the price is not an accurate indicator of a good link. Good and bad links can both be cheap or costly equally depending where you get them and how easy you are to be fooled
Good links = links that meet all / most of these criteria:
1) d0follow
If the links have "nofollow" tag attached to them they won't pass link juice / SEO value / authority / strength / DA / DR or whatever you want to call it, it's the same thing. So, they won't pass link juice, therefore they won't improve your rankings. The only nofollow links that are worth getting are those from big popular sites in your niche / industry, like for example, if your site is about pets you will probably want backlinks from sites like petmart or petkeen because these sites are huge in the pets industry so even if the links from these giants are nofollow they're still worth getting because they boost the trust of your site before google (whatever this trust means, I don't know how it's quantified or factored into the formula that google uses to calculate the quality of a link, I only know that they matter, so you should get them anyway if you can)
Besides, having nofollow links is one of the important things we must do to keep our sites safe because a site that has only d0follow links screams "link builder" to google, and google hates link builders because backlinks (as you've just experienced yourself) can make or break the success of a site in google. So, you should have a few nofollow links anyway in your backlinking profile, try to aim for anywhere between 10% to 30% nofollow links, and the rest of them can (and should) be d0follow
2) links from quality sites
I should have probably had this as point 1 instead of 2, but oh well....
What I mean by "quality sites" in regards to backlinking is that the sites giving you the backlinks should get organic traffic from google. If google sends traffic to those sites it's usually a sign that google trusts those sites so, naturally, backlinks from those sites will be considered safe by google, therefore they're good for you to have, no matter if they're d0follow / nofollow.
But just because a site ranks in google it doesn't mean that's the exact definition of quality. Everything that I mention under this point should be taken together, only then will you know that a site is quality and that it's worth getting backlinks from. So, getting google traffic is one of the main sub-points of this section, and 1 of the first indicators of a "quality site" in the context of acquiring links from these sites
Another good indicator is the number of OBLs (OutBound Links, or Outgoing Links), which basically means how many other sites this "quality site" is linking out to. If you find a site that you feel is pure gold for you, but then you check the page where your link will be placed on and see that this "quality site" is linking out to many other sites like yours that's a bad sign, and such a site will lose its google ranking sooner or later because it's considered a link farm (ie: site created only, and specifically for selling links).
So, what you should look for, ideally, is a site that only links out to your site only (from the page where your link will be placed on, otherwise it's no problem if the site links out to other sites like yours as long as you get the full benefit of that link).
It's also ok for the site giving you the backlink to link out to other sites from the same page where your link is placed, as long as the other sites are relevant to the topic of the page and as long as they're not affiliate sites like yours. For example, they could link out to wikipedia, or to forbes, to CNN, or whatever other huge site. That's fine and getting a backlink from a page that links out to such big sites could still be worth getting.
There might be more things to be said here, but the general idea is that you want links from:
- sites that don't link out to other sites like yours (or to affiliate sites in general, like Amazon / product review sites, for example)
- if they do link out to other sites at least make sure that they're not linking out to those sites from the exact page where your backlink will be placed, or else you'll have to split the link juice with the owners of the other sites
- sites that don't link out to affiliate sites from every single content page on it. Ideally, you will want the backlinks to come from sites that only link out to sites like yours (or to affiliate sites) once every 10-20 pages. If every single page of that website has even 1 link to other sites like yours, or to other affiliate sites in general, then this screams link farm and the quality of such a site is diminished, or will diminish over time.
Use your common sense and knowledge when assessing the quality of a site and you will know whether or not it's worth getting links from it
... Check its DA / DR, check how many pages it has indexed in google, check for how many keywords they're ranking in google and how much traffic they're getting, etc...
Of course, you could still rank with backlinks from sites that don't meet all of these conditions, cheap PBN links are still a thing that works, but if you have the money always aim for high quality instead of high volumes. It will pay off in the long run and it will have bigger chance of bypassing any future google updates
3) in-content links
When acquiring links, the placement of your backlink, and the type of link you can get are numerous. But the best links are always the in-content ones. Meaning, links that are placed inside of an article, or that are surrounded by a few lines of text at least.
