Cheap bought backlinks barely survive a year. A SpeedyIndex case study reported on November 6 re-checked 15,389 backlinks the company had bought on Fiverr and Kwork one year earlier — and found only 562 of them, or 3.7%, were in Google's index. Only 1.8% were live, open to indexing and indexed at the same time. The links came from SpeedyIndex's own paid orders: profiles, Web 2.0 pages, forum and comment links, articles and PBN links in Tier 1, 2 and 3 packages. Fiverr accounted for 12,350 URLs, Kwork for 2,886 and other marketplaces for 153. No sampling was used — all 15,389 URLs were checked. SpeedyIndex crawled all URLs on August 21, 2026 with a Googlebot Smartphone user agent and checked indexing on October 29, 2026 with its Google Index Checker.
The methodology is unusually thorough for this kind of study. Every URL was checked, not a sample, and the checks separated three different states: whether the link was still live, whether the page was open to indexing, and whether Google had actually indexed it. Only 1.8% passed all three tests at once. The gap between live and indexed is the story: many of these pages still exist, but Google has chosen not to keep them in its index — which means they pass no ranking value at all.
The link types are the familiar marketplace catalogue: profile links, Web 2.0 properties, forum and comment spam, paid articles and PBN placements, sold in tiered packages. These are the links that bulk sellers promise will boost rankings. A year later, 96.3% of them are not in Google's index. Whatever short-term movement they may have caused, the durable value is close to zero.
Google's indexing decisions are a quality filter, and these pages fail it on every dimension: thin content, no real audience, no reason to exist except to host links. The search engine does not need to penalise them individually — it simply declines to index most of them, which achieves the same result with less drama. The study's full case study is published free with charts, method, a checklist for link buyers and a table of page types that popular sites close to indexing.
The finding also fits the pattern of Google's recent spam updates, which have targeted scaled and low-quality link schemes. Buying links in bulk was always a bet that Google would not notice; the study suggests Google noticed and quietly stopped indexing the pages. The links did not get a manual action — they got something more final. They were forgotten.
The 3.7% figure is the number to quote the next time someone proposes buying a bulk link package. It reframes the cost: a package of a thousand links is really a package of about 37 indexed links, plus 963 dead ones — and the 37 that survive are on the lowest-quality pages on the web. Earned links from real sites, by contrast, are indexed because the pages hosting them are worth indexing.
The lesson is not that links do not matter — it is that the links that matter are the ones Google wants to keep. A single link from a real publication that Google indexes and readers actually visit is worth more than a thousand marketplace links that vanish within a year. Build the content that earns that kind of link, and the indexation problem solves itself.
The study's other implication is about time. A link that is indexed today may not be indexed in a year, and a link that survives a year on a real site is worth far more than a link that survives a year on a page nobody visits. The 3.7% figure is a snapshot at twelve months; at twenty-four months it would likely be lower still, as more of the host pages decay, lose their own links, or get dropped from the index entirely. Earned links have the opposite trajectory: a link from a real publication tends to gain value as the host page earns its own links and authority. The two kinds of links do not just differ in quality — they differ in direction. One decays, the other compounds, and the choice between them is a choice about which direction your link profile moves over time.
Sources: Newsfile Corp., November 6, 2026 (SpeedyIndex case study).
Related reading on this site: reddit-stock-google-traffic-down-huffman, ai-agents-three-ways-websites-treat-them, google-protect-important-urls-deindexing, A Connecticut Grocery Chain Outranks Wikipedia on Google for 'Apples', Aleyda Solis Turns Google's Content Quality Guidance Into 83 Checks, and Google Moved Brand AI Overviews Into the Right Column.
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