There is no universal number of links that gets you to the top; “100 links and you’re in the top 10” is a myth. The right answer is always specific to your case and is calculated from the competitors already ranking in the top 10 for your query. The method is simple: collect the top 10, pull the number of referring domains for each, find the median and subtract your current figure. The gap between the competitors’ median and your profile is your link plan.
Key points in 30 seconds
- There is no “magic number” of links: it depends on the niche, the specific query and how strong the competitors are.
- We count referring domains, not the total number of links; that’s the honest unit of measurement.
- Use the top 10 median as your benchmark, not the average: outliers like aggregators skew the average.
- The gap between the competitors’ median and your profile = the amount of work.
- Your link buying plan = the gap split into months at a safe link velocity.
Why “how many links” is the wrong question
People expect a single number, but Google doesn’t rank by the absolute number of links. The same type of query in different niches needs a completely different volume: in one, 30 donors are enough; in another, even 300 won’t cut it. Also, 200 links from five sites and 50 links from fifty different domains are fundamentally different things. Search engines care less about the number of links and more about the number of independent domains linking to you: each new domain is a separate “vote.” Five sites praising you forty times each look less like a fan club and more like five very chatty friends. So the correct question is: “How many referring domains do I need to catch up with the current top 10 for my query?” And keep in mind that links are only one ranking factor; without solid content, technical SEO and user signals, links alone won’t get you to the top. For more on the role of links, see the cornerstone article What is link building.
What the data says: why we count referring domains
Google itself doesn’t hide that links are part of the algorithm. Its guide to Google Search ranking systems explicitly lists “Link analysis systems and PageRank,” describing PageRank as one of the core systems used since the search engine launched. So the question isn’t whether links count, but how many you need in your particular SERP.
Large studies show how wide the gap between the leaders and everyone else can be. Backlinko analyzed 11.8 million Google results and found that the page in position #1 has, on average, 3.8 times more backlinks than pages in positions 2–10. For our method, that’s an important takeaway: matching the “average” top-10 page is the minimum bar, and competing for the first spot usually requires a noticeably stronger profile.
The second key study is Ahrefs’ search traffic study. According to Ahrefs, 96.55% of pages get no traffic from Google at all, and there’s a clear correlation between the number of referring domains and a page’s traffic. One telling fact: out of roughly 20 million pages with zero referring domains, only 2,997 get more than 1,000 visits a month, about one page in 6,671. Those are roughly the odds of finding a parking spot at the mall on a Saturday. That’s exactly why we count domains rather than raw backlinks: researchers measure the relationship with traffic through the number of independent linking sites.
An important caveat: correlation isn’t causation. Pages with many referring domains are often also better written, older and backed by stronger brands. So study figures don’t give you a “link quota” for your niche. They only confirm the logic: without referring domains, your chances of meaningful traffic are slim, and the actual threshold has to be pulled from your own SERP.
The calculation method in 4 steps
Step 1. Collect the top 10 for your target query
Take the main commercial query you want to rank for and open the SERP for the right region (preferably in incognito mode to remove personalization). Write down the first 10 results. Right away, flag the “unfair” neighbors: aggregators, marketplaces, Wikipedia, major media outlets. Their link profiles are huge, and they don’t work as a benchmark for a regular site. Keep only sites comparable to yours in type and scale.
One more check at this step: search intent. If the SERP for “buy X” is dominated by informational articles while you’re promoting a store category, the problem isn’t links. Google sees a different user intent. The calculation only makes sense when your page type matches what already ranks.
Step 2. Pull the number of referring domains
In Ahrefs, Serpstat, Semrush or a similar tool, check each site’s Referring Domains, not Backlinks (the total number of links). Why domains: 500 links from one forum are essentially one vote, not five hundred. Record the RD figure for each comparable competitor you selected. How to export a competitor’s profile step by step is covered in the article Competitor backlink analysis, and Semrush’s guide to finding competitor backlinks explains the donor-research logic well too.
Record two numbers: RD to the specific URL that ranks, and RD to the whole domain. If a ranking page has 15 referring domains on a domain with 600, it’s being pulled up by the overall strength of the site, and you’ll need to build up both your target page and your domain as a whole. If the page and the domain have similar figures, working on the page itself is enough.
Step 3. Find the median, not the average
Sort the RD numbers in ascending order and take the value in the middle. That’s the median. The median is resistant to outliers: if one competitor has 5,000 domains and the rest have about 150 each, the average balloons to an unrealistic figure, while the median stays close to the real “entry threshold.” The median shows how many domains you actually need to be in the same league as the current top results.
