Every few months a prospect forwards us a quote from another agency: 500 backlinks for a few hundred dollars, delivered in thirty days. On a spreadsheet it looks like a bargain. In practice it is usually the thing we spend the following 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 going after.
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 actual people carries meaningfully more weight than a link from a page that exists only to host links.
That context is the part cheap 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 in the first place.
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. Most opportunities do not survive them, which is the point.
- 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.
Anchor text is where most profiles give themselves away
If you want to spot a bought link profile without looking at a single domain, look at the anchor text distribution instead.
Links that happen naturally are messy. People link using your brand name, your URL, the title of the page, or something unhelpful like “this article” and “here”. Exact-match commercial phrases turn up occasionally, because occasionally that is genuinely the clearest way to refer to a page.
Bought links are tidy. Twenty placements, and eighteen of them say “best accounting software london” because that is what appeared in the order form. No editor writes like that. It is one of the cheapest patterns for a search engine to detect, and it is the reason a profile can look strong by every other metric and still be treated as manipulated.
When we place a link, the anchor is whatever reads naturally in that sentence, on that page, for that publication. Sometimes that is the target keyword. Usually it is not.
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 would have.
What about nofollow and sponsored links?
A question we get on nearly every call: if a link is tagged nofollow or sponsored, is it worthless?
No, and treating it as worthless leads people to some bad decisions. Those tags are treated as hints rather than instructions, and more to the point, a link from a publication your customers actually read still sends you customers whether or not it passes authority. We have had placements that moved no rankings at all and produced enquiries for two years.
What we will not do is pay for a link and then quietly leave the tag off. That is the thing the rules exist about, and it is not worth the risk to your domain for a signal you were probably going to get anyway.
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.
If you have already inherited a bad profile
This is common enough that it is worth saying plainly: if a previous provider built you a profile full of directory spam and paid placements, you have not ruined the site permanently. It is a repair job, not a rebuild.
The order matters, though. Audit first, work out which links are actually doing harm rather than simply being unimpressive, and be conservative with the disavow file — it is a blunt instrument and people cause themselves real damage with it. We wrote the process up in more detail in recovering from a toxic backlink profile.
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.
Then check the anchor text distribution against what you just read. Those two checks, done honestly, will tell you more about where you stand than any single authority score.
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.