What link building actually involves
Every link you didn't ask for was earned by something: a page worth citing, data nobody else published, a quote a journalist needed at 4pm. Link building is making that happen deliberately rather than waiting.
In an agency it's three jobs on one invoice line: finding targets, creating the reason to link — the expensive part, and the part most agencies skip — and outreach, which is mostly rejection. If a method would be embarrassing to describe to the person who runs the linking site, it's a purchase with extra steps.
What each tactic costs in India
These are ranges we see quoted here — in agency proposals, marketplace outreach and the offers landing in founders' inboxes. Market observation, not survey data, and they move constantly. Use them to sanity-check a quote, not as a price list.
| Tactic | Typical cost in India | What it's worth |
|---|---|---|
| General directory listing | Free–₹2,000 each | Nothing for rankings. Local citations help the map pack if your name, address and phone match everywhere — a different job. |
| Marketplace guest post | ₹2,000–₹25,000 per placement | Usually nothing. Priced on DR, sold at volume, and exactly what Google's link spam policy describes. |
| Editorial placement on a real publication | Effort: pitching, writing, revisions | High. Slow and uncertain, and it survives audits. |
| Original data or research story | ₹1,00,000–₹5,00,000 per campaign | Highest ceiling. Lands two links or fifty, which is why it's priced per campaign. |
| Expert commentary to journalists | Time — a few hours a week | Good value if a named person actually replies. Low response rates, same-day deadlines. |
| Partnerships, integrations, supplier pages | Free, needs a relationship | Underrated. Every vendor and client is a link you've earned and never asked for. |
| Broken link and unlinked-mention reclamation | Time only | Highest hit rate in outreach — you're asking for a correction, not a favour. |
Link schemes, and the penalty that isn't a penalty
Google's spam policies define link schemes plainly: buying or selling links that pass ranking credit, excessive exchanges, large-scale article campaigns with keyword-rich anchors, automated link creation. Most of the Indian link market sits inside that definition, which everyone involved knows.
Two things can happen. A manual action — a human reviewer flags unnatural links, a message appears in Search Console, rankings drop, and recovery needs a clean-up plus a reconsideration request. Far more common is neutralisation: the spam systems simply stop counting the links. No message, no drop, no signal at all. Founders brace for the first and get the second, which is commercially worse — a penalty at least tells you to stop.
How many links a real campaign lands
Work the arithmetic and the promises collapse on their own. One genuine placement needs research, something worth pitching, two follow-ups and often a piece of writing — several hours per landed link, at a hit rate frequently below one in ten.
At a link budget of ₹20,000–₹30,000 a month, which is what a ₹75,000 SEO retainer can sensibly allocate, a competent team earns between two and eight relevant referring domains a month. It's a range because sector decides it: fintech and healthcare journalists take commentary readily, industrial manufacturing doesn't.
Two to eight looks weak beside a marketplace offering thirty, and compounds differently. Eight relevant domains a month for a year is a profile; 360 purchased placements is an audit finding. Our link building work runs at the first pace, which is part of why we take three clients a month.
Four questions to ask before you sign
Ask these in the pitch and watch how long the answers take. An agency that earns links answers all four in under a minute.
- "Show me the last ten links you built for a client in my sector." Not a portfolio — ten live URLs. Then check whether those sites have traffic.
- "Do you pay for placements, and do those links carry `rel="sponsored"`?" There's a correct answer and a revealing one.
- "What's the monthly link budget, and how many links does it buy?" Then divide.
- "What's the reporting?" Live URLs, anchor text, follow status, first-seen date. Not a count — a count is what you report when the URLs won't survive inspection.