Teardown
Cheap SEO links for 20 branches: reading a $99 offer line by line
The pitch is always the same: a hundred links for the price of a pizza. Here is a typical offer taken apart, with the questions we would ask.
The offer as it arrives (a composite, not a real seller)
| Line in the offer | What it usually means | Question to ask |
|---|---|---|
| "100 local links for $99" | About $1 each, from lists or profiles | Can I see the list before I pay? |
| "High DA sites" | A third-party score, easy to inflate | Which sites, and what is their real traffic? |
| "Delivery in 7 days" | Batch posting from a template | Is every link on a different page and domain? |
| "White hat, safe" | A claim no one can back | What happens if Google devalues them? |
| "Works for all your locations" | One URL gets all of it | Can I pick a target per branch? |
Cheap is not the sin
Let us be fair. A link can cost $1 and be fine. Our own marketplace starts at $1 per link, and some small relevant sites are worth that.
The sin is blindness. You are not seeing what you buy. When 100 links arrive as a spreadsheet after the fact, you cannot judge relevance, region or language. On a chain with twenty branches that matters, because a link from a site in the wrong country does little for the Leeds page.
Google's SpamBrain system, announced in 2022, was built to catch patterns like mass-posted links on unrelated pages. We cannot say what it would do to any one order. We say: do not buy blind.
Think of it like buying parts for a van. A bin of unlabeled bolts at $1 each is a gamble, while the same bolts sorted by size are a fair deal. Labels are what you pay for. The row in our marketplace is the label: Domain Rating, traffic, niche, language, price.
Our reading
Three red flags and two green ones
Count them before you pay. One red flag means ask. Two means skip.
- Red: no list of sites before payment.
- Red: one target URL for every branch.
- Red: a promise about rankings or about safety.
- Green: price, traffic and Domain Rating shown per site.
- Green: you choose each target page.
The same $99, spent by hand
- 1
Pick one branch
The one with the largest gap to its rival, per your Ahrefs or Semrush check.
- 2
Filter by region and language
Set a traffic floor and a price ceiling, then read the rows.
- 3
Order three to five links
At $15 to $30 each, you buy a handful you can name, not a hundred you cannot.
- 4
Wait 30 days, read Search Console
Then decide on the next branch.
A word on the budget, and on this site
Fewer links, chosen with eyes open, will usually teach you more than a bulk bag. That is also cheaper to unlearn if you are wrong.
This marketplace has limits as well. Placements are one link per article, the monthly data from other tools differs, and we do not run your Business Profile. To plan the order itself, open the decision tree or the rollout timeline.
Price questions
What is a fair price for a local link?
There is no single number. Here prices run from $1 to about $500 and rise with authority, traffic and niche. For a branch page in a mid-sized town, a handful of links in the low tens of dollars is a sensible first test.
Are $1 links always bad?
No, but check the row. A small relevant site with real readers can serve a local page. A site with no traffic and no topic does nothing. The marketplace shows traffic and niche so you can tell the difference.
Should one order cover all my branches?
Only if each branch has its own target row. A single URL receiving everything helps one page and leaves nineteen untouched.