Top-3 Link Building Services That Actually Work in 2025 (Tested)

We tested popular link-building services and ranked them. Here are our top three picks:

Rank	Link-building service	Rating
1	Outreach Monks	★★★★★
2	The HOTH	★★★★★
3	FATJOE	★★★★★

N.B. Participants in this rating are B2B2B companies. They are primarily used by large SEO agencies and professional link-building companies.

Using guest-posting marketplaces requires significant expertise to choose the right publisher. If you’re a business owner or just starting with SEO, consider professional link-building services instead.

If you’re not into link-building, you might have never heard some of these (or all of these) names.

But that’s how link building, in general, is. The global link-building market is valued at $20.72 billion, yet most of these players are unknown to business owners and even marketers.

Before we dive into each of these services, let’s first look at why links matter and what types of links you should avoid.

Why Link-Building Is Important

Links from other sites are one of the strongest website’s “authority” indicators for Google. 

A high number of high-quality links helps a website’s content to rank higher. However:

Getting quality links is not easy. Link-building takes years of effort. 

One way to acquire links is to write great content and hope your content gets linked to, overtime. This is a passive approach.

Another way, a more active approach, is to make efforts to build links.

That’s where the link-building services come in. They build links for you for a price.

Link-Building Pitfalls to Avoid

However, there are many pitfalls to avoid when going for link-building services.

The problems range from –

• links from spammy sites
• links from PBNs
• sites with high DR/DA but no real traffic
• chain of resellers
• outrageous markup prices

We’ve gone in detail about some of these link-building practices and pricing here.

Keeping these pitfalls in mind, we tested multiple link-building services.

Our Testing Methodology

We asked these link-building services to build a link for us along with copywriting for the article.

Our requirement was simple: a backlink from a real site with real traffic (1k+ monthly) with decent copywriting.

Once they delivered the link, we analyzed their service quality based on these parameters:

• Pricing: Is the pricing dependent on useless metrics like DA/DR or on traffic and a reliable metric?
• Delivery time: How quickly did they deliver the link? Promised due date vs actual due date?
• Content quality: How good the published article is? Written by a human or AI-generated?
• Site quality: Are the site metrics as promised? Did the site traffic meet our criteria?
• Value for price: Do other services or guest-posting marketplaces offer the same site link at a lower price? How satisfied were we with the process?

With this testing methodology, here are our top picks.

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#1. Outreach Monks

We paid Outreach Monks $129 to build a backlink from a site with at least 1K monthly traffic. The result?

Outreach Monks exceeded our expectations.

The site metrics were as promised, and they delivered the link within three days, faster than the promised 21 days.

Most of all, the link price was fair. We checked other marketplaces for the link from the same site, and the prices there were much costlier.

The only downside was the content quality (the article with the link placement). It was poor and very likely AI-written.

Overall, we liked their services very much except for one blip.

Pros

• Clear pricing bands based on site traffic
• Early delivery
• Fair pricing for the link
• Good publisher site quality
• Very good experience

Cons

• AI content

You can read our detailed Outreach Monks review here.

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#2. The HOTH

We paid the HOTH $230 for a link placement.

The HOTH has an easy-to-use interface and a clear pricing band. But, the pricing is based on metrics that can be easily manipulated. They also provide traffic-based pricing, which is what we went for: a link placement from a site with 1k+ monthly traffic.

The link delivery was fast, got the link in five days as against the promised 30 days.

However, the publisher’s site was subpar. The site traffic was dying, diving below the 1,000 monthly mark, and the site category was completely irrelevant to ours.

The published article was okay, but the link price was outrageous. We found guest-posting marketplaces offering the same link at a quarter of the price.

Overall, the HOTH is a decent link-building service with some major flaws.

Pros

• Easy-to-use interface
• Clear pricing bands
• Quick link delivery

Cons

• Dying publisher site traffic
• Irrelevant site category
• Outrageous pricing

For more details, here’s our complete the HOTH review.

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#3. FATJOE

We paid FATJOE $127 for a link placement.

The site pricing was not easy to understand, though. The pricing bands are too wide, especially for traffic-based pricing.

For a $129 link placement, the promised site traffic is anywhere between 100 and 10 K—that’s a wide range!

Apart from that, the major metric used for pricing is Ahrefs DR, which is unreliable and can be inflated easily.

The link delivered was subpar as well. The site had a monthly traffic of 128 (according to Semrush), which is terrible. You start to understand why Fatjoe’s pricing has such a wide range. You can’t even dispute this useless link.

The pricing was not fair either. The link we paid Fatjoe for $127 was available for $35 on other platforms.

The only bright side was the article quality. The copywriting was good with no AI.

Pros

• Good content quality

Cons

• Publisher site has little to no organic traffic
• Irrelevant publisher site category
• Unfair pricing

Here’s our detailed FATJOE review.

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