You have probably had the message this month. It arrives on WhatsApp, from a number you do not recognise.
DA 60 site, permanent do-follow link, Rs 3,000 per post. Bulk discount on ten.
I want to talk about what that actually costs, because the answer has changed and the old objection was never the strongest one.
The half life got very short
Google’s site reputation abuse policy started in March 2024 as manual actions only. By the August 2025 spam update it was enforced algorithmically. The October 2025 update went specifically after AI generated guest post farms, the operations publishing thin machine written articles whose only purpose is to carry a paid link. The March 2026 spam update ran through the index in under a day.
Reported figures put the lifespan of a spammy parasite page down from around nine months to six to eight weeks.
Read that as a buyer rather than as an SEO. You are paying Rs 3,000 for something with a two month half life, on a site that will eventually be caught, at which point the link either stops counting or stops existing. And that is the good outcome. The bad one is a manual action on your own domain.
The old argument against buying links was that it was against the rules. The current argument is simpler: it no longer works for long enough to be worth the money.
So here is what does, ranked by how much effort each one costs against what it returns for an Indian business.
1. The memberships you are already paying for
Start here because you have probably already bought these links and never claimed them.
Industry associations and chambers list their members, and those listings carry links. CII, FICCI, NASSCOM if you are in technology, and more usefully the specific body for your sector, which almost every category has. Then your city or state chamber of commerce.
Go and check whether your entry exists, whether the URL is right, and whether the description is the one you wrote in 2019. Most companies find at least one listing that points at a domain they no longer use.
These links are unglamorous, they will not move a competitive keyword on their own, and they are exactly the kind of thing a real business has and a thin one does not.
2. Ask the people you already do business with
The cheapest genuine links in existence, and almost nobody sends the email.
Your suppliers frequently have a customers or partners page. Your software vendors have integration directories and case study sections. Your clients sometimes have a vendors or who-we-work-with page. Anybody you have a formal relationship with has a plausible reason to name you.
Write five emails today. Not a template. Something like: we have been working together for two years, would you be open to listing us on your partners page, happy to do the same for you if that is useful.
The reciprocal offer is what makes it easy for them to say yes, and a handful of genuine business relationships linking to each other is not a link scheme. It is what the web looked like before anybody was optimising it.
3. Trade publications before national dailies
The mistake here is aiming at the Economic Times or Mint first, getting ignored, and concluding that press does not work.
Work the ladder. Your sector’s trade publication, then the startup and business press that covers your category, Inc42, YourStory, Entrackr and their sector equivalents, then the national business press once you have something they cannot ignore.
What gets picked up is data and specificity, not announcements. Nobody covers a funding round under a certain size or a new office. What does get covered: a number from inside your business that nobody else has. Order volumes by city. Hiring patterns in your function. What input costs did over eighteen months in your category.
You have data a journalist cannot get anywhere else. Most Indian companies sit on it and send a press release about a rebrand instead.
4. Be the person who answers
Journalists put out requests for expert comment on platforms, and a quote gets you a link from a publication you could not otherwise reach.
Qwoted, Featured, Help a B2B Writer and Source of Sources are the current options after HARO’s shutdown and reopening under new ownership. Be honest about the limitation: they skew heavily American and British, so an Indian marketer will see a lot of irrelevant requests.
Which is why the better version here is direct. Build a list of fifteen named journalists who cover your sector in India. Follow them, read them, and when one posts asking for somebody who knows about your exact thing, reply within the hour with something genuinely useful and no pitch attached.
Do that three times and you are the person they message first. That relationship outperforms any platform, and it is the same discipline that makes commenting work better than posting on LinkedIn.
5. Build one thing worth citing
The only link source that compounds, and the only one that keeps working while you sleep.
A calculator, a dataset, a template, a benchmark. Something in your category that somebody would send to a colleague. A freight cost comparison across metros. A salary benchmark for roles you hire for. A GST calculator specific to your sector’s quirks. A template every new business in your category has to build from scratch.
It takes a week and it earns links for years, because anybody writing about the topic needs a source and you made yourself the most convenient one.
The blunt part about paid guest posts
I am not criticising anybody who has bought them. Nearly every Indian marketer I know has, usually under pressure to show link growth on a monthly report.
The model is the problem. A network that sells placements on a hundred sites is publishing content with no editorial oversight on domains whose authority was borrowed, which is the precise thing the site reputation abuse policy describes. Enforcement moved from manual to algorithmic to routine, and the interval between a network launching and a network being caught keeps shrinking.
If you have historic placements, do not panic and do not start disavowing in bulk. Stop adding to them, and put the same budget into the five sources above, where the link survives the next update because it was never the point of the page.
Before lunch
An hour, three things.
Search your company name plus the word members, and find every association and directory listing you already have. Fix the URLs.
Then send five partner page emails to suppliers, vendors and clients.
Then open a document and write down the one number inside your business that a journalist in your sector would want and cannot get elsewhere. That is your first digital PR story, and it costs nothing but the decision to publish it.
While you are at it, the links you already control matter too, and how your own pages link to each other is usually a faster win than anything external.
My notes on SEO cover the rest. If you’d like to think through your own approach, drop me a line on email, WhatsApp or LinkedIn and we can have a quick chat. I’m contracted full time so this isn’t a pitch.