Link Building: How I Plan It and What It Costs

Link building is getting links from other sites to your site. I plan it as a monthly budget for specific pages, not as buying links by DR. DR (Domain Rating) is an Ahrefs metric that measures the strength of a domain's link profile. Google says that link analysis, including PageRank, is still part of its core ranking systems. In practice, publications are bought with follow links, that is, links that pass SEO value. I co-run Linko, a link platform that sells such links, so the package prices in this post come from its shop.

What is link building?

Link building is the planned acquisition of links that lead from other sites to your site. Such a link is a backlink, that is, an incoming link. Typical forms are:

• an article published on a site with a link to your site;
• a link added to an article that is already on the site;
• a guest post, that is, your article published on someone else's site;
• a mention in the media or a listing in a business directory;
• a link from a partner or a supplier.

Link building is part of off-page SEO, and a link will do little for a page that Google does not index or that does not answer the question asked in the search engine. That is why I check the target page before I plan any links. In the post on the SEO audit I described how I check such a page.

Links are expensive, so I first check whether they are needed in a given topic. In the post on SEO strategy I described competitor analysis. It helps me assess the gaps in content and in the link profile and set the order of actions.

Do backlinks still affect rankings in Google?

Yes: according to Google, link analysis is still part of its core ranking systems. Google's guide to ranking systems says that links between pages help determine what a page is about and which page may be the most helpful in answering a query. One of those systems is PageRank, which Google has used since the search engine began. According to Google, the way PageRank works has changed a great deal since then (Google Search Central).

Google also has systems that detect link spam. The same guide describes a system from 2012, known as the Penguin update, which has been part of the core ranking systems since 2016. Google detects violations of its spam policies automatically, among other ways with a system called SpamBrain, and manually when needed. In this guide Google does not say how much weight links have compared with other signals.

Answers from AI are a separate matter. In the post on AI SEO and GEO I described why I plan publications on other sites only after the description of the brand is put in order.

What types of links are there?

Links from paid publications differ mainly in where they go: a publication is a new article with a link, and a link insert is a link added to an article published earlier. A publication needs a new text, which you write or order together with the publication. An insert does not need a new text, so it usually goes live faster. Free links include media mentions, listings in business directories and links from partners.

Publications and inserts are bought with follow links. A follow link, also called a dofollow link, is an ordinary link that passes part of the linking page's value to the target page. Linko sells such links. Google treats a paid link that passes value as a violation of its policies, so I limit that risk by choosing sites and anchors, that is, the clickable texts of links.

Why can a link insert cost more than a publication?

An insert goes into an article that already has rankings and traffic from Google, and publishers want more for that traffic. My partner at Linko describes an insert as a link in an existing article that is not sponsored, has no other external links and is visible in Google. In his experience, for articles with a lot of traffic the publisher sometimes raises the price for adding a link.

An insert also depends on the publisher agreeing to change a text that already brings them traffic. A publisher can reject an insert, sometimes only a long time after the order. That is why in a campaign plan I have a backup site or an ordinary publication for every insert.

I plan an insert in an article that ranks for keywords from the topic of the target page. Such an article gives a link in content that people already find in Google. My partner points out that an article with a high ranking is also more likely to end up among the sources of AI answers. For a page that we are still fixing, I order an insert after the changes on that page, not before them.

How much does link building cost?

Packages in the Linko shop cost from 2,000 to 22,100 PLN net, depending on the topic and the number of domains. The largest package, a technology one, covers twenty domains. For each domain the shop shows, among other things, DR, organic traffic and the number of linking domains.

Add the cost of the text to the price of a publication. In the Linko shop the “Home and Garden” S package covers publications on four domains. It costs 3,000 PLN net with your texts or 3,400 PLN with the texts written for you. The “Home and Garden” M package with eight domains costs 6,000 and 6,800 PLN respectively (read on October 18, 2026). With one article per domain, the surcharge in both packages is 100 PLN net per text.

The price of a publication depends on the site, so DR alone does not explain it. The price is affected by, among other things, the site's traffic, its topic and the form of publication. That is why in a plan I look at the price of each domain separately.

