A Guest Post Service alternative, tested over one buyer's working day

Meet Dana, a hypothetical in-house SEO who has a content budget of $300 and a list of ten pages that need a few more referring domains. Everything below is her invented day, built on real numbers from the seller's public pages and our index.

She opens the Guest Post Service homepage first. The hero shows three overlapping tilted cards: Teachable.com, Pitchero.com, and in front, Houzz.com with “89 DA, 92 DR, 3M+ traffic, $15, Dofollow”. Under the headline sit three counters: 10,786 sites in database, 50,000+ placements, 98% satisfaction. The page also promises that placements “typically go live within 24 – 48 hours of order confirmation.”

Dana's first move is to write down every number the seller supplies, and decides to test the ones that can be tested. Placements and satisfaction scores cannot be checked from outside. Donor strength and link visibility can.

The “Websites List” page is a filterable table: domain, DA, DR, traffic, niche, country, link type, price. With every filter empty and no account, the list's own request returned 1,034 rows when we read it on 2026-10-08, not 10,786. That does not prove the larger inventory is missing, since a logged-in view was not tested. It does mean Dana should plan around what she can see.

What she can see skews US-heavy and general-interest: USA 682 rows, India 164, UK 39, Canada 26. “General” is the largest niche tag at 452 rows. All 1,034 rows are labelled dofollow. A further 436 rows show traffic of “0”, so the traffic column cannot be the filter she leans on.

Then a smaller oddity. All 99 rows priced at $5 are third-level hostnames under ten *.blog parents, such as devtrix.tech.blog and tuneza.music.blog. Who operates them is not stated, so Dana asks the seller before ordering from the $5 tier. A cheap row is not a bad row, but a hostname under a shared parent is a different kind of asset from a standalone domain, and the price alone does not say which she is buying.

The pricing is the cleanest part of the product. There is no pricing page and no plans (/pricing/ returns 404). Each site is its own product with one fixed USD price, paid up front. Across the public rows the minimum is $5, the maximum $500 (autogpt.net), the median $20 and the mean $26.61. About 84% of rows (868) cost $20 or less. The popular price points are $20 (572 rows), $15 (150) and $5 (99).

Dana's $300 therefore buys roughly fifteen placements at the median. The listing copy says the price includes a free article of 700+ words and the order form takes 2 keywords and 2 URLs. The listing FAQ says 500 to 700 words, a small mismatch she notes for the order message.

The thing she cannot find is the seller's bulk rate: the contact page says “Discounts available for bulk orders” and offers custom quotes, with no amounts published. For a fifteen-order month that is a question to ask before checkout, not after.

This is where an independent index earns its place. The seller's list says which DR a site has but not which tool produced it. Our DR is computed from referring-domain counts in our own web graph, so the two scales will not match. Treat them as comparable in spirit only. Dana runs the donors she is considering through action=domain, which is free and needs no key:

The ordering holds. Houzz sits well above Pitchero in both, and the $500 row has about 2,100 referring domains in our graph. What Dana learns is not that anyone is wrong. She learns what a $15 row and a $500 row look like in a graph she can query herself, and ccmajority.org shows that a $20 row can be a very small site. The donor's referring-domain count is a better price sanity check than any 0–100 badge.

Over a sandwich Dana does what an investigator would: she looks at the seller's own backlink profile as a sample of the product. The details are in the data section above. Three things stand out.

• Inventory shows up as donors. Five of the 58 referring domains are sites the shop also sells placements on: teachable.com ($15, 29 dofollow links to guestpostservice.net), caramellaapp.com ($15), 24liveblog.com ($15), filmdaily.co ($60) and timebusinessnews.com ($40). She can read how a placement on those sites looks in crawl data.
• The big donors are nofollow. Of 411 links from the 16 donors with DR 50 or higher, 82 are dofollow.
• The anchors are repetitive. “buy guest post” and “Guest Post Service” are 26% of links, which is ordinary for a company that sells one thing and is linked for it.

She can repeat the same read on any donor with the free explorer, no sign-in. Nothing here says the placements are poor. The seller's profile is simply a free, public specimen she can read alongside the donor-by-donor numbers.

Dana reads the small print before paying, and finds that the site says two things. The homepage: “Not satisfied within 30 days? We refund your order, no questions asked.” The Refund Policy page: “all sales are considered final upon the initiation of work”, with refunds reviewed “on a strict case-by-case basis”, and none granted for “Changes in the Domain Rating (DA/DR) or metrics of the publisher's site after purchase.”

On removal, the three documents differ again. The Terms say removed posts after publication are not refunded, the listing FAQ promises an alternative site or a full refund, and the Refund Policy offers a replacement of equal or greater value, with a refund “may be issued” if none exists. The Terms also state that publishing decisions, including edits and link placement, are at the publisher's discretion.

None of this makes the shop unusual: sellers who do not own the sites carry exactly this risk. The point is practical. Dana keeps screenshots of the listing, and she writes down the DR and traffic she saw on the day, since changes in publisher metrics are not refundable.

Dana's shortlist has twenty candidate donors. Instead of opening twenty tabs she sends them to bulk_dr, which returns DR and counts for up to 2,000 domains in one request. Then compare lines up to 20 domains side by side. For a donor she likes, refdomains shows its strongest linkers and anchors shows what it is mostly linked for. The reference is on the API docs page, and lookups cost 1 credit ($0.0001) while list calls cost 2.

The first $100 of credit arrives free on sign-in with Google, with no card. At 1 credit per lookup, that is 1,000,000 lookups, far more than this workflow needs. There is no cart, no content writing and no outreach on our side. We supply the numbers that decide whether the $20 is well spent, and no link at the end of it.

If Dana wants to see how the same inspection step applies to a different seller, the Rocket Guest Posting page in this series covers one.

The honest answer is: for the job of getting a link written and placed, almost always. apibacklinks does not build, sell or place links, and it has no outreach, no content and no delivery. If Dana has a budget and no writers, the seller's model does the thing she needs.

• You want an article placed, not data. The seller writes it, pitches the publisher and delivers a live link. We do none of that.
• You value fixed prices. Every listing, according to the homepage, is “set upfront”, and $20 is the median. You can budget a month in advance.
• You want to browse by niche and country. The list has 36 niche filters and 40 country filters. Our index has no catalogue of purchasable sites.
• You need fresh results. Our index refreshes roughly monthly from our own web data and a new link can take weeks to appear. The seller's delivery window is a day or two.

Stay with Guest Post Service for the buying. Add apibacklinks around it for the checking, and read the delivered link with your own crawler too.

The last task of the day is a diary entry for next month: verify what was delivered. The seller says each order comes with a report, and the homepage describes step six as tracking rankings, referral traffic and link health. What the account area contains was not checked. Dana therefore plans to confirm three things herself, whatever the report says.

1. The link exists on the live page, with the anchor and URL she ordered.
2. The rel attribute matches the dofollow label in the listing.
3. After a crawl cycle, the donor shows up in backlinks for her target. Our data is not real-time, so she checks again after a few weeks rather than the next morning.

If a link does not appear in the index after that, it is a prompt to look at the page, not proof of a problem. For getting a delivered page crawled in the first place, the sister service IndexJump exists. The wider tooling map is in the link building tools hub.