You’ve put in the work—your website is polished, your content is strong—but if your backlink profile is full of junk, you’re sinking instead of swimming. Not all backlinks help; some actively drag you down.
If you’re just getting started with SEO, you might wonder: What makes a link cheap? Knowing the difference between a quality link and one that’s useless (or harmful) is the first step toward building a strong backlink profile. Let’s break it down.
A "cheap" link in SEO doesn’t necessarily refer to its monetary cost. Instead, it describes links that lack quality, authority, and relevance. These links are often easy to acquire but provide little to no SEO value—or worse, they can trigger penalties from search engines. Cheap links are typically associated with spammy practices and violate Google's guidelines.
Danica Barnack, our Content Outreach Team Manager, states,
“A cheap link as a link that requires little to no effort – which nearly always means and results in a low-to-no quality backlink that has zero relevance to a site, their resources, or their audiences, and very little, if any, authority.”
Not all links are created equal; some can do more harm than good. If you’re wondering why some links help boost rankings while others hold you back, here are the key warning signs of a cheap link.
One of the first indicators of a cheap link is a low-authority domain. Domain authority (DA) is a score that predicts how well a website is likely to rank on search engines. Links from low-DA sites typically carry minimal SEO value. Worse, if the site has a history of spam or black-hat tactics, it could pass along negative signals to your own site.
In a recent talk from brightonSEO, our Director of SEO, Amy Zwald, stated that DA should be used as a baseline, not a rule. This means that SEOs should look at more than just DA scores.
Why does the site have a low DA? Is it because it lacks authority, or is it a niche site? It’s important to note that niche sites with a lower DA can still be beneficial if they are relevant to your business.
Amy advises starting with a DA of 30 and above to help set the baseline for more quality sites.
Relevance is everything in link building. A backlink from a website that has nothing to do with your industry? That’s a waste of space. Search engines prioritize links from related sites because they signal genuine endorsements rather than manipulative linking tactics.
Many SEOs make the mistake of optimizing for search engines instead of people. It’s important to remember that the end goal is to create a great user experience, which means we must create a seamless reading experience. Human readers will ultimately become frustrated with links shoved into an article that doesn’t make sense.
Instead, you’ll want to focus on three levels of relevance:
These levels of relevance help enhance the user experience.
If a website sells backlinks with no editorial oversight, that’s a huge red flag. Links from link farms, directories, or private blog networks (PBNs) are often considered cheap and can get you penalized.
Since 2016, Google has warned against using paid links because these links are typically used to game the algorithm. SEOs of old used these spammy practices to get to #1 in the SERPs regardless of user experience. This was a turning point in SEO. Google created a new algorithm that detected and penalized people using these practices.
If a link feels like a shortcut, it probably is.
A website with no organic traffic is a dead end. If a site isn’t ranking well itself, it won’t pass much value to your site. Cheap links often come from ghost-town sites with no real audience, offering no benefit beyond a backlink count.
You can detect if a site has no traffic by using third-party tools like Semrush and Ahrefs. But don’t just chase high numbers. You must look deeper into the site’s organic traffic and determine if the traffic is relevant, legitimate, and aligned with your goals.
Traffic is a crucial metric, but context matters.
Anchor text matters—but not when it’s stuffed with keywords. Cheap links often rely on unnatural, overly optimized anchor texts that scream manipulation. Search engines catch on to this and may penalize your site for it.
Anchor text should be treated as a promise to the reader. SEOs aim to fulfill that promise with the page they link to. So, if you promise the reader more information on a topic but direct them instead to a homepage or service page, you are breaking that promise.
That doesn’t mean you can never link to a homepage. You just have to make what you are linking to explicitly clear. In fact, your internal linking strategy should combine branded anchor text and keyword-rich anchor text to balance readability and click-through potential.
Just be sure that the anchor text matches the linked page's content.
While a few strategic site-wide links can be useful, cheap links are often stuffed into footers, sidebars, or splattered across unrelated pages. These placements are commonly associated with low-quality link-building tactics and tend to be devalued by search engines.
Luckily, Google’s spam updates have become so sophisticated that hidden footer links are a lot less common than they used to be. Google heavily devalues links in the footer menu, making this spammy practice less effective for “boosting” site rankings.
However, it’s still good practice to drop to a website’s footer and ensure it supports a positive user experience.
If a website has a high spam score due to excessive outbound links, poor-quality content, or link schemes, its backlinks are more of a liability than an asset. A bad neighborhood in SEO can drag your site down with it.
You can easily check a spam score by using tools like Moz or Semrush. However, be sure to check the actual website to make sure the tools are reporting accurately.
If cheap links are so easy to get, why avoid them? Here’s why:
Now that we’ve covered what makes a link cheap, let’s talk about what makes a link valuable:
Danica says,
“Valuable links are links that will funnel positive link equity to your site. There is a range of worthwhile links; some may provide an abundance of link equity while others may provide less link equity. Both of these are valuable and make up a stable backlink profile.”
Understanding what makes a link cheap helps you avoid pitfalls and build a backlink profile that actually works. Instead of wasting time on easy, low-value links, focus on earning high-quality, authoritative, and relevant backlinks that will stand the test of time. Sustainable link-building practices lead to better rankings, increased credibility, and long-term success in SEO.