Forty links built in March. Forty-three in April. Six pages of URLs, every one marked "live", every one supposedly pointing fresh authority at a small business website. The monthly report from the SEO company looks like excellent value for the €250 that left the account. It is designed to look that way.

The owner reading it, let us say a flooring contractor in Carlow, and I should be upfront that this is a composite of many conversations I have had rather than any one client's story, signed up in February. The cold email had promised page one of Google before the summer fitting season, when the phone needs to ring. Three reports and several hundred euro later, the rankings have barely moved. The phone rings exactly as often as it did in January.

When an owner in that position finally forwards me the report and asks whether this is normal, I have to give the answer nobody enjoys hearing. Yes. Completely normal. This is the standard outcome of buying backlinks in bulk, and the frustrating part is that Google told everyone it would happen, in writing, years ago.

Bought links cost a small business twice. Once when the invoice is paid. Again when the same money could have gone into work that genuinely moves a local business up the results, and did not.

What a Backlink Package Actually Buys

First, the plain-English version. A backlink is a link from someone else's website to yours. Google's founders built their original algorithm around a simple idea: a link is a vote of confidence, so if respected sites point to you, you are probably worth showing to searchers. That logic still exists. It is also almost thirty years old, heavily gamed, and carries far less weight than the sales emails suggest.

So what do the forty-three links in that April report actually look like? A predictable pattern shows up in the reports owners share with me. Directory listings on sites no customer has ever visited. Forum profiles and blog comments. "Guest posts" on websites that publish a dozen articles a day about flooring, forex, skincare and wedding venues, written for algorithms rather than for anyone who might read them. Link networks that exist for one purpose, which is selling space to SEO resellers.

There is real money in this trade. Ahrefs, the SEO software company, contacted hundreds of websites across nine industries and found that a link placed inside an existing article sold for around 360 dollars on average, with paid guest posts averaging closer to 80 dollars ^[1]. That is one vendor's study and prices vary enormously by market, but it shows the going rate for even mediocre placements. A €250 monthly retainer does not buy forty-three links at those prices. It buys the cheapest inventory available, in bulk, from the bottom of the barrel.

Most package links pass no ranking value at all. The spend disperses quietly.

What Google Does With Links You Buy

Google's spam policies are unambiguous on this. Buying or selling links for the purpose of manipulating rankings is link spam, and sites that violate the policy may rank lower in results or not appear at all ^[2]. In practice, though, the dramatic penalty is rare. What usually happens is quieter and, for the person paying the invoice, arguably worse.

Nothing happens.

Since the Penguin 4.0 update back in 2016, and more aggressively since the December 2022 link spam update, Google's systems (the current one is called SpamBrain) identify links that were bought or manufactured and simply neutralise them ^[3]. The link stays visible on the page. It still appears in the monthly report, marked "live". It passes no ranking value whatsoever. You paid for a vote that was never counted, and nobody refunds a neutralised link.

For the owner-operator, that means a report can be one hundred percent live and one hundred percent useless at the same time. The €250 keeps leaving the account either way.

And the guarantee in the cold email? Google publishes its own advice for businesses hiring SEO help, and it contains one sentence worth keeping to hand: no one can guarantee a number one ranking on Google ^[4]. The same page carries a warning that stings a little more. You are responsible for the actions of any company you hire. If a link seller strays into tactics that do trigger a manual penalty, the penalty lands on your website, not theirs.

Early in my sales career I watched a client renew a link building retainer I privately doubted, and I said nothing because it was not my product and not my place to comment. Their spend, my silence. Staying quiet to be polite cost that customer real money, and I have not made that mistake since.

Links Matter Less Than the Sales Email Claims

Even genuine links carry less weight than they used to. Gary Illyes, one of Google's most senior search engineers, told a conference audience that links are no longer among the top three ranking factors, and later went further, saying Google needs very few links to rank pages, as Search Engine Land reported ^[5]. Google has spent a decade shifting weight towards content quality and user signals precisely because links were so widely bought and sold.

For a local business, the maths is more forgiving again. When someone in your town searches for what you do, the local results run on three factors Google names openly: relevance, distance and prominence ^[6]. Links feed into prominence. So do reviews, and so does a complete, active Business Profile with photos and accurate hours. Distance cannot be bought at any price. A competitor with sixty recent reviews and a well-tended profile will sit above a business holding a folder of purchased links, week after week.

This is usually the real story when competitors outrank you in local search, and it has nothing to do with anyone's link building budget.

The Links Worth Having Cannot Be Ordered by the Dozen

Real links, the kind Google actually counts, come from websites that would exist whether or not they linked to you. For a local business they are more attainable than the industry pretends:

Your trade association or chamber of commerce member directory
Suppliers and manufacturers who list their approved installers or stockists
The local paper covering something your business genuinely did
Clubs and events you sponsor, linking to you from their pages
Neighbouring businesses you actually work alongside, referring customers both ways

None of these costs €250 a month. All of them sit on pages a real customer might genuinely click through, which is the quiet test worth applying to any link: if it only works on a robot, it probably does not work at all.

One nuance on sponsorships, since they involve money changing hands. Google is perfectly happy with paid links when they are labelled as such, using what is called a sponsored tag, they just pass no ranking credit ^[2]. The value of sponsoring the local team is the shirt, the sign, and the families who see your name every weekend. Treat any ranking benefit as a bonus, not the point.

An honest limitation, because this is exactly where the retainer pitch starts to sound tempting: earned links arrive slowly and cannot be scheduled. A new website might attract a handful in its first year, and there will be months where nothing happens at all. That is normal, and it is survivable, because local visibility was never really about link volume in the first place.

Earned links grow slowly, but they are the only ones that compound.

Where the Retainer Money Works Harder

There is one genuine exception before we reallocate the budget. A national e-commerce brand fighting for competitive commercial keywords across the whole country can get real returns from professional digital PR, meaning earned coverage and links from major publications. That discipline costs thousands per month and is worth it at that scale. It has almost nothing in common with a €250 package sold by cold email, and if you are reading this as the owner of a local business, it is not what you are being offered.

For everyone else, take the same €250 a month, €3,000 a year, and put it where Google is actually looking.

Write for the searches that bring buyers. One page that answers the exact question a customer types is worth more than a hundred bought links, and plenty of businesses rank for the wrong searches entirely long before links become their problem.

Feed your Google Business Profile. Photos, services, opening hours, and a steady rhythm of reviews. This is the prominence signal you control directly, and it costs time rather than money.

Make the website itself worth linking to. Fast, secure, professionally presented, with pages worth citing. That foundation costs far less than the industry has trained owners to expect: Web60's €60-a-year all-inclusive hosting covers the AI-built site, SSL, backups, security and analytics for roughly a quarter of what a typical backlink retainer charges in a single month.

Run that reallocation for a year and compare. Roughly €3,000 on links Google quietly neutralises, or a properly built website plus twelve months of content and profile work. One of those compounds. The other produces six-page reports.

The Two Questions That End the Sales Call

Back to the flooring contractor. In the version of this story I keep encountering, the retainer gets cancelled, the purchased links stay wherever they live, and nothing about the site's visibility changes in either direction. That tells you everything about what those links were doing. Recovery does not come from deleting anything. It comes from redirecting the spend.

The next email will arrive. When it does, two questions cut through every pitch. Where exactly will these links live? And would that website exist if it did not sell links? A seller with good answers to both is rare enough that asking costs you nothing. What happens to the €250 a month is your decision, and it is the one that will actually show up in your search results.