Backlink Transparency with SEO Agency
-
Hello everyone. I recently started working with an SEO agency and today they gave me an updated keyword report which showed some increase in rankings. I was not aware that any backlinks had been created yet so I asked for a report of the links. Their response is below and I am just wondering if this is normal practice being I have not worked with any type of SEO agency yet.
"
Hey Daniel,We release a small report on them which the guest blog team will do soon. We don't reveal all backlink sources unfortunately because people have tried to bother the webmasters we have and basically steal our techniques.
But rest assured you will be ranking at the top of the pack with our methods
" -
This doesn't ring true to me because:
- There are all kinds of ways you can find links to your site (referring traffic in GA, link analysis sources like moz's own tools, ahrefs, majestic etc, and tools like Google Alerts)
- You've already got the link in these cases, so you would have no incentive to "bother" the webmasters
- In general, my experience has been that most providers want to tell you about as many placements as they can!
Add to this some of the phrasing (e.g. "webmasters we have" -- emphasis mine) suggests that there may be payments taking place or other schemes afoot that place these well outside the Google guidelines.
Per the conversation in the other comments - I would recommend that you get at least a statement of work in place to govern what you are expecting for the money you are paying even if you are not committing to a long-term contract. This could include agreements on any of the above (what information they will provide you with, what you will do with that information etc). At the very least, you should want to understand the techniques in use in order to make your own informed decisions about the risks and rewards.
Hope that helps.
-
Thanks for the feedback. Anyone else want to chime in on this?
-
There should be some sort of contract.
You are sharing your private information with the agency and vice versa. Also the contract will govern what services the agency provides and what you can expect from their services. If they write content for your site, the contract will govern who owns that contract.
It is my opinion that you may want to get out of this deal before you are in to deep. They are already shady with a backlinks report. This is only my opinion.
Thanks,
Don
-
There was no contract between me and the agency. It is month to month.
-
Hello,
You can use moz's link explorer to reveal the back links https://analytics.moz.com/pro/link-explorer/home
If they are good quality they usually show up in the index but not always. Another area you can check is google search console.
I do not think it is common practice to give a backlinks report upon request. They may not want to reveal their sources. But this information should not be private to a client. The contract should govern any information that is shared.
Thanks,
Don
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How much time does it takes for a backlink to get registered in Google? My basketball anime website has been live since start of this week and Google has not registered any backlink.
So my website https://www.animedhfa.com/basketball-anime/ about basketball Anime has shown no changes in DA or backlinks. It has been 5 days perhaps since it went live.
Link Building | | ahmad74750 -
Backlinks from a secondary domain
Hi i finally figured out why my link profile is out of wack. Apparently we had a second domain registered that for some reason was active and linking to us - somewhat duplicated site. no idea when or how that happened. I wasnt with the company then. anyhow Ive now pointed the domain to a blank folder since I dont know how to disable it in 1&1 Hosting (if anyone knows please let me know!). Im wondering if this is enough? will the links still be there indexed even though the domain points to a blank folder? also how can I get google to profile my backlinks again? so I can see if it worked. Currently waiting for a new Moz crawl so Ill see if at least there my profile is looking healthier. thanks in advance!
Link Building | | ACEmina0 -
Backlinks with less authority the own website
If a backlink location has less authority/trust than my own site would it likely pass any value or not?
Link Building | | seoman100 -
Site scraped/Backlink problem?
Hi - I was looking in my Google webmaster tools because we saw a huge jump in backlinks last week. We found this one article with 84,475 total links, which obviously stands out as spam. All the links are from 1 page and 1 domain (financeai.com). This is the article on our website - http://loyalty360.org/resources/article/engaging-customer-atmosphere-at-pizza-patron and webmaster tools says all the links back to it come from this page http://financeai.com/forex/mxn/pkr/q/39665 My question is - should we/what can we do to clean this up? How does this impact our search ranking? We have had some issues with our website getting extremely slow overnight, and we believe the site scraping is really slowing down the site at points. Thanks.
Link Building | | carlystemmer1 -
Starting SEO For My E-commerce Site?
Hey guys, So I'm starting SEO for my e-commerce furniture store and I'm a little confused. Right now the only links I have are from sponsored posts. How do I get links from other sources? What other sources are there besides sponsored posts? I submitted my site to Dmoz.org and I was also going to submit it to the Yahoo directory. I have contacted a few personal home decor blogs but have not heard back from those people. Could someone steer me in the right direction. Thanks a ton!
Link Building | | The_Kiwi_Man0 -
Backlink Building to Facebook?
Would there be any benefit to building some backlinks to your social media profiles (i.e. Facebook, Twitter), considering that you're linking to yourself regularly from them anyway? There are a few SEO companies that I would like to try out, but I figure why not try them out on my social media profiles first, before having them do any work directly to my site. Thoughts?
Link Building | | JABacchetta0 -
Does anyone do seo on their twitter pages
Hi, i am just wondering if anyone does any seo or anything with their twitter page to gain more followers. I have justover 19,000 followers and since launching the twitter account we are getting about 500 followers per week and i am just wondering if there is anything we should do to improve this. I am not sure if we should be putting keywords into our twitter page or anything else to let people know about our twitter page. any advice would be great. also, when we set up our twitter page we decided to use the following twitter name @2celebritynews just wondering if you are allowed to change this at any stage as we should really have got the twitter page of @in2town if it is not possible to change it then maybe we will need to start over again
Link Building | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Opinion regarding SEO Sabotage
Hello Mozcommunity, I would like opinions regarding potential spammy inbound links from others . In theory you would want excellent useful content on your site that other web properties would link to in a natural way..link bait. But what if links were pointing to your site with malicious intent. For example a competitor bombs yours site with spammy/black hat links. This is clearly a dilemma for search engines since anyone can link to your site...even though you can block incoming with .access I don't believe many smaller in-house seo teams (or do it yourself small business owners) use Google analytics to routinely monitor referring sources.
Link Building | | johnshearer0