SEO
How to Hire a Link Building Agency: A Step-by-Step Guide
We all know that link building is an integral part of any SEO strategy. But acquiring top-notch links is not as easy as it looks. It takes a lot of experience, skill, and time to do it well. So what if you can’t manage link building yourself but still want the best results?
If you don’t have the experience to find high-quality link prospects or can’t spare hours doing outreach, now may be the time to hire a link building agency. A quality one can get the results you need without the headaches.
But with so many agencies out there claiming to be the best in the business, it can be challenging to know who’s legit. In this article, we will look at how to hire a link building agency, including the qualities and red flags to look out for.
Link building, when done well, is a full-time job. It takes skill to assess a site and come up with a strategy and roadmap, produce quality content that brands want to publish, and build long-lasting relationships with businesses and journalists.
Even if you have all of the skills required to build exceptional links that will move the needle, doing so takes a lot of time. If you’re already an SEO or a business owner, the likelihood is you don’t have the time needed to land killer links.
A link building agency has a dedicated expert team set up specifically to build links for their clients on a full-time basis. A high-quality agency will take care of everything you need—from strategy and planning to execution—and keep you updated as it progresses.
The best link building agencies are made up of expert writers, SEOs, PR executives, and experienced managers to deliver a successful service seamlessly. This means you can get the results you need without the headaches and simply check in with them for updates on your campaign.
Outsourcing to an agency vs. building an in-house team
If you’re at the point where you know you need help with link building, you may want to take a moment to consider whether the best option is to hire a link building agency or build your own in-house team.
Obviously, hiring an agency has several benefits. You’re paying for years of experience, a fully functional, coordinated team with pre-built relationships, and systems in place. Especially in the short term, this all makes link building easy (and one less thing to manage).
However, link building agencies have high business costs. To turn a profit, link building agencies usually charge higher prices, which often take up a huge portion of your SEO budget. Meaning, using an agency to build links at scale long term may not be the best option.
If you’re building up your own business, either as an independent SEO consultant or building digital assets like a niche site, it may be more beneficial (especially in the long term) to build your own in-house team.
First, this will be more cost-efficient. And if you have link building experience yourself and just need additional hands to help scale, you can train an in-house team with your own standard operating procedures (SOPs) to work exactly how you want.
So now we have established why you may need a link building agency, the question is, “How do you find a high-quality agency that will actually get results?”
It’s easy to pick up any old rubbish from Fiverr or a list from a Linkedin outreach warrior. But acquiring backlinks that move the needle from big businesses like HubSpot or Monday takes more than a cold email from a random SEO “expert.”
To set you up for success, we’re going to look at the traits of a quality link building agency.
1. Great communication
Great communication is a key factor for success in any business. With link building agencies, responsiveness and transparency can be key indicators for quality.
Although you should always allow a reasonable amount of time for a busy agency to respond (keeping in mind that an agency may be in a different time zone to you and have different working days), expecting a response within 24 hours during working hours is standard.
An agency should also offer transparency into how it intends to work and what can be expected of it. It’s standard practice for a quality agency to have an onboarding process for new clients, walking you through exactly how things will go.
If an agency is reluctant to communicate or share its methods, timelines, etc., that should be a big red flag, and you’ll probably want to look elsewhere.
2. Creates realistic timelines and goals
Anyone who tells you they can acquire 762 links in 30 days probably sold snake oil in a former life.
High-quality link building takes time and, depending on the link building services you choose, may even take months to start seeing results.
Services like digital PR and HARO link building require time. After all, it takes a while to build relationships with journalists and see placements as articles are published. It’s not an overnight process. A good agency will be up front about realistic timelines, many stating what to expect on their websites.
If an agency gives you unrealistic metrics (either the number of links it can acquire or the time frame it expects), it will likely use black-hat methods to acquire links or simply let you down.
3. Holds itself accountable
Here’s the thing about great link building: It’s not a one-size-fits-all solution!
