Improve your anchor distribution with a planned mix of branded partial and exact match

A backlink is a recommendation from one site to another. Treat it as anything less and you end up with a profile full of references nobody made on purpose. Our whole approach starts from taking that sentence literally, which turns out to rule out most of what gets sold as link building.

How we work

1. Read the site firstBefore any outreach we go through the pages you want to rank, the profile you already have, and the competitors you keep losing to. Sometimes this ends with us recommending you spend the budget on the pages instead.
2. Re-check on a schedulePlacements are revisited long after they are invoiced. A link that vanishes in month four is our problem to raise, not yours to discover.
3. Verify after publicationWe check the live page for the link, the attribute, the status code and whether the page is reachable at all. Anything that fails goes back to the publisher before it reaches your report.
4. Report with evidenceYou get the URL, the anchor, the date, the target page and a note on why that publisher was chosen. It is written to be forwarded to somebody who was not in the room.
5. Pitch, not blastEach publisher gets an individual approach about a specific idea. This is the slow part and it is the part that decides whether the placement is any good.
6. Agree the shortlistYou see every publisher before we approach them, with the reasoning attached. Anything you are not comfortable with comes off the list and nothing is placed on a site you have not seen.

Where we draw the line

• No links in footers, sidebars or author boxes sold as editorial placements. If it is not in the body, we do not call it a body link.
• No publishers we would not read ourselves. It is a soft rule and it removes more candidates than all the hard ones together.
• No hiding a lost link. If a placement drops we tell you, we chase it, and if it cannot be recovered it comes off the invoice.
• No sites that exist only to sell links. If the archive is a wall of unrelated sponsored posts, we are not interested no matter what the metrics say.
• No promises about rankings. We control where links come from; nobody controls a search engine.
• No invented metrics. We report what the placement is, not a score we made up to make it look better.
• No pages built the same week for the sole purpose of hosting your link.

How results are documented

You get a spreadsheet and a short written summary. The spreadsheet is the record; the summary is there so that whoever forwards it to a finance director does not have to interpret it themselves.

Alongside new placements, each report lists everything we re-checked from previous cycles and its current state. Links that disappeared appear in the report as clearly as links that went live.

Reports are written on the assumption that somebody sceptical will read them. Every placement carries the live URL, the anchor used, the target page, the publication date and a short note explaining why that publisher was on the list in the first place.

If a placement did not happen, the report says which one and why. Campaigns that only ever report successes are hiding the interesting part.

Background

This began as an internal tool for a small group of site owners who were tired of buying links and then auditing them afterwards. Most of the rules on this page exist because at some point we broke one of them and had to clean up after ourselves.

Nobody here came from a link marketplace. The background is in editorial and in running sites that depended on traffic, which is a different set of instincts than optimising a placement count.

Ways to work together

Common questions

Recommended

For anyone who wants the reasoning rather than the pitch, most of it has been written up over at:

• obmina.store