Outsourced Link Building (What is it?, Pros & Cons, How to & More)

Most companies waste months trying to build backlinks in-house. After 17 years in link building, I’ve learned why outsourcing links is often faster, cheaper, and far more effective. Here’s how it works and how to choose the right partner.
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I started building backlinks when I was just 12 years old. I’m not joking.

I was messing around on forums and swapping links with people twice my age who had no idea a kid was behind the profile picture. Seventeen years later, I’ve built and sold link building agencies, run thousands of link campaigns in the toughest industries, tested every tactic Google has tried (and failed) to kill, and worked inside niches most SEOs won’t even touch.

Today, I’m the CMO of the fastest growing link building platform on the internet, the same one whose blog you’re reading right now! And I’ve had a pretty unique vantage point watching tens of thousands of links go live, in real time, every week for the past 12 months.

My experience has taught me one simple truth: Most companies should not do their own link building in house.

Link building in 2026 is a volume, systems, negotiation, risk assessment, due diligence, and data game. It’s no longer “send emails, get links.”

The reason that myself and other top tier SEOs succeed at link building is due to our supply chains, publisher relationships, and link business skills (like algo volatility management and ROI forecasting). Those SEO skills and relationships take years to build.

So when I tell you that outsourcing link building is usually the smartest possible ROI move you can make, it’s because I’ve seen the same things over and over again in my 17 years in the link building industry. 

Companies who outsource their link acquisition benefit from:

  • Leveraging supply chains and relationships cultivated over years or even decades, which help you build links faster and cheaper than doing it on your own
  • More free time to focus on growing their business rather than sending “dear sir, I LOVE your website!” emails
  • Cost SAVINGS. It’s counterintuitive, but outsourcing actually saves you money in the long run. Instead of paying large salaries and wasting your time, you get lower costs, no overhead, and more of your valuable time back

OK, enough of me rambling about my link conquests. It’s time to help you find the best possible link building partner for your budget, needs, and goals. 

This ultimate guide to outsourcing your links will teach you everything you need to know. Including what to look for in an agency or freelancer, how to evaluate potential links and partners, my favorite tools, the pros and cons of outsourcing, and a lot more.

Outsourcing link building is when you hire a third party to build and manage your backlink acquisition for you. It’s typically more affordable and a lot easier than building your own links in house. Link building professionals can find higher quality links, negotiate for you, and ensure your links stay live. They can also build links a lot faster due to industry relationships.

In 2026, link building is more complex and difficult to manage than it’s ever been. There’s also more value and reward than ever before, too. But you need to do more to find, evaluate, negotiate, build, and manage links than you used to. That’s why I 100% recommend that you buy backlinks in one way or another, whether directly, through a marketplace, or via an agency.

In my professional opinion (which is basically fact), 95% of companies should outsource their link building efforts.

Pros of outsourcing link building:

  • Lower prices
  • Speed
  • Quality
  • Professionals handling negotiation and management (which gets better results at lower prices)

Cons of outsourcing link building:

  • Difficult to find reliable providers
  • Loss of control

Who should outsource?

  • Small to medium sized businesses
  • People without industry connections
  • People who aren’t SEO professionals
  • Anyone on a budget
  • Businesses that prioritize speed and volume

Who should not outsource?

  • Companies needing digital PR (in some cases)
  • If you have a big enough budget for a large in house team

Outsourced link building is exactly what it sounds like: You hire an external agency, freelancer, or service to build backlinks to your site instead of doing it yourself. 

Outsourcing link building yields high quality links at greater volume, usually at lower prices in the aggregate (in my experience).

When you outsource link acquisition, your service provider handles the prospecting, outreach, follow ups, and placements. You just sit back and get the links.

It’s extremely common in SEO these days. 

According to a study published by SEO.ai, 60% of SEOs are in favor of outsourcing link building. Interestingly enough, that survey also says that 60% also reported rising costs, which outsourcing can help offset through lower overhead costs, better negotiating tactics, and volume pricing.

There are obviously a lot of differences between in house vs outsourcing, but the #1 difference for you as a business owner is resource allocation. An in house team is capped by headcount, tools, and the relationships they’ve had time to build. An outsourced team does this all day, every day, across dozens of clients and niches.

