What actually drives the price of a link placement
Why two sites with the same domain rating can be priced very differently, and which of those factors are worth paying for.
Publisher pricing looks arbitrary until you know what publishers are actually pricing. It is rarely the metric you are looking at.
Authority is the headline, not the driver
Domain rating and similar scores correlate with price because they correlate with everything else. On their own they are third-party estimates, and they can be inflated deliberately by a site that has bought its way to a number.
A site with a strong score and negligible organic traffic is the clearest warning sign in the marketplace. Someone built that score on purpose, and it was not for your benefit.
Traffic is closer to the truth
Real organic traffic is harder to fake than authority, and it reflects something that matters: whether anyone will actually read the page your link sits on. Two sites at the same DR can differ by an order of magnitude in traffic, and that difference is usually the difference in price.
Look at how the traffic is distributed, too. A site with one freak page carrying everything is a weaker prospect than one with traffic spread across a catalogue.
Niche moves price more than anything else
Finance, legal, health, gambling and crypto cost more everywhere, for reasons that have nothing to do with SEO. Those sites carry regulatory exposure, their advertisers pay more, and fewer publishers will touch the content at all. A site that will accept a gambling placement is pricing scarcity.
If you work in an expensive niche, the useful response is to widen the definition of relevance rather than to hunt for a discount. Adjacent sectors are often genuinely relevant and priced normally.
Editorial standards cost money
Sites that edit properly are slower and more expensive, because a person reads the piece and sometimes rejects it. That cost is worth paying: a site that publishes anything will publish anything for your competitors too, and the value of a link from it falls accordingly.
What is not worth paying extra for
- A high DR with traffic that does not support it
- A "homepage link" - it is the first thing dropped in a cleanup
- Guaranteed permanence, which nobody can actually guarantee
- Bundles priced by metric band rather than by named site
How to use this
Filter by relevance first, then look at traffic, then look at price. Sort the marketplace by price and you will end up with a shortlist of whatever is cheapest, which is a different exercise entirely.
Our marketplace shows the price of every placement upfront, per site, so you can make this comparison directly rather than by requesting quotes.