Link Building Services in the UK: Page One Measured, the Rate Cards That Exist, and 320 UK Publishers Pitched
One site holds first place for six different UK link building searches: link building services uk, link building uk, link building company uk, link building packages uk, backlink service and backlinks uk. It has an Ahrefs Domain Rating of 45, sells through an order portal, and publishes no price on its homepage. Behind it, the second result for backlink service is a site at DR 0, and the first result for buy backlinks uk is another site at DR 0. This is a market where being British and naming the service outranks authority, and where, unlike Australia, a few vendors do publish what they charge. This page measures the results pages, itemises the three rate cards that exist, adds the prices UK publishers quoted to our customers when asked directly (which is the number the rate cards are built on), and reports what 320 UK domains did when pitched: 14 replied, one of them with the sharpest refusal in our records.
We sell outreach software, not a UK agency. The vendors below are the answer Google gives a British buyer, measured rather than reviewed, and the publisher quotes are from our customers' inboxes with the publishers unnamed.
Three of thirteen UK vendors on page one publish prices: £39 to £349 a link at Backlinks4U, £249 to £649 at SharpRocket, £25 a month for bulk links at Get Backlinks. The site that ranks first for everything publishes none.
Median DR, page one: 45 for link building services uk, 38 for backlink service and blogger outreach, 34 for backlinks uk, 44 for link building packages; 61 to 65 for link building uk and company uk, where Semrush and directories crowd in.
Publisher quotes, UK, Jul to Sep 2026: £65, £350 (£900 for three), £400 to £500, £550, and one $60 offer with no sponsored tag.
320 UK domains pitched by 18 accounts; 14 replied (4.4%, platform 7.4%), five positively, four declined, one link went live. Median reply five hours, nine in ten inside 26 hours.
Prospect pool: 592 .uk sites recorded across 62 accounts, median DR 50; 223 at DR 60 or above, 119 at DR 24 or below.
Role inboxes: 34% of UK contacts were info@, editor@ or similar, against 45% platform-wide.
183 of the 320 were pitched by one social media SaaS account, so the mix leans to marketing and business publishers.
Who ranks for link building in the UK, and at what DR
Nine searches, read on 14 September 2026 with Google's location set to the United Kingdom and personalisation off, every domain looked up for Ahrefs DR. Directories and platforms (Clutch, The Manifest, Sortlist, Semrush's agency list, TopSEOs, Reddit) are shown but left out of the medians. The four link building ... uk searches share five to seven of their ten results, so they are one page in practice; backlink service, blogger outreach and the two backlinks uk searches are separate pages with different sites on them.
| Search (from the UK) | Monthly searches | Median DR, non-directory | Page one, in order, with DR |
|---|---|---|---|
| link building services uk | 100 to 1K | 45 | uklinkology.co.uk 45 · screamingfrog.co.uk 87 · Clutch 91 · The Manifest 80 · netpeak.co.uk 32 · digitallyunique.com 22 · seodons.co.uk 11 · cuttingedgepr.com 54 · sharprocket.co.uk 28 |
| link building uk | 100 to 1K | 65 | uklinkology.co.uk 45 · The Manifest 80 · Clutch 91 · screamingfrog.co.uk 87 · Semrush 92 · linkdigital.co.uk 50 · seodons.co.uk 11 · cuttingedgepr.com 54 · clickintelligence.co.uk 65 |
| link building company uk | 100 to 1K | 61 | uklinkology.co.uk 45 · Semrush 92 · The Manifest 80 · Clutch 91 · linkdigital.co.uk 50 · digitallyunique.com 22 · Sortlist 64 · sharprocket.co.uk 28 · TopSEOs 61 |
