Backlink buy: how to judge an offer before you spend anything

TL;DR

• A backlink buy only stays inside Google’s rules if the link carries rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow", and those attributes are exactly what stops it passing ranking credit. The compliant version is an advert.
• The word covers five different products: guest post placements, link inserts, paid directories, private blog networks and real sponsorship or press. They fail in different ways and cost wildly different amounts.
• Ahrefs actually paid for links to find out the price. Link inserts averaged $361.44 across 450 sites. Guest posts averaged $77.80, and the sites selling them were almost all weak.
• Buying a PBN backlink is the worst value on that list. You are renting a footprint that somebody else controls.
• There’s a second UK problem nobody mentions in the sales email: paid editorial has disclosure rules under the CAP Code, and hidden advertising is on the CMA’s list.

If you’re weighing up a backlink buy, the honest summary is that the version which is safe is the version that doesn’t move rankings, and the version that moves rankings is the version that’s against the rules. That sounds like a dodge, so the rest of this is the long answer.

I’ve had this conversation a lot. Someone emails offering “high DA placements”, the price looks small next to a month of ads, and it feels like a shortcut worth testing. So let’s price it properly.

What does a backlink buy actually get you?

A backlink buy gets you a link, and almost never gets you the ranking credit you thought you were paying for.

Google’s spam policies list “buying or selling links for ranking purposes” as a link scheme. That includes exchanging money, goods or services for links, and sending free product in return for coverage with a link. The policy is direct about what happens next: sites that violate the policies “may rank lower in results or not appear in results at all”.

The same page then gives the escape hatch. Paid links are fine as long as they’re qualified with a rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" attribute. Google’s own documentation says to mark “links that are advertisements or paid placements” with sponsored.

Read those two things together and the trap is obvious. Disclose the link properly and it passes no ranking signal. Don’t disclose it and you’re in breach. There is no third door where you pay for a link and quietly keep the credit.

That doesn’t make paid placement worthless. A sponsored link on a publication your customers genuinely read can send real people to your site. Just buy it as advertising and measure it on clicks and enquiries. The moment you value it as SEO, you’re paying a premium for something you aren’t getting.

What are you actually buying? The five tiers

Five different products get sold under the same phrase, and lumping them together is why owners get burned.

Only the bottom row buys the thing you wanted. The other four buy a URL that appears somewhere.

So apply one test to any offer: if Google stopped counting links tomorrow, would you still want this placement? If yes, it’s advertising and might be a fine buy. If no, you’re buying a lottery ticket.

Should you buy a PBN backlink?

No, and it’s the easiest “no” on this list.

A private blog network is a set of websites owned by one person, usually built on expired domains that still carry old link equity, publishing filler content so that links can be sold to strangers. Search Engine Land’s PBN guide covers the pitch and the risk, and the risk is the bit that matters: these networks share detectable patterns.

The footprints are boring and consistent. Same hosting, same registrar, same handful of templates, same analytics IDs, same outbound link neighbourhood, and content nobody has ever read voluntarily. That’s a pattern-matching problem, and pattern matching is the one thing search engines are genuinely good at.

Google’s December 2022 link spam update put its machine-learning spam system on exactly this: detecting both sites buying links and sites built to pass links onward. The word Google used was neutralise.

That’s the part owners miss. The common outcome isn’t a dramatic penalty and an angry email, it’s silence.

The money goes out and nothing happens, and you can’t tell the difference between “it hasn’t worked yet” and “it will never work”.

Then there’s the ownership problem. When you buy a PBN backlink you’re renting space on an asset you don’t control. The operator can sell the network, let a domain lapse, redirect the site, or stack another 40 paid links onto the same page next quarter. You’ll be the last to know.

How to read a link-selling offer in five minutes

I run this whenever a client forwards me one of these emails. It settles the question nearly every time.

1. Search the site’s name in Google. If nothing exists beyond its own pages, no reader has ever gone there deliberately.
2. Read the last ten posts on their blog. Is there a subject? Or is car insurance sitting next to loft conversions next to crypto?
3. Check their existing outbound links for rel="sponsored". If they take money and disclose nothing, they’re outside Google’s policy and the UK ad rules at the same time.
4. Ask how many other paid links sit on the page yours would go on. A page with 30 of them is a link farm with better manners.
5. Ask for traffic data, not a domain score. Domain ratings are third-party estimates and can be inflated deliberately. Real sessions can’t.
6. Ask what happens if the link disappears in six months. Almost nobody has an answer, which tells you what you’re really buying.

If the replies come back vague on all six, you haven’t found a bargain. You’ve found someone who has done this to a lot of businesses already.

What does a bought backlink cost?

