A typical story: the owner of a car service, a clinic or a shop pays an SEO contractor every month. A report arrives: “40 links placed”, a table with a long list of sites. And calls from search are not growing. The question “where did the money go” is perfectly fair here, and you can answer it without studying SEO. Below are five questions about the contractor’s report. You can ask each of them yourself, and one of them is answered by the free Search Console.
First, what a “link” means in this article. It is a mention of your site on someone else’s site that you can click. Google has long used such links as one of its signals: if someone respected in your field links to you, it looks like a recommendation. That is exactly why they are sold. We checked the data and rules below on October 27, 2026; where practitioners and Google disagree, we give both sides.
1. How many links: this is not the main question
Contractors like to count links because the number looks convincing. But Google does not look at it. Google’s John Mueller has said many times that the number of links is not a factor: millions of weak links are simply ignored, and one link from a relevant site is worth more. Ukrainian SEO agencies confirm this in their materials too. Our wording “one link from a site in your field weighs more than a hundred random ones” is a simplification for clarity, not a Google quote.
So ask the contractor not “how many links” but “from which sites and why exactly those”. If the answer is “because they are cheap” or “because it is a package”, that is your answer.
There is also a rules side. In Google’s spam policies, buying and selling links to influence rankings is named as a violation outright. At the same time, paid placements as advertising are allowed if the link is marked with a special attribute (rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow"). Practitioners say Google mostly just does not count low-quality links rather than punishing them, and that manual actions are rare. Google words it more carefully: sites that violate the policies may rank lower in results or not appear at all. How it plays out in your case, nobody can say in advance. But buying “packages” hoping for a quick effect is definitely not worth it.
2. Is the site about your topic
A link to a car service from a recipe site does almost nothing. Google checks not only that a link exists but also whether the source fits your topic. In the practice of Ukrainian SEO teams this is one of the most stable observations: a topical site with a modest rating is more useful than a big publication off-topic. In the examples practitioners give, a topical site with a “weaker” score beat an off-topic media outlet with a score twice as high, and a project with a hundred mentions in big publications got nothing.
The check is simple: open five sites from the contractor’s report and read their home pages. Do they write about what you do? If it is “everything about everything” and the link to you sits in a list with dozens of other sites, you are paying for decoration.
3. Does anyone read that site
Contractors often show the rating of the donor site in tools: DR in Ahrefs, TF in Majestic and others. This is not a Google score but the tool’s own metric, and it can be inflated, as several independent sources point out. A more reliable signal is whether people come to that site from Google. A site that Google itself shows to nobody is unlikely to pass you anything valuable.
Ask the contractor for the monthly traffic of the donor sites. Practitioners name different thresholds: a “red flag” is usually below a few hundred visitors a month, and for good placements they often require a thousand or more. There is no single rule, it depends on the niche and budget, but the direction is clear: no visitors, no benefit. Another warning sign: the site’s rating is high but there are almost no visitors, or the site has noticeably more outgoing links than incoming.
4. How long to wait
A link does not work instantly. The weight of a new link arrives after Google finds and indexes it, and rankings move later still. The only quantitative source we found is the 2022 Authority Hacker survey: 618 of 755 link builders surveyed said the effect of links shows within 1 to 6 months, on average about 3.1 months. This is practitioners’ opinion, not a Google measurement, and we saw the original only in secondary retellings (the survey page now redirects, an archived copy remains). So take “1 to 6 months, 3 on average” as a guideline, not a promise. Other practitioners name first results after 2 to 3 months and stable ones after 6 to 12.
From this comes a rule that several sources confirm: if there is no movement at all after two months of active work, change the approach rather than buy more links. Compare clicks from Google before the start and after 2 to 3 months. But the most important thing is not clicks but calls and requests: that is what you pay for. To make that visible, requests from search must be counted separately (call tracking, meaning a separate number that shows where callers come from, or goals in Google Analytics).
5. Who links to you: you can see it for free
You can check this one without the contractor. Search Console, Google’s free service for site owners, shows which sites link to yours. The path: Search Console, “Links”, then “External links” and the “Top linking sites” report. Next to it are reports on the top linked pages and the top linking text. The export button sends the list to Google Sheets.
Compare this list with the contractor’s report. If it shows hundreds of placements and your Search Console shows a dozen sites, the contractor can explain why one thing was placed and another is visible. The reasons can be innocent: Google shows only the links its crawler has already found. But you will be asking a concrete question. The report names follow Google’s help in English.
What to do with the contractor’s report
You do not have to terminate the contract right away. Do this:
- Ask for the full list of placements with page addresses, not just a count.
- Open five random sites: topic, visitors, whether your link sits among dozens of similar ones.
- Compare with the list in Search Console.
- Write down the start date and the clicks and requests from search at that moment. Compare after 2 to 3 months.
- Ask whether paid placements are marked with the sponsored attribute. An honest “yes” or “no, but here is why” beats silence.
One more thing contractors do not like to discuss: calls may not be growing for reasons other than links. According to practitioners, if a site grows slowly, the cause is more often weak pages where the visitor lands than a shortage of links. From this angle it is also worth asking whether you need SEO right now: we covered it in the article “Google Ads or SEO: Pros and Cons for a Business Owner”.
Summary
You can pay for links, but you should pay for a result you can verify. Five questions: which sites, whether they are about your topic, whether anyone reads them, how many months have passed, and what the free Search Console shows. If the contractor cannot answer two or three of them, that is a reason for a conversation, not for another payment.
Want a free audit of your Google Ads account? Send us a request: we will look at your account and tell you where money is being spent for nothing. You can show us the contractor’s link report too, and we will point out what looks odd in it.