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Quick answer: A legitimate backlink service should include a prospect list you can see, pitch copy you approve, content produced for each placement, a placement log with live URLs and rel attributes, a replacement policy for lost links, and full ownership of those assets after you leave. If none of that survives the contract, you rented links.
Most people shopping for a backlink service compare proposals on two numbers: the monthly fee and the number of links promised. Both numbers are easy to read and neither tells you what you will own when the engagement ends. A backlink (a link on another website pointing to yours) is only part of what you are paying for. The rest is the research, the relationships and the content that produced it, and whether you get to keep those is decided in the contract, usually in clauses nobody reads.
This post goes through a backlink service engagement line by line: what a legitimate provider should hand over, what cheap packages quietly leave out, what the market typically charges in Singapore dollars, and which contract terms protect you. It is not a guide to vetting agencies in general or to choosing a delivery model; those are separate decisions. It sits inside how we think about SEO services as a whole, and it argues one point. The thing you are really buying from a backlink service is a set of transferable assets. If they do not survive the contract ending, you did not build a link profile. You rented one.
Start with a simple test. Imagine your backlink service ends tomorrow. What do you still have on Monday morning?
With a cheap package, the honest answer is usually a monthly PDF report and a set of links on sites you have never heard of, placed through contacts you do not know, using articles you never saw. Some of those links will still be live in a year. Many will not, because the sites that sell placements to everyone tend to get cleaned up, sold or abandoned. You have no way to replace what disappears, because the knowledge that produced the links left with the vendor.
With a legitimate engagement, the answer looks different. You have a list of every publisher that was researched and why, a record of who was contacted and how they responded, the articles and assets that earned placements, and a log of every live link with its exact URL. If you hire someone else, or bring the work in-house, they start from that record rather than from zero. That record is the asset. The links are its output.
In our experience, this is the distinction Singapore SME owners most often miss, because providers are not motivated to raise it. A provider that keeps the prospect list and the editor relationships has made itself hard to leave. That is a commercial choice, not a technical necessity. There is no operational reason a reputable provider cannot hand over everything it built on your behalf, and the ones confident in their work generally do.
So the line-by-line review below asks the same question of every deliverable: does this stay with you, or with them? A deliverable that stays with the vendor is a cost. A deliverable that stays with you is an investment that keeps paying after the invoices stop. Price, volume and turnaround all matter, but they come second to this, because a cheap service that leaves you with nothing is more expensive over three years than a dearer one that leaves you with a working pipeline.
The first deliverable in any honest engagement is a prospect list you can actually see. A prospect list is the set of websites the provider intends to approach for a link, with enough detail to judge each one: the domain, the specific page or section, why it is relevant to your business, the contact person or role, and the angle the pitch will take. In Singapore, a good list for a B2B services firm might include trade associations, chambers of commerce, sector publications, polytechnic and university resource pages, supplier partner pages and local business media.
Seeing the list matters for three reasons. You can veto sites you do not want to be associated with, including competitors’ partners or publications with a tone that does not fit your brand. You can add contacts you already have, which in our experience is where many of the best Singapore placements come from, because a supplier or industry body that already knows you is far more likely to say yes. And you can spot a fake list. A list padded with overseas sites that accept anything is the clearest early warning you will ever get.
The second deliverable is pitch copy you approve before it is sent. Outreach (the process of contacting site owners or editors to request a link or propose content) goes out under your brand name, or under the provider’s name on your behalf. Either way, editors will associate the email with your business. A clumsy, templated pitch sent to fifty editors in a small market can burn relationships you may need later, and Singapore’s pool of relevant publishers in most sectors is small enough that the same editors hear from everyone.
Approval does not need to be heavy. One template per campaign angle, reviewed once, with the provider free to personalise the opening line, is enough. What you are checking for is accuracy (no invented credentials or claims), tone, and anything that would create a compliance problem in a regulated sector. Firms covered by advertising rules, such as those we support through law firm SEO, should treat pitch approval as non-negotiable, because a pitch that overstates expertise is a publicity issue before it is an SEO one.
Most placements are earned with something: a guest article, a data piece, a quote, a resource worth citing. The third deliverable is the content that earns each placement, and the question is who owns it.
In a cheap package, content is typically produced by the cheapest available writer, often outside Singapore, in volume, with no review step on your side. You never see it before it is published, and sometimes you never see it at all, because the report only lists the link. That creates two problems. The content represents your brand on someone else’s site without your approval. And if the host site disappears, the article disappears with it, and you have no copy to place elsewhere.