Step 4. Calculate the gap and build a plan
Compare your RD figure with the competitors’ median. Gap = median − your figure. That’s the target number of referring domains for the campaign. Then split the gap into months at a safe growth rate, since you can’t ramp up abruptly (for the limits, see Does a sudden spike in links hurt).
If your goal isn’t just the top 10 but the top three, benchmark against the third- or fourth-strongest competitor in your sample rather than the median. That’s consistent with Backlinko’s data on the leader’s lead: the very top of the SERP usually has a noticeably stronger profile than the rest of page one.
A worked example
Let’s take a hypothetical commercial query and its SERP. All figures in the table are made up purely to illustrate the method, and in your niche they will be different:
| Position | Site | Referring domains (RD) | Included |
| 1 | Competitor A | 320 | yes |
| 2 | Competitor B | 180 | yes |
| 3 | Aggregator | 4,200 | no, excluded |
| 4 | Competitor C | 210 | yes |
| 5 | Competitor D | 95 | yes |
| 6 | Competitor E | 150 | yes |
| 7 | Competitor F | 240 | yes |
| 8 | Marketplace | 8,000 | no, excluded |
| 9 | Competitor G | 130 | yes |
| 10 | Competitor H | 175 | yes |
After excluding the aggregator and the marketplace, eight comparable competitors remain, with figures of 320, 180, 210, 95, 150, 240, 130 and 175. Sorted in ascending order: 95, 130, 150, 175, 180, 210, 240, 320. There are eight numbers, so the median is the average of the two middle values: (175 + 180) / 2 = 177.5, rounded to 178.
For comparison, the arithmetic mean of all ten results, including the aggregator and the marketplace, would be 1,370 domains, almost eight times the median. That kind of inflated figure is exactly what makes site owners believe the top is out of reach. Usually the next sentence in the meeting is “maybe we should just run more ads?”
Say your site has 60 referring domains. The gap: 178 − 60 = 118 domains. That’s how many new sites you need to reach the median of the current top. If your site is young and a safe pace is about 15–20 new domains a month, a realistic campaign horizon is roughly 6–8 months. Note that this is a benchmark, not a guarantee: competitors keep growing their profiles too, so revisit the calculation once a quarter.
How to spread the gap over months
Let’s continue the same hypothetical example. A gap of 118 domains shouldn’t be split evenly: it’s better to go slower in the first months and increase the pace once the profile has some “background.” Here’s one possible schedule (again, an illustration, not a rule):
| Month | New domains | Total RD | What we monitor |
| 1 | 12 | 72 | Indexing of placements, natural anchors |
| 2 | 15 | 87 | First movement on long-tail queries |
| 3 | 18 | 105 | Target page trends in Search Console |
| 4 | 18 | 123 | Recalculating the top 10 median |
| 5 | 18 | 141 | Share of branded and naked URL links |
| 6 | 19 | 160 | Rankings for the main query |
| 7 | 18 | 178 | Reaching the median, maintenance plan |
Once you reach the median, the campaign doesn’t stop; it switches to maintenance mode: a few new domains each month so the profile doesn’t “freeze” while competitors keep growing. You can build a ready-made schedule like this with our Link building plan tool.
How many links to buy per month
The gap gives you a monthly pace easily: divide the required number of domains by a safe velocity. The general principle: a young site should grow more slowly, while an aged site with history can go faster. Roughly:
| Site age / profile | Safe growth, new domains per month |
| Young site (under 6–12 months) | 5–15 |
| Site with history, weak profile | 15–30 |
| Aged site, strong profile | 30–60+ |
Exact figures depend on the niche and your current profile. Crowd links are the most convenient way to add domains steadily and on schedule: they provide natural growth spread over time from real discussions. If you don’t want to search for platforms manually and keep up the pace, you can buy crowd links as a package sized to your gap calculation.
Remember that velocity is about consistency, not just volume. Google’s spam policies classify as link spam buying links to manipulate rankings, using automated programs to create links, and large-scale guest posting with keyword-rich anchors. A hundred identical placements in one week with exact-match commercial anchors is precisely the pattern that looks artificial. You can buy 500 links over a weekend. Explaining to Google where they came from is the hard part. A smooth schedule, a variety of platform types and natural anchors reduce that risk.
