People also ask
In practice
The headline price per placement is never the whole unit cost, and comparing vendors on it is how buyers get misled. The full per-link cost includes content production (drafting, editing, uniqueness per placement), qualification labour (the screening hours that keep bad sites out), the publisher fee where one exists, monitoring for the link’s guaranteed life, and the replacement of what drops — plus the amortised cost of the placements that never went live because a site failed screening.
A vendor who charges little per link but places into sites that vanish within months has a higher true cost per link than a flat-fee vendor whose links survive the year, and only the tracker reveals the difference. The countable definition matters too: live and working means present, pointing at the agreed target, on an indexed page — not “delivered” in a report.
Market prices vary enormously with the quality floor: bulk placements from sites built to sell links trade at pocket change; placements into publishers with real audiences, editorial gates and topical relevance carry real fees; and DR-based tier pricing correlates only loosely with any of the qualities that matter. A flat price with a fixed quality floor and content included is defensible precisely because it makes the unit economics predictable: the buyer knows the cost, the floor, and the guarantee before the first placement.
What the figure should never be asked to do is promise ranking value — cost per link measures acquisition, not effect, and mixing the two is how budgets get judged against claims nobody made.
See also: Link building pricing models, Publisher fee transparency, Metrics that matter when buying links.
Related service: Link building strategy.
