A link building package is a fixed monthly bundle: a set number of placements on other sites for one price, usually covering prospecting, content, outreach and any publisher fee. Published packages I checked in October 2026 work out to roughly $180 to $430 per link at entry level.
The link count is not what you are buying. The clauses are. All three published price lists I checked, mine included, promise an average DR, not a minimum, and none of the five top-ranking guides for this keyword mentions Google’s rel=”sponsored” rule for paid links. Judge a package by its clauses or you will overpay for links you can’t use.
What’s inside a link building package
Strip away the branding and almost every package sells the same five jobs. What changes from vendor to vendor is how much of each you get and how much you control.
| Component | What it should mean | What to ask for |
|---|---|---|
| Prospecting | Finding sites in your topic with a real audience | The site list before anything goes live |
| Content | A new guest post, or a line added to an existing article (a niche edit) | Draft approval before publishing |
| Outreach | Pitching editors who decide whether to publish | Confirmation that a human editor reviews every piece |
| Placement mix | Guest posts, niche edits, sometimes digital PR | The split, in writing |
| Reporting | Live URL, anchor text, target page, site metrics | A report per link, not a dashboard of totals |
Price moves with three things: site quality, volume and how hard your niche is to place in. DR (Ahrefs) and DA (Moz) are third-party scores, not Google metrics. Vendors use them as price tiers because buyers recognise them. I explain what they do and don’t measure in my guide to domain authority.
The basic red flags every serious guide agrees on still hold:
| Red flag | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| No site list until after you pay | You can’t vet what you can’t see |
| High DR, almost no organic traffic | Classic link farm pattern: metrics built for selling, not reading |
| Private blog networks (PBNs) | Sites that exist only to sell links |
| Dozens of links a month for a few hundred dollars | Real editors don’t work at that price or speed |
| No written replacement policy | Links get removed; without terms you pay twice |
| Long lock-in contract on the first order | You can’t test quality before committing |
I keep a longer list of tactics to walk away from in link building scams to avoid. When I vet a site, the floor is at least 2,000 real monthly organic visitors, a human editor and a clean outbound link profile. No PBNs, no link farms.
How much does a link building package cost?
Entry-level packages from vendors that publish their prices run about $1,750 to $3,000 a month, or roughly $180 to $430 per link (pricing checked October 2026). Here is what three published price lists actually say. Sheikh Shadi is my agency, so I’ve included it with the same fields as the others.
| Vendor and plan | Monthly price | Links | Price per link | DR promise | Traffic floor stated | Replacement terms on pricing page |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Editorial.link Startup | $1,750 | 5 | $350 | Average DR 50 to 90 | 5k+ | Not stated |
| Editorial.link Growth | $6,000 | 20 | $300 | Average DR 50 to 90 | 5k+ | Not stated |
| OneLittleWeb Startup | $2,999 | 7 | $428 | Average DR 50 to 90 | Not stated | Not stated for monthly plans |
| OneLittleWeb Growth | $5,999 | 15 | $400 | Average DR 50 to 90 | Not stated | Not stated for monthly plans |
| Sheikh Shadi Startup | $1,800 | 10 | $180 | Average DR 50+ | 2,000+ organic visitors per site | 6 months on every live link |
| Sheikh Shadi Growth | $3,800 | 20 | $190 | Average DR 60+ | 2,000+ organic visitors per site | 6 months on every live link |
Pricing checked October 2026 on each vendor’s own pricing page. Prices change; check before you buy.
Per backlink, those lists span $180 to $428. Per-link prices quoted in the guides that rank for this keyword spread much wider, from about $60 to $2,000+, because one DR 90 placement and one DR 30 placement are different products. For how link building fits a full SEO budget, including what an in-house team costs instead, see how much SEO costs.
Is a link building package still worth buying?
Yes, if links are what’s holding you back. Google’s own documentation still says it “uses links as a signal when determining the relevancy of pages and to find new pages to crawl.”
Volume and time both matter. For Zluri we built 370 links over 14 months, and monthly visits went from 8,700 to 56,000. That is roughly 26 links a month, sustained for over a year. Read the Zluri case study for the full timeline. A three-month trial of five links a month will not tell you much on a competitive SaaS keyword.
