Built by operators who got tired of bad links.
Ankore is a productized link-building operation run by a small team of SEO operators, content editors, and outreach specialists. We sell the work we would buy ourselves — and only that.
To make link building feel like craft work again — honest, durable, and worth charging for.
What three years looks like.
Why we started this.
Most link-building agencies are optimized for the wrong thing — link counts, not link quality. The result is a market full of placements that do not move rankings, reports that do not survive scrutiny, and clients quietly renewing because switching feels like more trouble than it is worth.
We started Ankore with a different premise. If a placement is not worth showing on the homepage of a case study, it is not worth charging for. Every package we sell, every outreach pitch we send, and every report we deliver is built around that idea.
We are a small team. We work hard on small numbers of clients. The unglamorous truth is that link building done right is craft work — slow at the front end, durable at the back end. We would rather be honest about that than promise the alternative.
Six things we won't compromise on.
Every operating decision we make traces back to one of these. If a client engagement requires us to bend on any of them, we walk away.
Manual outreach, every time.
Automation has its place. The actual outreach pitch — the one a real human reads and responds to — is not it. We do not sell volume that bots produce.
Transparent pricing.
Anyone hiding pricing behind a sales call is optimizing for their margin, not yours. We publish what every package costs, including agency wholesale tiers.
Real metrics, real reports.
DR is a starting point, not the end. We report organic traffic, anchor distribution, and link velocity because those are the metrics that actually drive ranking changes.
We say no to bad fits.
Casino, gambling, adult, payday loans — we decline. Legitimate businesses cannot afford to be linked from sites we cannot proudly attach our name to.
Anchor math is non-negotiable.
Every campaign has an anchor calendar that holds the math. Exact-match never over-indexes. Branded distribution diversifies. We model your niche, not the average.
Slow at the front, durable at the back.
Quality outreach takes weeks, not hours. The placements that survive eighteen months of algorithm changes were never the cheap ones. We are honest about the trade.
The six-point quality scorecard.
Every placement we ship is scored on these six dimensions before it leaves the building. Anything that scores below the bar gets thrown away — even if a client already approved it.
Domain authority
DR40+ floor, traffic-verified through Ahrefs and Similarweb cross-checks.
Topical relevance
Host page semantic alignment, not just niche-level fit.
Page-level traffic
Live ranking host pages — no zombie domains coasting on legacy DR.
Anchor fit
Distribution-aware anchor selection per placement, against the campaign calendar.
Indexing trajectory
Monitored re-promotion if a placement is slow to index in the first 14 days.
Durability
12-month watch with automatic replacement on removal, nofollow conversion, or anchor swap.
How we work, honestly.
Direct comparison against the average link-building agency. Not a strawman; the reality of the market we operate in.
What we lean on.
Industry tools for verification, custom internal tooling for the things off-the-shelf software does badly. Every metric we report can be traced back to one of these sources.
Verticals we actually understand.
We say no to industries we cannot represent honestly to a publisher. Below are the spaces where we have writers, publisher relationships, and historical data to point at.
Where we draw the line.
Not every dollar is worth taking. These are categories we decline as a matter of policy — not because they cannot pay, but because we will not vouch for them to a publisher we respect.
- Casino, gambling, sports betting
- Adult, dating, escort services
- Payday lending, debt-collection schemes
- Crypto pump-and-dump, MLM token launches
- Counterfeit goods or unlicensed pharmaceuticals
- Any vertical we cannot represent honestly to a publisher
Small team, deep specialty.
Four humans plus a small pool of niche-specific writers and outreach contractors. Same people from your kickoff to your eighteenth-month review.
Leo M.
Founder · Strategy
Ten years in SEO operations. Built and sold an agency before deciding the productized model was the only honest way to ship link building at scale.
Anna K.
Head of Outreach Operations
Runs the outreach pods. Ex-publisher relations at a tier-1 trade media group. Holds the publisher quality bar the rest of us argue with.
Kojo A.
Head of Content
Editor and writer. Trains every contributor on niche-specific style. The reason guest post drafts read like editorial, not content marketing.
Saanvi P.
Digital PR Lead
Owns daily HARO and Qwoted cadence and the quarterly data study program. Direct journalist relationships across 30+ trade and tier-1 publications.
Coverage across five time zones.
We answer every reply within one business day, regardless of where you are. Outreach pitches go out at the local time of the publisher, not ours.
What clients actually say.
Pulled from active engagements documented on our case studies page. Names anonymized at client request; quotes verbatim.
“We went from invisible in AI tool roundups to consistently showing up in 'best AI for X' lists. The directory work alone paid for the engagement, and the guest post layer compounded for months after we paused outreach.”
“We expected the link work. We did not expect the trade press mentions to drive enterprise demo requests directly. That changed how we forecast pipeline — three of our five biggest deals last quarter cited our coverage as how they first heard of us.”
“Removing fulfillment from our founders' plates was the unlock. We grew the agency without growing the team — Ankore became the back-end. Clients never knew, and our retention got better because we had time to actually do strategy.”
Want to work with us?
The fastest way to know if we're a fit is a 20-minute call. No deck, no pitch — just questions about your goals.
- Public per-link pricing
- 12-month replacement
- No long contracts
