Phase 3 · AmplificationModule 11 of 15
Links and authority
This is the module where the honest cost box is hardest to argue with, because outreach is labour and labour does not get cheaper when you get better at it.
What this actually costs you
- Hours to learn
- 6
- Hours / month
- 8 to 12
- Tools
- $99 to $199/mo
- Difficulty
- High, and it never ends
What this looks like when it is done badly. A business buys a package of fifty links for $400. They arrive within a fortnight, from sites with no readers, in categories unrelated to the business, in the footers of pages that exist to hold links. Nothing improves. The links cannot be removed, because there is nobody to ask.
Hours and tool costs are RedSEO’s own estimates from client work and from teaching this material, not industry survey data. They assume a business owner doing the work themselves on a site under about 50 pages.
This is the module where the honest cost box does the most work, because link building is the one part of SEO that does not get cheaper when you get better at it.
Writing gets faster with practice. Technical fixes get faster. Outreach is a fixed number of minutes per conversation with a human being, and there is no version of expertise that removes the conversation.
The arithmetic nobody publishes
Here is the shape of a realistic outreach cycle for a small business with something genuinely worth linking to. These are our working planning numbers rather than a study, and they are deliberately not optimistic.
Roughly fifteen to twenty hours of work across the whole cycle. Divide the hours by the links and you get three to eight hours per earned link, which is the number that belongs in your payback math as a real monthly cost.
RedSEO planning figures from client outreach, not an industry study. Deliberately not optimistic.
A hundred prospects, researched and individually written to, is roughly fifteen to twenty hours. What comes back is a handful of links. Divide it out and one earned link costs somewhere between three and eight hours of a person’s time.
Take that number back to the payback math in module 1 and put it in asM. Ten hours a month at a rate you would genuinely accept for your own time is a real monthly cost, and it belongs in the calculation next to any agency quote you are comparing against. Most people never do that comparison, which is why DIY link building feels free and is not.
What Google actually forbids
Worth reading rather than absorbing by rumour. Google’s spam policies define link spam as “the practice of creating links to or from a site primarily for the purpose of manipulating search rankings,” and name specifics:
- “Exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links”
- “Exchanging goods or services for links”
- “Sending someone a product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link”
- “Excessive link exchanges” and partner pages that exist only for cross-linking
- “Advertorials or native advertising where payment is received for articles that include links that pass ranking credit”
- “Low-quality directory or bookmark site links”
Note the qualifier, because it is the part people miss. Google says buying and selling links “is a normal part of the economy of the web for advertising and sponsorship purposes” and stays compliant when the links carry rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored". Paying for placement is fine. Paying for ranking credit is not. The attribute is the whole difference.
Which also answers the gift question, and it catches people out: sending a product to someone in exchange for a review with a followed link is named explicitly. If you do product seeding, ask for the attribute.
Talk to us about digital PR instead
What actually works at small scale
In rough order of return for a business without a PR budget:
Being genuinely the local expert. Local press, industry newsletters and association sites need people who know things. This is slow, real, and produces links no competitor can replicate.
Publishing something with data in it. Numbers get cited. It does not need to be a big study: what you charge, what you observe, what changed in your market. It needs to be yours.
Relationships you already have. Suppliers, customers, partners, associations, the chamber of commerce. These are the highest-conversion pitches you will ever send and almost nobody sends them first.
Broken link building. Find a dead page that people link to, write the replacement, tell the linkers. Labour-intensive, low rejection rate, and honest.
What I would not spend time on: guest posting at volume, which Google names when payment is involved and which has poor economics even when it is not; directory submissions beyond the genuinely local ones in module 10; and anything that arrives in your inbox offering links.
What I would do in your position
Run exactly one cycle. A hundred prospects, real research, individual emails, one follow-up, everything logged. Then divide your hours by your links and look at the number.
If it is three hours a link and you have the hours, carry on, because that compounds. If it is eight hours a link and you do not, you have learned the most useful thing in this module for the price of one month, and the qualifier below is written for exactly that outcome.
