The reaction was a swing back to agencies, which solved the quality problem by removing the buyer's ability to see anything at all. You stopped getting junk and you also stopped getting a list.

Neither of those is the interesting version. The interesting version is a catalogue where every quality signal you'd use to reject a site is printed on the listing.

What's on a listing

Six fields, on every publisher, before you spend anything.

Ahrefs domain rating. The number everyone quotes, useful and routinely misread.

Organic traffic. The number that says whether anyone reads the site. DR measures backlinks. A DR 60 domain pulling 200 visits a month is an old backlink profile attached to nothing.

Spam score. The check most buyers skip and then regret in month four.

Niche and language. Including which high-risk categories the publisher accepts, flagged per site, so a brand that shouldn't sit next to gambling content doesn't end up there.

Price. Publisher price plus our fee, visible before checkout. No call, no quote, no "contact for pricing."

Turnaround. Stored per publisher, in weeks, because that's how publishers quote it. Some move within a day. Others quote several weeks. Filter on it if a deadline is the constraint.

Free account, no card. The whole catalogue is behind the signup and nothing else.

How to buy from a marketplace without getting burned

The listing gets you most of the way. Four things it won't do for you.

Read DR against traffic, always in that order. Sort by DR alone and you will buy old domains. The gap between a site's DR and its traffic is the single most useful tell in this category.

Open the blog index on anything above $200. Twenty recent posts, all contributed, all from unrelated industries, is a site that says yes to everyone. Still passes something. Passes far less than the DR suggests.

Check what else links out of the page you're buying into. Three do-follow links to three unrelated commercial sites means you're sharing.

Buy fewer, better. The most common mistake we watch people make is spreading $2,000 across twenty $100 placements when five $400 placements on sites with real readers would have done more. Volume feels like progress. It mostly isn't.

What a marketplace won't do for you

Worth saying plainly, because the version of this page written by a sales team wouldn't.

It won't decide which pages need links. That's a judgement about your business and your SERP, and it's the thing worth paying a strategist for.

It won't set your anchor distribution. Anchor decisions made one placement at a time drift toward exact-match, and past roughly 10–15% of your profile that's a risk you created. Write the split down before you buy the first link.

It won't tell you how many links you need. That's a function of the specific pages outranking you and how many referring domains they have. Anyone quoting a universal number is guessing.

And it won't make a weak page rank. Links amplify a page that deserves to be there. They don't rescue thin content or a page answering a different question than the query, and money spent on links before the page is fixed is the most expensive mistake in this category.

What you can buy

Four products, priced separately, because bundling them is how the input costs get hidden.

A guest post is a new article on the publisher's site with your link in it. See guest posting.

A link insertion adds your link to an article the publisher already has. No content cost, usually faster, cheaper. See link insertions.

A listicle placement puts you into a "best X" roundup, which passes a link and sends people who are already shopping.

Digital PR is pitched coverage rather than bought placement, priced per placement, with the outlet named before you buy.

The full comparison, including which one suits which target page, is on link building services.

Content, if you need it

For anything that requires an article, you either bring your own and pay nothing for writing, or brief us. Length runs from 500–750 words up to 2,000. Revision rounds are your choice, including unlimited. You approve the draft before it goes to the publisher, and the publisher's house rules are handled during drafting rather than discovered at rejection.

Who buys here

Three groups, and they use it differently.

In-house SEOs who got tired of quarterly vendor negotiations and want to buy against a written quality bar instead. They filter hard, buy a handful of good placements a month, and check the survival rate at twelve months.

Agencies buying for clients, usually under their own brand. Volume is lumpy because it's the sum of other people's budgets, which is why nothing here requires a commitment. See white label link building.

Founders doing their own SEO who need to see what things cost before they can decide anything. This is the group packages hurt most, because a package is designed to prevent exactly that comparison.

No packages, no minimum, no retainer

Buy one placement. Buy forty. Stop for three months and start again. There's nothing to cancel because there's nothing to sign.

Packages exist so the buyer can't see the input prices. That's their function. Once prices are on the listing, a package has no reason to exist, so we don't sell one.

Pricing detail, including what drives the spread between a $60 site and a $700 one, is on link building pricing.

What you get after you buy

The live URL, the anchor as published, and the publisher's DR and organic traffic at the date of placement. Same fields every time, so a month-to-month comparison is actually a comparison.

Do four things with it on the day, because they take ten minutes and they're the difference between knowing what you bought and hoping. Confirm the link is do-follow by reading the page source rather than the rendered page, since a rel="nofollow" added at publication is the most common silent failure in paid placement. Confirm the anchor is what you agreed. Confirm the URL is exactly right, protocol and trailing slash included. Then check indexation two weeks later.

Twelve months, or we replace it

Every placement carries a 12-month live-link guarantee. If the link goes dark inside that window, we replace it on a publisher of equal or better DR band. If we can't place a replacement within 30 days, that placement is refunded. Decline the replacement and take the refund if you prefer.

The DR band is measured at time of order. A publisher whose DR slides afterwards isn't a covered event, and that's the exclusion worth reading twice.

It covers our delivery. Not your rankings, not your traffic, not your own domain rating, not indexation. Those belong to Google, and a vendor promising them is writing a cheque on somebody else's account.