Most bad link building purchases were predictable before any money moved. The link building red flags are remarkably consistent: guarantees nobody can honestly make, volumes nobody can honestly deliver, prices below what real links cost to produce, and secrecy about where links come from. If you learn to spot nine specific warning signs, you will screen out the large majority of providers who would have wasted your budget, including the polished ones with great sales calls.
This checklist exists because the failure stories all rhyme. The prices below come from Adsy's February 2026 analysis of 52,671 sites that sell placements, and the policy references come from Google's own documentation, so you can calibrate every claim a salesperson makes against what the market and Google actually say.
1. Guaranteed rankings or guaranteed DR
Nobody controls Google. A provider who promises "page one in 90 days" or "DR 50 guaranteed" is either lying about what they can control or planning to hit the number in a way you do not want. Domain Rating in particular is easy to inflate with links that do nothing for your actual rankings, which is why a DR guarantee is a worse sign than no promise at all. Run any domain they show you through a free Domain Rating checker and look at where its links come from before treating the number as proof of skill.
2. Bulk numbers at impossible prices
"500 high-quality backlinks for $99" fails arithmetic before it fails SEO. The 2026 market data puts the average real guest post at $459 and the average link insertion at $225; even low-DR placements average $332. A provider selling links at fifty cents each is selling links that cost them nothing to make, and Google's SpamBrain update exists specifically to neutralize those, so "any credit passed by these unnatural links" is lost. You are not buying rankings at a discount. You are buying nothing, cheaply.
3. A "private network" they cannot show you
If the links come from sites the provider owns or a "secret network of publishers," you are buying PBN links, and the secrecy is the tell: networks stay hidden because exposure kills them. Real link building has nothing to hide. A legitimate provider can show you live examples of links they have built for other clients, on real sites you can visit, with real traffic. Refusal to show samples before payment is disqualifying on its own.
4. The retainer that is secretly a markup
One of the most instructive threads in r/bigseo last year came from a marketer who discovered the agency hired to grow their authority was simply buying links from webmasters at $25, $50, sometimes $150 each and billing the work as organic link building. The client paid a retainer to be a middleman's customer. The screening question is direct: "What percentage of the links you build involve paying the linking site?" Any answer is workable; a refusal to answer is your answer.
5. No questions about your business
A provider who quotes a package before asking about your niche, your target keywords, or your current profile is selling inventory, not a service. Real link relevance requires knowing what you do. This is also the fastest way to distinguish packages from genuine custom service: the package seller talks about quantities and DR bands; the service talks about which pages need links and why.
6. Promises of fast results
Links take months to move rankings, not days. Ahrefs' study of 1.3 million keywords found only 1.74% of newly published pages reach the top 10 within a year, and the average #1 result is five years old. A provider promising visible movement in two weeks is betting you will not measure, or planning to show you movement on meaningless long-tail terms. Set expectations from data instead: our guide to how long backlinks take to work gives you the realistic curve.
7. Silence about disclosure rules
Google's spam policies are explicit that buying or selling links for ranking purposes is link spam, and equally explicit that paid links are fine when marked with rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored". A provider doing sponsored placements who never mentions those attributes is either ignorant of the rules or deliberately routing you around them with your domain carrying the risk. Ask how they handle disclosure on paid placements. The good ones have an answer ready.
8. Anchor text they fully control
If a provider promises exact-match anchor text on every link ("best project management software" fifty times), they are describing links they place rather than earn, and an anchor profile that looks manufactured because it is. Natural profiles are dominated by brand names, bare URLs, and mundane phrases like "this guide." A little exact match happens naturally; a lot of it is a fingerprint. Our breakdown of what a healthy backlink profile looks like shows the distribution you actually want.
9. Case studies without live URLs
Screenshots of ranking charts are the cheapest asset in marketing. What a real provider can give you: the client's domain (or an anonymized niche plus timeframe), example links that are still live, and what happened to specific keywords. What the fakes give you: a graph with no axis labels and a testimonial from "John, SaaS founder." If every proof point is unverifiable, treat the whole pitch as unverified.
