Five price tiers, and what you're actually buying at each
Every link on sale in India falls into one of five bands. The band tells you far more than the domain rating in the seller's spreadsheet does, because DR is trivially inflated and the business model behind the site is not.
| Price per link | What it actually is | What Google does with it |
|---|---|---|
| ₹300 – ₹800 | Marketplace bulk: private blog networks, expired domains, profile and comment drops, directory dumps. Delivered in 48 hours because nothing was negotiated. | Link spam under Google's published policies. Best case ignored, worst case a manual action. |
| ₹1,500 – ₹4,000 | A "guest post" on a site that exists to sell guest posts. Two hundred outbound links a month, no readers, no editorial standard. | Almost always discounted. You bought a URL, not a signal. |
| ₹5,000 – ₹12,000 | Paid placement on a real niche site with real traffic. The content is fine. Money still changed hands for the link. | Policy violation if it passes PageRank without rel="sponsored". With the tag, no ranking value — which is the point. |
| ₹12,000 – ₹25,000 | Earned: a data story, an expert quote, a tool, a partnership. Nobody invoiced anybody for the link. | The only tier Google's policies are indifferent to, because there's nothing to detect. |
| ₹25,000+ | National press or high-authority editorial, usually the output of a campaign rather than a pitch. | Same as above, plus brand search lift you can actually see in Search Console. |
Why one earned link costs about ₹18,000
The publisher charges nothing. The cost is entirely your side of the table: the thing you pitch, and the hours spent pitching it. Here's the model at a ₹1,200/hour blended delivery cost, assuming one placement per thirty pitches. Your hit rate will differ — the shape of the maths won't.
| Line | Time | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Asset you pitch — data cut, survey, tool or expert POV, amortised across the campaign | — | ₹4,000 |
| Prospecting and list building, qualifying real sites | 2 hrs | ₹2,400 |
| Thirty personalised pitches at ~12 minutes each | 6 hrs | ₹7,200 |
| Follow-ups, negotiation, supplying quotes and images | 2 hrs | ₹2,400 |
| Tools — backlink index, email finder, outreach seat, amortised | — | ₹1,500 |
| QA, tracking the placement, reporting | 0.5 hr | ₹600 |
| Total for one live, earned link | 10.5 hrs | ≈ ₹18,100 |
How many links a ₹75,000 retainer honestly funds
Link and digital PR work typically takes 20–30% of an SEO retainer, with the rest going to technical, content and reporting. On ₹75,000 a month that's ₹15,000–₹22,500 of link budget.
At ₹18,000 fully loaded, that buys one earned link a month, occasionally two when a single campaign asset lands more than one placement. That is the real number, and it's the number nobody puts on a proposal because it looks small next to "25 high-DA backlinks monthly".
It looks small until you compare what each side is. Twelve earned editorial links in a year, from sites your buyers actually read, will outrank a hundred and fifty marketplace placements — and won't need cleaning up later. The full breakdown of where retainer money goes is in what SEO services cost, one service at a time.
- ₹25,000/mo link package, 20 links → ₹1,250 per link. Tier one. You're buying a network.
- ₹50,000/mo, 8 links → ₹6,250 per link. Paid placements on real sites, most likely undisclosed.
- ₹75,000/mo retainer, 1–2 links → ₹15,000–₹22,500 per link. Outreach that actually happened.
- ₹1,50,000/mo digital PR → 3–6 placements. A campaign, not a pitch list.
The risk you inherit when you buy links
Google's spam policies name link spam directly: buying or selling links that pass ranking signals, exchanging goods or services for links, and large-scale automated link creation. Disclosure with rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow" keeps you compliant, and simultaneously removes the ranking benefit you paid for. That trade-off is the whole story of paid links.
The practical risk in 2026 is rarely a dramatic manual penalty. It's quieter: the links get algorithmically discounted, your rankings don't move, and you spend nine months believing SEO doesn't work for your category. You paid for a signal that was neutralised on arrival.
The second risk is the cleanup. When a site does pick up a manual action for unnatural links, disavowing and removing them is slow, unglamorous work — and it's charged at the same hourly rate the outreach would have been.
Why we refuse to sell links by the unit
Per-link pricing sounds fair and behaves badly. It pays the agency for placements, so the agency optimises for placements — which means the cheapest source that technically counts, every time.
It also makes "no" expensive. If a publisher is wrong for your brand, or the site smells like a network, declining costs the per-link agency real money. Nobody makes that call twenty times a month when it's coming out of their margin.
And it converts a judgement into a quota. The best link opportunity in a given month might be one partnership that takes three weeks and produces a single placement. Under a per-link contract, that month looks like failure.
- We bill link work as hours inside the retainer, at the same rate as everything else.
- We report referring domains gained and lost, with the live URL. You can click every one.
- We don't buy placements, and we don't accept a brief that requires a fixed monthly link count.
- The number we're actually measured on is your qualified leads from organic, frozen as a trailing-90-day baseline on day one. Miss it in 90 days and we keep working free until we beat it. No promised position, ever.