| link building packages uk | 10 to 100 | 54.5 | uklinkology.co.uk 45 · screamingfrog.co.uk 87 · Clutch 91 · buriedagency.com 34 · netpeak.co.uk 32 · Sortlist 64 · sharprocket.co.uk 28 · The Manifest 80 · seodons.co.uk 11 · clickintelligence.co.uk 65 |
| link building packages | 100 to 1K | 44 | linkbuilder.io 68 · uklinkology.co.uk 45 · bulldogdigitalmedia.com 65 · convertdigital.co.uk 27 · sharprocket.co.uk 28 · onlinemarketingsurgery.co.uk 44 · logica-digital.co.uk 27 · Backlinko 90 · studio36digital.co.uk 39 |
| backlink service | 100 to 1K | 38 | uklinkology.co.uk 45 · backlinkservice.co.uk 0 · rankifyer.com 21 · Reddit 95 · linkbuilder.io 68 · bulldogdigitalmedia.com 65 · dibbledigital.co.uk 27 · Backlinko 90 · jamestaylorseo.co.uk 31 |
| blogger outreach | 100 to 1K | 38 | bloggeroutreach.io 38 · getblogged.net 35 · clickintelligence.co.uk 65 · fatjoe.com 72 · guestpost.uk 29 · Backlinko 90 · editorial.link 73 · jamestaylorseo.co.uk 31 · bloggeroutreach.services 3.2 |
| backlinks uk | 10 to 100 | 34 | uklinkology.co.uk 45 · smartwebagency.co.uk 40 · rootdigital.co.uk 41 · Reddit 95 · textbroker.co.uk 28 · seodons.co.uk 11 · backlinkbuildingagency.co.uk 0 · Semrush 92 · shift.digital 23 |
| buy backlinks uk | 10 to 100 | 40 | backlinks4u.co.uk 0 · clickintelligence.co.uk 65 · getbacklinks.co.uk 0.5 · uklinkology.co.uk 45 · limelightdigital.co.uk 54 · theblueprints.co 26 · bulldogdigitalmedia.com 65 · smartwebagency.co.uk 40 · backlinkbuildingagency.co.uk 0 |
The UK market is about a third of the American one by search volume and the results are a tier softer, but not as soft as Australia: the UK has a real agency layer at DR 22 to 45 (SEO Dons, Digitally Unique, Netpeak UK, SharpRocket, Buried, Link Digital, UK Linkology) that Australia's results pages mostly lack. What the two markets share is that the exact-match domains at DR 0 and 0.5 sit on page one above agencies at DR 65, and that the biggest sites on the page (Screaming Frog, Backlinko, Semrush) are there for a tool or a guide, not to sell the service. A buyer who wants to compare UK vendors on price gets three numbers, and they are in the next section.
The three rate cards, and the ten that are not there
Thirteen UK vendor sites from those results pages, opened on 15 September 2026. Every price is quoted as the vendor states it; where a page names a tier without a figure, that is recorded as none.
| Vendor | DR | Published prices | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| backlinks4u.co.uk | 0 | Niche edits £39 to £89 (DR 30 to 50). Guest posts £89 to £179 (DR 30 to 50). Premium guest posts £199 to £349 (DA 50 to 63). Managed campaign from £449 a month, 4 to 6 links. Blogger outreach from £119. White label from £35 a link. Digital PR £129 to £899+. | Ranks first for buy backlinks uk. Promises a 30-day indexing guarantee and lifetime retention. |
| sharprocket.co.uk | 28 | DR 30+ links from £249. DR 50+ from £399. Digital PR (DR 70+) from £649 a placement. Monthly campaigns from £2,000, "typically 5 to 8 links". | Publishes the traffic floor for its DR 30 tier (1,000 organic visits a month) and says most clients run 10 to 50 links a month. |
| getbacklinks.co.uk | 0.5 | £25 to £1,000 a month for 50 to 1,714 "backlinks": web 2.0 posts, wiki links, bookmarks, comment links, social signals. | A different product from the rest of the table; see web 2.0 backlinks for what those are. |
| uklinkology.co.uk | 45 | none on the homepage | First for six searches. "Link Service (Approval)" and "(Non-Approval)", a 10% first-order code, and prices inside the dashboard order portal. |
| backlinkservice.co.uk | 0 | none | Guest posts, niche edits, content, "visual links"; testimonials, no figures. |
| seodons.co.uk | 11 | none | Ranks for four of the nine searches. |
| jamestaylorseo.co.uk | 31 | none | Case-study numbers, no rate card. |
| convertdigital.co.uk | 27 | none | "Monthly Link Building Packages" named, not priced. |
