Publishing on heroturf.org — metrics, brief and price

A 32 DA listing at $65 is the price of an experiment: if the article earns citations, you have found a channel; if not, you have lost one invoice.

General-interest publications are the workhorses of a link profile and the easiest place to overpay. The article shape that works is boringly specific: a problem, the method used, what happened, what it cost. A general title with 4k monthly visits survives because it answers questions well, not because it loves contributors, so a piece with nothing verifiable in it gets edited down to a bio link.

Within the General section of the index — 1,576 listings, 39 median DA, 5k median traffic, $70 median price — this placement is 7% below the median on cost and roughly 73% of the index median on audience. Listings in that section range from $30 at the cheap end, so the question is not whether $65 is high for a link, but whether it is high for this one.

Where heroturf.org is not a topical match for your market, buy it for that plausibility and for whatever brand exposure comes free, and put your exact-match anchors on the sites that genuinely cover your subject. That one discipline is the difference between a general guest post strengthening a profile and the same link making it look synthetic.

The index lists this property's editorial links as followed. Availability of a followed link changes with the site's monetisation decisions, so we confirm the tag on the live URL before counting delivery.

Two comparisons decide whether heroturf.org at $65 is a good buy: this listing against the 1,576 other General entries we index, and against the whole 2,000-site index. The gap between those two answers is where a price is either justified or inherited from a rate card nobody revisited.

Two things the metrics cannot tell you, so we say them plainly: whether the host will still accept a contribution article this month, and whether the section your piece lands in is crawled weekly or monthly. Everything else on this page — 32 DA, 27 PA, 53 DR, 4,000 visits, $65, do-follow — is measured, dated September 2026, and available to you before you commit.

heroturf.org out-ranks 42% of the index on audience size (roughly 73% of the index median) and 6% on authority. The placement costs $16.25 per thousand estimated visits, and mid-priced for a site carrying DA 30-39. Those two figures, not the DA column alone, decide whether $65 is a good trade or just a listed one.

• New domains that need a plausible first set of citations before anything ambitious.
• Thin profiles where diversity matters more than raw authority.
• Anyone testing guest posting before committing to a premium title.
• Do not buy this if the site's topical distance from your market needs three paragraphs of explanation. Relevance has to be obvious to a crawler reading the neighbourhood.
• Do not buy this if the page it would sit on is already crowded with five other commercial links — we will usually flag that at the availability check and offer a different section.

Pitch angle: a myth-busting piece on one belief your industry has to fight. That is the shape we take to a General audience, because it is the version the host's own editor has a reason to keep.

• Send the anchor text in the draft Not afterwards. Once the editor has set the copy, changing the anchor is a new request and a new reason for the link to end up in a bio block.
• Add a heading someone would search A question-style H2 phrased the way the reader phrases it. This is what lets the article rank on its own, which is the difference between a placement that gets crawled weekly and one that gets crawled yearly.
• Write 900–1,300 words Long enough to be worth crawling and citing, short enough that a real desk will read all of it. Anything longer gets skimmed and trimmed, and trimming is where links go.

Anchor plan for this host

• if you already have links from similar sites, vary the anchor shape entirely
• a descriptive anchor that repeats a phrase the article already uses naturally

• Anchor history. We pull the anchors other sites have bought there. If the last twenty were all money phrases, a brand anchor from you will look natural, which is the rare and useful direction.
• What happens on removal. heroturf.org is covered by the same 12-month replacement terms as every other listing, which means a dropped link is rebuilt and re-reported rather than argued about.
• Neighbour content on the same section. The twelve articles around yours set the context search engines will use to judge the link. If they are all sponsored posts on unrelated topics, the slot is worth less than the price says.
• Whether the exact placement URL is indexable. A 32 DA domain happily serves noindexed contributor pages. We read the robots meta tag on the article template, not on the homepage.

1. You send the target URL and your angle The page you want the link to point at, the subject, and any author you want credited. Five minutes of input.
2. We confirm availability on heroturf.org Publisher slots move week to week, including on 32 DA properties. Nothing is promised until the section and the placement URL are confirmed, and we tell you before you pay if the slot has gone.
3. You approve the brief and the shortlist Where the host gives a choice of section or existing article, we send options with the numbers that matter: traffic, indexation, neighbours.
4. The article is drafted and edited for the host Written for heroturf.org's audience rather than for your keyword, then checked against the site's own style before submission.
5. The host publishes; we verify the live URL Placement live, correct target, link attribute as recorded, indexable. Only then does the order count as delivered.
6. You get the report, and the replacement cover starts PDF and CSV with the live URL, anchor, placement date and target page. Twelve-month replacement on the link itself, no ticket required.

The quoted $65 is our standard rate for this listing at the time of the September 2026 snapshot. Two things move it: whether the host still has contributor capacity that month, and whether the slot you want is a standalone article or a paragraph inside an existing page (niche edits on the same property are typically cheaper and faster).

What comes with this placement

• Link attribute verified on the published page and reported as found.
• 12-month replacement cover: if the link drops, we rebuild it.
• Anchor and target page exactly as approved in the brief, or the placement is not counted.
• White-label PDF + CSV report — forward it to a client unchanged.

Browse the index: all 2,000 briefs · General listings · domains beginning H (74) · DA 30-39 band (892)