Quality link building agencies must adapt their strategy on a client-by-client basis. In order to get the best results, they need to understand what your site needs and consider many factors, such as niche and business type.
Often, this can mean trial and error as they develop a client’s individual plan. On occasion, this can mean things go wrong.
An agency that can hold itself accountable for mistakes and offer reassurance on how it can rectify the issue and get back on track is necessary for a long-term, successful partnership.
4. Continuously updates you with progress
Being updated on the progress of your account is essential, especially for link building services that take slightly longer to fulfill.
This helps ensure you have the reassurance the work you paid for is being done and you can coordinate other parts of your SEO strategy and campaigns alongside ongoing link building efforts.
Most large, well-established agencies these days will have some form of client dashboard where you can monitor the ongoing progress of your campaigns. But even small agencies with limited staff should pre-arrange regular progress check-ins as part of the service.
5. Methods and tools
A professional link building agency will have specific methods for acquiring links (depending on the types of links) that it should be willing to share with you.
Although it may not want to share every insider secret that makes it more successful than other competitors, it should give you a brief overview of its process during client onboarding.
Agencies that are reluctant to share their processes are something to be wary of. Often, they work from a list of guest post providers or use techniques that can land you a Google penalty, like buying links.
But a professional agency will utilize many professional tools to run competitor analyses, audit backlinks, find link prospects, liaise with journalists, run outreach campaigns, and track results. An agency should be happy to share which tools it uses and why.
6. Reputation
You should always be able to ask a prospective agency for testimonials from satisfied customers. In fact, the majority will have testimonials listed on their websites.
However, anyone can write a fake testimonial from never-heard-of-before Joe Bloggs about how fabulous they are. On the other hand, recommendations from well-known industry professionals add a layer of confidence that an agency knows what it is doing and gets results.
Moreover, well-established link building agencies will have additional information available alongside testimonials, adding to their credibility. Examples include detailed case studies and any awards they have won. These are all things to look out for.
You can also go one step further than what an agency promotes on its website (let’s face it, that is always going to be positive). Do some digging and check out reviews on social media, Reddit, and even from previous employees on Glassdoor.
7. Pricing
I think it is important to say here that expensive doesn’t always mean better. Paying someone $300 an hour doesn’t necessarily mean you will get the best results possible.
There are high-quality agencies worldwide, and those working from countries where the cost of living and running a business are cheaper will often have lower prices than those in the U.K. or U.S.
With that said, there has to be a happy medium. Any high-quality link building agency has several unavoidable costs they need to cover before even turning a profit, including:
- Professional tools.
- Outreach staff.
- Writers (for guest posts, for example).
- Other agency staff (account managers, administrators, etc.).
- General business costs (office space, utilities, and so on).
All of these need to be covered with an additional margin for profit for an agency to function. Therefore, if an agency charges $20 per link, regardless of where it is based, you should consider that a red flag.
It’s also worth considering that the price (as well as scale and turnaround time) will vary depending on the types of links you want to acquire.
Link prices among the most popular agencies range from $1 per link (for local citations) to $700 per link (for HARO link building).
8. Ability to scale
If you are considering using a link building agency for the long term, you’re probably going to want to scale up the operation as you go forward. If the agency you’re using is a small four-person operation, it probably isn’t able to grow with you.
The ideal situation is to find an awesome link building agency that you can build long-lasting relationships with. It should be one that knows your website and goals so you won’t have to change providers every time you want to double down on your efforts.
Finding an agency that is already well established with a large team of staff is the best option if you are looking for long-term growth opportunities.
Final thoughts
Hiring a link building agency could be the secret sauce for SEO success for anyone who wants to build epic backlinks at scale. But finding the right agency can take time, effort and, in some cases, trial and error.
Finding an agency that is professional, has open communication, and is invested in seeing you succeed is going to be key to building a long-lasting partnership.
Got questions? Ping me on Twitter.
