How Much Do Backlinks Cost [2025 Update]

How Much Do Backlinks Cost in 2025?

In 2025, the cost of a single backlink is only slightly higher than before, now averaging around $370. However, the prices depend on several variables, mainly backlink quality and quantity. We’ll discuss this in more depth below.

Before we get to that, let's see how the current cost of backlinks compares to that in previous years. Surprisingly, it's not so different—and may even be somewhat lower:

• 2018/2019: SociallyInfused Media found that the cost per link was $291.55. However, once they removed the marketing niche from the calculations, the cost rose to $391.55. – Read here.
• 2022: Ahrefs found that the cost per niche edit was $361.44. But, to be fair, they also found that paid guest posts were much cheaper; $77.80, on average. – Read here.

There are two important things to take away from this:

• (1) The price of backlinks stayed more or less the same since at least 2018, and
• (2) The price of backlinks varies greatly depending on many different factors, such as link type and quality. 

Let’s examine these factors in more depth.‍

‍TL;DR: You can expect the price of an average backlink to be around $370 in 2025. 

‍What Influences the Cost of Backlinks in 2025?

‍The cost of backlinks in 2025 depends on several factors:

• Backlink quality, usually determined by DR and DA scores,
• Backlink quantity, i.e., how many links you order from the same vendor,
• Backlink type, such as niche edits vs. paid guest posts,
• Other factors, such as your brand's reputation.

First Factor: DR and DA Link Building Pricing Scales

Almost all vendors charge more for higher-quality links. Though this is not the only metric that matters, link quality is usually determined based on the domain authority (DA) or domain rating (DR) scores of the sites you’re building links on. 

• DR (Domain Rating): Measures the strength of a site’s backlink profile. Scores range between 0 – 100; high scores indicate a high-quality profile with a significant number of backlinks.
• DA (Domain Authority): Predicts how likely a website will rank on the SERPs. Scores range between 0 – 100; high scores indicate a high likelihood of ranking.

DR is mainly based on the quality and the number of backlinks. DA, on the other hand, is based on a number of factors — linking root domains, domain age, quality of incoming and outgoing links, and so on.

So, how do these scores determine the price of a backlink? Here’s a general rule of thumb:

‍Backlinks with high DR and DA scores are more expensive than backlinks with low scores.

‍For example, we charge only $180 for link placements on DA40+ sites, but $380 for placements on DA80+ domains.

Of course, there are exceptions since every link building service can determine its own rates—but charging more for links with lower scores doesn’t make a lot of sense. Building backlinks on highly authoritative .edu domains, for example, is more difficult than building them on personal blogs with lower scores, and most vendors base their prices on the difficulty and complexity of outreach.

Second Factor: Backlink Quantity

Some vendors offer discounts for purchasing backlinks in bulk. 

We offer bulk discounts on all backlink packages. For example, we charge $280 for a single link on a DA60+ site, but $4600 for 20 links. This brings the price down to $230 per link.

This is especially useful for companies that need to build a sizable number of links fast, primarily because they’re in competitive niches, and agencies looking to leverage white label link building.

Third Factor: Backlink Type

As the aforementioned Ahrefs’ study indicates, there’s a big difference between the cost of niche edits and paid guest posts. 

(A quick refresher if you need it: paid guest posts are, on average, 4.6x cheaper than niche edits.)

This may be so because guest posts require more effort on your part, since you need to write an entirely new piece of content as opposed to, for example, writing an additional paragraph that could host your niche edit.

Then, there are also sites that will publish your guest posts for free—or even pay you for them. But such sites are few and far between, and often don't have great domain ratings or authority.

For example, here’s a response we got after contacting a website that didn’t seem to charge for guest posts:

So, obviously, even if it doesn’t seem like that at first glance, most sites actually do charge for guest posts.

The price varies for other types of links, too. For example, image links can be cheaper or, less likely, more expensive than text links. Contextual and niche-relevant links are also typically more costly than, for example, profile links, and so on.

