We Counted All 1,197 URLs in a 1,200-Backlink Package — 509 Linked to the Customer

Every bulk backlink package is sold as a number. 300 links, 1,200 links, 5,000 links. Almost nobody tells you what that number counts.

We can, because we check every URL before a report goes out. This is what one 1,200-link foundation package looked like when we counted it properly — 1,197 URLs, every one of them opened and read.

What is in a backlink package: the actual split

Of the 677 article pages, 509 were confirmed live and pointing at the customer's site on the day we checked, and every one of those was dofollow. The remaining 168 were published but had not yet shown the link — these platforms roll out over a few weeks, so that number climbs.

The line that matters is the second and third rows. 518 of the 1,197 URLs — 43% — were never going to link to the customer's website at all.

Those 518 pages are not padding, but they are not backlinks either

This is where it helps to know how foundation packages are built. They are tiered. A writer publishes an article on a Web 2.0 blog and points it at your site — that is the link you are buying. Then bookmark pages and profile pages are created that point at that article, to help it get discovered and indexed.

That second tier is a real, long-standing technique — we have written up how tiered link building works in What Is a Link Pyramid?. The pages exist, they are live, and they do a job. What they do not do is link to you. They link to the thing that links to you.

So when a package says 1,200, the honest question is not "are these real?" It is "how many of them point at my website?" In this delivery the answer was 677 capable of it and 509 confirmed on the day.

Why the count is quoted the way it is

Because everyone in the supply chain counts URLs, not backlinks. The supplier hands over a list of 1,197 URLs and calls it a 1,200-link delivery, which is true as a count of pages created. It stops being true the moment it is sold as 1,200 backlinks to your site.

We were doing this too. Our Growth Pack's feature list said "1,200 do-follow backlinks", which claimed every placement was a followed link to the buyer's site. It is not, and it never was. We changed that line the day we finished this count — it now reads "1,200 foundation placements", which is what it is. The headline number stayed, because the number is real; the description of it was wrong.

What this means if you are buying

Three questions worth asking any seller of a bulk package:

1. How many of these URLs will link to my website? Not how many URLs — how many links to you. If the answer is "all of them", ask to see a past report.
2. How many are live right now? New Web 2.0 posts take weeks to settle. A count taken at handover and a count taken a month later are different numbers, and the honest seller will tell you which one they are quoting.
3. How many distinct domains? A hundred links from twenty domains is closer to twenty links than a hundred. Foundation packs are usually broad on this, which is their main virtue, but it is worth checking.

Is a foundation package still worth buying?

For the right job, yes — and we sell one, so read that with the appropriate scepticism. Volume packs build a base of link diversity around a site cheaply. They are not the thing that moves a competitive keyword; a handful of contextual links on sites with real traffic does that, and those cost more per link because they are worth more per link.

The mistake is buying 1,200 of something believing you are getting 1,200 of something else. What you are actually buying, in the delivery we counted, is roughly 677 chances at a link to your site plus a supporting layer around them — at a price where that is a perfectly reasonable trade, as long as nobody pretends otherwise.

Method: one delivered foundation package, 1,197 URLs, each fetched and inspected for a link to the customer's domain in August 2026. Live and dofollow status verified per URL. Customer and site not named.