How bklink Values a Backlink: Methodology

Backlink Value (BV) — the algorithm and its versions

Every dollar figure in a bklink report is produced by BV, bklink's backlink valuation algorithm. The live version is BV 2.8. Each report records the version that built it. When BV 2.5 went live on 27 September 2026, every campaign was re-priced at BV 2.5, as every campaign was at BV 2.4 and BV 2.3 on 26 September, at BV 2.2 and BV 2.1 on 25 September and at BV 2.0 on 24 September; BV 2.4, BV 2.5 and BV 2.6 value an audited link exactly as BV 2.3 does. BV 2.7, live from 29 September 2026, changes how audited links are valued, and stored reports were not re-priced with it: each keeps the figures and the version it was built with until its campaign is audited or its links are checked again. BV 2.8, live from 3 October 2026, counts traffic that was never measured as none on every site, and was launched the same way. The reports built with earlier versions stay on record as history. Property totals, the dashboard and the value-over-time chart are calculated with the live version.

Pick a version to see exactly how it values a link. Each is set out in the same order: what it measures, which links are worth $0, the starting value, the kind of link, relevance to your site, traffic, niche, hosting and link networks, several links from one site, copies of one article, rounding, and what changed from the version before. Each version has its own address to link to: #bv-2-8, #bv-2-7, #bv-2-6, #bv-2-5, #bv-2-4, #bv-2-3, #bv-2-2, #bv-2-1, #bv-2-0, #bv-1-1, #bv-1-0.

BV 2.8 — Live from 3 October 2026

What it measures

How much a link helps the site it points to rank — the link equity it passes, shown as Market Value. BV 2.8 is BV 2.7 with one change: traffic that was never measured counts as none on every rated site, not as 10,000 visits a month, in audits and on mxverify's checker. Stored campaign reports were not re-priced at launch, as at 2.7; a property's totals are priced with BV 2.8.

value = worth up to (from Site Strength) × level factor × relevance × repeat-link share × copy share

Links worth $0

Some links are worth $0 before anything else, and the report says why for each one: no link on the page; a dead page (404 or 410, a domain that no longer resolves, a "not found" page served with a 200 status, or a server error on two audits in a row); a page that is not indexable (a noindex tag or header, a canonical pointing elsewhere, or a robots.txt block); links from search-engine domains, which are crawl artefacts; an unrated domain, one Ahrefs does not rate; and a link from your own site, which is not a backlink.

Unverified links — pages that blocked or timed out our auditor — count toward gross value at their full value, and are disclosed, but are left out of the estimated value entirely: we have no proof the link exists. Among the links from one site, an unverified link ranks after every verified one (Several links from one site, below), so it never takes a verified link's place.

Starting value

Site Strength is half the linking site's Domain Rating and half its organic traffic, scored from 0 to 100 on a logarithmic scale where 5,000,000,000 monthly visits score 100 — so going from 100,000 to 1 million visits counts as much as going from 1,000 to 10,000. A followed editorial link is worth $2,265 at strength 100 and halves every 16.2 points below it; a site of Domain Rating 40 with 10,000 visits sits at 41, worth $179. Both anchors are published asking prices for guest posts: the top tenth at Domain Rating 80+, and the median at 30–49.

traffic score = min(100, 100 × log10(1 + monthly organic visits) / log10(1 + 5,000,000,000))

Site Strength = ½ × Domain Rating + ½ × traffic score

worth up to = $2,265 × 2^((Site Strength − 100) / h), where h = (100 − 40.62) / log2(2265 / 179) = 16.22

40.62 is the strength of the Domain Rating 40 site with 10,000 visits, so the curve passes through both anchors. A site whose traffic was not measured scores as 10,000 visits, except a subdomain, whose Domain Rating is its parent domain's, or a site rated below Domain Rating 1, where it scores as none; a site Ahrefs does not rate has no strength, and its links are worth $0 (Links worth $0, above). Worth up to is the value of a followed editorial link (level A) of adjacent relevance; every step below multiplies it.

Site Strength	Worth up to
100	$2,265
90	$1,477
80	$963
70	$628
60	$410
50	$267
40	$174
30	$114
20	$74
10	$48
0	$32

On mxverify, which does not show Domain Rating, strength is priced and shown in steps of 5, so the rating cannot be read back from it. bklink reports show Domain Rating with Ahrefs' credit and price the exact strength.

Kind of link: how likely search engines are to count it

Each link has a level, from search engines' own published position on which links count:

Level	What it is	Keeps
A counted	An editorial citation or a genuine contribution: linked because it is useful to readers, with no sign it was paid for, placed or mass-distributed.	100%
B may be discounted	A guest post, an article placed or sponsored by you on a real site, or a listing on a product, tool or startup directory.	50%
C usually neutralised	A press release or a copy of one, a syndicated article, a generic web directory, a forum post, profile or comment, a widget, or a footer, sidebar or menu link.	10%
D link network	A site on a server whose sites show footprints of one owner (Hosting and link networks, below), a link farm, a hacked page, or machine-generated content that exists to carry links.	5%

A model reads the evidence for each link — the page, where the link sits, the words around it, and what the audit found across the campaign — and gives the probability of each level. The link keeps those probabilities applied to the factors above: a link judged 70% A and 30% B keeps 85%. A nofollow, sponsored or ugc link is at most level C, and so is a page on a free-hosting, link-in-bio or open publishing platform (a blogspot.com or gitlab.io subdomain, a link-in-bio page, a post on medium.com, a page on sites.google.com), because the Domain Rating it carries is the platform's and anyone can make the page; so is a link from a high-risk niche unrelated to yours (Niche, below). "At most C" moves the probability of A and B to C. A post on dev.to, a community where anyone can publish and nobody edits a post in, is at most level B, as a guest post is: the probability of A moves to B, and the report shows B where the model read A. A nofollow post there is still at most C, and a post on medium.com, an open publishing platform, stays at most C.

When the model cannot judge a link, fixed rules place it, and never at A — no rule can tell an earned citation from an undisclosed paid one. A site on a network's server is D; a copy of an article found on another audited site, a press-release address or newswire, a forum, thread or comment, a directory, listing, profile or member page, and a link in a footer, header, menu, sidebar, widget or ad slot are C; a page that says it is sponsored, a guest post or partner content, a link in an author box, and every other link are B. The caps above then apply. On a server whose sites show footprints of one owner, every link is level D, whatever the model read from the page.

On mxverify's backlink value checker, a site with no audited link is judged from a reading of its articles: what kind of site it is, how established it is, whether it sells placements, and the kind of link it gives. A product or launch directory's pages are listings: they keep the reading's own mix, with A counted as B, since a listing is placed, never earned. A syndication feed gives C, a syndicated copy; a platform where users post, or a service with no articles of its own, gives C; and a link network D. A publication — which includes a company's own blog of original articles — a reference work, or a site the model cannot place keeps the model's A only in proportion to the chance the site is established or major and does not sell placements, and is B otherwise. The site's own share of nofollow links then moves that share of A and B to C: the share among the live links our audits verified on the site where there are three or more, otherwise the share in its articles. A search engine, social network, video platform, messaging app or AI assistant is priced at C, the listing, profile or user post it usually gives; yahoo.com is priced by its news pages instead, as an editorial citation, level A, capped at C by its nofollow share. The checker caps dev.to at B, as audits do. A site whose articles cannot be read is placed by the fixed rules, and where they leave it at B, the default, and our audits verified three or more links there, their nofollow share of that B is priced as C. A site in a high-risk niche — adult, gambling, an online pharmacy, CBD, payday loans, counterfeit goods or piracy — is valued for a buyer outside it: its link is at most C with the probability it is in one, read from the audit links judged there, from our reading of the site or, for a site we cannot read, from its title, description and top searches in third-party traffic data. The report also shows what a buyer in the same niche would get. A site Google lists no page of — two searches for site: and its address, at least 7 days apart, both found no page — is priced at most level C, as a nofollow link is, unless something on record shows Google indexing it: an audited page on it found indexed, organic traffic of 100 or more visits a month measured in the last 30 days, or a domain registered in the last 30 days. A search that failed, gave no count or listed a full first page never counts as finding nothing, and a later search that finds pages lifts the cap.

Relevance to your site

The site's audience is already in its strength (Starting value, above). Relevance multiplies the value; a link the model could not judge multiplies by 1, so it is never marked down for something we have not measured.

Relevance of the linking site to yours	Factor
Unrelated	0.5×
Loosely related	0.75×
Adjacent	1×
Closely related	1.1×
Same topic	1.25×

Relevance is about the linking site's usual subject, not the one article that carries the link, and is weighted by the model's probability for each step.

Traffic

Half of Site Strength (Starting value, above), not a separate factor. The figure is an estimate of the linking site's monthly organic visits, kept once per domain: a third-party estimate, fetched by audits or by mxverify's checker. A new audit or links check reads that one record; a stored report keeps the figures it was priced on until then; before BV 2.3 went live, the 351 priced sites that had no figure were measured. A site with no estimate counts as 10,000 visits, neither marked up nor down. A subdomain with no estimate counts as none, and so does a site rated below Domain Rating 1: a subdomain's Domain Rating is its parent domain's and says nothing about its own audience, and of the 15 sites rated below 1 with a traffic figure on record on 29 September 2026, none reached 1,000 visits a month. At Domain Rating 0.1, the lowest Ahrefs gives, the assumed 10,000 visits made up more than 99% of a site's strength. A measured figure, zero included, is used as it is.

Niche

No niche is worth more or less in itself: BV 1.x's premiums for high-priced niches are gone. A link from a site in a high-risk niche that yours is not in — adult, gambling, pharmacy, CBD and cannabis, payday loans, counterfeit goods, piracy — is at most level C, weighted by the model's probability that the linking site is in such a niche and yours is not. Crypto, forex, ordinary dating and finance are not on the list: legitimate sites are common there, and the link's level catches the rest.

Hosting and link networks

Every linking domain is resolved to the server it serves from. A shared address alone is not a network: large hosts put unrelated sites side by side, and one syndication host can carry the finance pages of hundreds of real newspapers. So a server where 10 or more audited publications sit is checked for five footprints of one owner, from public records and the audits:

Nameservers — 60% or more of its sites use the same privately run nameservers. A registrar's or host's defaults are shared by millions of customers and do not count.
Registration dates — 60% or more of its registered domains were registered inside one 90 days.
Registrar — one registrar holds 70% or more of them.
Site theme — one WordPress theme runs on 70% or more of the homepages read.
Identical purchases — 90% or more of its sites with audited links carry the same number of them, and 95% or more of those links share one follow state.

A footprint counts only when at least 5 sites or registered domains were read for it (10 sites with audited links for identical purchases), and dates and registrars count once per registered domain. The server is a network when at least two footprints agree and one of them is nameservers, registration dates or theme — the ones a popular registrar or a buyer's habits do not produce by chance — and every link from its sites is level D. It is a syndication platform, never a network, when 90% or more of its sites are subdomains of fewer than 10 registered domains, or its domains were registered years apart (under 40% inside any 90 days) with a median year before 2010. On a platform the fixed rules read a page as a syndicated copy, level C, and a level D the model gave counts as C. Where only the registrar and the buying pattern agree, the server is marked as one owner possible and is not priced as a network. On a server measured and found not to be a network, a level D the model gave because more than 20 audited sites share it counts as C.

