Five checks before you pay for any link
Run these in order on any link, whether it is being offered to you or you already have it. Each takes a minute or two.
- Is the page in Google at all? Copy the address of the page that would carry your link and search for it in Google, in quotes. If nothing comes back, Google has not indexed that page, and a link sitting on a page Google has not indexed cannot pass anything to you. A good number of paid directory pages fail at this first step.
- Would it ever send you a visitor? Open the site and look at it the way a customer would. Is there recent content, a real business behind it, pages that have changed this year. This is the check you can settle with evidence instead of argument, because if you do take the link you can look for that domain in your analytics a month later and see what turned up. Here is how to do that.
- Is the link real or marked? Right click on the link, choose Inspect, and read the highlighted line for
rel="nofollow"orrel="sponsored". Both are labels telling Google not to read the link as an endorsement, so if the seller has marked the link they are charging you for, you are buying the version Google has been told to discount. - Is it relevant? A plumbing association, or a supplier you actually buy from, makes sense next to your name. A gambling blog registered in another country does not, and Google is good at telling those apart.
- Would a person plausibly find you there? Picture an actual customer on that page. If there is no reason for one to be there, or your name is one of two hundred in a list, you are looking at decoration. The original PageRank model that Google's founders published in 1998 divided a page's value between the links leaving it, so two hundred outbound links meant a two hundredth each. Google says the system has changed enormously since then, so that is the idea and not a description of today's mechanism. It remains a sound way to think about a long list.
The numbers link sellers quote
Most pitches lead with Domain Authority or Domain Rating. Both were invented by SEO tool companies as a way of estimating how strong a site is. They can be useful for comparing two sites against each other, they are easy to inflate, and Google does not publish or use either of them.
Moz, which created Domain Authority, says as much about its own metric: it "is not a Google ranking factor and has no effect on the SERPs". A pitch built on "DA 50+ guaranteed" is quoting you a score whose own maker says Google ignores it.
Google's spam policy is blunter than most owners expect. Its definition of link spam includes "buying or selling links for ranking purposes", and a few bullets down the same list sits "Low-quality directory or bookmark site links", five words with no further explanation attached.
On paid placement Google is conditional rather than absolute: it is not a violation as long as the links are qualified, meaning marked sponsored or nofollow. So whatever you are being offered is either unmarked and against policy, or marked and carrying the label that tells Google to discount it. That covers most of what gets sold.
There is a caveat here that runs the other way, and leaving it out would be misleading. In a small local market where nobody is competing hard, modest links appear to do more than they would in a competitive one, because most published guidance is calibrated for national search. Nobody has measured the size of that effect in New Zealand, so treat it as a reason to be less absolute, not as a reason to buy. The argument here is about which links matter, not whether links matter.
Where the good ones come from
The strongest links mirror relationships you already have:
- Your suppliers, and the trades you refer work to
- The association you belong to
- The club or event you sponsor
- The local paper that covered a job
Each of those passes every check above, and each costs a conversation. A competitor can outbid you for anything on a rate card. They cannot outbid you for your own supplier.
Edward Sturm, who has interviewed a long line of link builders, sets the standard as a ladder: "The best backlinks are on pages that are indexed, and the even better backlinks are on pages that are indexed and get clicks, but at least you want to be on pages that get indexed."
That points at the one sort of paying that does make sense. Sponsor the local club, take a stand at a trade event, back something whose page real people visit, and what you are buying is the visitors, with the link arriving alongside them. The test is whether you would still do it if they took the link away.
Separately from all of this, keep your handful of core directory listings accurate, since customers and AI assistants use them to confirm that you exist and that your details agree with each other. That is a different job from building authority, and it is a job you do once.
We are one of the sites that links to businesses, so treat this as interested advice and run the checks on us as well. Our category pages are indexed, they are built from a method we publish in full, and every one gets rescored and rewritten on a cycle rather than left to go stale.
Subscribers get that link from every category page they rank in, plus a profile page of their own. What nobody gets is a position: the link follows a ranking the business earned, and no business can pay to move up.
The links you already have
Everything above is about a link before you agree to it. The ones already pointing at you raise two different questions, and the answer to one of them is to do nothing.
Some of what you have already paid for is doing nothing, because the page carrying it was never indexed. That is the first check in this article run backwards, and it is free: search the address of each of those pages in quotes and see whether Google returns it. Charles Floate, who builds links for a living, reckons a meaningful share of what link campaigns produce never enters the index at all.
The thing not to do is buy a cleanup. Sooner or later a report arrives saying you have several hundred toxic backlinks, with an offer to disavow them. Google's link spam systems are aimed at the networks selling the links, and their usual effect is to make those links count for nothing rather than to punish the site they point at. David Quaid puts the disavow case narrowly: it is for a business that knowingly bought links in bulk and got caught, not for an owner alarmed by a list they had no part in building. Most of what those reports flag is ordinary user-generated web that anyone can post.
You will also be told you need hundreds of links because a competitor has hundreds. What you need is enough to compete for the searches that actually bring you work, which for most local trades is a handful of relevant ones rather than parity with anybody. Chasing a competitor's link count is a race against their head start.