Post what you actually paid for a homepage link — real sites only

Every price thread on this board turns into people quoting what they were quoted. I want the number that left your account.

Four fields, one line each: niche, rough monthly search traffic of the site, what you paid, and whether it was permanent or a yearly renewal. If it was a renewal say what year two cost, because that's where the actual price lives.

Caveat on why I'm asking: I buy maybe six to ten of these a year for offer landers, and my sense of the market is entirely built from the three brokers who email me. I'd like to know how badly that's skewing me.

I'll start. Finance-adjacent, low thousands of visits a month, $340, yearly — renewal quoted at $340 again and I talked it to $260.

Rough ranges from what's crossed my desk this year. These are what people paid, not asking prices, and the spread inside each row is enormous.

Niche	Site traffic	Homepage link, per year
Local trades	under 1k	$80 - $200
General blog / lifestyle	1k - 10k	$150 - $500
Finance, insurance	1k - 10k	$400 - $1,400
Casino, adult	any	$600 - $4,000

Two things that move the number more than traffic does: whether the site already sells links from the homepage, which pushes the price down because you're one of nine, and whether the owner has been asked before. First-time owners either say no or say $50.

Permanent is mostly a fiction above about $300 by the way. What you're buying is "until he sells the site or redesigns".

You're collecting prices for the worst product in the category and you're going to end up with a very precise number for something you shouldn't buy.

Homepage links have been the softest thing in link buying for a decade. Think about what the homepage of a small site actually is: the page that gets redesigned, the page with a footer full of other people's anchors, the page whose outbound profile changes six times a year. Whatever you get on the day is not what you have in month eight, and it is the single easiest pattern on the web to discount at scale because the position of the link on the page tells you what it is.

In 2014 I bought a lot of homepage links and they worked. They stopped working somewhere around the time everybody started selling them, which is the same sentence I end up writing about every tactic on this board.

An insertion into a five-year-old page that already ranks for something is worth three of them and usually costs less, because the owner doesn't know that's the valuable inventory.

I'd take the aged insertion too, given a choice. But I've placed both this year and I don't think the gap is anywhere near three to one.

Where homepage still earns its money is local. Small service site, one homepage link from a genuinely local business site with a bit of history, pointed at a city page — I've watched that move things in the last twelve months more reliably than anything else I sell. The homepage on those sites isn't a link farm, it's the whole site.

So I think the answer is that homepage links are dead in the niches where people buy a lot of them and alive in the ones where they don't. Which might just be a longer way of saying you're right about the general case.

Home improvement, about 6k a month, $400, sold to me as permanent.

Five months, nothing has moved on the target page. I don't have a control so I'm not claiming it did nothing, but I wouldn't pay it again. Posting it because everyone posts the ones that worked.

"Real traffic" needs a definition before post twenty or this thread is forty people quoting an estimate from the same tool at each other.

Suggest: search traffic only, from a source you can name, and say which tool. A site pulling 6k of direct and social and 90 from search is not the site anyone in this thread thinks they're buying.

Fair, and taking it: organic search only, name your tool, and if the owner showed you analytics say so because that's a different quality of number entirely.

Five data points in so far including mine. The thing that stands out isn't the prices, it's that three of the five were sold as permanent and two of those three have already been renewed once. So "permanent" in this market means about eleven months.

On the homepage-versus-insertion argument I'm not going to referee it, but I notice both of you are pricing homepage links at the top of the market while telling me not to buy them.

Because that's where the demand is, not where the value is. Those are allowed to be different things, and the gap between them is what a broker's margin is made of.

I'll give byte_broker the local point. I don't think it generalises past a town of 40,000 people and I don't think he does either.