How Many Bought Backlinks Survive a Year? A 15,389-Link Audit

How many bought backlinks still work a year later? We audited 15,389 Fiverr and Kwork links: only 3.7% are in Google's index, a third are dead, and 14.8% are blocked by noindex, robots.txt or canonical. Full data and charts: https://en.speedyindex.com/cases/marketplace-backlinks-one-year-later/

Transcript

1. CASE STUDY · BOUGHT-LINK AUDIT · SPEEDYINDEX Bought Backlinks One Year Later: 15,389 Links Audited Links bought on Fiverr and Kwork, crawled as Googlebot Smartphone on August 21, 2026 and checked in Google’s index on October 29, 2026. 3.7% of the links are in Google’s index 562 URLs Bought backlinks one year later 01
2. THE DATASET 15,389 bought URLs. Every one checked, no sampling. 12,350 from Fiverr 2,886 from Kwork Profiles, Web 2.0, forum and comment links, articles, PBN links Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 packages from different sellers Each link came with the seller’s placement report Source: SpeedyIndex case study, October 29, 2026 153 from other marketplaces Link age: 13,742 older than 12 months, 1,572 aged 6–12 months, 75 under 6 months Googlebot Smartphone UA, Chrome TLS fingerprint, redirects not followed 02
3. WHAT GOOGLE ACTUALLY SEES 562 of 15,388 checked URLs are indexed 3.7% Live, open and indexed: only 277 links, 1.8%. Out of every 100 links bought, fewer than two actually work. Screenshot from the case study: bought links vs. links open and in Google’s index. 15,388 URLs were checked: two links that differed only in letter case were merged 03
4. SIX OUTCOMES A YEAR LATER Only 21% of the bought links are live, open pages Live and open 21.0% Dead 33.7% Error response 13.4% Redirected elsewhere Cloudflare challenge Blocked from indexing One primary outcome per URL. Cloudflare-challenged URLs count as unverified, not dead. 3,231 URLs 5,179 URLs 2,063 URLs 11.9% 1,837 URLs 11.9% 1,832 URLs 8.1% 1,247 URLs 04
5. WHY LINKS STOP WORKING DNS failures and deleted pages lead the list Screenshot from the case study: the 12 most common causes. Bought backlinks one year later 2,626 URLs (17.1%): domain does not resolve 1,885 (12.2%): 404, page deleted 1,837 (11.9%): 3xx redirect to another URL 566 (3.7%): redirect to the homepage 547 meta robots noindex, 337 robots.txt Disallow, 194 X-RobotsTag 05
6. LINK AGE Early on pages get deleted. Later, whole domains vanish. SIGNAL 6–12 MONTHS · 1,572 URLS OLDER THAN 12 MONTHS · 13,742 URLS Domain not resolving (DNS) 2.3% 24.9% 23.4% 3.8% 18.5% 10.8% 20.8% 3.6% Deleted pages (404) Working links Indexed In both cohorts about a third of links are dead. DNS failures are 8× more common in the older cohort: typically nobody renewed the domain. Indexed: 60 / 1,572 and 494 / 13,742 06
7. FIVERR VS KWORK More working links on Kwork, the same third dead Working Dead Indexed Screenshot from the case study: outcomes by marketplace. Bought backlinks one year later FIVERR KWORK 19.4% 33.9% 3.6% 27.5% 33.4% 3.4% Indexed: 442 / 12,350 and 97 / 2,886. Neither marketplace guarantees a link will survive a year. 07
8. A 200 STATUS IS NOT ENOUGH A page that loads fine can still block Google 4,750 URLs returned HTTP 200 15.7% of them carry noindex 32.4% have an indexing block of any kind Counting every blocking signal (noindex, robots.txt Disallow, a canonical pointing elsewhere), 14.8% of all bought links are blocked from indexing. Even among technically clean pages, only 8.6% are indexed (277 / 3,231). Check the directives, not just the status code 08
9. CLOSED PAGE T YPES The homepage is open. The profile you bought is not. Screenshot from the case study: one bought link from each of 4,512 sites. 1,829 open page types · 308 could not be checked 457 blocked page types on 443 sites On 266 of them the homepage is open: only that page type is blocked Example: trello.com is open, but user profiles (trello.com/u/{id}) are blocked by robots.txt and meta noindex 09
10. CHECKLIST 8 steps before and after you pay 1 Check the linking site first Is the domain or section in Google’s index at all? 2 Look for noindex and X-Robots-Tag Also robots.txt Disallow and a foreign canonical. 3 Check the report for 404s 4 Catch redirects 5 Check for server errors 6 Re-check at 3, 6 and 12 months 7 Get live links indexed 8 Index gradually Deletions cause most losses in the first months. 5xx and timeouts are early signs of a dying site. A live link that is not indexed is wasted money too. Bought backlinks one year later A 301/302 to the homepage is not the link you paid for. Links die gradually; audits show what still works. Spread a large package out instead of one day. 10
11. METHOD AND LIMITATIONS What this audit does and does not show One set of our own orders, two dates: crawl on August 21, 2026, index check on October 29, 2026 Redirects were recorded as returned (301, 302, 307, 308), not followed The Cloudflare JS challenge was not bypassed: 1,832 URLs count as unverified, not dead Each URL has one primary outcome; the 14.8% “blocked” figure counts every signal, so it is higher than the 8.1% group The crawl measured technical indexability; index presence was checked separately Bought backlinks one year later 11
12. FULL DATA, CHARTS AND TABLES Read the complete case study en.speedyindex.com/cases/marketplace-backlinks-one-year-later/ A note on the rules: Google’s spam policies list buying or selling links for ranking purposes as link spam; paid links are fine only when qualified with rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored". This audit adds a second problem: a year later, most such links simply do not work. SpeedyIndex · case study published October 29, 2026 12