As I said before, outsourcing wins for most businesses. Unless you’re an enterprise with a dedicated SEO team, building links in house is slow and expensive. Outsourcing gets you faster results, proven systems, and specialists who live and breathe link acquisition.

There are a ton of different options for building links these days, so let’s cover those before getting to when you should (and shouldn’t) outsource your link building efforts.

A screenshot from a case study where we built 150 new, unique referring domains for a client over 3 months. The results speak for themselves.

 

Your main options for link building in 2026 are marketplaces, freelancers, and agencies. They all have their advantages and drawbacks, like link quality, reliability, and price. So let’s cover the different options in more detail:

  • Freelancers: These are independent link builders you hire directly, usually through platforms like Upwork or LinkedIn. The main advantage is cost. Freelancers are almost always cheaper than agencies, and you can find some genuinely hungry, talented people with industry connections if you dig deep enough. That said, I’m not a huge fan of this option. Freelancers are hit or miss (mostly miss) and vetting someone’s link building skills (versus their ability to write a convincing proposal) is harder than it sounds. Every SEO has a link building freelancer horror story…ask me how I know.
  • Marketplaces: These are platforms like PressWhizz (shameless plug), where you can browse and purchase links directly from a catalog of sites. I think you can see the advantage here. You pick a site, pay, and get your link without any back-and-forth outreach or negotiation. All the sites are vetted and 100% safe, and you don’t waste any time prospecting (which is a full time job). You choose an ideal link partner, pay for the link, and it’s live within a few hours. It doesn’t get any easier. I bet you could get 10 high performing links from our site in the time it would take you to interview one freelancer.
  • Agencies: These are dedicated link building or SEO firms that manage the entire process for you. If you’re an enterprise with a serious budget and a long runway, agencies can be a great fit. You get a full team, established publisher relationships, and a system that’s been refined across dozens of clients. Just be prepared to pay for it and expect a lot of red tape.

I recommend outsourcing link building when you don’t have a massive SEO budget but still want to scale fast. If you don’t have the time or resources to do it yourself or hire a team, outsourcing is the best way to scale fast at a reasonable price. As I said before, most companies should be outsourcing their link acquisition.

Here’s an example…

Say a business owner is ready to scale up and needs links to rank their website higher in Google. Naturally, they need links. Getting even a handful of links per month could easily take 12-15 hours of their time, and if they don’t have much experience, they’re rolling the dice on link quality. Is the link safe? Will the provider even keep the link live? Hell, will they even insert the link as they promised? It’s a dangerous world out there.

But when you outsource, those risks mostly go away. Even if you pay a bit more to acquire each link in cash, you’re saving hours of work and getting a high quality link, guaranteed.

Let me cover the situations when you should outsource link campaigns in more detail:

Outsourcing makes more sense than doing things in house when you’re on a small budget.

Hiring even one full time link builder costs you a salary, benefits, and tools. That could easily come out to $25,000-$50,000+ a year before you build a single link. A freelancer or a smaller boutique service can get you real links for a fraction of that. 

Did You Know?: According to ZipRecruiter, the average salary of an SEO link builder is $150,000 per year. That’s mental. Glassdoor claims the average salary of a link building professional starts around $70,000. Either way, it’s a ton of money.

Prospecting, outreach, and negotiation take a lot more time than most people realize. It is a full time job. An outsourced team already has the lists, the relationships, and the workflow to let you scale up links fast. Buying 10 links a month from PressWhizz takes 20 minutes, while running your own outreach campaign to get those same 10 links could easily eat up 40+ hours of work.

In the following image, you see how quickly we are able to scale up links for clients. And all of these links are safe, high quality referring domains.

Note: Buying links is always the correct answer when you want to scale up fast. Check out my guide on the best places to buy backlinks for the best places to buy high quality links.

You Don’t Have Time to Perform Outreach

If you don’t have at least 15 hours per week to dedicate to outreach, you should be paying someone else to do it for you.