SEO
How Compression Can Be Used To Detect Low Quality Pages
The concept of Compressibility as a quality signal is not widely known, but SEOs should be aware of it. Search engines can use web page compressibility to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords, making it useful knowledge for SEO.
Although the following research paper demonstrates a successful use of on-page features for detecting spam, the deliberate lack of transparency by search engines makes it difficult to say with certainty if search engines are applying this or similar techniques.
What Is Compressibility?
In computing, compressibility refers to how much a file (data) can be reduced in size while retaining essential information, typically to maximize storage space or to allow more data to be transmitted over the Internet.
TL/DR Of Compression
Compression replaces repeated words and phrases with shorter references, reducing the file size by significant margins. Search engines typically compress indexed web pages to maximize storage space, reduce bandwidth, and improve retrieval speed, among other reasons.
This is a simplified explanation of how compression works:
- Identify Patterns:
A compression algorithm scans the text to find repeated words, patterns and phrases - Shorter Codes Take Up Less Space:
The codes and symbols use less storage space then the original words and phrases, which results in a smaller file size. - Shorter References Use Less Bits:
The “code” that essentially symbolizes the replaced words and phrases uses less data than the originals.
A bonus effect of using compression is that it can also be used to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords.
Research Paper About Detecting Spam
This research paper is significant because it was authored by distinguished computer scientists known for breakthroughs in AI, distributed computing, information retrieval, and other fields.
Marc Najork
One of the co-authors of the research paper is Marc Najork, a prominent research scientist who currently holds the title of Distinguished Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. He’s a co-author of the papers for TW-BERT, has contributed research for increasing the accuracy of using implicit user feedback like clicks, and worked on creating improved AI-based information retrieval (DSI++: Updating Transformer Memory with New Documents), among many other major breakthroughs in information retrieval.
Dennis Fetterly
Another of the co-authors is Dennis Fetterly, currently a software engineer at Google. He is listed as a co-inventor in a patent for a ranking algorithm that uses links, and is known for his research in distributed computing and information retrieval.
Those are just two of the distinguished researchers listed as co-authors of the 2006 Microsoft research paper about identifying spam through on-page content features. Among the several on-page content features the research paper analyzes is compressibility, which they discovered can be used as a classifier for indicating that a web page is spammy.
Detecting Spam Web Pages Through Content Analysis
Although the research paper was authored in 2006, its findings remain relevant to today.
Then, as now, people attempted to rank hundreds or thousands of location-based web pages that were essentially duplicate content aside from city, region, or state names. Then, as now, SEOs often created web pages for search engines by excessively repeating keywords within titles, meta descriptions, headings, internal anchor text, and within the content to improve rankings.
Section 4.6 of the research paper explains:
“Some search engines give higher weight to pages containing the query keywords several times. For example, for a given query term, a page that contains it ten times may be higher ranked than a page that contains it only once. To take advantage of such engines, some spam pages replicate their content several times in an attempt to rank higher.”
The research paper explains that search engines compress web pages and use the compressed version to reference the original web page. They note that excessive amounts of redundant words results in a higher level of compressibility. So they set about testing if there’s a correlation between a high level of compressibility and spam.
They write:
“Our approach in this section to locating redundant content within a page is to compress the page; to save space and disk time, search engines often compress web pages after indexing them, but before adding them to a page cache.
…We measure the redundancy of web pages by the compression ratio, the size of the uncompressed page divided by the size of the compressed page. We used GZIP …to compress pages, a fast and effective compression algorithm.”
High Compressibility Correlates To Spam
The results of the research showed that web pages with at least a compression ratio of 4.0 tended to be low quality web pages, spam. However, the highest rates of compressibility became less consistent because there were fewer data points, making it harder to interpret.
Figure 9: Prevalence of spam relative to compressibility of page.
The researchers concluded:
“70% of all sampled pages with a compression ratio of at least 4.0 were judged to be spam.”
