Niche edits beat new placements 2.3x on cost-per-referring-domain

Niche edits beat new placements 2.3x on cost-per-referring-domain

Home-services client, head-to-head test, n=88 links split evenly across two methods over 5 months.

Results per method:
— New guest placements: $310/link, 44 unique referring domains, 6.1% of target keywords moved
— Niche edits (links into existing aged content): $135/link, 44 referring domains, 9.4% of target keywords moved

The edits cohort cost less and moved more keywords, plausibly because the host pages already had crawl history and traffic. Caveat: edits on low-traffic pages (under 50 monthly visits) showed no ranking lift at all — the average hides that split.

Filter niche-edit prospects by host-page traffic above 50/month or you're buying dead links.