A package is not worth it when your pages can’t convert or rank on content alone. Links amplify a page; they don’t fix a thin one.
Which link building company is best?
There isn’t one best company. Two of the “best services” lists ranking for this keyword were written by a vendor that put itself first. The right vendor is the one whose clauses match your floor: the minimum DR and traffic per site you’ll accept, your niche, and how much control you need over content and anchors.
If you are weighing in-house against outsourcing, my guide to outsourcing link building covers the decision and the questions to ask before you sign.
What most package guides leave out
The five top-ranking pages for “link building package” cover prices and red flags well. None of them covers the four points below, and each one changes what you should sign.
Google’s rule on paid links applies to packages
Google’s spam policies define link spam as “creating links to or from a site primarily for the purpose of manipulating search rankings.” The first example listed is “buying or selling links for ranking purposes,” including “exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links.”
Google’s guidance on outbound links says paid links are fine for advertising when they’re marked: “Mark links that are advertisements or paid placements (commonly called paid links) with the sponsored value.”
A package price can include a publisher fee alongside outreach and content. Ours does when a publisher charges one. No vendor can make that risk disappear, and nobody should call a paid link “safe” or “Google-approved.” What you can do:
- Ask whether any placement in the package includes a payment to the publisher.
- Ask whether the editor reviews and can reject the piece. A placement an editor would publish on merit is a different thing from a slot on a sold-link menu.
- Decide your own risk line before you buy, not after a link is live.
I go deeper on attribution in my post on sponsored links.
Where a high-DR link sits matters as much as the DR
A “DR 90 placement” can live in the publication’s main editorial section or in a third-party content section bolted onto the domain. Google introduced its site reputation policy to stop “a practice where third-party content is published on a trusted website just to exploit that site’s good reputation to rank higher in Search.”
Google updated this policy on 28 August 2026. Outside the EEA, a manual action “will directly affect search results for the portion of the site affected.” Inside the EEA, “the affected section of the site may be separated in our systems so that, over time, it ranks independently from the rest of the site.”
My reading: a link in a section Google treats separately should not be priced as if it carries the host domain’s full weight. Before you pay a high-DR premium, ask for the exact URL path, check that the section has a named author or editor, and check that it’s linked from the site’s main navigation.
Average DR is not minimum DR
Every price list in the table above promises an average, mine included. An average says nothing about the weakest link in the batch. Five DR 80 links plus five DR 20 links average DR 50.
Ask for two things in writing: a minimum DR per link and a traffic floor per site. Our floor is 2,000 real monthly organic visitors on every site, which protects you from the high-DR, no-audience pattern even when the DR average looks fine.
Cost per qualifying link beats price per link
Price per link is the number on the sales page. Cost per qualifying link is what you actually pay for each link that meets your floor and is still live after the replacement window. Here is the formula:
Cost per qualifying link = package price ÷ links that meet your floor and are still live at the end of the replacement window
Illustrative example with stated assumptions, not vendor data:
| Input | Package A | Package B |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly price | $3,000 | $3,500 |
| Links delivered | 10 | 10 |
| Sticker price per link | $300 | $350 |
| Links below your floor (assumed) | 3 (only an average DR promised) | 0 (floor written into the order) |
| Links removed in six months, not replaced (assumed) | 1 (no replacement terms) | 0 (replacement guarantee) |
| Qualifying links | 6 | 10 |
| Cost per qualifying link | $500 | $350 |
The cheaper package costs more per usable link. Run this with your own floor before comparing quotes, and ask each vendor what happens to links that miss it.
My verdict
Buy a link building package when links are your bottleneck and you can commit for long enough to see movement. Skip it if your target pages are thin or you can’t say what floor a link has to meet.
Before you sign, get four things in writing: the site list or a sample with live URLs, a per-link minimum DR plus a traffic floor per site, replacement terms for removed links, and a clear answer on publisher payments and editorial review. If a vendor won’t put those in writing, walk. Our link building service works this way: you pay upfront, any link that doesn’t go live is replaced or refunded in full, and every live link has a 6-month replacement guarantee.
Want to know how many links stand between you and the sites outranking you? Get a free link gap analysis, or compare plans on our link building pricing page.