But they also discovered that using the compression ratio by itself still resulted in false positives, where non-spam pages were incorrectly identified as spam:
“The compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6 fared best, correctly identifying 660 (27.9%) of the spam pages in our collection, while misidentifying 2, 068 (12.0%) of all judged pages.
Using all of the aforementioned features, the classification accuracy after the ten-fold cross validation process is encouraging:
95.4% of our judged pages were classified correctly, while 4.6% were classified incorrectly.
More specifically, for the spam class 1, 940 out of the 2, 364 pages, were classified correctly. For the non-spam class, 14, 440 out of the 14,804 pages were classified correctly. Consequently, 788 pages were classified incorrectly.”
The next section describes an interesting discovery about how to increase the accuracy of using on-page signals for identifying spam.
Insight Into Quality Rankings
The research paper examined multiple on-page signals, including compressibility. They discovered that each individual signal (classifier) was able to find some spam but that relying on any one signal on its own resulted in flagging non-spam pages for spam, which are commonly referred to as false positive.
The researchers made an important discovery that everyone interested in SEO should know, which is that using multiple classifiers increased the accuracy of detecting spam and decreased the likelihood of false positives. Just as important, the compressibility signal only identifies one kind of spam but not the full range of spam.
The takeaway is that compressibility is a good way to identify one kind of spam but there are other kinds of spam that aren’t caught with this one signal. Other kinds of spam were not caught with the compressibility signal.
This is the part that every SEO and publisher should be aware of:
“In the previous section, we presented a number of heuristics for assaying spam web pages. That is, we measured several characteristics of web pages, and found ranges of those characteristics which correlated with a page being spam. Nevertheless, when used individually, no technique uncovers most of the spam in our data set without flagging many non-spam pages as spam.
For example, considering the compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6, one of our most promising methods, the average probability of spam for ratios of 4.2 and higher is 72%. But only about 1.5% of all pages fall in this range. This number is far below the 13.8% of spam pages that we identified in our data set.”
So, even though compressibility was one of the better signals for identifying spam, it still was unable to uncover the full range of spam within the dataset the researchers used to test the signals.
Combining Multiple Signals
The above results indicated that individual signals of low quality are less accurate. So they tested using multiple signals. What they discovered was that combining multiple on-page signals for detecting spam resulted in a better accuracy rate with less pages misclassified as spam.
The researchers explained that they tested the use of multiple signals:
“One way of combining our heuristic methods is to view the spam detection problem as a classification problem. In this case, we want to create a classification model (or classifier) which, given a web page, will use the page’s features jointly in order to (correctly, we hope) classify it in one of two classes: spam and non-spam.”
These are their conclusions about using multiple signals:
“We have studied various aspects of content-based spam on the web using a real-world data set from the MSNSearch crawler. We have presented a number of heuristic methods for detecting content based spam. Some of our spam detection methods are more effective than others, however when used in isolation our methods may not identify all of the spam pages. For this reason, we combined our spam-detection methods to create a highly accurate C4.5 classifier. Our classifier can correctly identify 86.2% of all spam pages, while flagging very few legitimate pages as spam.”
Key Insight:
Misidentifying “very few legitimate pages as spam” was a significant breakthrough. The important insight that everyone involved with SEO should take away from this is that one signal by itself can result in false positives. Using multiple signals increases the accuracy.
What this means is that SEO tests of isolated ranking or quality signals will not yield reliable results that can be trusted for making strategy or business decisions.
Takeaways
We don’t know for certain if compressibility is used at the search engines but it’s an easy to use signal that combined with others could be used to catch simple kinds of spam like thousands of city name doorway pages with similar content. Yet even if the search engines don’t use this signal, it does show how easy it is to catch that kind of search engine manipulation and that it’s something search engines are well able to handle today.
Here are the key points of this article to keep in mind:
- Doorway pages with duplicate content is easy to catch because they compress at a higher ratio than normal web pages.
