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Building backlinks is a fundamental part of any link building campaign. Together with high quality content, it is part of the SEO double-whammy that will have the biggest effect on ranking and organic traffic.
But link building is labour-intensive and time-consuming. Doing it at scale is a full-time job which, if you’re already providing other SEO services, could end up distracting your team.
The workaround is white label link building. This is where you hire a link building service to take care of the backlinks while you focus on what you do best.
At dofollow, we specialize in user-centric link building–links designed to pass on real authority and trust–for SaaS, tech and real estate clients.
Reach out to find out more about how you can offer your clients our years of white hat link building experience.
We’ve built high quality backlinks on some of the web’s biggest, most high authority sites:
In a nutshell, white label link building is where agency A builds links for the clients of agency B and agency B then presents those links to their client as if they built them themselves.
It happens often because link building is a fundamental component of search engine optimization, but a lot of SEO agencies don’t have the specialized knowledge and skills in house to do it well.
Some of the scenarios where you might find yourself in need of a white label link building service include:
The main benefit of opting for white label link building is that you are given access to expertise, processes, and relationships that would otherwise take many years to acquire in-house.
This is how you provide the kind of top tier links we consistently build for our clients.
There are a variety of benefits that come with white label link building.
The biggest pitfall when you outsource link building is untrustworthy link building partners.
You need to be able to trust that the link builders you are handing your SEO to (and, if you’re hiring a white label service, your client’s site/SEO and your reputation) are going to build links the right way.
These means no black hat link building–page rank manipulation tactics that don’t add value for your visitors and users–things like link farms and blog spam.
Google really doens’t like when you do this and they can come down quite hard on you in the form of a manual action penalty.
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Google has gotten very good at spotting these link building techniques and a manual action penalty could result in significant drops in ranking and traffic.
The bottom line is, you want to be very certain that the link builders you hire are not going to jeopardize your search engine optimization or that of your clients.
Here are some of the more common link building scams and dangers to keep an eye out for whenever you are considering handing your link building over to an outside party:
PBN (Private Blog Network) is a constellation of websites that exist solely to provide backlinks to what is called a “money site.”
An individual, or a group of people, create these networks–typically on expired domains with residual domain authority–and then populate them with cheap, low-quality content that is used to host links to a target site.
Google really doesn’t like these and can take action against you if you try to source backlinks from them.
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Link farms are similar to PBNs in that they are scam sites that exist solely to sell backlinks.
They are also usually built on expired domains with residual high domain authority to give them a veneer of credibility.
When you buy cheap links from link farms, you are putting your site at risk.
These are links left in web directories (for businesses and industries), and in forum and blog comments.
They are almost always seen as spam by Google.
Guest posting is one of the predominant ways people build backlinks. Done right, they work great, but there are plenty of unscrupulous link builders out there happy to sell you guest post backlinks placed on link farms.
A guest post backlink is only going to be as valuable as the site that hosts the guest post.
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This is someone who reached out to us with a cold email offering their services.
“Thousands of websites in their database,” they claim.
That, combined with the standard, non G-Suite Gmail address that they contacted us with (which I won’t post here for privacy reasons), are major red flags.
It’s hard to tell how many of those thousands of sites will be complete trash that you don’t want anything to do with, but probably a huge chunk.
Other red flags to look out for with freelance and unproven link builders include things like overpromising on the delivery time (which this person didn’t do)--e.g., I’ll have 10 links published in a week (just not feasible).
If you’re going to be trusting your reputation and your clients’ SEO to outsiders, better make sure they have a sound link building philosophy (i.e., only Google-approved link building tactics) and case studies to back up their link building efforts.
White label link building services that aren’t just interested in a quick buck and pride themselves on selling long-term SEO solutions to clients can be hard to find, but they have a few things in common.
If it’s not evident from just spending some time exploring their website, it should be made quite clear during your exploratory call.
Backlink analysis is probably the most important part of the link building process because Google wants to see quality over sheer quantity.
Link builders that just focus on DA/DR are either uninformed on what actually defines quality links, or they know better and are hoping you don’t.
This is because a lot of people approach link builders under the impression that domain authority is king. That if you simply get backlinks from high DA websites, you’ve won.
As we touched on earlier with the PBN and link farm concepts, domain authority (which is a proxy used by SEO analytics tools, not a Google-approved metric) can be gamed by purchasing old domains with leftover DA and then filling them with shoddy content.
A solid white label link building agency is going to look at:
Transparent pricing means value for money that is self-evident.
You know what you’re signing up for and what you’re paying for.
A good white label link building agency will usually offer a tiered pricing plan that is based on DA/DR, but link building opportunities are informed by all of the metrics mentioned above.
If you are putting your faith in outside link builders, you should expect them to be there to answer questions and assuage concerns that you might have.
A lot of the bad experiences people have with not only link building services, but professional services of all kinds, concern a lack of communication.
If you are spending good money for a bespoke service and the service provider is hard to get a hold of, doesn’t show up for or avoids meetings, and is only ever there when it’s time to invoice you, you have a right to be upset.
Quality link building services that care about their clients are attentive.
With white label link building, you are essentially hiring someone else to work for your client, and you are doing it without them knowing it.
You want to be certain that a link building service has your client’s domain authority and search engine optimization best interests at heart.
Good link building agencies that have good processes in place and are confident in their work will have no problem providing detailed real-time reporting that you can access whenever you like.
That is to say, they should have good social proof backing up their services. Here is what some of our clients have to say about us, for instance:
The proof is in the pudding when it comes to link building. We’ve built links for businesses and those businesses have been very happy with our services.
If any white label link building services you are considering don’t have social proof to back up what they are claiming to offer, approach with caution.
If you’re seeking out white label link building services, very likely you have a strong link building base knowledge already–you’re an SEO or digital marketing agency.
In addition to the metrics they use to evaluate link building opportunities, a good quality link building service should be able to tell you about their editorial policy when it comes to things like anchor text and anchor text placement, link selection for guest posts (i.e., which of your pages will they use and why), and their quality assurance standards.
At the end of the day, you are reaching out to a white label link building agency because you either don’t have the bandwidth or the expertise to build links yourself.
You are looking for someone to take the reins, which means trust is an absolute must.
You want a company that knows what Google wants when it comes to backlinks, how to avoid what Google doesn’t like and has the integrity to make good on its promises.
You also want a company that offers transparent, performance-based pricing, real-time reporting, and open communication.
For all of that and more, backed up by years of experience, and a deep roster of satisfied clients, reach out to dofollow to discuss how we can add a high-value skill set to your SEO services.
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