There is a version of this article that moralises. This is not it. Buying links is a normal commercial decision and pretending otherwise is theatre.
The argument here is narrower and purely economic: cheap links are not a discounted version of the same product. They are a different product, and it usually does not work.
Where a £20 link comes from
Work backwards from the price. A genuine editorial placement involves a writer, an editor, a hosting bill, and a site somebody maintains and promotes so it retains value. At £20 a link, none of that arithmetic closes.
So the inventory is one of:
- Automated or near-automated sites. Thousands of pages generated at scale, no readers, existing purely as link inventory.
- Expired domains rebuilt. A domain with residual authority bought at auction and repopulated with filler to sell links against, until the authority decays.
- Abandoned real sites. A once-genuine blog whose owner stopped caring and now sells insertions to anyone.
- Resold network inventory. The same handful of sites sold through six intermediaries, each adding margin, which is how one site ends up linking to four competitors in the same town.
None of those are secret. They are the visible consequence of the price.
What actually happens next
The common assumption is a penalty. That is not usually how it goes, and the reality is worse for diagnosis.
The links get devalued. Silently. They still exist, still show in your backlink tool, still appear on next month's report. They simply stop counting. There is no notification, no warning, and no way to tell from the outside whether a link is passing anything at all.
This is the genuinely expensive part. Not the £400 spent, but the six months spent believing the link building is handled — while the pages that needed real links sat untouched, and the competitor who spent the same money on four good placements moved past you.
The cost of a bad link is not the price of the link. It is the six months you spent thinking that box was ticked.
The cases where it does cause harm
Devaluation is the normal outcome. Actual damage happens in two situations.
Network-wide demotion. If the vendor's inventory is a recognisable footprint and that footprint gets demoted, every site pointing into it inherits the association. Recovery means disavowal and waiting.
Anchor over-optimisation. Cheap packages often ship with keyword-rich anchors as a feature, because that is what buyers ask for. Forty links all saying "plumber Nottingham" is a stronger negative signal than the links are a positive one, and this can suppress the exact page you were trying to lift. More on getting the distribution right.
The arithmetic that actually matters
Compare two realistic scenarios for a UK local business over six months.
| Cheap package | Editorial placements | |
|---|---|---|
| Spend | £600 (30 links at £20) | £570 (6 at £95) |
| Links you can inspect | Usually none before payment | All of them |
| Host sites with real traffic | Typically zero | All |
| Realistic links still counting at 12 months | A handful at best | Most |
| Referral traffic | None | Some, occasionally meaningful |
| Usable as social proof | No | Yes |
Roughly the same spend. One produces six assets you can point at, link from your own site, and put in a pitch deck. The other produces a spreadsheet.
What a fair price looks like
In the UK, for a genuine editorial placement on a maintained publication, expect £65 to £150 depending on whether an article is being written from scratch. Below about £40, the economics of running a real site do not work, and that gap is the whole tell.
Above £250 you are usually paying either for genuine national-tier placement — which exists and is worth it when the brief needs it — or for a broker's margin. Ask which.
The three questions that filter almost everything
- "Can I see the host page before I pay?" A no ends the conversation. There is no legitimate reason to hide it.
- "Does this site rank for anything other than its own name?" If not, there is no authority to pass on, whatever the domain rating says.
- "Would a real person read this article?" Still the best test anyone has come up with, and it takes ten seconds.
Any vendor comfortable with all three is probably fine, whatever they charge. Any vendor evasive about the first one has answered all three.
We publish every site in our network on a public page and show host URLs before payment, because the alternative is asking people to buy something they cannot see. Full pricing is on the pricing page, for the same reason.
Frequently asked
Are cheap backlinks worth it?
Rarely. Below roughly £40 a link the economics only work if the host sites are automated, abandoned or reselling at volume, all of which are the properties that cause links to be devalued. The money is usually not wasted slowly, it is wasted entirely.
Can cheap backlinks harm my site?
The usual outcome is devaluation rather than penalty — the links simply stop counting and nobody tells you. Genuine harm is possible where links come from networks that get demoted wholesale, or where anchor text is so over-optimised it suppresses the pages being targeted.
What is a fair price for a backlink in the UK?
For a genuine editorial placement on a maintained UK publication, roughly £65 to £150 depending on whether an article is being written. Below £40 the arithmetic of writing, editing, hosting and maintaining a real site does not work, which tells you something about what you are buying.
Want this done rather than explained? We own 38 UK publications and place editorial articles and links on them from £65. Send the target page and we'll come back within one working day with a plan.