You spent two years writing on Medium or Substack. You built a readership. Then you did the sensible thing and started a site of your own, somewhere nobody can change the rules on you overnight.
Within about a month, the emails started.
Hi there, I came across your amazing blog. We have high authority sites in your niche. DA 60 plus. Permanent dofollow. Special price for you.
They arrive three a day. They misspell your name. They call your work content. And somewhere underneath the bad grammar is a question you cannot answer yet, which is whether any of this is real and whether you are missing something by ignoring it.
I should tell you who is writing this before you read any further. I sell guest post placements for a living. People pay me to put links to their sites on other people’s sites.
That is exactly why I want to tell you that most writers reading this should not buy a single one.
What these people are actually selling
A backlink is a link on somebody else’s website that points to yours. That is all it is.
Search engines have used links as a signal since the beginning. If many sites link to a page, that was taken as a sign the page is worth something. So an industry grew up around manufacturing that signal, and that industry is what is filling your inbox.
There are two products in it.
A guest post means somebody publishes a new article on their site with your link inside it. A niche edit, also sold as a link insertion, means somebody adds your link into an article they published years ago.
Both are the same transaction wearing different clothes. Money moves, a link appears.
Google’s own position has quietly shifted
Here is something the people emailing you will never mention.
At a search conference in Bulgaria in April 2024, Gary Illyes of Google said this, as reported by Search Engine Journal.
“We need very few links to rank pages… Over the years we’ve made links less important.”
He later said publicly that he should not have said it, which tells you something in itself. People inside Google were not thrilled that he said the quiet part out loud.
I am not going to tell you links do nothing. That would be convenient for nobody and it is not true. But the version of the internet those sales emails are describing, where you buy fifty links and arrive on page one, stopped existing a long time ago.
The number that decides whether you need any
Ahrefs studied around 14 billion pages. They found that 96.55% of them get no traffic from Google at all.
That sounds like an argument for buying links. It is not. Read the next part.
Of roughly 20 million pages that no other website links to, only 2,997 received more than 1,000 monthly visits from search. That is about one page in 6,671.
So links and traffic do travel together. But the pages in that tiny successful group are almost all doing the same thing, and it is not buying links. They are answering questions that few other people have answered properly.
That is the whole game for a writer. If you write about something thousands of businesses are fighting over, you will need links and money and years. If you write about something specific that you actually know, you need neither.
Most writers already have the second thing and keep being sold the first.
What it costs, if you are curious
You should know the real numbers, because the numbers in those emails are made up.
A pricing study covering 52,671 websites, published in 2026, put the average paid guest post at $459 and the average niche edit at $225.
The figure that matters more is this one. In the same dataset, the average asking price for a backlink was $929. The average price buyers actually paid was $207.
Sellers ask about four and a half times what people pay. Whatever number lands in your inbox is an opening position, not a price.
I went through all of that data, including which of the two is actually worth buying and why, in niche edits vs guest posts. It is written for people who have decided to buy. If you have not decided, you do not need it yet.
What actually makes a link worth having
If you ever do reach the point where this matters, one idea will save you most of the money.
A link lives on a page, not on a website.
Every one of those emails is selling you a domain score. DA 60. DR 55. Those numbers come from SEO tools, not from Google, and they describe the whole site. Your link does not go on the whole site. It goes on one page, and that page has its own readers, its own links, and its own neighbours.
A link on a dead page of a strong site is worth close to nothing. A link on a genuinely read page of a modest site is worth a great deal. The sales email cannot tell the difference, because the domain score it is quoting cannot tell the difference either.
I set out the full reasoning, including the five checks I run before I will place anything, in what makes a backlink high quality.
There is also an awkward fact worth knowing. Links die. A study of more than 865,000 monitored backlinks found at least 31% confirmed gone, and on the weakest sites only about a third were still live. The cheapest links die fastest, which means the cheap option was never cheap. It was temporary.
The part nobody puts in the email
Google’s spam policies have a section on link spam. It names paid placements directly. Paying for a link that passes ranking credit is a policy violation.
The same page also says this, which almost nobody quotes.
“Google does understand that buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web for advertising and sponsorship purposes. It’s not a violation of our policies to have such links as long as they are qualified with a
rel="nofollow"orrel="sponsored"attribute value to the<a>tag.”
So paying for a placement is allowed. Paying for one that passes ranking credit is not. A small tag in the page code is the entire difference.
Which creates the contradiction this market is built on. The tag that makes the purchase legitimate also removes the benefit you were buying. Anyone promising you an untagged paid link is promising to break a rule on your behalf, and the risk of that sits with your site, not theirs.
I am not telling you where to stand on that. I am telling you to decide on purpose rather than by accident, because the people emailing you are counting on you never reading this far.
What to do instead, for the next year at least
Write about things only you can write about. Not the topic with the most searches. The topic where your answer is better than everybody else’s because of what you have actually done. Those pages need few links and sometimes none.
Claim the mentions you already have. Search for your own name and your site’s name in quotes. You will find people who referred to your work without linking to it. A short, friendly email asking for a link converts better than anything you could buy, and it costs nothing.
Write for publications your readers already read. Not for the link. For the readers. The link follows, and it is the kind nobody can take away from you.
Keep publishing on your own site. Platforms change their rules. A domain you own does not.
Ignore the emails. All of them. If you ever genuinely need placements, you will know, and you will go looking rather than replying to the third message of the morning.
One last thing
I have just spent fifteen hundred words telling you not to buy the thing I sell.
That is not generosity. It is the long view. The writers who build something real on their own domain become the people who, three or four years from now, have a business that does need help with this. The ones who buy fifty cheap links in their first year usually have nothing left to help.
Your writing is the asset. Everything else is a tool, and most tools are being sold to you by people who have never read a word you wrote.
Sources
- Gary Illyes quote reported by Search Engine Journal, April 2024
- Ahrefs, 96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google, 14 billion pages studied
- Adsy, Link Building Pricing 2026, 52,671 websites
- Linkody, Link Building Statistics 2026, 865,000 monitored backlinks
- Google Search Central, Spam policies for Google web search
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