Seven questions to ask any link building supplier before you send them a client

Agencies outsource link building for a sensible reason: it is a second business, with its own publishers, writers, tooling and monitoring. The risk is not that the supplier does bad work. It is that you find out six months later, from the client.

The guides agencies read before choosing a supplier converge on the same handful of questions. Put them in writing and compare the answers side by side.

1. What happens if the position is never reached?

The right answer is that nobody promises a position, because nobody controls Google. A supplier who guarantees a ranking is either guessing or planning something that works briefly and then does not. Treat a ranking guarantee as a disqualifier, not a feature.

2. What is the publisher actually paid out of this price?

A single bundled price hides which half you are buying. Ask for the publisher's cost and the supplier's fee as separate lines. If the supplier cannot or will not split them, you cannot tell whether a price rise next quarter is the publisher's or theirs.

3. What is the traffic threshold, and what happens when it cannot be measured?

Two traps here. The first is global traffic: a site with real readers in the wrong country passes a global floor and sends your client nothing. Ask for traffic measured in the client's own country. The second is the unmeasurable domain: when a tool returns no spam score, most suppliers treat that as clean. A missing number is not a clean number.

4. Is the delivery date binding, and what does a late delivery cost you?

Most remedies are claim-based, and most dates are described as estimates. Ask whether a credit accrues automatically or whether you have to notice, chase and file.

5. What happens if the link goes live and never gets indexed?

A placement Google never indexes is a placement that does not exist. Ask whether indexation is checked at all, by whom, and what the remedy is if it fails.

6. Who notices when a link disappears in month seven?

Four to seven percent of placed links go down within a year for reasons outside anyone's control: redesigns, sold sites, changed editorial direction. The question is who is watching. 'We'll see what we can do' is not an answer. 'Checked weekly, replaced or refunded for twelve months, reported monthly' is.

7. What stops you approaching the clients I introduce?

An NDA and a non-circumvention clause are promises. They expire, and they assume a breach would be deliberate. Automated prospecting does not know your client is your client. Ask whether your client domains are excluded from the supplier's outreach by a mechanism, permanently, or by a sentence in a contract.

The eighth question

Can I check any of this before I pay? If a supplier's figures are real, they can show you a candidate record with traffic, spam score, relevance and price that you can verify in your own tools in two minutes. If they cannot, you are not buying vetting. You are buying inventory.