LinkByMe alternative: five questions to decide where your link budget goes

The first thing LinkByMe tells you is its rank. The hero reads "The #1 Guest Posting & Link Building Marketplace", with "#1 Guest Posting" in blue and "Link Building" in orange, and above it a scrolling ticker with a "LIVE" badge and lines such as "John from USA just bought a DR 72 backlink on a tech site". That text is hard-coded in the page HTML, so read it as marketing copy rather than a feed of real orders. The sentence under the headline is the whole pitch: an all-in-one guest blogging service, PR distribution marketplace and content placement network.

A decision tree has to start with something checkable, so we checked. The homepage counter says "60K+ Verified Websites". The public catalog, logged out, on 2026-10-08, said "29 Websites & Blogs That Accept Guest Posts" across three pages, and the countries page counted 26 sites in three countries: Spain 19, India 4, United States 3. We did not create an account, so we cannot say what a logged-in buyer sees. The gap may be a login wall or a catalog that is still filling up; the public pages do not say. Treat the number as unverified and test with a small order, which is what the rest of this page is for.

The tree below has five branches. Answer one question per branch, follow the arrow, and stop when you reach a recommendation.

• Branch 1: do you need a post written, placed and paid for today?
• Branch 2: do you want to know what is behind a donor's DR before you pay?
• Branch 3: do you need to prove, afterwards, that the link exists?
• Branch 4: do you run an agency that wants an API?
• Branch 5: do you own a site and want to sell placements?

If the answer is yes, close this tab and open LinkByMe. We do not build links, sell links or index pages. We provide data. A marketplace that does all four of those things in one flow is simply a different category of product, and for this job it is the correct one.

What the site says it does for an advertiser, in its own words, is a six-step flow: browse the marketplace, choose a site, place an order, the publisher accepts, you track status, you get the backlink. Payment is held in escrow, and the homepage promises that "Funds release only after successful publication". There is an optional content writing service (price not published) and a removal guarantee: "a free 3-month article removal guarantee, extendable to 12 months", with a re-placement on a comparable or better site if a publisher takes the article down.

Prices are the other thing a buyer wants first, and the site is candid about the ranges even if it hides exact figures behind login. The advertiser page lists DR 30-50 sites at $10-$50, DR 50-70 at $50-$150 and DR 70+ at $150-$500+, with "zero markup from LinkByMe". The guest-post-sites page prints different bands, though, so treat any range as indicative until you see a price on a card. Content rules from the Terms of Use are worth reading before you commission anything: a minimum of 2,000 characters, 75% unique content and a maximum of three links.

The branch ends here for most buyers: buy on LinkByMe, order a small test placement first, and carry on to Branch 3 to verify it.

This is where a data service earns its keep, and LinkByMe's own domain makes a good specimen. In our index it has DR 30, 167 referring domains and 800 backlinks. The interesting part is the composition, because a number like DR 30 does not tell you what the site is. The profile reads like a different company's history: the most common anchors are "Linkbyme" (54), "Bail Bond Tampa" (14), "steroid alternatives" (13) and "supplement stacks" (11). Not one of the top 50 anchors mentions guest posts, link building or marketplaces.

The likely explanation is the domain's earlier life. Third-party pages show it as a US local-business directory with city subdomains such as austin.linkbyme.com, though LinkByMe does not say anything about that period. Thirty-nine of the top 50 linked URLs in our index are old listing pages of the shape city.linkbyme.com/business-name-if123456/, and the subdomains we tested no longer resolve. Our first-seen date for links to the domain is 2024-07-13, twelve days before the current registration date of 2024-07-25, consistent with a domain that was re-registered. That says nothing against the current marketplace. It does show why a DR figure can be inherited rather than earned. LinkByMe's own blog makes a related point about DR without organic traffic.

The second lesson is about counting. One forum, matronics.com, supplies 166 of the 349 dofollow links (47.6%), and 166 of the 171 links to the homepage. Those links are one member profile crawled under many session IDs. Counted by referring domain, the picture is a profile of 167 domains, average donor DR 21 and zero gov or edu sites.

So the branch rule is: before paying for a placement, pull the donor's overview, count referring domains instead of links, and read the top 20 anchors. If they describe the site you are about to buy on, fine. If they describe an unrelated business, ask the seller what the DR is based on. The same free call works on any candidate from the LinkByMe catalog, and you can open this exact profile in the explorer and read the rows yourself.

