Why Your Last Agency's Links Didn't Work

Links from the same place don't add up

There's a Google patent, filed by three of their most senior search engineers, describing how links get combined. When the sources are strongly affiliated, the contributions resolve toward a maximum rather than a sum.

So a package of "50 backlinks a month" isn't fifty times better than one. If they share a footprint, it's about the same as one.

Worth saying plainly: that patent has since lapsed. We cite it as evidence of how the system was built, not as a live legal claim. We'll always tell you which is which.

How to tell if you bought them

We audit this on every account we inherit. The signatures are consistent:

• Bursts. Genuine links arrive gradually. Bought ones arrive twelve, nineteen, forty at a time.
• Then mass disappearance. Rented links vanish when the payment stops. We've seen accounts lose fifty-seven links in a single month.
• Identical commercial anchor text appearing across several sites within days.
• Foreign blog networks with no connection to your industry or your town.
• Several domains on the same server subnet. The tell that they're one operator wearing different hats.

The good news, usually

If you've bought links, your instinct is probably panic. Usually that's the wrong response.

Google's published guidance is that the disavow tool is for sites with an actual manual penalty, not for anyone whose tool flagged some links as "toxic." Most sites never need it. Reflexively disavowing can remove links that were doing no harm.

Bought links are rented, not owned. When the payment stops, they decay on their own.