How to price a link placement (from the seller's side)
I charge $250 for a placement on one of my own sites. For the first year, that number came from a spreadsheet of other people’s rate cards. I collected about fifteen, looked at the middle of the range, and picked something near it.
That is copying with an extra step in the middle to make it feel like analysis.
It took roughly a year of awkward negotiations before I could rebuild the price from what a placement actually costs me and what the buyer is actually getting. Almost none of it comes from the metrics both sides quote at each other, which is worth knowing whichever chair you’re sitting in.
The three numbers on every rate card
Every pitch I receive leads with the same trio: an authority score, a monthly traffic estimate, and a count of referring domains. Mine used to as well.
All three come from third party tools, all three are estimates, and all three can be moved by whoever is quoting them.
Authority scores are computed from a link graph. A site raises its score by acquiring links, and acquiring links is precisely the business a link seller is in. So the score on a seller’s media kit is partly a product of the selling. It isn’t independent evidence about anything.
Traffic estimates are models. They’re directionally useful and frequently wrong by a factor of several in both directions, which I know because I can see the real analytics on properties I own and compare.
A buyer paying by those numbers is paying for a signal the seller has both the ability and the incentive to inflate.
What actually sets the value
My honest list, roughly in order of how much it moves the price:
- whether the site publishes anything a stranger would believe a human wrote for another human. Volume is irrelevant here.
- whether the page hosting your link has any reason to exist beyond hosting links. An article that would have been written anyway is a different asset entirely from a post assembled around four client URLs.
- how many other links already leave the site. I audited my own outbound this year and found 15,321 dofollow links pointing out against 16 pointing in. That ratio says something unflattering about what any single one of those links is worth, and I sell placements from that property.
- topical relevance. Everyone says they price on it and almost nobody does. A link about proxy infrastructure on a general business blog is worth a fraction of the same link on a site that has covered the subject for years.
- whether the site has customers, a mailing list, a product, anything making it a business instead of an inventory. That is the hardest thing on this list to fake and it appears in almost no pitch.
Two questions that price it faster than any tool
If you have sixty seconds, ask these two before you open a single dashboard.
Would this page exist if nobody had paid for it? That one question separates a publication from an inventory, and it’s the most informative thing you can establish about a seller.
Then: how many links already leave this page? Count them yourself. If yours would be the seventh commercial link on eight hundred words, you now know exactly what you’re buying and it isn’t much.
Neither requires a subscription. Together they disqualify about half of what gets pitched at me, before I’ve spent any real time on it.
Rebuilding the $250 from cost
Three inputs, none of them an authority score.
First, what the placement costs me. Every link I sell spends a little of my own outbound budget and a little of my credibility with readers. Nothing leaves my bank account, but it’s a real cost and pretending otherwise is how sites end up looking like directories.
Second, what the page is worth to me unsold. A page that ranks for something bringing me enquiries is not for sale at any price I’d be sensible to accept, because renting a slot on it earns less than the enquiries do.
Third, what the buyer is actually receiving, which comes from the list above.
$250 is where those three land for my site. I’ve taken less for something genuinely well matched to the subject, and I’ve turned down considerably more for something that would have looked wrong sitting next to the rest of the page.
A placement is a depreciating asset
Buyers price a link as though it lasts forever. It doesn’t.
Pages get rewritten. Sites get sold. Themes change and the link quietly stops being followable. Somebody runs an outbound cleanup and your placement is collateral in a project that had nothing to do with you.
I have no clean industry figure for how fast that happens, and anyone quoting you one is guessing. What I can say from my own properties is that a meaningful share of what was placed three years ago is simply gone, and nobody who paid for it ever came back to check.
So price it as something that decays with no maintenance contract attached, and audit your own placements once a year.
The one protection worth negotiating for is a written note of what was agreed and where. A line in an email is enough. Without it you have no basis for the conversation later.
Why bulk should cost more, not less
The volume request arrives constantly and it deserves a straight answer.
Somebody wants ten placements and expects a discount, on the reasoning that ten of anything costs less per unit than one. That holds for manufacturing. Here it inverts.
Ten links from one site to one buyer are worth less per link than a single link would be. The pattern is visible from outside, and each additional placement dilutes the one before it. If the price tracked value honestly, the per unit number would rise with volume. I say that knowing it has cost me deals.
What I offer instead is one placement now and a second in a few months on genuinely different material. Commercially that’s the worse deal for me, and it’s the one that works for them.
What marking it sponsored actually does
Sellers get nervous about disclosure, so it’s worth stating plainly what changes.
The attribute tells search engines not to pass ranking value through the link. Your buyer has therefore bought a mention. If ranking value was the point, they will be unhappy, and you should establish that before money moves.
It also means you were honest, which has a value that never appears on an invoice.
My position: a site running a small volume of clearly marked sponsored content at a proper price is a better business than one quietly selling unmarked links at scale. Plenty of people disagree, and in the short run they’re right about the revenue. The unmarked model has one failure mode, which is somebody deciding the whole site is a link farm. I’ve watched that take out properties worth more than every placement ever sold on them.
The filter that explains the entire market
This is the part buyers should sit with.
A site with real traffic and real customers earns more from its own business than from renting slots. So the sites most willing to sell are, almost by construction, the ones with the least to lose by selling.
Your available inventory is filtered by willingness, and willingness correlates with exactly the property you don’t want. No amount of vetting fully escapes that.
The exception is a genuine editorial site that takes sponsored content openly, labels it, and caps how much of it runs. Those exist, they charge properly, and they’re the only version of this market I’d recommend without caveats.
What I refuse
Short list, and it has cost me money.
Anything in a category I wouldn’t want associated with the site, at any price. That’s a judgement call, and having a judgement is the whole point.
Exact and unnatural anchor text. I’ll link a brand name or a natural phrase. A buyer insisting on precise commercial wording is telling you what the link is for, and it makes the placement more fragile for both of us.
A link into a page that is itself obviously assembled for links, because at that point my site is a node in something instead of a publisher.
Anything carrying an ongoing obligation. A placement is a one time transaction. A promise to keep something live indefinitely is a liability that outlives the payment by years, and I’ve watched people forget they ever made it.
The ledger nobody keeps
This is the boring operational part and it matters more than the pricing does.
Keep a file of every placement. Buyer, date, page, destination, whether money moved, and what you promised. Mine is a plain text ledger and I update it the day a deal closes.
The reason is that obligations outlive your memory. I’ve found links on my own sites pointing at partners whose arrangement ended years earlier, still live because removing them was nobody’s job. That’s outbound value leaking for free, and worse, it meant I couldn’t have told you what I owed anyone.
When you eventually clean up your outbound links, that ledger is the difference between a tidy up and breaking an agreement you’d forgotten you signed.
The expensive mistake
Getting the price wrong by copying competitors was the obvious error. It wasn’t the costly one.
The costly one was selling a placement on the page that was already working for me. I had a piece bringing in enquiries steadily, somebody offered a good number for a link inside it, and I said yes because the number looked large next to the effort involved.
What I’d actually done was rent out the most valuable surface I owned for a fraction of what it produced on its own, and bolt an outbound link onto the one page I most wanted people to stay on.
So build the ledger before you build the rate card, and mark the pages that are not for sale before anyone asks about them. Deciding that in the moment, with a number sitting in front of you, is how it goes wrong. The rest of what I’ve worked out from both sides of these deals is here.