Other Factors That Influence The Cost Of Backlinks

Various other factors can influence the price of backlinks, too. Here are some:

• Brand reputation: If you have a well-established brand, you may be able to drive the price per link down.
• Content quality: Sites that have first-class content usually have first-class rates. Plus, they receive many link building inquiries, so they can be picky about who they work with. If you want to get backlinks at a cheaper price, you could choose sites with lower- or medium-quality content. (But be aware that this will influence your results.)
• Industry: For example, backlinks are traditionally more expensive for industries directly related to money.
• Agency fee or in-house team expenses: There are additional costs that come with link building. Take those into account too.

In-House vs. Agency Link Building Pricing Scales

So, yes—another fee to take into account is the cost of overhead, i.e., the cost of having an in-house link-building team or hiring an agency or a contractor.

Having an in-house link-building team is bound to get you a sizable number of links on a regular basis. But it’s not cheap, and usually isn’t cost-effective for companies whose core business is not SEO or marketing.

Besides paying your staff and other expenses that may come with having employees, like rent and utilities, you’ll also need to pay for the necessary software.

For starters, you’ll need link building tools, such as Moz or Ahrefs, and outreach tools like Buzzstream or Hunter.

‍That's why, in most cases, agencies are more affordable than in-house teams. We say "in most cases" because agency rates can significantly vary; price points may range anywhere from $5,000 to $20,000 per link building campaign.

Agencies are also usually more effective because they follow link-building procedures they’ve already tested and perfected with their other clients. In-house teams often need more time to drive results.

‍Additionally, many agencies—us included—charge one flat rate which already covers their fee and doesn’t add extra costs for you.You can check out our prices here.

‍Should You Buy Backlinks? Natural vs. Paid Link Building

‍Now that we’ve determined how much backlinks cost, let’s see if you should buy them in the first place.

Well, first of all, you should know what the alternative is—earning backlinks organically. This is called natural link building.

‍Both natural and paid link-building can benefit your business in at least three ways:

• Increased brand awareness: Link building lets you reach a wider audience through other people’s sites.
• Higher rankings on SERPs: Backlinks help search engines discover new sites and determine how high they should rank. More backlinks = higher rankings.
• More conversions: Brand awareness and high rankings will bring your site more traffic to convert. Even if your conversion rate stays the same, your bottom line will likely improve.

Although they share some similarities, natural and paid link-building are different in many ways. We’ll go through the most crucial differences below to help you choose the better option for your business.

‍Natural Link Building: Pros & Cons

‍Natural link building refers to earning backlinks instead of paying for them. You can earn them by publishing high-quality content that other bloggers and site owners want to link to because it makes their content more valuable.

• ‍Example: In this post, we’ve linked to Ahrefs’ study on link-building prices in 2022. We’ve done so because we believe it will be useful to our readers, and not because Ahrefs paid us to do so.

Pros

‍Here are some pros of natural link building: 

• Decreased costs: As we’ve said, natural links are earned—not bought.
• High-quality traffic: If someone links to your content because it’s valuable to their audience, it’s likely you’ll get more qualified leads.

Cons

‍Here are some cons of natural link building:

• It's slow: You can consistently make first-rate content, but you won’t get backlinks until someone notices it and decides to link to it. This may take months or years, or it might never even happen.
• Unpredictable results: You never know when someone will link to you. You also can’t know if their sites will be high or low quality, and how much their backlinks will actually benefit you. So, most people can’t rely on natural link building for steady results.
• Falling behind your competition: (Paid) link building is a widespread SEO practice. You can fall behind your competitors if you’re relying solely on natural links.

Paid Link Building: Pros & Cons

‍Paid link building is about buying backlinks instead of earning them naturally. It works like a simple business transaction: after the buyer pays for a link, bloggers, site owners, or link builders link to their site. That’s it.

• ‍Example: If Ahrefs had paid us to link to their study in this post, that would be paid link building.

