Should You Buy Backlinks? What You Actually Get for the Money

At a glance

• You can buy backlinks, and plenty of sites do, but buying links that pass ranking credit breaks Google’s spam policies.
• No law forbids buying a link. The risk is commercial: the link gets ignored, removed or flagged, and the money is gone.
• A bought link is rented. The site owner can take it down, add a sponsored tag, or sell the same page to your competitors.
• In an Ahrefs outreach study run “a few years ago”, a link insertion averaged $361.44 and a guest post $77.80 (per Ahrefs, fetched 2026-10-28).
• Never buy PBN links. A network that sells links to anyone is a public network, and public networks are the easiest kind to find.
• The option that holds up is owning the sites you link from: a network you build, host and control yourself.

We have hosted private blog networks for over a decade and we don’t sell links. This article is about whether buying them is a good deal, which is a different question from whether it is allowed.

Is buying backlinks illegal?

No. There is no law against paying a website to link to you. What you break is Google’s rulebook, and Google’s rulebook is about its own search results.

Google’s spam policies (fetched 2026-10-28) define link spam as “the practice of creating links to or from a site primarily for the purpose of manipulating search rankings.” The first example on the list is “Buying or selling links for ranking purposes”, which includes “Exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links” and “Exchanging goods or services for links.” Sending someone a free product in exchange for a post with a link counts too.

The same page has a carve-out: “Google does understand that buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web for advertising and sponsorship purposes. It’s not a violation of our policies to have such links as long as they are qualified with a rel=“nofollow” or rel=“sponsored” attribute value to the tag.”

So paying for links is fine with Google as long as the link tells Google not to count it. That removes the reason most people buy one.

Here is our opinion on that carve-out. If Google could reliably detect paid links on its own, it would have little reason to ask webmasters to label them. Google does detect a lot of link spam, and its spam policies say violations are found “both through automated systems and, as needed, human review.” But a link on a real site, in a relevant article, with a natural anchor, looks the same whether someone paid for it or not.

Does Google penalize bought links?

It can, but the more common outcome is quieter. In its December 2022 link spam update post, Google said it was using SpamBrain, its AI spam system, to “neutralize the impact of unnatural links on search results”, and that SpamBrain “can now detect both sites buying links, and sites used for the purpose of passing outgoing links.” It added: “Ranking may change as spammy links are neutralized and any credit passed by these unnatural links are lost.”

For a buyer, that means two different risks:

• The link gets discounted. It stays on the page but passes nothing, and you get no notice that it stopped counting.
• A manual action. A human reviewer at Google flags your site for unnatural inbound links. This is rarer, and you’ll see it in Search Console. Google’s spam policies say sites that violate them “may rank lower in results or not appear in results at all.”

Most money spent on bad links is lost to the first one. You don’t get punished, you just don’t get anything.

Why people buy links anyway

You often don’t have a choice. Publishers know links are a commodity, and plenty of site owners who would happily link to a good resource for free will still ask for a fee once they know you want the link for SEO.

The other reason is time. Outreach means finding prospects, qualifying them, writing to them, waiting, and following up. Guest posting adds writing a full article for someone else’s site. Both take hours per link, and a lot of those hours produce nothing. Paying skips most of that work, which is why buying links became a normal part of how SEO gets done.

The ways people buy links

Type	How it works	Who controls the link	Main risk
Paid guest post	You (or the seller) write an article for another site, with a link to you inside	The site owner	The site publishes paid posts for anyone, so its outbound links are easy to discount
Link insertion (niche edit)	The owner adds your link to an article that already exists	The site owner	The link can be removed or edited at any time, and you rarely notice
Sponsored post	A post marked as sponsored, usually with a nofollow or sponsored link	The site owner	Passes little or no ranking value by design
Directory listing	A paid entry in a business or web directory	The directory	Low-quality directory links are on Google’s link-spam list
PBN links sold publicly	Posts on a blog network whose owner sells links to all comers	The network owner	Public networks are found and devalued, taking your links with them
Bulk “packages”	Hundreds or thousands of links for a flat fee	Nobody you can contact	Automated, spammy links that are ignored at best

In every row, someone else owns the page your link sits on. That decides most of what happens to your money.

What backlinks cost

Ahrefs published the most transparent numbers we know of. In its guide to buying backlinks (updated July 18, 2024, fetched 2026-10-28), Ahrefs’ Joshua Hardwick describes a small study he ran “a few years ago”:

• Link insertions (niche edits) averaged “$361.44”, based on reaching out to 450 sites across nine competitive niches and asking to buy a link outright.
• Guest posts averaged “$77.80”, based on pitching a guest post to 180 sites across the same nine niches. He didn’t offer to pay, and many site owners sent their fees anyway.