| digitallyunique.com | 22 | none | "Request sample placements." |
| dibbledigital.co.uk | 27 | none | Free website audit first. |
| bloggeroutreach.io | 38 | none | Three tiers named on the pricing page (Establish, Accelerate, Dominate), "quoted to your brand". |
| getblogged.net | 35 | none | Marketplace: the brand sets a budget, bloggers pitch, "the creator gets paid the same day". |
| guestpost.uk | 29 | none | Custom quote form asking for URL, niche, authority level and budget. |
Two vendors sell editorial placements with a price on them, and their tiers do not overlap: Backlinks4U tops out at £349 for a DA 50 to 63 guest post, SharpRocket starts at £249 for DR 30. A DR 50 link is £199 to £349 on one site and from £399 on the other, and the gap is the difference between a vendor that sources from its own and partner blogs and one that quotes a traffic floor. Both are plausible prices for the product they describe. The ten with no rate card are not hiding anything unusual: the UK publisher quotes further down come out between £65 and £500 a placement, and a vendor's price is that plus their margin and their labour, which is why the vendors who do publish land at £249 to £399 for the mid tier.
Backlink service: the softer search with a DR 0 site in second
Backlink service gets 100 to 1,000 searches a month in the UK, more than any single link building ... uk phrasing, and its results page is softer: median DR 38, with backlinkservice.co.uk at DR 0 in second place, Rankifyer at DR 21 third and Dibble Digital at 27 seventh. The searcher who types "backlink service" rather than "link building agency" is closer to buying a unit than hiring a firm, which is why UK Linkology's order portal wins here as well and why a DR 0 exact-match domain with no prices can hold second. In the US the same phrase returns a wall at DR 70 and above with Legiit, Backlinko and Semrush; searched from Australia it is Legiit and Rankifyer again with the Australian agencies at DR 42 to 65 filling in.
What a "backlink service" is, in the sense the page-one sites use, is a link insertion or guest post on a site the vendor already has a relationship with, priced per unit, delivered in one to four weeks. The link insertion services guide covers the unit and its price range; the niche edits guide is the same product under its other name.
Blogger outreach in the UK
Blogger outreach is a British phrase. It gets 100 to 1,000 searches a month in the UK against 100 to 1,000 in the far larger US market, its top-of-page bid in Keyword Planner is among the highest of any search on this page, and the UK results are a different set of sites from the agency searches: bloggeroutreach.io (DR 38), Get Blogged (35), guestpost.uk (29), James Taylor SEO (31) and bloggeroutreach.services at DR 3.2 in ninth, with FATJOE, Click Intelligence and two Backlinko-style guides making up the rest. None of the first three publishes a price. Get Blogged's model, which is the interesting one, inverts the usual outreach: the brand posts a budget and bloggers pitch for it, and the blogger is paid the day the post is approved.
Our own records treat bloggers as one kind of publisher among several, and the UK pool leans away from them: of the 592 .uk sites our customers' campaigns turned up, the commonest title words are "marketing", "media", "social", "agency", "digital", "business" and "news", and "blog" appears in 16 titles. That is because the accounts doing the pitching sell marketing software and a health app, and the sites they find are the ones that write about those things. A consumer brand running the same search would find the food, travel and parenting bloggers that the Get Blogged marketplace is built on; the blogger outreach tools guide covers how those lists are built and the pitch template guide covers what to send them.
