Fiverr Backlinks: Do They Work And Are They Safe?

It makes sense that people look for the easiest ways to automate the daunting process of link building if one considers that this crucial off-page activity can be expensive and time-consuming for any SEO or site owner to do effectively on their own.

As an SEO, if you’re unwilling to create or build backlinks yourself, then your only other option is buying links from others who will create or build them for you.

Enter Fiverr. An online marketplace that makes it very simple to browse cheap backlink services and acquire any type of backlink you want.

But with any cheap marketplace with virtually no barriers to entry, a buyer must consider the legitimacy of its sellers and verify the quality of their products.

Although Fiverr is a good place to find quality backlinks that suit your needs, it’s very important for a new user to understand what Fiverr is all about and what to look out for in order to conduct business in a safe and effective manner.

What is Fiverr?

Fiverr was founded in 2010 as an online marketplace for freelance digital services. It’s one of the most popular freelance marketplaces and websites for online outsourcing in the world. Fiverr has grown in conjunction with the growth of different types of digital marketing and other broad technology services like graphics design, programming, video & animation, writing & translation, music, and audio.

Fiverr was created with the intention of providing a valuable “two-sided market” in the online space. This means both user groups, freelancers and customers, provide each other with network benefits.

It’s now a heavily used platform for listing temporary work positions where freelancers can offer services to customers worldwide, and customers can browse a countless selection of digital services for almost any niche. If a job can be done online, you’ll most likely find multiple services offered for it on Fiverr.

The website had about 1.3 million gigs offered in 2012. Since then, the platform transaction volume has grown by over 600%. There are now thousands of different types of specialized gigs offered on Fiverr ranging from website building, writing, video editing, graphics design, audio transcription, software development, tutorials, coaching, analytics, advertising, and marketing.

Fiverr is known for giving customers access to cheap services. In fact, the base price of advertised services when Fiverr started was $5 (hence the name). The platform now allows freelancers to charge up to thousands of dollars for a gig depending on their reputation. But there are still hordes of freelancers who charge the lowest base amount for many services, no matter how difficult they may seem.

This price undercutting may seem like Fiverr is a haven for scams and low-quality work. Although this is true for some marketplaces, including Fiverr, the platform at least gives buyer’s the right to request a refund after a gig is completed. Still, buyer beware. Make sure you’re very diligent about what you want and who you’re getting it from.

Fiverr has been involved in scandals in the past. One of the most notable was a lawsuit from Amazon against over 1,000 users who offered to write fake product reviews on Amazon’s website for $5 each. If anything, this is an example of how Fiverr provides an efficient channel for users that seek out cheap, deceptive, or shady services that may potentially break the law.

However, these negative aspects shouldn’t dissuade anyone from using the platform if they’re actually in need of legitimate digital services, because there are many highly skilled and trustworthy services offered by reputable freelancers on Fiverr. You can even filter for “Pro Verified” services provided by vetted professionals who are verified for quality and service.

Buying backlinks and other SEO services on Fiverr

Digital marketing and search engine optimization are hugely popular categories on Fiverr. In terms of gig selection for customers, there are dozens of digital marketing service categories and specialized activities related to those services.

Let’s go over a few examples to give you an idea of what you may find on Fiverr:

Email marketing

You can outsource any aspect of your email marketing even to the point of having someone manage your entire campaign. There are plenty of experienced sellers offering to find and develop your target audience, automate your email flows, and write cold emails.

There are plenty of offers to set up tools like Klaviyo, Shopify ecommerce, Mailchimp, and other autoresponder services. Some people will automate newsletters, do template design, and basically provide a comprehensive package of skills and tasks at an affordable rate.

Content marketing

Here you can find sellers advertising strategies to attract more visitors and publish content on a variety of websites. Many offers focus on niche guest posting on high DA/DR sites while providing a dofollow backlink. Some sellers claim to offer guest posts on sites with over ten million monthly organic traffic!

Other sellers will help you generate unique content ideas or act as your social media manager and content creator. You’ll find plenty of niche content writers here.

Web analytics

This category allows you to find sellers who will set up analytics, tracking, and conversion tools for your website. Others will actually perform the routine tracking & reporting functions for you, help with website optimization, or fix technical issues related to analytics.

There are many sellers who will set up Google Analytics, Tag Manager, and Google Ads conversion tracking. Some will build you a custom reporting dashboard or manually audit your site. It’s a good place to find experienced people who will utilize your on-site and off-site data to help improve your website/ecommerce store.

SEO

Here you’ll find practically every service needed to rank in search engines and generate more traffic. Services are categorized into off-page, on-page, technical, competitor analysis, keyword research, comprehensive packages, and voice search SEO.

This is where you’ll find countless sellers offering all kinds of backlinks, and where you’ll need to be diligent in choosing exactly what you need from the right person while making sure they aren’t giving you low-quality links or blatantly ignoring Google guidelines.

You’ll find a lot of ridiculously cheap offers like 50 quality backlinks with high trust/citation flow for $5. Or over a hundred “high quality” dofollow web 2.0 links starting at $5. Really? I’ve seen some sellers even offering millions of links in one big package. Do these people know something that we don’t?

Many of the sellers have near-perfect reviews too (often from the same user spamming multiple reviews), so you won’t be able to tell if the seller is legit just based on their star ratings. It helps to look out for “Pro Verified” sellers.

Other than off-page SEO, you’ll find all kinds of offers for targeted keyword research, private consultations, comprehensive site audit reports, and on-page optimization with WordPress.

