How pricing works

Domain Rating and authority

Higher-DR sites cost more. BuzzStream's pricing data shows guest post prices rising with DR and DA, and it's the first number publishers point to when they set a rate. It's also the metric most often gamed, which is why a DR 70 site at a DR 30 price deserves a closer look before it deserves an order.

Real organic traffic

A site with steady search traffic in your market is worth more than one with the same DR and no visitors, because the article can actually be read and send referral traffic. Publishers with genuine audiences know this and price accordingly.

Niche

Finance, legal, insurance and software publications tend to charge more than lifestyle blogs. Fewer good sites exist in those niches, and the buyers in them have bigger budgets.

Format

A link insertion into an existing article is usually the cheapest option, since nothing new has to be written. A guest post costs more because of the writing and editing. News and PR placements and product reviews on established publications sit higher again.

Grey niches

Casino, CBD, crypto, adult and payday lending are accepted by far fewer publishers, and the ones that accept them tend to charge more. Every listing on Rankticker states whether grey niches are accepted.

Turnaround

Most publishers have a standard turnaround. If you need a placement sooner, the rushed order option costs extra where it's offered, because it means the publisher moves you up their schedule.

What third-party studies have found

There's no official price list for backlinks, so treat any average with care. These are the most transparent figures we found, all in US dollars and all from sources with their own methodology and their own interests. Rankticker prices are shown in pounds and set by each publisher.

The gap between the BuzzStream averages and its quality-filtered figure is the useful part. Most of what's for sale at the average price wouldn't pass a careful review, and the sites that would are scarce and priced that way. Ahrefs' older numbers point the same way from a different angle: in its niche edit outreach, only 12.6% of the sites contacted were willing to sell a link at all.

Comparing two prices fairly

When two listings look similar, we'd compare them on what you get per pound and not on the headline number. A guest post on a site with steady traffic in your country, named authors, a permanent dofollow link and an indexing guarantee is probably better value than an insertion at a third of the price on a page nobody visits, with no terms attached at all, even though the cheaper one looks like the bargain in a spreadsheet sorted by price. Price per DR, which the recommendations use as one input, is a useful tiebreaker between sites that have already passed the quality checks. It's a poor way to pick sites in the first place.

Then look at the results over a few months. The project's SEO tab shows referring domains, DR and rankings next to the dates your links went live; our guide to measuring link building ROI explains how to read it.