Between roughly £60 and £400 a link at the vendors who publish their rates, banded by Domain Rating. Below are the real numbers from five rate cards, read on 4 August 2026, plus what the published research says and where it disagrees with itself.
A single backlink from a vendor who publishes prices costs roughly £60 to £400, or $37 to $405, depending almost entirely on the authority and traffic of the site it sits on. Digital PR links run higher, at $1,250 to $1,500 each. Published survey averages range from $83 to $509, and that spread is a measurement artefact rather than a real disagreement.
Every figure on this page was read off the vendor’s own live pricing page on 4 August 2026 and is attributed where it appears. Prices change. If one of these is out of date, tell us and we will fix it.
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Prices read 4 August 2026
The rate cards
Published price per link, by Domain Rating band.
Five vendors who publish real per-link prices rather than routing you to a call. Currencies are as published, not converted, because converting would introduce a number nobody actually charges.
Feature
DR 20+
DR 30+
DR 40+
DR 50+
DR 60+
FATJOE (UK, GBP)
£80
£100
£180
£280
£380
The HOTH (USD)
$175
$225
$345
$405
Not published
Rhino Rank (USD)
$95
$130
$200
$300
$400
Stan Ventures (USD)
Not published
$37
$67
$247
Not published
Loganix (USD)
Not published
$200
$400
Not published
Not published
All read 4 August 2026 from each vendor's own pricing page. FATJOE bands are its Blogger Outreach and Niche Edits rate card, which is identical for both products, and it serves GBP to UK visitors. Rhino Rank guest posts band by Moz DA rather than Ahrefs DR. Stan Ventures bands by DA/DR with a separate traffic requirement per tier. Loganix publishes two named tiers rather than a full band table. "Not published" means that vendor does not list a price at that band, not that it will not sell one.
What authority is worth
One vendor's published rate card, bottom band to top.
FATJOE's price per placement across its own DR bands. Every vendor with a published table scales by a similar factor, roughly five to seven times from entry to top tier.
DR 10+£60
DR 20+£80
DR 30+£100
DR 40+£180
DR 50+£280
DR 60+£380
One vendor's published rate card, bottom band to top.. Published price per placement, GBP.
Period
Published price per placement, GBP
DR 10+
£60
DR 20+
£80
DR 30+
£100
DR 40+
£180
DR 50+
£280
DR 60+
£380
Published price per placement, GBP. Source: FATJOE published rate card · read 4 August 2026
Format
Guest post, niche edit, or digital PR.
Most pages on this topic assert that one format is cheaper. The published evidence does not support that, and the vendors contradict each other.
Feature
Guest post
Niche edit
Digital PR
FATJOE, own rate card
£60 to £380
Identical, £60 to £380
£425 to £700 per guaranteed link
The HOTH, own rate card
$175 to $405
$200 to $450
$266 to $300 in bundles
Rhino Rank, own rate card
$75 to $400
$60 to $210
Not offered
Ahrefs study, 450 + 180 sites
$77.80 average
$361.44 average
Not measured
BuzzStream, 500,000-site database
$295 direct, $461 via vendor
$179
$1,250 to $1,500
Vendor figures read 4 August 2026. The Ahrefs figures come from Joshua Hardwick's outreach study on ahrefs.com/blog/buy-backlinks, in which 450 sites were approached to buy a link outright and only 12.6% were willing to sell; the article dates the study to several years before its 2024 update, so treat it as directional. BuzzStream's figures are from its June 2026 analysis of a vendor database of over 500,000 sites. Digital PR is the only format where every independent source agrees on a premium.
What actually moves the price
Traffic, more than Domain Rating.
DR sets the band. Traffic sets the number inside it, and the rate cards give that away. Stan Ventures prices a DR 30+ site with 100 or more monthly visits at $37, and any site at all with 1,000 or more visits at $107. Same publisher, same product, and the traffic requirement nearly triples the price while the authority requirement falls.
Rhino Rank abandons DR completely and bands by referring domains, with a traffic floor attached to the upper tiers. FATJOE attaches a traffic range to every band and guarantees Ahrefs traffic rather than DR alone. A high Domain Rating with no traffic behind it is the single most common thing we reject, and it is also the easiest thing for a cheap vendor to sell you, because the number looks right in a report.
Gambling is the one niche with a published premium rather than an asserted one. FATJOE charges from £120 for iGaming placements against £60 at its standard entry band, on the same rate card. Editorial.Link’s 2026 survey of 518 professionals found 61% named gambling as the highest-budget vertical. Finance, legal and CBD premiums are widely claimed but we could not find a vendor publishing a separate rate card, so there is no number here for them.
The cheap end
897 sites went in. 68 came out.
BuzzStream ran the exercise in June 2026. Starting from 1,500 vendor-supplied guest post sites, they removed anything below DR/DA 65 or under 10,000 monthly traffic. The qualifying list fell from 897 to 68. Across their full database of more than 500,000 sites, roughly 1.37% cleared that bar. On link insertions specifically, one site out of 174 qualified.
They also found that rel=sponsored is almost never applied, even though money changed hands. Google’s spam policies name “exchanging money for links” and undisclosed paid placements directly. That is the actual risk at the bottom of the market, and it is not priced into a $9.99 link.
Source: BuzzStream link building pricing analysis, last updated 16 June 2026. Google Search spam policies, read 4 August 2026.
The published research
Why the averages disagree, and which to trust.
Four figures get quoted constantly and they range from $83 to $509. They are all real. They measure different things, and the sampling explains the whole gap.
$83Authority Hacker, 755 link builders
The most-quoted number and the most misread. Roughly 70% of the sample were niche site owners buying at the cheapest end, and the figure explicitly excludes the labour of outreach. It is the price of the placement, not the cost of the link. The page has since been taken down, so this is read from the Internet Archive capture of the November 2024 version.
