Done-For-You Link Building: What DFY Backlinks Cost, and 61 Placements Re-Checked
Search for DFY link building or DFY backlinks and half of page one is not a service at all. It is reviews of DFY Suite, a piece of software that creates web 2.0 and profile links in bulk, ranking because its name contains the three letters. The other half is small providers: Rank-Jacker (Domain Rating 12) at the top, Linksmint (DR 25), DFY Webs & Links (DR 32), an Upwork listing for HARO links. No large agency sells anything under this name, which is why the results look the way they do.
We sell one of these services, so this page has an interest to declare. It does two things the other pages do not. It reads what each provider on page one actually charges and delivers, and it publishes the one number a done-for-you buyer should ask every provider for and almost never gets: how many of the placements it reports are still a link on a page. We fetched all 61 of ours.
Done-for-you link building means the provider prospects, writes, sends and follows up; you approve. On page one it costs "a few hundred to several thousand" a month at Rank-Jacker and is unpriced elsewhere. Per-link rates run $99 to $350.
What ranks for the term: DFY Suite software reviews (YouTube, Reddit, LinkedIn, Substack), two small services, a Crunchbase entry and a glossary.
The question to ask: "Send me the URL of every placement from the last 90 days." Then open them.
Ours: $99 a month for one site, outreach only, links verified before they count. Pricing.
MentionAgent's records held 61 URLs marked as placements across 8 sites. Fetched on 16 September 2026: 37 carry the link, 19 pages load without it, 5 could not be fetched. Median DR of the verified links is 25.
Follow type: 35 of the 37 verified links are dofollow, 2 are nofollow.
DR spread: of the 28 with a reading, 9 are DR 30 or above and 6 are under DR 10.
Volume behind them: 6,939 emails to 6,209 domains in August 2026 across 17 sites; 6,289 in the first sixteen days of September across 19.
The 19 missing links are the same kind of overcount every provider's dashboard carries: a publisher said yes and the system believed it. We describe the fix below.
Who ranks, and what they sell
We pulled the top ten for dfy link building and dfy backlinks on 16 September 2026 and looked up each domain's Ahrefs Domain Rating. Four of the ten results for the first query overlap with the second, so they are one topic with two spellings.
| Result | DR | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Rank-Jacker | 12 | "DFY Monthly Link Building Retainer": a managed monthly service with niche edits, guest posts, HARO links, press releases and PBN links on the same menu. Budget form starts at $500 a month. |
| Linksmint | 25 | "Done-For-You (DFY) Link Building Service" from a backlink marketplace for SaaS and B2B. The page renders in the browser only, so its scope and price could not be read. |
| DFY Webs & Links | 32 | Ready-made websites on aged domains, with link building and content as add-ons. Closer to a site flipper than an outreach service. |
| DFY Suite reviews | YouTube 99, Reddit 95, LinkedIn 99, Substack 94 | Four of the top ten for dfy backlinks. A software product, see below. |
| Upwork listing | 95 | "DFY HARO Link Building Service": a freelancer pitching journalist-request links. |
| MarketersMedia, Crunchbase, DMI, Dave Chaffey, The Links Guy | 46 to 91 | A press release, a company profile for "DFY Links", a how-to guide, a glossary entry and a strategy list. None sells the service. |
So the buyer who types this query gets one real retainer page, one unreadable one, a site flipper, and a wall of software reviews. That gap is the reason a DR 12 site holds the top spot: nobody with authority has written the page. It is the same shape we found on the affordable SEO services results, where DR 0.7 and DR 2.1 package pages sit at positions one and three.
DFY Suite is not a service, and it is most of the results
DFY Suite is sold as software that syndicates your URL across web 2.0 properties, social profiles and video sites, creating what its reviews call "up to 1,200 backlinks". Those links are on pages the product created for you, on domains that host millions of similar pages. They are not editorial links, nobody at the linking site chose to link, and they are the class of link Google's spam policies describe as automatically generated. Whether they help is a separate argument; what matters for this page is that they are not what "done-for-you link building" means to anyone hiring a service.
If you arrived here comparing DFY Suite to an outreach service, the honest comparison is on our buying backlinks page: a $12.50 link and a $200 editorial placement are different products with different risk, and the price tells you which one you are looking at.
