Most people who get burned buying backlinks did not buy a bad link. They bought a number. A seller quoted a domain rating, the buyer paid for it, and nobody looked at the site. This guide is the look.
A real backlink costs between $100 and $500
The price of a link tracks the cost of getting it placed. A writer has to pitch an editor, the editor has to say yes, someone has to write an article the site will actually publish, and the publisher usually charges a fee. On a site with a domain rating in the thirties and a few thousand monthly visitors, that adds up to somewhere around $150. On a DR 60 site with tens of thousands of visitors, it is closer to $500.
Anything far below that range is not the same product. A "50 backlinks for $99" package cannot be paying editors, so the links sit on sites that publish anything for anyone. Those sites are the ones Google discounts or penalises.
Run five checks on any site before you pay
You do not need paid tools for most of these. A free account with a backlink checker and ten minutes is enough.
1. Check the site has organic traffic
Open the domain in Ahrefs, Semrush or a free equivalent and look at organic traffic, not domain rating. A site with a DR of 45 and 40 visitors a month is a link farm with a good backlink profile. A site with a DR of 28 and 8,000 visitors a month is a real publication. Traffic is the number that is hard to fake.
2. Read three articles on it
Pick three recent posts at random. If they are on unrelated topics, written in different voices, and every one links out to a commercial site in the second paragraph, the site exists to sell links. If they read like a person wrote them for a reader, it does not.
3. Look at who else links from it
In your backlink tool, look at the site's outgoing links. A real publication links to sources, tools and other publishers. A link seller's site links to casinos, CBD stores, essay mills and loan companies, all from the same month.
4. Ask where the link sits and what attributes it carries
Ask before you pay. A link in an author bio, a footer or a sitewide sidebar is worth far less than one in the body of an article, on an anchor that makes sense in the sentence. Ask about the rel attribute too. Google's guidelines say paid placements should carry rel="sponsored" or nofollow, and treat paid links meant to manipulate rankings as link spam. A seller who promises every link is followed and risk free is telling you they have not read those guidelines. A seller who tells you the placement type and the attribute up front is one you can plan around.
5. Ask what happens if the link disappears
Publishers delete posts, sell domains and redesign sites. A seller who stands behind the placement will replace a link that drops within a set period. A seller who will not is telling you what they expect to happen.
Walk away from these offers
- Any package priced per hundred links.
- Any seller who will not name the site before you pay.
- Any site whose domain rating is the only number the seller quotes.
- Any guarantee of a ranking. Nobody controls that, and a seller who claims to is either lying or planning to point spam at your page.
- Any private blog network, however it is described. "Our network of partner sites" is a PBN.
What to send a seller
Give them the page you want to rank, the two or three competitors that already rank for it, and the anchor text you would like within reason. A good seller uses the competitors to find sites that already link to pages like yours. A bad seller ignores them because the sites are the same regardless of what you sell.
How BacklinkBuddy handles each check
We run the traffic check in Ahrefs on the day we pitch a site, share each site with you before we write anything, place the link in the body of a written article, disclose the placement type and link attributes on the report, and replace any link that drops within twelve months. The prices are on the homepage, by domain rating tier, and they are the same prices on the invoice.