$361.44Ahrefs, 450 sites approached
For paid niche edits, against $77.80 for guest posts across 180 sites. The most useful detail is not the price: only 12.6% of sites approached were willing to sell a link at all. That supply constraint is why cheap inventory skews to publishers who will sell to anyone.
$179 to $461BuzzStream, 500,000-site database
Link insertions $179, guest posts $295 direct or $461 through a vendor, with top-tier placements around $780. Not a survey, an analysis of real inventory, which makes it the most grounded figure here.
$508.95Editorial.Link, 518 professionals
The highest figure, and the one to treat most carefully. It is stated willingness to pay rather than price paid, the survey was run by a link building vendor, and over half the sample was recruited through the vendor's own LinkedIn outreach. Directionally useful, commercially interested.
The most UK-weighted dataset available is Aira’s State of Link Building, 270 respondents and 45% UK, but it was fielded between 16 March and 2 May 2022 and no newer edition has been published. It found price-per-link was the least used pricing model among agencies, at 8%.
Worth knowing
Most agencies do not publish a price at all.
We checked every vendor we could think of on 4 August 2026. Page One Power, Sure Oak, Authority Builders, NUOPTIMA, Digitaloft and UK Linkology all sell link building, and none of them listed a price anywhere on their site. That is a legitimate commercial choice. It also means you cannot compare anything without booking a series of calls, and that the number you are quoted can reasonably depend on what you look like you can afford.
Ours are below, and they are the same for everyone.
Our rates
What we charge.
Direct, for businesses buying their own links. Agencies reselling under their own brand pay the wholesale rates.
Managed links
From $425per link
Manually sourced placements on sites with real traffic and real editorial standards. Buy them on their own or as part of a retainer.
5 links, $2,125
10 links, $3,950
20 links, $7,500
Every domain sourced in-house. Around 70% of the sites we source never make it past screening.
Your site has a technical or indexation problem. Links will not fix a page Google cannot crawl, and you will have spent the budget finding that out.
You cannot say what a customer is worth. If the lifetime value of a client is a few hundred pounds, the arithmetic on a £300 link rarely works and we would rather tell you now.
You need it to work this quarter. Authority Hacker's survey put the average at 3.1 months before links moved anything, and that matches what we see.
If any of those apply, a Revenue Baseline is a better first purchase than a link package, because it tells you what search is currently worth before you spend on growing it.
Pricing FAQs
What people ask before they buy links.
There is no single number, but the published rate cards cluster tightly. At DR 30 the live prices on 4 August 2026 were £100 at FATJOE, $130 at Rhino Rank, $225 at The HOTH, $200 at Loganix and $37 at Stan Ventures. At DR 60 the same vendors run £380 and $400. Anything materially below that range is usually a site that will sell to anyone, which is the problem rather than the bargain.
Because they measure different populations. Authority Hacker's 755-respondent survey reported an $83 average, but roughly 70% of that sample were niche site owners buying at the cheapest end, and the figure explicitly excluded outreach labour. Editorial.Link's 2026 survey of 518 professionals reported $508.95, but that is what people said they would accept paying, it was run by a link building vendor, and half the sample was recruited by the vendor's own outreach. Both numbers are real. Neither is the price of a link.
Not reliably, and most pages asserting one or the other are wrong. FATJOE charges the identical rate for both at every DR band. The HOTH charges slightly more for insertions at the top. Rhino Rank charges less for insertions. Ahrefs' own study of 450 sites found paid niche edits averaged $361.44 against $77.80 for guest posts, which runs the opposite way to the usual assumption. Buy on the site, not the placement type.
It sets the band, but traffic moves the number more. Stan Ventures prices a DR 30+ site with 100+ monthly visits at $37 and any-DR site with 1,000+ visits at $107. Rhino Rank drops DR entirely and bands by referring domains with a traffic floor on the upper tiers. FATJOE attaches a traffic range to every DR band and guarantees the traffic, not just the DR. A high DR with no traffic is the most common thing we reject.
More than any other format, and every independent source agrees. BuzzStream's June 2026 analysis puts it at $1,250 to $1,500 per unique link. FATJOE's own campaign pricing implies £425 to £700 per guaranteed link. The trade-off is that you are buying coverage rather than placements, so the count is a minimum rather than a target.
Often, yes. BuzzStream started from 1,500 vendor-supplied sites in June 2026 and, after removing anything below DR/DA 65 or under 10,000 monthly traffic, the qualifying list fell from 897 to 68. Across their full database of over 500,000 sites, roughly 1.37% qualified. They also note that rel=sponsored is almost never applied even though money changed hands, which is a direct breach of Google's link spam policy.
We checked. Page One Power, Sure Oak, Authority Builders, NUOPTIMA, Digitaloft and UK Linkology all sell link building and none of them published a price on 4 August 2026. That is a legitimate commercial choice, but it means you cannot compare without booking calls. Our rates are on this site because the alternative wastes your time and ours.
$425 a link direct, with 5 for $2,125, 10 for $3,950 and 20 for $7,500. Agencies buying wholesale pay $145, $120 or $105 a link depending on monthly volume. Those are the same numbers for everyone and they are on the pricing page.
In gambling, provably. FATJOE charges from £120 for iGaming placements against £60 for its standard entry band, a published 2x premium on the same rate card. Editorial.Link's survey found 61% of respondents named gambling as the highest-budget vertical. For finance, legal and CBD the premium is widely asserted but we could not find a vendor publishing a separate rate card, so we are not going to put a number on it.
Authority Hacker's survey found 618 of 755 link builders said one to six months, averaging 3.1 months. That matches what we see. Anyone promising movement inside a month is describing a coincidence.