What UK publishers quote when you ask them
The vendor rate cards above are built on this. Between July and September 2026, UK publishers replying to our customers' pitches named these prices, unprompted in most cases. The publisher is not named; the DR and the kind of site are.
| Publisher | DR | Quote, as written | What it buys |
|---|---|---|---|
| Established publisher | 76 | "We generally charge a fee for backlink insertions, rather than doing link exchanges - we charge £350 for one link and £900 for three." | Link insertion in an existing article. The customer had offered a reciprocal link; the publisher declined the swap and named the fee. |
| Regional news group (several local titles) | 62 | "£65 per general post or link insert / £175 per gambling, crypto, Forex, trading or vaping-related post or link insert" | Guest post or insertion across a list of local news sites, with a 2.7x surcharge for restricted niches. |
| Technology publisher | not measured | "Happy to publish content for you for which we charge £500 per piece. We can include you in that piece for £400." | A full article, or a mention inside one the publisher writes. |
| Printed cycling magazine, annual guide | not measured | "1 slot for £550 Net + Vat or 2 slots for £1,000 Net + Vat (product or vouchers)" | Advertising in a buyer's guide, promoted "via solus and socials". Not a link; recorded because it is what a print publisher offers when pitched for one. |
| Blog | 50 | "a spot ... for just $60, giving you the option of either a guest post with 2 do-follow links or a link insertion in an existing article ... published without any sponsored tag" | Undisclosed paid links, quoted in dollars from a .co.uk. The kind of offer the buying backlinks guide says to decline. |
| Founder community site | 47 | "all commercial links ... go through our standard paid placement process (rel="sponsored" attribution, flat rate, upfront payment). If that's of interest, happy to send rates." | Disclosed sponsored links at a flat rate; the rate itself was not in the reply. |
Put the two tables side by side. A DR 62 regional news group sells an insertion for £65; SharpRocket's DR 50+ tier is from £399 and Backlinks4U's DA 50 to 63 tier is £199 to £349. A DR 76 publisher asks £350; SharpRocket's DR 70+ digital PR is from £649. The vendor price is roughly two to five times the publisher's fee, which is the cost of the vendor finding the publisher, writing the content and taking the risk that the link is removed. Whether that markup is worth paying is the whole outsourcing question; the UK-specific part is that the publisher fees are in pounds and mostly under £400, so the arithmetic is easy to check on your own outreach. Across all markets our customers have received 169 quotes, and the cost guide has that distribution.
592 UK sites in our outreach records
Read on 15 September 2026: 592 domains ending in .uk across 62 accounts, plus 47 Irish domains left out here. By Ahrefs DR:
| Ahrefs DR band | UK sites | Share | Pitched | Replied |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 to 9 | 63 | 10.6% | 41 | 3 |
| 10 to 24 | 56 | 9.5% | 32 | 0 |
| 25 to 39 | 103 | 17.4% | 62 | 3 |
| 40 to 59 | 118 | 19.9% | 82 | 5 |
| 60 to 79 | 146 | 24.7% | 81 | 3 |
| 80 and above | 77 | 13.0% | 18 | 0 |
| Not measured | 29 | 4.9% | 4 | 0 |
Median DR 50, nine points above the Australian pool and close to the platform's, and top-heavy: 223 of the 592 are at DR 60 or above, because the UK has a deep layer of national charities, trade bodies, membership organisations and news groups that turn up for almost any keyword. Forty of the 592 were dropped before any email went out for being too large for the account pitching them. The 18 sites at DR 80 and above that were pitched anyway got no reply, and the three replies at DR 0 to 9 came from small marketing and business sites, including the one UK domain where a link went live.