Pros

‍Here are the pros of paid link-building: 

• Faster results: If you pay for a link, you get it immediately. There’s no waiting until someone notices your content.
• Competitiveness: As mentioned, your competitors are probably already paying for links (because who doesn’t nowadays). Doing so yourself will help you keep up.
• Zero time wasted: With paid link building, you don’t have to spend time forging relationships with site owners and bloggers in hopes of getting a backlink one day. You should get a link within several days of your transaction; that’s it.

Cons

‍Here are some cons of paid link building: 

• Can be risky: Google doesn’t encourage paid link building. In fact, they sometimes penalize sites that go about it in the wrong way.
• Potential to waste money: Paid links won’t pay off if they’re low quality. So, before you buy them, you should know how to assess link quality.

How to Buy Backlinks (Or Build Them Via Outreach)

‍Unless you want to rely on luck in order to build links naturally, you probably want a more strategic approach. In that case, you have two options:

• Buy backlinks directly: Buy guest posts, sponsored posts, link placements, etc., on SEO marketplaces or from link building agencies like ours.
• Build links via outreach: Pay someone to do outreach and arrange link placements for you (or DIY it). This is link-building in the truest sense.

Each option has its pluses and minuses. Buying links is faster; outreach can be cheaper and come with extra benefits.

For example, you could pay someone $70/hour to build links for you. Three hours of their work would cost you $210, which is still cheaper than the average price of a single backlink you can buy. Besides that, if you do outreach the right way, you'll have new contacts you can collaborate with in the future.

On the surface, this option looks great—but it actually has two significant drawbacks:

• Firstly, there’s no guarantee that the person you hire (usually a VA) will actually manage to build links. The only guarantee you get is that they’ll do outreach.
• Secondly, you may still need to pay the site owner an additional fee for the actual link placement, bringing your total cost of link building to an unpredictable and potentially much higher amount than expected.

Alternatively, you could build links via outreach yourself, but this takes a lot of time, effort, and some marketing knowledge.

Still, no matter how you want to go about acquiring backlinks, it’s vital that you can:

• Define what you need: How many and which links you need to rank;
• Assess the quality of links: To ensure that you’re making a wise investment;
• Track your results: So that you know if you’re getting the ROI you want.

Here’s how to do that in both scenarios (buying links or building them via outreach).

0. Know Where To Buy or Build Backlinks 

Knowing and deciding where you’ll buy or build backlinks will determine everything else you should do. When it comes to buying backlinks directly, you can choose between two basic options:

• Working with link-building agencies, like ours. You can usually pay link-building agencies one, flat fee per link placement, which takes away the risk of paying someone to do your outreach without actually obtaining links. Additionally, as mentioned, some link-building agencies also offer bulk discounts. 
• Buying links from online marketplaces. The second option is getting your backlinks from websites that advertise links for sale. You can usually find cheap links there, but the quality can be questionable. 

On the other hand, if you’re set on building rather than buying backlinks, consider hiring VAs, doing your own outreach, or collaborating with other websites:

• Hiring virtual assistants to do your outreach is often a cost-effective link-building strategy. However, as mentioned, most VAs don’t guarantee they’ll build you links, and you may need to pay extra for the actual link placements.
• Doing your own outreach and asking for links is the cheapest, but also the most time-consuming link-building tactic. It may also not yield the best or fastest results.
• Appearing on podcasts, contributing to other people’s content, and practicing similar collaborative tactics can help you build links, too, on top of building your credibility. Still, finding the right collaboration opportunities can take time and may not be as straightforward as it sounds.

1. Determine How Many Backlinks You Need

You’ll need an SEO tool to determine how many links you need to rank. (Or you can have a link-building partner do that for you.)

To do so, you could look at keyword difficulty — a metric that tells you how difficult it is to rank for a specific keyword. The higher the difficulty score, the more links you’ll need to outrank your competitors.