How the worst providers find you
You rarely go looking for the worst offenders; they arrive in your inbox. The unsolicited "Dear webmaster, we can provide high DA guest post" email is its own red flag category, and it deserves its own filters:
- They found you by scraping, not by fit. The same email went to fifty thousand sites. Whatever they sell was never matched to your niche, which fails the relevance test before the first link exists.
- The inventory list they attach is the product. Spreadsheets of "DA 50+ sites, $30 per post" describe exactly the placement-farm pool that SpamBrain exists to neutralize. Real sites with real audiences do not need to cold-email strangers to sell space.
- Metrics in the pitch, never traffic. DA and DR appear in every line; organic traffic appears nowhere. Inflated-metric, zero-traffic domains are the standard stock of link sellers, which is why every check in this post keeps returning to "visit the site and look."
- Urgency and discounts. "Slots filling fast" pricing on a commodity that regenerates infinitely tells you how they expect buying decisions to get made.
None of this means outreach itself is illegitimate; you will send outreach in the other direction when you build links properly. The asymmetry to remember: people with genuinely scarce, valuable link placements do not need to hunt for buyers.
Spotting link building red flags in 60 seconds
When you do not have time for full vetting, four questions catch most of the nine flags at once: What exactly will I receive, as a list of URLs? What does each link cost me, all-in? What percentage involves paying the linking site? What happens if a link disappears in 60 days? A provider who answers all four crisply has already outperformed most of the market. A provider who answers none of them just saved you the rest of the call.
What to do instead
Screening out bad providers is half the job; the other half is knowing what good looks like at your stage. The encouraging flip side of this whole list: because the bad end of the market is so uniform, honest providers are unusually easy to recognize once you know the tells. Transparency about sources, prices in line with the market, and deliverables you can click on are rare enough to be a genuine signal, not just table stakes.
If your site is new and what you actually need is the foundation layer (directories, listings, launch platforms), you do not need an agency at all. That work is well-defined enough to do yourself with a good list, or to buy as a flat, one-time service where you can see exactly what you are getting. That transparency is the standard BacklinkBot holds itself to: hand submission to 100+ vetted directories (one-time, from $99) with a proof report listing every submission, and a free database of 1,011+ directories with real DR scores if you would rather do it yourself. No retainer, no secret network, every link inspectable.
If you are past the foundation stage and genuinely need outreach at scale, hire slowly: our guide to vetting a link building agency turns these red flags into the exact questions to ask on the sales call, and the budget guide tells you what honest work costs so underpriced promises stand out instantly.
FAQ
Are cheap Fiverr backlinks ever worth it?
For rankings, no. Links priced at a few dollars are produced by automation or link farms, and SpamBrain neutralizes them. The realistic outcomes are wasted money (most common) or, for genuinely deceptive schemes at scale, worse. The one exception is cheap manual labor for legitimate tasks you direct yourself, like submitting to a list of directories you chose.
Can a bad link building service actually hurt my site?
The usual damage is financial rather than algorithmic: Google neutralizes most spam links rather than penalizing you for them. The genuinely risky cases are deliberate schemes, like undisclosed paid links at scale or PBNs, where Google's link spam policy is explicit that violations "may rank lower in results or not appear in results at all." If you have inherited a mess, see how to remove bad backlinks.
What is a fair price for a legitimate backlink in 2026?
Market averages: $459 for a guest post, $225 for a link insertion, with low-DR sites around $332 and DR 71+ sites around $2,025. Also useful: average asking prices run near $929 while actual transactions close around $207, so quoted prices are highly negotiable. Anything dramatically below these ranges is priced like spam because it is spam.
How do I check what a provider actually delivered?
Ask for the live URL of every link, then verify three things: the page is indexed, the link is still present, and it is dofollow if that is what you paid for (our list of backlink analysis tools covers free ways to monitor this). Do the check again 60 days later. Links that quietly disappear after the invoice clears are one of the oldest tricks in the industry.
Should I trust reviews of backlink services?
Partially. Review platforms for SEO services are heavily gamed in both directions: providers seed positive reviews, and competitors seed negative ones. The more reliable signal is long-form buyer accounts in communities like r/SEO and r/bigseo, where people document spend, deliverables, and outcomes with specifics that are hard to fake. Weigh detailed negative accounts heavier than star averages, and weigh what the provider shows you (live links, real answers) heavier than anything third parties say.