See what you already have
One tool here. The outreach volume calculator this module wants does not exist yet, so the arithmetic is in the figure above rather than behind a button.
The tools for this module
Free, no signup.
- Backlink CheckerWhat already points at you, which is the baseline you are trying to move.
- Redirect CheckerFor broken link building: confirm the target is genuinely dead before you pitch a replacement.
Run one outreach cycle properly
One cycle, start to finish, so you find out what it actually costs you before you commit to doing it every month for a year.
Make sure you have something worth linking to
Not your homepage. A page with information, data or a tool on it that somebody would reference. If you do not have one, this module is premature and module 6 comes first.
Build a list of 100 genuinely relevant sites
Relevant means their readers would care. Industry publications, local press, suppliers, associations, complementary businesses. A hundred is the working number, and it will take longer to assemble than you expect.
Find a real person at each one
A named editor, owner or writer. This is the step that separates outreach from spam, and it is most of the hours.
Write each email individually
A specific reason you are writing to them specifically. Templates get template response rates, which is close to zero. Budget five to ten minutes per email and accept that.
Send, wait, follow up once
One follow-up after about a week. Not three. The second follow-up converts poorly and costs you the relationship for next time.
Log every response, including the nos
The nos are your list for next quarter and the data that tells you which angle works. Without a log you will run the same failing approach twice.
Count what one link actually cost you
Total hours divided by links earned. That number is the honest input to the payback math in module 1, and it is usually a shock the first time.
Decide, with that number in front of you, whether to continue
This is the point of running one cycle. Deciding after one month with real data beats deciding after a year with none.
Can you do this yourself?
You can do this yourself if
- You have ten or more hours a month, indefinitely, and somewhere obvious to take them from. Not enthusiasm. Hours.
- You have something genuinely linkable: proprietary data, a free tool, local knowledge nobody else has, or a story a journalist would run.
- You are comfortable being ignored ninety times out of a hundred and writing the ninety-first email in the same tone as the first.
You cannot do this yourself if
- You do not have 10 hours a month to spend on outreach, forever. This is the honest condition and it disqualifies most small businesses, including ones doing everything else in this curriculum well.
- You are tempted to buy links to skip the labour. Google’s spam policy names "exchanging money for links" explicitly, and the risk is not worth the shortcut.
- Your site has nothing on it worth citing yet. Outreach for a page nobody would reference fails at the pitch, not at the follow-up, and no amount of persistence fixes that.
Questions people ask about this
- How many hours does one backlink take?
- On our planning numbers, three to eight hours of a person's time per earned link, once you divide total outreach hours by links actually acquired. That figure belongs in the payback math in module 1 as a real monthly cost, which is the comparison almost nobody makes before deciding DIY link building is free.
- Is buying links against Google's rules?
- Buying ranking credit is. Google names "exchanging money for links" and "exchanging goods or services for links" in its spam policies. But it also says buying and selling links "is a normal part of the economy of the web for advertising and sponsorship purposes" and stays compliant when links carry rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored". The attribute is the entire difference.
- Does sending someone a free product for a review break the rules?
- If the resulting link passes ranking credit, yes. Google names "sending someone a product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link" specifically. Product seeding is fine; ask for the sponsored or nofollow attribute on the link.
- Is guest posting still worth doing?
- Rarely, at volume. Google names advertorials and paid placements that pass ranking credit as link spam, and unpaid guest posting has poor economics for a small business compared with being genuinely useful to local press and industry publications.
- What is broken link building?
- Finding a dead page that other sites still link to, writing the replacement, and telling the people linking to it. It is labour-intensive but has a low rejection rate because you are solving a real problem for the person you are emailing.
- When should I not do link building myself?
- When you do not have ten hours a month to spend on outreach, indefinitely. That is the honest condition and it disqualifies most small businesses. Outreach is the one part of SEO that does not compress with skill, because it is a fixed number of minutes per conversation with a person.