This is not to say that links placed somewhere in the sidebar, or even in the footer will not work. If, in an act of mysterious, unfathomable kindness, BBC happen to mention your site in the footer of their homepage for whatever reason that nobody understands, don't contact them threatening to sue them for giving you free advertising and SEO power, just thank them quietly in your chin and pray to God that they never remove the link
But generally speaking, links placed inside of the content are worth more than any other type of link, so you should aim to make most of your backlinks in-content links if you have the means.
Something else that needs to be said here is that profile links - while still possible to be inside of content (technically) because they might be surrounded by text - are not very valuable anymore. They're still worth getting like most other safe links, just to diversify your backlinking profile because sites that only have 1 type of links look very unnatural and could get your site flagged / penalized by google, so get every type of link that's not considered spam yet by google, but don't stress about it, just get them to have them and move on to more important links (guest posts, niche edits, quality PBNs, these 3 are usually the most important links today that pack the biggest punch)
4) links from pages that have traffic
Under point 1 I've mentioned that sites with organic traffic are a great source of backlinks (and they are), but if you have the choice of getting links from pages with traffic vs pages without traffic (both of these pages belonging to the same site, obviously, that's what this discussion is all about), you should obviously aim for pages with traffic whenever possible. it might cost you more, yes, but google put a lot of emphasis on non-orphaned pages lately (non-orphaned pages = pages that have links and traffic coming into them)
5) (niche) relevancy
Strong links are good links no matter whether they're relevant or not. But strong links that are also relevant are the secret to ranking high in google and, more importantly, keeping the rankings.
Whenever possible, try to get backlinks from sites / pages that are at least slightly relevant to the topic of your site / page that you're linking to. For example, if you have a site about baseball any backlink that comes from baseball-oriented sites, from outdoor-oriented sites, from sports-related sites, or even from sites that have nothing in common with basball / outdoor / sports but have articles on them that address these topics, any backlink from such a site / page is worth getting even if it's nofollow, and even if it carries less authority (DA / DR) than links that might have more authority but which are less relevant.
And that's all, I think... There might be more checkpoints but I'm not remembering them at the moment. But these 5 are among the biggest ones and what you should focus on to assess the quality of a backlink, so start with these 5 points first.
Something else that I need to mention is that, generally speaking (not always, but most of the time), links that are free to get, easy to get, or both, are hated by google and they will be penalized at some point. Google doesn't like link builders because they manipulate the rankings in their favor, and so, whenever links are free and easy to get google tends to de-value them. It's happened with most sources of backlinks that were easy to get over the years: article directories, bookmarking sites, wiki sites, and web 2.0 and profile links lately.
This is not to say that these links are not worth getting, I already mentioned earlier that a diverse backlinks profile is a safe backlinks profile, so you should still get these links, but only for the sake of having them, and only after your site starts ranking, there's no point in building such links when your site is not even indexed or ranking in google. Focus on quality instead of quantity first, as I mentioned earlier in this post...
And the other thing that you need to be aware of when building / buying links that's not about the quality of links necessarily, but about safe practices of link building mostly, is to mind your anchors and the link building speed.
If you have a new site (less than 3 months old), a fresh domain (never used before), a site / domain that has never had any backlinks before, or any combination of these 3 criteria, it's generally best to build links slowly but gradually and increase the number over time instead of building 100s of them in 1 week and then stop.
You might still rank even if you blast your site with 100s of low quality links, and you can actually test this and let us know how it turns out, personally I'm always curious to find out about stuff like this
But if you're building links for a site that you care about and which ticks any of the 3 checkboxes mentioned above it's just better to play it safe. Slow and steady wins the (SEO) race most of the time.
And that's about link building speed...
Regarding the anchors, this is also another very important aspect of link building that a lot of newbies screw due to lack of knowledge or, simply, carelessness. The anchor texts you use for your backlinks should be as varied (but also as little "exact match") as possible. At least in the beginning. Once you've acquired a few 100s links that are of decent / high quality you can start throwing some exact match anchors in there, but in the beginning focus on varied anchor texts (generic, naked URL, and branded anchors should make up the bulk of your anchors, while exact / partial match can be 5% or less)
