Who you are actually dealing with
We are a link building agency that sells almost entirely to other SEO agencies. That has been the business since 2012. Today it runs as a marketplace of 410 publishers with the prices published, which is unusual in this industry and deliberate.
- Operating since
- 2012
- Sites on the list
- 410
- Countries
- 23
- Prices published
- All of them
Muhammad Tayyab
Founder
Has worked in search for over twelve years, across technical SEO, content and local search. Started The Stark SEO as a consultancy and grew it into a link building agency working almost entirely with other agencies.
Check for yourself: Muhammad Tayyab on LinkedIn. Worth doing before you send anyone money.
Why the prices are on the website
Most agencies in this space will not tell you what a link costs until you have been on a call. There is a commercial logic to it: a conversation lets you anchor the price to the client's budget rather than to the placement.
We stopped doing that because our buyers are other SEO agencies. They know roughly what things cost, they are pricing three suppliers at once, and making them sit through a discovery call to find out a number mostly loses the ones who were going to buy anyway. Publishing the list is faster for everyone, and it means the conversations we do have start somewhere useful.
Why you pay afterwards
Because the risk sits in the wrong place otherwise. An agency buying links is spending on behalf of a client, often before it has been paid itself, on a placement it cannot see yet. Taking money upfront for that is asking someone to trust a supplier they have not worked with.
Delivering first moves the risk to us, which is where it should be. It also means we do not get paid for placements that never happen, and that is a healthier incentive than a deposit.
What we are not
We are not a strategy partner. If you want someone to own the direction of a client account, hire for it — you cannot build a reputation on judgement you have subcontracted. We work best as delivery capacity behind an agency that already knows what it wants.
We are also not the cheapest. Manually vetting publishers and paying writers who know their subject costs more than not doing either, and it shows up in the price.
How a site gets onto the list
Roughly two thirds of what we assess never makes it. This is what that assessment is, and you can run most of it yourself with our publisher audit.
- Step 1
Find it
Mostly from outreach and from publishers approaching us. We do not buy prospect lists, because a list somebody sold us has been sold to everyone else too.
- Step 2
Read it
Open recent articles and count the outgoing commercial links. Four or more per piece and it is selling links rather than publishing. Check the last month of posts share a subject.
- Step 3
Check the numbers
Referring domains against outbound volume. Whether their own backlinks arrived steadily or all in one month. Whether the domain rating is matched by keywords the site actually ranks for.
- Step 4
Price it, or reject it
If it passes, we agree a rate and it goes on the list with that rate visible. If it does not, we say no and it never appears.
Real traffic
Not estimated traffic, and not a domain rating standing in for it. A site with authority and no readers is a number, not an audience.
Editorial standards
Someone has to actually review what gets published. If they will run anything, your client's link sits next to whatever else they ran.
Clean history
No prior penalties, no obvious link-scheme footprint, no archive of two hundred sponsored posts with commercial anchors.
They answer
A publisher who goes quiet after taking an article is a placement we cannot deliver. Reliability is part of the assessment.
Things we changed our mind about
We used to gate the publisher list behind a partner account, on the standard reasoning that the inventory is the asset and giving it away helps competitors. It was the wrong call. Agencies pricing three suppliers at once would not sit through a signup to find out what a link cost, so the wall mostly filtered out the people who were going to buy.
We also used to lead with domain rating in everything we sold, because it is the number clients ask about. Our own data does not support it: the DR 40–49 band on our list is cheaper than DR 20–39, because price follows how contested a niche is rather than authority. We now sell relevance first and say so.
And we stopped quoting a 365-day guarantee in some places and 90 in others. It is 365, everywhere, and it always was in the refund policy.
How we work
Your clients never learn we exist
Nothing we produce carries our name and we hold no contact details for them. The relationship is yours, and commercially it should stay that way.
We turn work down
No adult, no prescription pharma, almost no gambling. You will get told that on day one rather than three weeks into a campaign that was never going to happen.
The numbers on this site are read from the database
Publisher counts, median prices, how many sites take niche edits. None of it is typed into the page, so it cannot drift away from what we actually sell.
No guaranteed rankings
Anyone selling those is selling something else. We will tell you what we expect to move and roughly when, and be specific, but a promised position is not a real product.
Everything above except the founding year is counted from the live marketplace when this page loads.
Have a look at the list
Every site with its price, nothing to fill in first, and nothing to pay unless a link actually goes live. 365 days of cover on every placement.
Open the marketplace