Worked example
Buy pagerank backlinks? A made-up compost blog, month by month
Every figure below is invented to show a way of thinking. The blog does not exist, nobody earned these results, and your own numbers will differ.
This is a hypothetical case written by our editorial team. It is not a customer story, a forecast or a promise. Use it as a template for questions, not as a target.
The imaginary site and its problem
Meet Hollow Heap, a pretend compost blog launched in March 2026 with 12 posts and no links. The owner wonders whether to buy pagerank backlinks, because a forum told her that was the fastest route.
Nobody can sell pagerank as such any more. Google retired the public toolbar score years ago, so what she can read in our shop is Domain Rating, organic traffic and referring domains. Those are different numbers, and mixing them up leads to expensive mistakes (our glossary untangles them). Easy to blur.
So she decides to treat links as one tool among several, with a budget of $150 across six months.
Her plan has one more rule. Every purchase goes through the checks in our cheap links plan, and anything that fails the compost-heap test of our red flags page goes back on the shelf. Short.
Hollow Heap's owner also keeps a small log in a spreadsheet: date, donor, anchor, target page, price and what Search Console showed four weeks later. After six months that log, not any single link, tells her what to do next. Slow data beats fast guessing.
Her plan on one page
| Month | Main job | Links bought | Money spent |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Fix indexing, tidy titles, link posts to each other | 0 | $0 |
| 2 | Publish 4 more posts, check Search Console | 0 | $0 |
| 3 | First two placements for the 'compost bin' guide | 2 | $14 |
| 4 | Read results, publish 3 posts | 1 | $9 |
| 5 | Two placements for the second guide | 2 | $30 |
| 6 | Review everything, decide on a stronger donor | 1 | $60 |
The reasoning behind each stage
- 1
Months one and two: nothing to buy yet
A brand-new domain with zero links is normal, and a blog with half its pages unindexed has a different problem. She uses Search Console to see which posts Google has found.
- 2
Month three: two small placements
She picks donors with a gardening or home angle and moderate traffic, and sends both to one guide. Nothing is aimed at the home page, and the anchors are varied: one brand name, one plain phrase such as 'this compost bin guide'.
- 3
Month four: look, do not touch
Impressions on the guide may rise, stay flat or wobble. She writes down what she sees and orders only one more placement.
- 4
Month five: repeat on a second guide
If the first guide gained traction, she repeats the pattern on another page. If it did not, she rereads the guide with a critical eye instead.
- 5
Month six: one bigger step
With about $60 left she considers a single stronger donor, perhaps rated in the 40s on Ahrefs' Domain Rating scale. She checks Ahrefs for the donor's referring domains and decides whether the price suits her.
What the example teaches
Pagerank is the wrong question, relevance is the right one
The invented owner spends under a third of her budget on links in the first four months and the rest only after reading data. That pace is the point, not the exact numbers.
- Look at DR, traffic and referring domains rather than a vague pagerank claim.
- Fix content and indexing before spending.
- Keep a reserve for the moment you understand more.