DR68 for $220 and I can't work out why it's so cheap

seller has a site at DR68 offering homepage links for $220. everything comparable i've been quoted is 600+

i've checked the obvious stuff, it's got traffic (about 9k/mo), it's indexed, the content is real-ish, been around since 2017

this feels like i'm about to learn something expensive. what am i not looking at?

look at where the links come from, not how many

Six checks, in the order that catches the most for the least effort. Any one of these failing is usually enough.

1. Referring domain concentration. Sort the referring domains by first-seen date. If 400 of the 500 appeared in one eight-week window, that's a purchased spike, not a profile. This is the single most common inflation method and it takes ninety seconds.
2. Where the strong links sit. A DR is dragged up by a handful of very strong referring domains. Look at those specifically. If the three strongest are a university 404 page, a comment on an abandoned blog, and a redirect from a domain that used to be something else, the DR is a number with nothing behind it.
3. Traffic against the pages that rank. 9k a month is meaningless until you see which pages get it. If it's all one page ranking for a brand term that isn't theirs, or a viral post from 2019 in an unrelated language, you're buying a homepage on a site with no topical presence at all.
4. Outbound link count on the homepage. Go and count. If there are already fourteen commercial links there, yours is the fifteenth and the price is telling you the truth.
5. The archive. What was it in 2019? A site that changed topic completely in 2022 is an expired-domain rebuild, and after the policy update in March that's a different risk profile than it was last year.
6. Does it rank for anything it should? Take its three best pages and check whether they rank for their own obvious phrases. A site with real authority ranks for its own material. Inflated ones frequently rank for nothing.

Depends what you're running, but at $220 against a $600 market I'd bet on 1 and 4 together.

And if it survives all six, buy it. Cheap and real does exist, it's just rarer than the price suggests.

Adding one number to byte_broker's list because it's the one I use as a first filter and it's a single ratio.

Organic traffic divided by referring domains. Across the sites I've bought from that turned out to be real, that ratio sits somewhere between 15 and 80. Across the ones that turned out to be inflated it's under 5, usually well under.

His site: 9,000 over however many referring domains. If it's 500 domains, that's 18 and it's plausible. If it's 4,000 domains, that's 2.2 and you have your answer without doing anything else.

Caveat: the ratio is useless in some verticals and completely wrong for anything local. It's a filter, not a verdict.

3,100 referring domains. so ratio of 2.9

oh.

Now do byte_broker's first check. I'd like to know the window.

2.9. you already know

did it properly this morning

2,400 of the 3,100 first seen between january and march 2023. one three month block. and the homepage already has 11 outbound commercial links which i somehow didn't scroll far enough to see yesterday

not buying. genuinely would have if i hadn't posted, which is a slightly upsetting thought

You'd have bought it and it would have done nothing and you'd have concluded that link buying doesn't work, which is how most people arrive at that opinion.

The part worth internalising: the metric was invented by a tool company to sell subscriptions, and within about eighteen months of it existing there was an industry devoted to manufacturing it. That was around 2015. Every metric that becomes a price input gets gamed, always, and the lag between a metric becoming standard and becoming worthless is roughly two years.

The checks byte_broker listed are all really the same check, which is: does this site behave like a site people actually visit. That question has never been gameable at $220 and it never will be, because behaving like a real site is expensive.

Stop buying DR. Buy sites you'd be annoyed to find your competitor on.

Twelfth link on a homepage. At that point you're in a directory with extra steps.