Placing a link on thetravelsguides.com

At $40 this is a budget listing; the maths still has to work, and it works when the page is topical and the host is active.

Seasonality governs everything here. A placement published three months before the peak season for the destination accumulates internal links, refreshes and round-up mentions; the same article published in the off-season gets crawled and left alone. If the site covers rail routes, time the pitch to their planning window rather than to yours.

Within the Travel section of the index — 18 listings, 54 median DA, 3.9k median traffic, $30 median price — this placement is 33% above the median on cost and in line with the index median on audience. Listings in that section range from $20 at the cheap end, so the question is not whether $40 is high for a link, but whether it is high for this one.

Travel publishing is affiliate-driven, so a clean editorial link is both easier to negotiate and more valuable than in most categories: readers trust a recommendation that does not earn the site a commission. Editors in this group like contributions with first-hand detail: the price of the bus, the name of the station, the reason the second hotel is better.

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 thetravelsguides.com at $40 is a good buy: this listing against the 18 other Travel 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.

thetravelsguides.com has 43 DR against an index median of 51, 5.1k monthly visits against a median of 5.5k, and a placement price of $40 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.

thetravelsguides.com out-ranks 48% of the index on audience size (in line with the index median) and 90% on authority. The placement costs $7.91 per thousand estimated visits, and cheaper per visit than 63% of the DA 50-59 band. Those two figures, not the DA column alone, decide whether $40 is a good trade or just a listed one.

• Travel-tech and booking platforms needing topical relevance beyond review sites.
• Tourism boards and regional businesses with seasonal campaigns.
• Hotels, tours and operators fighting OTAs for branded demand.
• 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 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 sustainable or off-peak angle that argues a case. That is the shape we take to a Travel audience, because it is the version the host's own editor has a reason to keep.

• 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 $40 look cheap a year later.
• Name a real author A person with a title and a bio. Anonymous contributions on Travel sites are the first thing an editor distrusts, and the first thing a reader discounts.
• 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.

Anchor plan for this host

• 'the hotel we stayed at' style anchors work and read naturally; keyword anchors do not
• the operator, route or place name as the anchor, in the sentence where it is described

• Editorial activity. A site with 5.1k monthly visits and nothing published in six months is a decaying asset, and decaying assets get dropped from the index in batches.
• 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.
• Whether the exact placement URL is indexable. A 55 DA domain happily serves noindexed contributor pages. We read the robots meta tag on the article template, not on the homepage.
• 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.

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 thetravelsguides.com Publisher slots move week to week, including on 55 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 thetravelsguides.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.

The quoted $40 is our standard rate for this listing at the time of the September 2026 snapshot. Two things move it: whether the host still has contributor capacity that month, and whether the slot you want is a standalone article or a paragraph inside an existing page (niche edits on the same property are typically cheaper and faster).

What comes with this placement

• Anchor and target page exactly as approved in the brief, or the placement is not counted.
• Live-URL verification, with a dated record of the placement.
• The article itself, drafted to the host's style and edited before submission.
• Link attribute verified on the published page and reported as found.

Browse the index: all 2,000 briefs · Travel listings · domains beginning T (303) · DA 50-59 band (302)