A Loganix alternative for the checking, not the buying: a 24-day migration diary

Before the first entry: the agency in this log is hypothetical. Three people, about twenty placements ordered a month, nobody real. The dates are a storytelling device; every Loganix fact comes from its public pages, and every index number was pulled from apibacklinks on 8 October 2026.

The file opens with a screenshot. Above the fold, loganix.com offers to let you “Hand off the toughest tasks in SEO, PPC, and content without compromising quality”, and the word “link” appears exactly once, as a menu item. The browser tab disagrees: “Link Building Services for SEOs and Marketing Agencies | Loganix”. The catalogue has outgrown that label. The “How it works” strip under the hero counts “over 15+ services (starting from just $7)”, and the menu runs through Managed Services, Local SEO, SEO, PPC and AI Visibility before it reaches Link Building.

Our hypothetical team buys from one corner of that catalogue, the self-selected site list. Loganix describes it with unusual candour:

Browse our huge list of unvetted opportunities, filter by any criteria, and do your own quality control.

That sentence is the brief. The orders stay with Loganix. The quality control (vetting prospects, sizing up competitors, confirming that delivered links exist) is what the team set out to move onto an API over 24 days. One early note fixed the scope: the list is “25,000 sites available” on the link-building page and “30,000+ sites across 90+ countries” on the marketplace page. The site does not reconcile the two figures; the practical point is that a buyer cannot count the inventory from outside and has to judge it one domain at a time.

First stop was the tool Loganix already gives away. Its Domain Authority Checker promises “12+ must-know metrics from 4 trusted sources in a single look-up” and names Moz, Ahrefs and Majestic among those sources. The limit is printed just as plainly: “Check up to 10 URLs every 24 hours”, once you “Drop your email and pass the robot test”.

The team’s prospect sheet for the month held 400 domains. At ten a day that is 40 days of pasting, longer than the month itself. The tool page says as much itself, in a pitch for Loganix’s paid research: “Instead of cobbling data together 10 URLs at a time, get deep and complete research from experts…”

On the API side the same sheet went out as one request. Against the checker’s ten, bulk_dr accepts up to 2,000 domains per call, so all 400 came back together as JSON with a DR and link counts for each.

What did not carry over is the number itself. Loganix’s marketplace columns show “Domain Authority (Moz) and Domain Rating (Ahrefs)”; apibacklinks computes its own Domain Rating from referring-domain counts in a graph built on Common Crawl. The two are comparable in spirit and different in value: ahrefs.com itself sits at DR 67 in that index. So the team’s old rule of thumb, lifted from the “Average DR: 40” line in Loganix’s niche-edit vetting, could not be copied across. They re-based it instead: sort the 400 by our DR, mark where sites from past Loganix orders landed, and draw the cut-off there.

To calibrate, the team took the bar Loganix publishes on its niche-edits page for the publisher sites it offers and asked a narrow question: which of these lines can a buyer re-check with link data alone? As a test subject they used loganix.com, because anyone can repeat the exercise.

One and a half out of six. That score set expectations: link data answers the link questions and leaves traffic, indexation and editorial judgment where Loganix’s reviewers already handle them. On the lines it does cover, though, a refdomains call shows the shape behind the count. Of loganix.com’s top 100 referrers, nearly half fall in our DR 30–49 band, 30 sit in 15–29, and only two reach 70: sharethis.com and wikipedia.org, the latter citing a Loganix glossary post on grey hat SEO through 24 nofollow links.

The margin note from that day: a single DR cell, in the marketplace or in anyone’s spreadsheet, compresses exactly the distribution a buyer would like to see before paying the $200 or $400 Loganix lists per niche edit.

Loganix sells a Backlink Gap Analysis for $49, and the pitch is labour saved: “Save yourself from exporting and cleaning link data from tools like Ahrefs. This report looks at up to 1000 keywords a site ranks for + 5 competitors to show backlink gaps.”

The team tried to reproduce it and got exactly half. The link half maps to a single action. intersect returns the referring domains shared by two to ten targets, so “who links to all five of this client’s competitors” is one list call at 2 credits, or $0.0002. Each domain on that list (the team capped it at the first 30 per client) then gets checked against the client’s own profile with a source-domain filter on backlinks, and whatever is missing becomes the shortlist the team carries into Loganix’s marketplace filters.