- Groups of web pages with a compression ratio above 4.0 were predominantly spam.
- Negative quality signals used by themselves to catch spam can lead to false positives.
- In this particular test, they discovered that on-page negative quality signals only catch specific types of spam.
- When used alone, the compressibility signal only catches redundancy-type spam, fails to detect other forms of spam, and leads to false positives.
- Combing quality signals improves spam detection accuracy and reduces false positives.
- Search engines today have a higher accuracy of spam detection with the use of AI like Spam Brain.
Read the research paper, which is linked from the Google Scholar page of Marc Najork:
Detecting spam web pages through content analysis
Featured Image by Shutterstock/pathdoc
SEO
New Google Trends SEO Documentation
Google Search Central published new documentation on Google Trends, explaining how to use it for search marketing. This guide serves as an easy to understand introduction for newcomers and a helpful refresher for experienced search marketers and publishers.
The new guide has six sections:
- About Google Trends
- Tutorial on monitoring trends
- How to do keyword research with the tool
- How to prioritize content with Trends data
- How to use Google Trends for competitor research
- How to use Google Trends for analyzing brand awareness and sentiment
The section about monitoring trends advises there are two kinds of rising trends, general and specific trends, which can be useful for developing content to publish on a site.
Using the Explore tool, you can leave the search box empty and view the current rising trends worldwide or use a drop down menu to focus on trends in a specific country. Users can further filter rising trends by time periods, categories and the type of search. The results show rising trends by topic and by keywords.
To search for specific trends users just need to enter the specific queries and then filter them by country, time, categories and type of search.
The section called Content Calendar describes how to use Google Trends to understand which content topics to prioritize.
Google explains:
“Google Trends can be helpful not only to get ideas on what to write, but also to prioritize when to publish it. To help you better prioritize which topics to focus on, try to find seasonal trends in the data. With that information, you can plan ahead to have high quality content available on your site a little before people are searching for it, so that when they do, your content is ready for them.”
Read the new Google Trends documentation:
Get started with Google Trends
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Luis Molinero
SEO
All the best things about Ahrefs Evolve 2024
Hey all, I’m Rebekah and I am your Chosen One to “do a blog post for Ahrefs Evolve 2024”.
What does that entail exactly? I don’t know. In fact, Sam Oh asked me yesterday what the title of this post would be. “Is it like…Ahrefs Evolve 2024: Recap of day 1 and day 2…?”
Even as I nodded, I couldn’t get over how absolutely boring that sounded. So I’m going to do THIS instead: a curation of all the best things YOU loved about Ahrefs’ first conference, lifted directly from X.
Let’s go!
OUR HUGE SCREEN
The largest presentation screen I’ve ever seen! #ahrefsevolve pic.twitter.com/oboiMFW1TN
— Patrick Stox (@patrickstox) October 24, 2024
This is the biggest presentation screen I ever seen in my life. It’s like iMax for SEO presentations. #ahrefsevolve pic.twitter.com/sAfZ1rtePx
— Suganthan Mohanadasan (@Suganthanmn) October 24, 2024
CONFERENCE VENUE ITSELF
It was recently named the best new skyscraper in the world, by the way.
The Ahrefs conference venue feels like being in inception. #AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/18Yjai1Cej
— Suganthan Mohanadasan (@Suganthanmn) October 24, 2024
I’m in Singapore for @ahrefs Evolve this week. Keen to connect with people doing interesting work on the future of search / AI #ahrefsevolve pic.twitter.com/s00UkIbxpf
— Alex Denning (@AlexDenning) October 23, 2024
OUR AMAZING SPEAKER LINEUP – SUPER INFORMATIVE, USEFUL TALKS!
