Should an SEO firm ever guarantee link building results by quantity?

[jsteimle]

This post is deleted!

[LoganRay]

Hi Josh,

I think you nailed it with your 3 bullet points. There is absolutely no way to guarantee any link worth having, so I don't think you're missing anything and I don't believe there is another way to look at it that justifies making promises that can't be kept.

[EGOL]

Linkbuilding is the most dangerous SEO activity.  Look how many website owners have lost - through Penguin - assets that took them years or decades to build.   They lost them to sleezy linkbuilding.

Anybody who hires a linkbuilder is playing with fire.  FIRE.   That's how you get stuck with $10M of inventory in a $30K/month warehouse and 12 employees on unemployment.

I think it would be crazy to have that work done on a quota and it would also be crazy to have that work done without a monthly report that includes the URL of the webpages where I can go and see for myself the links that have been acquired.  I would want to be the judge of the quality and quantity of work that is being done.

If the SEO does not want to provide that information.  Fine.  I'll get someone else.   Only idiots buy pigs in pokes.

[RobertFisher]

Josh, 
You knew the answer before you wrote the question but it is a smart question. As someone who works daily in an agency and is responsible for most of our proposals, I see this regularly around link building, ranking, website development, etc.

Client comes in and says we need a new website and we quote $15,000. Client says we have someone who can build the same website for $5,000. "Fantastic, you will save $10K!"

Someone says we need to be ranked in top three of Google for our terms, how much will that cost? "I don't know as we do not guarantee rankings of any kind." Yes, you can add more to that, but you understand.

So, with link building if you know the others are guaranteeing X amounts of high quality links I am assuming the client told you this. If so, my answer would be "That is great, I have been doing SEO a long time and am unable to make those kinds of guarantees. I wish you the very best." Of course, you could be tacky, "Once that is finished, should you run into trouble, we do penalty recovery!"

I had to write this as it really is funny that people still don't get this stuff. Matt in our UK office said something the other day that cracked me up about a potential client who had a huge huge huge SEO problem and said they would pay $3k one time to get 2 million pages indexed within a month after they had gotten most of their pages to disappear somehow. He said, "Pay peanuts, get monkeys!"

Sometimes the monkeys will beat you out for a client; let it go and move on.

Best