Outreach can take anywhere from 5 to 20 hours a week, depending on how aggressive your campaign is. Some SEOs claim they spend 15+ hours a week on prospecting, writing pitches, and following up, and that’s before any negotiation happens. Managed link building services take that number down to zero, with a team handling everything while you focus on other parts of your business. Even buying from a marketplace cuts the time commitment down maybe 30 minutes a month compared to the dozens of hours you’d pour into a full outreach operation yourself.

You Don’t Have Any Publisher Relationships

This is the biggest hurdle holding most websites back from getting high quality backlinks, especially when they’re a new site. Link building is all about relationships with the right publications, especially when you’re in niches like SaaS, iGaming, crypto, or healthcare. Good luck just emailing a site like Forbes or Healthline and begging for a link.

Marketplaces and agencies have spent years building relationships with high authority publishers, which guarantees your links get placed and stay placed. For example, with PressWhizz, all you’d have to do is choose your country, sort by domain rating, and you can select the most authoritative websites to get links from. 

Here’s a screenshot of some of the publications we can get you links with:

MSN, USA Today, AP News, Entrepreneur…do you know how hard it would be to even get in contact with the right people there? Let alone get a link. With PressWhizz, it takes 5 minutes.

You Don’t Have SEO Knowledge

If you don’t know how to build links, you should not be building your own links. It sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised at how many companies with no SEO experience think they can build their own links. These are the companies that end up wasting thousands of dollars and getting Google penalties. Building links is not easy anymore. Go back and read my intro again if you don’t believe me. You need to understand relevance, DR, and a number of other SEO metrics to build links properly.

You can keep your link building campaigns in house if you have a massive budget, you’re an experienced SEO professional, or you’re looking for true digital PR (though you can outsource that as well).

This is pretty rare these days, and if you’re reading this article, I suspect you don’t fit this description. No offense. It’s just really hard to DIY this.

Here’s more on when it’s best to keep your link building in house.

You Have a Massive SEO Budget

If you’ve got the money to spend, then by all means, hire a team of professional SEO link builders. If you can hire a link builder and a team of VAs to handle prospecting, outreach, negotiation, and monitoring, going in house is probably the best play.

You or Your Team Are SEO Professionals 

First, I want to say that even if you are SEO professionals, outsourcing is usually the best idea for businesses. But if you know how to evaluate links, have industry connections, and know how to track and analyze data, you can get great results on your own. You could always mix and match by getting your own links and then supporting those efforts with extra links from a marketplace.

Digital PR is a bit different from pure SEO link building. 

Digital PR focuses more on brand building and telling your company’s story, with links being the byproduct. SEO link building is primarily concerned with getting high quality links to improve your search engine rankings. They aren’t exactly the same. For example, some companies run creative campaigns to raise awareness or create linkable assets like statistics pages or case studies to naturally attract links or get placements on targeted publications. If that’s your goal, going in house is the right decision if you have the budget.

Some of the main advantages of outsourcing link acquisition are immediate access to network connections, fast turnaround times, and lower costs. Here’s a bit more on each of these advantages:

  • Scaling without risk: Outsourcing lets you ramp up your link building volume without risking building spammy links or getting Google penalties (as long as you choose a legit agency or marketplace). As soon as you figure out how many backlinks you need, you should ask yourself “am I capable of building this many links on my own?”. Chances are, you’re not.
  • Access to established publisher relationships: Good agencies and services have spent years building relationships with site owners, editors, and publishers across dozens of niches. Getting into those placements on your own would take months of cold outreach and a lot of ignored emails.
  • Faster turnaround on link placements: When you outsource, you get more links, faster. Period. 
  • Lower costs: A full time link builder will cost you $25,000-$50,000+ a year before you factor in tools and training. Outsourcing gets you the same output, often for a fraction of that cost.
  • Proven outreach systems and templates: Outsourced teams have already tested what works across hundreds of campaigns. If you’re using a marketplace, the publishers are already there waiting to place your links. No outreach needed.
  • Frees up internal team for other SEO tasks: Link building is time consuming, and pulling your in house team away from content, technical SEO, or strategy to do outreach is a major opportunity cost. Outsourcing keeps everyone focused on what they do best.

