less obvious one: Google’s hiring advice says you should never have to link back to the provider. So a sneaky footer credit in the contract? No.

Price matters too. Proper outreach and decent writing take hours. So when someone offers a “DA 70 link” for less than a takeaway lunch, ask what work could possibly be in it. Usually it’s fake domain authority, scores pumped up on sites that exist to sell links.

Anchor text is another giveaway. If the agency wants your money keyword in every single placement, it’s building exactly the pattern the link spam policy describes. A sane anchor text mix leans on your brand name and plain phrases. Commercial terms? Keep them to a small minority.

And read the reviews properly. The FTC banned buying and selling fake reviews back in 2024, but fake praise is still everywhere. Check more than one platform. If there’s a wall of five-star reviews all posted in the same fortnight, that tells you something.

When several of these turn up together, cheap and metric-obsessed and cagey about sites and pushing a twelve-month contract, you’re probably looking at one of the usual link building scams. Walk away early. Right now it costs you nothing. In six months it won’t.

Get These Terms in Writing

The sales call sets expectations. The contract is the only thing you can actually hold them to later. So before you sign, make sure these are written into the document itself, not floating around in an email thread or a call recording somewhere:

• How many placements you get each month, what type, and the minimum standard every site has to meet.
• How long each link is guaranteed. Also what “replace” actually means: the same site, a similar one, or literally any site.
• When reports arrive and what’s in them.
• Who owns the articles written for your placements.
• Notice period. Plus what happens to half-finished work if you leave.

If the quote looks low next to those terms, check it against typical link building pricing before you sign anything. The gap usually tells you which corner is getting cut. And it’s rarely a corner you’d have picked yourself, given the choice.

Your First 90 Days With a New Agency

Treat the first three months as a trial, whatever the contract says. Run the twenty-minute test again on the first real batch, because quality sometimes slips once the paperwork’s signed. If it does, say something in month one. Don’t wait for renewal.

Don’t expect rankings to jump straight away either. How long backlinks take to work depends on your site and your competition, so ask for an honest range and the early signs to watch. Track the pages you’re building links to. That’s where the return on the spend shows up. Or doesn’t.

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