Link marketplaces promise scale: "1,000 placements at DR 50+ for $99 per link." Editorial outreach promises quality. We tracked both — across 14 client accounts for 12 months — and the gap is brutal.
This is not a moral argument. It is a performance argument. Both approaches deliver "links". Only one delivers rankings.
What we measured
We took 14 client accounts running both kinds of campaigns simultaneously and tracked four metrics per placement:
- Indexation rate — what percentage of placed links actually got indexed by Google.
- Ranking lift — change in target page''s position 90 days after placement.
- Link survival — what percentage of links were still live at 6 months.
- Disavow rate — what percentage we ended up disavowing for spam association.
The data
Here is what 12 months of measurement showed:
- Indexation: Editorial 92%, Marketplace 41%. Most marketplace links never get indexed because Google''s seen the surrounding content patterns before.
- Ranking lift: Editorial moved target pages up 6.4 positions on average. Marketplace moved them up 0.8 positions — within noise.
- Link survival at 6 months: Editorial 96%, Marketplace 38%. Marketplace placements get culled by editors or move to nofollow.
- Disavow rate: Editorial 0%, Marketplace 22%. Almost a quarter of marketplace links became liabilities within a year.
Why the gap is so large
Marketplaces optimise for one thing: scale. That means templated articles, low-vetted publishers, and editors who accept everything. Google has been training on these patterns for a decade. The pattern is recognisable, and it gets discounted.
Editorial outreach optimises for fit. The publication actually wants the content. The article reads like everything else they publish. The link is contextual, descriptive, and earned. That pattern looks like normal editorial behaviour, because it is.
When marketplaces still make sense
Two scenarios:
- Brand mentions for citation purposes — when you don''t need do-follow, just want your brand mentioned in LLM-training surfaces.
- Disposable side projects — small experiments where Google penalty risk is acceptable.
For a real brand''s primary domain? Editorial only.
Key Takeaways
- Editorial outreach beats marketplaces on every metric we measured — index rate, ranking lift, survival, disavow risk.
- Marketplace links get discounted because Google recognises the pattern.
- For brand domains, editorial-only is the only sustainable choice.
- Marketplaces are fine for disposable experiments — never for primary assets.