The backlink market… essential for any company seeking visibility and traffic on its site (and in its store).
Since the beginning, or at least 2001, Google’s algorithm has been based on backlinks and online citations (see attached image – article from 2001). The history of search engine optimization has seen some great qualitative and non-qualitative moments (link farm, bookmark, site farm, panda, penguin etc.), but the reality is that a technically clean site with backlinks (and a good e-reputation) works! It trusts the top of the first page on all desired queries and keywords. Over the past few months, on behalf of various clients, I’ve been comparing the different offers on the market and the value for money of the networks on offer. So I’m going to gradually introduce the service providers/partners I always enjoy working with and present my briefs.
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Interview with Sylvain Le François, Owner of www.backlinks.fr
Hello Sylvain, thank you for accepting this interview. Can you introduce yourself and your different areas of expertise?
Hello Nicolas, and very happy to do this interview with you :)
I’m Sylvain Le Francois, I started SEO in 2012, mainly with the creation of niche sites (a big hundred). I then turned more and more to selling backlinks, and created backlinks.fr in 2016. At the time, there were almost no link-selling platforms other than Rocketlinks. Rocketlinks is a very good platform, but the problem for agencies was that you had to negotiate each sponsored article, each link, with a different intermediary. Many advertisers didn’t respond to requests for sponsored articles, and planning a 50-link campaign took forever.
Backlinks.fr solves this problem, with a single intermediary and guaranteed publication times.
Sylvain, the market for SEO tools is exploding all over the world, and not a week goes by without some stranger (often Indian or Pakistani lol) offering me, via Linkedin, a trusted spot. What makes Backlinks.fr so special compared to other paid PBNs, link resellers or backlink offers on uncritical media?
Most of the freelancers offering these “trusted spots” are intermediaries.
- They take a commission on the sale, which therefore reduces the ROI of the link-buying budget. Link buying is a customer acquisition channel like any other; as with SEA, the aim is to obtain the maximum possible result for each € spent. The more intermediaries there are, the lower (on average) the ROI.
- The problem with buying from strangers, and even more so if you don’t know anyone in common, is that they’re not interested in building your loyalty. A friend of mine tried to make a dozen purchases from English speakers who contacted him (probably Indians); after spending over €1,000, he had 100% of his links removed in less than 2 months.
- Finally, compared to other platforms, I don’t know them in detail and I think some of them do a good job. On our side, I’d say that our specificity, which I haven’t found elsewhere, is to put a huge emphasis on site security.
The aim is, of course, to avoid Google penalizing our sites for “selling links”, and by extension, to avoid Google penalizing customer sites for “buying links”.
We have put in place numerous processes to limit risks. I couldn’t possibly list them all, but I’d like to mention a few:
- Network confidentiality
- Several hundred different IP addresses (expensive to host, so not everyone does it)
- Different hosts
- Different registrars
- Regular publication of articles without links, to avoid being a “link farm”.
- 100% of content is written by humans, not AI
- Sites don’t link to each other (it’s super easy to explode your trustflow by linking sites to each other, but the risk of penalization becomes very high).
- etc…
Sylvain, in all honesty, buying backlinks can have its contextual limits. The famous glass ceiling, positions that no longer advance. How do you think this can be managed?
There are several levers to work on to improve your SEO. The most important (in random order) are content, site speed, backlinks and user behavior.
The limiting point is, of course, the lever you work least on. If you’ve put a lot of pressure on one or more of these levers, but have done very little work on the others, you’ll generally get better results by working on your weakest links.
Sylvain, what are your 4 tips for getting a good link profile that flies under the radar?
All the tips I’m going to give will have the same goal, to keep a natural link profile:
- Don’t systematically optimize your anchors, and vary them. If 50% of your anchors are exactly “click here”, it’s not because your anchor is supposedly natural that your link profile is! Divide your anchors into different categories, e.g. 20% “semi-optimized”, 20% “very slightly optimized”, 35% URLs, and 25% “neutral words” (vary them, never use the same neutral words twice).
- Vary, vary, vary the type of links. Don’t just do 300-word sponsoring articles, or web profiles, or homepage links, or forum links. If you look at the link profile of a site that doesn’t buy links (like wikipedia or others), you’ll see that its link profile is varied. The key is to get as close as possible to a natural link profile!
- Maintain a natural link acquisition frequency. You don’t have to (and shouldn’t) acquire links at a very (too) symmetrical frequency. But for example, working for 2 months on landing page 1, then moving on to 2, and so on, is not natural at all. Similarly, working on one type of link (e.g. sponso article) for 3 months, then switching to forum links for 2 months, and so on, isn’t natural either.
- The conclusion from the previous 3 points: when you look at your own link profile, via tools like majestic, you shouldn’t be able to see that your links are purchased.
What about ereputation and local seo? Does it work on Backlinks.fr too?
I’m not an e-reputation specialist, but I imagine that the principle is to highlight the content you want, before the content you want to see disappear. So all you have to do is work on the SEO of the results you want to see (such as Linkedin, trustpilot, favorable blog articles, etc.). You can, of course, use backlinks to rank this type of content.
As far as local SEO is concerned, we have a few sites that specialize in certain regions, such as sites related to real estate in a certain geographical area, businesses in the south-west, etc.
What are your plans for Backlinks.fr in 2025?
Our top-secret (lol) plans for 2025 are to continue working on site security, to stay as natural as possible and under Google’s radar. We’re also planning new processes for our content, to improve visitor behavior on the site, as this is one of the levers I see as increasingly important.
In principle, our texts will continue to be written by humans, but I’d like to see us improve our processes using AI, to get the most interesting texts possible for users.
Thank you very much Sylvain for your time and this excellent interview. For those of you who are looking for good value for money in your netlinking purchases, go here: www.backlinks.fr
Thanks to you, it was a pleasure to share my knowledge, hoping it will be useful to readers :)