The average price from a package is not the price of one link. The average from a package combines cheap and expensive sites, so for a specific publication you will pay more or less.

I plan the budget in zloty per month, not in a number of links. In 2021 I said that I pay for links in monthly cycles, not annual ones, so that I can move the budget between domains and test (DevaGroup). The same budget may, for example, be enough for 5 publications in one month and for 15 in another, depending on the prices of the chosen sites.

What is Domain Rating (DR)?

DR is an Ahrefs metric, not a Google rating: it compares the strength of a domain's link profile with other domains on a scale from 0 to 100. Ahrefs says that the scale is logarithmic, that DR counts only links and takes neither traffic nor spam into account, and that a large number of low-quality links can raise it. According to the same article, Ahrefs has already blocked some methods of artificially raising DR (Ahrefs). In 2022 I wrote that DR is easy to manipulate (Senuto). That is why, when I choose a site, DR is one of several criteria for me, not the only one.

How do I plan a link building campaign step by step?

I start a campaign from the page whose rankings I want to improve, not from a list of sites. The order of the steps:

People run the campaign, and AI agents speed up data collection and checks. A person chooses the target page, assesses the sites, sets the anchors, talks to publishers and is accountable to the client for the plan. At Linko a planning agent prepares the first version of the plan: it picks domains, topics and anchors within the budget. An automatic check verifies every day whether an ordered publication has appeared, whether the link works and whether the article is blocked from indexing. When something does not match, a person writes to the publisher asking for a fix.

Step 1. The goal: a link or a mention

First I decide whether I need a link or a mention of the brand, because each of them is built differently. A link is meant to help a specific page in Google results. I plan mentions where the audience looks for information about a given solution. In a statement for the Majestic blog in 2026 I wrote about this difference (Majestic). I measure the brand's presence in AI answers separately.

Step 2. Which page I link to

I link to pages that already rank in positions 5-20 for commercial keywords and have real demand. As my partner at Linko puts it, the best target is a category that sells well and is in season right now. It should also have an average position of 5-20 and many commercial keywords without the brand name. On such a page a link may help improve the ranking, though it does not guarantee a rise. If a page has no rankings, I improve it first, and only then link to it. This choice is provisional until the page passes the checks in step 4.

I start the test with one page, because then it is easier to see the changes after the links arrive. When links go to the home page and, say, ten categories at once, it is hard to tell which links helped which page. A rise alone does not prove that links caused it, though: at the same time the content of the page, the competition or Google's systems may change.

Step 3. Choosing sites

I assess a site's topic by its visibility in Google, not by the category name in the offer catalog of a link platform. A general site can work well for a garden store if its home and garden section ranks for keywords from that topic. According to my partner, the topic of the article does not have to be identical to the topic of the page if the article ranks well in Google. I check every site on its home page and in several of its latest articles.

For every site I check five things, and DR is only one of them:

• search traffic and its trend over the last 12 months;
• the ratio of the number of domains that link to the site to the number of domains the site links to; I treat it as a signal for further assessment of the site, and in the Linko shop it is the “Link ratio” column;
• the history of gained and lost links;
• mass publishing of content unrelated to the site's topic, which I treat as a risk signal;
• DR checked in Ahrefs on the day of purchase, not copied from the offer.

Step 4. Five checks before buying

Before I order publications, I check the plan on five points, because each of them can rule out a page or a site:

1. Is the target page in the Google index, and does nothing block its indexing?
2. Which URL does Google show today for the important keyword: the one I want to link to, or another?
3. Which pages are in the top ten of the results? When the first three places are taken by large e-commerce platforms, I treat it as a signal that links alone may not be enough.
4. How has the page's visibility changed over the last 12 months?
5. Why is each site on the list? A good reason is an article of the site in the results for a keyword from the topic, or links from the site to several competitors.

The checks help detect obstacles to indexing and assess whether the chosen page answers the query. In one plan for an online store, 4 of 19 links led to an empty category with a noindex directive. That directive tells Google not to show the page in results. The sites in that plan passed the check, but nobody had checked the target page, and the store had been losing visibility since June 2026. Pulling the data for the five checks cost 2.91 USD in DataForSEO, a service with data on search results, and the analysis time came on top of that. The 12-month period and the three-place threshold are my settings, not a Google rule.