Up to 40 sites per server are read, across as many registered domains as it holds; each is read once and again after 90 days. A server not measured yet — new since the last measurement — keeps BV 2.1's rule until it is: more than 20 other audited sites on it make it a network. CDN edge addresses are never grouped. Each server's verdict and footprints are published on mxverify (how networks are decided). Other links take no hosting discount.

Several links from one site

Ten links from one site are not ten sites vouching for you. Within each linking site, links are ranked by value; the strongest keeps 100%, the second 20%, the third 10%, and each further one half the one before (5%, 2.5% …), so all the links from one site together are worth at most 1.4× its best. A link already worth $0 takes no place in that ranking, and a link the audit could not verify ranks after every verified one.

A site is a registered domain with every subdomain that carries its Domain Rating: texas.wire.example, ohio.wire.example, www.wire.example and wire.example are one site, so a brand's second link keeps 20% wherever it sits. Ahrefs gives a subdomain its parent domain's rating: it rates the brand, not its sections or state editions. A page on its own subdomain of a free-hosting platform — xyz.blogspot.com, *.gitlab.io, *.pages.dev — is not part of a brand: different people own the pages, so each is a site of its own. Pages at addresses on one host, such as medium.com posts or sites.google.com pages, still rank together as one site, as in every version. mxverify's checker values one new link from a site, which always ranks first.

Ahrefs says only the first link from a domain increases Domain Rating. Matt Cutts, then at Google, said in a video around 2013 that if Google sees fifty links from one domain it might count them only once; that remark is known from press coverage of the video, not from Google's documentation. Halving keeps the first three links as they were and stops a long run from one site adding up without limit. No link's share ever reaches zero, though far down a long run a link's value can round to $0; the report then labels it with its place among the links from its site. Like the curve before it, this is a judgement, not a calibrated figure: there are no labelled examples or sale prices for repeat links to fit it to.

The same article on many sites

A press release distributed over a wire appears on hundreds of sites as one article, and search engines consolidate it rather than counting every copy. bklink groups copies of the same article — the same canonical address, the same article path across hosts, or a headline spelled slightly differently — and credits the copy the others name as the original at 100%. Every other copy keeps 5%. Where no copy names an original, the most valuable one is credited.

Rounding and totals

Every factor multiplies the exact value, and each link's value is shown to the cent. The estimated value is the sum of the verified links' values, rounded once to the dollar. Gross value is every link's value before copies are collapsed, unverified links included.

What changed from BV 2.7, and why

10,000 visits a month was meant to be neutral. It was not: of 2,645 rated sites with a measured figure on 3 October 2026 the median had 1 visit a month and 85% scored below 10,000, so a site nobody had measured was valued above most sites that had been measured. A newly listed site with a Domain Rating of 30 and no figure was worth $70 per link; the same site measured at 1,000 visits, $57, and at none, $30.

BV 2.8 counts traffic that was never measured as none, the same as a measured zero, so a missing figure can never outrank a measured one. A measured figure is used as it is. The same day, traffic was fetched for all 467 rated sites that had never been measured: 426 had fewer than 10,000 visits a month and 221 had none.

Parameter	BV 2.7 (previous)	BV 2.8
Traffic never measured, on any rated site	Counted as 10,000 visits a month (none on a subdomain or below Domain Rating 1)	Counted as none; a measured figure, zero included, is used as it is
Everything else	Unchanged: levels A–D, the checker's reading and its caps, link networks, relevance, repeat links per brand, copies of one article, rounding

How it was checked. Before BV 2.8 went live, every campaign on record, every site mxverify has a price for and every property's totals were priced under BV 2.7 and BV 2.8 from the same records, read once. No campaign moved ($30,257 gross and $10,390 estimated across 17), and none of 3,390 sites on mxverify moved, since every rated site had a measured figure by then. Property totals, priced from the links stored when each campaign was audited, moved from $25,411 to $24,749 of gross value across 13 properties, where stored links still carried no traffic figure; no property's estimated value moved.

BV 2.7 — 29 September 2026 – 3 October 2026, until BV 2.8

What it measures

How much a link helps the site it points to rank — the link equity it passes, shown as Market Value. BV 2.7 is BV 2.6 with two changes. A subdomain, whose Domain Rating is its parent domain's, and a site rated below Domain Rating 1 count traffic that was never measured as none, not as 10,000 visits a month, in audits and on mxverify's checker. And in an audit, the subdomains of one domain rank with it as one site among the links from it. Stored campaign reports were not re-priced at launch: each keeps its figures until its campaign is audited or its links are checked again, while a property's totals are priced with BV 2.7.

value = worth up to (from Site Strength) × level factor × relevance × repeat-link share × copy share

Links worth $0

Starting value

traffic score = min(100, 100 × log10(1 + monthly organic visits) / log10(1 + 5,000,000,000))

Site Strength = ½ × Domain Rating + ½ × traffic score

worth up to = $2,265 × 2^((Site Strength − 100) / h), where h = (100 − 40.62) / log2(2265 / 179) = 16.22

Site Strength	Worth up to
100	$2,265
90	$1,477
80	$963
70	$628
60	$410
50	$267
40	$174
30	$114
20	$74
10	$48
0	$32

Kind of link: how likely search engines are to count it

Each link has a level, from search engines' own published position on which links count:

Level	What it is	Keeps
A counted	An editorial citation or a genuine contribution: linked because it is useful to readers, with no sign it was paid for, placed or mass-distributed.	100%
B may be discounted	A guest post, an article placed or sponsored by you on a real site, or a listing on a product, tool or startup directory.	50%
C usually neutralised	A press release or a copy of one, a syndicated article, a generic web directory, a forum post, profile or comment, a widget, or a footer, sidebar or menu link.	10%
D link network	A site on a server whose sites show footprints of one owner (Hosting and link networks, below), a link farm, a hacked page, or machine-generated content that exists to carry links.	5%

Relevance to your site

Relevance of the linking site to yours	Factor
Unrelated	0.5×
Loosely related	0.75×
Adjacent	1×
Closely related	1.1×
Same topic	1.25×

Relevance is about the linking site's usual subject, not the one article that carries the link, and is weighted by the model's probability for each step.

Traffic

Niche

Hosting and link networks

Nameservers — 60% or more of its sites use the same privately run nameservers. A registrar's or host's defaults are shared by millions of customers and do not count.
Registration dates — 60% or more of its registered domains were registered inside one 90 days.
Registrar — one registrar holds 70% or more of them.
Site theme — one WordPress theme runs on 70% or more of the homepages read.
Identical purchases — 90% or more of its sites with audited links carry the same number of them, and 95% or more of those links share one follow state.

Several links from one site

The same article on many sites

Rounding and totals

What changed from BV 2.6, and why

Ahrefs gives a subdomain its parent domain's Domain Rating, and at the end of September 2026 it began rating hundreds of press-release copy hosts it had not rated before, at Domain Ratings of 0.1 to 2.4: most of them state and section subdomains of a few wire brands. None had a traffic figure, so BV 2.6 counted each as a site with 10,000 visits a month, which at Domain Rating 0.1 is more than 99% of its strength; and each subdomain was a site of its own among the links from one site, so each one's link ranked first and kept 100%. Priced again on the new ratings, one press-release package of 849 placements went from $547 to $2,182 of gross value without a single new link.

BV 2.7 changes both. Traffic that was never measured still counts as 10,000 visits a month, neither marked up nor down, except on a subdomain, whose Domain Rating says nothing about its own audience, and on a site rated below 1, where of the 15 with a traffic figure on record none reached 1,000 visits a month. There it counts as none. A measured figure, zero included, is used as it is. And the subdomains of one domain, with the domain's own address, rank as one site among the links from it: a brand's second link keeps 20%, as a second link from one site always has. A page on its own subdomain of a free-hosting platform — a blogspot.com subdomain, say — is not part of a brand: different people own the pages, so each stays a site of its own. Pages at addresses on one host, such as medium.com posts, still rank together as one site, as in every version.

Parameter	BV 2.6 (previous)	BV 2.7
Traffic never measured, on a subdomain or below Domain Rating 1	Counted as 10,000 visits a month	Counted as none; a measured figure, zero included, is used as it is
Traffic never measured, on any other rated site	Unchanged: counted as 10,000 visits a month, neither marked up nor down
Subdomains of one domain (audits)	Each a site of its own: each one's best link keeps 100%	One site with the domain's own address: 100%, 20%, 10%, then half the one before (5% …); at most 1.4× the best link
Pages on their own subdomain of a free-hosting platform	Each a site of its own, as every subdomain was; traffic never measured counted as 10,000 visits	Each still a site of its own; traffic never measured counted as none, since the Domain Rating is the platform's
Everything else	Unchanged: levels A–D, the checker's reading and its caps, link networks, relevance, copies of one article, rounding

How it was checked. Before BV 2.7 went live, every campaign on record and every site mxverify has a price for were priced under BV 2.6 and BV 2.7 from the same records, read once. Across the 16 campaigns gross value fell from $33,190 to $29,029 and the estimate from $10,578 to $10,401; no link changed level. The press-release package of 849 placements went from $2,182 to $450 gross and from $260 to $174 estimated; the one customer campaign's estimate moved by $9. On mxverify, 431 of 2,987 sites moved, all down, from $12,494 to $5,269 of value per link between them: 388 subdomains on their parent domain's rating, 34 sites rated below 1 and 9 pages on free-hosting platforms; none changed level. Unlike every launch since BV 2.0, the stored campaign reports were not re-priced: a re-price would also have carried into customers' reports everything measured since each was built — new Domain Ratings and traffic figures, $1,625 of gross value across the campaigns — on the day. Each report keeps its figures until its campaign is audited or its links are checked again. A property's totals and its value-over-time chart, priced from its campaigns' stored links with the live version, follow BV 2.7 from launch (the public pages and badges by the next daily update): $26,628 to $24,013 of gross value and $8,725 to $8,635 estimated across the 12 properties.

BV 2.6 — 29 September 2026, until BV 2.7

What it measures

How much a link helps the site it points to rank — the link equity it passes, shown as Market Value. BV 2.6 is BV 2.5 with one change on mxverify's checker: a site Google lists no page of is priced at most level C once a second search confirms it, unless something on record shows Google indexing the site. Audit reports do not change: an audit prices each linked page on its own.

value = worth up to (from Site Strength) × level factor × relevance × repeat-link share × copy share

Links worth $0

Starting value

traffic score = min(100, 100 × log10(1 + monthly organic visits) / log10(1 + 5,000,000,000))

Site Strength = ½ × Domain Rating + ½ × traffic score

worth up to = $2,265 × 2^((Site Strength − 100) / h), where h = (100 − 40.62) / log2(2265 / 179) = 16.22

40.62 is the strength of the Domain Rating 40 site with 10,000 visits, so the curve passes through both anchors. A site whose traffic was not measured scores as 10,000 visits; a site Ahrefs does not rate has no strength, and its links are worth $0 (Links worth $0, above). Worth up to is the value of a followed editorial link (level A) of adjacent relevance; every step below multiplies it.

Site Strength	Worth up to
100	$2,265
90	$1,477
80	$963
70	$628
60	$410
50	$267
40	$174
30	$114
20	$74
10	$48
0	$32

Kind of link: how likely search engines are to count it

Each link has a level, from search engines' own published position on which links count:

Level	What it is	Keeps
A counted	An editorial citation or a genuine contribution: linked because it is useful to readers, with no sign it was paid for, placed or mass-distributed.	100%
B may be discounted	A guest post, an article placed or sponsored by you on a real site, or a listing on a product, tool or startup directory.	50%
C usually neutralised	A press release or a copy of one, a syndicated article, a generic web directory, a forum post, profile or comment, a widget, or a footer, sidebar or menu link.	10%
D link network	A site on a server whose sites show footprints of one owner (Hosting and link networks, below), a link farm, a hacked page, or machine-generated content that exists to carry links.	5%

Relevance to your site

Relevance of the linking site to yours	Factor
Unrelated	0.5×
Loosely related	0.75×
Adjacent	1×
Closely related	1.1×
Same topic	1.25×

Relevance is about the linking site's usual subject, not the one article that carries the link, and is weighted by the model's probability for each step.