From our practice
When a client comes to us saying “we need 120 domains,” we first check whether the niche actually has that many quality platforms. In our October 2026 check of 16,500 forums, 90% were live, but on 68% of the forums where we could inspect threads, the checked threads contained no external links at all: moderators either remove them or don’t let them through. Among forums where links do exist, 49% are dofollow and 32% nofollow/ugc. That’s why we always reconcile a domain-based plan with the real pool of platforms, not just with a competitor spreadsheet.
Budget: turning the gap into money
Once you know the gap and the pace, the budget is simple multiplication. As a market benchmark, Ahrefs, citing an Authority Hacker survey of 755 link builders, reports that 74.3% of link builders buy links and that the average price of a paid link is $83. To be fair, Ahrefs itself advises against buying links. That’s exactly why we focus on relevant placements in live discussions rather than selling “link juice.”
Links-Buy’s crowd link pricing depends on order size (minimum order is 20 links):
| Order size | Price per link | Example |
| 20–39 links | 86 UAH | 20 links = 1,720 UAH |
| 40–79 links | 79 UAH | 40 links = 3,160 UAH |
| 80–99 links | 76 UAH | 80 links = 6,080 UAH |
| 100+ links | 70 UAH | 120 links = 8,400 UAH |
In our hypothetical example, the gap is 118 domains. You could close it with monthly packages of 20 links (1,720 UAH a month) or with a single order of 120 links on a stretched-out placement schedule (8,400 UAH at 70 UAH per link). But don’t equate “a link” with “a new domain”: some placements may land on forums that already link to you, and crowd links are only one type in a healthy profile. So a realistic campaign budget usually includes other formats too: articles, outreach, local directories.
To skip the manual math, use our link budget calculator: enter the gap and your target timeline, and it will show the monthly volume and total cost. Current terms are on the Pricing page.
When the median-based calculation won’t work
The method gives a reliable benchmark, but there are situations where the RD figure on its own says little:
- Low competition. If the ranking pages have 0–5 referring domains, content and intent match decide the outcome. Links only speed things up here; they don’t determine the result.
- Local results. Google Maps relies on different signals: relevance, distance and prominence of the business. Links contribute to prominence, but they don’t replace your business profile and reviews.
- A weak page. If competitors answer the query more thoroughly, your 178 domains may not get you to the top. First bring the page up to the leaders’ level, then close the gap.
- Low-quality donors. A hundred domains that Google neutralizes as unnatural count as zero in your calculation. Check every platform before placing a link, for example with our donor site checker. A hundred links from forums nobody has opened in years carry about as much weight as a hundred postcards dropped into an abandoned mailbox.
From our practice
For Ukrainian-language projects, the pool of platforms is narrower than it seems. In our October 2026 check of 16,500 forums, only about 1,819 of the 14,869 live forums (~12%) were in Ukrainian or mixed Ukrainian/Russian, and only 58% of forums with a visible last-post date had new posts in the past three months. So for narrow niches we plan a longer horizon and never promise to “close the gap in a month”: 15 relevant placements in active threads beat 50 in abandoned ones.
Common calculation mistakes
- Counting backlinks instead of domains: the number inflates many times over and misleads you.
- Using aggregators and marketplaces as a benchmark: their profiles are out of reach and irrelevant.
- Using the average instead of the median: one big outlier breaks the whole calculation.
- Chasing quantity and ignoring donor quality: 100 junk domains are weaker than 30 trusted ones.
- Forgetting that links are not the only factor: without content and technical SEO, a link plan won’t work.
- Comparing domain-level RD with page-level RD: specific URLs compete in the SERP, so look at both figures.
- Calculating once and forgetting about it: the top 10 median shifts, so without a quarterly recalculation the plan quickly goes stale.
How to turn this into a month-by-month plan per page is covered in Link building strategy from scratch. If you need a budget breakdown for a specific volume, see How much it costs to get a site to the top.
Don’t want to build spreadsheets, calculate medians and work out the gap yourself? Fair enough: few people get excited about spreadsheets at 2 a.m. We’ll calculate the number of referring domains you need for your queries and propose a link buying plan for your niche and budget. Discuss your project and get a quote.
Sources
- Google Search Central: A guide to Google Search ranking systems: link analysis systems and PageRank
- Backlinko: We Analyzed 11.8 Million Google Search Results: #1 has 3.8x more backlinks
- Ahrefs: Search Traffic Study: 96.55% of pages get no Google traffic
- Semrush: How to Find Competitor Backlinks
- Google Search Central: Spam policies for Google web search
- Ahrefs: Should You Buy Backlinks?: Authority Hacker survey, $83 average price
