Placing a link on kerbalcomics.com

Mid-market at $60: the band where judgement about the site matters more than the invoice.

There is a second job these placements do that is worth naming: they make a young or thin profile look normal. A domain that acquires 34-level links from a spread of ordinary publications, in drips, over months, looks like a business that has been around. A domain that acquires forty links from aggressive networks in a fortnight looks like a campaign, and it is the pattern rather than the individual link that gets noticed.

Within the General section of the index — 1,576 listings, 39 median DA, 5k median traffic, $70 median price — this placement is 14% below the median on cost and roughly 22% of the index median on audience. Listings in that section range from $30 at the cheap end, so the question is not whether $60 is high for a link, but whether it is high for this one.

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 1.2k 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.

Our observation on this host is do-follow outbound links in editorial content. That is the attribute, not the value: the 34 DA and 1.2k monthly visits are what the attribute is attached to.

Two comparisons decide whether kerbalcomics.com at $60 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.

Ranked against the 2,000 listings we index, kerbalcomics.com sits in the top 16% for audience and the top 11% for authority, at $50 per thousand monthly visits. Inside the DA 30-39 band (892 listings) that price ranks 677th for value, which is the comparison to use: nobody competes with the whole index, they compete with the sites a buyer would book instead.

kerbalcomics.com out-ranks 16% of the index on audience size (roughly 22% of the index median) and 11% on authority. The placement costs $50 per thousand estimated visits, and one of the pricier placements in its DA 30-39 band. Those two figures, not the DA column alone, decide whether $60 is a good trade or just a listed one.

• Anyone testing guest posting before committing to a premium title.
• Thin profiles where diversity matters more than raw authority.
• Local and service businesses whose market has few specialist publications left.
• 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.
• Do not buy this if you need the anchor to be your money keyword and the host is marked Do-follow. Attribute and anchor politics matter less than the page's survival, and a forced anchor is the easiest thing for an editor to change.

Pitch angle: an experience write-up with numbers, dates and decisions. 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.

• Include one thing nobody else has A table, a chart, a worked example, a photograph you took. This is what earns the citations that make the $60 look cheap a year later.
• Name a real author A person with a title and a bio. Anonymous contributions on General sites are the first thing an editor distrusts, and the first thing a reader discounts.
• Open with the thing you know One specific claim, a number or a dated decision, in the first two sentences. Editors in General positions decide whether to keep a contribution in about that long.

Anchor plan for this host

• no two anchors to the same target page from one article
• if you already have links from similar sites, vary the anchor shape entirely

• 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.
• Whether the exact placement URL is indexable. A 34 DA domain happily serves noindexed contributor pages. We read the robots meta tag on the article template, not on the homepage.
• Template stability. Redesigns and CMS migrations kill placements. We check the age of the site's oldest surviving article as a proxy for how long a page there tends to live.
• Indexation of the host's recent output. We run site:kerbalcomics.com and compare the count against the site's publishing rate. A property publishing weekly with a fraction of its pages indexed has a crawl or quality problem you would inherit.

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 kerbalcomics.com Publisher slots move week to week, including on 34 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 kerbalcomics.com'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.

Rates on this kind of listing drift with the host's own demand, so $60 is a current figure rather than a locked one. Volume changes the maths: a second placement on the same domain is usually refused, whereas a second placement across the General section of our index at the same budget is easy to arrange.

What comes with this placement

• Link attribute verified on the published page and reported as found.
• Availability confirmed on the exact URL before you are invoiced.
• 12-month replacement cover: if the link drops, we rebuild it.
• The article itself, drafted to the host's style and edited before submission.

Browse the index: all 2,000 briefs · General listings · domains beginning K (29) · DA 30-39 band (892)