A link network is a group of websites that exist mainly to sell links, usually run by one operator and dressed up to look like independent publications. You can spot one before you pay by checking a seller's sample sites for shared templates, the same clients appearing across several of them, posts on every topic at once, and pages that Google has not indexed. The checks below take a few minutes each and need nothing more than a browser.
Why This Matters More Than the Price
Google's spam policies name buying links to pass ranking credit, and large-scale networks built for that purpose, as link spam. The usual result is that Google ignores those links, so the money buys nothing. The worse result is a manual action on the site that bought them.
This is not a theoretical risk. In October 2026 we read the samples and delivery reports of eight link sellers, most of them highly rated on Fiverr, and checked every link. One seller's "own 19-year-old magazine" turned out to be a network of ten sites, three of which had about one page left in Google. One 200-link package delivered 115 URLs, nearly all on one-post subdomains of the same throwaway blog network. The full results are in our outreach research.
Check 1: Look for the Same Template Everywhere
Ask the seller for the list of sites they publish on, then open five of them side by side. Real publications look different from each other. Networks rarely bother.
Signs to look for: the same theme and layout, the same plugins in the page source, the same footer wording, and contact details that name a different domain. In the network we audited, the template contact pages still listed six unrelated older domains, which suggests the sites were built on expired names of old brands.
Check 2: Find the Same Clients on Several Sites
Open the newest five posts on each site and note who they link to. In a network, the same client turns up on two or three of the sites within days: the same motorcycle accessory shop, the same property development, the same escort agency. Independent publishers do not coordinate their guest posts.
Check 3: Read the Last 100 Headlines
Scroll the blog archive or the site's post feed. A real site has a beat. A network site publishes home improvement, crypto, casino reviews, CBD, payday loans and fashion in the same week, because each post is a paying client.
This one check rules out more sites than any metric. It also catches sellers who say they refuse gambling content while their own sites carry it, which is exactly what we found.
Check 4: Check Whether Google Has the Pages
A link only counts if Google has the page. Search site: followed by the domain and compare the rough count with how many posts the site has published.
| What you see | What it usually means |
|---|---|
| Thousands of posts, a few hundred pages in Google | Google is filtering most of the site out |
| Thousands of posts, about one page in Google | The site has effectively been deindexed |
| A sample post from last year still missing from Google | Your link would likely never be seen either |
| Most posts indexed and the site has search traffic | A real site, so move on to the other checks |
Two sample posts we checked had been published a year earlier and were still not in Google. Whatever those clients paid for, they did not get a link that counts.
Check 5: Test Whether the Links Are Followed
Open a recent client post, view the page source and find the outbound link. If it carries nofollow, ugc or sponsored, it passes no ranking credit. Some large, real sites nofollow every outbound link, which is honest but makes a paid link worthless for rankings. Network sites usually leave links followed, which is precisely what makes them a target.
Our guide to nofollow vs dofollow links covers how each attribute is treated.
Check 6: Ignore the Platform's Domain Authority
Many packages advertise "DA 50 to 98" links. Look at the delivery report: the high numbers almost always belong to the platform, not your page. A new profile on Medium, TED or Tumblr is a brand-new page with no authority of its own, and most big platforms nofollow or noindex new users' pages anyway.
We tested about 55 free platforms on a brand-new site and 16 gave a followed link on an indexable page. The list is in our free profile links test. Anything a seller charges for on those platforms, you can build yourself in an evening.
Check 7: Look Up the Domains in a Traffic Ranking
The Tranco list ranks the top million websites by combined traffic data and is free to search. Real publications with an audience usually appear in it. Link networks almost never do.
When we checked a vendor spreadsheet of 3,153 "guest post" sites priced at a median of $110, only 36 of the domains (1.1%) were in the top million, and most of those were free platforms anyone can post on. Another 254 domain names contained adult, piracy, app-download or gambling words. Thirty seconds per domain saves the whole budget.
What a Real Site Looks Like Instead
After those checks, the sites worth considering tend to share a profile: their own topic and audience, steady Google traffic you can see in any SEO tool, a mix of staff and contributor articles with few commercial links, followed outbound links, and a price close to what the same site charges on a link marketplace. They are fewer and slower to land, which is why the leader in the niche we studied had about 20 links of that kind and hundreds of junk ones that did nothing.
That is the bar our own placements have to clear, written out on our standards page.
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