This week I started a pretty massive link building campaign across a few of my own personal websites (thousands of emails/month).
I figured I'd share the journey as it actually happens, because buying backlinks is a weird little world and almost nobody talks about it honestly.
Here's the thing. You can still get backlinks from all kinds of sources. But if you want links that are genuinely relevant and actually move something, you have to be able to:
- Spot the bad link opportunities
- Go after the ones that would be the more relevant for your niche
- Stop prioritizing weak vanity metrics, like DR (Domain rating)
First week building links went better than I expected. Well enough that I tweeted about it.
If you want my answer: the clear winner is the $75 one. DR 61, and real referring page traffic.
Almost everyone on X picked the same one
And that last one is really the bigger point here.
Price doesn't equal quality (and the sellers know it)
There are a lot of ways a link vendor can justify a number. DR is the easiest one. It's a single figure, it sounds authoritative, and most buyers don't check anything past it.
But plenty of them know exactly what they're selling.
I told one seller his $250 was out of my budget, and I showed him why.
Here's what came back.
He agreed that referring page traffic matters more than DR alone.
He knew the whole time. He just doesn't have to say it unless you bring it up.
So what actually makes a link worth paying for?
I've narrowed it down to one question.
Will a real person see this link, click it, and land on my directory because it's genuinely relevant to them?
That's the one question that I let guide my link building spend.
I ran on that instinct for a while but turns out, Google agrees.
In 2024, a big chunk of Google's internal search documentation got exposed, and it gave everyone the clearest look yet at how the ranking system is actually put together.
One thing it showed: links get stored along with the index tier of the page they live on, roughly high, medium and low. A link sitting on a page nobody visits ends up in the low tier almost by definition.
So a link on a real page that real people actually read is worth more. Not as a theory. As a documented mechanic.
Meanwhile DR is a number Ahrefs invented. Useful, and I check it every day. But Google has never seen it. Not once.
Building backlinks isn't hard, it just takes care
Buying backlinks is kind of like shopping for a birthday gift for a rich friend.
You want something meaningful and relevant. You're on a budget. And you genuinely can't spend your way out of the problem, because the price was never the point.
Go ask Claude or ChatGPT what makes a high quality backlink and you'll get a tidy list that sounds correct and helps you roughly zero percent. Same energy as most of the link building advice floating around X.
The actual work is looking at the specific page instead of the domain, and deciding whether a human being would ever click through it.
Link marketplaces exist...they're just not for me
Marketplaces have become the easy button, and I get why. Browse a database, filter by DR and price, buy, done.
Now go try that in an obscure niche.
Based on my experience, you'll scroll thousands of listings and find almost nothing genuinely about your topic. Not to mention, there are hoards of site owners selling links from their site with ZERO root domain traffic, and just a high DR.
That's the real reason link building is hard. It isn't the outreach. It's the relevance.
Which is why I keep coming back to cold email. If nobody's selling what you need, you have to go ask for it directly.
I'm still really early in this. I'll be running the campaign for another month or two, so I'll have a lot more data (and probably a lot more strange pricing) to share as it goes.
If you want to do cold link outreach yourself, I just shipped DataForSEO into HeyLinks, so the traffic data comes out of the box now.
One warning though. If you're going to do this the way I am, you'll need to invest some time and money into warming up your email infrastructure first.
That's a completely different topic and it gets into the weeds fast, but I'm happy to cover it if that's useful. Just hit reply and let me know.
