Automated links, public PBNs and tiered link building

This page covers the cheapest links there are: public blog network posts, free blog platforms, comment and profile spam, software that posts links by the thousand, and the bundles sold on freelance sites and forums. They cost under $5 each and often far less than a cent.

The short answer is that they do not rank a real site. Google ignores most of them. Operators who still use them point them at second-tier pages or at domains built to be thrown away. The risk on a money site is R4 to R5.

What the group contains

Public PBNs. Blog networks that sell a post to anyone. Because everyone can buy, the same sites link to hundreds of unrelated businesses, and they are the first networks to be devalued. See private blog networks for how networks are detected.

Web 2.0s. Free blogs on platforms such as WordPress.com, Blogger, Medium, Tumblr and Google Sites, set up to hold an article that links to the buyer. The footprint is a brand-new subdomain with one to five posts, all linking to one site.

Comment, forum and profile spam. Links dropped in blog comments, forum posts, signatures and user profiles. Most carry a nofollow or UGC attribute. The footprints are a username that is a keyword, and the same comment on thousands of pages.

Crowd marketing. Paid forum posts from aged accounts, sold in Central and Eastern European and iGaming markets. Buyers use them to vary a link profile and to add nofollow links to it.

Automation software. Programs that find target sites, register accounts, solve captchas and post links without a person involved. GSA Search Engine Ranker is the best known, alongside older tools such as Scrapebox, XRumer and Money Robot.

What it costs

Most prices below are practitioner estimates or come from one vendor, and are marked. There is no measured dataset for this end of the market.

Item	Price	Basis
Automated blasts	$0.001 to $0.05 per link	Practitioner estimate, low confidence
Comment and profile links by automation	$5 to $30 per thousand	Low confidence
Profile, web 2.0 and bookmark packs	$0.05 to $1 per link	Practitioner estimate, low confidence
Web 2.0 packages	$5 to $50	Low confidence
Public PBN posts	$1 to $5 each, in bundles such as 100 for $100	Respona, 2026
Crowd or forum posts by aged accounts	$3 to $20 per post	Practitioner estimate, low confidence
Tier 2 package	$20 to $200 per tier 1 page	Low confidence
GSA Search Engine Ranker licence	$127, lifetime	Vendor’s site, October 2026
Running automation: proxies, captcha solving, server, site lists	$50 to $300 a month	Practitioner estimate

Tiered link building

Tiering sorts links by distance from the money site.

• Tier 1 links point at your site: a guest post, a press article, a niche edit.
• Tier 2 links point at those tier 1 pages, to get them indexed and add strength to them.
• Tier 3 is bulk automation pointing at tier 2.

There is a version of this inside Google’s guidelines. Sharing your press coverage, linking to it from your own site, or earning a few real links to a strong guest post all count as tier 2. That version is R2.

The spam version points automated blasts and web 2.0s at paid placements. Our research rates it R3, and the risk lands first on the publisher. A guest post that suddenly collects thousands of spam links is easy to spot, and a publisher who notices may delete the page along with your link.

In 2026 its main real use is narrow: getting tier 1 pages indexed, and adding page-level strength to paid placements that sit on weak pages.

Volume packages in high-risk markets

Bundles are sold on Fiverr, the BlackHatWorld marketplace, Telegram channels, SEOClerks and regional forums. Typical listings promise “1,000 DA 50+ backlinks”, “100 PBN posts”, “500 casino links” or an “edu and gov pack”.

They exist because of one business model. In gambling, adult, pharma, crypto and loans, some operators launch many domains for the same keywords and push each one hard with redirects, network links, rented sitewide links and tiered spam. A domain ranks for weeks or months. When it is neutralised it is dropped or redirected, and the next one takes over.

Our high-risk market research lists what the model depends on: very high revenue per day of ranking, acceptance that every asset will be lost, automated site building, and markets where enforcement lags. It does not transfer to a brand, to a licensed operator with one domain, or to any business that needs stable rankings. The iGaming hub explains the market.

One warning about “edu and gov” packs. Some of those links are injected into hacked websites and resold to buyers who do not know. That is a criminal offence by the person who placed them and a legal exposure for the buyer. Look at the page source, be suspicious of cheap government and university links, and avoid any seller who cannot change the text around the link.

Link indexers

A link on a page Google has not indexed passes nothing, and pages on low quality sites often stay unindexed. Indexers sell a fix.

They do not force anything. They create crawl signals: pings, sitemap and feed submissions, and links from pages that are crawled often.

Rapid URL Indexer charges $0.04 to $0.05 per URL and refunds credits for URLs not indexed after 14 days, according to its site in October 2026. It claims a 91 percent average indexing rate, which is the vendor’s own figure. It also states plainly that it cannot override a noindex tag, a robots.txt block, a redirect or a canonical. Other test results in circulation, such as 68 percent for Omega Indexer, come from posts that read as promotional. We found no independent large-sample test from 2026.

Three points hold up:

1. An indexer can get a page crawled. It cannot make Google keep a low quality page, and many URLs drop out again within weeks.
2. If a placement you paid for needs an indexer, that tells you something about the publisher.
3. Refund or pay-per-indexed pricing is the only sensible way to buy.

The clean alternative is to ask the publisher to link the article from a category page and include it in the sitemap, and to link to it from your own indexed pages. How to track backlinks sets out when to check.

How it gets caught

Google’s link spam policy names these methods directly: automated link creation, forum comments with optimised links, and low quality directory or bookmark links.

Automation leaves obvious marks. The same platforms appear again and again, because the software targets the same engines. Link counts spike in days. Links arrive from foreign-language guestbooks. Most of the links are deleted by site owners within months.

The realistic outcome is that the links are ignored. With its March 2026 spam update, Google said that when the effect of spam links is removed, the ranking benefit is lost and cannot be regained. How search engines evaluate links explains why ignoring is the default, and Google link penalties and recovery covers the cases where it goes further.

When not to use it

Never point any of this at a site you intend to keep. That covers nearly every reader. If you are tempted by the price, compare it with what the links do, which on a real site is nothing. The tactics index lists methods that cost more and leave you with something.