Answers, without the sales gloss
The eight questions we get asked before every engagement.
1. What are link building services?
Getting other websites to link to yours, deliberately. Google still treats a link from a relevant, trusted site as a vote of confidence — and those votes are a large part of why one page outranks another. The service does the part that doesn’t scale: finding sites worth a link, convincing an editor, and writing something good enough that they say yes.
2. How much should I pay for link building?
Our own placements run from $50 to $500 per link by the host site’s authority, and managed programmes run $2,900 to $19,000 a month. Anything under about $50 a link is almost certainly a network placement sold to everyone in your niche at once. The better question is what a placement is worth to you — one page moving from position eight to three can be worth five figures a year.
3. What does a link builder do?
Four things, in order: work out which sites can realistically link to you (usually by studying who links to your competitors), pitch them something they’d actually publish, write it, then handle the editor’s revisions until it goes live. The link is the last five minutes of a job that is mostly research and writing.
4. Is link building illegal?
No. Earning links is exactly how Google’s own documentation says ranking is supposed to work. What its spam policies prohibit is link schemes — buying links purely to pass ranking signals, PBNs, and reciprocal arrangements at scale. We stay on the side of the line where a placement would still be defensible if a human at Google read the article.
5. Is link building necessary?
If you compete for terms anybody else wants, yes. You can rank a genuinely unique page with no links in a niche nobody contests. In a commercial category where the top five all have hundreds of referring domains, content alone won’t close that gap — and every month you don’t build, the gap widens.
6. Is link building still relevant in 2026?
Yes, and its role has broadened. Links still carry ranking weight in classic search, and they now feed the AI answer layer too: assistants cite sources, and the sources they cite are disproportionately pages other trusted sites already point at. Being linked is increasingly how you get quoted, not just how you get ranked.
7. How does Google see a backlink as natural?
Roughly: does the link make sense without the SEO explanation? A natural link sits in relevant content on a site with its own audience, uses anchor text a normal writer would choose, points at a page that supports the sentence, and arrives at a plausible pace. Unnatural looks like the opposite — exact-match anchors at volume, guest-post-only sites, footer placements, fifty links in a fortnight.
8. How long does link building take?
A placement takes roughly two to six weeks from approval to live URL. Ranking movement is slower: expect early signals at eight to twelve weeks and a fair read at four to six months. Anyone promising movement in thirty days is either in a niche with no competition or not building links that last.
Still have a question?
Ask it directly — you’ll get a straight answer from the person who’d run your project.