Providing quality services as an agency is becoming increasingly difficult. Constant algorithm changes, AI content, finding decent employees, and then, the actual work. If you already offer marketing agency services, you may be struggling with providing backlinks to your clients.
Building backlinks is one of the most difficult and unpredictable aspects of doing digital marketing. But if you want to offer it as a service but don’t have the capacity, you can offload the work to someone else. This is called white label link building and it is a common practice for marketing and SEO agencies.
In fact, in 2025, 61% of link builders plan to increase their spending on link building, showing both its difficulty and ongoing importance.
Today, we’ll show you what white label link building is, whether it’s a good idea and what you should watch out for.
Key takeaways
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White label link building: Outsourcing backlinks to a partner for delivery under your brand, helping agencies expand services without hiring more staff.
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Benefits: Enables diversification, saves time, and makes upselling services easier.
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Risks: Potential for low-quality or unethical placements; mitigate by vetting providers.
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White label vs. alternatives: In-house link building offers control but is expensive and hard to scale; freelancers provide flexibility but inconsistent quality; white label partnerships strike the balance by delivering scalability without additional headcount.
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What to watch: Prioritize methods transparency, relevance, and page-level metrics; ensure balanced anchor text and clear pricing.
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Evaluation metrics: Relevance, page-level authority, and organic traffic provide better insight than DR/DA alone.
What is white label link building?
White label link building is the practice of outsourcing link building services to an agency partner and charging the work to your own client.
Let’s say that you have an agency that delivers content marketing, design and social media services to Acme Inc. This company decides they want to build some links too, but your agency does not offer that service. Instead of telling them no, you outsource the link building work to a partner in a relationship called white label link building.
They build the links, you submit them to the client as your own work. You help them out with Google search engine rankings and provide a more complete offer and they get backlinks on top of their existing deliverables.
This type of arrangement can work out, provided that several conditions are met:
- You have a reliable partner who uses white hat link building
- You know the difference between good and bad links, and which metrics to track
- You have to monitor the work delivered and make sure the contractors are providing high-quality backlinks
In theory, white label link building sounds like a win-win situation for everyone involved – your clients get great links at a fair cost. But let’s find out if that is really the case.
The pros of using white label link building
If you’re considering using white hat link building to amp up your clients’ SEO strategy, there are plenty of benefits to this method.
Diversifying your offer. Doing link building through various methods (guest posting, outreach, link exchanges, broken link building, and others) requires a large team of people. White labeling helps you offer link building with a smaller headcount.
Saving time. The average link can take weeks to build. Reaching out to bloggers, securing targets, getting posts published – it takes time. White label partners have networks of partners that can build links much faster and at scale, without making the client look spammy.
Upselling your existing clients. You can use white label link building as an upsell to charge your existing clients even more and give them a package deal on content and SEO services.
Quality control at scale. The right partner screens for topical relevance, page-level authority, organic traffic, and balanced anchor text, not just DR/DA.
In a white label setup, the focus should be on earning relevant, high-quality placements. Avoid tactics that could cause long-term issues, such as bulk guest posts with keyword-heavy anchors or excessive link swaps.
Having said all of that, there are some downsides to using white label partners for link building too.
Potential downsides
Letting someone else build links for you and presenting them as your own also involves a lot of risk. Here are some potential pitfalls of white label link building.
The contractor may be using black hat building techniques. If your outsourced agency or freelancer is using PBNs, providing links from low quality websites, buying links from a webmaster, spamming blog comments, or something else, it will hurt your reputation as you’re the one reporting to the client.
You have to get up to speed on link building. As the one charging for the work, you need to get familiar with link building as an aspect of search engine optimization. You also need to learn how links contribute not just to SERP but also to brand awareness.
This means you need to understand concepts such as domain rating, website traffic, anchor text, backlink profile, and many others. For many agencies, this is not a possibility because of a lack of time.
Know which tactics your partner uses: editorial outreach, digital PR, broken link building, unlinked mentions, or guest posting. If exposure is paid for, qualify those links appropriately. Also note that HARO used to be a popular method, but it got rebranded as Connectively and discontinued in Dec 2024, with ownership moved to Featured in 2025.
Some freelancers won’t reveal their link building tactics, and this is a clear sign to look elsewhere because their SEO techniques could do more harm than good.
