A good agency will show you its work before it asks for your money. A poor one will sell you a metric, a promise and a price, in that order. Here is how to tell the difference before you sign.
Buying links is a trust decision disguised as a shopping decision. You are not buying a product you can inspect on arrival.
You are buying placements on other people's websites, placed by other people's writers, judged by a search engine that never tells you exactly how it scored them.
That gap between what you pay for and what you can see is where bad providers thrive.
The market makes the gap wider. BuzzStream put the share of low quality guest post marketplace sites at 96.2 percent, and almost 80 percent of guest posting sites sit under DR 40.
Treat these as a warning in the same direction: if you buy on price and on a single metric, you will mostly buy sites Google already ignores. A small discount on a bad placement is still money spent on a link that will not help you.
Start with the site list, not the sales pitch
Any provider worth considering should be comfortable showing you where your links will appear. Ask for live sample placements, not screenshots and not a spreadsheet of domain scores. Open three sample articles and read them as a reader would.
Would you trust this site if you found it through search? Would you share its article with a customer? If the answer is no, the domain score does not rescue it.
Check each sample for four basics. First, relevance: does the site regularly cover your subject, or does it cover everything from finance to pets to casinos? Second, traffic: does it receive real organic visits, and has that traffic held steady or grown over the past year?
Third, editorial standards: are articles written for readers, with named authors and sources? Fourth, placement context: does the link support the article, or does the article exist only to carry the link? A provider that refuses to show a site list is asking you to buy blind.
Read the site like a reader, not like a spreadsheet
Domain Rating and Domain Authority are useful for screening. They are poor judges on their own. A high score with almost no organic traffic is a classic warning sign. It often means an expired domain kept its old score while its audience left, or a site built to look authoritative while nobody reads it.
A practical ten point site check runs like this. Look for a score far above traffic, unrelated categories on one domain, and every post carrying a commercial link. Look for anonymous authors with no body of work, publishing in bursts, with nothing for months and then ten posts in a week.
Look for a page that ranks for nothing even when the domain ranks for something, a domain named after a search term rather than a brand, and an instant yes on any topic, because a real editor has standards and a queue.
Look for traffic trending down over twelve months, and for no social presence, no business and no brand beyond the domain itself. One or two of these can have an innocent explanation. Three or more rarely do. If the best thing about a site is its score, it is not a good site.
Ask the questions a good provider answers easily
Good providers welcome specific questions because they already have specific answers. Ask how placements are secured, who writes the content, and whether subcontractors are involved. Ask whether you approve sites before outreach starts.
Ask what a report contains: live URL, domain metrics, anchor text and publication date should be standard, not extras. Ask what happens if a link is removed, and for how long replacements are covered.
Ask about link attributes too. Google expects paid links to be qualified with a sponsored or nofollow attribute, and expects honest labelling of paid content.
A provider that cannot explain how it handles this, or that promises followed links on every paid placement with no discussion of policy, is either uninformed or unwilling to be straight with you. Neither is a good basis for a long relationship.
Price signals that should make you pause
Price is not proof of quality, but extreme price is useful evidence. One industry survey reported an average acceptable price of about 509 dollars for one high quality backlink in 2026, with most respondents expecting costs to keep rising.
Against that benchmark, links at under 50 dollars each should prompt hard questions about where those links live and how they were obtained. Cheap links usually come from networks of sites built to sell links, not from publications with readers.
Volume promises deserve the same scepticism. Packages of 50 to 500 links at once, delivered quickly, do not look like natural editorial growth. Natural backlink growth is gradual and tied to content people actually cite.
A sudden spike from unrelated sites is exactly the pattern Google spam systems are built to notice. Guaranteed rankings in 30 days belong in the same category. No ethical provider can guarantee a ranking, because rankings depend on competitors, search updates and Google systems outside any agency control.
The Google risk, in plain terms
Google link spam policy has been consistent for years: buying or selling links that pass ranking credit in order to influence rankings is a violation. Its systems do not always announce themselves with a manual action. Often the outcome is quieter.
The links simply stop counting, and you never learn which ones. You keep paying, your rankings stall, and the provider points to live URLs as proof that the work was done.
The policy picture widened in 2026. On 15 May 2026 Google clarified that its spam policies also apply to generative AI responses in Google Search. The June 2026 spam update (24 to 26 June) was described by Google as a normal spam update, with no target category announced.
Buying AI citations is now treated in the same spirit as buying links. Dressing an old tactic in new AI language does not make it safe. The deal must make sense without the ranking signal.
Would the placement be worth it for referral visitors, for credibility with customers, and for being seen in a publication your buyers read? If the only value is a followed link Google is meant to count, rethink the deal.
A short checklist before you sign
Use this list on every proposal, even one from a provider you like.
- You have opened and read at least three live sample placements.
- Each sample site shows real traffic, relevant coverage and named authors.
- The provider explains its process, its writers and any subcontractors.
- You approve sites before outreach, and reports include live URLs and anchor text.
- Paid links are qualified honestly, and the provider can explain how.
- No ranking is guaranteed, and success is measured over months, not days.
- Replacement terms are written down, not promised in a call.
- The price makes sense against the publication, not just against a score.
If a provider fails several of these, do not try to fix the proposal with a lower price. Find a provider that passes the list. The cheapest link Google ignores is the most expensive link you will buy, because you pay for it and then pay again to replace it.
At Linkuild, the starting point is the publication list itself: real sites, checked for traffic and relevance, with placements you can open and read before you judge them. That is the standard to hold any provider to, including us. Linkuild has delivered 5,235+ orders with 98 percent placements live, and you can read the case studies before you decide.
If you are comparing providers now, run them through the checklist above and keep the answers in writing. The provider that answers plainly, shows its work and refuses to guarantee what it cannot control is usually the one worth paying.