A slightly exhausted guide to buying links without funding three layers of people who've never spoken to a publisher
Let's be honest. The link building industry has the same energy as a used car lot where nobody puts prices on the windshields. You walk in, point at something, and a man in a short-sleeved shirt disappears into a back office to "check with his manager." You never find out what the car actually costs. You just find out what he's decided you're going to pay.
This is basically how most link building platforms work.
You see a domain. You see a price. You click buy. Somewhere between you and the publisher, one, two, sometimes three layers of people have added their margin, none of them told you about it, and all of them are perfectly happy with that arrangement.
The question isn't whether this is happening. It is. The question is whether you care enough to do something about it.
What "transparent" means when a link building platform says it
When a platform calls itself transparent, they usually mean one of three things:
They show you the domain before you buy. Congratulations, this is the minimum viable product of not being a scam.
They show you DR, traffic, and some metrics. Again, the floor, not the ceiling.
They have a nice website that uses the word "transparent" a lot.
Actually transparent would mean showing you what the publisher charges versus what the platform charges. That number, the gap between those two prices, is where all the interesting information lives. It's also the number almost nobody shows you, because it would immediately reveal whether you're paying a 20% service fee or a 250% markup dressed up as a "curated placement."
Most platforms have chosen opacity as a business model. It's a rational choice. Opacity lets you charge whatever the market will bear on each individual transaction without buyers ever building up a reference point for what things should cost.
The reseller situation, which is somehow even worse
Here's a fun game. Take any publisher domain you've bought links from. Search for it on three or four different link building platforms.
In a depressing number of cases, you'll find the same domain listed everywhere, at prices that vary by anywhere from 50% to 400%. Same site. Same DR. Same traffic. Wildly different prices depending on which platform you happened to find first.
This happens because many platforms aren't actually sourcing their inventory directly from publishers. They're buying from other platforms, adding their margin, and presenting it as their own network. Which means when you buy that $180 placement, you might be paying a publisher $60, a first-tier platform $80, and the platform you're actually using $40 on top of that. Three sets of margins for one link.
The best part is there's no label that says "resold inventory." It just looks like a listing. You have no way of knowing how many hands your money passed through before it reached the publisher, if it reached the publisher at all in any meaningful time frame.
This also explains why replacements and support get complicated. When your link disappears three months later and you ask the platform to fix it, they have to ask their supplier, who has to ask their supplier, who eventually reaches someone who can actually contact the publisher. By which point you've sent four emails and everyone is very sorry but unfortunately.
Platforms that are actually worth using
There are a handful of platforms that take transparency seriously enough that "serious" isn't a completely ironic word in this context.
WhitePress is the big one. Publishers manage their own listings, the inventory is large, and you can filter properly before buying. The platform's own economics aren't disclosed, but at least you're dealing with publisher-set prices rather than a reseller markup on top of another markup.
LinkAgent gives you hands-on control in the way a self-serve tool should. You review sites, approve placements, manage your own campaigns. Requires more time investment than hitting a buy button, but you know what you're buying.
PressWhizz has a decent reputation among people who do this professionally. Good visibility before purchase, faster delivery than most. Entry pricing is higher, but it reflects actual quality positioning rather than just someone deciding they could charge more.
Links as a Service, which I co-founded so feel free to apply appropriate scepticism, operates on a fixed 25% markup on publisher cost. Published openly, applied to everything. If the publisher charges $100, you pay $125. The reason this is possible as a public commitment is that the inventory is sourced directly from publishers rather than resold from other platforms. You can't promise a fixed margin on resold inventory because you don't control what the upstream platform charges.
The self-serve side lets you choose your publisher, set the publishing date, specify your URL and anchor text, decide whether you're writing the content or having it produced. The managed service exists for people who'd rather not do any of that themselves. Both options, same pricing model, same inventory.
Is LaaS the largest marketplace? No. WhitePress has been running longer and has more publishers. Does LaaS have decades of industry recognition? Also no, it's newer. What it does have is a pricing model that doesn't require you to guess whether you're being taken for a ride, which in this industry is rarer than it should be.
How to actually evaluate a platform before spending money on it
Ask them directly whether they source inventory from other platforms or publishers directly. Most won't answer this honestly. The ones that deflect or give you a vague answer about "our network" are almost certainly at least partially reselling. The ones that can describe their publisher onboarding process in specific terms probably aren't.
Cross-reference pricing on any domain you're seriously considering. If the same site appears at dramatically different prices across platforms, that's a reseller signal and also a data point you can use to negotiate or simply buy from the cheaper source.
Ask what happens when a link goes down. If there's no documented replacement or refund policy, or if the answer involves a lot of "we'll look into it on a case by case basis," that's a platform that hasn't committed to anything in writing because they don't intend to be held to it.
Look at whether you can control the placement variables before ordering. Publishing date. Target URL. Anchor text. Content. If the platform makes these decisions for you or won't tell you until after purchase, you're handing over your campaign strategy along with your credit card number.
None of this is complicated. It's just the kind of due diligence the industry has trained buyers to skip by making it slightly inconvenient and burying the important information behind a buy button.
The broader point, since apparently someone has to make it
Link building has a transparency problem that the platforms profiting from it have no incentive to fix. The buyers who don't ask questions subsidise the margins of everyone who figured out that most buyers don't ask questions.
The good news is that the information exists if you look for it. Publisher pricing can be cross-referenced. Platform economics can be interrogated. The platforms that are willing to tell you how their pricing works are precisely the ones worth using, partly because transparency is pleasant, and mostly because a platform that tells you their markup has nothing to hide in the parts you can't see.
The rest are still out there with their short-sleeved shirts, very happy to check with the manager on your behalf.
Magnus Løv Schmidt is co-founder of Links as a Service (LaaS) and a one of the best SEO specialists based in Denmark, specialising in e-commerce SEO, link building, and technical SEO.
Date
June 11, 2026
Topic
Link Building