A legitimate backlink service treats content as a deliverable in its own right. You receive every draft for approval, you receive the final version as published, and the contract states that copyright in content produced for you belongs to you once paid for, subject to whatever licence the host publication requires. That last point matters. Some publishers ask for exclusive first publication, which is reasonable. But you should still own the underlying research, data and drafts, so you can repurpose them for your own site, newsletters or a future pitch.
The strongest content deliverables are not guest posts at all. They are linkable assets: pages on your own site that people want to cite, such as a local price guide, a survey of your customers, a regulatory checklist or a calculator. These sit on your domain permanently, attract links without outreach once they are known, and cannot be taken away when the vendor relationship ends. When we audited link profiles for businesses arriving from other providers, the accounts with at least one genuinely useful asset on their own site almost always had a steadier stream of unsolicited links than those whose provider had only ever placed articles elsewhere.
If your site has crawl or indexation problems, though, those assets will struggle to be found, so a technical SEO check is worth doing before you invest in content designed to earn links.
The fourth deliverable is the one most cheap services fudge: a placement log. This is a running record, usually a shared spreadsheet, listing every link the provider claims to have produced. A useful log has, at minimum, these columns:
The rel attribute deserves explanation. It is a small piece of code on the link that tells Google how to treat it. A “nofollow” value tells search engines not to pass ranking credit, “sponsored” marks a paid or advertising placement, and “ugc” marks user-generated content such as forum posts or comments. Google introduced the sponsored and ugc values in 2019 and treats all three as hints. A link marked sponsored is perfectly legitimate, but it is a branding and referral play rather than a ranking one, and you should know which kind you are paying for.
Cheap reports often list only domains, with an authority score next to each. That is not a placement log. Without the exact URL you cannot check whether the link exists, whether it is buried on page nine of a tag archive, or whether it was quietly removed a month later. We’ve seen reports that listed a placement as live for half a year after the page had been deleted, because nobody was checking.
You should be able to open the log at any time, click any URL and see the link. If a provider resists giving you that access, assume there is a reason. A clean log also makes the rest of the engagement auditable: you can compare it against your own backlink data in Google Search Console (Google’s free tool for monitoring how your site appears in search), and any gap between their log and your data is worth a conversation.
Links decay. Pages get redesigned, publications close, editors update old articles and strip outbound links. Some loss is normal and no provider can prevent it. What a provider can do is commit to a replacement policy for lost links: if a placement they produced disappears or changes to nofollow within a defined window, commonly six to twelve months, they replace it with one of comparable relevance at no extra charge.
A replacement policy only works if it is written precisely. It should define what counts as lost (removed, redirected, changed rel attribute, page deindexed), who checks and how often, how quickly a replacement is due, and what “comparable” means. Vague wording such as “we will do our best to replace any lost links” is not a policy. It is a sentence.
The sixth deliverable is the one that decides whether you bought assets or rented links: ownership of relationships and assets after you leave. At the end of the engagement, you should receive the full prospect list with outcomes, the outreach history showing who was contacted and what they said, every piece of content produced, the placement log, and an introduction or at least named contacts for any publisher that agreed to an ongoing relationship such as a regular column or resource listing.
Providers sometimes argue that relationships belong to their staff, not to the client. There is a fair version of that point: an editor’s goodwill toward a particular outreach specialist cannot be transferred by contract. But the record of the relationship, the editor’s name, what they published, what they liked and what they said no to, is work you paid for. Conventional wisdom says the provider’s contact book is their competitive moat and you should not expect to see it. That framing frequently backfires on the client, because it guarantees you restart from nothing the day you switch. A provider who genuinely adds value will keep winning work because of how it runs outreach, not because it holds your history hostage.
For smaller businesses, this handover is often the difference between being able to continue modest outreach in-house and having to buy the whole thing again. Our small business SEO work is built around leaving clients with that capability.
The table below sets out what a typical cheap package includes, what a legitimate backlink service should include, and the red flag that tells you which one you are looking at. Use it as a checklist against any proposal you receive.
| Deliverable | What cheap packages typically include | What should be included | Red flag |
|---|---|---|---|
| Prospect list | Nothing, or “access to our network” | Named sites, pages, relevance reason, contact role, with client veto | Refusal to share the list before outreach |
| Pitch copy | Generic template you never see | Template per angle, approved by you, accurate claims only | “We handle all communication” with no visibility |
| Content | Bulk articles, no approval, no copy kept | Drafts for approval, final copies delivered, client owns copyright once paid | You cannot get a copy of articles placed under your name |
| Placement log | Domain list with authority scores | Exact live URL, target URL, anchor, rel attribute, dates, payment disclosure | Domains only, no URLs, no rel attributes |
| Lost links | Not mentioned | Written replacement policy with defined window and definition of “lost” | “Best efforts” wording only |
| Link sources | Sites that sell to anyone, private blog networks | Relevant local and sector publishers, associations, partners | Same handful of sites appear in every client’s report |
| Exit handover | Report archive only | Full prospect list, outreach history, content, log, named contacts | Contract silent on what happens at termination |
| Pricing basis | Fixed number of links per month | Days of work, content and outreach effort, with a review point | Per-link price with a guaranteed monthly count |
A private blog network (PBN) is a group of websites run mainly to sell or pass links, and using one to manipulate rankings breaches Google’s spam policies. If the same handful of unfamiliar domains appear across several of a provider’s case studies, that is often what you are looking at.
