Links from $1 on 50,000+ vetted domains. Nothing is charged until you pay the basket.

Buyer's scorecard

Score the host article before you pay for the anchor

A host article is a landing page you rent by the sentence. Eight lines, two points each, and the placements you would regret stop reaching the basket.

ArticlesLander editorial team · Updated 2026-10-29

Reading the total

Twelve out of sixteen goes in the basket

Score each line 0, 1 or 2. Below nine, skip the row. A $1 link on a page nobody would read still costs you the minutes you spent checking it, and cheap rows are where most people stop looking.

12 to 16: add to the basket
9 to 11: fix one weak line or find a sibling row
0 to 8: leave it, whatever the price

The eight-line scorecard

Score on the host article itself, with the filter columns open beside it.
Line	2 points	1 point	0 points
Topic fit	The article's main subject is yours	Same industry, different subject	Unrelated
Sentence for the link	A natural sentence already exists	Needs a light rewrite	The link would be bolted on
Host metrics	DR, traffic and referring domains agree with each other	One figure looks out of line	Cannot be checked
Language	Same as your target page	Close, for example regional spelling	Different
Reader path	A click continues the sentence	A click lands near the topic	A click feels like a detour
Neighbouring links	Few outbound links, all relevant	Several, mixed relevance	Looks like a list of paid slots
Niche label	Exact match in the list	Adjacent niche	No match
Price against peers	In line with similar rows	Noticeably higher	Far from every comparable row

How the scorecard behaves on an anchor text backlink

The first two lines matter most. They decide whether your anchor can read like part of the article.

Take an example with invented numbers. Row A is a 1,800-word piece on onboarding emails, DR 52, with a sentence about "drip sequences" in the third paragraph. Row B is DR 61, a list of forty tools, no copy around any of them. A scores 14. B scores 7, because the metrics line is the only one that wins.

That is the whole point. Authority numbers are one line out of eight, and the other seven describe what a visitor sees. Ahrefs and Semrush give you a second opinion on the host domain if you want one, while our list shows DR, organic traffic and referring domains per row.

Run the scorecard on the host article, not the homepage of the host site. A site can carry a good page and a poor one.

One more habit helps. Keep the scores in a sheet with the date, because a host article that scored 13 in October 2026 can lose points if the page changes next spring.

Treat the sheet as a shared note for the whole content team, so nobody pays for the same weak row twice.

Three minutes in the filter

Set niche and language first, then price, then the three authority columns
Open five rows and read the host article for each, top to bottom
Write the score next to each URL in a sheet before adding anything
Drop every row with a zero on topic fit or reader path
Add the top rows to the basket and look at the set as a whole

A zero is a veto

Any 0 on topic fit or reader path ends the discussion, whatever the total says. Metrics can be repaired by choosing a sibling row, but a mismatched topic cannot be repaired by a nicer anchor.