Purchasing links or earning them: the two routes side by side
Editorial links are given. Paid links are arranged. Both can point at the same page, and they behave very differently on your budget and your risk.
PublicLinks editorial team ·
Editorial and paid, row by row
Question
Editorial link
Paid placement
Who decides to link
The writer, on merit
The buyer, then the publisher agrees
Typical cost
Staff hours, content, outreach
From $1 to about $500 per placement here
Speed
Weeks to months, unpredictable
About 24 hours after payment here
Control over anchor text
None
High
Google's stance
Welcome
Wants a sponsored or nofollow value
Repeatable on demand
No
Yes
The honest trade
Editorial links cost time and carry no switch. Paid placements cost cash and carry a policy risk. Neither is free. Anyone claiming otherwise is selling one of them.
Buying has a place. Purchasing links makes sense when a page is already good and the missing piece is distribution. Thin pages are different. It makes little sense there, because a link cannot repair content that nobody wants to read. Fix the page first, as our pricing guide assumes on the seller's side.
Google's spam policies name buying or selling links that pass ranking credit as a link scheme. Since the December 2022 link spam update, SpamBrain also works to neutralise links that exist only to pass credit. We cannot promise any link will count. Nobody can.
Where each route earns its keep
Match the tool to the job.
Editorial for authority
A data study, a tool or a strong opinion gets cited without a fee. It scales slowly and compounds.
Paid for a starter push
A new page with no mentions can use a few relevant placements to get noticed. Judge each donor by its readers.
PR for names
A press mention builds the brand queries that sit behind everything else, linked or not.
What we would do
Put the first $500 into the page, then the first links into the page's best reader
Fix the page, then buy three or four placements on sites whose readers overlap with yours, and spend the rest of the month pitching one genuinely useful asset. Review traffic from those links, not only rankings.
Check the donor's real articles, not its metrics alone
Use varied, natural anchors
Keep a log with dates and prices
Typical objections
Is buying a link against Google's rules?
Google's spam policies list buying or selling links for ranking purposes as a link scheme. Marking paid links with a sponsored or nofollow value is the compliant route. Which risk you accept is your decision, and nobody can remove it.
How many paid links is too many?
No public figure exists, and anyone quoting one is guessing. Look at proportion and pace instead: a page whose entire profile arrived in one month looks different from one that grew steadily for a year.
A fair test for any link you consider
Ask who would click it. If the honest answer is nobody, the link has no job except ranking, and that is the use Google targets. A link a reader might follow has a second purpose and a safer profile.
Then imagine the attribute added tomorrow. A placement that still makes sense with rel="sponsored" on it, because it brings readers and a mention, is a decent purchase. One that only works as unmarked credit is a bet on being missed. Don't make it. For the mechanics, read the rel guide.
A hypothetical month
Picture a site owner with $300. In this made-up example, $150 buys three placements on topic-matched sites at $50 each, $100 pays for a small data table on the money page, and $50 covers outreach tools for a week. Compare Search Console clicks to the page after 60 days. These figures are illustrative only.