FatJoe Blogger Outreach Review – Is It Worth Buying?

Of all the activities that you need to carry out when doing SEO, link building is undoubtedly one of the most time-consuming, and probably the one that is taking you most worries.

Writing your content and waiting, you will not get results as fast as when you’re building high-quality and relevant backlinks meantime.

That’s the reason why in the last years, new productized services have popped out that promise to accomplish this tedious task – link building, for affordable prices.

One of the most popular services of this kind is FatJoe that has been around since 2012. 

Whether you do SEO for your business or your clients, keep reading this review to discover whether FatJoe is worth using or not for link building.

Our Methodology

I ordered a DA40+ and a DA50+ blogger outreach for one of the sites in my portfolio from FatJoe.

In the image below, you can see proof of the order place (I have removed some parts of the screenshot for obvious reasons.)

Doing link building is a delicate process as landing links on the wrong sites can get you no results or, worse, get you penalized from Google.

The methodology I’m using for this test focuses on some metrics which are generally used for vetting link building opportunities. Which means in a few words: how much does it look like a natural promotion of a website getting linked by another because of its quality services/content?

• Niche Relevancy. Relevancy is critical. If you have a website about golf, getting a link from another site that is dedicated to this topic will land you better results than from a generalist site.
• Quality of the Content. Many websites that exist only to sell links will be publishing everything as long as people pay them. I’ve analyzed the quality of the guest posts from FatJoe, and the overall site quality in terms of content.
• Organic Traffic. Not all websites are getting traffic from Google, which means that if a site does get at least 1000 visitors a month from search engines, it is probably considered as reputable and trustable enough.
• Domain Rating (DR). This is a metric created by Ahrefs to determine whether a domain is more or less reputable. While FatJoe uses Domain Authority (DA) from Moz to tier its Blogger Outreach service, I prefer using DR because I consider it more objective.
• Referring Domains (RD). How many links is the domain that we’ve landed a link from have? This is another positive factor that a site is trustable and reputable.
• TF/CF. What are the Trust Flow and Citations Flow of the domain? I usually target a ratio of TF/CF of 0.75 minimum for making a link building opportunity worth pursuing.
• Wayback Machine. How does the history of the site look like? Was it blatantly selling backlinks in the past? Did it change topics completely? It’s always good to have a look at the Archive of the site’s history to vet the quality of a link building opportunity and its safety.
• Other Relevant Factors.

Metrics of the Guest Posts Received

Niche Relevancy

As said before, if you run a blog about golf, getting a link from a site that covers all the topics under the sun is going to be less potent than getting it from a site all about golf.

In the case of the links obtained from FatJoe the DR50+ site was perfectly relevant to our site, while the other scored a 4 out of 5 in terms of relevancy, but I have to say that it wasn’t easy to find a niche to perfectly fit with this topic. Overall the result was excellent.

Rating: 5/5

Quality of the Content

On the site that we’ve landed a guest post on content quality was great overall.

The guest posts were readabable, editorial, and well edited, published by a trusted author, with relevant external links. Really nothing to complain about.

You can choose the length of the article when ordering. I went for 1000 words and it didn’t had any filler content inside. The links were also placed in a natural way that fits with the context.

This note sounds obvious but in the SEO world there are lots of shady service providers, so I need to underline that both blogs aren’t stuffed with random links to casino or other shady stuff. 

The websites are far from being a “hub” simply publishing guest posts without adding any value.

Rating: 5/5

DR, Organic Traffic, and RD

That’s the DA40+ website

While this is the DA50+ site.

As you can see, the DR of the sites it’s really high and compliant with what promised by FatJoe.

The sites are getting a good amount of organic traffic, which means they’re trusted by Google. 

Referring domains are as well more than 100, in one case even 2.39k, which makes the site even more reputable in the long-run (a shady website wouldn’t get so many backlinks.)

Rating 5/5

TF/CF

That’s the DA40+ site.

While that’s the DA50+ site.

As you can see from the images, both sites have a TF/CF ratio lower than 0.75, which is what I usually recommend to determine an excellent link building opportunity. 

Both sites have good metrics anyhow on the other factors, which makes this single element passable as an exception. 

As you can see anyway, the higher the DA you choose on FatJoe, the better the metrics seem to be overall.

Rating 3/5.

Wayback Machine

Does the website have a clean history?

In this case, both sites had a clean history and have been around for years.

Rating 5/5

Other Factors

It was discovered that having “Write for Us,” “Guest Posts” or similar on the page correlates (not causation though) with penalties.

Both sites were clean on this site and looked like regular editorial sites. One downside, however, is that the DA50+ site didn’t have a valid SSL certificate.

A plus is instead that both sites have a consistent presence of social media, both have a Facebook page or Group with thousands of subscribers, and both blogs were updated consistently.

Rating 4.5/5

SERP Movement

I waited a couple of months before reviewing the placement from FatJoe to analyze SERP movements and make this a proper and data-driven review. 

Here’s what happened.

The guest posts hit on 23rd November 2019 and the SERP went up.

Unfortunately, two backlinks are not enough to make a real case, so take this data for what it is.

I don't think these are the most potent backlinks I've ever had, but based on the metrics previously analyzed, they surely help to move the needle.

Great Customer Support

FatJoe's customer support proved to be reliable. While for them to manage so many link building campaigns at a time, it's understandable that they can commit some mistake along the way, I haven't found a single review that blamed their customer support, most they were praising it.

While I didn't have any issue with my order, I've felt that the customer support was supportive and quick.

Rating 5/5

Pricing

As of 2020 the following are FatJoe prices for Blogger Outreach.

As reported by various reviews, getting a DA10+ might not be worth it, and these links would be anyway too weak.

As said previously, for this review, I have analyzed a DA50+ and a DA40+ link.

My advice is to go for at least a DA30+ and always to upgrade the content length (at least 1000 words), you’ll usually get better results and sure-proof even more your site from penalties.

Rating 5/5

What Others Are Saying

Other reviewers like AuthorityHacker and GotchSEO outlined that results from FatJoe can vary, especially when choosing lower-priced tiers. 

While I believe, from what I’ve seen, that FatJoe has improved its service and quality over time, I think that they can continue improving in vetting the websites for their blogger outreach.

Conclusion

Hiring someone to do link building is always delicate. I would compare it to having brain surgery. You want the best doctor you can find to do it because the consequences can be fatal. Because of the operation, well… You might die. For link building, your business’s site can get penalized, which, well, it isn’t the end of the world, but it would be a considerable loss.

When using FatJoe’s Blogger Outreach service for DA40+ and DA50+, I’ve found the service to be clean and secure to be used. 

While FatJoe might not be the best white-hat link building service in the market, for cost-value, it’s the one that delivers the best results in terms of SERP movements and metrics of the sites for the price.

Overall supplementing your link building strategy with some guest posts from FatJoe can be a good strategy if you have the budget, but only if you’re spending the effort to get backlinks as well with proper marketing and creating linkable assets.

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