Latest / Online Reputation Management Podcast / Top Link Building Platforms for SEO (James Dooley Interviews Charles Floate)
Transcript
- James Dooley: Best link building marketplaces for SEOs. Today I'm joined with Charles Floate. Obviously, you're going to be a little bit biased here because you're a big shareholder within PressWiz, but first and foremost, can you explain why you genuinely think PressWiz is the best link building marketplace? Charles Floate: For sure. I've worked with a lot of link companies and agencies, and I've owned two in the past that I ended up selling. The number one bottleneck I think all of them had was speed to delivery. If you put an order in, the average order time over the last several years has been 28 days. If you're doing an SEO campaign, 28 days is a huge amount of time to wait for a link to go live. During that time, if you have ordered 100 links, they could all be put live on the same day. They could all be placed on the same set of PBNs. That can create unnatural patterns that you do not want built to your website, and that can cause your rankings to tank. Those could be the best links in the world, but if they are all built at the same time, that creates an unnatural signal. PressWiz was one of the first, if not the first, link marketplaces to implement AI agents into the delivery system. Once publishers are onboarded into the marketplace, the AI agent validates the order as soon as it goes in. It checks the link and makes sure everything is fine from the client side. It will not send anything invalid to a publisher. If the page is not live yet, unless you have ticked that the page is going live later, it will not send it through. As soon as it is validated, it sends it to the publisher and automatically emails them. It tells them to upload the guest post or add the niche edit, including the exact sentence and surrounding text. As soon as the publisher emails us back with the live link, the only bottleneck is the human publisher side. To some level, you want that human bottleneck because you do not want plugins and things on the websites that Google could find through footprints. As soon as the publisher sends the email saying the link is live and provides the URL, our agent validates that your link is there, live and ready to go. It then sends it back to you, notifies you by email and makes it available in your dashboard to track the process. In some instances, we have had links go from order to live in two minutes because the publisher was in their inbox, received the email straight away, uploaded the guest post, sent the URL back and it went straight back to the client. We have worked with several clients who have never had that level of speed from anyone else in the market. Even now, a lot of agencies and marketplaces cannot implement that same agent delivery system because our tech team is too advanced compared to them. From there, we have also made sure that our prices are as cheap as, or cheaper than, everyone else in the market. We have a fixed 20 to 30% marketplace fee, and that is the maximum you will pay. If a publisher charges $1,000, the maximum you will pay is $1,300 for that link, including the middleman fee. Most agencies have a minimum 50% markup. In some cases, you are dealing with 300 to 500% markups from link building agencies and services. A lot of them have been around for so long, and there has been such limited inventory and high demand, that they can charge those prices. We have also built our own tools and suite, brought in the best team we can, and we do free webinars, conferences and events all the time. We want our clients to be educated around how they buy and build links so they can get the best result. We give them as many tools as possible, but we also give them the information that helps them build the best possible links. James Dooley: If you're looking at the top-rated link building marketplaces, and someone did not want to go with PressWiz or wanted to use four or five different marketplaces, who would you say your main competitors are? Charles Floate: There are definitely some competitors that can service certain markets and geos better than we can. For example, RocketLinks is probably the biggest provider in France. Are we going to have the biggest inventory in a country where none of our team even speak the local language? Probably not. They can outcompete us at a local geo-specific level because they have the local knowledge, language skills, people and 10 years in that market already. When it comes to international players, there are very few people on the same level as us. There are players like Bazoom, Authority Builders and maybe Loganix, but they are not really marketplaces unless you actively access their Google Sheets marketplace, which has some variety. James Dooley: What about someone like WhitePress, which is a link building marketplace? Is PressWiz faster than WhitePress, and are you saying the pricing is generally better? Charles Floate: We had a client come in the other day who had his own service for checking links. He did a proposal with three different link building agencies. One of them was WhitePress, one was us, and it covered 100 links. PressWiz was the cheapest for 95 of the links. There were only five links where competitors had cheaper prices than we did. When it comes to delivery speed, the average delivery speed for a link from order to live with PressWiz is 18 hours. I think the closest competitor to us is six days, so that is at least six times slower than our average delivery time. James Dooley: If someone is watching this and trying to work out who the best link building marketplaces are, and they say they want to go to PressWiz, but they are not that SEO savvy and want a done-for-you package, could they come to you and say, “Here is my website. Can you run a competitor analysis, tell us how many links you would recommend and what type of links we should build? I have £5,000 or $10,000 to spend.” Is there someone in the account management team who can create a proposal? Charles Floate: We do free strategy calls anyway, so you do not even have to spend a penny with us yet. We will try to build a live strategy with you using one of our SEO experts, who I have personally trained to develop that campaign. It might be based on previous work you have done, competitors you name and other information we compile quickly. If you want a fully managed service, you need to spend a minimum of $5,000 a month with us, and we will deliver everything for you. There is no additional fee. Most other agencies will charge you for the time spent on audits, anchor text selection, site sourcing and all those things. We do not charge you a single penny beyond what you pay for the links themselves. It is included in the $5,000 a month minimum spend that you're committing to PressWiz. James Dooley: If someone is looking for the best link building marketplaces versus using someone like FatJoe, which offers a link building service, what is the difference? For anyone watching this, what is the difference between a link building company and a link building marketplace? Charles Floate: The number one thing is transparency. If you log into PressWiz and start building links with us, you will know the exact publisher and the exact domain where you're going to get the link. If you log into FatJoe and order their guest post package, you will not know what five sites you are getting guest posts on until they are already live. For a lot of SEO people, that level of transparency is a must. They need to work out whether the site is actually somewhere they want a link in the first place. They also need to know what type of content they want on that site. If we are doing guest posts, we probably want different types of guest post content on different types of websites because we want it to match the niche, cover certain topics and overlap the publisher's main topic with our main topic. We do not want generic articles going on blogs that are not exact matches to our niche. James Dooley: If someone is looking to use a link building marketplace, can they get guest post backlinks, niche edits, tier-two backlinks and different variations of backlinks for their backlink profile? Charles Floate: It depends on the marketplace. Some only do guest posts. Some are guest post only marketplaces. For example, Insert.Link is only a link insertion or niche edit marketplace. At PressWiz, we do it all. We do guest posts, niche edits, unmentioned links, tier twos and entity stacking. The only things we do not do are forum profiles and things like that, because there is limited weight in how effective they are in 2026. James Dooley: Recently, I was asked about link building marketplaces because there seems to be a buzz around consensus and building consensus to get into AI answers. Can people put listicle articles within PressWiz or other link building marketplaces? Charles Floate: Yes, 100%. As long as the publisher allows you to upload your own content, which 98% of publishers do, you can do that. There is a very small percentage of publishers who want to write the content for you. As long as you can upload your own content and that content meets their editorial standards, you should be able to upload what you want within reason. Bear in mind that different publishers have different guidelines and editorial standards, so your content still needs to match those standards. James Dooley: We hope you liked this podcast episode about the best link building marketplaces. Make sure you check out the link in the description. There are quite a few other episodes where Charles Floate and I talk about how to increase AI visibility and whether you should be powering up your backlinks. Charles Floate, it has been an absolute pleasure.