Pricing explainer
Article backlink price: what each band buys
Prices on the marketplace run from $1 to about $500 per link. The spread looks absurd until you see what moves it.
Three bands, described honestly
These are our descriptions of the typical rows in each band, not fixed products. Real prices are shown per donor.
Entry
$1 to $15per link
- Small sites, modest traffic
- Good for testing the process
- Weak signal on its own
Middle
$15 to $80per link
- Established niche sites
- Visible organic traffic
- Where most careful buyers spend
Top
$80 to about $500per link
- High authority, large traffic
- Fewer rows, slower to choose
- Worth it for pages that earn money
What moves the price
Four things. Authority, traffic, niche and language. A row with strong Domain Rating but little traffic often costs less than a smaller site that readers actually visit.
Niche is the sneaky one, because finance, health and gambling topics cost more to host. If your page is in one of them, expect to pay at the upper end of a band, and expect fewer donors to accept the topic at all.
Price also tells you nothing about fit. A $300 placement on an irrelevant site is a worse buy than $20 on a relevant one.
Trust the numbers a little, the topic a lot.
What we would do with $100 and with $1,000
| Budget | Example split | Reasoning |
|---|---|---|
| $100 | Two entry rows, two middle rows | Learn the process and compare results across bands |
| $1,000 | Six middle rows, one top row, a reserve | Spread risk and keep money for the winners |
Reading one row before you spend
Each row on the list carries six facts. Domain Rating, organic traffic, referring domains, niche, language and price: use them in roughly that order of suspicion, since any one of them can look good while the others do not.
Start with traffic, because it is hardest to fake. Then look at the niche, then at referring domains, which can be padded by spam links pointing at the donor. Domain Rating comes last. It is Ahrefs' score, not one Google publishes.
Language matters when your page is local. A German clinic gains little from an English hobby blog, whatever the price says, and the ordering walkthrough shows where the language filter sits.
A row that is strong on all six is rare. Expect trade-offs, and decide which one you can live with.
If a seller offers 100 links for $50, ask what the unit is. Directory submissions, comment links and profile pages are not the same product as an article on a live site.
Why not just pick the cheapest
Because the link is only part of what you pay for. You also pay for the review, the checking and the wait.
A $1 row is a fine experiment, and we say so plainly. But if a campaign is meant to support a page that earns money, the spread between $5 and $40 is small next to the cost of getting the wrong niche. Revisit the history of article directories if you want to see what cheap-at-scale turned into.
Before comparing quotes
- Same link type: placement or insertion?
- Same permanence: is it permanent or time-limited?
- Dofollow stated in writing
- Traffic shown from a named tool such as Ahrefs or Semrush
- Delivery time and how you verify it
- Refund terms and who writes the text