Do bought backlinks get indexed? The honest answer from one large dataset is: rarely, and fewer every month. SpeedyIndex bought 15,389 backlinks on Fiverr and Kwork for its own projects, then re-checked every URL. The numbers below come from the full bought-backlinks study.
The headline numbers
Method in short: every URL from the sellers' reports was crawled as Googlebot Smartphone on August 21, 2026, and Google's index was checked on October 29, 2026. No sampling.
Where the links went
| Outcome | Share of URLs |
|---|---|
| Dead (DNS, 404/410, parked, redirect to homepage) | 33.7% |
| Live and open | 21.0% |
| Error response (403, 5xx, SSL, timeout) | 13.4% |
| Redirected elsewhere | 11.9% |
| Behind a Cloudflare challenge (unverified) | 11.9% |
| Blocked from indexing | 8.1% |
Counting every blocking signal rather than one main outcome per URL, 14.8% of links carried noindex, a robots.txt Disallow or a canonical pointing elsewhere.
"It loads" is not "it's indexed"
Of 4,750 URLs that returned HTTP 200, 32.4% had an indexing block of some kind. The most common causes were a meta robots noindex (547 URLs), a robots.txt Disallow (337) and an X-Robots-Tag: noindex header (194). The header is the hardest to spot, because it doesn't appear in the page source. Google's documentation on noindex covers both forms.
Big platforms, closed pages
A strong domain doesn't mean the page with your link can be indexed. The audit found 457 page types blocked from indexing on 443 sites, and on 266 of them the homepage was open while profiles, shared files or "share" pages were closed. The table of blocked page types lists each pattern.
Even clean pages rarely make it
Among live pages with no blocking signal, only 8.6% were indexed (277 of 3,231). Most of these are thin pages, a profile or a short post with a link, and Google is under no obligation to index every one.
Marketplaces made little difference in the end: Kwork had more working links than Fiverr (27.5% vs 19.4%), but indexation was about the same (3.4% vs 3.6%).
What to check on your own links
- Status code: HTTP 200, no redirect.
- noindex in meta robots and in the X-Robots-Tag header.
- robots.txt for the path of the link page.
- Canonical pointing to the page itself.
- Index status of the exact link URL, re-checked after 3, 6 and 12 months.
The free checks on this site walk through steps 1–4: see free indexing checks.
Limits and rules
This is one set of orders from a limited number of sellers, checked on two dates. 1,832 URLs behind a Cloudflare challenge were not bypassed and count as unverified, not dead. And under Google's spam policies, paid links that pass ranking credit without rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow" are link spam. The data describes links that were already bought; it is not a buying guide.
FAQ
What share of bought backlinks were indexed after a year?
In this audit, 562 of 15,388 checked URLs (3.7%) were in Google's index. Only 1.8% were live, open and indexed at the same time.
Why aren't live backlinks indexed?
Many carry noindex, are blocked by robots.txt or point a canonical elsewhere. Even clean pages are often thin, and Google doesn't index every page it finds.
Does the marketplace matter?
In this dataset Kwork had more working links than Fiverr, but indexation ended up almost the same: 3.4% vs 3.6%.
Sources
- SpeedyIndex case study: 15,389 bought backlinks a year later
- Table of page types blocked from indexing
- Google Search Central: Block indexing with noindex
- Google Search Central: Spam policies