There are some drawbacks to hiring a third party to build links for you. Here are the 3 biggest disadvantages to outsourcing:

  • Some upfront costs for small businesses: It’s obvious, but paying for links or service providers does cost more than just you and a VA trolling for links, at least when you’re just starting out. There are plenty of places you can get free links as a new website, but the benefits fade after a while.
  • Loss of control: This is the biggest downside when using freelancers or agencies. You need to rely on an outside party to get you your links, and that comes with some risks. That’s why you need a trusted link building service provider.
  • Higher risk of spammy links from low quality providers: Since service providers and agencies are under pressure to justify their prices, you run the risk of getting spammy links from low quality freelancers or agencies. If you’re outsourcing, choose wisely.

Link building costs vary widely, but you can expect to pay anywhere from $1,500 per month to $10,000+, depending on how many links you’re building, what type of links you’re building, and how many people are on your team. Here are some ballpark figures:

  • SEO link building specialist salary: Anywhere from $2,500-$8,000 per month.
  • Average freelancer hourly wage: According to research online and my personal experience, a decent freelancer will cost anywhere from $50-$200 per hour.
  • Average link cost: Costs vary widely, depending on quality. You’ll probably pay anywhere from $150-$2,000 per link, depending on the outlet.
  • Opportunity costs: You’ll spend anywhere from 12-20 hours per week building links, which, depending on your hourly rate, could add up to thousands.

So the answer is: It depends. The factors that influence your link building costs include:

  • Niche: Building high authority links in niches like gaming, healthcare, gambling, crypto, and SaaS is more expensive than in other niches.
  • Target page: Getting a link on a high value page with a lot of traffic is worth a lot more than one with 0 traffic and no organic keyword rankings. This could factor into pricing.
  • Site owners: Site owners are getting greedier, and since links are still extremely valuable to SEO, they know they can get high prices (especially when you don’t get volume discounts or have leverage).
  • Volume: How many links do you want to acquire per month? 1? 10? That obviously changes your costs. If you don’t know the answer to this question, you aren’t ready to build links yet. Start by benchmarking yourself against competitors.
  • Content creation: If you’re creating posts to add to websites with your link in them, then that adds to your costs. These days, expect to pay anywhere from $50-$200 per blog post.

As you can see, there are so many variables that it’s difficult to come up with ballpark figures.

Here’s a nice looking table I’ve made for you:

Now, for the million dollar question: Should you outsource link building or keep it in house?

I think you know my opinion based on what you’ve read in this article so far.

I highly recommend that you outsource link building unless you have a massive budget, industry connections, and heavy manpower to get the job done. If you’re a major, 7-figure brand, be my guest. But everyone else will almost certainly benefit from outsourcing link acquisition to a freelancer or agency. Or, if you want the best of both worlds, you can use a marketplace like PressWhizz.

With PressWhizz, you can get safe, high quality links fast and for reasonable prices, all without paying $5,000 per month for an agency (or finding freelancers).

Once again, I’ve made you this fancy looking table to show you the stark contrast between in house vs. outsourced link building:

So, you’ve decided to outsource link building to a qualified link specialist or a quality company.

First off, that’s a great decision. Trust me. I’ve been building links since I was 12 years old. It’s the right idea.

So now the question is: How do you find a high quality link service provider without risking being taken down in a Google sting operation? And once you find one, how do you know if they’re any good and not just another “come inbox” spam operation?

Let’s cover some of my favorite ways to find link companies before we get into how to vet them.

I, of course, recommend you just use PressWhizz. We are the world’s fastest growing link marketplace. Each and every day, we add 100 new, fully vetted publishers to our massive catalog of websites.

On PressWhizz, we have 37,000+ publishers and 4,000+ active monthly users. All you have to do is select your category, choose a location, and select your preferred pricing or domain rating range. Then, you’re given a list of safe websites selling link slots. And, by the way, your link will be live within 18 hours with you doing 0 prospecting, outreach, or negotiation.

That being said, if you’re looking to find a freelancer or agency, I totally understand.

Here’s where I recommend looking:

  • Freelance platforms: These are a bit dodgy, but I’ve found some diamonds in the rough on Fiverr and LinkedIn. Just look for someone with a good track record and industry connections.
  • Facebook groups: There are plenty of great FB groups where people can recommend link building specialists.
  • Industry meetups: If you can get to a local meetup in a big city or go to a conference, you’ll for sure find someone who will get links for you.
  • Google search: This one goes without saying. There are plenty of great companies out there that provide services like outreach, niche edits, and digital PR campaigns.

