SerpInsight is a newly launched link insertion (also called a niche edit) service, built by an in-house SEO who spent years buying links from vendors and checking their work. The vetting checklist that came out of that job is now the service. It’s published in full, because we have no case studies to hide behind.
Why SerpInsight exists
This started as a spreadsheet. Years of working in-house meant signing off on link invoices every month, and then quietly opening each placement to see what had actually been bought. A lot of it was fine. A lot of it wasn’t — links dropped into articles that had never ranked for anything, on domains with a Domain Rating of 58 and a traffic graph flatlined at forty visits a month, in paragraphs that had clearly been written backwards from the anchor.
The reports never mentioned any of that. They listed DR, they listed the URL, and they moved on. So the spreadsheet grew a second tab: a checklist of things to verify before accepting a placement. Does the host page rank for a real query? Does anyone read it? Does the sentence still make sense if you delete the link? Does the site have any other articles on this topic, or is this the one lonely post about kitchen renovation on a general blog?
SerpInsight is that checklist turned into a service. Nothing more mysterious than that.
We’re new, and we’d rather say so
SerpInsight launched recently and we’re small. We don’t have a wall of client logos, a “500 placements delivered” counter, or five years of retention data, and we’re not going to invent any of it — you can find plenty of vendors who will. What we have instead is a method we’re willing to describe in complete detail, including the parts that make us look slower and more expensive than the competition.
That’s a deliberate trade. An established agency can point at results and stay vague about process. We can’t point at results yet, so the process has to carry the weight. Every standard on this page is written as a commitment you can hold us to and check yourself, because you can open any placement we report and verify it in about four minutes. Do that. We’d genuinely rather work with clients who check.
Work we turn down
Some of this costs us money, and we do it anyway.
We don’t place casino, sportsbook, pharmacy or payday lending links into general-interest sites. Not because those industries are beneath us, but because the placement is a lie — a home decor blog does not organically link to an online casino, and every party involved knows it. Those verticals have their own publications, and that’s where those links belong.
We also turn down clients whose page isn’t ready. If the URL you want to move is thin, slow, or doesn’t actually answer the query you’re targeting, links won’t fix it. They’ll just make an underperforming page slightly more visible to a crawler that already decided. In most of those cases the honest advice is to spend the money on the page first, and we’ll tell you that before we quote. Our SEO audit and on-page work exist partly because that conversation kept happening.
And we decline exact-match-only anchor demands. If you want every link pointing at your money page to read “best project management software,” we’re not the right vendor. A healthy profile runs somewhere around 40–50% branded, 25–35% partial or topic-based, 10–20% naked URL or generic, and only 5–10% exact-match. We’ll build to something like that mix or we’ll pass. The reasoning is laid out in our anchor text ratio guide.
What gets published on the blog
The blog has one editorial rule: we publish what we’ve actually tested or verified, and we say which is which. When something is industry-general knowledge rather than our own measurement, it’s hedged — “typically,” “in our experience,” “in most niches” — and when we don’t have data, we describe the method instead of inventing a statistic.
That includes writing up things that stopped working. Outreach angles that used to get replies and now don’t. Vetting signals that were useful in 2019 and are noise now. A tactic dying is more useful to you than another post explaining what a backlink is, and it’s the kind of thing agencies tend not to publish because it dates their playbook.
Our vetting standard
This is policy, not an aspiration. Every host page we propose has to clear all six before it reaches your shortlist. We’re not going to quote you an accept rate, because we haven’t placed enough links to have measured one honestly — but here’s the bar itself:
- At least 1,000 monthly organic visits to the host site — traffic, not Domain Rating alone
- The specific host page is indexed and ranks for a real keyword, not just the domain
- Shared search intent between the host page and your target page — adjacent topic, same reader
- The paragraph still reads correctly with the link removed — if it doesn’t, the link was the point
- At least 3 other articles on the host site in the same topical cluster
- A clean outbound profile — no wall of unrelated sponsored links stacked in the same post
Anything that fails one of these gets dropped before you see it. You then approve or veto what’s left, so the final call is yours. If you want to run the same checks on links you’ve bought elsewhere, our backlink quality evaluation guide walks through it step by step.
What we’d tell you not to buy
Don’t buy links if your site is under roughly DR 20 with a handful of thin pages. At that stage links have almost nothing to amplify, and you’ll spend $1,500 discovering that your content was the constraint.
Don’t buy packages sold purely on DR. “50 DR 50+ backlinks for $499” is arithmetically impossible to deliver honestly — that’s under $10 a link against four to six hours of real work per placement. Somebody owns those sites.
Don’t buy links to a page that hasn’t been touched in three years. Refresh it first, then build. And don’t buy sitewide footer or sidebar links at any price; they’re the easiest paid pattern in the world to spot, and they’ve been getting discounted for well over a decade.
Paid links are against Google’s guidelines. That applies to us as much as anyone else, and we can’t make the risk zero — vetting, anchor discipline and sensible pacing reduce it, they don’t remove it. If a vendor tells you their links are guideline-compliant and completely safe, that’s the moment to close the tab.
Work with us
If the standard above matches how you’d want your own links vetted, we’re probably a fit. Start with the link insertions service to see the full process, check the pricing, or send us the page you’re trying to move — we reply within 24 hours, and if links aren’t the right spend for you right now, we’ll say that instead of quoting.