How to choose a site for purchasing external links. Updated algorithm 2021

Link building continues to be one of the main ways to promote a website, therefore, a lot of attention / time / resources is paid to obtaining high-quality links. We at Links-Stream analyzed the briefs of the clients (SEO specialists) and collected the most significant factors that should be guided by the selection of a link donor. This list will work equally well for link building for both Yandex and Google.

Algorithm for selecting donor sites

To begin with, we check the list of potential link donors massively for indicators, then we look at the remaining ones manually. Massive metrics that sites can be checked for include:

1. ICS – not less than 100

The site quality index is far from a new indicator for Runet sites, but one of the fundamental ones for evaluating sites when promoting in Yandex. This indicator is checked using the service https://be1.ru/yandex-iks/.

Example of ICS of a link donor, link cost – $ 70

2.DR – not less than 30

Domain Rating from Ahrefs is the most common indicator of a site’s quality when promoting to the West. The higher this indicator, the better. Since the indicator is calculated logarithmically, it is much more difficult for a site to get a value of 30 than from 0 to 20. That is why resources with DR of 30 are more in demand.

Example DR link donor, link cost – $ 70

3. Traffic from Google on Ahrefs at least 5000

Placement cost – $ 400

4. Link price: from $ 10 in runet, from $ 50 – for western sites

Since Google introduced new link attributes (ugc, sponsored), placement prices have gone up. Even now, despite the coronavirus pandemic, discounts cannot be expected (as, for example, a year ago). If 2 years ago it was possible to find sane links in RuNet for $ 7 and to the West – for $ 30, now the price tag has seriously grown (especially hit the niches where you need a lot of links “for yesterday”, like in essay).

5. TF – not less than 5

Indicators TF (trust flow) and CF (cituation flow) show the quality of the link profile of a potential link donor. This indicator is determined by the majestic.com service.

Example TF site, cost of placement – $ 25

6. Topics – our, related, newspapers, media, portals

Themed blogs are most suitable for linking to a niche site, but broad-topic media and news / city portals are also great. When all the options have been exhausted, you can also consider related topics and even those that at first glance seem unobvious. For example, you are promoting a travel site. What prevents you from writing an article about how the functionality of your site was developed and placing it at a web studio?

Thematic donor site, link cost – $ 100

We sort the remaining sites in descending order of traffic or ICS and browse them by hand.

7. Article rate – no more than 20%

In Runet, this indicator can be partially checked on exchanges like Miralinks, but they will not be completely reliable. The most reliable way to understand the “article content” of a site is to open the last 20 blog articles and see how many of them will contain commercial links.

For example, on this site (cost of placement – $ 40), 8 of the last 10 posts contain links to third-party commercial sites. It is not recommended to buy links on such sites.

But the site where the purchased articles are much less, and the cost of placement is only $ 35.

8. The site is lively, fresh articles are posted regularly

Pay attention to the frequency of publications here on this resource (cost of placement – $ 70) – only 2 posts per month. This is not enough for a good link donor. High-quality news resources publish at least 2 posts per day, thematic blogs – 1 article approximately every 2-3 days.

Here is an example of a site on which information is updated much more often than on the site above, and the cost of placement is the same:

9.UR (Ahrefs) of selling articles is not equal to 0

Any previously purchased article on the donor site can be checked through Ahrefs and see what its metrics are. It is desirable that the UR is not equal to zero, like on a website about decor, where the article was posted the day before this article was written, but already received UR 9 (the cost of posting on the resource is $ 200).

Example UR site, cost of placement – $ 200

We hope this list will help you get quality links at reasonable prices. All TOPs!

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