Nothing is charged until you pay the basket. Links from $1.
Myth vs reality
Bloggers swap beliefs about links the way they swap affiliate tips. Some are right, some are half right, and a few cost money.
We kept a running list of things bloggers say about links. Each one below is sorted into true, partly true or false, with the reason, and with the limits of what anyone outside Google can know.
One more caveat. Google does not publish its ranking formula. Where a claim rests on evidence, we say so; where it rests on experience, we say that instead.
| The claim | Verdict | What is actually going on |
|---|---|---|
| Publish more and the links will come | Mostly false | Content is necessary, but pages rarely attract links just by existing. Someone has to find them. |
| Nofollow links are worthless | Partly false | Google treats nofollow as a hint since March 2020. They can still send readers and mentions. |
| Domain Rating is what Google uses | False | DR is Ahrefs' own score. Google has no such number you can look up. |
| A new blog needs hundreds of links | False | Fresh sites in many niches rank with a handful. Check the page you want to beat. |
| Buying links always gets you penalised | Not that simple | Paid links meant to manipulate rankings break Google's spam policies; outcome depends on scale and pattern. |
| Free guest posting is the only safe route | Half true | It costs time, and the host often decides the anchor and the target. |
| Exact-match anchors are the best anchors | Often false | Heavy repetition is a footprint. Mix them. |
| One link ought to move a page overnight | False | Crawling and re-evaluation take days to weeks. |
The most expensive belief is that backlinks to my site are a number to push up. The count is a vanity metric. What matters is which pages gain support and from whom.
A hypothetical example. Blogger A has 120 links, almost all to the homepage. Blogger B has 25, spread across her best three reviews. If we had to bet on whose reviews rank better, we would not pick the bigger number.
Look at links per money page. That is the figure worth tracking, and this checking guide shows how.
Where Google has said something in public, we used it: nofollow became a hint on 1 March 2020, rel sponsored and rel ugc arrived in September 2019, and the December 2022 link spam update brought SpamBrain into the picture.
Where it comes from practice, we say so. If you want to test one yourself, the $100 plan shows a way to do it on three pages.
Where we land
Treat links as a boost for pages that already deserve attention. Fix the page, then support it. Do both slowly.
A link from a page Google has not indexed cannot pass anything, so indexing matters. You can check with a site: search or the URL Inspection tool in Search Console. Being indexed alone does not make a link strong; relevance and editorial context still matter.
It can, if links are clearly paid and manipulative. Penguin became part of the core algorithm in September 2016, and SpamBrain has worked on link spam since December 2022. Smaller, relevant, varied purchases look very different from bulk orders.
No. A placement carries one link to one URL. If you want several pages supported, order separate placements, ideally on different donors, and spread them across weeks rather than days.