Owners forward me the emails. Fifty high authority backlinks. Two hundred. A thousand, for less than a tank of gas. Then a different owner forwards a proposal from a serious company with a line that says “link building, monthly” and a number next to it, and asks whether that is the same thing.
It is not, and the difference is the whole point of this post. Links from other websites are still one of the strongest signals Google reads about which pages deserve to rank, which is exactly why there is a market for selling them badly. Here is what link building services are actually selling you, what a real one looks like on an invoice, why the target page matters more than the link, and when a small business should refuse to pay for links at all. Including from us.
What are link building services actually selling you?
A link, to Google, is one website vouching for another. When a trade association, a local newspaper or a supplier’s site links to your roof replacement page, Google reads that as a reason to trust the page a little more. Enough of those, pointed at the right pages, and you move against competitors who have been at it longer.
That is the asset. The service is the work of earning it, and the work is slow: finding sites that matter in your industry or region, giving them a reason to link, supplying whatever gets the placement, following up. A lot of that effort produces nothing. The links that land are the survivors.
The other kind of vendor skips all of that. They own or rent a stock of websites built for one purpose, placing links for whoever pays, and they sell placements by the dozen. The sites have no readers. The articles are filler written around your keyword. The links arrive fast, in bulk, at a price per link that should tell you everything. Google’s spam policy describes this trade in plain words: buying or selling links for ranking purposes, low quality directory links, keyword rich links in guest posts and press releases distributed across other sites. The vendor does not carry that risk. You do.
So the question is never “do I need link building.” It is “which of these two things am I being sold,” and the invoice answers it.
What does a real link look like on an invoice?
Three questions for every link line. Which site is it on? Which page of mine does it point at? Would that site have readers if it never sold a link?
A vendor who earns real links can answer all three before you pay. A vendor who sells volume cannot name the sites, because the sites are interchangeable, and will not name the target page, because everything goes to the homepage. When I see “25 backlinks per month” with no site names and no target pages, I read it as 25 of something, somewhere.
Here is how we wrote our own line, because I wanted it to be checkable against an invoice: new links from real, established websites with their own traffic, in your industry wherever they are available, every link pointed at a page we are pushing toward page one, no directories, no link farms. The counts are on the plans page: two a month on Growth, four on Authority, eight on Dominate. Starter has none, on purpose, because we did not want to sell a link to a business that does not have the pages for it yet.
Those numbers look small next to the emails. They are supposed to. What should be in an SEO package has the test I run on any package line, countable and lands somewhere you can look, and “fifty backlinks a month” fails the second half every time.
Why does the page the link points at matter more than the link?
This is the part most owners never hear, because the vendors selling volume do not want to talk about it. Every one of those thousand cheap links points at the homepage, and the homepage already ranks for the one thing it is ever going to rank for, your name. The pages that bring in work are the service pages and the town pages, and those are the pages that need the help.
So before anyone sells you a link, they should be able to tell you which page it is for and why. The answer sounds like: your deck repair page sits at position eight for the town you want, the three companies above you each have a handful of real links to their deck pages, and you have none. That is a link with a job. A link with no job is decoration.
It also sets the order of work. If you do not have a page for each service in each place you serve, a link vendor has nothing to aim at, which is why the link line in our plans arrives on the same tier as the new pages line: two and two on Growth, four and four on Authority, eight and eight on Dominate. What done for you SEO should include shows how the pages, posts and links fit together in a month, and how much SEO costs for a small business explains why links and original content are the expensive lines on any honest quote.
What does a link farm look like when you are the one paying?
Let me show you a real one, anonymized. We run SEO for a roofing contractor in New England, and I pulled its backlink profile from our tool this morning. It has 212 referring domains live right now. Of those, 107 have an authority score under 10 on a 100 point scale. Sixty seven are throwaway subdomains on one free app hosting service, the kind created by the thousand and abandoned. Two free blog accounts, both scoring zero, supply 76 links between them, 54 from one and 22 from the other.
The six strongest domains in the whole profile, the ones scoring 60 or higher, are a job board, a business bureau listing, a question and answer forum, two map directories and a race registration site. Four of those six carry a tag that tells Google not to pass credit through the link.
We did not build that profile. The oldest of the spam links first appeared in 2023, long before we were involved, and I am not going to guess at who built them or why. What I can tell you is what they are worth, which is nothing. The roofer’s phone rings because of its Google Business Profile and its town pages. The 76 links from two free blogs have not moved one of its 50 tracked searches.
A carpentry company we run tells the same story a different way. It has 81 live referring domains, and one business directory alone accounts for 68 of its links. One listing, counted 68 times. Sold as “68 backlinks,” that would be true and worthless at the same time.
That is what you are looking for when you ask to see the sites. Free subdomains. The same domain over and over. Blogs with no posts about anything. Directories you have never heard of. If the vendor hesitates to show you the list, you have your answer. If they show it proudly and it looks like the roofer’s, you also have your answer.
