If you buy guest posts or link placements from more than one marketplace, one question decides how much you actually overwrite yourself: how much do their catalogs overlap? Two platforms advertising "50,000+ sites" each don't give you 100,000 options if half the inventory is the same domains resold on both.
We compared the full public site catalogs of links.me and backlinked.com inside our Backlink Pricing dataset, matched on the normalized domain (lowercased, no scheme or www), and measured the overlap.
The overlap in one picture
The two databases share 21,559 domains. That is 39% of everything on links.me and 55% of everything on backlinked.com. Measured as a Jaccard index (shared ÷ combined), the two catalogs are 29% identical — so roughly 71% of the combined inventory is unique to one platform or the other.
Unique inventory
The value of a second marketplace is the inventory you can't get from the first:
- 34,210 domains are on links.me only (61% of its catalog).
- 17,705 domains are on backlinked.com only (45% of its catalog).
links.me is the larger database and also the more independent one: only 39% of it is duplicated on backlinked.com, versus 55% of backlinked.com's catalog being reachable through links.me.
Where they overlap, who's cheaper?
For the 21,559 shared domains that carry a price on both platforms, we compared the cheapest listing on each:
On identical inventory, links.me is the cheaper source 80% of the time, with a median price of $228 against backlinked.com's $379 for the very same sites. The average absolute price gap between the two for a shared domain is $232 — a strong argument for price-checking every placement across platforms before you buy.
Is the shared inventory the good stuff?
Domain Rating distribution across the three pools (share of each pool, sites with Ahrefs data):
| DR band | On both | links.me only | backlinked only |
|---|---|---|---|
| DR 80–100 | 2% | 4% | 1% |
| DR 60–79 | 13% | 11% | 12% |
| DR 40–59 | 30% | 24% | 26% |
| DR 20–39 | 42% | 36% | 44% |
| DR 0–19 | 13% | 25% | 17% |
Median DR is 37 for shared domains, 33 for links.me-exclusive and 34 for backlinked-exclusive. The overlap skews slightly higher-quality — the domains popular enough to be listed everywhere tend to be the established mid-DR sites — while each platform's exclusive tail carries more of the low-DR long tail.
Geography
Top markets by number of domains (by each site's leading traffic country):
| # | links.me | domains | backlinked.com | domains |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | United States | 9,745 | United States | 5,473 |
| 2 | India | 4,246 | Germany | 4,265 |
| 3 | France | 4,107 | France | 3,716 |
| 4 | Poland | 3,790 | Netherlands | 3,435 |
| 5 | Germany | 2,804 | Italy | 1,989 |
| 6 | Ukraine | 2,253 | India | 1,817 |
Both lean US-first, but the mix diverges after that: links.me is deeper in India, Poland and Ukraine, while backlinked.com is stronger in Germany, the Netherlands and Italy. If your campaign is geo-specific, the "better" marketplace can flip entirely depending on the country.
Takeaways
- ~29% catalog overlap. The two databases share 21,559 domains; the other 71% of the combined pool is exclusive to one side.
- links.me is bigger and more independent — 55,769 domains, only 39% of them duplicated on backlinked.com.
- Running both lifts your reachable inventory to 73,474 unique domains (+32% over links.me alone) — but dedupe first.
- Price the overlap. On the same 21,559 shared sites, links.me wins on price 80% of the time, $228 vs $379 median.
Every number here comes from cross-referencing marketplace catalogs by normalized domain and joining Ahrefs metrics. You can run the same overlap and price checks on any set of vendors in the Backlink Pricing tool.
FAQ
Does "on both platforms" mean it's the same seller?
Not necessarily. A domain can be listed on both marketplaces by the same publisher or by different resellers. What's shared is the placement opportunity on that domain — which is exactly what you want to dedupe before buying.
Why is the overlap only 29%?
Marketplaces recruit publishers independently and in different regions, so most inventory is exclusive. High-authority, widely-monetized domains are the ones most likely to appear on several platforms at once.
Is a bigger database always better?
No. Size matters for reach, but overlap, price spread, quality (DR/traffic) and geography decide value for a specific campaign. The point of comparing databases is to buy the same link for less and to find inventory a single platform can't offer.
www/trailing slash); prices are the cheapest listing per platform per domain; DR and country from Ahrefs metrics joined on the same domain key. Figures reflect the current snapshot of our pricing dataset and shift as catalogs update.