A fast-growing creator commerce platform
Volume link building is where quality usually dies. It did not here.
A flat-rate programme at 187 placements, with a content-weighted mix the client set at kickoff and a publisher bar that never moved to hit a number. Every figure below is checkable in Ahrefs.
The brief
This client was already growing fast. Press, partners, and its own creators were adding referring domains every month without anyone at an agency lifting a finger. They did not need help making a graph go up.
What they needed was the one thing their in-house motion could not produce on schedule: a steady stream of editorially placed contextual links into specific content and product surfaces, at a flat cost per link, with nothing attached that would need cleaning up later.
Volume programmes are where link building agencies quietly lower their standards. The quota arrives, the qualified inventory runs out, and the DR bar slips. We took the opposite constraint: fix the price, fix the mix, and absorb the cost of rejection upstream.
What we actually placed on
Not a sample and not our pick of the batch. We ran all 146 publisher domains from this campaign back through Ahrefs and measured every one of them.
The result is a distribution weighted higher than most agencies’ premium tier: the largest single band is DR 70 to 79, and more than half of the domains we placed on sat at DR 70 or above.
Domain Rating distribution across all 146 publisher domains used in the campaign.
| Measured across all 187 placements | Result |
|---|---|
| Placements delivered | 187 |
| Unique publisher domains | 146 |
| Domains carrying exactly one link | 124 (85%) |
| Median Domain Rating | 70.0 |
| Domains at DR 40 or above | 143 (98%) |
| Domains at DR 60 or above | 109 (75%) |
| Domains at DR 70 or above | 75 (51%) |
| Median publisher organic traffic | 11,428 / month |
| Publishers above 2,000 monthly visits | 122 (84%) |
| Combined monthly readership of all publishers | 10,804,934 |
| Distinct anchor variations used | 149 across 180 recorded anchors |
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One page, examined closely
The campaign’s deepest single target was a high-intent money-making guide on the client’s blog. It already existed and already had 20 referring domains when we started, so this is not a launch story. It is a story about what concentrated link building does to a page that has plateaued.
Referring domains went from 20 to 149. The rankings followed, but not immediately, and the shape of that lag is the honest part of this case study.
Referring domains to the target page, monthly. Source: Ahrefs Site Explorer.
Keyword rankings by position band. The page held zero top-three positions for the first four months of the campaign, then moved: 16 by May 2026, 78 by June, and a peak of 129 in July, with positions four to ten peaking at 189 in August.
URL Rating for the target page, from 12 to a peak of 22.
The lag is the lesson
For nine months this page showed almost nothing in the top ten. A client watching a weekly dashboard would have called the programme a failure somewhere around month four.
Then it compounded. Between April and July 2026 the page went from zero top-three rankings to 129. The links that produced that move had been in place for months.
This is why we sell twelve-month programmes and report on leading indicators. Referring domains and URL rating move first. Rankings move when the engine gets around to it.
Have a page that has plateaued?
Content that ranks on page two is usually an authority problem, not a content problem. We will tell you which of your pages are closest to breaking through and what it would take.
What happens when a link comes down
Links get removed. Editors leave, sites get redesigned, articles get consolidated. Any agency claiming otherwise is either new or not paying attention. The question that matters is what happens next, and for most agencies the answer is nothing, because nobody is watching.
Removals are flagged automatically
Every placement we have ever built is monitored by automation, not by someone remembering to check a spreadsheet. The moment a link comes down, an alert goes to our team and to the client at the same time. You find out when we do, not at the next quarterly review.
We restore it, or we replace it
First we go back to the publisher and work to get the original link restored. Where that is not possible, we build a replacement placement on an equivalent domain at no cost. The guarantee has no expiry date, which is why placements we built in 2025 are still our responsibility today.
What we did not do
This client’s whole domain grew from roughly 9,100 to over 20,000 referring domains during the engagement window. We are not going to claim that curve. A platform at this stage of growth gains links from press, product, partnerships and its own creators, and we were one contributor among several.
What is unambiguously ours: 187 placements across 146 publisher domains at a median DR of 70, held to the content-weighted mix the client specified, at a price per link that never moved, on sites with 10.8 million monthly readers between them.
The result that matters most in a volume programme is not one dramatic graph. It is that after eighteen months of delivery, nothing we built needed to be disavowed.
How to check any number on this page
Referring domains, keyword position bands and URL Rating come from Ahrefs Site Explorer, pulled on 14 September 2026. Domain Rating and publisher traffic were measured for all 146 publisher domains through Ahrefs batch analysis on the same date. Placement counts, publisher domains and anchor counts come from our own delivery records, deduplicated.
Anyone with an Ahrefs seat can reproduce the third-party figures.