Cost of Buying Links in SEO
Backlinks. Link building is challenging, time-consuming, and often demoralizing. PageRank is a ranking factor used by Google to evaluate the quality and relevance of a webpage. If a website violates its guidelines, such as buying links, it can harm its PageRank. Most purchased links will pass PageRank, but Google will discount them, meaning they won’t have any impact on search engine rankings.
Google has a team of human reviewers who can impose manual actions on websites. If your site receives a manual action, some or all of it may not be displayed in Google’s search results. You can check for manual actions in Google Search Console.
Despite creating great content and personalizing outreach emails, many site owners still ask for payment in exchange for placing a link. This makes it extremely difficult to build links based on merit, so it’s understandable that many SEOs opt to buy links instead. And many do.
In examining Site Explorer data, it seems highly likely that many of these links were purchased.
What is the cost of links?
- Niche edits – You pay a site owner to add a link to an existing page on their site.
- Paid guest posts – You write an article containing links to your site and pay a site owner to publish it on their website.
How much do niche edits cost?
It depends on various factors:
- The domain authority of the site.
- The organic traffic received by the site over time. You can check this in the Overview report in Site Explorer.
- Whether the site has been buying links or not. You can check for unnatural anchors in the Outgoing Link Anchors report in Site Explorer.
- If your proposed link provides value. This can be determined by checking the website’s content and engagement on social media.
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