Traffic

Niche

Hosting and link networks

Nameservers — 60% or more of its sites use the same privately run nameservers. A registrar's or host's defaults are shared by millions of customers and do not count.
Registration dates — 60% or more of its registered domains were registered inside one 90 days.
Registrar — one registrar holds 70% or more of them.
Site theme — one WordPress theme runs on 70% or more of the homepages read.
Identical purchases — 90% or more of its sites with audited links carry the same number of them, and 95% or more of those links share one follow state.

Several links from one site

The same article on many sites

Rounding and totals

What changed from BV 2.5, and why

mxverify asks Google how many pages it lists for each site it values, with a search for site: and the site's address. On 29 September 2026, 79 of the first 262 sites asked came back with none: Google gave a count of 0 and listed no page. 64 of them were subdomains, most of them press-release sections of other sites, and no answer from Google on record contradicted any of them. BV 2.5 priced a link from each as if Google counted it: $4,158 of value per link between them.

A link from a site Google does not list passes nothing Google counts. BV 2.6 prices it at most level C, as it prices a nofollow link, once a second search at least 7 days after the first also finds no page: one answer can be a passing fault, so one never caps. The cap does not apply where anything on record shows Google indexing the site: an audited page on it found indexed, organic search traffic of 100 or more visits a month measured in the last 30 days, or a domain registered in the last 30 days, which Google may not have reached yet. A later search that finds pages lifts it at the next price. A search that failed, gave no count, or listed a full first page without one never counts as finding nothing.

Parameter	BV 2.5 (previous)	BV 2.6
Sites Google lists no page of (mxverify's checker)	Not considered: priced like any other site	At most level C, once two searches at least 7 days apart find no page and nothing on record shows Google indexing the site
What holds the cap back	—	An audited page on the site found indexed, organic traffic of 100+ visits a month measured in the last 30 days, or a domain registered in the last 30 days
Everything else	Unchanged: every audited link is priced on its own page exactly as in BV 2.5, and the checker's other rules are 2.5's

How it was checked. Before BV 2.6, the 79 sites whose search found nothing were priced under both versions from the same records. None had a second answer yet, so none moved: each is asked again by the first daily run at least 7 days after its first answer (in practice 7 or 8 days after it), inside the day's existing budget for Google's page counts. If every one is confirmed, a link from them falls from $4,158 to $833 of value per link between them; one of the 79, registered in the last 30 days, is held back. Audit reports do not change.

BV 2.5 — 27–29 September 2026, until BV 2.6

What it measures

How much a link helps the site it points to rank — the link equity it passes, shown as Market Value. BV 2.5 is BV 2.4 with one change on mxverify's checker: a site in a high-risk niche — adult, gambling, an online pharmacy, CBD, payday loans, counterfeit goods or piracy — is valued for a buyer outside that niche, as audits already value a link from such a site for a customer outside it. The report also shows what a buyer in the same niche would get. Every stored campaign was re-priced with it at launch; the reports built with BV 2.4 stay on record as history.

value = worth up to (from Site Strength) × level factor × relevance × repeat-link share × copy share

Links worth $0

Starting value

traffic score = min(100, 100 × log10(1 + monthly organic visits) / log10(1 + 5,000,000,000))

Site Strength = ½ × Domain Rating + ½ × traffic score

worth up to = $2,265 × 2^((Site Strength − 100) / h), where h = (100 − 40.62) / log2(2265 / 179) = 16.22

Site Strength	Worth up to
100	$2,265
90	$1,477
80	$963
70	$628
60	$410
50	$267
40	$174
30	$114
20	$74
10	$48
0	$32

Kind of link: how likely search engines are to count it

Each link has a level, from search engines' own published position on which links count:

Level	What it is	Keeps
A counted	An editorial citation or a genuine contribution: linked because it is useful to readers, with no sign it was paid for, placed or mass-distributed.	100%
B may be discounted	A guest post, an article placed or sponsored by you on a real site, or a listing on a product, tool or startup directory.	50%
C usually neutralised	A press release or a copy of one, a syndicated article, a generic web directory, a forum post, profile or comment, a widget, or a footer, sidebar or menu link.	10%
D link network	A site on a server whose sites show footprints of one owner (Hosting and link networks, below), a link farm, a hacked page, or machine-generated content that exists to carry links.	5%

Relevance to your site

Relevance of the linking site to yours	Factor
Unrelated	0.5×
Loosely related	0.75×
Adjacent	1×
Closely related	1.1×
Same topic	1.25×

Relevance is about the linking site's usual subject, not the one article that carries the link, and is weighted by the model's probability for each step.

Traffic

Niche

Hosting and link networks

Nameservers — 60% or more of its sites use the same privately run nameservers. A registrar's or host's defaults are shared by millions of customers and do not count.
Registration dates — 60% or more of its registered domains were registered inside one 90 days.
Registrar — one registrar holds 70% or more of them.
Site theme — one WordPress theme runs on 70% or more of the homepages read.
Identical purchases — 90% or more of its sites with audited links carry the same number of them, and 95% or more of those links share one follow state.

Several links from one site

The same article on many sites

Rounding and totals

What changed from BV 2.4, and why

Since BV 2.0 an audit has capped a link from a high-risk site at level C when the customer is not in that niche: to a search engine it is an unrelated link from a kind of site it distrusts. mxverify's checker values a link from a site with no customer in view, so it never applied the cap. A betting site and an online casino guide showed level B, $87 a link, because neither could be read, so the default applied.

BV 2.5 applies the audit's cap on the checker for the typical buyer, outside the niche: the link is at most level C with the probability the site is in one. That probability comes from the audit links judged there, from our reading of the site, or, for a site that cannot be read (behind an age gate, say), from third-party traffic data's description of it: its title, its description and the searches that bring visitors to it. The report also shows what a buyer in the same niche would get, where the cap does not apply.

Parameter	BV 2.4 (previous)	BV 2.5
High-risk niches (mxverify's checker)	Not considered: a link from a gambling or adult site was valued like any other	At most level C with the probability the site is in a high-risk niche, for a buyer outside it; the report also shows a same-niche buyer's value
Where the niche comes from	—	The audit links judged on the site (the audit's own weight), our reading of the site, or third-party traffic data's description of a site we cannot read
Everything else	Unchanged: every audited link is priced on its own judged page exactly as in BV 2.4, and the checker's other rules are 2.4's

How it was checked. Before BV 2.5 went live, the 2,946 sites mxverify has a record for were priced under both versions from the same records. 128 have some probability of a high-risk niche on record, and 29 moved, all down: from $1,284 to $1,056 of value per link between them. Two changed level: betfans.nl and casinoslotsspelen.nl, from B at $87 a link to C at $17; a buyer in gambling still gets $87. outbid.lol, 30% likely a gambling site, fell from $254 to $193; the other 26 moved by $9 or less. To find the niche of the sites no audit had judged, 115 were asked once, from our stored reading of each or a stored description from traffic data: $0.0076 in all. Audit reports do not change: an audit already applied the cap for its customer. At launch every campaign on record was re-priced from its stored links at BV 2.5, and the rule changed no estimate. Two moved, by $29 and $25, because the traffic of seven sites they link from was measured again after BV 2.4's re-price; priced at BV 2.4, they move the same.

BV 2.4 — 26–27 September 2026, until BV 2.5

What it measures

How much a link helps the site it points to rank — the link equity it passes, shown as Market Value. BV 2.4 is BV 2.3 for every audited link. On mxverify's checker, a site with no judged audit links is placed from our reading of it with a product or launch directory's listings at level B, a syndication feed at C and a company's own blog read as a publication; the share of a site's links that are nofollow comes from the links our audits verified there when there are three or more; and yahoo.com is priced as a news publication, level A. Every stored campaign was re-priced with it at launch; the reports built with BV 2.3 stay on record as history.

value = worth up to (from Site Strength) × level factor × relevance × repeat-link share × copy share

Links worth $0

Starting value

traffic score = min(100, 100 × log10(1 + monthly organic visits) / log10(1 + 5,000,000,000))

Site Strength = ½ × Domain Rating + ½ × traffic score

worth up to = $2,265 × 2^((Site Strength − 100) / h), where h = (100 − 40.62) / log2(2265 / 179) = 16.22

Site Strength	Worth up to
100	$2,265
90	$1,477
80	$963
70	$628
60	$410
50	$267
40	$174
30	$114
20	$74
10	$48
0	$32

Kind of link: how likely search engines are to count it

Each link has a level, from search engines' own published position on which links count:

Level	What it is	Keeps
A counted	An editorial citation or a genuine contribution: linked because it is useful to readers, with no sign it was paid for, placed or mass-distributed.	100%
B may be discounted	A guest post, an article placed or sponsored by you on a real site, or a listing on a product, tool or startup directory.	50%
C usually neutralised	A press release or a copy of one, a syndicated article, a generic web directory, a forum post, profile or comment, a widget, or a footer, sidebar or menu link.	10%
D link network	A site on a server whose sites show footprints of one owner (Hosting and link networks, below), a link farm, a hacked page, or machine-generated content that exists to carry links.	5%

Relevance to your site

Relevance of the linking site to yours	Factor
Unrelated	0.5×
Loosely related	0.75×
Adjacent	1×
Closely related	1.1×
Same topic	1.25×

Relevance is about the linking site's usual subject, not the one article that carries the link, and is weighted by the model's probability for each step.

Traffic

Niche

Hosting and link networks

Nameservers — 60% or more of its sites use the same privately run nameservers. A registrar's or host's defaults are shared by millions of customers and do not count.
Registration dates — 60% or more of its registered domains were registered inside one 90 days.
Registrar — one registrar holds 70% or more of them.
Site theme — one WordPress theme runs on 70% or more of the homepages read.
Identical purchases — 90% or more of its sites with audited links carry the same number of them, and 95% or more of those links share one follow state.

Several links from one site

The same article on many sites

Rounding and totals

What changed from BV 2.3, and why

An audit of every publication mxverify lists found that its reading of a site — used where no link placed there has been judged — put three kinds of site at the wrong level. A product or launch directory was filed as a platform where users post and priced at level C, although a directory listing is level B; a press-release syndication subdomain was filed as a link network, level D, although a syndication host is never one; and a software company whose pages are its own articles was filed as a service, level C. BV 2.4 asks what kind of site it is with those kinds named. Where our audits verified three or more live links on a site, their nofollow share replaces the share read from its articles, which on a directory counts links that are not the listing.

Two more rules change on the checker. A site with nothing read and no link judged is level B by default; where our audits verified three or more live links there, their nofollow share of that B is now priced as C, as a reading's share is. And yahoo.com, priced as a search engine (level C) since 25 September, is priced by its news pages: its reading showed news pages (82% A), and the new question calls it a publication (59%). A link there is an editorial citation, level A, capped at C by its nofollow share like any other site's.