How many links does a small business actually need?
The honest answer depends on who is above you. A business in a town where no competitor publishes anything can rank its service pages on a clean profile, correct listings and good pages. A business where three competitors have been earning real links for years needs its own, pointed at the pages where the fight is.
That is why our ladder is built the way it is. Starter is the full engine without links or new pages, for a business that needs to get found for its name and its core services before it fights anyone. Growth adds two links, two pages and citations a month, which is where most businesses with real competition should start. Authority and Dominate scale the same lines for a business that wants to own a category or a crowded metro. None of those tiers promises a position. We guarantee the work and the counts, never the result.
One more thing on counts. Authority and Dominate include press releases on the national newswire. Those are sold for coverage and mentions, something to send a buyer and a reporter, and we do not count them in the link line. Google’s spam policy specifically names keyword anchor text links in distributed press releases as link spam, so a vendor counting newswire links toward your monthly total is padding, and one stuffing them with anchor text is worse than padding.
Citations are a different line entirely. A citation is your name, address and phone listed on a directory, and its job is to make Google trust your business details for the map, not to pass ranking credit to a page. Our software side has a local citation audit that explains the difference. A vendor who counts directory citations as backlinks is mixing two jobs so the number looks bigger.
When should a small business refuse to pay for links at all?
Four cases, and I mean all of them, including when the company asking for the money is us.
You serve one town and nobody is competing. Search your main service plus your town from your phone. If the map shows you and two others and none of them has published anything in a year, you do not have a link problem. You have a profile and listings job, and you can do a lot of it yourself. Why your business is not showing up on Google Maps is the checklist, and Google Business Profile optimization is what we do about it on every plan.
You have nothing to point a link at. If your site is a homepage, an about page and a contact form, a link vendor will point everything at the homepage and you will have paid to rank harder for your own name. Build the service and town pages first. Then links have a job.
The vendor sells by the hundred, or will not name the sites. This one is not a judgment call. Volume pricing and unnamed sites are the two marks of a farm. Say no, and if the same line shows up inside a bigger package, the post on SEO packages and padding covers how to strike it.
Your profile and listings are still wrong. A link to a business whose phone number disagrees with itself across the internet is a link to a business Google does not fully trust yet. Clean that first. It is on every plan we sell because it comes first.
When none of those four is true, when you have real competitors, real pages, and a vendor who will name the sites and the target pages, links are the line that moves you. Pay for them with the count, the sites and the target pages in writing. SEO contracts: what to sign and what to strike has the clause wording, and how to choose an SEO company for a small business has the questions that expose a company that cannot answer the three above.
Before you pay for a single link
Look at your own backlink profile before anyone sells you more. The free audit shows you whether Google is indexing your site, whether your profile and listings agree, and whether an AI assistant names you or the company down the road. If your profile looks like the roofer’s, the answer is not more links. It is the pages and the content the links were supposed to help.
If it is a thin profile and three competitors with real links to real pages, that is the work, and it is already inside Growth with the pages built alongside it. Every plan starts with a seven day free trial, month to month, with the counts printed on the page and the full month laid out on how it works. Our SEO company for small business page has the rest.
Questions We Get Asked
What is a link building service?
A company you pay to get other websites to link to yours. The honest version does slow work: finding established sites in your industry or region, giving them a reason to link, and aiming each link at a page on your site you want ranking. The dishonest version owns or rents a network of sites that exist only to sell links and places yours by the dozen. Both use the same two words, so judge the service by the invoice, not the name.
How much does link building cost?
Real links are the most expensive line in SEO because each one takes skilled hours and some of those hours produce nothing. That is why we do not sell links on their own. They are built into Growth at two a month, Authority at four and Dominate at eight, and the plan prices are printed on our plans page. Be suspicious of any link price that works out to a few dollars each. Nobody earns a placement on a real website for the cost of a coffee.
Is it worth paying for backlinks?
Paying a company for the labor of earning links from real websites is normal, and it is most of what you are paying for once you have competitors. Paying a website to link to you, or buying a package of links by the hundred, is what Google's spam policy calls link spam, and it is money gone. The test is whether the site would exist and have readers if it never sold a link. If yes, the work is worth paying for. If no, walk away.
What should you avoid in link building?
Anything sold by volume: fifty links, two hundred links, a thousand directory submissions. Any vendor who will not name the sites before you pay. Links that all point at your homepage. Links from sites in a different language or a different industry. Guest posts and press releases stuffed with keyword anchor text, which Google's spam policy names specifically. And any promise that links alone will put you on page one, because nobody can promise that.
Can bad links hurt my website?
Usually they do nothing, which is its own kind of harm because you paid for them. Google says its systems ignore most spam links, and a manual penalty is rare and comes from an obvious, large pattern of buying. The practical damage is quieter: the budget that bought a thousand worthless links did not buy the pages and the real links that would have moved you. Do not pay a second vendor to clean up the first one's mess unless Google has actually flagged your site in Search Console.