Treat those as old, rough averages. Prices move with the niche, the site’s traffic and the type of link, and gambling and finance sit at the expensive end. A cheap guest post also isn’t cheap once you count the article you have to write for it.

For pricing models, retainers and a worked comparison, see our breakdown of what link building costs.

Why most bought links underperform

The problems with bought links come from how the deal is built.

The site sells to everyone. A site that will sell you a link will sell one to anyone. Its outbound links point to dozens of unrelated businesses, often in gambling or pharma. That pattern is easy to spot, for a buyer and for Google. High-risk niches pay the most for links and get burned the most.

The link can vanish. You paid once. The site owner can delete the post, edit the link, add rel="sponsored" after an audit, or let the domain expire. Nothing in the deal protects you.

You don’t control the details. The seller decides the anchor text, the surrounding article and the topic. You get a link in whatever post the site was willing to publish.

It never stops costing money. Every new link is a new purchase. When you stop paying, you stop getting links.

Tagged links do almost nothing. A nofollow or sponsored link can still send visitors, but its value for rankings is small to none. The difference between the two is a topic of its own (dofollow vs nofollow). If a seller offers a “safe” sponsored link for SEO, you are paying for traffic, so judge it as an ad.

How to vet a link before you pay

People will buy links whatever we say, so here is the checklist we would use.

• Does it sell to everyone? Look for “write for us”, “sponsored post” or “advertise” pages with a price list. Scan the site’s recent posts for outbound links to casino, pharma or loan sites.
• Does it have real organic traffic? Check the site in Ahrefs or Semrush. A site with authority metrics but no search traffic often exists only to sell links.
• Is it on topic? A link from a site about your subject is worth more than one from a general blog that covers everything.
• Is the page indexed? Search Google for the exact URL once the post is live. A link on a page Google doesn’t index passes nothing.
• Is the link dofollow? Check the HTML after publication. Check again a month later.
• Who else does it link to? If the outbound links on the site look like a client list, they probably are.

Two more habits help. Run a link gap analysis against competitors so you buy the links you are missing. Plan your anchor text and spread the purchases out over time, so one week doesn’t bring a burst of exact-match anchors.

Domain Authority is Moz’s metric and Domain Rating is Ahrefs’. Neither is a Google score, so neither tells you on its own whether a link is worth paying for. Traffic and relevance tell you more.

Even a link that passes every check can hurt your site if it’s part of a pattern of spammy links.

Should you buy PBN links?

Absolutely not. The P in PBN stands for private. If anyone can buy a link on a network, it’s a public blog network, and public networks are much easier for Google to find and penalize than private ones.

Our advice in the PBN guide hasn’t changed: build your own network, and don’t sell links on it. We cover the economics in more detail in buying PBN links.

The alternative: own the links

The question that matters is what you own at the end. After a year of buying links, you own none of them. After a year of building a network, you own the sites, the content and every link on them.

A private blog network is a group of blogs on expired domains that still have links pointing at them, hosted so they don’t look connected, and used to link to your own sites. Owning them changes three things:

• You choose the anchor text, the article and the page your link goes on, and the link stays as long as you want it.
• Once a blog is running, each new link from it costs you one post. The marginal cost keeps falling as the network grows.
• In competitive niches you have an edge, because your competitors can’t buy links from your network.

It is against Google’s guidelines, same as buying links. The difference is that the risk sits in your hands. A network built on good domains, with real content and no shared footprints, is very hard to tell apart from ordinary blogs.

It costs more up front. From our PBN guide, a good expired domain costs roughly $50 to $250 or more, depending on the name and backlink profile. Then you need hosting that keeps the blogs from looking related, and content for each one. Our guide to build your own PBN walks through every step. If you want an agency to do outreach for you instead, read about link building services first.

Easy Blog Networks

Easy Blog Networks hosts the blogs in your network so that they don’t share footprints. Each blog gets its own IP, and the IPs and nameservers come from the hosting providers themselves, such as Amazon Web Services, DigitalOcean and Linode. You run every blog from one dashboard. Backups run daily and WordPress, theme and plugin updates are automatic. You can schedule AI-written posts to every blog with your own OpenAI API key.

Plans start at US$39 a month for 10 blogs, with a 7-day free trial and a 30-day money-back guarantee. See pricing or host your own blog network on Easy Blog Networks.