Backlink exchange

RankPine's backlink exchange is an optional contextual-link network between participating customer sites. While a new article is being written, RankPine can reference one genuinely related article elsewhere in the network — but only if an existing sentence naturally supports the link.

It does not add sitewide footers, directory pages, "related reading" blocks, or automatic A-for-B swaps. If the destination does not fit the writing, RankPine skips it and spends nothing.

The dashboard

Open Backlinks in the site sidebar to see the site's participation state, available credits, next refresh, purchased reserve, and every earned or hosted placement.

Each row shows the source article and site, anchor text, destination article, referring Domain Rating, credit cost, date, direction, and current verification state.

The page header controls which new backlinks the site may receive:

• Source language means the language of the article linking to you. Keep the current same-language behavior, accept all supported languages, or choose a specific set of languages.
• Minimum referring Domain Rating is the lowest Ahrefs DR a site may have to create a new link to you. DR 0+ accepts any measured rating; higher thresholds reduce the available network pool and usually spend more credits per match.

These preferences apply to new matches. They do not remove or rewrite backlinks that were already placed.

Before a site can join

The participation switch unlocks when all of these are true:

• You are the site's owner.
• Your RankPine account has an active paid subscription. Trial accounts cannot join yet.
• Autopilot is on.
• A publishing integration is connected.
• RankPine has measured the site's Domain Rating.
• At least one article is published. RankPine uses the CMS destination when one is available, otherwise it derives the URL from the site's Blog address and article slug.

Hover or focus the participation switch to see every missing requirement. Turning autopilot off later immediately pauses participation.

How matching works

Credits

Every eligible site gets 100 included credits per UTC calendar month.

A placement costs the referring site's rounded Domain Rating, with a 10-credit minimum and a 100-credit maximum:

Included credits are spent first. They refresh on the first of the month and do not accumulate. One-time top-ups stay in the site's purchased reserve until they are used:

Choose Get more credits on the dashboard. Polar handles payment in an embedded checkout; a successful order is reconciled by both the signed webhook and the return page, with an idempotency guard so it can only credit the wallet once.

Buying credits does not buy a guaranteed number of links. Placement still depends on topical fit, available network supply, and the referring sites' DR.

Placement states

RankPine also refunds a reservation when article generation fails, the contextual edit finds no fit, you delete or archive the source article, an editor removes the link before publishing, the publishing integration disappears, or the CMS does not return a public URL.

Same-month refunds return credits to the buckets that paid for the placement. If the included-credit month has already ended, those expired monthly credits move to the purchased reserve so the refund does not disappear at the next refresh.

Turning participation off

Switch Participating off on the Backlinks page. RankPine stops creating new matches for the site. Existing public links are not remotely deleted from either customer's CMS; they remain visible in the ledger and continue through the normal verification lifecycle.

What another participant can see

The network uses only the public/site content needed to match and verify a link: article titles and URLs, site name and niche context, language, Domain Rating, anchor text, and placement state. It never exposes account email, credentials, tokens, billing data, private drafts, or full site settings to another customer.