Parameter	BV 2.3 (previous)	BV 2.4
Kind of site in a reading (mxverify's checker)	A product or launch directory read as a platform where users post (C), a press-release syndication subdomain as a link network (D), a company whose pages are its own articles as a service (C)	Directories and syndication feeds named: a directory's listings keep the reading's mix with A counted as B; a syndication feed gives C; a company's own blog of original articles is a publication; a platform where users post, or a service with no articles of its own, gives C; a network D
Nofollow share (mxverify's checker)	The share in the articles read	The share among the live links our audits verified on the site, where there are three or more; otherwise the articles'
Default level (mxverify's checker)	B, when nothing was read and no link judged	B, with the nofollow share of three or more links our audits verified there priced as C
yahoo.com (mxverify's checker)	A search engine: level C	A news publication: level A, capped at C by its nofollow share
Everything else	Unchanged: every audited link is priced on its own judged page exactly as in BV 2.3 — Site Strength, levels A–D, networks, the caps, relevance, repeat links, copies, rounding

How it was checked. Every campaign on record was re-priced from its stored links at BV 2.4: the new rules changed no estimate, and the one move — $3 on one campaign — came from a site's traffic measured again since BV 2.3 went live. On mxverify, the 2,925 sites with a report were priced under both versions from the same records: 79 moved, from $2,788 to $3,555 of value per link between them — mostly directories and company blogs from C to B — and one site whose default B met three nofollow links our audits had verified fell from $165 to $33. yahoo.com, priced as a news publication from launch, went from $148 to $773 a link. On the 44 sites with a reading and three or more judged audit links, the new placement agrees with what those links turned out to be on 41; the old one agreed on 9.

BV 2.3 — 26 September 2026, until BV 2.4

What it measures

How much a link helps the site it points to rank — the link equity it passes, shown as Market Value. BV 2.3 is BV 2.2 priced on each linking site's measured traffic, with repeat links from one site bounded: each link past the third keeps half the one before, so one site is worth at most 1.4 times its best link. A post on dev.to, where anyone can publish, is valued at most as a guest post, and a link the audit could not verify ranks after the verified links from its site. Every stored campaign was re-priced with it at launch; the reports built with BV 2.2 stay on record as history.

value = worth up to (from Site Strength) × level factor × relevance × repeat-link share × copy share

Links worth $0

Starting value

traffic score = min(100, 100 × log10(1 + monthly organic visits) / log10(1 + 5,000,000,000))

Site Strength = ½ × Domain Rating + ½ × traffic score

worth up to = $2,265 × 2^((Site Strength − 100) / h), where h = (100 − 40.62) / log2(2265 / 179) = 16.22

Site Strength	Worth up to
100	$2,265
90	$1,477
80	$963
70	$628
60	$410
50	$267
40	$174
30	$114
20	$74
10	$48
0	$32

Kind of link: how likely search engines are to count it

Each link has a level, from search engines' own published position on which links count:

Level	What it is	Keeps
A counted	An editorial citation or a genuine contribution: linked because it is useful to readers, with no sign it was paid for, placed or mass-distributed.	100%
B may be discounted	A guest post, an article placed or sponsored by you on a real site, or a listing on a product, tool or startup directory.	50%
C usually neutralised	A press release or a copy of one, a syndicated article, a generic web directory, a forum post, profile or comment, a widget, or a footer, sidebar or menu link.	10%
D link network	A site on a server whose sites show footprints of one owner (Hosting and link networks, below), a link farm, a hacked page, or machine-generated content that exists to carry links.	5%

On mxverify's backlink value checker, a site with no audited link is judged from a reading of its articles: what kind of site it is, how established it is, whether it sells placements, and the kind of link it gives. A platform where users post, or a service, gives C, and a link network D. For the rest, the model's A stays A only in proportion to the chance the site is established or major and does not sell placements, and is B otherwise; the site's own share of nofollow links then moves that share of A and B to C. A search engine, social network, video platform, messaging app or AI assistant is priced at C, the listing, profile or user post it usually gives. The checker caps dev.to at B, as audits do. A site whose articles cannot be read is placed by the fixed rules.

Relevance to your site

Relevance of the linking site to yours	Factor
Unrelated	0.5×
Loosely related	0.75×
Adjacent	1×
Closely related	1.1×
Same topic	1.25×

Relevance is about the linking site's usual subject, not the one article that carries the link, and is weighted by the model's probability for each step.

Traffic

Niche

Hosting and link networks

Nameservers — 60% or more of its sites use the same privately run nameservers. A registrar's or host's defaults are shared by millions of customers and do not count.
Registration dates — 60% or more of its registered domains were registered inside one 90 days.
Registrar — one registrar holds 70% or more of them.
Site theme — one WordPress theme runs on 70% or more of the homepages read.
Identical purchases — 90% or more of its sites with audited links carry the same number of them, and 95% or more of those links share one follow state.

Several links from one site

The same article on many sites

Rounding and totals

What changed from BV 2.2, and why

A review of BV 2.2 found that half its value rested on traffic it had never measured: a linking site with no traffic figure counted as 10,000 monthly visits. BV 2.3 measured the 351 priced sites that had none and prices every report on each site's one traffic record; most of those sites have little or no search traffic, so values fell. It also read, on 1,609 priced pages never checked before, whether search engines may index them; 19 may not, and are worth $0.

It changes three rules. Links from one site past the third halve, one after another, instead of each keeping 10% without limit: a directory with 28 links to you had counted as almost four of its best link, and now counts as at most 1.4. A post on dev.to, which anyone can publish, is valued at most as a guest post (level B), even where the model read it as an editorial citation. And a link the audit could not verify, already left out of the estimate, can no longer take first place among a site's links and push a verified one down to 20%.

Parameter	BV 2.2 (previous)	BV 2.3
Site traffic	Half of Site Strength, from the estimate copied into the audit's row; not measured counts as 10,000 visits	Half of Site Strength, from the one traffic record per domain, read at every re-price; not measured still counts as 10,000 visits, and the 351 priced sites never measured were measured before launch
Several links from one site	100%, 20%, then 10% for every further link	100%, 20%, 10%, then half the one before (5% …); at most 1.4× the best link
Unverified links from one site	Ranked by value with the verified ones: one could take first place and leave the site's best verified link at 20%	Ranked after every verified link from the site, and still left out of the estimate
Posts on dev.to	The model's level, A included	At most level B, as a guest post; a nofollow post is still at most C
Everything else	Unchanged: Site Strength, levels A–D, the site reading, link networks by footprints of one owner, the nofollow, platform and high-risk-niche caps, relevance, copies, rounding

How it was checked. Before BV 2.3 went live, every campaign on record was re-priced from its stored links, and the engine was required to price BV 2.2 and every earlier version exactly as before. The estimated value of the 15 campaigns fell from $12,838 to $10,047: measured traffic and indexing took $1,224, dev.to posts at level B $1,306 and the bound on repeat links from one site $279, while ranking unverified links last added $18. The largest customer campaign fell from $3,820 to $2,526.

BV 2.2 — 25–26 September 2026, until BV 2.3

What it measures

How much a link helps the site it points to rank — the link equity it passes, shown as Market Value. BV 2.2 is BV 2.1 with link networks found by evidence of one owner, not by how many sites share a server. Every stored campaign was re-priced with it at launch; the reports built with BV 2.1 stay on record as history.

value = worth up to (from Site Strength) × level factor × relevance × repeat-link share × copy share

Links worth $0

Starting value

traffic score = min(100, 100 × log10(1 + monthly organic visits) / log10(1 + 5,000,000,000))

Site Strength = ½ × Domain Rating + ½ × traffic score

worth up to = $2,265 × 2^((Site Strength − 100) / h), where h = (100 − 40.62) / log2(2265 / 179) = 16.22

Site Strength	Worth up to
100	$2,265
90	$1,477
80	$963
70	$628
60	$410
50	$267
40	$174
30	$114
20	$74
10	$48
0	$32

Kind of link: how likely search engines are to count it

Each link has a level, from search engines' own published position on which links count:

Level	What it is	Keeps
A counted	An editorial citation or a genuine contribution: linked because it is useful to readers, with no sign it was paid for, placed or mass-distributed.	100%
B may be discounted	A guest post, an article placed or sponsored by you on a real site, or a listing on a product, tool or startup directory.	50%
C usually neutralised	A press release or a copy of one, a syndicated article, a generic web directory, a forum post, profile or comment, a widget, or a footer, sidebar or menu link.	10%
D link network	A site on a server whose sites show footprints of one owner (Hosting and link networks, below), a link farm, a hacked page, or machine-generated content that exists to carry links.	5%

On mxverify's backlink value checker, a site with no audited link is judged from a reading of its articles: what kind of site it is, how established it is, whether it sells placements, and the kind of link it gives. A platform where users post, or a service, gives C, and a link network D. For the rest, the model's A stays A only in proportion to the chance the site is established or major and does not sell placements, and is B otherwise; the site's own share of nofollow links then moves that share of A and B to C. A search engine, social network, video platform, messaging app or AI assistant is priced at C, the listing, profile or user post it usually gives. A site whose articles cannot be read is placed by the fixed rules.

Relevance to your site

Relevance of the linking site to yours	Factor
Unrelated	0.5×
Loosely related	0.75×
Adjacent	1×
Closely related	1.1×
Same topic	1.25×

Relevance is about the linking site's usual subject, not the one article that carries the link, and is weighted by the model's probability for each step.

Traffic

Half of Site Strength (Starting value, above), not a separate factor. The figure is an estimate of the linking site's monthly organic visits: a third-party estimate, fetched by audits or by mxverify's checker. A report is priced on the estimate copied into its audit's rows; a site with no estimate counts as 10,000 visits, neither marked up nor down.

Niche

Hosting and link networks

Nameservers — 60% or more of its sites use the same privately run nameservers. A registrar's or host's defaults are shared by millions of customers and do not count.
Registration dates — 60% or more of its registered domains were registered inside one 90 days.
Registrar — one registrar holds 70% or more of them.
Site theme — one WordPress theme runs on 70% or more of the homepages read.
Identical purchases — 90% or more of its sites with audited links carry the same number of them, and 95% or more of those links share one follow state.

Several links from one site

Ten links from one site are not ten sites vouching for you. Within each linking site, links are ranked by value; the strongest keeps 100%, the next 20%, every further one 10%. A link already worth $0 takes no place in that ranking.

The same article on many sites

Rounding and totals

What changed from BV 2.1, and why

BV 2.0 and 2.1 called a site's server a link network when more than 20 other audited sites shared it. Checked against the 21 servers mxverify lists, that count was wrong both ways: it put syndication hosts — one company's pages for many real newspapers and farm-market sites — at level D, and it missed one-owner networks of 10 to 20 sites. A shared address is evidence, not proof. BV 2.2 looks for the footprints only one owner leaves across a server's sites instead.

Parameter	BV 2.1 (previous)	BV 2.2
Link networks (level D)	A site sharing its server with more than 20 other audited sites	A site on a server whose sites show footprints of one owner: at least two of five agree, one of them nameservers, registration dates or theme
Syndication platforms	Level D when more than 20 other audited sites share the server	Never a network: the fixed rules read a page on one as a syndicated copy (C), and the model's D counts as C
A server not yet measured	—	Keeps BV 2.1's count until it is measured
Everything else	Unchanged: Site Strength, levels A–D, the site reading, the nofollow and platform caps, relevance, niche, repeat links from one site, copies, rounding

How it was checked. Before BV 2.2 went live, the 21 servers mxverify lists were classified by two blind reviews and a reconciliation: 16 one-owner networks and 5 syndication hosts. The footprint rule agrees on all 5 hosts and on 12 of the 16 networks; it marks the other 4 as one owner possible — a registrar and a buying pattern in common, nothing only one owner would share — and does not price them as networks. Re-priced from their stored links, 11 of the 15 campaigns on record did not change. A $29 press-release package rose from $130 to $138 as 124 syndicated copies left level D; the other three moved by $8 or less.