More than most owners guess, and the invoice is the smaller half of the cost.

Ahrefs did the useful thing and ran the experiment rather than guessing. Across 450 sites in nine competitive niches, only 12.6% were willing to sell a link insert at all, and the ones that were charged $361.44 on average. A parallel test on 180 sites found guest post placements averaging $77.80, and noted that the sites happily selling guest posts almost all had weak domain scores.

Put those two numbers side by side and the market explains itself. The cheap tier is cheap because it’s weak. The expensive tier is expensive because the seller knows what they’re holding and has priced it accordingly. There’s no quiet middle where strong sites sell cheap links to small UK businesses.

And neither figure includes the real costs: the article you have to write, the back-and-forth, the tracking spreadsheet you’ll abandon, and the cleanup if it goes wrong. One link insert at the average price is roughly a month of proper SEO consulting attention on the things you actually control.

Is a backlink buy legal in the UK?

Buying a link isn’t illegal. Publishing paid content without saying it’s paid is a different matter, and that’s a UK-specific layer most sellers won’t raise.

The CAP Code applies a two-stage test to advertorial: if there’s payment and the marketer has control over the content, the full Code applies and the content has to be obviously identifiable as an advert. The ASA’s guidance on advertisement features lists acceptable labels, and it specifically advises against using “sponsored” on its own because readers interpret it too loosely. The affiliate guidance adds that a disclaimer at the bottom of a page isn’t enough, because the reader meets the link before they meet the disclaimer.

On top of that sits the Competition and Markets Authority, which gained direct enforcement powers over unfair commercial practices under the new consumer protection regime. Hidden advertising is squarely inside what those rules exist to address.

Most of that exposure sits with the publisher, not the buyer. But you’re the paying party, and you’re a business whose customers are meant to trust it. Undisclosed paid editorial is an odd hill for a local service business to stand on.

What I’d spend the same money on instead

One project that comes to mind is CoLaz. I grew that group from a single clinic to nine between 2016 and 2022, using SEO and conversion-built websites with almost no ad spend, and I never bought a link. Not once, and not out of principle. It just never looked like the best use of the money.

What we did instead was unglamorous. Every new location got its own page, its own Google Business Profile, its own review flow, and links that came from things that had genuinely happened: a local sponsorship, a supplier’s stockist page, a business association listing, coverage in a local paper when we opened the doors. You can read more about that period if the background’s useful.

None of it spiked. All of it compounded, and none of it evaporated when Google changed its mind about something.

So if you’ve got the price of one link insert to spend, here’s what I’d actually do with it:

• Fix the Google Business Profile properly. Categories, services, hours, photos, a weekly post, every review answered. It’s the highest-return hour in local SEO and most competitors are skipping it.
• Clean up your citations. Same name, same address, same phone number everywhere it appears. Dull, cheap, still works.
• Earn two local links the slow way. A supplier’s stockist page, a trade body listing, a club you already sponsor. These take emails, not money.
• Publish one genuinely useful page. Not a keyword page. The answer to the question customers actually ring you about. That’s what the content work is for.

For a local business the ranking factors are only half the story anyway. BrightLocal’s 2026 survey of 1,002 US consumers found 97% read reviews online and 31% will only use a business rated 4.5 stars or higher, nearly double the year before. It’s US data, so treat it as direction rather than gospel, but the direction is clear enough. No purchased link fixes a 3.8-star average.

What if you’ve already bought links?

Check Search Console for a manual action first, and don’t reach for the disavow tool on instinct.

The manual actions report tells you whether a human reviewer at Google has taken action against your site. If that report is empty, the most likely story is that the links were simply ignored. Nothing to fix, nothing to clean up, just money you won’t see again.

If there is an unnatural-links action, the sequence is: remove what you can get removed, then disavow what you can’t, then file a reconsideration request explaining what you did. Google’s own documentation calls disavow an advanced feature that can harm your performance if used carelessly, and that warning is there for a reason.

The practical bit: write down what you bought and where, while you still remember. Most owners who come to me after an agency link campaign can’t produce that list, and reconstructing it is the expensive part.

Where I’d start this week

Three things, in this order.

Open Search Console and look at the manual actions report, so you know whether there’s an actual problem or just a sunk cost. Then spend an hour on the Google Business Profile, because that’s where the fastest local movement lives. Then pick one real relationship, a supplier, a trade body, a local club, and ask for the listing you’ve probably already earned.

To be honest, none of that is exciting, and none of it is what the person in your inbox is selling. It’s just what holds up.

If you want a second opinion before you spend anything on links, book a call and bring the URL. I’ll tell you straight whether links are anywhere near your real bottleneck, and most of the time they are not.