The table is deliberately blunt. Very few providers will tick every box in the middle column, and some boxes matter more than others for your situation. But any proposal that ticks nothing in the middle column is a link rental agreement, regardless of how it is described.
Prices vary with sector, competition and how much content is involved, so treat these as the ranges we typically see in the Singapore market rather than fixed rates. They are monthly retainers in Singapore dollars.
Per-link pricing also exists, commonly from around S$150 to S$600 per placement on marketplaces. Most agencies will tell you to compare proposals by cost per link. That advice frequently backfires, because it rewards the provider whose links cost least to produce, which usually means the ones least likely to last or to carry real relevance. A better comparison is cost per retained asset: what you will still own, and still be able to use, twelve months after the last invoice.
In our B2B ecommerce SEO case study, a B2B wholesale kitchenware supplier based in Ubi, serving Singapore and regional buyers, ran an 8-month engagement with us. It started with a domain authority of 11 and page-1 rankings only for its own brand name. Phase 5 of that programme, Trade Directory and Citation Building in Months 4 to 8, is the part most relevant to this post. It covered consistent submissions to the Singapore Business Federation directory, the Enterprise Singapore supplier registry, HardwareZone Business and 12 industry-specific trade directories covering F&B, hospitality and food manufacturing.
| Metric | Baseline (Month 0) | Month 8 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly organic visitors | 470 | 1,476 | +214% |
| Keywords ranking page 1 | 5 (brand only) | 32 | +540% |
| Monthly trade enquiries (organic) | 5 | 28 | +460% |
| Domain authority | 11 | 22 | +11 |
By Month 8 the supplier was in the top 3 for 4 wholesale search terms. Those results came from the whole programme, not from directory links alone: 14 rebuilt category and specification pages, 6 industry vertical pages, 8 trade buyer content pieces, and schema and technical work that lifted mobile Lighthouse from 48 to 74 all ran alongside the directory work. What the directory phase shows is the kind of placement this post argues for. A listing on a trade association directory or a government supplier registry is held in the client’s own name and stays in place after the engagement ends, which is exactly what a transferable asset looks like.
That is the comparison worth making on any proposal: not how many links arrive each month, but how many of them you will still hold, and be able to point to, after the last invoice. Our pricing page explains how we scope work on effort rather than a link count.
Most of the protection described above only exists if it is written into the contract. Before you sign with any backlink service, check for these clauses, and ask for them to be added if they are missing.
Sectors with professional advertising rules, including healthcare providers working on medical SEO, should also add a clause requiring regulatory review of any content published under the practice’s name. Check the relevant Ministry of Health or professional body guidance with your own compliance adviser rather than relying on the provider’s reading of it.
A provider that pushes back on most of these clauses is telling you what the engagement really is. A provider that accepts them readily is usually one that expects to keep the account on merit.
Everything above applies anywhere, but the argument is sharper in Singapore because of the size of the market. In most sectors there are perhaps dozens, not thousands, of genuinely relevant local publishers, associations and media outlets. That has three consequences for how you evaluate a backlink service.
First, the prospect list is finite and valuable. Once a provider has researched the relevant Singapore publishers in your sector, that research does not need to be redone from scratch, as long as you keep it. Losing it when you change provider means paying for the same research twice, and having the same editors approached again by someone who does not know they already said no.
Second, relationships compound in a small market. An editor at a sector publication who accepted one well-pitched article is far more likely to accept a second, and to quote your founder when a story breaks. That goodwill only accrues to you if the relationship is recorded and handed over. In a market where the same people move between publications, associations and agencies, a named contact list remains useful for years.
Third, local relevance outweighs raw metrics. A link from a Singapore trade association, a polytechnic resource page or a local business directory with real readership often matters more than a higher-scoring overseas site with no connection to your customers. Cheap packages rarely reach those sources, because they take relationships and patience that a fixed-price volume model cannot afford. This is also why off-page work and local SEO tend to reinforce each other: the same local citations help both.
In our experience, a business that switches providers without a proper handover often starts from zero each time, paying again for research into the same short list of publishers. Firms that insist on handover clauses from the start can brief each new provider with a complete history, so their link profiles grow steadily instead of in disconnected bursts. Sector-level differences in how this plays out are covered on our industry SEO page.
