How to choose a link building agency without buying a farm

See the host class before you pay. Open a site the vendor would actually use: homepage, two category pages, outbound graph. If you cannot inspect a class of publication, you are buying a spreadsheet. Mystery catalogues are the product at most marketplaces, and every other buyer has the same sheet.

Ask how QC runs before a domain is approved. On this desk, DataForSEO scans spam and toxic signals first. Ahrefs DR prices the English card: $125, $175, $250, $275, $450. It is not a blessing from Google. Moz DA is a third-party score we can report and will not sell as a band. If the vendor leads with a toolbar number and hides the archive, leave.

Read the process, not the founder slide. How we work is brief, approve publisher, write, you approve class of site, place, report, replace. Why us is the company constraint list. If those two URLs are the same essay, the vendor does not have a process. The scam patterns sit on link building scams.

A public card lets you audit the invoice against a page anyone can open. Demo-only pricing is how a sales call invents a “partner menu” that evaporates when the client Googles the vendor. If the only number you get is after a thirty-minute pitch, you are financing their prospecting.

Worldwide Backlinks publishes English guest posts on pricing: DR20+ $125 (GR4D2J), DR30+ $175 (6RZX7J), DR40+ $250 (QJE1WN), DR50+ $275 (PNKO6R), DR70+ $450 (EN1PXR). The monthly package is $1,500 (2R60XR) on Home and pricing only — a scoped desk, not a 50-link quota. International guest posts start at $175. Niche edits from $99 stay quote-only. iGaming from $180 stays quote-only.

Gold desks — Wikipedia, digital PR, directories, adult, CBD, crypto — stay Enquire Now. A vendor who glues those to an English $125 SKU is hiding inventory. White-label uses the same public rates. You keep 100% of what you charge. There is no unpublished agency menu. If a partner programme sits well above the public page, you are paying for a logo swap.

A desk that will not replace a dropped link is selling a screenshot. Publishers pull pieces. Sites sell. House style changes. The replacement should stay in the same language and traffic class. A pulled German URL is not “made good” with a leftover English blog so the vendor can close the ticket.

On this desk, replacement is included on published DR work. The new host still passes DataForSEO. You still approve the class. The report still lists a live URL, target, anchor, and attribute. rel=sponsored stays marked when the publisher marked it. We do not sell a secret dofollow toggle as a replacement perk.

Ask what happens when the vendor cannot fill the class cleanly. An honest desk says no. A farm desk ships the next badge. We will miss TAT rather than dump junk into a graph you have to live with. Typical original TAT is about two weeks, 20-day maximum on standard DR work. That clock restarts on the replacement. It is still placement, not a ranking warranty.

Honest TAT is a placement ceiling, not a rank date. Anyone promising page one in twenty days is selling the invoice week as Google’s crawl. Same-day “DR70 guest posts” usually mean the seller controls the CMS. That is a network with a checkout button. Read the process clock on how we work.

Ask what the clock covers. Here it covers pitch, unique copy, publish, and the live-URL report on standard English DR lines. Digital PR ignores it because newsrooms ghost. Wikipedia reviewers move at their own pace. Named newspapers ignore our ceiling. Those stay quoted. A vendor who applies a 48-hour SLA to every product is not doing editorial work.

Quality is not infinite same-week capacity. If you need fifty URLs by Friday, the honest answer is no. The monthly $1,500 desk is still not a quota machine. We will not invent an on-time percentage slide. We will tell you when a host set is thin. That refusal is the TAT test. A desk that never misses a date is filling from inventory it already owns.

Casino and sportsbook need publishers who accept gambling on purpose. That is the iGaming table from $180, quote-only — not a $125 lifestyle post with the policy ignored. Adult, CBD, and crypto stay Enquire Now. A vendor who says yes to all four on the English grid is either lying or running a farm.

YMYL — finance and law — shrinks the host set. We will not invent a finance SKU or a lawyer package. DR50+ at $275 and DR70+ at $450 exist when a host will take the URL. Many will not. Quote first. A declined lending page is not a refunded we-tried-a-farm-instead.

International money pages need native-language hosts. International guest posts start at $175 because the pitch and draft are native. A cheap English blog will not make a Japanese URL safer. It will make a report that looks busy in a US tool. Hard-niche honesty is saying which door the URL belongs on before anyone pitches.

White-label is for agencies that already sold SEO and need the client PDF under their masthead. Same public rates. No Worldwide Backlinks on the delivery sheet. We never email your client. NDA on request. You keep 100% of the fee. The product landing is white-label link building.

Outsource is for in-house teams that already own the roadmap and do not need a logo swap. You are the brand. We are overflow outreach. Default role on the form is In-house SEO, not Agency. The product landing is outsource link building. Do not buy white-label if you are the company that ranks. Do not buy outsource if you are reselling and hiding a second vendor name.

Neither path invents a cheaper SKU. English guest posts stay $125–$450. The $1,500 month stays a scoped desk. If a vendor offers you a “reseller cost-plus” that is not on the public site, ask which inventory you are actually buying. A logo swap is not a different host set. The process on how we work does not change because the PDF masthead did.

A catalogue you can filter and checkout without talking to a person. 48-hour delivery on “DR70.” 0% rejection. Invented retention. Secret dofollow. “We rank you in ChatGPT.” Competitor-named URLs as proof. A DR10 row. A monthly quota of fifty links in week one of a new domain. Those flags are how link building scams start.

Forum profiles, Web 2.0 dumps, and “tiered” PBNs sold as a magazine group. Owned sites hidden as “media partners.” We own about 500 sites and say so — they are not the product and not a disguised network. Third-party editorial is the default. If the vendor will not say what they own, assume the graph is theirs.

Prices that only appear after a demo when a public card should exist. English SKUs glued to iGaming, Wikipedia, or CBD. Testimonials with no live URL you can open. We do not publish fake reviews or a win-rate percentage. If the homepage is fear numbers and a countdown cart, you are not choosing an agency. You are choosing a storefront.

A short list of money pages, an honest vertical, and one English DR band you can defend. DR40+ at $250 (QJE1WN) is the usual first row. You approve the class of site. DataForSEO runs before a domain is approved. You get a live URL plus DR, traffic, and anchor. If the link drops, we replace it.

Order that band when the destination is a normal commercial URL. Quote when the brief mixes languages, niche edits from $99, iGaming, or a gold product. Dual path stays open. Create an account at clients.worldwidebacklinks.com or send the quote. We reply within 24 hours. Phone 1 800 751 994.

Founded 2022, Richmond VIC. Teams in Australia, Singapore, and the Philippines. 10,000+ placements, 15+ languages, 40+ countries. Those are fulfilment facts, not a case-study lift we will invent. Stay on how we work for the steps. Stay on why us for the company. If the checklist fails, do not hire the desk — including us.