320 pitched, 14 replied
320 UK domains were emailed (329 emails, a handful of follow-ups) by 18 accounts between July and September 2026. A domain counts as replied when a human at it answered, from any address; auto-acknowledgements from media teams and charities ("this inbox is monitored Monday to Friday", "we will endeavour to respond within 7 working days") are excluded, and the UK produces plenty of those.
| Measure | UK domains | All domains, platform |
|---|---|---|
| Domains emailed | 320 | 16,101 |
| Human reply | 14 (4.4%) | 1,191 (7.4%) |
| Positive reply | 5 (1.6%) | 608 (3.8%) |
| Countered with a price or an advertising offer | 3 | 166 named a price |
| Declined | 4 | 195 |
| Link recorded as live | 1 | 61 |
| Bounced | 8 of 331 addresses (2.4%) | 2.4% |
| Median hours to first reply | 5.0 | 2.7 |
| 90th percentile hours to first reply | 25.6 | 72.7 |
By month: 7 of 111 in July (6.3%), 4 of 146 in August (2.7%), 3 of 63 in the first half of September (4.8%), against a platform 7.2%, 6.8% and 8.0%. The UK is below the platform rate in every month, and the August dip coincides with the one account that pitched 183 of the 320 UK domains working through a pool heavy with marketing agencies and media companies, which are the publishers least likely to answer a pitch from a software company. The reply timing is the opposite of Australia's: 231 of the 320 first emails went out between 06:00 and 11:00 UTC, which is 7am to noon in London, so they were read the same morning. Half the replies came inside five hours and nine in ten inside 26. The Australian median is 14 hours for the same software for the reason the Australian page explains: the clock, not the publishers.
The one live link is a reciprocal placement: a DR 26 marketing blog wrote back "I'm happy with a reciprocal link arrangement" and a DR 6 site completed a swap, sending back the URL, the anchor text and the sentence it wanted added. Both sides of that exchange are recorded, which is how a placement gets counted at all; the link exchange guide covers when a swap is worth doing and the exchange platforms page covers the organised version.
The four declines, which say more than the yeses
Four UK publishers said no in writing, and three of the four gave a reason. They are worth reading in full because British editors write the clearest refusals in our records.
- The automation objection (DR 45, an independent editorial site). "I see this was an automated AI outreach to help 'run link building on autopilot'. Therefore, this isn't one for us." The pitch went out from our own account, the editor looked up the sender's domain, read what the software does, and declined on principle. It is the fairest decline we have: a pitch that is not worth the editor's time is not made better by having been generated. It is also why every draft on the platform is shown to a person before it is sent, and why the AI versus manual page reports the reply rates of both honestly.
- The policy refusal (DR 47, a founder community). No reciprocal links or mention swaps; "all commercial links ... go through our standard paid placement process (rel=sponsored attribution, flat rate, upfront payment)". A decline that is also a rate card, and the correct answer from a publisher that wants to keep its editorial and its advertising apart.
- The membership refusal (DR 45, a professional body). "Our members have specifically requested that we do not facilitate or permit any unsolicited emails or promotional outreach." Trade bodies and professional associations make up a large share of the UK pool at DR 40 and above, and this is the standard answer from them. They are worth removing from the list before sending rather than after.
- The media-inbox refusal (DR 85, a national charity). "This inbox is monitored Monday to Friday ... we are unable to assist with any non-media enquiries." Not a person declining, but a system that will never forward the pitch. The equivalent Australian replies come as ticket numbers; the British ones come as office hours.
Set against these, the five replies classed as positive were three counter-offers with a price or an advertising slot attached (including a DR 75 magazine that redirected the pitch to "advertising and event sponsorship opportunities"), the $60 offer, and a DR 63 agency's marketing director asking for "more details regarding your proposal". None of them was a yes to a free editorial link. In the UK records, the free editorial link does not appear; the live one was a swap, and every other route to a placement had a price on it.
Link building packages UK, against the quotes
Link building packages gets 100 to 1,000 UK searches a month and its results page is one of the softer ones here (median DR 44), held by Convert Digital, Logica, Online Marketing Surgery and Studio 36 at DR 27 to 44 alongside LinkBuilder.io and Bulldog. A package is a monthly price for a number of links, and the two published UK packages price out like this: SharpRocket from £2,000 a month for five to eight links is £250 to £400 a link; Backlinks4U from £449 a month for four to six links is £75 to £112 a link. The first is buying DR 30 to 50 editorial placements at roughly the publisher fee plus a margin; the second is buying something closer to the £65 regional-news insertion above, at the vendor's own and partner sites.