Escrow releases funds when you verify the live URL, so the first proof is manual: open the page, find your link, check the rel attribute. LinkByMe's own catalog cards show a link type, and the filters distinguish dofollow, nofollow and sponsored. What a marketplace page cannot show is whether the wider web has noticed the link.

That is a job for crawl data, with a caveat we owe you. Our index is built from Common Crawl hyperlink data, refreshed roughly monthly, so a brand-new link can take weeks to show up and a missing link in our index is not evidence that it is missing from the page. The useful use is trend and bulk: check the placement weeks later with the backlinks action filtered by source domain, and see whether the anchor and rel survived. A placement that appears in the crawl with the anchor you ordered is a good sign. A placement that never shows up after a couple of crawl cycles deserves a look at the page, not an accusation.

A worked example, hypothetical: you buy five placements in one week. A month later, run bulk_dr on the five donor domains to record their DR, then backlinks on your target with the donor filter for each. That is six calls. At 1 credit for the lookup and 2 for each list call, the arithmetic is 1 + 5 x 2 = 11 credits, about $0.0011, and the $100 starter credit covers that routine roughly 90,000 times.

The branch ends with: buy on the marketplace, verify manually, then log what the crawl sees. The API docs list the filters in one place.

LinkByMe's pages mention API access for agencies twice, on the About page and in the advertiser FAQ, alongside bulk orders, team accounts and white-label reports. That is all the public site says. We found no documentation, no endpoint list, no auth scheme, no limits and no price, and the URLs we tried (/api, /docs, /developers and a few more) returned 404. Whether a key is issued after signup is unknown. If API ordering matters to your workflow, ask the team before you commit and request the documentation.

Be clear about what an API from us would be, because it is not the same thing. apibacklinks has 19 actions on one endpoint and returns data: DR, referring domains, backlinks, anchors. It cannot place an order, and it has no reporting dashboard, no alerts and no new or lost link feed. If your plan is "order links programmatically", you need the marketplace's API, wherever it exists. If your plan is "vet every candidate donor programmatically and attach evidence to reports", you need ours, and the two can sit side by side.

There is also a family of neighbours worth comparing against. Other pages in this series cover Link Placement and other buying channels, and the hub groups them by job.

Here, honestly, LinkByMe is the better answer and apibacklinks is not an answer at all. We have no publisher side, no wallet, no payouts and no buyers. LinkByMe's publisher page lists daily withdrawals "via PayPal, Payoneer, or Wire Transfer", USDT on TRC-20 or ERC-20, a referral program and the ability to set your own price, content rules and turnaround. It states a minimum of 500 monthly organic visitors, no PBNs and no domains under three months old (the homepage FAQ quotes a higher bar, 5,000 monthly visits, so ask which one applies). Approval is described as taking 24-48 hours.

The fee statements deserve a careful read. The advertiser page says zero platform commission for advertisers, while the publisher FAQ says advertisers pay "a small service fee on completed orders", and the Terms of Use say the platform may charge service fees for deposits and withdrawals. No percentage is published.

Use us for one thing on this branch, a mirror check: pull your own domain's overview before you list it, so you know what a buyer will see in third-party data. If your referring domains are a handful of dofollow links from one forum, price accordingly or fix the profile first.

This is the leaf most readers should take if they only want one sentence. LinkByMe wins whenever the task is to get a link placed, as opposed to knowing about links.

• It performs the work. Ordering, escrow, publication tracking and a removal guarantee are marketplace functions. We have none of them.
• It has two sides. Publishers and advertisers meet in one place, with messaging and a published ruleset.
• It has per-site fields we cannot show. DR, DA, AS, traffic, language, country and turnaround sit on each card. We offer our own DR plus link counts, no traffic and no keyword data.
• It is free to start. Signup is free with no minimum order, and the lowest published placement price is $10.
• It sells at today's terms. Prices and availability come from publishers at order time. Our index is a monthly snapshot of a broad crawl.

Stay with LinkByMe if you are a publisher, a one-off buyer or a team that wants someone else to run delivery. The caveat is the same one we apply to ourselves: its counters (60K+ sites, 3,200+ agencies, $7M+ paid) are claims we could not verify, and the visible catalog was 29 sites on the day we looked. Verify what you can, order small, and keep screenshots.

One last rule for the roots of any tree: a marketplace's counters describe the marketplace, and a crawl describes the web. When the two disagree, treat the disagreement as the interesting part and go and look at the page.