Teardown
Teardown of a typical donor listing, line by line
A row in a link marketplace is a small contract. Here is how to read every field of an invented but typical one.
The row below is hypothetical, made up to show the method. The domain, the numbers and the price are not a real listing on the site.
The invented row
| Field | Value in our example |
|---|---|
| Domain | kitchen-notes.example |
| Domain Rating | 38 |
| Organic traffic | 4,200 visits a month |
| Referring domains | 310 |
| Niche | Home and kitchen |
| Language | English |
| Price | $24 |
Reading it from the top
Start with the donor domain, because everything else depends on it. Type it into a browser and read three posts. Do they look written for people? Is the site updated? Is it about something near your page?
A DR of 38 is a mid-low authority score from Ahrefs, a measure of the site's backlink profile on a 0–100 scale. It is a comparison tool, not a Google metric, so treat it as a rough ranking of donors against each other.
A quick sanity routine
Open the donor in a browser before anything else. Scroll its latest posts and note whether it publishes anything outside its niche.
Five minutes, no tools.
Cross-check it. Then look the domain up in Ahrefs, Semrush or Moz if you have a free account, and compare the figures with the row. They will not match to the digit, because each tool runs its own crawler, but they should tell the same story. Finally, think about how your link would sit in a post there. An honest fit is usually obvious once you picture it.
Traffic and referring domains disagree on purpose
The two numbers check each other. Small traffic with a large referring-domain count can mean a site that was pushed with links but never earned readers.
In our example, 4,200 monthly visits against 310 referring domains is a believable pairing for a niche blog. Reverse it, say 90 visits against 3,000 referring domains, and you would want to look harder before paying.
What each field cannot prove
Authority
It cannot prove that Google trusts the site for your topic.
Traffic
It cannot prove the visitors would ever care about your brand.
Niche
It cannot prove the article will sit next to similar content.
Price
It cannot prove value. Compare it with rows of similar authority, since price scales with authority, traffic and niche.
Language and niche: the quiet filters
The language filter saves more first orders than any metric. An English page linked from a Portuguese site might be fine for a global brand and pointless for a local shop.
Niche works the same way. A link from a home-and-kitchen blog to a kitchen-gadget page reads naturally, and a link from a crypto blog to the same page does not.
Order matters here. Filter by niche and language first, and only then sort by price. That order keeps you from falling for a bargain that does not belong to your topic. After 2024 Google spam policies widened, relevance matters more to avoid looking forced, and you can see it in the row before you pay. Try the red-flag list on any row you doubt, and compare a second candidate in the same niche before you decide.
Our worked example would also be checked against Ahrefs or Semrush if you have access, since third-party tools use their own crawlers and numbers will differ a little. Differences of ten or twenty percent are normal. Differences of several times over deserve a question.
Our reading of the example
Reasonable for a first test, if the pages check out
For a $24 test aimed at a kitchen or home-goods page, this row is plausible. The decision rests on the visual check of the live site, not on any single metric.
- Strong: niche match and balanced traffic against referring domains
- Weak: authority is middling, so expect a modest effect at best
- Do next: add it to the basket and sleep on it