Ranges, not quotes
What to pay when you purchase 100 backlinks for a town blog
Prices run from $1 to about $500 per link. The honest question for a small local site is not the total, it is which band deserves your money.
CentralBlog editorial team ·
The sum before the shopping
A hundred links is a lot for a blog that publishes three posts a week. Most hyperlocal sites we would advise should think in tens. Still, people do ask about the larger number, so let us price it. Nothing is hidden.
Pricing on the marketplace is pay as you go. It runs from $1 for modest donors to roughly $500 for top domains, and it scales with the donor's Domain Rating, organic traffic and niche. No subscription. No minimum order.
That means a hundred at the bottom band would be about $100, while a hundred at the top would be $50,000. Nobody sensible does either. The figures below are an example, not a quote.
An example split of $1,000 for a city blog
| Band | Example price per link | Links | Spend |
|---|---|---|---|
| Budget, small regional sites | $5 | 40 | $200 |
| Mid-range, relevant niche | $25 | 24 | $600 |
| Stronger domain, one-off | $100 | 2 | $200 |
| Total | 66 | $1,000 |
What moves the price of a single link
Domain Rating
Ahrefs' 0 to 100 score for a site's backlink profile. Higher usually costs more, and for a local blog it matters less than you think.
Organic traffic
A donor with real readers costs more than one with none. Readers are the part of the link you cannot fake.
Niche and language
A donor on property, food or local services in your language is dearer than a generic one, and worth it when your page matches.
Content mode
Automatic content is included. Supplying your own article takes your time, not extra cost on the product side.
What $100 does, and what $1,000 does
Hundred dollars: we would buy about eight links in the $10 to $15 range, aimed at one guide page. Wait six weeks. Done.
A thousand dollars asks for more discipline. Split it over three or four pages, never put more than a third into one target, and keep a portion back for a second round after you have read the results.
For a calendar of what to expect after the money is spent, read the week-by-week diary. If you are weighing it against free options, the free local links checklist comes first.
Where cheap stops being cheap
A $1 link is not automatically a bad link. It is a link on a modest site, and for a neighbourhood blog that may be exactly right. The trap is buying a hundred of them for one page.
Think of it as buying newspaper ads. A small notice in the parish magazine costs little and reaches the right street. Twenty identical notices in the same magazine do nothing extra.
Ahrefs, Semrush and Moz all give an indication of a donor's strength. They disagree with each other, and that is fine. Use one tool consistently, and use your own eyes on the site as the tiebreaker.
Before you click pay
- Each target page is finished, indexed, and worth a stranger's visit.
- No more than a third of the budget points at a single URL.
- Anchors vary: brand name, bare URL and a plain phrase, not the same keyword ten times.
- You can afford to lose the whole amount without a hard conversation at the next meeting.
- You have the baseline numbers from Search Console saved.
Our view
Spend less, aim closer
For a town blog, twenty well-chosen links usually beat a hundred cheap ones. Cheap has its place, but the rows that cost a little more and sit next to your subject are where we would put the weight.
- Start under $100 and learn how your pages respond.
- Prefer relevance to a high score.
- Rankings are never promised, and the price does not change that.
Try your own numbers
The budget widget is a local estimate only. It does not place an order.