How to Submit to LinkSalad, and What Skipping the Queue Costs

The links are real, and that deserves saying first

Across 181 HTML files we fetched, the string nofollow appears zero times. So does sponsored, and so does ugc. Every anchor pointing at a customer's domain carries rel="noopener", which is a security attribute with no bearing on whether a link passes authority. On the 74 project pages we audited in detail, not one href was wrapped in a redirect, a tracking parameter or a click interstitial: the link is the destination, unmangled.

We also checked for the trick where a site shows crawlers something it doesn't show people. Five project pages and the homepage were re-fetched under a Googlebot user agent and came back semantically identical to the same pages under an ordinary one, with the same titles, the same external links and rel attributes, and the same robots directives. Because two fetches of the same page under the same agent already differed by tens of thousands of bytes, we ran that control first to be sure the differences were streaming noise rather than a response to the agent.

One more credit, because it is unusual. Listings last. Every one of the 29 project slugs we could only find in February and May archive captures still returns a live page today, carrying the same clean followed links. What rotates on LinkSalad is position on the homepage, not the link itself.

What $9.9 buys is a place further up a queue

The Premium Launch card lists four bullets and the first is Skip the Free Queue - Priority access, their hyphen. That is a precise description of the product and it is worth taking literally. The FAQ fills in what the queue is: five free projects, ten premium and three premium plus launch each day, and the scheduling horizon runs 90 days for free users, 30 for premium and 14 for premium plus. So the fee is mostly buying calendar.

The card also promises a "Guaranteed Dofollow Backlink", and their FAQ names two ways to earn one: ranking in the top 3 projects of the day, or submitting a Premium project. We could not test the free side of that, and we want to be exact about why. In the homepage payload, every single listed project is tagged premium or premium plus, twenty and four out of twenty-four, with no free one among them, and both archived homepages show the same thing. So we never found a free listing to inspect. Either the distinction isn't enforced in the pages we read, or nothing currently on display came in free. We can't tell you which, and neither can the pricing page, which sells no free card and never states the free tier's terms.

The reach number on the page you pay from

On /boost the line is scoped: Tens of thousands of unique visitors every month across the network. The pricing page prints the same sentence with those three words removed, directly above the price, with no date and no source. Their own /sponsors page, on the same day, states 1,899 unique visitors and 5,070 page views for the last 30 days. A third-party checker we looked at puts monthly traffic around 1.0K, which sits with the smaller figure rather than the larger one.

Give them this: publishing a real traffic number at all puts them ahead of most of the directories we write about, and 1,899 is not a number anyone invents to impress you. The issue is only that the two sentences are at least ten times apart, since "tens of thousands" starts at twenty thousand, and the bigger one is the one printed next to the price.

The DR line has the same shape. The homepage today reads Gain DR 15+ authority with every link you submit; both archived copies we pulled, from February and May 2026, read DR 30+ instead. The DR Booster sells "10 dofollow backlinks from DR 20-60 sites" while linksalad.me is itself rated 19, a figure they publish on their own homepage three times over.

Two rendering details on the cards themselves

The DR Booster card as served reads $50 struck through $0. That is not a typo we are reading uncharitably; it is what the page renders. The reason is in their own shipped code: the displayed $50 is a fixed constant, while the struck "old price" is computed at render time as nine dollars multiplied by the number of sites in their network list. It shows $0 because that list is empty at the moment the page is drawn. The "Our Network" panel beside it names no sites, and the "10" in "10 dofollow backlinks" is likewise a hardcoded constant rather than a count of anything.

Smaller, but the same species: the Premium Plus card promises a Valuable SEO boost from our domain with a doubled space where a value was meant to be interpolated and rendered as nothing. Neither of these tells you the product is bad. They tell you the number next to the price is generated, not typed, and generated numbers are worth reading twice.

Paperwork, and how big the catalog really is

LinkSalad publishes real legal documents, which is more than several sites in this bracket manage: /legal/terms runs nine sections, /legal/privacy runs ten and asserts data-subject rights, and there is a separate badges policy. The gap is specific rather than general. The terms contain zero occurrences of refund, payment, purchase, price, fee, money-back, billing or cancel, so the document that governs the transaction says nothing about the transaction. Nobody is named as operator: across all 33 files we captured, 30 live pages plus robots.txt and two archive replays, there is no LLC, Inc, Ltd, GmbH, OÜ, B.V. or company number, word-boundary matched. The domain was created on 7 January 2026 and registered for a single year.

One detail may explain the refund contradiction. The FAQ's refusal is scoped to something it calls the "SEO Growth Package", a name that appears nowhere on the pricing page and nowhere on /boost. We have met that sentence before: Shipybara, an unrelated service we checked in July 2026, publishes "We do not offer refunds for the SEO Growth Package. Once purchased, the service is considered final and non-refundable." Two unconnected sites refusing refunds for the same product neither of them sells, in near-identical wording, looks more like inherited boilerplate than like either one's actual position. Which is a reason to ask them, rather than a reason to assume the answer.

On size, be careful with their sitemap, and so were we. It lists 450 URLs, but 332 of those return a page titled "Project Not Found" marked noindex. The real catalog is 118, which we reached two independent ways: fetching all 450, and crawling the hundred category pages, which surface exactly 118 distinct listings and orphan none of them. Their own feed payload agrees, reporting a total of 118. To their credit those 332 dead entries are marked noindex, so nobody is trying to get junk into the index. Worth noting separately: robots.txt points crawlers at a sitemap URL that returns 404, while the sitemap that works sits at a different path that nothing advertises.

Is a LinkSalad launch worth $9.9?

In absolute terms $9.9 is small, the link is genuinely followed, the page it sits on stays up, and nothing is being hidden from crawlers. If you want one more clean followed link from a DR 19 domain and you have ten dollars, it does what a ten-dollar listing can do, and it is honest about its own authority in a way that most of this bracket is not.

Read the fee for what their own bullet says it is, though. You are buying priority in a queue that has a free lane, and the pricing page sells no card for that lane, naming it once only to tell you to skip it. The reach line printed beside the price is roughly ten times the number they publish themselves. Whether you can get your money back depends on which of their pages you read, and the terms are silent on the subject. And per listing it is 10.2 times what a door costs here, which is the whole reason this guide exists.