BV 2.1 — 25 September 2026, until BV 2.2

What it measures

BV 2.0's measure — link equity, shown as Market Value — on one continuous scale: the site's strength, its authority and its audience together, sets what a link could be worth, with no ceiling below the strongest sites on the web. Every stored campaign was re-priced with it at launch, and its reports stay on record.

value = worth up to (from Site Strength) × level factor × relevance × repeat-link share × copy share

Links worth $0

Starting value

traffic score = min(100, 100 × log10(1 + monthly organic visits) / log10(1 + 5,000,000,000))

Site Strength = ½ × Domain Rating + ½ × traffic score

worth up to = $2,265 × 2^((Site Strength − 100) / h), where h = (100 − 40.62) / log2(2265 / 179) = 16.22

Site Strength	Worth up to
100	$2,265
90	$1,477
80	$963
70	$628
60	$410
50	$267
40	$174
30	$114
20	$74
10	$48
0	$32

Kind of link: how likely search engines are to count it

Each link has a level, from search engines' own published position on which links count:

Level	What it is	Keeps
A counted	An editorial citation or a genuine contribution: linked because it is useful to readers, with no sign it was paid for, placed or mass-distributed.	100%
B may be discounted	A guest post, an article placed or sponsored by you on a real site, or a listing on a product, tool or startup directory.	50%
C usually neutralised	A press release or a copy of one, a syndicated article, a generic web directory, a forum post, profile or comment, a widget, or a footer, sidebar or menu link.	10%
D link network	A site sharing its server with more than 20 other audited sites, a link farm, a hacked page, or machine-generated content that exists to carry links.	5%

When the model cannot judge a link, fixed rules place it, and never at A — no rule can tell an earned citation from an undisclosed paid one. A site sharing its server with more than 20 other audited sites is D; a copy of an article found on another audited site, a press-release address or newswire, a forum, thread or comment, a directory, listing, profile or member page, and a link in a footer, header, menu, sidebar, widget or ad slot are C; a page that says it is sponsored, a guest post or partner content, a link in an author box, and every other link are B. The caps above then apply.

On mxverify's backlink value checker, a site with no audited link is judged from a reading of its articles: what kind of site it is, how established it is, whether it sells placements, and the kind of link it gives. A platform where users post, or a service, gives C, and a link network D. For the rest, the model's A stays A only in proportion to the chance the site is established or major and does not sell placements, and is B otherwise; the site's own share of nofollow links then moves that share of A and B to C. A search engine, social network, video platform, messaging app or AI assistant is priced at C, the listing, profile or user post it usually gives. A site whose articles cannot be read is placed by the fixed rules.

Relevance to your site

Relevance of the linking site to yours	Factor
Unrelated	0.5×
Loosely related	0.75×
Adjacent	1×
Closely related	1.1×
Same topic	1.25×

Relevance is about the linking site's usual subject, not the one article that carries the link, and is weighted by the model's probability for each step.

Traffic

Niche

Hosting and link networks

Every linking domain is resolved to the server it serves from. A site sharing a known server — not a CDN edge — with more than 20 other sites in the same audit is a link network, level D, whatever the page is, press-release copies included: the fixed rules place it at D, and the model, which judges most links, is told the same rule. A server is one address, or one announced address block whose addresses hold 8 or more of the audit's sites each on average, outside the large clouds and CDNs. Other links take no hosting discount.

Several links from one site

The same article on many sites

Rounding and totals

What changed from BV 2.0, and why

BV 2.0 started every link from one of five Domain Rating bands and multiplied it by one of four traffic bands. Both stopped rising: a Domain Rating of 70 counted the same as 100, and 100,000 monthly visits the same as 2.7 billion. So the strongest sites on the web — a search engine, an encyclopedia, a national newspaper — shared one ceiling with a middling blog, and could only differ by the kind of link they give.

BV 2.1 does what Ahrefs does for Domain Rating: it fixes the top of the scale first and places every other site against it, on Site Strength (Starting value, above). How much of that an audited link keeps — its level, the nofollow cap, relevance, repeat links, copies — is BV 2.0's, with two changes to the kind of link. A page on a free-hosting, link-in-bio or open publishing platform is at most level C, in audits and on mxverify's checker whichever way its level was set, because the Domain Rating it carries belongs to the platform and anyone can make the page. And on mxverify's checker, a reading of a site with no audited link may now give level A, where BV 2.0 counted a reading's A as B: the reading also asks what kind of site it is, how established, and whether it sells placements.

Parameter	BV 2.0 (previous)	BV 2.1
Starting value	Five Domain Rating bands, $25 / $100 / $179 / $200 / $342	Site Strength (half Domain Rating, half log organic traffic) to a continuous value, $32 at strength 0 to $2,265 at 100
Site traffic	A separate factor, 0.6× / 1× / 1.3× / 2×	Half of Site Strength; 5,000,000,000 monthly visits score 100; not measured counts as 10,000
Site reading (mxverify's checker)	The kind of link only: a reading's A counts as B, and the site's own nofollow share moves that share of B to C	Also the kind of site, its standing and whether it sells placements: A kept only in proportion to P(established or major) × P(does not sell placements), the rest B; a platform where users post, or a service, gives C, a network D; the nofollow share still moves that share of A and B to C. Only a site with an article read is judged
Platform pages	In audits, priced on the platform's Domain Rating at the model's level; on mxverify's checker, level C only when the fixed rules placed it — a reading or audited links priced it at their level	At most level C in audits and on mxverify's checker, whichever way the level was set; more free hosts listed (gitlab.io, bitbucket.io, pythonanywhere.com and others)
Strength on mxverify	—	Priced and shown in steps of 5, so Domain Rating cannot be read back from it
Everything else	Unchanged: levels A–D for audited links, the nofollow and high-risk-niche caps, relevance, link networks, repeat links from one site, copies, rounding

How it was checked. Before BV 2.1 went live, every campaign on record was re-priced under both versions from its stored links, and fifteen well-known and representative sites were read and judged. The first runs changed two rules: a site with no traffic figure had been scored as if it had the largest audience on the web, and a page on a free blog host kept the host's Domain Rating at level A. An independent review then found four defects, all fixed before launch. Re-priced from their stored links, 14 of the 15 campaigns on record moved between −21% and +39%, and one press-release package rose 84%. The largest customer campaign fell 21%, because its links on free blog hosts are now level C.

BV 2.0 — 24–25 September 2026, until BV 2.1

What it measures

How much a link helps the site it points to rank — link equity, shown as Market Value: the site's authority, times how likely search engines are to count the link, adjusted for the site's audience and its relevance to yours. Every stored campaign was re-priced with it at launch, and its reports stay on record.

value = Domain Rating band × level factor × traffic factor × relevance × repeat-link share × copy share

Links worth $0

Starting value

One link-equity scale by Ahrefs Domain Rating: the median asking price for a guest post in each band. No market figure exists below Domain Rating 10, so that band is set, not measured, at $25 — a site with almost no links passes almost no equity. It is the value of a followed editorial link (level A) of adjacent relevance on a site whose traffic was not measured. Every step below multiplies it.

Domain Rating	Starting value
70+	$342
50–69	$200
30–49	$179
10–29	$100
0–9	$25

Kind of link: how likely search engines are to count it

Each link has a level, from search engines' own published position on which links count:

Level	What it is	Keeps
A counted	An editorial citation or a genuine contribution: linked because it is useful to readers, with no sign it was paid for, placed or mass-distributed.	100%
B may be discounted	A guest post, an article placed or sponsored by you on a real site, or a listing on a product, tool or startup directory.	50%
C usually neutralised	A press release or a copy of one, a syndicated article, a generic web directory, a forum post, profile or comment, a widget, or a footer, sidebar or menu link.	10%
D link network	A site sharing its server with more than 20 other audited sites, a link farm, a hacked page, or machine-generated content that exists to carry links.	5%

On mxverify's backlink value checker, a site with no audited link is judged from a reading of the site, and a reading never gives A: its A counts as B, because a site fed by press releases read 98% A. The site's own share of nofollow links then moves that share of B to C. A page on a free-hosting, link-in-bio or open publishing platform is level C there only when the fixed rules place it; a reading, or the site's audited links, price it at their level.

Relevance to your site

The site's audience is a separate factor (Traffic, below). Relevance multiplies the value; a link the model could not judge multiplies by 1, so it is never marked down for something we have not measured.

Relevance of the linking site to yours	Factor
Unrelated	0.5×
Loosely related	0.75×
Adjacent	1×
Closely related	1.1×
Same topic	1.25×

Relevance is about the linking site's usual subject, not the one article that carries the link, and is weighted by the model's probability for each step.

Traffic

A separate factor, as evidence that search engines send the site visitors, from an estimate of the linking site's monthly organic visits: a third-party estimate, fetched by audits and, from 25 September, by mxverify's checker. A site with no estimate multiplies by 1.

Monthly organic visits	Factor
100,000+	2×
10,000–99,999	1.3×
1,000–9,999	1×
Under 1,000	0.6×

Niche

Hosting and link networks

Several links from one site

The same article on many sites

Rounding and totals

What changed from BV 1.1, and why

A method review in September 2026 traced every number in BV 1.x's rate tables to its source. None was measured. The followed-link table was copied from a published agency price guide that cites no data and does not say what kind of link it prices; the nofollow table was an estimate. Its top band — $1,700 for a followed link on a Domain Rating 70+ site — is roughly what the most expensive tenth of sellers ask for a guest post. The typical asking price at that level is about a fifth of it.

BV 1.x also priced every kind of link off that one table. A copy of a press release, syndicated to hundreds of sites, was priced as if it were a hand-placed article. Tested on two real purchases, BV 1.0 valued them at 11 and 29 times what was paid.

BV 2.0 asks a different question: how much does this link help the site it points to rank? Search engines' published spam policies say which kinds of link they count and which they neutralise, and BV 2.0 prices each link by that before anything else.

Parameter	BV 1.1 (previous)	BV 2.0
Gates	No link, dead, not indexable or unrated → $0; unverified → left out	Same, and a link from your own site is $0: it is not a backlink
Starting value	Rate table by Domain Rating and follow attribute: $25 to $1,700 followed	One link-equity scale by Domain Rating, the median asking price in each band: $25 / $100 / $179 / $200 / $342
Kind of link	Not considered	Four levels, A 1× to D 0.05×, judged by a model from the page itself
Link attribute	A separate, lower table for nofollow	A nofollow, sponsored or ugc link is at most level C
Hosting	10+ sites on one server keep 5%; every other link keeps 50%	A site sharing its server with more than 20 other audited sites is a network (level D). No flat discount on other links.
Niche	Premiums for high-priced niches, casino highest (1.64×)	No premium. A high-risk niche unrelated to your site is at most level C.
Relevance to your site	Not considered	From 0.5× (unrelated) to 1.25× (same topic)
Site traffic	Same bands, 0.6× / 1× / 1.3× / 2×; in BV 2.0 as evidence that search engines send the site visitors
Several links from one site	Unchanged: 100%, 20%, then 10% for every further link
Copies of one article	The most valuable copy 100%, every other copy 5%	The copy the others name as the original 100%, every other copy 5%
Rounding	Each link rounded, then summed	Summed exactly, rounded once

How it was checked. The model that judges each link's level and relevance was tested against 200 links from real audits before launch, and both versions were run over two real purchases: see "How the link model was calibrated" and "Tested on two real purchases", further down this page.