A super insightful explanation of how Google Search Ranking works #ahrefsevolve pic.twitter.com/Cd1VSET2Aj
— Amanda Walls (@amandajwalls) October 24, 2024
“would I even do this if Google didn’t exist?” – what a great question to assess if you actually have the right focus when creating content amazing presentation from @amandaecking at #AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/a6OKbKxwiS
— Aleyda Solis ️ (@aleyda) October 24, 2024
Attending @CyrusShepard ‘s talk on WTF is Helpful Content in Google’s algorithm at #AhrefsEvolve
“Focus on people first content”
Super relevant for content creators who want to stay ahead of the ever evolving Google search curve! #SEOTalk #SEO pic.twitter.com/KRTL13SB0g
This is the first time I am listening to @aleyda and it is really amazing. Lot of insights and actionable information.
Thank you #aleyda for power packed presentation.#AhrefsEvolve @ahrefs #seo pic.twitter.com/Xe3A9MGfrr
— Jignesh Gohel (@jigneshgohel) October 25, 2024
— Parth Suba (@parthsuba77) October 24, 2024
@thinking_slows thoughts on AI content – “it’s very good if you want to be average”.
We can do a lot better and Ryan explains how. Love it @ahrefs #AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/qFqWs6QBH5
— Andy Chadwick (@digitalquokka) October 24, 2024
A super insightful explanation of how Google Search Ranking works #ahrefsevolve pic.twitter.com/Cd1VSET2Aj
— Amanda Walls (@amandajwalls) October 24, 2024
This is the first time I am listening to @aleyda and it is really amazing. Lot of insights and actionable information.
Thank you #aleyda for power packed presentation.#AhrefsEvolve @ahrefs #seo pic.twitter.com/Xe3A9MGfrr
— Jignesh Gohel (@jigneshgohel) October 25, 2024
GREAT MUSIC
First time I’ve ever Shazam’d a track during SEO conference ambience…. and the track wasn’t even Shazamable! #AhrefsEvolve @ahrefs pic.twitter.com/ZDzJOZMILt
— Lily Ray (@lilyraynyc) October 24, 2024
AMAZING GOODIES
Ahrefs Evolveきました！@ahrefs @AhrefsJP #AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/33EiejQPdX
— さくらぎ (@sakuragi_ksy) October 24, 2024
Aside from the very interesting topics, what makes this conference even cooler are the ton of awesome freebies
Kudos for making all of these happen for #AhrefsEvolve @ahrefs team pic.twitter.com/DGzk5FSTN8
— Krista Melgarejo (@kimelgarejo) October 24, 2024
Content Goblin and SEO alligator party stickers are definitely going on my laptop. @ahrefs #ahrefsevolve pic.twitter.com/QBsBuY5Yix
— Patrick Stox (@patrickstox) October 24, 2024
This is one of the best swag bags I’ve received at any conference!
Either @ahrefs actually cares or the other conference swag bags aren’t up to par w Ahrefs!#AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/Yc9e6wZPHn— Moses Sanchez (@SanchezMoses) October 25, 2024
SELFIE BATTLE
Some background: Tim and Sam have a challenge going on to see who can take the most number of selfies with all of you. Last I heard, Sam was winning – but there is room for a comeback yet!
Got the rare selfie with both @timsoulo and @samsgoh #AhrefsEvolve
— Bernard Huang (@bernardjhuang) October 24, 2024
THAT BELL
Everybody’s just waiting for this one.
@timsoulo @ahrefs #AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/6ypWaTGDDP
— Jinbo Liang (@JinboLiang) October 24, 2024
STICKER WALL
Viva la vida, viva Seo!
Awante Argentina loco!#AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/sfhbI2kWSH
— Gaston Riera. (@GastonRiera) October 24, 2024
AND, OF COURSE…ALL OF YOU!
#AhrefsEvolve let’s goooooooooooo!!! pic.twitter.com/THtdvdtUyB
— Tim Soulo (@timsoulo) October 24, 2024
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There’s a TON more content on LinkedIn – click here – but I have limited time to get this post up and can’t quite figure out how to embed LinkedIn posts so…let’s stop here for now. I’ll keep updating as we go along!
