A SaaS link building agency judged by what it turns down.
Anyone can buy links. The difficult part, and the part that decides whether your rankings survive the next twelve months, is refusing the ninety percent that look fine in a spreadsheet and are worthless on the page. Below is the exact test every prospect passes before we contact anyone, what fails it, and what you receive each month.
Every link is a signal from a real site to yours. We check the source before we count the link.
Five signals, then the outreach.
Most link programs sort a prospect list by domain rating and traffic — the two numbers link farms optimize hardest. Our screen ignores both until the five signals below have already cleared.
The five-signal test every prospect passes.
SaaS link building goes wrong in one predictable way: someone filters a prospect list by domain rating and traffic, both of which are the metrics link farms optimize hardest, and buys whatever survives. Here is what we check instead. A domain has to clear all five.
Real organic traffic, earned on real terms
Not a traffic number, a traffic source. We look at what the site actually ranks for. A domain pulling thousands of visits from unrelated nonsense keywords is a domain someone built to sell you a link.
Topical fit with your category
A logistics software link on a lifestyle blog does nothing, no matter what the metrics say. The site should plausibly write about your subject without being paid to.
Content a person would read
Someone on our team opens five posts and reads them. This single step catches more failures than every metric combined, and no tool performs it.
A clean outbound profile
We check who else the site links to. A page selling links to a casino, a crypto exchange, and your competitor in the same month is not a publisher, it is a billboard.
No network fingerprints
Sites cross-linking to each other in patterns, sharing hosting and templates, or running the same “write for us” funnel are a network. Networks get discounted together, and your link goes down with them.
Permanent reject list.
Nonsense-keyword blogs, AI-generated review mills, piracy-adjacent domains, and any site whose business model is selling placements. These go on a permanent shared reject list, so a domain we turned down in March cannot come back through a different researcher in September.
What our SaaS link building agency actually delivers.
Four things arrive every month. Nothing else is promised, because nothing else is controllable.
Earned editorial placements
Links inside real articles on sites that pass the five signals, placed where the sentence makes sense without them. Volume depends on your tier and your category, and we will give you a target range rather than a guarantee, because the sites decide, not us.
The full placement record
Every link with its referring domain, the live URL, the anchor text, the date, and the paragraph it sits inside. Click any row and judge the placement yourself inside ten seconds.
The reject list
The domains we screened and turned down, with the reason. This is unusual and it is the most useful document you will get from us, because it shows what you are paying us not to do. Most months it is four or five times longer than the placement list.
Anchor and distribution reporting
What anchor text went where, and which sections of your site received authority. Anchors stay mostly branded and page-title based, exact match stays rare, and links spread across hubs, proof pages, and money pages rather than pointing at two URLs forever.
How link building for SaaS is different.
Three things change when the client is a software company.
Your linkable assets are different
Nobody links to a features page. They link to original data, a free tool, a benchmark, or a genuinely useful template. Part of this work is telling you what to build so that earning links stops being purely an outreach problem.
Your category is small and everyone knows everyone
In a niche vertical there might be forty sites worth a link. Burning them with bad outreach is expensive and permanent, which is why the first email matters more here than in consumer categories.
Your competitors are funded and buying
You will see rivals gain domains faster than you. Some of that is real and some is purchased and will be discounted later. The right response is a steady rate you can sustain for two years, not a spike that matches theirs for one quarter.
The reason this workstream exists at all is measurable: a large-scale study of ranking correlations put the number one result several times ahead of everything under it on backlink count. Google's spam policies name link schemes explicitly, which is why the screening above exists.
Pace, not spikes.
A natural link profile grows the way interest compounds. It does not arrive in a batch and then stop.
We work to a monthly band you can sustain, typically 20 to 35 new referring domains for an active program, and we hold it.
113 → 357 referring domains
Cloud warehouse platform for third-party logistics. Eleven months at a steady rate. Domain rating moved 19 → 55, and the curve kept rising after the engagement closed.
130 → 1,413 referring domains
Twenty-two months. Neither number came from a package. Both came from turning down more than we placed.
What links cost, and what the cheap ones cost later.
Published market rates vary more in this category than any other. Individual placements are advertised anywhere from about $30 for an insertion on a low-quality site to several hundred dollars for an editorial link on a publication with real readers, while packaged programs are advertised across a $2,000 to $15,000 monthly spread, depending on volume and standard.
A thirty-dollar link is not a discount on a good link. It is a placement on a page nobody opens, on a domain that also rents space to a casino, and its likely futures are two: it does nothing, or you pay somebody to remove it in eighteen months. Our own pricing page publishes what a program costs here, and the link work is a workstream inside it rather than a per-link menu.
Common questions.
What is SaaS link building?
Open
SaaS link building is the work of earning links from other websites to a software company's site, so that search engines and AI systems treat it as a credible source. What makes it specific to SaaS is the asset side: software companies rarely earn links with product pages, so the work usually involves building something worth citing, original research, a free tool, a benchmark, and then earning placements around it in a small, well-connected category.
What is a link building agency?
Open
A link building agency finds, qualifies, and earns placements on other websites on your behalf, and reports what it placed. The difference between a good one and an expensive one is entirely in the qualifying step. Ask any agency for its rejection criteria before you ask for its results, because an agency that cannot describe what it turns down does not turn anything down.
Does link building still work?
Open
Yes, and the evidence is visible on any competitive results page: the pages holding position one consistently carry far more referring domains than the pages below them. What stopped working is bulk purchasing from domains whose whole business is selling placements. Those get discounted, and at scale they attract manual action. Earned placements on real publications still move rankings, and they now also feed AI systems deciding which sources to quote.
How many links do we need?
Open
There is no universal number, and anyone quoting you one has not looked at your competitors. The useful question is the gap: how many quality referring domains separate you from the pages currently ranking for your money terms, and how long a sustainable pace takes to close it. We answer that with your actual data on the audit call, before any proposal exists.
Do you guarantee placements or rankings?
Open
No, and neither should anyone else. We commit to a screening standard, a monthly target range, and full disclosure of everything placed and everything rejected. Publishers decide what they publish. An agency guaranteeing a specific number of links each month is either buying them or padding the list with sites that will accept anything.
Find out how wide your link gap actually is.
Hand over your domain plus two rivals whose rankings annoy you. You get the referring-domain gap, a named list of sites linking to them and not to you, and a pace that could close it without looking bought.