BV 1.1 — 24 September 2026, until BV 2.0

What it measures

What a link would be listed for: an asking-price rate table by Domain Rating and link attribute, adjusted for the site's traffic and niche, then a flat discount. BV 1.1 valued links exactly as BV 1.0 did and checked them better (What changed, below). Its reports stay on record.

value = rate-table mid rate × traffic factor × category factor × repeat-link share × copy share × hosting keep

Links worth $0

No link on the page; a dead page (404 or 410, a domain that no longer resolves, a "not found" page served with a 200 status, or a server error on two audits in a row); a page that is not indexable; links from search-engine domains; and an unrated domain. A link from your own site was valued like any other. A page that loads its article by script is read at source where it can be (MSN), and otherwise recorded as not verified — never as no link.

Unverified links — pages that blocked or timed out our auditor — were priced from the campaign's own verified links: the low end at $0, the high end at the followed rate, and the middle at the followed and nofollow rates mixed in the proportions the campaign's verified links showed — a verified page with no link counting $0, and the nofollow rate alone when nothing was verified. They counted toward gross value and were left out of the estimated value.

Starting value

A rate table by Ahrefs Domain Rating, with a separate, lower table for nofollow, sponsored or ugc links. Reports showed the low–high band; the mid rate was carried into every total.

Followed link (BV 1.1)
Domain Rating, followed	Low	Mid	High
70+	$900	$1,700	$2,500
50–69	$400	$650	$900
30–49	$150	$275	$400
10–29	$50	$100	$150
0–9	$0	$25	$50

Nofollow, sponsored or ugc (BV 1.1)
Domain Rating, nofollow	Low	Mid	High
70+	$50	$275	$500
50–69	$30	$150	$300
30–49	$15	$60	$120
10–29	$5	$20	$40
0–9	$0	$5	$15

Kind of link

Not considered. An editorial citation, a guest post, a copy of a press release and a forum profile were priced off the same table; the link attribute alone chose between the followed and nofollow tables.

Relevance to your site

Not considered.

Traffic

A market adjustment from an estimate of the linking site's monthly organic visits (a third-party estimate), multiplied with the category factor. A site with no estimate multiplied by 1.

Monthly organic visits	Factor
100,000+	2×
10,000–99,999	1.3×
1,000–9,999	1×
Under 1,000	0.6×

Niche

Category factors, from a keyword classifier reading the site: casino 1.64×, beauty 1.55×, dating 1.5×, cbd 1.49×, finance 1.44×, crypto 1.44×, legal 1.4×, adult 1.4×, business 1.38×, technology 1.21×, health 1.19×, education 0.8×, lifestyle 0.74×; every other category 1×. They came from marketplace prices, so the riskiest niches carried the highest premiums.

Hosting and link networks

Every linking domain was resolved to the address it serves from. 10 or more audited domains on one address, with a known host that is not a CDN, were treated as a private network, and their links kept 5%. Neighbouring addresses were merged into their announced address block where its addresses held 8 or more domains each on average, outside the large clouds and CDNs. Every other link kept 50% — a flat discount — including links whose hosting could not be identified.

Several links from one site

Within each linking site, links were ranked by value; the strongest kept 100%, the next 20%, every further one 10%. A link already worth $0 took no place in the ranking.

The same article on many sites

Copies of one article — pages naming the same canonical address, or sharing a distinctive article address across sites — were grouped. The most valuable verified copy kept 100% and every other copy 5%. The same headline spelled differently in two addresses was not recognised as one article.

Rounding and totals

Each link's rate × traffic × category was rounded to the dollar, again after the repeat-link share, and each link's contribution to the estimate was rounded before the total was summed. Gross value was every link's value before copies and the hosting keep; the estimated value applied both and left unverified links out. The three links of the worked example below were worth $1,234 gross and $539 estimated on this arithmetic.

What changed from BV 1.0, and why

Link checking. Some sites — MSN among them — send an empty page and load the article by script, so BV 1.0 read the link as missing. BV 1.1 reads an MSN article from MSN's public article data, including the source it names as the original, and records any other page that served neither the link nor its article as not verified: loaded by script — never as no link. Of 43 stored "no link" rows checked again, 1 became a verified followed link, 5 became not verified and 37 stayed "no link".

Traffic. Site traffic estimates are refreshed again after a three-day pause, which had left 879 domains at an estimate of 0 visits.

The valuation arithmetic is unchanged: a link's value moves only where what was found about it changed. Why BV 1.x was replaced is under BV 2.0.

BV 1.0 — Every report until BV 1.1 on 24 September 2026

What it measures

What a link would be listed for: an asking-price rate table by Domain Rating and link attribute, adjusted for the site's traffic and niche, then a flat discount. The engine as bklink built it, named BV 1.0 on 24 September 2026; every report until BV 1.1 went live that day was built with it and stays on record. It is described here as it stood that day; what changed while it was live is at the end.

value = rate-table mid rate × traffic factor × category factor × repeat-link share × copy share × hosting keep

Links worth $0

No link on the page; a dead page (404 or 410, a domain that no longer resolves, a "not found" page served with a 200 status, or a server error on two audits in a row); a page that is not indexable; links from search-engine domains; and an unrated domain. A link from your own site was valued like any other. A page that loads its article by script, and so served our auditor neither the link nor the article, was recorded as no link.

Starting value

A rate table by Ahrefs Domain Rating, with a separate, lower table for nofollow, sponsored or ugc links. Reports showed the low–high band; the mid rate was carried into every total.

Followed link (BV 1.0)
Domain Rating, followed	Low	Mid	High
70+	$900	$1,700	$2,500
50–69	$400	$650	$900
30–49	$150	$275	$400
10–29	$50	$100	$150
0–9	$0	$25	$50

Nofollow, sponsored or ugc (BV 1.0)
Domain Rating, nofollow	Low	Mid	High
70+	$50	$275	$500
50–69	$30	$150	$300
30–49	$15	$60	$120
10–29	$5	$20	$40
0–9	$0	$5	$15

Kind of link

Relevance to your site

Not considered.

Traffic

A market adjustment from an estimate of the linking site's monthly organic visits (a third-party estimate), multiplied with the category factor. A site with no estimate multiplied by 1. From 21 September 2026 until BV 1.1 the estimates were not refreshed: 879 domains already on record kept an estimate of 0 visits (0.6×), while domains seen for the first time counted as not measured (×1).

Monthly organic visits	Factor
100,000+	2×
10,000–99,999	1.3×
1,000–9,999	1×
Under 1,000	0.6×

Niche

Hosting and link networks

Several links from one site

Within each linking site, links were ranked by value; the strongest kept 100%, the next 20%, every further one 10%. A link already worth $0 took no place in the ranking.

The same article on many sites

Rounding and totals

What changed while it was live

The first version. On 14 September 2026 its network threshold rose from 5 to 10 domains on one address, and network links kept 5% rather than nothing. On 20 September 2026 Ahrefs Domain Rating became the only rating that prices a link, replacing a vendor rank that ran about 19% low on the same links. Why it was replaced is under BV 2.0.

Every version, side by side

Each cell is set out in full in its version's panel above.

