You have probably had the email. “Hi, I can get you 50 high-authority backlinks for $99.” Before you reply, spend five minutes here. Most of those links will either do nothing or quietly damage the site you are trying to grow.

What a backlink actually is

A backlink is a link from someone else’s website to yours. Google treats it as a vote of confidence: if a respected site links to you, that is a signal you are worth trusting. The key word is respected. A link from a junk directory nobody visits counts for nothing, and a link from a network of fake sites built purely to sell links can get your site penalised, meaning Google actively demotes it in search results.

The problem with paid links

Google’s guidelines are plain: buying or selling links that pass ranking credit is against the rules. They call it a “link scheme.” They have been catching these at scale since the Penguin update in 2012, and the detection has only got sharper since. When Google spots an unnatural link pattern, it either ignores the links entirely (so you paid for nothing) or it applies a manual penalty, a human reviewer flagging your site, which can wipe your rankings for months.

The services flooding your inbox are selling links on what are called “private blog networks” or PBNs, clusters of websites that exist only to sell links and have no real audience. The sites look legitimate at a glance but Google’s systems are good at spotting them. Even when they are not caught immediately, the links rarely move the needle because the sites linking to you carry no genuine trust.

Ahrefs publishes a link-building service marketplace where individual links are sold for anything from a few pounds to several hundred. The price does not protect you. A link that costs $200 from a PBN is still a PBN link.

Three options when you want more links

Option 1: Buy them anyway

Some businesses do it and get away with it for a while. The risk is real and the upside is unreliable. If you are in a competitive niche and your competitors are doing it, you might feel you have no choice. That is a gamble, not a strategy. If Google catches up with you, recovering from a penalty takes months of work and costs more than the links ever did. Dont go here unless you understand exactly what you are buying and why.

Option 2: Earn links you actually deserve (the free route)

This is slower but it compounds. Every link you earn from a real site stays working for years. Here is where a local business genuinely gets them without paying a link seller:

  • Suppliers and trade bodies. If you stock a brand, that brand often has a “stockists” page. Email and ask to be listed. Trade associations, accreditation bodies, and professional memberships almost always link to members. Check yours today.
  • Local press. A story about your business in a local paper or a regional news site earns a link that carries real weight, because those sites have genuine audiences and editorial standards. A product launch, a local hire, a charity tie-in, an unusual service: any of these can be a short press release to your local paper’s news desk.
  • Sponsorships. Sponsoring a local sports club, school event, or community group almost always gets you a link from their website. The link is real, the site is real, and you get goodwill on top.
  • Supplier directories. Many manufacturers and wholesalers run directories of approved retailers or installers. If you work with them, you should be in there. It takes one email to find out.
  • Complementary businesses. A florist and a wedding venue. A plumber and a kitchen fitter. If you refer work to each other, a link on each other’s “recommended suppliers” page is natural, earned, and useful to visitors.

Work out how many of these you have already. If you have ten suppliers and are listed on none of their stockist pages, thats ten free links you have not claimed yet. That is where to start.

Option 3: Fix what you already have

Before chasing new links, check whether links you have already earned are working. Use Google Search Console, Google’s free tool that shows you how your site performs in search, and look at the “Links” report. You may find links pointing to pages that no longer exist, a broken redirect that loses you the credit entirely. Fixing those is free and immediate.

The honest recommendation

Do not pay for links from an email you did not ask for. The risk is not worth the reward, and the reward is usually nothing. Instead, spend one hour this month doing three things: email two suppliers and ask to be listed on their stockist page; check your trade association membership page and make sure your profile links to your site; and send one short story to your local paper’s news desk. Thats three real links from real sites, for the cost of an hour.

If you want to grow faster after that, the next step is building content that earns links because it is genuinely useful, which is a different conversation.

If you want us to look at your current link profile and tell you exactly where you stand, we can do that. We will show you what you have, what is broken, and what is worth going after first. See how we work and decide if it’s worth a conversation.