Buying backlinks: the price, the policy, and who pays

"Buying backlinks" covers four fairly different transactions, and the prices and the risks are not the same across them. Knowing which one is on offer matters more than the headline price.

The cheapest end is a marketplace listing. Search this term today and the third organic result is a marketplace advertising 722 link services starting at six dollars. At that price nobody is writing anything, and the link is going onto a page that exists to hold links.

The most expensive end is a placement in a publication with a real audience, sold as a sponsored post. That one is often honestly labelled, which is also why it does not do what the buyer usually wants it to do.

The rule is not ambiguous and it is worth reading rather than paraphrasing. Google's link spam policy names "buying or selling links for ranking purposes" as link spam, and it defines that to include exchanging money for links, exchanging goods or services for links, and sending somebody a free product in exchange for them writing about it with a link.

There is a legitimate version of every one of those, and the difference is a single attribute. A paid or sponsored link marked rel="sponsored", or any link marked rel="nofollow", is not a policy violation, because the markup tells Google not to pass ranking signals through it. Advertising is allowed. Advertising disguised as an editorial endorsement is what the policy is about.

This is the trap in the whole category. The attribute that makes a paid link compliant is the same attribute that removes the ranking benefit somebody is paying for. A seller who marks the link correctly is selling you traffic and brand exposure, which can be worth buying on its own terms. A seller who does not is selling you a policy violation and letting you carry it.

Two things can happen when Google decides a link was paid for. The first is algorithmic: the link stops counting. That is the quiet outcome, and the practical result is that the money bought nothing at all. Nobody sends you a notice, and the campaign simply underperforms in a way that looks like bad luck.

The second is a manual action. In Search Console this arrives as "Unnatural links to your site", and it is issued against the domain the links point at. Recovering from it means finding the paid links, removing or disavowing them, and filing a reconsideration request that explains what you did. That work is measured in weeks, and it is work you do on your own site.

The seller is in neither outcome. Their page keeps ranking, they keep the fee, and the only thing they lose is one customer. This asymmetry is the whole reason the market functions: the person taking the risk is not the person setting the price.

Almost nobody wants a link. They want one of three things, and a link is just the form the thing usually arrives in. Separating them out is useful, because two of the three can be had without paying anybody.

The first is speed. Outreach is slow and rejection-heavy, and buying converts an uncertain three-month process into a purchase order. The second is certainty, which is what "guaranteed links" is selling. The third is the ranking signal itself, and that is the only one of the three that the policy is about.

Speed and certainty are real problems and they have honest answers. The reason outreach is slow is not that emails take a long time to write. It is that finding the openings, working out which of them you can honestly answer, and writing something specific to each is a job nobody has time to do by hand, so it does not get done. That is a workload problem, and workload problems are what software is for.

None of this is an argument for doing nothing. It is an argument that the same budget buys more when it is spent on finding and answering openings rather than on placements.

Start with the openings that already have your name on them. Unlinked mentions are pages that already talk about you and simply did not link; the pitch is a correction rather than a favour, and it has the highest hit rate of anything in link building. Next are the pages linking to two or three of your competitors and not to you, which are pages whose author has already demonstrated they will link to something in your category.

Then the inbound side, which most people skip because it does not look like link building. Journalists, podcast bookers, conference programmes and awards are all actively asking for people to feature, and answering them is not outreach at all: it is responding to a request that was published. Those links are editorial by construction, which is the thing the paid market is trying and failing to imitate.

Mentionry is built on the position this page argues for, and it is worth being direct about the commercial interest: we sell the alternative, so read the argument on its evidence and not on our say-so. The policy text and the manual-action wording are Google's, and both are public.

What the product does is remove the workload reason people buy links in the first place. It reads public sources on a schedule, finds the openings across both halves of the problem, judges every one of them against your domain one at a time, and writes the email, the form contents or the reply that opening needs. The outreach goes out from your own mailbox, so the replies and the sending reputation are yours.

It will not find you a paid placement, and that is a refusal rather than a limitation. Marketplaces are filtered out of every channel twice, and if a reply asks for payment in exchange for a link, the drafting declines to write the response and says why. Qualifying a domain is free, and it answers the first honest question: whether there is a competitor pool worth mining at all, or whether everything you have is still to be earned.