Is it safe to buy backlinks from Fiverr?

Fiverr is only safe if you know exactly what you’re looking for and how to properly recognize it being advertised by a seller. The process of buying links on Fiverr is like buying miscellaneous goods from a bazaar. If you don’t understand what you’re buying, or what questions to ask the merchant, you can easily get hustled by shady sellers and purchase something fake, poor quality, or even illegal.

Even if most sellers on Fiverr have good intentions and are trying to sell you their best work, the sheer quantity of freelancers means that you’ll invariably come across some bad products.

You should have a solid grasp of SEO, especially link building, if you plan on buying backlinks from Fiverr. This is when understanding what makes a quality link is crucial to filtering out the legitimate gigs from the scams.

A really good practice is to deploy a test site for vetting the link packages you buy from Fiverr before using them on your main sites. This will allow you to monitor the results without serious consequences. People who attempt to just go based on blind trust to a client site may be in for a rude awakening.

Be wary of sellers offering crazy deals like “SEO blasts” that will deliver 5,000 diverse, high authority contextual links for $5. Does that sound natural to you? If a link was truly high quality, such as a high-authority contextual link, then it wouldn’t be so cheap and readily available.

Even an inexperienced SEO or website owner could use a little common sense to realize that an offer like the one mentioned above is probably too good to be safe. And these “too good to be true” offers are abundant on Fiverr.

The reality is that 9 out of 10 times these amazing packages are composed of harmful spam links or low-quality links that will get you penalized by Google. Unfortunately, it’s a very common practice for backlinks sellers to rely on auto-generated links, or blog and forum comments (which aren’t blocked by bots), to beef up their gigs.

These manipulators are just getting a bunch of low-quality links placed on blog sites and forums that probably won’t help you in the long run (often using simple tools like ScrapeBox). Plus how do you know if you’re getting links placed on relevant sites unless you consult with a seller that offers a niche selection?

Having said that, Fiverr is still a good marketplace for buying backlinks, especially if you’re looking for quick wins that won’t cost you an arm and a leg. I’m only giving you examples of what to look out for, and not trying to scare you away from using Fiverr, and recovery from bad links is always possible in the worst-case scenario.

The negative side to Fiverr backlinks

Two ways that Fiverr backlinks can harm you are:

1. They may penalize your website by clearly violating Google Webmaster Guidelines.
2. They may diminish the quality of your website’s link profile, causing your site to get an increased spam score and slowing down it’s progress over time.

Other disadvantages to Fiverr include:

May seem overwhelming

If you browse any sub-category you’ll notice hundreds of freelancers advertising their gigs with “I will do such and such”. There is a huge variety of services offered across multiple categories and many freelancers offering very similar gigs.

It may be a little difficult to find exactly what you’re looking for, especially if it’s a very specific gig. You also have to carefully read what sellers are offering because gig descriptions can either be very niche-specific, very similar to others, or misleading.

Fake reviews and fraud are rampant

As a seller these days, you’re practically at a disadvantage if you’re not hyping your profile up with fake reviews. Almost every seller has near-perfect reviews. Personally, I don’t care too much about the reviews. The “Pro Verified” status is a better indicator of quality than a 4 or 5-star average rating.

Sometimes a scammer will just sell you crappy links that violate Google guidelines and end up harming your site, despite how the seller advertises the gig.

Hard to truly know what you’re getting

Although you can find some services offering quality pillow/foundational style links through careful auditing, most of the “guest posts” you see, for example, are no more than glorified PBNs with low traffic coming from PBN farms.

Moreover, a lot of the gigs can be misleading. You may think you’re ordering something really good, but you’ll find the quality is way below what you were advertised after the gig gets delivered.

The best sellers may be too expensive

The professionally vetted freelancers who actually sell high-quality work, and who know it themselves, may feel entitled to charge a buyer a much higher price for a gig just to separate themselves from the other sellers and to communicate to the buyer that they’re actually professional.

The good side to Fiverr

There are definitely great advantages to Fiverr that make it a unique and valuable service:

A diverse selection of gigs

You can find some really neat gigs on Fiverr that no one else is really selling if you know what you’re looking for. If a job can be done online, you’ll find it on Fiverr. Everything you need that’s related to digital marketing and SEO can be found on Fiverr.

Affordable service

It goes without saying that Fiverr is cheap. Most gigs start at $5. You won’t find a cheaper marketplace for highly specialized digital skillsets and technical gigs anywhere else.

User interface

The website is well designed and has an easy-to-use interface for buyers. Broad categories are intelligently divided into subcategories with user-friendly descriptions and guides to help buyers find what they’re looking for.

Customer service

Fiverr is a reputable company that prioritizes the satisfaction of buyers. That’s why they offer full refunds and “verified” sellers. The platform also has pretty good customer service with a decent resolution system in place to help you deal with sellers.

There is also a strong knowledge base and community forum support for buyers and sellers.

Final thoughts on Fiverr backlinks

Fiverr is a good place for buying backlinks if you know exactly what you’re looking for and how to find it from particular sellers. Make sure you find a seller who will consult with you about your exact requirements and quality expectations.

As a new buyer, don’t risk deploying your purchased link packages to your most important sites before knowing that they’ll deliver expected results first. This is when a test site is useful for vetting sellers.

If a gig is too good to be true, it’s probably a harmful scam. As a buyer, you should really be patient and do business with someone you like. Even if a bad transaction can be refunded, using any bad backlinks from Fiverr can really damage your website’s performance on the search engine results pages in the long run.

Contributing Author: Brian Kihneman

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