Guest post on sophiscake.com: the site brief

At $35 this is a budget listing; the maths still has to work, and it works when the page is topical and the host is active.

Food is a category with a very high content bar and a very low tolerance for commercial insertions, because the best-performing pages are pictures and steps. A placement works when your brand is part of the ingredient list, the equipment or the sourcing story; it fails when a restaurant-supply paragraph appears inside a 14-step recipe. Choose the article shape before you choose the site.

Ranked against the 2,000 listings we index, sophiscake.com sits in the top 52% for audience and the top 52% for authority, at $5.85 per thousand monthly visits. Inside the DA 40-49 band (703 listings) that price ranks 306th for value, which is the comparison to use: nobody competes with the whole index, they compete with the sites a buyer would book instead.

Expect one link in the body plus one in the method or shopping list. Expect the editor to remove the second if the first already carries the brand.

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 sophiscake.com at $35 is a good buy: this listing against the 31 other Food & Drink 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.

sophiscake.com has 45 DR against an index median of 51, 6k monthly visits against a median of 5.5k, and a placement price of $35 against $70. Where those three numbers point in different directions, the traffic figure is usually the honest one: it is what a publisher has to protect, and it is what decays first when a site starts selling too much inventory.

sophiscake.com out-ranks 52% of the index on audience size (in line with the index median) and 52% on authority. The placement costs $5.85 per thousand estimated visits, and cheaper per visit than 56% of the DA 40-49 band. Those two figures, not the DA column alone, decide whether $35 is a good trade or just a listed one.

• Food and drink producers who need retail-adjacent citations.
• Delivery and meal-kit brands competing on review-style queries.
• Restaurants, cafés and venues with a strong local search footprint.
• 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 40 DA placement on a Food & Drink site is a start, not a strategy.
• Do not buy this as part of a burst. 5–9 days is the delivery window for one placement; a month's worth of placements across several hosts is the pattern that works.

Pitch angle: a regional guide to where to eat or buy, written by a local. That is the shape we take to a Food & Drink audience, because it is the version the host's own editor has a reason to keep.

• 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.
• 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 $35 look cheap a year later.
• 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

• the specific product or supplier name inside the shopping line
• 'where to buy' style anchor only if the page it leads to is a shop page for that product

• Link attribute on a live example. Not the pitch, not the rate card: the rel attribute on an outbound link in a real article published this month.
• Indexation of the host's recent output. We run site:sophiscake.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.
• Disclosure policy. Whether the host labels paid contributions. A label costs you nothing in link value and protects the host from the penalty that removes the page.
• Editorial activity. A site with 6k monthly visits and nothing published in six months is a decaying asset, and decaying assets get dropped from the index in batches.

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 sophiscake.com Publisher slots move week to week, including on 40 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 sophiscake.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 $35 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 Food & Drink section of our index at the same budget is easy to arrange.

What comes with this placement

• Anchor and target page exactly as approved in the brief, or the placement is not counted.
• Availability confirmed on the exact URL before you are invoiced.
• Link attribute verified on the published page and reported as found.
• White-label PDF + CSV report — forward it to a client unchanged.

Browse the index: all 2,000 briefs · Food & Drink listings · domains beginning S (146) · DA 40-49 band (703)