Placing a link on shortcutmagazine.com

Mid-market at $80: 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 39-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% above the median on cost and about 2.6× the index median on audience. Listings in that section range from $30 at the cheap end, so the question is not whether $80 is high for a link, but whether it is high for this one.

Where shortcutmagazine.com 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.

Our observation on this host is do-follow outbound links in editorial content. That is the attribute, not the value: the 39 DA and 14.2k monthly visits are what the attribute is attached to.

Two comparisons decide whether shortcutmagazine.com at $80 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 — 39 DA, 32 PA, 60 DR, 14,200 visits, $80, do-follow — is measured, dated September 2026, and available to you before you commit.

shortcutmagazine.com out-ranks 72% of the index on audience size (about 2.6× the index median) and 42% on authority. The placement costs $5.63 per thousand estimated visits, and cheaper per visit than 73% of the DA 30-39 band. Those two figures, not the DA column alone, decide whether $80 is a good trade or just a listed one.

• Local and service businesses whose market has few specialist publications left.
• Thin profiles where diversity matters more than raw authority.
• New domains that need a plausible first set of citations before anything ambitious.
• 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 your profile has no branded searches yet and this is meant to be the single link that changes that. One 39 DA placement on a General site is a start, not a strategy.

Pitch angle: a data note built from something you have measured. 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.

• 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.
• 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.
• Put one link in the body Exactly one, in the sentence where the article needs the source. A second link to your own domain is the most common reason a piece gets rewritten before publication.

Anchor plan for this host

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

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Ownership. Several of the listings in our index turn out to share a publisher or an ad network. Relevance does not multiply when five links come from one hand, so we check the footer, the registration and the ad slots.

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 shortcutmagazine.com Publisher slots move week to week, including on 39 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 shortcutmagazine.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.

If the article you want published needs expert authorship, data or photography, that work is included; if it needs a regulated-industry review, say so early, because it changes the timeline rather than the price.

What comes with this placement

• White-label PDF + CSV report — forward it to a client unchanged.
• The article itself, drafted to the host's style and edited before submission.
• Link attribute verified on the published page and reported as found.
• Availability confirmed on the exact URL before you are invoiced.

Browse the index: all 2,000 briefs · General listings · domains beginning S (146) · DA 30-39 band (892)