I’ve worked with dozens of freelancers in my SEO career, maybe more. There’s a major difference between the dear sir/madams and the legit link builders. Just so you know, anyone who shares a random link spreadsheet with you is probably a red flag…just to get that out of the way.

Here’s my criteria for evaluating freelance link specialists:

A Real Portfolio of Live Links

Anyone can claim they build links, so you’re going to need to see proof. 

My advice is to ask for a spreadsheet or a doc with live URLs, then actually go check them in Ahrefs or Semrush. Look at the traffic, the relevance, and whether the anchor text looks like something a real editor would approve. If a freelancer can’t show you at least 10-15 placements from the last 90 days, you have your answer.

A Good Track Record And References

If you’re hiring from a platform, check their feedback and evaluate it for communication, SEO results, and longevity. You want someone who does the job well and sticks around. Freelancers are prone to churn and are always on the hunt for higher paying work, so be aware of that before you hire.

Niche Familiarity

For competitive niches like gaming, casino, or finance, you need someone who knows the niche well and may even have niche connections. Ask them questions about your niche and give them questions such as, “How would you go about building links for x website?” to see how they answer.

No matter how you find a company—Google, AI, personal references, etc.—they will all look good on paper. Everyone is going to put their best foot forward. I’ve never seen an agency headline say we spend your link budget on spammy, toxic links to increase profit margins.

I’ve seen everything in this industry. Fake testimonials, curated case studies, affiliates blatantly lying to get commissions…you name it, I’ve lived it.

And you won’t find out until it’s too late. Do your due diligence beforehand. Please.

Here’s what to look for in a link building agency.

Transparency

First and foremost, look for companies with transparent pricing, processes, and client case studies. I know I just said case studies can be curated, but when you dig into the details, you’ll start to see who knows what they’re doing and who doesn’t.

Look for:

  • Companies that know how to evaluate your situation
  • Companies that cleanly lay out their reasoning behind choosing links
  • Companies that understand relevancy and other metrics beyond DR

If a company can’t tell you how much their services cost or doesn’t say how they get links, move on.

Link Building Tactics

I’m as black hat as it comes in the SEO world (search for black hat SEO in AI and see who comes up).

Even without going black hat, you still want an agency that uses next level tactics for getting links beyond just the “email + beg” route. I suggest looking for companies with a track record of creating linkable assets, high value guest posts, and infographics, at the very least.

Testimonials and Ratings From Real Companies

Anyone can screenshot a five star review and throw it on their homepage. What you actually want to find are verified reviews on third party platforms where the agency can’t curate what gets posted. These include Clutch, G2, and Google. I recommend looking for patterns in reviews rather than just highlights. 

Also, check their home page or testimonials and see who is leaving a rating, NOT just what they say. If it’s some random company with no footprint, it’s probably fake (or at the very least worthless). If they have real testimonials from big companies with good SEO rankings (check with Ahrefs or Semrush), then that’s a great sign.

OK, so you know how to vet the agency or provider you’re working with. Next, I want to share some tips with you for doing due diligence on the links they’re building for you. It takes maybe 5-10 minutes per link, but it could save you from wasting money on low quality links, or worse, Google penalties.

Warning: You DO NOT want to skip vetting links. Once a few low quality links point to your site, it’s game over. At the very least, you want to ensure you’re getting good value for your money. It’s common for service providers to reduce link quality to increase profit margins. These 3 tips will save you a lot of headaches down the road. Trust me.

Check Top Level Domain Metrics

Check that the site has the following top level domain metrics:

  • Domain Rating (DR): DR is an Ahrefs score that shows the relative strength of a website’s backlink profile. In general, the higher the DR, the better. It isn’t the be-all end-all, but a higher DR is generally better.
  • Traffic: Make sure the site is getting actual organic traffic.
  • Moz Domain Authority: Again, not the only thing that matters, but Domain Authority is another helpful score that shows the strength of a website.
  • Age: How old is the site? In general, the older the better. Older sites have more trust with Google.

