The four products

A guest post is a new article, written for the publisher, published on their site, with your link inside it. You're buying the article slot. Price tracks the publisher's traffic and how picky their editor is, and it runs from about $40 on a small niche blog to four figures on a site with genuine readership.

A link insertion, also sold as a niche edit or a contextual link, adds your link into an article the publisher already has. No writing, faster in most cases, cheaper. The catch is that the host page has to be relevant and has to have some standing of its own. A link dropped into a three-year-old post nobody reads is worth what you'd expect.

A listicle placement puts you into a "best X tools" or "top Y services" roundup. These convert traffic as well as passing a link, which is why they cost more than a plain insertion. For SaaS and ecommerce they're the most underrated buy in the category.

Digital PR is different work entirely. You produce something a journalist wants, usually original data or a genuinely novel claim, and pitch it. The hit rate is low, the placements are the best you'll ever get, and nobody can quote you a fixed price per link because nobody controls whether a reporter bites.

Anything else you're offered is one of those four with marketing on top. "Authority link acquisition" is a guest post. "Contextual backlink service" is a link insertion. "Editorial outreach package" is a bundle where the mix isn't disclosed, and the undisclosed mix is the point: bundles let a vendor fulfil with whichever product is cheapest that week.

Ask any vendor which of the four they're selling you. The ones who answer in one word are the ones to keep talking to.

What separates a $60 link from a $600 one

Four things, and only one of them is the DR number everyone fixates on.

Real traffic is the first. A site can be DR 60 and get 200 visits a month, because DR measures backlinks, not readership. Plenty of DR 60 domains are old sites that got scraped by directories a decade ago. Check organic traffic before you check DR.

Editorial standard is the second. Does the site publish anything nobody paid for? Look at the last twenty posts. If every one is a guest contribution from a different industry, you're buying from a link farm with a nice template.

Topical fit is the third. A link from a mid-sized accounting blog to an accounting SaaS beats a link from a DR 80 general news site to the same page, most of the time, and costs a fraction.

Whether the link survives is the fourth, and it's the one nobody prices in. A cheap link that vanishes in month four cost you 100% of what you paid, not 100% of a discount.

Which product for which page

The product choice matters more than most vendors let on, because pushing every buyer into guest posts keeps fulfilment simple rather than getting you value.

A commercial page that already ranks 5–15 wants authority and relevance, not volume. Two or three properly good placements on sites with real readership will do more than fifteen cheap ones, and the cheap ones leave a pattern.

A brand-new domain wants breadth before depth. Relevant, unremarkable links from real sites, spread over months. Buying three expensive placements in week one on a domain with no other profile looks exactly like what it is.

A product page in a category people compare wants listicle placements. You get the link and you get people who are already shopping, and per customer acquired it's frequently the cheapest thing on the menu.

A page competing against a publisher's own article wants a link insertion into that publisher's article rather than a new post that starts from zero.

A brand that needs to be quotable wants digital PR, and needs to accept that the hit rate is what it is.

How the marketplace handles this

Every one of those four checks is on the listing before you buy.

The Ahrefs domain rating, the organic traffic figure, the spam score, the niche, the languages the site publishes in, and the price. Turnaround is stored per publisher, in weeks, because that's how publishers quote it, and it appears on the listing rather than in a promise we'd have to average across 110,000 sites. High-risk niches are flagged per publisher, so you know before you order whether a site takes gambling, adult or crypto work.

You filter, shortlist, and buy the specific sites you chose. One placement or forty. No package, no minimum, no call with an account manager before you can see prices.

There are 110,000+ publishers in the inventory, which is more than anyone needs. The number matters for one reason: filtering hard on traffic, niche and spam score removes most of any list, and a small catalogue leaves you nothing after the filters.

Browse it free at the marketplace. No card.

Content is included, unless you'd rather not pay for it

For guest posts, listicles and PR placements, the article has to exist. Two options.

Bring your own. You write it, we place it, you pay nothing for words you already had.

Or brief us. Pick the length, from 500 to 750 words up to 2,000, and pick how many revision rounds you want, including unlimited. You approve the draft before it goes anywhere near the publisher. Writers work to your brief, your angle, and your product's actual positioning rather than a template.

Link insertions need no content at all, which is part of why they're cheaper. See link insertions for that route specifically, and guest posting for the article route.

What to check before you order, in four minutes

Two of these are on the listing. Two take a browser tab and are worth doing on anything above $200.

Traffic against DR, in that order. The gap between the two is the most useful signal in this category and it's the one most buyers invert.

Spam score. Not decisive alone. Decisive in combination with anything else here.

The last twenty posts on the blog index. All contributed, all from unrelated industries, means the site says yes to everyone.

Outbound do-follow links on the specific page. Three links to three unrelated commercial sites means you're sharing.

What "service" means here and what it doesn't

We handle the publisher relationship, the submission, the revisions the publisher asks for, and the chasing when a publisher goes quiet. That's the labour you'd otherwise be paying an agency retainer for.

We don't decide your strategy. Which pages need links, which anchors to use, how fast to move: that's yours, or it's a consultant's. A marketplace that told you it also knew your anchor distribution would be guessing.

If you want the strategy layer, that's a genuine reason to hire a person, and the honest comparison is on link building agency.

How an order actually runs

Six steps, so there's no mystery about what happens after you click.

You filter the inventory and shortlist. You choose the product for each site, since not every publisher offers all four. You brief the content or upload your own. We submit to the publisher and handle whatever the editor comes back with. The placement goes live and you get the URL. Then it sits under the guarantee for twelve months.

The step people underestimate is the editor round. Publishers with real standards ask for changes, sometimes several times, and that back-and-forth is most of the elapsed time on a placement. It's also the thing that separates a publisher worth buying from one that isn't: a site that publishes whatever you send, unread, is telling you exactly what its links are worth.

Every placement is covered for 12 months

Links disappear. Publishers get sold, sites get pruned, a new SEO shows up and runs a nofollow sweep across every sponsored post on the domain. This is normal and almost nobody in the category prices for it.

Every marketplace placement carries a 12-month live-link guarantee. If the link drops in 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. You can decline the replacement and take the refund.

The DR band is measured at the time you order. If a publisher's DR falls afterwards, that isn't covered, and it's worth knowing that up front rather than in an argument.

The guarantee covers our delivery. It doesn't cover your rankings, your traffic, your domain rating, or whether Google indexes the page. Nobody can guarantee those, whatever their sales page says.

What this costs

The price of a placement is the publisher's price plus our fee, and both are visible before you check out. There's no retainer, no setup charge, and no minimum spend.

The spread across the inventory is wide, because the inventory is wide. Small niche blogs sit at the bottom. Sites with real editorial staff and six-figure monthly traffic sit at the top, and they cost what they cost. We surface both deliberately rather than pushing everyone into a middle tier.

Full breakdown, including what actually drives the spread, is on link building pricing.

Choosing a supplier, ours or anyone's

Five questions. The answers sort the category faster than any review site.

Do I pick the sites, or do you send them? If they send them, you get whatever clears their margin that week.

What do I see before I commit? DR alone is the flattering half. Organic traffic is the number that says whether the site has readers.

What happens when a link drops, and in what window? A mechanism and a deadline, not a reassurance.

Is content bundled or separate? Bundled means you pay for writing you may already have.

What's the minimum? A supplier who needs a commitment is asking you to carry their forecasting risk.