Add-ons
Backlink Exchange
Earn and spend credits to swap contextual backlinks with other Grandranker websites.
The Backlink Exchange is a barter network between Grandranker websites. Your site earns credits by hosting one contextual link to another member inside an article we generate for you, and spends credits to have another member link back to one of your pages. No money changes hands between members, and no link is ever placed on a page you do not control.
Exchanged links are followed links given in return for credits. Search engines, including Google, may treat links exchanged this way as a link scheme and may devalue, ignore, or penalize them. Grandranker makes no ranking or indexation guarantee. Read the Backlink Exchange clause in our Terms of Service before you rely on it.
How credits work
The unit of account is Domain Rating (DR), Ahrefs' 0-100 measure of a domain's backlink authority. 1 credit = 1 DR point.
- Receiving a link costs the linking site's DR in credits. A link from a DR 30 site costs 30 credits (a minimum of 5 credits applies at very low DR).
- Giving a link earns 70% of your DR, rounded down:
floor(DR × 0.7). A DR 30 site earns 21 credits per link it hosts.
The 30% spread is what makes credits scarce, and it is why heavy receivers eventually top up with a paid tier or free-credit tasks.
Every eligible website gets a one-time grant of 100 credits when it joins the network, so you can start receiving before you have earned anything.
Credits are only consumed once a link is verified live. A link that never publishes, or that we cannot find on the page within 14 days, releases the credits back to you. If a verified link is later removed, the credits are refunded to the receiver and deducted from the site that dropped it.
Limits
| Limit | Value |
|---|---|
| Links per generated article | 1 |
| Links you can receive per day | 3 |
| Links your site gives per month | 30 |
| Same pair of sites | One link, once |
We never place a link between two of your own websites, never link you to a competitor listed in your brand profile, and never place the same pair twice.
Participation and opting out
Participation is on by default for eligible websites. A website is eligible when it is a paid or primary domain, its hostname is verified, and it publishes to a platform that produces a crawlable article URL on your own domain. Websites with no publishing platform connected, or that use the JavaScript embed, cannot give links and so do not participate.
To turn it off, open Backlinks in the sidebar and switch Participate in the exchange off. Your site immediately stops hosting new outbound links and stops receiving inbound ones. Links already published stay in your articles until you edit or remove them yourself.
What you see on the Backlinks page
The Backlinks page shows the inbound side of the exchange, the links other members have placed to your site:
- Credits — your current balance, plus credits earned this month.
- Total Backlinks and Unique Sources — verified links received, and how many distinct domains they came from.
- Backlinks Value — an estimate of what these links would cost on the open guest-post market, derived from the DR of each linking site. It is an estimate for comparison only, not a valuation or a promise of return.
- Domain Rating — your DR, refreshed roughly every 30 days. Domain Rating data is provided by Ahrefs.
- Earned backlinks table — one row per link with the date, the linking site, its DR, the article the link sits in, and a status of Placed (published, awaiting verification), Verified (we found the link live), or Dead (the link was removed).
If your website has no publishing platform connected, the page says so at the top: your articles never reach a page we can put a link on, so the site earns no credits. It can still receive links. Connecting a CMS in Integrations is what turns earning on.
The exchange does not show the outbound links your own articles host. To see them, review the articles published on your website.
Free and paid tiers
Every eligible website participates for free. Free participation earns credits by hosting links, receives links using them, and uses a fixed minimum DR filter of 5.
Paid tiers add a monthly credit allowance and targeting controls, per website:
| Tier | Price | Credits per month | Roughly |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | Earned only | Depends on how many articles you publish |
| Premium | $149/mo | 400 | ~26 links/mo at a median DR of 15 |
| Enterprise | $399/mo | 1,400 | ~90 links/mo, saturating the 3-per-day cap |
Paid tiers also unlock:
- Minimum DR — refuse links from sites below a DR you choose, between 5 and 20.
- Link targeting — nominate which of your pages should receive links, instead of letting us pick the most relevant page from your sitemap.
- Custom anchors — supply preferred anchor text. Anchors that exactly match a target keyword are capped at 10% of the links you receive, on every tier, because a link profile made entirely of exact-match anchors from one network is the pattern search engines look for.
Credits are granted on each successful invoice, not on the calendar month, and they do not expire. Cancelling a paid tier keeps whatever balance you have left.
Earning free credits
Beyond hosting links, Backlinks → Free Credits lists one-off tasks you can claim credits for:
| Task | Credits |
|---|---|
| Share a post about Grandranker on social media | 50 |
| Join the Grandranker affiliate program | 50 |
| Leave a review on G2 or Capterra | 50 |
| Leave a review on Trustpilot | 50 |
| Record a short video review | 200 |
Submit the URL of your post, review, or video as proof — it has to be a normal http:// or https:// web address. Each claim goes into a manual review queue and shows as Pending review until we approve it, at which point the credits land in your balance. Each task can be claimed once per account.
If a claim comes back Not approved, the task opens up again: the card explains what happened and lets you submit better proof.
FAQ
Will these links get my site penalized?
We cannot tell you they will not. These are followed links given in exchange for credits, which is what Google's guidelines describe as a link scheme. The realistic downside is that search engines quietly stop counting them, but a penalty is possible. Participation is optional and reversible, and the trade-off is yours to make. See the Terms of Service.
Where does the link go in my article?
Inside a body paragraph, in the same language as the article, with anchor text written to fit the sentence around it. It is never placed in a heading, the first paragraph, a link list, or the closing call-to-action. Only one exchange link goes into any article, and you can delete it in the editor like any other content.
Who chooses which site links to me?
We do. Candidates are filtered for topical relevance, then drawn by a weighted lottery so credits do not simply flow to whoever has the largest balance. Cross-language matches have to clear a higher relevance bar than same-language ones.
Can I see which of my articles carry outbound links?
Not from the Backlinks page. Reviewing the articles published on your site will show them.
What happens to my links if I stop participating or cancel?
Links already published stay live until you remove them. Your credit balance stays with you, and you keep receiving links until it runs out.
Is this the same as the Backlinks report under Analytics?
No. Backlinks under Analytics monitors your whole backlink profile from every source. The Backlink Exchange is only the links traded inside this network.
Questions? Contact us at [email protected].