The keyword half maps to nothing. apibacklinks has no keyword research, rank tracking or traffic estimates, so the “1000 keywords a site ranks for” part of the Loganix report has no counterpart; the similarly named keyword action answers a different question, namely which sites are linked with an exact anchor phrase. The log’s verdict: use intersect for the monthly prospect list, and keep buying the $49 report when a client wants gaps framed by rankings and delivered as a finished document. The full action list is in the API docs.

The team also looked for a Loganix API so marketplace rows could be pulled into the same script. The /api/ address returns a 404 and we found no developer documentation on the pages we read. The only API on record belongs to another company: in a Wayfront case study, Adam Steele of Loganix describes folding its home-built dashboards into Wayfront’s client portal (“we easily spent 60k building our old link building dashboard”) and expecting Wayfront’s API to “cut down even more on labor”. Loganix, in other words, has a migration story of its own. It covers the order desk, not the data.

Loganix reports to agencies in “unbranded Google Docs and Sheets”, and its terms contain two promises a buyer can audit: “Each link placement will be on a unique referring domain”, and a 6-Month Live Link Guarantee for any link that “goes down (404, redirect to homepage, removed by publisher)”. The same document is just as clear about what sits outside the guarantee, exact anchor text among them, and this:

Indexation. We guarantee links are indexable (no noindex tags, no blocked pages). We do not guarantee when or whether Google will index a specific page.

So the team built a weekly check. For each delivered URL, a backlinks call on the client’s domain, filtered by source domain, returns what the crawl saw: source URL, anchor, rel and last-seen date. Did two placements land on the same referring domain? Is the live anchor the one requested? Is the link visible in crawl data at all?

The third answer comes with a caveat the team learned from a false alarm. The index is rebuilt as Common Crawl releases arrive, roughly monthly and never in real time, and Common Crawl samples the public web instead of covering all of it, so a new link can take weeks to show. A niche edit delivered on 20 September and absent on 28 September proves nothing. The rule they settled on: absence is a reason to open the URL in a browser, never on its own a reason to file a replacement request inside Loganix’s six-month window. Getting a live page indexed is a separate job, the one Loganix’s terms decline to promise; our sister service IndexJump is a URL indexing service built for it, while apibacklinks only reports what the crawl recorded.

By the third week the log had a column headed “did not move”. It is the longer column, and nothing in it counts as a failure of the migration.

• The placements. apibacklinks does not build, sell or place links. Loganix does, with “a small team of US & Canada-based writers”, publishers it says it does not own or control, and a placement guarantee that opens: “You will never pay for a link that doesn’t go live.”
• Metrics clients already speak. One marketplace row carries Moz DA, Ahrefs DR, Majestic TF and CF, traffic, language, location and price. A client who asks for “DA 40” is asking in Loganix’s units, not ours.
• The human look. For niche edits, Loganix says its team “manually reviews 5 – 10 recent posts” on a site. A crawl sample refreshed about once a month will not notice that a blog went quiet last week.
• Everything that is not a link. Citation building, Reddit marketing, content writing, managed SEO and PPC, the other categories in Loganix’s terms, have no equivalent in a backlink API.
• Agency plumbing. White-label reports ready to forward, “transparent per-link pricing” and terms that are “month-to-month or one-time purchases” are things you hire, not things you query.

Who should stay entirely on the Loganix side? An agency with nobody who writes scripts. A reseller whose clients read reports in Ahrefs and Moz numbers. Anyone ordering five links a month, since at that volume the checker’s ten-a-day limit is no limit at all. The other outreach and link vendors we have compared are collected under link building tools.

Closing entry. The team totalled a month of API use the way an auditor would, counting list calls at the published 2 credits each:

950 credits at $0.0001 is $0.095, drawn from the $100 starter credit that arrives on first sign-in with Google, no card asked. Plain lookups on top are billed at 1 credit per call, and the domain and overview actions cost nothing and need no key.

Now the other side of the same month. Loganix’s self-selected list advertises “Links starting from $99”, so twenty placements from it cost at least $1,980; twenty of its niche-edit product at the published $200 or $400 per link come to between $4,000 and $8,000. The data line is a rounding error next to the placement line, and that is the real finding of this diary: it was never a swap of one vendor for another. The team moved the checking, the part Loganix’s own page hands to the buyer, and kept the buying. Every order now goes out with a referrer list and an anchor profile attached, and every delivery sheet from Loganix gets a second column filled in from the crawl.

What the log could not establish: which data source feeds the marketplace’s “Ref. Domains” and “Traffic” columns (the page names sources only for DA, DR and TF/CF), and how those figures would line up against ours row by row. No export is documented, so that comparison stays a manual one.