What the providers charge
Only one page-one provider gives a number. Rank-Jacker's FAQ says a monthly link building retainer "may cost a few hundred to several thousand dollars per month" and its enquiry form offers $500, $1,000, $3,000, $5,000 and more. Linksmint's page could not be read. DFY Webs & Links prices sites, not links.
The wider market is better documented. Our monthly link building service page itemises the retainers that publish prices, and how much backlinks cost covers per-link pricing. The number we can add from MentionAgent's own outreach records is what publishers themselves ask for when they reply with a price: 203 conversations carry a quote, 189 of them parse to a dollar amount, and the middle half runs $99 to $350 per placement, median $200, with 61 quotes at $100 or under and 27 above $500. A done-for-you provider paying those rates on your behalf has to charge more than that per link to exist; one charging less is not paying publishers, which means either outreach that earns free links (slow, and the model MentionAgent runs) or links from somewhere you would not choose.
What done-for-you link building includes, step by step
The phrase is vague on purpose, so here is the work in the order it happens, with what a buyer should expect to see at each step.
- Prospecting. Finding sites that publish on your topic and would plausibly link. Done well this is a list you can read, with the page each link would sit on. Done badly it is a spreadsheet of domains with a DA column.
- Sending infrastructure. Separate sending domains and inboxes, warmed up for weeks before the first pitch, so your own domain's reputation is never at stake. Our email warmup guide covers why this is not optional.
- The pitch. One email per prospect, written for that page. The templates that survive are short and ask for one thing.
- Replies. The step most providers quietly hand back. A publisher answers with a question, a price, or a counter-proposal, and somebody has to respond that day.
- Placement and verification. The link goes live, somebody checks that it did, and it is recorded. This is the step that produced the 19 missing links below.
- Reporting. URLs, not counts.
Where a provider draws the line between "done for you" and "you" is usually step four. The link building on autopilot page lists which steps run unattended in MentionAgent and which do not, and the answer has not changed: everything up to the reply, and the reply once you have seen it.
61 placements, fetched on the same day
Any done-for-you dashboard has a "links placed" number. Ours had 61 URLs across eight sites, recorded either when a publisher confirmed in a thread that the link was live or when a customer marked the deal closed. On 16 September 2026 we fetched every one of those URLs and searched the HTML for a link to the customer's domain.
| Result | URLs | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Link on the page | 37 | The placement is real. 35 dofollow, 2 nofollow. Median DR 25 across the 28 with a reading; 9 at DR 30 or above, 6 under DR 10. |
| Page loads, no link | 19 | A page of 2,000 or more characters came back without a link to the customer. Four are homepages recorded instead of the article; the other fifteen are article pages that load without a link to the customer. A single fetch cannot tell a link that was never added from one that was removed later. |
| Could not fetch | 5 | Two 403s, one 404, one URL on the customer's own site, one behind a script. |
Seven of the eight sites have at least one verified link; one has none. The verified links skew toward paying accounts (25 on paid mid-range plans, 10 on freemium, one on premium, one on the free tier), which is mostly a function of how long each has been sending.
The point is not that 37 is a good or bad number for the volume behind it. It is that 61 was the number on the dashboard and 37 is the number that is true, and no buyer of a done-for-you service is shown the second one unless they open the URLs themselves.
Why placements go missing, and the fix
The 19 missing links have three causes, and each one applies to every provider, not just us.
The system believed a promise. A publisher writes "great, I'll add the link this week" and the classifier, or the account manager, records a placement. Some of those links are added, some are not, and nothing goes back to check. This was the largest group.
The wrong URL was recorded. The homepage of the linking site instead of the article, or a category page. The link may well exist on a page nobody wrote down. Two of the 19 are the same site recorded at its root and at an article that has since changed.
The link was removed. Editors clean up, pages get rewritten, a paid placement expires. A link that was live in July is not necessarily live in September, which is why a provider's lifetime count is a worse number than its verified-this-month count.
The fix is dull: fetch every recorded URL on a schedule and demote anything the page no longer carries. We ran this by hand for this article and are wiring it into the placement record so the dashboard shows verified links rather than believed ones. Until then, the backlink audit guide covers how to run the same check on any provider's report in an afternoon.
The part that stays yours
Done-for-you is honest about the work and quiet about the decisions. MentionAgent's records hold 1,655 classified publisher replies. 13.4% are a price quote, 10.1% a counter offer, and 3.6% propose a deal of some other kind, which is roughly a quarter of all replies asking for a decision with money or terms in it. Another 14.6% decline, 7.4% ask for details about your site, and 6.5% say they are interested without committing. A provider who never surfaces those to you is either declining them all on your behalf, which costs you the placements, or accepting them, which costs you money you did not approve.
