Read the case studies before the proposals. Straight North fits manufacturers, B2B firms and practices that judge SEO by leads; Digital Third Coast is the choice when earned media and links matter as much as on-page work; SEO Design Chicago suits small businesses that want a published monthly price; and Americaneagle.com makes sense when SEO is part of a large site or store rebuild. The questions below cover three things buyers often ask an agency about: paid links, Bing and IndexNow, and how to see a page the way Google sees it now that Google’s cached copies are gone.
Is it safe to pay for links to our site?
Not if the links are meant to lift your rankings. Google’s spam policies define link spam as creating links to or from a site primarily to manipulate search rankings, including trading money, goods or services for links; advertising links are acceptable only when they carry the sponsored or nofollow attribute, and Google added the sponsored value for paid links on September 10, 2019. Since its December 2022 link spam update, which began on December 14 and finished on January 12, 2023, Google has used its SpamBrain system to neutralize unnatural links so that they pass no credit, and a human reviewer can also issue a manual action for unnatural links, shown in Search Console’s Manual Actions report; once the links are cleaned up, the site owner requests a review, which Google says can take several days or weeks. Ask any agency selling link packages where each link comes from and whether money changes hands.
Should an SEO agency also work on Bing?
Usually a little, because the effort is small. Bing Webmaster Tools is free, and in February 2026 Microsoft added an AI Performance report, in public preview, that counts how often a site is cited in Copilot, Bing’s AI-generated summaries and partner experiences, along with the queries behind those citations, though not clicks. Bing also supports IndexNow, a protocol Microsoft and Yandex launched in October 2021 that lets a site notify search engines as soon as a page is added, updated or deleted; Amazon, Naver, Seznam.cz, Yandex and Yep participate as well, while Google, which said in November 2021 that it would test the protocol, is not among them. Plugins for WordPress and other content systems can send these notifications automatically, so ask your agency to switch them on and add Bing to its monthly reporting.
How can we see a page the way Google sees it now that the cache is gone?
With the URL Inspection tool in Search Console. Google removed the Cached link from its results in early 2024, and Danny Sullivan, its search liaison, confirmed on February 1, 2024 that it had been retired and that the cache: search operator would go away too; in September 2024 the Internet Archive announced that Google’s “More about this page” panel would link to the Wayback Machine’s copy of a site. For your own pages, URL Inspection shows the raw HTML Google fetched, the HTTP headers, JavaScript console output and the resources the page loaded, and a live test adds a screenshot when it succeeds, which makes it the quickest way to check whether content loaded by JavaScript, or blocked by robots rules, is invisible to Google. Ask your agency to include URL Inspection checks in every technical audit, not just third-party crawler reports.
