Link Building Services That Earn Links Worth Keeping

What Is Link Building?

Link building is the work of getting other websites to link to yours, so Google treats your pages as more trustworthy and worth ranking. Each link, or backlink, is a vote from another site. The clickable words in it, called anchor text, tell Google what your page is about. Some votes count far more.

Our link building starts with the sites that link to your competitors. We vet each one before anything is pitched, earn mentions from local partners, and choose which page each link should point at. Every placement goes on a log.

How We Judge a Link Before It Goes Live

We judge a link by the linking site’s real search traffic, its topical fit and where the link sits on the page. Domain Rating (DR), a third-party score of a site’s link strength, is only a first filter. It never decides alone. We accept a lower-DR site when it’s highly relevant to your niche and has real organic traffic in your category, or when the page carrying the link already ranks.

Some things are rejected at any DR. Link-farm patterns. Sites with zero organic traffic, whose DR is manufactured. Links that only appear in a footer, sidebar or author bio. Pages with more than 100 outbound links. For scale, the median web page carries 6 outbound links, and even at the 90th percentile it’s 25 on desktop (HTTP Archive Web Almanac, 2025). We treat 100 or more as a page built to sell links.

Colin Ma, who founded Matcha Growth, learned the early version of these rules on his own sites. In 2020 he sold two affiliate sites for six figures each, and he described his link process on Niche Pursuits in 2021. His first rule was to target sites with real organic traffic. The thresholds have moved since then.

Our Position on Paid Links

Our position on paid links is that we don’t sell them as a service. Google’s spam policies allow paid links only when they carry a sponsored or nofollow label, which asks Google not to count them for ranking. Few sites use the dedicated label. The rel=”sponsored” attribute appears on just 0.5% of pages, against 32.3% for nofollow (HTTP Archive Web Almanac, 2025). Google accepts either label on a paid link. A paid link with neither is the one that can cost you.

When Google discounts or penalizes those links, the site they point to takes the hit. The vendor doesn’t. And when a paid article recommends your product, the FTC’s Endorsement Guides, updated in 2023, add a second rule. A material connection has to be disclosed when a significant minority of readers wouldn’t expect it, and online the disclosure should be unavoidable.

Those two rules are why we leave paid links out of our service. We keep a log of every placement we’re involved in: the site, the page it points to and the anchor text. You get that log.

Links Disappear Over Time

Links disappear on their own, so the links you already have need rechecking. Pew Research Center found that 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 were no longer accessible by October 2023. Big sites aren’t immune. On news sites, 25% of pages in the top 20% by traffic had at least one broken external link, about the same as the 26% in the bottom 20% (Pew, 2024).

The placement log records each link’s page, so a dropped one can be found. We also look the other way. Dead pages on your own site that still have links pointing at them get a redirect to the closest live page, so that value isn’t wasted.

Link Building FAQs

Short answers to common link building questions.

Do backlinks still matter for SEO?

Backlinks still matter for SEO. In its 2025 remedies opinion in United States v. Google, the court described PageRank, which is built from the links pointing at a page, as a key quality signal, and quoted a Google document calling it an input to Google’s quality score. Links are one signal among many. That’s why we care more about where a link comes from than how many you get.

Is it safe to buy backlinks?

Buying backlinks carries risk, and the risk sits with your site. Google’s spam policies allow paid links only when they carry a sponsored or nofollow label. If a paid article recommends your product, the FTC’s Endorsement Guides say that connection needs a clear disclosure. That’s why we don’t sell paid links as a service. Every link we place goes on a log you can see.

How many backlinks do I need?

The number of backlinks you need depends on the pages that already rank for your target searches. We compare your referring domains with theirs and close the gap that matters, starting with sites that link to several competitors. There’s no universal quota. A few links from relevant sites with real traffic can matter more than dozens from directories nobody visits.

Do guest posts still work for link building?

Guest posts still work for link building when the host site has real search traffic in your field and the link sits in the body of the article. Before pitching, we pull what the host already ranks for and pick an angle that fits it. Links placed only in an author bio go on our reject list. So do hosts with no organic traffic.

Do you guarantee a number of links per month?

We don’t guarantee a number of links per month. Earned links depend on editors and reporters saying yes, and a fixed monthly quota pushes any agency toward weaker sites to hit it. You see every placement. Link building runs inside a monthly retainer with no setup fee.