Paid Backlinks

Paid backlinks are links to your site placed in another site's content in exchange for payment — via sponsored articles, paid inclusion in roundups, or link insertions into existing posts. They're the guaranteed-placement end of the visibility spectrum: you're buying certainty and speed, where earned coverage buys credibility and compounding.

Be clear-eyed: search engines' guidelines treat links bought to manipulate rankings as link spam, and reputable sites label paid placements and often mark the links accordingly. The durable case for paid placement is visibility — being present in articles your buyers read, with referral traffic to match. Featured favors real, disclosed placements on genuine sites and helps you avoid the link-farm end of the market.

It ranges widely with the site's authority, audience, and format — a niche blog insertion and a major trade publication's sponsored article are different markets. Featured shows typical pricing per site as you browse, so you calibrate your budget against real inventory instead of a broker's markup.

A sponsored article is a new piece published about or around your brand. A link insertion — often called a niche edit — adds your link to an existing article that already ranks or gets read. Sponsored articles give you narrative control; insertions give you speed and context. Featured surfaces both, labeled as what they are.

Different jobs. Paid guarantees presence on a schedule — useful for launches, category pages, and filling gaps. Earned coverage — journalist requests, bylines, podcasts — costs effort instead of cash and keeps compounding, because credible third-party coverage is what readers and AI assistants trust most. Strong programs run both; Featured is built to.

By looking at what a marketplace listing hides: whether the site's traffic and topical focus are consistent with reality, whether its content is written for readers, and how it handles disclosure. Ask Featured to vet any site before you spend — a two-minute check that regularly saves a wasted budget.

Yes. Advertising rules — FTC guidance in the US — require that material connections be disclosed, and reputable publishers label sponsored content clearly. Good disclosure doesn't kill performance; placements that read like honest service journalism work with the label on. Featured drafts to that standard by default.

Real placements on genuinely read sites can — AI assistants synthesize from content across the web, and a well-written sponsored piece that gets read and referenced adds to your presence. Junk links on link farms don't; engines and AI systems alike discount them. Spend where a human would actually read the article.

Finding and vetting placement opportunities is included in every Featured plan — free to start, $39/month (Lite) or $79/month (Pro, billed annually). What you pay per placement goes to the publisher and is shown as typical pricing before you commit.