You can enter your keyword in a tool like Ahrefs’ Keyword Difficulty Checker:  

As you can see, tools like Ahrefs also give you an estimate of how many backlinks you need based on the keyword difficulty. For example, according to Ahrefs:

• you’ll need backlinks from ~8 websites for a keyword at 7 difficulty, and
• you’ll need backlinks from ~22 websites for a keyword at 20 difficulty.

2. Conduct a Link Gap Analysis

Now that you know how many links you need, you want to find relevant sites that could host them. That way, you’ll avoid spending money on backlinks that won’t bring you high-quality traffic.

To find relevant sites, you can conduct a link gap analysis with an SEO tool like Moz’s Link Explorer.

You’ll get a list of sites that are linking to your competitors but not to you. This should help you pinpoint easy link-building opportunities because these sites have already demonstrated an interest in your niche.

After you finish your analysis, you’ll have a list of sites that are good candidates for your link placements. Now what?

3. Find High-Quality Links

Next, examine the quality of your prospect sites to determine potential link quality—i.e., how much a backlink on a particular site would help your SEO.  

One way to assess a site’s quality is to estimate its DA and DR scores. We’ve explained what they are in the section on link building pricing scales.

To discover these scores, you can use Ahrefs, Semrush, or Moz. Simply enter the URL you want to examine:

Most SEO experts consider DA and DR at 20+ acceptable—but keep in mind that this is usually the minimum threshold. In other words, you will likely need sites with much higher scores to see real results. This is especially true if you’re in a competitive niche, like finance, or trying to rank for a difficult keyword.

4. Plan Your Drip Dates

Drip dates are the specific dates when the backlinks you’ve built or purchased go live, and you should plan them in advance.

But why waste time on that when you could get all your links live at once? The answer: Google.

Google expects links to grow organically, and a sudden surge of backlinks could look suspicious. In other words, releasing many backlinks at once will signal that perhaps your links aren’t earned but bought — and this can lead to Google penalizing you.

That’s why you should release or build your backlinks slowly and methodically over time. So, again, plan your drip dates.

5. Track Your Results

The number one mistake people make is not tracking their results after buying backlinks. However, without keeping an eye on your analytics, you can’t know whether your investment was worth it.If you don’t know where to start, you can begin by tracking only these three metrics:

• Page Authority: The authority of specific pages on your site should improve after you build backlinks that link to them.
• Domain Authority: The overall authority of your domain should improve, too.
• Organic and Referral Traffic: You should see more organic and referral traffic because high-quality backlinks create more avenues to your site and help you rank higher on SERPs.

If you don’t see an increase in these metrics, chances are you’ve invested in a low-quality backlink. There isn’t much you can do about it after you’ve paid for a link, as most sellers don’t offer guarantees or refunds.

What you can do is switch to another seller or, better yet, hire an expert who will assess the link quality for you.

Note that seeing results from backlinks on average takes 2 to 3 months.

‍Frequently Asked Questions

‍Should I buy backlinks on Fiverr?

We wouldn’t advise buying backlinks on Fiverr. Many case studies, like this one, have concluded that Fiverr sellers mainly deliver low-quality, nofollow links that won’t help you rank. In fact, they’ll probably hurt your backlink profile and your rankings.

Is it illegal to buy links?

No, buying links isn’t illegal.

Does Google care about backlinks?

Yes, Google cares about backlinks. It uses them as signals of authority. The more backlinks link to your site, the higher its perceived trustworthiness – and the higher your site will rank.

‍So, Should You Invest In Link Building?

‍You should invest in link building if you want to gain visibility and grow your audience. Nowadays, it’s virtually impossible to achieve those outcomes without backlinks.

But keep in mind that you need to know how to assess link quality before making an investment. Otherwise, you risk wasting your money.

The problem is that reliable assessment can take a lot of time and resources. If you don’t know how to do it yourself — or just don’t feel like doing it — we can help. Schedule a free consultation today and discover how we can get you high-quality backlinks that yield results.