Link building is the part of SEO with the widest gap between what you pay and what you get. The same money buys a placement that moves rankings or one that does nothing, and the difference is not visible on the invoice.
Here is what we check before we buy anything.
1. Real organic traffic, not Domain Rating
Domain Rating, Domain Authority and every similar score is calculated from links. Links can be bought. So the score can be bought, and there is an entire industry doing exactly that.
Organic traffic is much harder to fake. Pull the site in Ahrefs or Semrush and look at its organic traffic trend over two years.
What you want: steady or growing traffic from a spread of keywords.
What should worry you: a site with DR 70 and 200 monthly visits. That is a link farm with a good score.
2. The traffic is in the right country
A site with 50,000 monthly visits, of which 48,000 are from countries where nobody speaks its publishing language, is usually running something other than a publication.
Check the country breakdown. It takes ten seconds and it catches a whole category of bad site.
3. Topical relevance
A link from a site about your subject is worth more than a link from a general news site with a higher score. A link from a site that publishes about gardening, crypto, dentistry and car insurance in the same month is worth close to nothing, because it is a link shop.
Look at the last twenty posts. Do they have a subject? Would a real reader subscribe?
4. The outbound link pattern
Open a few articles and look at where they link out.
Every article linking out to a commercial site in the second paragraph, with exact match anchor text, is a site that exists to sell links. Google's systems are good at spotting that pattern and the links in it carry little value.
5. The page will actually be indexed
A link on a page Google never indexes does nothing. Check that the site's recent articles appear in Google at all.
For niche edits, check that the specific page you are buying into is indexed and has some organic traffic of its own. A link inserted into a page nobody visits and Google rarely recrawls is close to worthless.
6. What the supplier will not tell you
Ask directly:
- Do you own any of these sites?
- Is this a guest post you place, or a paid insertion into existing content?
- Will the link be
dofollow, and will the article be marked as sponsored? - How long does the placement stay live, and what happens if it is removed?
The answers matter less than whether they are given straight. A supplier who gets evasive about ownership is usually placing links on their own network.
7. The report shows everything
A monthly report should list every URL, every anchor text, the site's organic traffic, and the date it went live. If you get a summary with counts and no URLs, you cannot check any of the above.
We publish every placement, including the ones that underperformed, because a client who cannot audit the work has no way to judge it.
The anchor text question
Even a good link can hurt you if the anchor text pattern is wrong. A natural profile is mostly brand, URL and generic anchors, with a minority of partial and exact match.
If a supplier offers you exact match anchors on every placement, say no. That pattern is the fastest way to a manual action, and cleaning it up costs more than the links ever earned.
What to expect after you buy
Most links take four to twelve weeks to show an effect, and the effect is largest on pages already sitting between positions five and twenty. Links to a page on position sixty rarely do much, because the page has other problems.
If a supplier promises movement in two weeks, they are either buying something that will be removed or they are describing something they cannot control.
This is how we run link building, and it is the same process whether you are a store buying directly or an agency reselling it.