Step 5. Anchor

Anchor text is the clickable text of a link, and Google lists anchors chosen for keywords among its examples of link spam. In a 2022 guide for Senuto I described my own rule: at least 50-70% of the links to a page were to have the page's URL alone as the anchor (Senuto). An example of such an anchor is “rogala.pro”. The remaining links have an anchor with the brand name or a natural phrase from the sentence. This is a rule from my practice, not a threshold given by Google.

Mentions of the brand without a link, and the consistency of what different sites write about the brand, also play a growing role. That is why for every publication I check whether the description of the brand matches the one on its site and on other sites. In the post on link building in the AI era I described how I plan brand mentions.

I record the campaign plan in a table where one row is one link. A row has the target URL, the site, the form of publication, the cost, the anchor and the date. After publication I add the result of the check to it.

Step 6. Publication and checks

After publication I check four things: whether the link is on the page, whether it is follow, whether the article is in the index and whether the anchor matches the plan. A publisher can change the link and the text later, and the article's status in the index can change too. That is why I repeat the check every month.

Step 7. Measurement

I measure the rankings and traffic of the target page, not the number of links gained. In 2021 I estimated that, with a well-prepared page and a domain older than 12 months, the effects of links show after 4-6 weeks (DevaGroup). Today I give a wider range: the first changes in rankings may appear after a few weeks, and the effect of a campaign builds up over 3-6 months after publication. The time depends on the age of the domain, the competition for the keyword, the state of the target page and how quickly Google visits the article with the link. In a campaign report I set the changes in rankings of the target pages against the publication dates, rather than listing the links alone.

Can you get links for free?

Yes, though free links take work instead of money, and the easiest way to start is with places that already name your company. You can find mentions without a link by typing the brand name into Google and adding -site:yourdomain.com, which removes your own site from the results. In two audits from my archive I found lists of partners and integrations that named the company without a link.

It is worth asking for a link where it will help the readers of that site. Partners and suppliers sometimes have lists of clients or integrations. The media look for data and expert comments. Industry directories accept listings of companies from a given industry. A free link is worth measuring the same way as a paid one: by the rankings and traffic of the target page.

How do you check your backlinks?

The simplest way is the Links report in Google Search Console, but it is a sample, not a full list of links. Google says that the tables in the report have at most 1,000 rows and that the report shows a sample of links. It also shows links found in the past, which may no longer exist (Search Console Help).

I supplement the Search Console data with data from an independent link index, for example Ahrefs. In its backlinks report Ahrefs shows, among other things, the anchor, the date the link was found and the date it was lost, also for competitors' pages (Ahrefs). That lets you compare the link profile of your site with the profiles of pages that rank above it.

When should you use disavow?

The disavow tool is for reporting links that Google should ignore, and most sites do not need it. You pass Google a list of links or domains in a text file. According to Google, it is worth considering only when a site has a lot of spammy, artificial or low-quality links pointing to it. The second condition: those links have caused a manual action or are likely to cause one. A manual action is a decision by a Google employee after which pages may drop in results or disappear from them (Search Console Help). Used wrongly, the tool can harm a site (Search Console Help).

Before I use disavow, I try to get the bad links removed from the sites that contain them. Google recommends the same: first remove as many spammy links as possible. In 2021 I said that removing a link works faster than disavow (DevaGroup).

What link building mistakes do I avoid?

In the link plans I have reviewed, the same mistakes keep appearing, all caused by skipping the checks before purchase:

• links to a page that Google will not show in results or will not show high: it has noindex, it is empty, or for its keyword Google shows a different type of results;
• choosing sites by DR alone, without traffic and without checking whom else the site links to;
• the average from a package given as the price of one link;
• the same keyword as the anchor in every link;
• links scattered across many pages at once, which makes it hard to judge what helped.

Frequently asked questions about link building

Where to start?

Start with the page whose rankings you want to improve, and check whether Google can show it high. Check whether it is in the index, which keywords it ranks for in positions 5-20 and which pages are above it in the results. Then open the Links report in Search Console and see who already links to you.