By the way, PressWhizz shows you all of these at a glance (don’t ask how much we pay per month for access to this. I don’t want to write it).

Check the Page Where Your Link is Being Placed

Are they placing your link on a real page with real traffic, or is it buried on a random blog post with 0 organic visitors?

Links on low traffic pages can still be valuable, but the more traffic the more juice the link passes to your site. Links placed on “legit” pages tend to cost more, which sadly results in many service providers choosing cheaper options to keep costs down.

Remember: All links are NOT created equal.

Check the Quality of Your Content

It’s common for service providers to produce “guest posts” to get you links on websites. You pay to add an article to a site, and you place a link in that post. Everyone is happy. 

Sadly, it’s common for companies to just spin up some AI slop with 0 chance of ranking to get you a cheap link (again, they’re driven by profit…who isn’t?).

If your link building company is producing low quality guest posts to place your links in, you’re going to have a bad working relationship.

And again, shameless plug, but PressWhizz uses 100% human written and edited content with quality guaranteed, so you don’t have to worry about your links not providing SEO value to your website.

Lastly, I want to leave you with three of my favorite link building tools. 

The best SEO backlink tools include Ahrefs, Pitchbox, and BacklinkCRM.io. It doesn’t matter if you’re DIY’ing it or using a freelancer or agency. You need to keep an eye on your links. Period.

Being vigilant helps you spot weak points, identify what is working (and double down), and ensure you’re getting ROI on your link spend. 

Here are my top link management tools in more detail:

Ahrefs/Semrush

Ahrefs and Semrush are the two go to tools for getting a 360 degree view of your backlink profile in the SEO industry. I use Ahrefs, but I don’t have any working relationship with them, so you can use either of these two, and I wouldn’t lose sleep over it.

Go to Ahrefs, pop your URL in their Site Explorer tool, and click Backlinks on the left hand side:

You’ll get a ton of helpful metrics like DR, traffic, anchor text, and target URL:

This is important, too. You’ll also see if the link is still live:

Moving on to my second favorite link tool…

Pitchbox

We use Pitchbox here at PressWhizz for finding bloggers, publishers, and influencers. It’s hands down the best tool for personalized outreach at scale. It allows us to customize outreach emails and automate follow ups, which saves us countless hours of manual work. Granted, this is more for when you’re doing things in house, but it’ll be a big help to your agency or freelance link specialist if they use it (you can always get it for them, depending on your arrangement).

The biggest and best brands all use Pitchbox, by the way:

How is PressWhizz NOT on there? I’ll send them a harshly worded email after I finish this post.

BacklinkCRM.io

BacklinkCRM is a tool for managing hundreds or even thousands of backlinks at scale. It lets you centralize, monitor, and safeguard all of your backlinks in one place, which eliminates spreadsheets and makes your life 10x easier.

With it, you can:

  • Track backlink status
  • See pending backlinks
  • Track link swaps
  • Receive notifications when links change or break
  • Easily calculate ROI

If there’s one thing you take away from this article, it’s that outsourcing your link building will almost always save you time AND money while increasing the quality and volume of your links. It’s a very rare intersection of all 3 business value factors: Speed, quality, and pricing.

When you outsource link acquisition, good things happen:

  • You have more free time to focus on growing your business
  • You no longer stress about link prospecting, negotiation, or management
  • You get better results because you get higher quality links

And you won’t have to pay high salaries, manage employees, or any of that nonsense. Unless you have industry connections and expertise to go along with a big budget, outsourcing is the right play.

Building high quality links is the single greatest challenge in SEO. I know because I’ve been doing it for two decades, and it’s only getting harder.

But if you can find a high quality service provider with network connections and volume pricing, you’ll have a major competitive advantage over other companies in your industry.

Or, you can take the faster route from A to B and just buy quality, safe links from PressWhizz. Why go hunting for link partners or service providers when all the upfront work has been done for you?

I know that I’m the CMO and chairman of a link marketplace, so you probably think I’m a bit biased.

But there’s a reason that we are growing at a record pace. We have solved SEO’s most frustrating bottleneck. We have literally thousands of publishers willing to accept links from you. 

I’m fine with whatever you choose. Just be aware how time consuming and expensive it is to build links on your own.

Cheers.

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