Backlinks On Steroids alternative: which branch are you on?

Most comparison pages assume two software products. This one does not, because Backlinks On Steroids does not look like software. The site is a WordPress build with a dark nav bar (Home, Services, Articles, Testimonials, FAQ, About Us), a sidebar that still says "Protected by DMCA Copyright 2005-2014", and an order flow that runs through PayPal and email. The company describes itself as having "60 backlink builders including three quality control specialists". The product is labour.

apibacklinks is the opposite: 19 API actions over an index of 181,132,097 domains and 2,774,625,913 domain-to-domain links. We do not place a single link. So the first question is not "which is cheaper" but "which verb do you need".

• Place links for me: go to Branch A.
• Tell me what a link vendor really delivered: go to Branch B.
• Vet an agency before I pay: go to Branch C.
• Run a link service of my own and need data: go to Branch D.

Some readers will land on two branches, and that is fine.

Here the answer is Backlinks On Steroids, or another agency, and not us. The page for its packages says "Google Rankings… Done For You" and tells you that all you need to do is pick keywords. That is a real service, and we do not offer it.

The price list is public. A few rows, all in USD and all taken from the live pages:

Do the arithmetic and Silver and Gold both land at $0.50 per backlink (counting profile links and comments, not the social signals), Platinum at about $0.63. The profile product alone is listed at $69.95 for 100 and $95 for 200. Whether the Link Balancing packages repeat monthly is not stated on the page, so ask before you pay.

Read the fine print before you decide: the pages say URLs and keywords can be changed once a month with a week's notice, and that no refunds are given once backlinking has started. Those are ordinary agency terms, and they are the reason Branch B exists: you commit monthly, so it helps to see what arrived.

The site says you receive position reports and on-page recommendations monthly, and that the spreadsheet listing the backlinks created is sent if you ask Joan. The FAQ also mentions two reports per order: one listing your backlinks and one listing the RSS directories they were fed to. So you will have a list, once you request it. What you will not have is a second opinion on whether the crawl can see those links.

That second opinion is a short API job. Take your own domain and pull the referring domains and the individual backlinks:

1. Call refdomains for your domain: up to 100 top referring domains, with links, pages, dofollow counts, donor DR and first and last seen. Cost: 2 credits, $0.0002.
2. Call backlinks with a date range that starts at your order date. Up to 1,000 rows come back per call, with source URL, anchor, rel and last seen.
3. Compare the source URLs against the agency's sheet. Matches are links the crawl has seen. Misses are links that are not crawled yet, fall outside the sample, or are not live.

A caveat that cuts against us: our index refreshes about monthly and is not real-time, and a brand-new link can take weeks to appear. A missing link two days after delivery proves nothing. A missing link four months after delivery is a question worth emailing. Also, the vendor's FAQ says its links are "Auto-Approved" and "usually start showing up within 24 hours"; a monthly crawl cannot confirm a window that short, so use it for the longer view.

For anchors, anchors returns the top 50 anchor texts per target. If an order promised "10% varied generic anchor text and URL only" for profile and comment links, you can check the split yourself in one call.

Backlinks On Steroids makes a handy worked example here, because its own footprint is public.

The site claims about 60 backlink builders, a company formed in 2006, and chart screenshots of keywords holding Position 1 after the 2012 and 2014 Penguin releases. Our index sees 53 referring domains, 135 links and 15 distinct anchors. The numbers do not contradict anything, because a crawl sample sees a slice of the web and client work lives on client sites, not the agency's own. They just show what a vetting pass looks like: a small profile whose anchors are mostly the company name and naked URLs, with a local keyword cluster around Rockford.

Now run the same pass on a prospect you are really considering, and go further than the agency's own site. Ask for one or two client domains, and call overview and refdomains on them. The questions that matter are plain ones. Are the referring domains varied in DR, or all stacked at one level? Do the anchors look balanced or all pointing at one commercial phrase? Do the links point at inner pages or only at the homepage? The overview and domain calls are free and need no key, so you can ask these questions before you have spent a cent, and the free explorer shows the same report for this agency in the browser.

If you are an agency yourself, you already know the pain this page keeps circling: the client wants proof, and the proof lives in six spreadsheets and a few screenshots. An API does not build links, but it can feed the reporting.

A sketch of a hypothetical month for a small agency with 40 client domains. This is a made-up scenario, not a customer story:

• One bulk_dr request covers up to 2,000 domains, so scoring a prospect list of 1,500 sites is a single call.
• One compare call puts up to 20 domains side by side, which is a ready-made slide for a client with 19 competitors.
• One intersect call across 2 to 10 competitors lists the referring domains they share, which is a short list of places to ask for links.

None of this replaces an outreach tool, a CRM or the people who write the emails. We have no alerts, no new-and-lost-links report and no client dashboards, so you build those views yourself from JSON. Developer teams like that. Account managers who want a login to forward to a client will not. If that is you, the hub at link-building tools sorts the products in this part of the market, and the Organicgrowth page is a sibling comparison in this series.

Be plain about it. If your sentence starts with "I do not want to learn a tool", you should stay with an agency like this one, and quite possibly this one.

• You want the work done. We have no labour to sell. They say they employ 60 builders and offer a menu of profile links, comments, Web 2.0 posts, PBN articles and social signals.
• You want a person. Phone and email are on the homepage. We are an endpoint and a documentation page.
• You want a small, predictable bill. $150 a month for Silver or $30 for five PBN articles is a number you can put in a budget without writing code.
• Your site is in the adult or gambling space. The pages state that profile backlinks are the only option offered for adult, porn or gambling sites. That is a clear rule, and it saves you a call.
• You value experience over software. The about page says the company was formed in 2006. How well that experience performs for your keywords is a thing our data cannot measure.

What you give up is visibility: no dashboard, no self-serve tool, no API, and reports arrive monthly by email. That is a fair trade for the right buyer. You can get some of the oversight back with a short script of API calls, as in Branch B.

Follow your branch to its end and the recommendation is short.

Branch A: hire the agency. Ask for the backlink list on day one, not at month three.

• A, hands-off buyer: keep Backlinks On Steroids or a similar agency; you do not need us.
• B, buyer with a delivery sheet: run refdomains and backlinks 60 to 90 days after the order and compare. Cost: a fraction of a cent.
• C, vetting an agency: use the free overview on its own domain and on two client domains before paying.
• D, running link work: use bulk_dr, compare and intersect for planning, and keep your outreach tooling.
• Anyone needing keyword research, traffic estimates or a site audit tool: we have none of those. Backlinks On Steroids offers monthly position reports and a written site analysis as services, not software; we offer neither.

The API docs list all 19 actions. New accounts get $100 in free credit on first sign-in with Google, with no card and no subscription, so most of these checks cost nothing to try.