A FastLinky alternative, tested against its own backlink profile

My habit with any link-building agency is the same: before reading the sales page twice, I run the agency's own domain through a backlink index. An agency's own profile is a free sample of how it works, even if an imperfect one. This notebook does that for FastLinky, using our index and nothing else.

Here is the setup. The homepage greets you with "Best Link Building Services Agency" and two orange buttons, Access Database and Book a Call. There is a WhatsApp bubble in the corner and no price above the fold. That tells me the product is a conversation first and a self-serve tool second. So the question for this notebook is narrow: what does the crawl actually see pointing at fastlinky.com, and what would you want to check if you were the one buying from them?

Rules for the experiments: one index, one domain, every number copied as returned. I did not touch the agency's dashboard because it sits behind a login. Everything below about the agency itself comes from its public pages, checked on 2026-10-09.

First number to log: 763 backlinks from 146 referring domains, 430 dofollow and 333 nofollow, so 56.4% dofollow. DR 30 in our index. First link seen 2024-07-12, last seen 2026-09-08. A tidy small profile.

Then I sorted referring domains by link count and the tidy picture cracked. innocams.io alone supplies 270 of the 763 links, spread over 128 pages, and only 30 of them are dofollow. The donor itself sits at DR 13. Nearly all of it carries one anchor: "Digital Marketing", 232 links, none of them dofollow.

My reading: that looks like a sitewide or category-style link, the kind a template stamps onto every page of a site. I cannot see the page templates, so treat this as an interpretation. It makes the profile look bigger than it is. Subtract that one donor and you are left with about 490 links from 145 domains. That is still a real profile, but it is a third smaller than the headline suggests.

Lesson for your own audits: always look at the top donor before you trust a total. A count of backlinks is only as honest as its most repetitive source. If you are vetting any agency's own site, run the refdomains action and read the first row before anything else.

Anchors are where an agency's method shows. Here is what the top of the list looks like, with dofollow share next to each:

Two patterns. The branded forms ("FastLinky", "Fastlinky.com", "FASTLINKY.COM", "fastlinky.com") are scattered across many capitalisations, which is what directory listings and forum signatures look like. Selectedfirms.co carries 22 links with the anchor "FastLinky" and zero dofollow, and webmastersun.com carries 15 dofollow links as "Fastlinky.com", which matches the forum account the brand holds there.

The commercial anchors are the second pattern: "high authority backlink", "best link building agency", "managed link building", "guest posting". All near 100% dofollow, and they land on service pages: 70 links to /high-authority-backlinks, 46 to /guest-posting, 42 to /casino-backlinks. The homepage takes 417. That fits the kind of placements its packages describe: links from DR 20 to 50 sites with descriptive anchor text. The index cannot show who placed each link, so this is a pattern, not proof of method.

The DR distribution of the 146 referring domains: 21 sit at 0 to 14, 44 at 15 to 29, 32 at 30 to 49, 3 at 50 to 69, and none at 70 or above. Average donor DR is 25. No .gov or .edu referrers at all. Nine referring TLDs, led by .com with 72 domains, then .uk with 13.

Set that beside the agency's own packages, which describe links from DR 20 to 50 and, on one page, up to DR 70. The profile matches the lower and middle of that range. The missing DR 70+ is not a flaw in itself, but it suggests what placements may look like in a crawl: plenty of DR 15 to 49 donors, rarely the big names.

The best donors in the profile are worth naming because they are the ones you could actually imitate or ask about: webmastersun.com (DR 46), promoteproject.com (DR 43, 22 dofollow links), selectedfirms.co (DR 41), ventsmagazine.co.uk (DR 41) and leadgrowdevelop.com (DR 38).

Every crawl-based index records things that nobody planned. Two oddities showed up here and they make a good teaching example.

