Anybody who answers this with a number, without asking which term, is guessing. The number is a property of the results page you want to be on, not of your site, and it is measurable in about twenty minutes.
How do you work out the actual number?
Look at the pages ranking three to seven for your target term, count the distinct domains linking to each of those specific pages, and take the median. That is your target. Positions one and two are excluded on purpose, because they are usually held by a brand whose link profile you cannot replicate and should not try to.
Do it page by page, not site by site. A well known publication with a hundred thousand referring domains may be ranking with an article that has four. You are competing with the article.
- Take the top ten for the exact phrase Incognito, in the country you sell in. Personalised results will quietly ruin the exercise.
- Discard positions one, two, and anything irrelevant Forums, video results and news pieces are not the competitive set for a commercial page.
- Count referring domains to the ranking URL Referring domains, not backlinks. Fifty links from one site is one domain and Google treats it roughly that way.
- Take the median, not the average One outlier with 900 domains will drag an average somewhere useless.
- Subtract what you already have The gap is the number you are actually buying or earning.
For most small business and niche commercial terms this lands between fifteen and sixty referring domains. For anything with money behind it, it will be hundreds, and that is a signal to pick a different term first rather than to raise the budget.
Do a hundred small links beat ten good ones?
No, and it is not close. The value of a link comes from the page it sits on being a page people and crawlers actually reach. A link on a page with no traffic, no other links into it and no editorial process is close to worthless, and a hundred of them is a footprint.
When we look at a target site before pitching it, four things decide whether it is worth the effort. All four are checkable without a subscription to anything:
| Signal | Worth having | Walk away |
|---|---|---|
| Organic traffic | The site ranks for terms unrelated to its own name. | All of its traffic is brand or nothing at all. |
| Topical fit | It already publishes about your subject for your audience. | It publishes about everything, which means it publishes for nobody. |
| Editorial process | Named authors, a real about page, pieces that were clearly commissioned. | A write for us page with a price list. |
| Outbound pattern | Links out where a link is warranted, to varied places. | Every post carries three do-follow links to unrelated commercial sites. |
Domain authority scores made by tool vendors are not on this list. They are a useful sorting device and a terrible decision rule, and they are trivially inflated by anyone who wants to sell you a link.
What about anchor text?
Anchor text still carries weight, and over-optimising it is one of the few things that reliably triggers a problem. A natural profile is mostly brand names, bare URLs and phrases like read more, with exact match keywords as a small minority.
A working rule of thumb for a profile you are building deliberately: keep exact match anchors under about one in ten, keep partial match under about one in four, and let the rest be brand, URL and generic. If your link profile reads like a keyword list, it reads that way to a spam classifier too.
Can you build them too quickly?
Speed on its own is not the problem. A product launch that earns two hundred links in a week is normal and Google sees it constantly. The problem is speed with no cause: a site with no news, no product and no audience suddenly acquiring links at a steady mechanical rate.
In practice this only matters if the links are bad anyway. Good placements arrive irregularly because editors reply irregularly. If your link acquisition graph is a straight line, something is generating it rather than earning it.
What does closing the gap actually cost?
Editorial placement on a site with real traffic, including the research, the pitch, the writing and the follow-up, is not a twenty dollar line item, and anything priced like one is selling you a link from a site that sells links to anyone. If your gap is thirty referring domains, treat it as a two to three quarter programme rather than a purchase, and expect to write for every one of them.
The link building tiers on the storefront are priced in the open with the referring domain count stated, and every placement carries a six month replacement warranty, which exists because placements do occasionally get pulled and that should be our problem rather than yours.