There is no going rate for a link, and the useful answer to "how much should this cost?" is not a number — it is a question you can answer yourself. A link's price tracks two things almost entirely: how much human judgement stands between you and the placement, and how much labour it takes to satisfy that judgement. Everything else in a quote — authority scores, niche, the word "permanent" — is a proxy for those two. Which means the price band you are shopping in tells you which method is being used on your behalf, and that is far more useful than knowing the average.
The same invoice line can describe two completely different transactions. Paying someone to fill in submission forms you would otherwise fill in yourself is buying labour. Paying a site owner to place a link that passes ranking signal is buying an endorsement that was not earned — a different thing, with a different risk. The price usually tells you which you are getting, if you know how to read it.
What you are actually buying when you pay for a link
Strip away the packaging and every quote is some mix of three things:
- Labour. Somebody's hours: research, writing, outreach, form-filling, follow-up, reporting. The only component with a real floor, because human time has one.
- Access. Permission to appear somewhere that does not let everybody in. Scarcity makes access expensive, and scarcity comes from gatekeeping.
- Risk transfer. A promise that the link stays up, gets replaced if it vanishes, or came from somewhere that will not embarrass you. Guarantees are priced in because they cost the seller money.
A quote that is mostly labour behaves like any other service: it scales with hours and drops with efficiency. A quote that is mostly access behaves like a market for a scarce good, which is why two superficially similar placements can differ enormously.
The five things that push the price up
1. Human editorial gatekeeping
Every placement sits somewhere between "anyone with an account can post" and "an editor decides". The more a real person has to be persuaded, the more it costs, because persuasion is slow and often fails. A site that publishes whatever it is sent has no gate and no scarcity, so its links are cheap — and worth roughly what they cost.
2. The content that has to exist first
Many placements require something written to a standard: an article, a resource, a piece of research. That writing is a real cost and varies enormously with the standard being met. When a quote looks startlingly low for a placement that normally requires an article, the article is where the corner was cut.
3. Relevance and scarcity
A genuinely relevant site in a small field is rare by definition, and rarity prices itself. General-interest sites that will take anything are abundant, which is why they are cheap and why relevance is the first thing sacrificed in a cheap package.
4. Durability, verification and reporting
A link that comes with a live report, a replacement guarantee, and someone checking it months later costs more than one you receive as a spreadsheet row and never hear about again. That difference is real work, not padding — and it is the part buyers under-value until the first time they audit a batch and find half of it gone.
5. Volume, and where volume is legitimate
Per-unit prices fall when work is repetitive and templated, and for some off-page work that is entirely honest. Bookmarking and directory submissions are production tasks: the judgement about which pages matter and what the copy should say stays with you, and only the form-filling is delegated. That is the case for buying volume, and it is covered properly in social bookmarking at scale. The dishonest version of the same discount is volume achieved by removing the judgement entirely.
What a cheap price is telling you
A price far below the labour floor is not a bargain; it is information. If a placement would take a person an hour of real work and it costs less than an hour of anyone's time anywhere, the work was not done by a person, or it was not done on a site that anybody reads.
Cheap almost always means one of these:
- The placement was automated onto sites that exist to host links rather than readers.
- There was no gate, so there is no scarcity, and nothing was rationed or earned.
- The content is generated filler wrapped around an anchor.
- The same page hosts hundreds of unrelated links, a pattern that is easy to detect and easy to discount.
None of that makes the link harmful in every case. It makes it inert in most, which is the more common and more expensive outcome: money spent on something that does nothing. What bookmarking and submission links actually contribute, and by what mechanism, is set out in the SEO link building guide.
The costs that never appear on the invoice
Budgeting on the quoted figure alone understates what the work costs you.
- Your briefing and review time. Somebody has to decide which pages get promoted and check what came back. Those are your hours, and outsourcing does not remove them.
- Follow-up on indexation. A placement nothing ever crawls is a placement that did not happen.
- Record-keeping. If you cannot say later where a link came from, you cannot judge the vendor, repeat what worked, or clean up what did not.
- Cleanup. Undoing a bad batch is slower than the batch was.
- Opportunity cost. The same budget spent on something worth citing often produces more links than the budget spent buying them.
How to set a budget when nobody will give you a price list
You can build a defensible number without knowing anybody's rate card.
- Price your own hours first. Work out what the task takes you and what your time is worth. That is your ceiling for pure production work — pay less and delegation is winning; pay more and you are buying convenience, which is allowed but should be a decision.
- Decide the unit before you shop. Per link, per placement, per month and per campaign are not comparable, and vendors quote in whichever unit flatters them.
- Separate judgement from production. Budget generously for the few placements that need a human touch, and treat the repetitive breadth as production to be bought efficiently.
- Buy a small test batch first. It costs a fraction of a campaign and shows you what the reporting, the sites and the survival rate actually look like.
- Cap what you spend on anything you cannot verify. If you cannot see where it went, it is a bet rather than a purchase, and bets should be sized accordingly.
Where paying makes sense, and where it never will
Paying works when it removes typing and leaves the thinking with you. It fails when it is asked to substitute for the thing links are a response to. No budget makes a page worth citing that nobody would cite, and the amount of money that turns a thin page into a ranking one is not a number that exists — the preconditions are set out in what has to be true before links work.
The practical test before any purchase: if this placement sent zero ranking signal and only real readers, would I still want it? If yes, the price is buying reach and it is worth negotiating. If no, you are buying a number in a report, and there is no price at which that is good value.
FAQ
Is buying backlinks against Google's guidelines?
Paying for links that pass ranking signal is against them, and that has not changed. Paying somebody to do submission work you could do yourself — filling in bookmarking and directory forms, writing descriptions you specified — is buying labour, not endorsements. That is not a loophole; it is the difference between delegating your own effort and purchasing someone else's vouch.
Why do two sellers quote wildly different prices for what sounds like the same link?
Because "the same link" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Different gatekeeping, content requirements, relevance, guarantees and reporting produce genuinely different products. Ask what each quote covers on those five points and most of the gap explains itself.
Is a cheap link ever worth buying?
When what you are buying is production rather than placement, yes — routine submissions where you set the targets and write the copy are legitimately inexpensive because the task is repetitive, not because the standard has been dropped. When the cheapness comes from removing the gate, no.
How do I compare a monthly retainer with a per-link price?
Convert both into "what arrives, and what does it cost to verify". A retainer usually bundles strategy, content and reporting; a per-link price does not. Divide the retainer by what it actually delivered over a real period rather than by what was promised.
How do I know whether any of it worked?
Not by counting links. Look for referral visits from the placements, whether the pages you promoted moved at all, and how much of the batch still exists a few months later. A vendor whose links quietly vanish is charging you again every time you replace them.
Next step
Take the last quote you were sent and mark it up against the five drivers: gatekeeping, content, relevance, durability and volume. Anything the quote does not cover is either not included or not happening, and that markup will tell you more about the price than any average ever could. More on spending off-page budget where it actually returns something at BookmarkingToday.
