Not every link is worth the same
Two links can both say "DR 60" and be worth wildly different amounts. One sits in the body of a relevant article that real people read. The other is a nofollow link in a footer next to 200 others. This calculator weighs the factors SEOs broadly agree on so you can put opportunities side by side.
What the score weighs
- Authority (up to 35 points). The linking site's Domain Rating, on a curve, because DR is logarithmic: the step from 60 to 70 is worth more than from 10 to 20.
- Placement (up to 20). Links inside body copy count most. Directory listings are solid when the directory is curated. Sidebars, profiles and footers are discounted.
- Relevance (up to 20). A link from a site about your topic looks earned. An unrelated one is mostly an authority signal.
- Page traffic (up to 15). Visitors who can click through. This counts in full even for nofollow links, because referral traffic does not care about rel attributes.
- Dilution (up to 10). The more outbound links on a page, the thinner each one's share.
Nofollow, sponsored and UGC links scale the ranking factors down to about a third. Search engines treat them as hints rather than votes, so they still carry some weight, just less.
About the cost range
The cost range is a rough estimate of what placements of similar quality sell for, from guest posts to paid listings. It exists to answer one question: is this worth an afternoon of outreach, or a listing fee? It is not a quote. Search engines ask that paid links carry rel="sponsored".
Using it well
- Check a list of targets with the bulk DR checker.
- Confirm whether a page's links are followed with the dofollow checker.
- Score the top few here and start with the highest.
The score is a model for comparing opportunities, not a number any search engine publishes.