OpenBacklinks, a community-run, non-profit marketplace for buying, selling, and swapping backlinks and sponsored posts, is now live. The platform connects site owners and buyers directly. It charges no markup on link sales and only a 5% flat fee when buyers top up their account credits.
OpenBacklinks was founded by Rickard Svedjestrand to make swapping and selling links more straightforward and fair for site owners. According to Rickard, the backlink industry has long been criticized for opaque pricing, anonymous resellers, and site owners receiving only a fraction of what buyers pay. OpenBacklinks was built to close that gap by removing the middleman. Unlike traditional link-buying services that route transactions through layers of resellers, OpenBacklinks helps website owners and SEO buyers worldwide buy, sell, and swap backlinks directly. The platform already lists over 8500 vetted sites across 96 countries spanning niches from general news and business to technology, travel, and lifestyle, with domain ratings reaching as high as 95.
“The people who actually create the value, the site owners who pay for hosting, write the content, and spend years building an audience, are the ones getting the smallest slice. I built OpenBacklinks to cut the reseller chain out,” said Rickard.
Rickard, who has led Moody Media AB since 2019, said the decision to launch OpenBacklinks and run it as a non-profit, community-run marketplace is to keep incentives aligned with the community. “Running OpenBacklinks as a non-profit is what keeps us honest,” he said. “We have no reason to push prices up or bury links in bulk packages. Our job is to ensure the marketplace remains fair, transparent, and useful to the community.”
OpenBacklinks operates on a simple three-step model that is designed for transparency at every stage. Step one requires webmasters to browse or list their site. Site owners can create free listings for their websites and set their price, link type, and turnaround time. Buyers filter the live marketplace by niche, country, domain rating, traffic, and price.
Step two is credit top-up. OpenBacklinks runs on an internal credit system where 1 credit is equivalent to EUR 1. Credits can be bought by card or invoice, and the only charge on the buying side is a flat 5% fee when credits are purchased. The platform doesn’t charge a markup on what sellers earn from link sales and also allows them to request payouts of withdrawable credits.
Step three is order placement with escrow protection. When a buyer places an order, credits are held in escrow and only released to the seller after the buyer verifies and approves the live link.
For site owners who prefer not to exchange money at all, OpenBacklinks supports free link swaps. The two members trade backlinks directly, and both placements are recorded on the platform for accountability.
The launch of OpenBacklinks comes at a time when search engines are increasingly relying on AI to evaluate the quality and authenticity of backlinks. OpenBacklinks requires every paid placement to be disclosed using rel=’sponsored ’ or rel=’nofollow ’ attributes. This positions the platform as a white hat alternative to bulk link packages and undisclosed paid placements.
Beyond being an open, fair marketplace for SEO backlinks, OpenBacklinks provides a rich resource hub for site owners to learn about backlinking and link-building tools and strategy, and how to identify spammy links. The platform includes an SEO Wiki consisting of checkable references built to help site owners and newcomers easily navigate SEO practices.
OpenBacklinks is now live at https://openbacklinks.org/, where site owners can list their sites for free and browse the live marketplace.
About OpenBacklinks:
OpenBacklinks is a community-run, non-profit marketplace for backlinks where site owners set their price, trade directly, and swap for free. The platform is built and funded by Moody Media AB, a Stockholm-based company established in 2019 that works with publishers and editorial link building. Moody Media covers OpenBacklinks’ running costs to keep the platform non-profit and free of markups.
For more information about backlinks and SEO backlinks or to sign up for access to the live marketplace, visit OpenBacklinks