First, 16 dofollow links carry the anchor "NetReputation.com reviews" (8 as "NetReputation.com reviews", 8 as "Netreputation reviews"), including 10 from ventsmagazine.co.uk. That is another brand's anchor text sitting in fastlinky.com's backlink list. The likely explanation is a shared guest-post page where the author box or link list mixes several clients. It shows how pages that serve more than one customer look in crawl data.

Second, about 27 nofollow links use Telegram link-seller strings, for example "TG @LINKS_DEALER | EFFECTIVE SEO LINKS FOR FASTLINKY.COM". Those read as comment or profile posts by third parties who name the domain. The site does not say it does this, and I would not blame the agency for strangers' posts. But the lesson is general: your backlink totals include whatever others chose to write about you, so filter by rel and by minimum donor DR before you report a number to anyone.

A third small thing: elivestory.com (7 links in our index) and newsforshopping.com both appear in the agency's published sample price table. newsforshopping.com also carries a post with an author box naming Fastlinky. For a buyer, that is a hint about the kind of publisher in the price table.

Not an index experiment, but I logged it because it will save you an email. FastLinky publishes prices, but the pages do not agree.

• The white-label page cards read Starter $99, Growth $149, Elite $199, while its body text says Basic from $99, Startup from $149, Growth from $199.
• The guest-posting page cards read $199, $299, $399, while its body text says $399, $499, $599.
• The managed link building page shows the $99, $149, $199 cards, while its FAQ says $399, $499, $599.
• The billing period is not displayed on the cards, so I cannot tell you whether a package is one-off or monthly.

The sample publisher table is more consistent: general-niche placements around $20 to $60 and grey-niche placements (casino and similar) from about $100 to $400 in the rows I saw. The company also states a 30-day window after receiving your report to ask for a revision, service credit or, in rare cases, a refund.

My advice: get the package, price and billing period in writing from the person you speak to, and attach the page you were looking at. Then use the data in this notebook to decide which DR band is worth paying for.

Let me be plain: apibacklinks does not build a single link. If you need links placed, FastLinky is the one doing the job and we are the one grading it afterwards. A few concrete cases where the agency is the right call:

• You want the work done. Their process runs six stages from planning to delivery, with outreach and relationship building included. We give you data, not labour.
• You resell. They offer white-label link building and say they update clients on key metrics. We have no client dashboards, shared reports or scheduled exports.
• Your niche is awkward. They list casino, cannabis and crypto link building as services with their own pages. Finding publishers for those niches is slow work, and an index cannot do it for you.
• You like to talk it through. Book a Call and WhatsApp are right on the homepage. An API will never ask what you are trying to achieve.
• You have no developer. Their login area and database access suit a marketer. Ours returns JSON, though the free explorer is there for browsing without code.

They also say they work with more than 750 clients and can reach more than 30,000 guest-post sites. Those are the company's own figures and I could not verify them, so treat them as claims to ask about, not facts.

The honest pitch is that we are the measuring tape, not the builder. If you buy from FastLinky or from anyone in the same lane, here is the protocol I would follow, using the API docs.

1. Before buying: run bulk_dr on the candidate publishers, up to 2,000 domains per call, and drop anything below the DR band you are paying for. Our DR is our own metric, comparable in spirit to other tools but never the same number.
2. Before choosing anchors: run anchors on your own target and read the top 50. If one phrase already dominates, vary the next order.
3. After delivery: run backlinks with the source domain filter and see whether each placement appears. Our index refreshes roughly monthly from our own web data, so a brand-new link can take weeks to show. Absence in week one means nothing.
4. Against competitors: run intersect on two to ten rivals to find domains that link to several of them. That is a prospect list you built yourself.

Cost for all of that: free actions cost nothing, lookups cost 1 credit, list calls 2 credits, from $0.10 per 1,000 calls. First sign-in with Google gives $100 of credit with no card. For more tools in this lane, see the link building tools hub.

Limits, since a good notebook states them: no keyword research, no rank tracking, no traffic estimates, no new-and-lost report and no alerts. Coverage is a sample of the public web and smaller than the big proprietary crawlers.