Parameter	BV 2.8	BV 2.7	BV 2.6	BV 2.5	BV 2.4	BV 2.3	BV 2.2	BV 2.1	BV 2.0	BV 1.1	BV 1.0
Starting value	Site Strength: $32 at 0 to $2,265 at 100	Site Strength: $32 at 0 to $2,265 at 100	Site Strength: $32 at 0 to $2,265 at 100	Site Strength: $32 at 0 to $2,265 at 100	Site Strength: $32 at 0 to $2,265 at 100	Site Strength: $32 at 0 to $2,265 at 100	Site Strength: $32 at 0 to $2,265 at 100	Site Strength: $32 at 0 to $2,265 at 100	Domain Rating bands: $25 / $100 / $179 / $200 / $342	Rate table by Domain Rating: $25 to $1,700 followed	Rate table by Domain Rating: $25 to $1,700 followed
Kind of link	Levels A–D, judged by a model: 100% / 50% / 10% / 5%	Levels A–D, judged by a model: 100% / 50% / 10% / 5%	Levels A–D, judged by a model: 100% / 50% / 10% / 5%	Levels A–D, judged by a model: 100% / 50% / 10% / 5%	Levels A–D, judged by a model: 100% / 50% / 10% / 5%	Levels A–D, judged by a model: 100% / 50% / 10% / 5%	Levels A–D, judged by a model: 100% / 50% / 10% / 5%	Levels A–D, judged by a model: 100% / 50% / 10% / 5%	Levels A–D, judged by a model: 100% / 50% / 10% / 5%	Not considered	Not considered
Nofollow, sponsored, ugc	At most level C	At most level C	At most level C	At most level C	At most level C	At most level C	At most level C	At most level C	At most level C	A lower table: $5 to $275	A lower table: $5 to $275
Free-hosting, link-in-bio and open publishing pages	At most level C, in audits and on mxverify's checker	At most level C, in audits and on mxverify's checker	At most level C, in audits and on mxverify's checker	At most level C, in audits and on mxverify's checker	At most level C, in audits and on mxverify's checker	At most level C, in audits and on mxverify's checker	At most level C, in audits and on mxverify's checker	At most level C, in audits and on mxverify's checker	In audits, the platform's Domain Rating at the model's level; on mxverify's checker, level C only when the fixed rules placed it	The platform's Domain Rating, on the rate table	The platform's Domain Rating, on the rate table
Posts on dev.to	At most level B, as a guest post	At most level B, as a guest post	At most level B, as a guest post	At most level B, as a guest post	At most level B, as a guest post	At most level B, as a guest post	The model's level, A included	The model's level, A included	The model's level, A included	Like any other link	Like any other link
Reading of a site (mxverify's checker)	Kind of site, standing and selling, with directories and syndication feeds named: directory listings B, syndication feeds C, a company's own blog a publication; A kept for an established site that sells no placements; platforms and services C, networks D	Kind of site, standing and selling, with directories and syndication feeds named: directory listings B, syndication feeds C, a company's own blog a publication; A kept for an established site that sells no placements; platforms and services C, networks D	Kind of site, standing and selling, with directories and syndication feeds named: directory listings B, syndication feeds C, a company's own blog a publication; A kept for an established site that sells no placements; platforms and services C, networks D	Kind of site, standing and selling, with directories and syndication feeds named: directory listings B, syndication feeds C, a company's own blog a publication; A kept for an established site that sells no placements; platforms and services C, networks D	Kind of site, standing and selling, with directories and syndication feeds named: directory listings B, syndication feeds C, a company's own blog a publication; A kept for an established site that sells no placements; platforms and services C, networks D	Kind of site, standing and selling: A kept for an established site that sells no placements; platforms and services C, networks D	Kind of site, standing and selling: A kept for an established site that sells no placements; platforms and services C, networks D	Kind of site, standing and selling: A kept for an established site that sells no placements; platforms and services C, networks D	The kind of link only; A counts as B	—	—
A reading's nofollow share (mxverify's checker)	From three or more links our audits verified, else the articles'; it also caps a default B	From three or more links our audits verified, else the articles'; it also caps a default B	From three or more links our audits verified, else the articles'; it also caps a default B	From three or more links our audits verified, else the articles'; it also caps a default B	From three or more links our audits verified, else the articles'; it also caps a default B	From the articles read	From the articles read	From the articles read	From the articles read	—	—
Search engines and social networks (mxverify's checker)	Level C; yahoo.com is a news publication: level A, capped at C by its nofollow share	Level C; yahoo.com is a news publication: level A, capped at C by its nofollow share	Level C; yahoo.com is a news publication: level A, capped at C by its nofollow share	Level C; yahoo.com is a news publication: level A, capped at C by its nofollow share	Level C; yahoo.com is a news publication: level A, capped at C by its nofollow share	Level C, the listing, profile or user post they give	Level C, the listing, profile or user post they give	Level C, the listing, profile or user post they give	Read like any other site	—	—
High-risk niches (mxverify's checker)	Valued for a buyer outside the niche: at most C with the probability the site is in one; a same-niche buyer's value shown too	Valued for a buyer outside the niche: at most C with the probability the site is in one; a same-niche buyer's value shown too	Valued for a buyer outside the niche: at most C with the probability the site is in one; a same-niche buyer's value shown too	Valued for a buyer outside the niche: at most C with the probability the site is in one; a same-niche buyer's value shown too	Not considered; audits cap a link from one at C for a customer outside the niche	Not considered; audits cap a link from one at C for a customer outside the niche	Not considered; audits cap a link from one at C for a customer outside the niche	Not considered; audits cap a link from one at C for a customer outside the niche	Not considered; audits cap a link from one at C for a customer outside the niche	—	—
Sites Google lists no page of (mxverify's checker)	At most level C, once two searches 7+ days apart find no page and nothing on record shows Google indexing the site	At most level C, once two searches 7+ days apart find no page and nothing on record shows Google indexing the site	At most level C, once two searches 7+ days apart find no page and nothing on record shows Google indexing the site	Not considered	Not considered	Not considered	Not considered	Not considered	Not considered	—	—
Site traffic	Half of Site Strength, from one record per domain; not measured counts as none	Half of Site Strength, from one record per domain; not measured counts as 10,000 visits, or as none on a subdomain or below Domain Rating 1	Half of Site Strength, from one record per domain; not measured counts as 10,000 visits	Half of Site Strength, from one record per domain; not measured counts as 10,000 visits	Half of Site Strength, from one record per domain; not measured counts as 10,000 visits	Half of Site Strength, from one record per domain; not measured counts as 10,000 visits	Half of Site Strength; not measured counts as 10,000 visits	Half of Site Strength; not measured counts as 10,000 visits	A factor, 0.6× / 1× / 1.3× / 2×; not measured ×1	A factor, 0.6× / 1× / 1.3× / 2×; not measured ×1	A factor, 0.6× / 1× / 1.3× / 2×; not measured ×1
Niche	No premium; an unrelated high-risk niche is at most level C	No premium; an unrelated high-risk niche is at most level C	No premium; an unrelated high-risk niche is at most level C	No premium; an unrelated high-risk niche is at most level C	No premium; an unrelated high-risk niche is at most level C	No premium; an unrelated high-risk niche is at most level C	No premium; an unrelated high-risk niche is at most level C	No premium; an unrelated high-risk niche is at most level C	No premium; an unrelated high-risk niche is at most level C	Category factors, 0.74× to 1.64×	Category factors, 0.74× to 1.64×
Relevance to your site	0.5× (unrelated) to 1.25× (same topic)	0.5× (unrelated) to 1.25× (same topic)	0.5× (unrelated) to 1.25× (same topic)	0.5× (unrelated) to 1.25× (same topic)	0.5× (unrelated) to 1.25× (same topic)	0.5× (unrelated) to 1.25× (same topic)	0.5× (unrelated) to 1.25× (same topic)	0.5× (unrelated) to 1.25× (same topic)	0.5× (unrelated) to 1.25× (same topic)	Not considered	Not considered
Link networks	Footprints of one owner: level D; a syndication platform never	Footprints of one owner: level D; a syndication platform never	Footprints of one owner: level D; a syndication platform never	Footprints of one owner: level D; a syndication platform never	Footprints of one owner: level D; a syndication platform never	Footprints of one owner: level D; a syndication platform never	Footprints of one owner: level D; a syndication platform never	More than 20 other audited sites on one server: level D	More than 20 other audited sites on one server: level D	10+ domains on one address keep 5%	10+ domains on one address keep 5%
Every other link	No hosting discount	No hosting discount	No hosting discount	No hosting discount	No hosting discount	No hosting discount	No hosting discount	No hosting discount	No hosting discount	Keeps 50%	Keeps 50%
Several links from one site	100%, 20%, 10%, then half the one before (5% …); at most 1.4× the best link	100%, 20%, 10%, then half the one before (5% …); at most 1.4× the best link	100%, 20%, 10%, then half the one before (5% …); at most 1.4× the best link	100%, 20%, 10%, then half the one before (5% …); at most 1.4× the best link	100%, 20%, 10%, then half the one before (5% …); at most 1.4× the best link	100%, 20%, 10%, then half the one before (5% …); at most 1.4× the best link	100%, 20%, then 10% for every further link	100%, 20%, then 10% for every further link	100%, 20%, then 10% for every further link	100%, 20%, then 10% for every further link	100%, 20%, then 10% for every further link
A brand's subdomains	One site with the parent domain, for repeat links; a page on its own free-hosting subdomain stays a site of its own	One site with the parent domain, for repeat links; a page on its own free-hosting subdomain stays a site of its own	Each subdomain a site of its own	Each subdomain a site of its own	Each subdomain a site of its own	Each subdomain a site of its own	Each subdomain a site of its own	Each subdomain a site of its own	Each subdomain a site of its own	Each subdomain a site of its own	Each subdomain a site of its own
Unverified links from one site	Ranked after the verified ones	Ranked after the verified ones	Ranked after the verified ones	Ranked after the verified ones	Ranked after the verified ones	Ranked after the verified ones	Ranked by value with the verified ones	Ranked by value with the verified ones	Ranked by value with the verified ones	Ranked by value with the verified ones	Ranked by value with the verified ones
Copies of one article	The declared original 100%, every other copy 5%	The declared original 100%, every other copy 5%	The declared original 100%, every other copy 5%	The declared original 100%, every other copy 5%	The declared original 100%, every other copy 5%	The declared original 100%, every other copy 5%	The declared original 100%, every other copy 5%	The declared original 100%, every other copy 5%	The declared original 100%, every other copy 5%	The most valuable copy 100%, every other copy 5%	The most valuable copy 100%, every other copy 5%
A link from your own site	$0: not a backlink	$0: not a backlink	$0: not a backlink	$0: not a backlink	$0: not a backlink	$0: not a backlink	$0: not a backlink	$0: not a backlink	$0: not a backlink	Valued like any other	Valued like any other
Articles loaded by script	Read at source, or not verified	Read at source, or not verified	Read at source, or not verified	Read at source, or not verified	Read at source, or not verified	Read at source, or not verified	Read at source, or not verified	Read at source, or not verified	Read at source, or not verified	Read at source, or not verified	Read as no link
Rounding	Summed exactly, rounded once	Summed exactly, rounded once	Summed exactly, rounded once	Summed exactly, rounded once	Summed exactly, rounded once	Summed exactly, rounded once	Summed exactly, rounded once	Summed exactly, rounded once	Summed exactly, rounded once	Each link rounded, then summed	Each link rounded, then summed

Tested on two real purchases

Two press-release distribution packages, placed in 2026 and audited in September 2026, valued over the same stored audits by BV 1.0 and by each version since BV 2.0. BV 2.4, BV 2.5 and BV 2.6 changed only mxverify's checker, so their figures are BV 2.3's. The BV 2.7 figures come from pricing the same audits on each site's records as of 29 September 2026, before launch; the stored reports were not re-priced. The BV 2.8 figures are the same audits priced on the records of 3 October 2026, where BV 2.7 and BV 2.8 give the same amounts.

Package	Paid	BV 1.0	BV 2.0	BV 2.1	BV 2.2	BV 2.3–2.6	BV 2.7	BV 2.8
Press-release distribution, 849 placements	$129	$3,726 (29×)	$111 (0.9×)	$204 (1.6×)	$204 (1.6×)	$189 (1.5×)	$174 (1.3×)	$174 (1.3×)
Press-release distribution, 550 placements	$29	$322 (11×)	$130 (4.5×)	$130 (4.5×)	$138 (4.8×)	$113 (3.9×)	$99 (3.4×)	$96 (3.3×)

The second package stays above what was paid because its release reached hundreds of live copies on established sites, and each copy keeps 5% of a credited copy's value. The first rises under BV 2.1 because its copies sit on high-traffic finance and news sites, which BV 2.0's traffic ceiling flattened. The second rises under BV 2.2 because 124 of its copies sit on syndication platforms that BV 2.1's server count had put at level D. Both fall under BV 2.3, to $189 and $113, mostly because their sites were re-priced on measured traffic and read for indexing; ranking unverified links last gives the second $18 of that back. Both fall again under BV 2.7, to $174 and $99: most of their copies sit on subdomains of a few wire brands, which now rank as one site each, and many of those subdomains have no traffic figure, which now counts as none. Without BV 2.7 the first would have risen to $260, because Ahrefs began rating hundreds of its copy hosts in late September. BV 2.8 moves neither: the second's $96 against $99 is newer records, not the change. Earlier drafts of this page showed its BV 2.0 figure as $229 (a hand calculation that counted one release, filed under two address patterns, as two) and then $186 (priced on fixed rules before the model's judgements were available).

In the first package, three links made up 96% of BV 1.0's figure. Those three, and the page the release was first published on, link by link at the fixed level factors (BV 2.2 prices each of them as BV 2.1 does):

Link	BV 1.0	BV 2.0	BV 2.1	Why it changed
Copy on a national newspaper's markets feedDR 90 · followed · finance · 100,000+ visits	$2,448	$3.42	$3.79	BV 1.0 credited it as the most valuable copy, at a guest-post rate with a finance premium. In BV 2.0 it is another copy of the release: level C, 5%.
Copy on a financial newswireDR 82 · followed · visits not measured	$850	$1.71	$2.20	BV 1.0 missed that it was a copy (its address spells the headline differently). BV 2.0 recognises it: 5%.
Copy in a national newspaper's press-release sectionDR 92 · nofollow · 100,000+ visits	$275	$68.40	$79.08	Credited copy of its release in both. Level C instead of the nofollow table.
The release's source publicationDR 64 · followed · visits not measured	$16	$20	$29.90	The copy the others declare as the original, so BV 2.0 credits it; BV 1.0 treated it as a weaker copy.
The other 845 placements	$137	$13.06	—	Mostly copies of the release at 5%; sites Ahrefs does not rate, and dead or missing links, are $0 in every version.

Try it

Try it — value one link

Pick what describes one link. Both versions value it side by side, step by step. For one verified, live link; a report also leaves out links it could not verify.

Ahrefs DR of the linking site

Link attribute

Kind of link

Copies of the same article

Links from this site

Site's niche

Relevance to your site

Site's monthly organic visits

BV 2.8 values this link 11% lower than BV 2.0: $61.19 against $68.40.

