The Long-Shot Ledger: link building told as odds. Most posts never earn a link, most outreach goes unanswered, quality links are scarce and pricey, and most links that do land are gone within a decade.
Link building statistics as odds: at each step of a link's life, the share of tries that come out a yes (blue) versus a no. Each strip is 100% of what its study counted.
Each strip comes from a different study, sample and year (2019 to 2026), so read each strip on its own rather than as one funnel. Yes shares marked as derived in the tooltips are 100% minus the published no share. Why the odds matter: of about 20 million pages in Ahrefs' index with no referring domains, only 2,997 get more than 1,000 search visits a month.
Link building tactics in active use, % of 755 link builders surveyed by Authority Hacker (2022 survey)
Respondents could pick several tactics. Values are read from Authority Hacker's chart, dated November 2022. Use and effectiveness differ: in Editorial.Link's 2026 survey of 518 SEOs, 48.6% named digital PR the most effective tactic, ahead of guest posting (16%) and linkable assets (12%).
Backlink cost by type, average US$ per placement on link marketplaces, 2026
BuzzStream marketplace data: 257,267 guest-post sites and 421,259 sites for insertions. A direct guest post is bought from the site itself, a vendor guest post through a typical link vendor, and the high-quality post is a guest post on a high-quality site bought through a vendor. A link insertion adds a link to an existing post. "High quality" is BuzzStream's tier of DR 71–80 with 50k+ monthly organic visits. 6.8× is derived ($3,130 ÷ $461). For comparison, SEOs in Editorial.Link's 2026 survey called $508.95 an acceptable price for one high-quality link.
Why backlinks are lost: share of lost links by reason, Ahrefs index, links to 2M+ sites since January 2013
"Page dropped" means Ahrefs removed the linking page from its index, often because it can no longer be crawled or the domain is gone. "Link removed" means the page still exists but no longer links. Ahrefs does not count crawl errors as link rot.
Link rot statistics: % of pages from each year's web snapshot no longer accessible as of October 2023
Values are read from Pew's chart labels. Pew sampled about 90,000 pages a year from Common Crawl (n=999,989) and counted a page as inaccessible if it returned an error code or no valid response. Each point is a different cohort of pages checked once in 2023, not one set of pages tracked over time.
Outreach email response rate: % more replies than the baseline, 12 million emails (2019)
Follow-up sequence means several messages sent to several contacts at the same site; custom means personalized. Relative lifts against Backlinko's baseline for each test (for example, one message to one contact), not percentage-point gains on the 8.5% average reply rate. The study reports correlations, not controlled experiments.
How long link building takes to work: reasonable timeframe to see results, % of 518 SEOs, 2026
Editorial.Link asked what timeframe respondents consider reasonable, an expectation rather than a measured result. In Authority Hacker's 2022 survey of 755 link builders, the average time to see a link's impact on rankings was 3.1 months.