I recently bought three links from FatJoe to see just how good this service is.
FatJoe is a well-known SEO business offering a wide range of SEO services. Getting backlinks through their blogger outreach service is easy, but is it worthwhile?
Read my full review, where I break down the quality of each link and reveal exactly what I received.
Overall FatJoe Review
I give FatJoe 3.5 stars out of 5.
Conclusion
For this FatJoe review, I ordered three links through their blogger outreach service. I wasn’t totally let down as some customers have been, but I wasn’t completely happy either.
A general feeling I got was that these links weren’t placed by bloggers through an authentic outreach program. Instead, it just felt like they were inserted into ‘link farm’ type sites. Looking at how quickly these links were placed, this theory makes sense.
I won’t deny that two of the links were pretty good. They were placed on relevant sites with a decent DR and traffic. One link, however, was pretty terrible.
So, is FatJoe worth it?
Well, it could be, depending on your niche and how many backlinks you need. The links weren’t as high quality as the ones I got from Authority Builders, but they were more affordable.
You can definitely use FatJoe to ramp up your SEO, but I’m not fully convinced if the link-building service I used was right for my site.
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FatJoe Review (3rd Party Reviews)
First, let’s see what other customers had to say about FatJoe.
FatJoe has a great reputation on Trustpilot, with a 4.5-star average and many glowing reviews.
While reading various independent blog reviews, it’s clear that FatJoe is either a big hit or miss. Some people rave about their SEO services while others absolutely tear them apart.
The only way for me to understand how good their services are is by trying them out myself.
My FatJoe Experience
For this FatJoe review, I used their blogger outreach service to build 3 links for my tech website.
Here is a breakdown of the links that I bought.
Link 1: 3 out of 5
- Total cost: $140
- Domain Rating (DR): 39
- Ahrefs Rank: 1,729,506
- Referring Domains (DoFollow): 1.92K
- Total Keywords: 57.1K
- Estimated Organic Traffic/mo: 35.1K
- Domain Relevance: 4 out of 5
- Content Relevance: 5 out of 5
- Content Quality: 4 out of 5
- Word Count: 1000 words
This was a great link to start off with.
The website is relevant to my target link, and the site is clearly focused on a specific niche.
Judging by the clear editorial control, this site doesn’t feel like a link farm or PBN at all. In fact, it seems like a very genuine blog - which is what I would expect from a paid blogger outreach service.
The blog post that my link was placed in covered a good topic, and my link fitted in naturally.
The website gets a good amount of traffic, but this traffic seems to happen in big spikes. Right now it’s on a steady upward path, but it who knows if it might just crash again?
These spikes would usually worry me, but the steady over the past two years is quite promising.
The guest post is also already indexed, so everything seems in order.
All things considered, this link seems worthwhile.
Link 2: 2 out of 5
- Total cost: $250
- Domain Rating (DR): 51
- Ahrefs Rank: 586,426
- Referring Domains (DoFollow): 12.4K
- Total Keywords: 3.1K
- Estimated Organic Traffic/mo: 241
- Domain Relevance: 1 out of 5
- Content Relevance: 2 out of 5
- Content Quality: 2 out of 5
- Word Count: 700 words
This link was a complete contrast to the first link.
I don’t think this site can be trusted, and I’m not sure how much of a real blog this is, or if it's just a site designed for backlinks. My guess is on the latter.
At first glance, the website may seem OK with a decent domain rating. Just look at the low traffic though, and you realize that this website probably doesn’t have any real audience.
Here’s a report of the organic traffic from Ahrefs:
Just by looking at this, my guess would be that it was once a legitimate site back in 2016 (when it earned a good DR), and was then repurposed into a link farm. The traffic pretty much just disappeared.
And when you look at the content on the site, every topic under the sun is covered:
Health, tech, celebs… anything goes. It seems like they’ve just set this up to accommodate any kind of backlink. The combination of Bitcoin, celebs, and animals just doesn’t gel well with me.
And the guest post that includes my link was not impressive at all. A short, rushed article that didn’t add any real value to my topic.
I’d say this link was a miss, and not what I’d expect from a paid service that’s supposed to reach out to real, trusted bloggers.
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Link 3: 3 out of 5
- Total cost: $300
- Domain Rating (DR): 58
- Ahrefs Rank: 303,168
- Referring Domains (DoFollow): 6.9K
- Total Keywords: 32.6K
- Estimated Organic Traffic/mo: 6.2K
- Domain Relevance: 3 out of 5
- Content Relevance: 3 out of 5
- Content Quality: 3 out of 5
- Word Count: 1500 words
My next link was placed on a tech news site specifically focused on Apple. While my content has nothing to do with Apple, it does fall within the general tech field, so I’ll accept the site as being relative to my link.
The site itself seemed pretty good, with clear editorial control and consistency in the content published.
I really liked how naturally my link was placed, with a strong anchor text. Check it out:
The site gets stable traffic. Here’s a report:
And a quick search on Archive.org shows somewhat consistency, with two major spikes:
These spikes are a bit worrying and show that the site may have been repurposed over these periods.
The guest post page is indexed by Google and has a tiny amount of organic traffic, which is a good sign.
Overall this link was well placed in relevant content. The site seems generally trustworthy, with no major red flags.
Summary
FatJoe is a big name in SEO, and they offer an easy way to get a lot of backlinks for your site.
The links that I got were a combination between good and questionable. The authenticity of the sites was a bit worrying, but I still managed to get some decent DR links pointing to my website.
So, not a waste of money, but not the best quality backlinks I’ve ever bought.
FatJoe Alternatives
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Read our roundup of the best link-building companies.
Also see our guides on link building, how to guest post, how to get link insertions, our broken link building process, the logic behind link juice and how niche edits work.