Guest posting prices research. Top factors that influence price.

Worldwide data from studying 317,026 guest posting publisher offers.

We put together the full inventory of the 19 largest guest posting marketplaces and dozens of private sellers to research guest post link-building pricing.

Our goal was to understand the factors that influence backlink costs and to see if there is such a thing as a “fair” price.

Let’s define what the “guest post price” really means. It includes three parts:

1. Placement price. This is what the publisher charges to place your content on their site. That’s what we’re focusing on in this research.

2. Content creation price. This is what it costs to write the article. It could be free if you write it or use AI. It could be expensive if you hire an expert writer. For this research, we assume the content is ready.

3. Builder markup. This is what agencies or link builders add. It covers finding publishers, managing communication, and ensuring the content meets requirements. This part is not included in our pricing data. It can vary wildly and is hard to estimate.

Now let’s jump into our numbers.

Looking at the entire database, the average price for guest post placement is $283.52. The median price is much lower at $68.33 because some marketplaces have a large number of low-cost publishers.

Here’s a full pricing breakdown:

Surprised to see so many links below $50. There are actually 12k+ with single-digit prices!

Most offers in this price range are garbage, but there are still some options, mainly in ex-USSR countries and Turkey, that have both traffic and authority.

Out of 12,209 publishers priced below $5, we found 856 with organic traffic of more than 100 monthly visits. Some have 1,000+ or even 10,000+ visits, which is surprizingly good for this price tag.

Traffic Distribution for Domains

We found 53,594 publishers with zero traffic from any source, accounting for 16,9% of the entire database.

And if you think links from zero-traffic domains are cheap, think again. While offers for traffic-empty websites are 3 times cheaper than average, most of them are not free at all!

We found two champions in this cohort. No traffic, 5-figure price of backlink:

• alfemminile.it – $25,573 (Italian women’s site)
• zzpbarometer.nl – $17,015 (Dutch business site)

Also, many “traffic-empty” domains have very high DR, with 86 domains at DR>80!

With all my respect to the Ahrefs team and their product, the DR metric and the SEO industry’s reliance on it is a bad joke. How can domains with no traffic be considered “authoritative”?

In the same cohort, Semrush’s AS (Authority Score) is below 10 in 99.3% cases, with no domains having an AS above 20. It’s one of the reasons why I trust AS much more than DR or any other domain “authority” metrics.

Let’s look at the total distribution.