Red flags to avoid:
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Guaranteed DR/DA placements or private networks
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Heavy use of exact-match anchors in most placements
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No clarity on placement sources or methods
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Pricing far below market norms
White Label vs. In-House vs. Freelance Link Building
Agencies exploring link building have three main choices: build it in-house, rely on freelancers, or outsource through a white label partner. Each comes with trade-offs in cost, control, and scalability.
In-House Link Building
Pros:
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Full control over strategy, outreach, and quality standards.
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Direct alignment with client goals and brand tone.
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Easier integration with other services (content, PR, SEO).
Cons:
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Expensive to hire, train, and retain specialists (salaries + tools).
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Time-intensive—building links can take weeks per placement.
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Hard to scale without a larger team.
Best for: Larger agencies with consistent link demand and the budget to build a dedicated SEO team.
Freelance Link Builders
Pros:
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Flexible and often cheaper than full-time staff.
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Easy to test different approaches (guest posting, outreach, niche edits).
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No long-term contracts.
Cons:
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Quality is inconsistent and depends heavily on the freelancer’s network.
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Limited scalability: one person can only handle so much outreach.
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Risk of black-hat tactics if you can’t fully vet them.
Best for: Agencies that only need occasional link placements or want to experiment without committing resources.
White Label Link Building
Pros:
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Scalable: partners often have existing publisher relationships.
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Saves time: no need to build outreach lists or negotiate placements.
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Allows agencies to upsell SEO services without new hires.
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Reporting and quality control handled by the partner.
Cons:
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Less visibility into the exact outreach process.
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Risk of poor-quality or spammy placements if the partner isn’t vetted.
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Relies on trust, as your reputation is tied to their work.
Best for: Agencies that want to offer link building at scale but don’t have the bandwidth or expertise in-house.
How to find a white label link building partner
For the typical agency owner, hiring someone to do white label link building has more pros than cons. However, the hardest part of the equation is finding someone who is reliable and provides great work that you can rely on in front of your clients.
Here is how to find that agency or freelancer, while respecting Google’s guidelines on ethical link building.
They are transparent about the links they build
The person or company building links for you uses only white hat link building techniques and they can tell you exactly how they built each link for you. They don’t hide the methods they use for building high authority links and they stand behind every link they send your way.
They focus on the right metrics
A reputable white label link building agency builds backlinks:
- From websites with a high domain rating (DR) and domain authority (DA)
- From websites that are relevant to your clients’ industry and niche
- From websites with a decent amount of organic traffic
In fact, you can see all of these metrics and characteristics in the reports they send you with their links. They avoid building backlinks from PBNs (private blog networks).
They don’t purchase links: they use white hat link building strategies
As we’ve written before, directly purchasing links from website owners and editors can be classified as black hat SEO. Great link builders use a wide range of white hat SEO tactics for building links:
- HARO
- Link exchanges and link insertions
- Editorial links
- Guest posting
- Creating high-quality content that attracts backlinks (link bait)
Depending on the client and the types of links, they adjust their approach to get high-quality links that meet both your and the client’s expectations and help them in search engine results.
They have a great portfolio of white hat backlinks
Before deciding on a white label link building partner, review their case studies, testimonials and backlinks they have built for other clients.
You want to make sure they use white hat methods to build links from authority websites and ideally, that they have worked in niches similar to the ones you need for your clients. If they use guest posting, you want to make sure that they have produced great content for their clients before.
Once you receive a list of links they have built, you can run them through a tool such as Ahrefs to determine if any black hat link building was done.
They have transparent pricing
The typical link building agency has a pricing system of some sort. Usually, they charge clients based on the domain rating of the website that the link is coming from.
According to 2025 data from BuzzStream (based on analysis of over 26,000 sites), the average estimated cost for a guest post is $364.76, with high-quality (top-tier) links costing up to $957.08, before any vendor markup. When purchased through intermediaries, costs can skyrocket to $1,459.06.
At ReportCard, we have an extremely transparent pricing method that you can check out at this page.
You can select the method for SEO link building, the organic search traffic, the domain rating of your target website, as well as the total number of links. Whether you want a link from a piece of content or a niche edit from another valuable content piece, we have your back.
Wrapping up
White label link building can be risky. However, when you find the right partners, you can offer your clients better search rankings and a great price per link. You can build links, but without doing all the time-consuming outreach and hard work that comes with each placement.
Are you ready to give your clients the quality links they deserve? Book a free call with us today to see how we can help with your link building needs.
