Buy Backlinks The Right Way in 2023 [Essential Guide]

❌ Spammy Services on Freelance Marketplaces

The first way to buy backlinks that most new site owners come across is through services offered on freelance websites like Fiverr or PeoplePerHour.

There may be good link-building services available on these sites, but there are also plenty of those that sell bad backlinks.

Here’s an example from one of the many low-quality sellers on PeoplePerHour:

Bad link-building services typically offer a large number of backlinks for a low price. They may even claim to create white hat links or provide big ranking increases.

Ensure you know what you are signing up for before deciding on one of these services. If the deal seems too good to be true, it almost certainly is.

This is because proper backlink building takes time, can be expensive, and has no guarantees.

A typical white hat campaign involves:

✅ Creating a backlink strategy.

✅ Conducting outreach to suitable websites.

✅ Negotiating with site owners.

✅ Creating high-quality content.

Any service that offers many links for a low cost is most likely taking shortcuts. Avoid these offers if you want to buy quality backlinks.

Beware of PBNs

Often, the people running these freelance services will have access to a private blog network (PBN), which is a network of websites they own that they can easily place links on.

This black hat link strategy allows them to generate a specific number of links with little time or effort.

The issue is that search engines hate PBNs. Buying links from this type of website can destroy your rankings.

Low-quality links

Other ways these freelance services generate links is through automatically generated content like blog comments or forum links. Or they may build low-quality links on directory sites.

Whatever their exact method, these are link-buying strategies you want to avoid.

🟠 Niche Edits

Niche edits are a strategy for buying links where you reach out to website owners that sell links and ask them to link to a relevant page on your website.

The upside

Niche edits are a good strategy to buy quality backlinks because you can:

✅ Choose the websites you reach out to.

✅ Generate backlinks to pages that don’t typically attract links.

✅ Generate backlinks quickly.

✅ Choose your anchor text.

It’s also hard for Google’s algorithm to spot this type of backlink. It’s tough to differentiate a niche edit link from an organic one, as long as you and the website owner are careful.

The downside

You must be vigilant about the types of sites you pay for links.

If a website owner is willing to link to your site for cash, how many other websites do they have the same agreement with?

While websites can typically accept paid links without search engines noticing, they risk Google’s algorithm regarding them as a link farm if they do it too many times.

Being associated with one of these sites can negatively affect your search engine ranking.

We recommend thoroughly analyzing any website on which you plan to pay for niche edit links. This will ensure you only buy quality backlinks.

High vs. low-quality sites for niche edits

We’ve spoken about how to differentiate between low and high-quality websites before. Here are the main points to consider:

• Domain metrics alone don’t tell you if a site is high quality. Plenty of sites used in PBNs are built on domains that already have a high domain authority (DA), which is a metric for the relevance of a website to a specific niche.

• A website’s content and traffic are the biggest indicators of quality. Look for a site with a good design, original articles, a clear topic, and a few posts marked as “Guest Author.”

• Transparency about who owns and operates the site is also important. Look for an “About” page with detailed information.

• Look for sites that generate consistent, quality traffic from Google. A downward trend, sudden drops, spammy keywords, or low traffic all suggest a site isn’t worth getting a backlink from.

🟠 Paid Guest Posts

Paid guest posts are when you pay money to place an article on a website.

This strategy has many of the same benefits as niche edits.

You can choose the website, the content you link to, and the anchor text. It’s a good way to buy high-quality backlinks.

Paid guest post on a pet niche blog

Here’s a common example of the kind of response you might get from a blogger who’s looking to earn some revenue from your guest post request:

This site has fantastic metrics, gets lots of relevant traffic, and they’re happy to receive revenue from it even though they’re strict about the content they publish.

In this particular instance, it will be a great option if you want to build links to any pet-related website.

The downside is the same as niche edits, too. If you place a guest post on the wrong site, you could get punished by Google.

Paid guest posts and niche edits

For these methods, you have to create the article yourself. This will either add to your costs if you choose to outsource or take up time if you choose to write the post yourself.

On a more positive note, when looking for paid guest posts, you might also find sites that won’t charge you in many cases, especially if you have a history of creating great quality content.

❌/🟠/✔️Paying an Agency

Paying an agency is slightly different from the other link-buying methods on this list.

This is because you are paying someone to build backlinks for you rather than paying for the backlinks themselves.

There is nothing wrong with hiring backlink builders, in our opinion. It’s no different from paying people to write content, design your website, or manage your SEO strategy.

What can make a difference, however, is how the agency you hire chooses to build links.

If the service spends your budget on PBN links, you’re at risk of getting a Google penalty.

But if it generates quality links through organic means like outreach or PR, you have nothing to worry about.

How can you tell a good agency from a bad one?

Of course, you’ll want to choose the best agency to carry out your link building so that you don’t run the risk of a penalty.

We suggest following these steps to find the right agency for you:

✅ Discuss with the agency how they build backlinks. Find out the strategies they use before committing.

✅ Look at their link-building case studies: These will show previous sites they have worked with and the results they have achieved. Check for specific details, as anyone can make up an anonymous case study.

✅ Check out their website. If the website has lots of good links and plenty of traffic, it suggests they know what they are doing.

✅ Read their testimonials and user reviews online: A history of happy clients is a good sign.

✅ Find out whether they use paid links. You can then make an informed decision about whether this is something you are comfortable with.

Try to avoid link-building services with these red flags:

❌ Suspiciously low prices: Link building is expensive, and the agency’s prices should reflect this. Avoid cheap backlinks.

❌ Guaranteed results: There are no guarantees in link building. If a service promises a certain number of links from specific sites, it suggests they are using a PBN.

❌ Fast links: We find that professional backlink building takes anything from a couple of weeks to a month to start generating results.

✔️ Sponsored content

Sponsored content is one way to buy links that is completely safe. It involves paying to place a sponsored blog post on websites.

This differs from guest posts in that the website owner will make it clear that the post is sponsored and give the link a rel=“sponsored” or rel=“nofollow” tag.

This is a tag that tells Google’s algorithm that you paid for the post. It also stops the post from passing on PageRank.

Unfortunately, this makes these links far less valuable than regular follow links.