Your first 100 links: a plan for a new site

A new site should earn its first links in order of risk and cost: free and safe ones first, paid and risky ones last. That order is not caution for its own sake. The early links make the later tactics work, because journalists, editors and publishers all look at who you are before they link to you.

Treat 100 as a working milestone. No source says 100 links is a threshold, and Google’s Gary Illyes said in April 2024 that Google needs “very few links” to rank pages. In local markets a much smaller number of referring domains can be enough. Your real target is the gap between your pages and the pages that rank for your terms.

The tactics in order

Costs are per link. Where a named study exists, it is given in the sections below. The other figures are practitioner estimates from our research and not from a published dataset, so read them as a guide to scale.

Stage	Tactic	Typical cost per link	Risk	Time to first link
1	Testimonials, partners and suppliers	$0	Within guidelines	Weeks
1	Local citations and curated directories	$2 to $3.20 per citation	Within guidelines	Days
1	Link reclamation	$0 to $50	Within guidelines	Days
2	Unlinked mentions	$20 to $80	Within guidelines	Days
2	Linkable assets and outreach	$150 to $400	Within guidelines	1 to 3 months
2	Genuine guest posting	$150 to $600 in labour	Within guidelines to low	2 to 6 weeks
3	Digital PR	$300 to $1,500	Within guidelines	1 to 3 months
4	Niche edits and paid guest posts	$179 to $461 on average	Moderate	1 to 4 weeks

Before you start

Three things need to be in place, or the links will have nothing to work on.

• A page worth linking to. If your only pages are sales pages, most editors will say no. Few sites link to commercial pages naturally.
• A way to measure. Set up Google Search Console and check its Links report, which shows a sample of the links Google knows about.
• A target. Count the referring domains of the pages that rank for your main terms. That number, not 100, tells you how far you have to go.

Stage 1: links you are already owed

These cost almost nothing and sit fully within Google’s guidelines.

Partners, suppliers and tools. List every organisation you have a commercial relationship with: suppliers, stockists, software you pay for, associations you belong to, clients who list their agencies. Many have a partners, customers or testimonials page that links out. A specific testimonial for a tool you use is often published with a link.

Listings a customer would use. Claim Google Business Profile, Bing Places and Apple Business Connect, then the main directories for your country and industry. BrightLocal charges $2.00 to $3.20 per citation. For non-local businesses the equivalents are curated industry directories and software review sites. The test for any directory is whether a customer would use it and whether it rejects poor listings. Packages that submit you to hundreds of directories are the low-quality directory links named in Google’s spam policies.

Reclaimed links. If the site replaces an older one, or the brand existed before the site, fix any links that point to dead or old addresses by redirecting them to the closest matching page. A brand-new domain will have little to reclaim.

Stage 2: links you earn with work

Unlinked mentions. Once anyone writes about you, ask for a link where your name appears without one. The editorial decision has been made, which is why this is among the cheapest tactics. It depends on having mentions in the first place.

One linkable asset. Build one page that other writers have a reason to cite: a statistics page with sources, a free calculator, a glossary, a template or a piece of original data. Then tell the people who write about that topic. This is slower, but an asset that ranks can keep earning links without further outreach.

Journalist requests. Platforms where reporters ask for expert comment cost between nothing and $149 a month. The real cost is an expert’s time. A BuzzStream survey from 2025 put the cost at about $400 per link by this route. It only works with a real, credentialed person.

Genuine guest posts. Write a real article for a publication whose readers could become your customers. Placement is free, and the cost is the writing and the pitching. Google’s warnings on guest posting are aimed at large-scale campaigns with keyword anchors, so keep to publications that turn weak pitches down.

Stage 3: digital PR

Digital PR means giving journalists a story, usually built on data, that they choose to cover. It earns the strongest links and it is the most expensive route: $1,250 to $1,500 per unique linking domain, with a typical campaign costing $5,000 to $10,000 and returning six or seven domains, according to BuzzStream’s 2026 analysis.

It is also a weak fit for a brand-new site with no credibility. Journalists check who is behind a story. That is the main reason it sits third in this plan and not first.

Stage 4: paid placements, if at all

Paying a site to add a link to an existing article (niche edits) or to publish an article with your link is common. A link insertion averages $179 at marketplace list price, according to BuzzStream’s August 2026 data. A guest post bought direct from a site averages $295, and $461 through a vendor, according to BuzzStream’s June 2026 data.

Know what you are doing before you spend. Buying links for ranking purposes breaks Google’s spam policies unless the link carries sponsored or nofollow. The most likely result of a poor purchase is that Google ignores the link and the money is gone. A profile dominated by paid links can lead to a manual action. See Google link penalties and recovery.

In some markets every competitor buys, and many sites decide they have to as well. If you do, learn how to vet a publisher first, and keep paid links as a minority of a profile that already has the earned links from stages 1 to 3.

Anchors and pace

Let most of your first links use your brand name or your address. That is what natural profiles look like. Keep keyword anchors for the internal links on your own site. Anchor text explains why.

On pace, no safe number of links per month has a primary source. What the leaked Google documentation shows is that spikes of similar spam-phrase anchors are measured. A steady flow of links from different kinds of sites, with varied anchors, does not fit that pattern.

What to skip

• Bulk directory submissions and “500 links for $50” packages. These are automated or low-quality links by Google’s own definition.
• Private blog networks and expired-domain redirects. These are high risk and a poor use of a new site’s budget.
• Disavowing links you did not build. Google says its systems ignore random spam links, and its guidance limits the disavow tool to links you built or paid for.
• Chasing a Domain Rating target.

Where to go next

Pick the first tactic you have not used from the table and open its page in the tactics chart. If you are unsure whether links are your main problem, read do backlinks still matter first.