Every few months a prospect forwards us a quote from another agency: 500 backlinks for a few hundred dollars, delivered in thirty days. It is always tempting on a spreadsheet, and it is almost always the thing we spend the next year undoing.
Link building has not stopped working. What has stopped working is treating links as a volume purchase. Here is how we actually decide whether a link is worth pursuing.
A link is a vote that carries context
Search engines do not count links so much as weigh them. A link from a page that is itself trusted, topically related to yours, and read by real people carries meaningfully more weight than a link from a page that exists only to host links.
That context is the part cheap link packages cannot fake at scale. They can produce the anchor text and the placement. They cannot produce an audience, an editorial standard, or a reason for the page to exist.
The five checks we run before recommending a link
Before a linking opportunity reaches a client’s monthly plan, it goes through the same five questions every time.
- Would this page exist without SEO? If the site’s only purpose is selling placements, the link is worth little and carries risk. Real publications, industry bodies, suppliers, local press and genuine blogs all pass this test.
- Is the topic actually adjacent? A link from a respected site in an unrelated field does less than a link from a smaller site that covers your subject. Relevance beats raw authority more often than people expect.
- Does the site have real traffic? We look for organic traffic and a keyword profile that makes sense. A domain with a high authority score and almost no traffic is usually a domain that has been manipulated.
- What does its outbound link profile look like? A page linking out to payday loans, casinos and unrelated e-commerce in the same paragraph is a page to stay away from, whatever its metrics say.
- Would we be comfortable showing the client? This is the one that settles most arguments. Every link we build goes into a monthly report with the URL in it. If we would rather it were not listed, we do not build it.
Why cheap links are worse than no links
A link that does nothing is a waste of money. A link that actively signals manipulation is a liability, and the cost of cleaning it up lands on the client months later, usually at the worst possible time.
The pattern we see most often: a site buys a package, sees a small lift for six to ten weeks, then loses more than it gained after a core update. The recovery work — auditing the profile, disavowing what needs disavowing, rebuilding with legitimate placements — takes longer and costs more than doing it properly from the start.
What good looks like in practice
For most of the accounts we run, a healthy month is a handful of genuinely earned placements, not dozens. That comes from having something worth linking to: original data, a useful tool, a well-argued position, or a spokesperson who can give a journalist a real quote.
It is slower. It also compounds, because those links keep sending traffic and keep being cited, while a purchased link stops working the moment the site hosting it is discounted.
A reasonable way to judge your own profile
Open your backlink report and sort by referring domain. Look at the top thirty. If you would be happy to send a customer to most of those pages, your profile is in decent shape. If you would not, that is your priority for the next quarter, ahead of building anything new.
If you would like a second opinion on what you are already carrying, our off-page SEO service starts with exactly that audit. You can also ask us for a free review of your current backlink profile.