That $300 backlink package I almost bought actually worked... kinda scared me

I was super skeptical about those cheap backlink packages everyone warns you about. Saw one for $300 offering 50 do-follow links from 'high authority' sites. Figured I'd waste the money just to prove it was a scam. Ran the domain through Ahrefs first and half the sites had zero traffic. Still bought it anyway and two weeks later my domain rating jumped from 18 to 27. Now I'm worried Google's going to slap me with a penalty in the next update. Has anyone else seen temporary gains from cheap links that later backfired?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_elizabeth27d ago

...yeah I went through the exact same thing with a $200 package last year and honestly you're right to be worried. The domain rating jumps look nice in your dashboard but Google's not dumb, they can see when a bunch of sites that have no traffic or real content all start linking to you at once. I started getting those manual action notices about three months after the jump, and by the time I actually checked the backlinks half of them were from pages in Russian with gibberish text. My advice would be to start disavowing those links right now before Google does it for you, and focus on getting even a few real links from places like local directories or guest posts on sites that actually have readers. It's way better to lose that artificial boost slowly and replace it with real links than to have everything crash down at once.

felix15527d ago

Man this hits CLOSE to home. Bought a $250 package myself six months ago for my hobby site, saw my domain rating jump from 15 to 23 in like ten days. Felt like a genius for a week then started noticing all these weird spammy domains linking to me from sites that looked like they were built in 2005 and never updated. Got hit with a manual action three months later, tanked my traffic by like 60%. Google definitely caught on eventually. Those cheap packages usually work SHORT TERM but they're literally paying for links from PBNs or expired domains that Google already flagged. You're probably gonna get that penalty when they do their next cleanup, I'd start building legit links now to offset the damage before it happens. Better to LOSE the ranking boost slowly than get nuked all at once.