Buying backlinks: where, what it costs, what gets penalized
People buy backlinks from gig sites, forums, guest post marketplaces and agencies, and buyers on Reddit report paying anywhere from about $30 to a few hundred dollars a link. Penalties and links that quietly stop working mostly come from the cheap end. We don't sell links. Below is what the market looks like and what we'd do instead.
No contract · cancel anytime
Where people buy backlinks, and what they pay
Most bought backlinks come from four places: gig sites like Fiverr, forums like BlackHatWorld, guest post and niche edit marketplaces, and agencies that resell those same marketplaces under their own name. The r/SEO thread asking where to buy backlinks names the first two, and most of the replies tell the poster to avoid both.
Prices vary as much as quality does. Buyers in r/localseo describe marketplace placements at about $30 to $40 each, and u/crazyfool267 in r/SEO estimated $100 to $300 a link for sites with real traffic that aren't oversold. On the bottom of the market, u/ClintAButler was blunt: "If you are paying $20 per link, you're buying PBN links."
What gets penalized: Google's spam policies treat buying or selling links that pass ranking credit as a link scheme, and that covers paid posts without a sponsored or nofollow tag. A manual penalty is the dramatic outcome. The more common one is slower. u/joyhawkins, who audits sites for clients, wrote: "I would stay clear away from guest posting networks. Google has been hammering these like crazy since 2023." They describe vendor sites whose ranking pages shrink year after year, and whatever value you bought shrinks with them.
The same thread has a fair counterpoint. Another commenter noted that competitors spending about $5,000 a month on these links keep ranking, because they replace lost links as fast as they lose them. That works as long as the budget never stops.
What you wanted from buying was links showing up without spending your week on it, and you can get that without paying for them. u/GardinerAndrew's advice in the r/SEO thread is the honest version of buying: "Do a backlink audit for the top competitors in your niche. Then reach out to the companies they are getting their backlinks from." That's a volume problem, which is the kind of work software is good at.
Last checked: 30 October 2026.
How it actually works.
Ask the pages already ranking
The agent pulls the pages ranking for your keywords and pitches those. They have readers, editorial standards and a reason to care, which is why a link from them is worth having.
One pitch per page, about that page
It isn't a template with the site name swapped. It reads what they published and says why you belong on that specific piece.
Rejection is part of it
Plenty say no, and that's the point. A page that will publish anyone for money is exactly the page a link is worthless from.
You see everything before it sends
There's no agency sending in your name to sites you've never seen. Every draft waits for your approval.
Paid directories, done properly
Where a listing fee is legitimate, our team fills in the form by hand and reports back what went live.
The one case where paying is fine
Plenty of legitimate directories charge a listing fee, and paying one isn't the same as buying a link. You're paying for review and inclusion on a page that exists for readers. Of the 1,289 directories in our database, 145 charge a fee and 1,138 are free, and each entry says which. The done-for-you service submits to them by hand, so you're paying for the work rather than for the link.
Real domains. Go and check them.
August.ai
in 60 days · 2.1K links · +900% traffic
BlackInk.ai
in 90 days · 10.5K links · +200% traffic
Virlo.ai
in 49 days · 1.3K links · +1200% traffic
Hey.Kwakwa.com
in 48 days · 724 links · +22% traffic
The things you're already thinking.
How much does it cost to buy backlinks?
By buyers' own accounts on Reddit, prices run from about $30 a link on marketplaces to $100 to $300 for links on sites with real traffic, and much more in competitive niches. Cheap links are usually cheap because the site exists to sell them.
Does buying backlinks actually get you penalized?
Sometimes, and unpredictably. The more common outcome is quieter: the links do nothing, the money is gone, and you can't tell which of your problems they caused.
Everyone in my niche is doing it though.
Some are. You're seeing the ones Google hasn't caught up with yet. That's survivorship, not evidence.
Isn't paying a directory the same thing?
No. A directory listing fee buys review and inclusion on a page built for readers. A link vendor sells the link itself. The test is whether anyone would visit the page if the links weren't for sale.
So how fast is the honest version?
You'll see first opportunities in minutes and usually first replies within a couple of weeks. It compounds, because the pages ranking for your keywords change every month.
I built this because I was doing it by hand for my own products, and the tedious part was never the writing. It was finding the twenty pages worth writing to, then remembering which ones I'd already asked.
So the agent does the finding and the remembering, and leaves you the part a human is still better at: deciding whether the pitch is any good. If it ever stops doing that well, tell me — the address below is mine and I read it.
Piyush Patel
Founder, BacklinkBot
Your next backlinks are
already out there.
On pages ranking for your keywords right now, written by people who have never heard of you. Run the agent and see how many it finds.
No contract · cancel from the dashboard