The right shape is the one the outreach agent runs: the agent drafts the answer, you see it, and the ones with a price attached wait for you. The how many backlinks do I need page is the other half of that decision, because a quote is only expensive relative to what the link is worth to you.
Our plan, with its numbers
MentionAgent is done-for-you link building in the narrow sense: prospecting, warmed sending inboxes on a separate domain, drafted pitches, sending, follow-up on warm threads, drafted replies, and the placement record above. It is $99 a month for one site, with higher tiers adding sending inboxes; the full ladder is on the pricing page. It does not write content, fix technical SEO or buy links; for those, the affordable SEO packages comparison lists who does.
What a month looks like, from the August 2026 records: 17 sites sent, 13 of them 100 emails or more. Sites on the free tier that sent a full month sent between 119 and 1,296 emails (median 227); paid mid-range sites sent 251 to 1,316 (median 544). The difference is inbox count, not effort. Across all sites that was 6,939 emails to 6,209 distinct domains, which is also the answer to "how many sites do you contact for me": nearly all of them once, because cold follow-ups are off by design and only warm threads get a second email (the follow-up templates page explains why).
What it produced is the table above, and we would rather you read that table than a testimonial. Read it alongside the outsource link building and managed link building pages, which cover the same decision from the agency side, and the affordable link building page for where $99 sits on that ladder.
How to choose a done-for-you provider
Five questions, in the order they save you the most money.
- What does a link cost you, the provider? If they pay publishers, the per-link fee has to clear the $99 to $350 publishers actually quote. If they do not, ask where the links come from.
- Send me every placement URL from the last 90 days. Then fetch them. Expect some to be missing; a provider who has never checked will be surprised by their own list.
- Who answers the publisher who replies with a price? If the answer is "we handle it", ask how much they have spent on your behalf without asking.
- Whose domain sends the email? Yours should never be the answer.
- What does the report contain? URLs with dates, the anchor, and whether the link is still live. A count is not a report.
A provider that passes all five is rarer than the search results suggest, and the price will reflect it. One that fails the second question is selling you a dashboard.
Frequently asked questions
What does done-for-you link building cost?
Read on 16 September 2026, the providers ranking for the term either quote a budget range (Rank-Jacker: a few hundred to several thousand dollars a month, with a form that starts at $500) or publish no price at all (Linksmint's DFY page renders only in the browser and could not be read). Per-link prices in the wider market run $99 to $350 for the middle half of 189 publisher quotes MentionAgent has recorded; MentionAgent's own done-for-you plan is $99 a month for one site.
What is the difference between DFY link building and a monthly link building retainer?
Mostly the word. A retainer bills hours or a link quota every month; done-for-you describes who does the work, which is the provider rather than you. The search results are different, though: the DFY results are dominated by reviews of a software product called DFY Suite, which builds web 2.0 and profile links, so read what a DFY page is actually selling before you compare prices.
How do I check a done-for-you provider's placements?
Ask for the URL of every placement they report and fetch each one. On 16 September 2026 MentionAgent re-fetched 61 URLs its own system had recorded as placements and found the link on 37 of them; 19 pages loaded without it and 5 could not be fetched. A placement is a link on a page, not a publisher saying yes in an email.
Is DFY Suite the same thing as done-for-you link building?
No. DFY Suite is a software product that creates large numbers of web 2.0, profile and syndication links automatically; its reviews rank for the DFY keywords because the product name contains the letters. A done-for-you link building service is a person or a system doing outreach to real editors on your behalf. The two produce different links and carry different risk.
What Domain Rating should done-for-you links have?
Across the 28 verified MentionAgent placements with a DR reading, the median was DR 25, nine were DR 30 or above and six were under DR 10. Editorial links from sites that are actually about your topic tend to sit in that range; a provider promising every link at DR 50 or higher is either paying for them or measuring something else. The relevant backlinks page explains why the topic match matters more than the number.
Can done-for-you link building run without me at all?
Prospecting, warmup, drafting and sending run unattended. The replies that carry money or terms do not: 13.4% of classified replies in MentionAgent's records are a price quote and 10.1% a counter offer, and those need a decision from you. Done-for-you means the work is done for you, not that every decision is.