Links you would still want if Google stopped counting them.

Yes. Links remain one of the strongest signals of authority, particularly in competitive markets where on-page work has reached parity. What has changed is that quality and relevance now dominate volume. A handful of genuinely relevant links outperform hundreds of directory placements.

No. Paid link schemes violate Google's guidelines, and enforcement has gotten considerably better at detecting them. The pattern we see is a few months of gains followed by a drop that is expensive and slow to recover from. If a vendor sells links by the unit, that is what you are buying.

There is no threshold number, because it depends entirely on what the competing pages have. The useful exercise is a link gap analysis against the specific pages currently ranking for your target terms, which tells you the actual bar rather than a generic figure.

Toxic links come from spam networks, link farms or irrelevant foreign-language sites, often pointing at you without your involvement. Google is reasonably good at ignoring them, so disavowing is usually unnecessary unless you have a manual action or a history of paid link building.

Individual links can influence rankings within weeks of being crawled, but a meaningful authority shift takes 3 to 6 months of consistent work. Earned placements also take time to secure. Genuine editorial outreach has a low hit rate, which is exactly why the links are worth having.