Field notes: In our B2B ecommerce case study, the off-site work for a wholesale kitchenware supplier in Ubi is a good example of what a provider should be able to hand over in full. Over Months 4-8, its details were submitted consistently to Singapore trade directories and B2B platforms: the Singapore Business Federation directory, the Enterprise Singapore supplier registry, HardwareZone Business and 12 industry-specific trade directories covering F&B, hospitality and food manufacturing. Every one of those is a named, checkable placement. Across the 8-month programme, which also built 14 category pages and 6 vertical pages, Domain Authority rose from 11 to 22. Ask any backlink service for that level of detail: an exact list of where each link sits, so the work can be verified and built on.
A backlink service is easy to evaluate on the wrong numbers. Monthly fee and link count tell you what you are spending and how busy the provider will look, not what you will own. The right question for every line of a proposal is whether that deliverable survives the contract ending: the prospect list, the outreach history, the content, the placement log, the named relationships. If those come with you when you leave, you have built something that keeps compounding, and your next provider or in-house hire starts ahead. If they stay with the vendor, you were renting links, and the rent stops paying the moment you stop paying it. Insist on the handover clauses before you sign. Our about page explains how we structure engagements so that everything we build stays with the client.
A backlink service researches websites that might link to yours, contacts them with a reason to do so, produces any content needed to earn the link, and tracks the placements that result. A legitimate one shares each of those steps with you: you see the prospect list, approve the pitch, approve the content and get a log of every live link. A cheap one usually just delivers a count of links each month from sources you cannot inspect.
In the ranges we typically see, low-cost packages run roughly S$300 to S$900 a month, legitimate outreach-led services roughly S$1,500 to S$4,000 a month, and digital PR or asset-led programmes from around S$4,000 to S$10,000 or more. The price difference mostly reflects how much research, content and relationship work is involved, and whether you keep those assets afterwards.
Not on its own. Price per link rewards the provider whose links are cheapest to produce, which usually means the ones least likely to last or to be relevant to your customers. Compare proposals on what you will still own a year after the engagement ends: prospect research, content, relationships and verified live links. That figure is a far better measure of value than a per-link rate.
At minimum, a placement log with the exact URL of each linking page, the page on your site it points to, the anchor text, the rel attribute, the date it went live and the date it was last checked. A good report also covers outreach activity: prospects contacted, replies and placements, including dead ends. A list of domains with authority scores beside them is not enough to verify anything.
A rel attribute is a small piece of code on a link that tells search engines how to treat it. Nofollow asks them not to pass ranking credit, sponsored marks a paid placement and ugc marks user-generated content. A normal link with no such value is a followed link. You need to know which kind you are getting, because a sponsored link is a branding and referral asset, not a ranking one.
Links placed on genuine publications usually stay live, though some will decay naturally over time. Links on networks or sites that sell placements are more likely to vanish, sometimes quickly. The bigger loss is often invisible: without a handover clause, you lose the prospect list, the outreach history and the content, so any replacement provider has to start again from nothing.
Yes, for the prospects researched for your business. You are paying for that research, and you need it to veto unsuitable sites and to avoid duplicating work later. A provider may reasonably keep its internal processes and tools private, but the list of sites approached on your behalf, and their responses, should be part of what you receive.
It is a commitment that if a link the provider produced is removed, redirected, deindexed or changed to nofollow within a defined period, commonly six to twelve months, they will replace it with a comparable placement at no extra cost. It is only meaningful if the contract defines what counts as lost, how it is checked and how quickly the replacement is due.
Paying for a placement is acceptable when the link carries a sponsored or nofollow attribute and is treated as advertising or branding. Paying for links intended to pass ranking credit breaches Google’s spam policies and can lead to the links being ignored or, in more serious cases, a manual action against your site. Ask any provider to disclose in the placement log whether payment was involved.
Many Singapore SMEs can run modest outreach in-house, particularly to suppliers, associations and partners who already know them. It is much easier if a previous provider handed over a proper prospect list, outreach history and content library. A common middle path is to use a backlink service for the research and first campaigns, with a contract that ensures you can continue the relationships yourself afterwards.
If you are not sure what your current or previous backlink service actually left you with, that is worth finding out before you renew or switch. We will review your link profile against any placement reports you have, check what is still live, and tell you plainly how much of it is an asset you own. No obligation and no link-count proposal. Book a free SEO audit and we will take a look.
Natalie leads SEO strategy at Singapore SEO Agency, helping local and regional businesses build organic search programmes that drive qualified leads. She specialises in technical SEO and content-led authority building for Singapore SMEs.
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