The alternative to a package is to do the asking yourself, which is what the 320 UK pitches in these records are. At the rates in the table, £449 a month bought four to six links from one vendor; the same £449 spent on publisher fees directly, at the £65 to £350 the UK publishers quoted, buys one to seven insertions on sites you chose, with the outreach labour on top. Our software sells the labour part for $99 a month per sending inbox, and the honest reading of the UK numbers on this page is that it produced 14 conversations and one link from 320 pitches, which is a worse rate than the platform average and a better price per conversation than any package. The affordable link building page has the same comparison for the US price tiers, and the pricing page has ours.
Frequently asked questions
How much do link building services cost in the UK?
Of thirteen UK vendors on page one that we checked on 15 September 2026, three publish prices. Backlinks4U lists niche edits at £39 to £89, guest posts at £89 to £179, premium guest posts at £199 to £349 and a managed campaign from £449 a month for four to six links. SharpRocket lists DR 30+ links from £249, DR 50+ from £399 and digital PR from £649 a placement, with monthly campaigns from £2,000 for five to eight links. Get Backlinks sells bulk web 2.0, wiki and bookmark links from £25 a month, which is a different product. The other ten, including the site that ranks first for every UK link building search, quote on a call or through an order portal.
What do UK publishers charge for a link when asked directly?
In replies to our customers between July and September 2026, UK publishers quoted £350 for one link insertion and £900 for three (a DR 76 site), £65 per post or insertion and £175 for gambling, crypto, forex, trading or vaping content (a DR 62 regional news group), £500 for a written piece or £400 to be included in one (a technology publisher), £550 or £1,000 for one or two slots in a printed buyer's guide, and $60 for a guest post with two links and no sponsored tag (a DR 50 site). Another site said all commercial links carry rel=sponsored at a flat rate paid upfront.
Who ranks for link building in the UK?
Searched from the UK on 14 September 2026, uklinkology.co.uk (Ahrefs DR 45) held first place for link building services uk, link building uk, link building company uk, link building packages uk, backlink service and backlinks uk. Behind it the page mixes directories (Clutch, The Manifest, Semrush's agency list) with UK agencies at DR 11 to 34: SEO Dons, Netpeak UK, Digitally Unique, SharpRocket, Buried. For backlink service the second result is backlinkservice.co.uk at DR 0, and for buy backlinks uk the first is backlinks4u.co.uk at DR 0.
Do UK publishers reply to link building outreach?
Across every account on MentionAgent, 320 UK (.uk) domains have been pitched and 14 replied with a human answer, 4.4%, against 7.4% across all 16,101 domains pitched. Five replies were positive, four declined, three countered with a price, and one ended in a live link, a reciprocal placement with a DR 6 site. UK replies arrive fast: median five hours after the send, with nine in ten inside 26 hours, because the emails land in the UK morning.
Is blogger outreach different from link building in the UK?
On the results page, yes. blogger outreach searched from the UK returns marketplaces and services (bloggeroutreach.io, Get Blogged, guestpost.uk, FATJOE, a DR 3.2 site called bloggeroutreach.services) rather than agencies, with a median DR of 38 and none of the first three publishing a price. Get Blogged's model is that the brand sets a budget and bloggers pitch for it. Link building services uk returns agencies and directories. The buyer of the first wants named bloggers and a per-post fee; the buyer of the second wants a company and a monthly retainer.
Why did a UK editor refuse an automated pitch?
Because the sender's own website said what the software does. One DR 45 editor replied: "I see this was an automated AI outreach to help run link building on autopilot. Therefore, this isn't one for us." The pitch had been sent from our own account, so the editor had looked up the sender and read our homepage. It is the clearest decline in the UK records and a fair one; an outreach email that is not worth the publisher's time is not improved by being automated. Every draft on the platform is shown before sending for exactly this reason.