Best Guest Posting Marketplaces & Link Building Platforms, Ranked by Data

Looking for the best guest posting marketplace — or the best link building platform to buy backlinks without overpaying? There are 35 major guest posting and link building marketplaces competing to sell you the same links, and they don't agree on much. The same site can cost $29 on one and $123 on another; one platform lists 55,000 sites while another lists 170. So which is the best backlink marketplace for your budget?

Instead of ranking the top guest post platforms from reputation and gut feel, we let the data decide. This analysis is built on the live catalog behind our Backlink Pricing tool: 727,532 real price listings across 109,047 SEO-worthy sites, every guest posting platform and backlink marketplace priced side-by-side on the exact same domains. Below: what each was judged on, a data-driven ranking of the best guest posting sites you can re-weight yourself with the sliders, and a directory of who's behind each link building platform.

What we measured

Because every marketplace is priced on the same pool of sites, we can compare them fairly. Each is scored on five criteria, every one a real number from the listings — these are also the sliders further down, so you can decide what "best" means for you:

• Catalog size — how many sites it sells. A bigger catalog means more of your targets are covered in one place.
• Best-price wins — how often it holds the cheapest price for a site among all vendors. The purest signal of a good deal.
• Value per DR — median price ÷ Domain Rating. What you pay for a point of authority; lower is better.
• Value per traffic — median price per 1,000 real monthly visits. What you pay for actual audience; lower is better.
• Site quality — the average Domain Rating of the sites it carries. A cheap link on a dead site is expensive at any price.

Each criterion is turned into a 0–100 percentile rank against the other 34 (robust to outliers), then blended with the default weights 30 / 25 / 15 / 15 / 15. Nothing is hand-adjusted, and the interactive table lets you change every weight and watch the ranking re-sort.

The best guest posting marketplaces & link building platforms at a glance

Grouped into tiers by the default score. The gap top-to-bottom is enormous: the leaders combine a deep catalog with genuinely competitive prices, while the bottom tier tends to be expensive and narrow.

Best link building platforms: the value map

Price & value along the bottom (how cheap and cost-efficient it is), catalog reach up the side, each bubble sized by how many sites the marketplace lists. The names you want live in the top-right. Hover any bubble for its numbers.

Bubble size = catalog size (sites listed). Colour = tier.

Catalog size: which backlink marketplace lists the most sites

The least glamorous criterion but the most practical — if a marketplace doesn't carry your target site, its price is irrelevant. Five platforms list 30,000+ sites each; the long tail lists a few thousand.

Which guest post platform is actually the cheapest

For every site, exactly one marketplace holds the lowest price. This shows how often each wins that race across its catalog. A big catalog doesn't guarantee good prices — some of the widest platforms almost never win, while lean specialists win nearly half the time.

Share of a marketplace's own listings where it holds the cheapest price of all vendors.

What a placement typically costs

Median price of a single placement. Two platforms with near-identical catalogs can differ 2–3× on the typical price — which is exactly why comparing before you buy pays off.

Criteria breakdown of the top link building marketplaces

No marketplace wins on everything. Here's how the top eight split across the five criteria — most trade catalog size against price value, and only a couple are strong across the board.

The full comparison — rank the best backlink marketplaces your way

This is the heart of it. Drag the sliders to weight the five criteria however you buy, and the table below re-ranks live. Care only about price? Pull "Best-price wins" up. Buying for authority? Push "Site quality". The default weights (30/25/15/15/15) reproduce the ranking above.

Score = weighted average of the five percentile ranks (your slider weights). $/DR and $/1k traffic are value metrics — lower is cheaper.

What the data says

• The winner does two things at once. links.me pairs the largest catalog (55.8k sites) with the best price discipline of any big marketplace — cheapest a third of the time, and strong on cost-per-DR and cost-per-traffic. It leads under almost any weighting.
• Big ≠ cheap. Some of the widest catalogs (bazoom, lemmilink, meup, paper.club) carry heavy markups — their typical listing runs several times above the market floor. Volume earns them reach and little on price.
• The value specialists. adxom, vefogix and topserp are small but punch far above their size on price-per-DR and win-rate. Excellent as a second marketplace to price-check the majors against.
• Quality lives in the niches. The highest-DR catalogs (guestpostlinks, contenthub, motherlink, icopify) are premium and narrow — reach for them when you specifically need authority.
• Move the sliders. The "best" marketplace genuinely changes with what you optimise for — which is the whole point of doing this from data instead of a fixed top-10.

The best guest posting sites & platforms, ranked — who's behind each

All 35 in default-ranking order, with what's publicly known about each: launch year, the company or founders behind it, headquarters, and a direct link to sign up. Where ownership or founding isn't public, we've left it out rather than guess.

How we scored

1. Dataset. Every filled cell of the price matrix behind the Backlink Pricing tool — 727,532 listings across 109,047 sites, after fake bait-prices and non-SEO-worthy sites were filtered out. Site metrics (Domain Rating, organic traffic) come from Ahrefs.
2. Per-marketplace metrics. Catalog size; share of its listings where it's the cheapest of all vendors; median price ÷ Domain Rating; median price per 1,000 organic visits; and the average DR of the sites it carries.
3. Scoring. Each metric becomes a 0–100 percentile rank against the other marketplaces (higher is better; the two value metrics are inverted so cheaper ranks higher). The overall score is the weighted average, default weights 30 / 25 / 15 / 15 / 15 — and fully yours to change with the sliders.

The best marketplaces by country

The global winner isn't every market's winner. We re-ran the same five-criteria methodology on 21 individual countries — each ranking covers only the sites whose top organic-traffic country is that market — and 6 different platforms take a national #1. Every link below opens the full interactive country ranking:

Best guest posting marketplaces: FAQ

What is the best guest posting marketplace?

In our data-driven ranking, links.me is the best guest posting marketplace overall — it pairs the largest catalog (55.8k sites) with the best price discipline of any big platform. collaborator.pro and prnews.io round out the top three best guest posting sites. "Best" is subjective, though, so the interactive table lets you re-rank every backlink marketplace by your own priorities.

What's the best link building platform for cheap backlinks?

On pure price value, adxom, vefogix and topserp are the best link building platforms per dollar — the lowest cost per Domain Rating and the highest "cheapest-price" win rates in the dataset. Their catalogs are smaller, so they work best as a second guest post platform to price-check the majors against.

Which is the top backlink marketplace by catalog size?

bazoom, adsy and links.me are the biggest backlink marketplaces, each listing roughly 49,000–55,000 sites. But the widest catalog isn't automatically the best backlink platform — several large guest posting marketplaces carry the heaviest markups, so always compare prices before buying.

What's the best backlink marketplace for high-authority links?

If you need authority over volume, guestpostlinks, contenthub and icopify carry the highest-DR inventory — the best guest post marketplaces for premium, high-Domain-Rating placements, though rarely the cheapest way to get them.

Is a bigger guest posting platform always better?

No. The best guest posting platform for you depends on whether you weight catalog size, price or site quality — which is exactly why this ranking of the top link building marketplaces is built from data and fully re-weightable.