If your inbox has an offer for a thousand links at the price of a pizza, this page is for you. It is written kindly, but it will not flatter the offer.
Grace Blogging editorial team ·
Why the offer finds you
Hobby bloggers are easy to reach. You publish often, you list a contact form, and you have probably searched for help with traffic. Sellers of bulk links know all this.
The pitch is usually the same. A thousand links, a PR9 badge, a promise of first-page results by next month. Each part collapses under a gentle question.
Take the PR9 badge. Google removed the visible PageRank score from its toolbar in March 2016, so anyone selling 'PR9' today is quoting a number that nobody can look up. It is a costume, not a measurement. Anyone who still quotes it is selling a story.
Five common mistakes and the calmer fix
The mistake
What goes wrong
The fix
Buying by quantity
A thousand links on throwaway pages carry almost no value, and the pattern looks automated
Buy five placements on real blogs instead
Trusting a made-up badge
PR9 and similar labels are not metrics Google publishes
Read Domain Rating, traffic and referring domains from a tool such as Ahrefs
Pointing everything at the home page
One page gets all the weight and the pattern is obvious
You discover the site list only after the money is gone
Choose from a list with visible metrics, and pay once you have reviewed the basket
What a bulk package really delivers
Picture the thousand links a few dollars buys. Most sit on pages created by software in an afternoon, with titles like a string of keywords and no readers at all.
Google has been discounting such pages for years. Its SpamBrain system and the link spam update of December 2022 were built for exactly this pattern, and a blog with 60 posts and a thousand new links overnight stands out in any report from Ahrefs or Semrush.
The best case is that nothing happens and you lose $20. The worst is a manual action letter in Search Console. Neither is worth the worry. Our glossary explains how to read those reports calmly, and the anchor notes show what a natural profile sounds like.
Red flags that deserve a polite no
The seller approached you first and wants payment within the day.
No list of sites is shown before you pay.
The offer mentions SENuke, GSA or any blast software as a feature.
Delivery arrives as a spreadsheet of thousands of rows at once.
Results are promised outright, with words like 'proof against every update'.
The price per link is a fraction of a dollar.
Reviews cannot be traced to a real person.
Our position
We would not sell you a thousand links, even if you asked
The marketplace works one placement at a time, from $1 to about $500, on sites you can inspect before you pay. If a thousand links ever helped a blog about gentle parenting, we have not seen how. Spend the same money on ten good placements and one better post.