BV 2.0 · previous

$68.40

Link equity, DR 70+$342
Level C: usually neutralised× 0.1
Traffic (100,000 – 999,999)× 2
Relevance to your site (adjacent)× 1
Nicheno premium, no penalty× 1
Strongest link from this site× 1
Only copy, or the declared original× 1

BV 2.8 · live

$61.19

Site Strength 69 (DR 80, 100,000 – 999,999 visits)worth up to, for a followed editorial link$611.89
Level C: usually neutralised× 0.1
Relevance to your site (adjacent)× 1
Nicheno premium, no penalty× 1
Strongest link from this site× 1
Only copy, or the declared original× 1

BV 2.8 is live. Since BV 2.1 it replaces BV 2.0's authority bands and traffic bands with one Site Strength — half the site's Domain Rating, half its organic traffic on a log scale — so a bigger, stronger site is always worth more, with no ceiling at DR 70 or 100,000 visits. In production a model judges each link's level and relevance from the page itself; the simulator applies each level's fixed factor (A 1.0, B 0.5, C 0.1, D 0.05) to the kind you pick. A page on a free-hosting or link-in-bio platform is at most C, whatever its host's Domain Rating. BV 2.2 changed how a link network is found — by footprints of one owner across a server's sites — which the simulator leaves to the kind you pick. BV 2.3 halves each link from one site past the third, so one site is worth at most 1.4 times its best link; values a post on dev.to at most as a guest post (B); and re-prices every report on each site's measured traffic. BV 2.7 counts traffic that was never measured as none on a subdomain, whose Domain Rating is its parent domain's, and below Domain Rating 1, and ranks a domain's subdomains as one site; the simulated link is on a site of its own, rated 5 or more, so neither arises here.

BV 2.8 in detail (live)

Everything from here to "When the model changes" describes BV 2.8, the live version, exactly as the audit engine runs it. Each earlier version is set out in full in its own panel in the picker above.

The two numbers in every report

Gross value: Every link at its full value — authority, link level, audience, relevance and repeat links from one site — before copies of one article are collapsed and before unverified links are left out.
Estimated value: What the profile is worth after copies are collapsed, with links the audit could not verify left out entirely. This is the figure on the dashboard, on project cards and in the value-over-time chart.

What the model reads

The link and the page — bklink loads every page you list and reads the link (followed, nofollow / sponsored / ugc, or missing), where it sits on the page (in the article, a sidebar, a footer, a comment), the words around it, and the page's own title and opening. Nothing here comes from a third-party index.
Domain Rating — Ahrefs Domain Rating, from the Ahrefs API, and nothing else. A domain Ahrefs does not rate is unrated, not estimated. Cached per domain for up to 30 days.
Organic traffic — an estimate of the linking site's monthly organic visits, kept once per domain and refreshed at most every 30 days: a third-party estimate, fetched by audits or by mxverify's checker. A new audit or links check reads that one record; a stored report keeps the figures it was priced on until then. It is half of Site Strength; a site with no estimate counts as none until one is fetched: the median measured site has about one visit a month, so a typical site's figure would mark it up.
Hosting — every linking domain is resolved to the address it serves from, via public DNS. Cached for up to 7 days.
Across the audit — which links are copies of the same article, and how many audited sites share a server.
Across the directory — for each server with 10 or more audited publications, the footprints of its sites: nameservers and registrar from public records, registration dates, and the theme each homepage runs, read once per site and again after 90 days.
Indexability — whether the page tells search engines not to index it: a noindex tag or header, a canonical pointing elsewhere, or a robots.txt block.

Worked example

Three illustrative links through the live engine, BV 2.8, with illustrative model judgements: a followed link in a technology site's news article, a nofollow link on the same site's author profile, and a wire copy of the same article on a small news site.

Link	Strength	Worth up to	Level	Relevance	Same site	Copy	Value
tech-review.example/news/acme-analytics-launches-reporting-suite-for-marketing-agenciesdofollow · DR 55	50.1	$268	A · 85%	1.11×	100%	100%	$253.04
tech-review.example/authors/acme-profilenofollow · DR 55	50.1	$268	C · 10%	1.11×	20%	100%	$5.95
wire.example/story/acme-analytics-launches-reporting-suite-for-marketing-agenciesdofollow · DR 38	33.3	$131	C · 14%	0.77×	100%	5%	$0.71
Estimated value (summed, rounded once)							$260

How a property is valued

A property — the site you are building links to — is not the sum of its reports. bklink takes the latest audit of every campaign on the property, merges their links, removes duplicates (the same address listed in two campaigns counts once), and runs the whole model again on the combined set: a link that was the strongest from its site in one campaign can become the second once another campaign's stronger link from the same site is merged in, and copies of one article are grouped across campaigns.

Value over time replays that calculation at each audit: at every point on the chart, the value is what the property's links were worth using the latest audit of each campaign as of that moment.

How the link model was calibrated

Before BV 2.0 went live, the model that judges each link's level and relevance — the same model every version since uses — was tested against 200 links from real audits. The definitions were settled on 103 of them; the other 97 were held back as a test. On those 97, compared with a blind review of every link on which the owner's labels, the model and fixed rules disagreed:

	Level agreement	Two or more levels off
The model	86%	3%
Fixed rules	73%	13%

Its stated probabilities matched how often it was right to within a few points, and relevance was within one step on three links in four. The review was partly done by an AI, so it is not fully independent of the model; bklink will repeat the check with an independent human reviewer, and watches where the model and the rules disagree. The model tends to rate product-directory listings a level too high.

What the model does not capture

Asserted factors. The two anchors of the value scale are market data; the equal weight of authority and traffic in Site Strength, the traffic of the typical site the lower anchor describes, and the level and relevance factors are set by rule and checked in calibration, not measured from rankings.
Vendor models. Organic traffic is a third-party estimate, not measured visits; Domain Rating is Ahrefs' model of link authority.
Pages that load their article by script are marked "not verified" rather than read, except MSN, which is read at source.
Copies with no declared original credit the most valuable copy, which can credit a copy over the original.
Networks outside the directory. Footprints are read for servers with 10 or more audited publications. A smaller group, or one spread over several servers, is not found that way; the model reading each link can still judge a page to be part of a network.
Language and market scarcity — the premium some non-English markets command — is not modelled.

When the model changes

Every report records the version that built it. The most recent changes:

3 October 2026 — BV 2.8 goes live. Traffic that was never measured counts as none on every rated site, not as 10,000 visits: the median measured site has about one visit a month, so the old figure valued an unmeasured site above most measured ones. Traffic was fetched the same day for every rated site that had none. Stored reports were not re-priced.
29 September 2026 — BV 2.7 goes live. A subdomain, whose Domain Rating is its parent domain's, and a site rated below Domain Rating 1 count traffic that was never measured as none, not as 10,000 visits. In an audit, the subdomains of one domain rank with it as one site among the links from it; a page on its own subdomain of a free-hosting platform stays a site of its own. Stored reports were not re-priced: each keeps its figures until its campaign is audited or its links are checked again.
29 September 2026 — BV 2.6 goes live. On mxverify, a site Google lists no page of is priced at most level C once a second search at least 7 days after the first confirms it, unless something on record shows Google indexing the site. Audit prices are unchanged.
27 September 2026 — BV 2.5 goes live. On mxverify, a site in a high-risk niche is valued for a buyer outside it: its link is at most level C with the probability it is in one, as audits already price it for a customer outside the niche. Audit prices are unchanged; every campaign was re-stamped at BV 2.5.
26 September 2026 — BV 2.4 goes live. On mxverify, a site's reading names directories and syndication feeds: a directory's listings are level B, a syndication feed C, and a company's own blog is read as a publication. Where our audits verified three or more links on a site, their nofollow share is used instead of its articles'. yahoo.com is priced as a news publication. Audit prices are unchanged; every campaign was re-stamped at BV 2.4.
26 September 2026 — BV 2.3 goes live. Every report is priced on each linking site's one traffic record, now measured for every priced site. Each link from one site past the third keeps half the one before, so one site is worth at most 1.4 times its best link. A post on dev.to is at most level B, and a link the audit could not verify ranks after the verified links from its site. Every campaign was re-priced at BV 2.3; earlier reports stay on record.
25 September 2026 — BV 2.2 goes live. A site is level D, a link network, when its server's sites show footprints of one owner — private nameservers, registration dates, a registrar, a theme, identical purchases — not because more than 20 audited sites share its server; a syndication host is never one. Every campaign was re-priced at BV 2.2; earlier reports stay on record.
25 September 2026 — on mxverify's backlink value checker, a search engine, social network, video platform, messaging app or AI assistant is priced at level C, the listing, profile or user post it usually gives, and its report lists every kind of link it can give and which are not backlinks at all. Level D is named a link network. Audits are unchanged: each link is judged on its own page.
25 September 2026 — BV 2.1 goes live. One continuous scale replaces the Domain Rating and traffic bands: Site Strength (half Domain Rating, half organic traffic) sets what a link could be worth, anchored at $2,265 for the strongest site. A page on a free-hosting or link-in-bio platform is at most level C. Every campaign was re-priced at BV 2.1; earlier reports stay on record.
24 September 2026 — BV 2.0 goes live. Link equity by Domain Rating, weighted by how likely search engines are to count each link (judged by a calibrated model), the site's audience and its relevance to yours; copies credited to the declared original; a link from your own site is $0. Every campaign was re-priced at BV 2.0; earlier reports stay on record.
24 September 2026 — BV 1.1: link checking reads articles loaded by script, and a page that cannot be read that way is reported as not verified, never as "no link". Site traffic estimates are refreshed again after a three-day pause.
24 September 2026 — the algorithm is named BV and the model then in use is BV 1.0.
20 September 2026 — only Ahrefs Domain Rating prices a link. It replaced a vendor rank that ran about 19% low on the same links.
14 September 2026 — BV 1.0's network threshold rose to 10 domains on one address, and network links kept 5% rather than nothing.

Questions about a figure in your report: support@bklink.uk. Written and maintained by Palash Bagchi, founder of bklink. See also About bklink.

How bklink values a backlink and a property

Backlink Value (BV) — the algorithm and its versions

BV 2.8 — Live from 3 October 2026

What it measures

Links worth $0

Starting value

Kind of link: how likely search engines are to count it

Relevance to your site

Traffic

Niche

Hosting and link networks

Several links from one site

The same article on many sites

Rounding and totals

What changed from BV 2.7, and why

BV 2.7 — 29 September 2026 – 3 October 2026, until BV 2.8

What it measures

Links worth $0

Starting value

Kind of link: how likely search engines are to count it

Relevance to your site

Traffic

Niche

Hosting and link networks

Several links from one site

The same article on many sites

Rounding and totals

What changed from BV 2.6, and why

BV 2.6 — 29 September 2026, until BV 2.7

What it measures

Links worth $0

Starting value

Kind of link: how likely search engines are to count it

Relevance to your site

Traffic

Niche

Hosting and link networks

Several links from one site

The same article on many sites

Rounding and totals

What changed from BV 2.5, and why

BV 2.5 — 27–29 September 2026, until BV 2.6

What it measures

Links worth $0

Starting value

Kind of link: how likely search engines are to count it

Relevance to your site

Traffic

Niche

Hosting and link networks

Several links from one site

The same article on many sites

Rounding and totals

What changed from BV 2.4, and why

BV 2.4 — 26–27 September 2026, until BV 2.5

What it measures

Links worth $0

Starting value

Kind of link: how likely search engines are to count it

Relevance to your site

Traffic

Niche

Hosting and link networks

Several links from one site

The same article on many sites

Rounding and totals

What changed from BV 2.3, and why

BV 2.3 — 26 September 2026, until BV 2.4

What it measures

Links worth $0

Starting value

Kind of link: how likely search engines are to count it

Relevance to your site

Traffic

Niche

Hosting and link networks

Several links from one site

The same article on many sites

Rounding and totals

What changed from BV 2.2, and why