Most people picture one thing when they hear "link exchange": you write an article, we find who to cite. That is one of four ways a link gets made here. The other three run in the background and hand you a suggestion when they find one worth showing you.
In every case the other site stays anonymous until you say yes. You judge the passage, the topic, and how strong the site is, never the domain. That is what keeps you from cherry-picking a name you recognize and what keeps anybody from reaching out to ask for a link instead of earning one.
This is the front door. Paste the title and a summary of something you are writing, or the whole draft if you have it. We search the network for pages worth citing inside it and hand you 3 to 5 suggestions, each one showing the exact paragraph it would support, a proposed anchor, and the tokens it would earn. Nothing happens until you pick one. Asking is free; agreeing to publish a link is what actually earns you tokens, and only once we fetch the page ourselves and confirm the link is there.
Most of what a site has written lives in the past, not in a draft folder. We read what you already published and look for a paragraph where a link would genuinely make the piece better. When we find one, you get the paragraph exactly as it stands, a suggested sentence with the anchor already in it, and what it is worth. You approve every single one before anything changes. Nothing on your site is ever touched without your click.
You can hold up to 10 of these open at a time. Leave one alone and it expires after 14 days and a fresh one takes its place. It is on by default the day a domain is approved, and you can switch it off entirely from that domain's settings if you would rather not see them.
Sometimes one of your published articles would be stronger with a citation, and nobody on the network has written the source yet. That is what a content bridge fixes. We spot the gap, sketch what the missing source would need to say, and invite a site that already knows the subject to go write it. Before that article exists, you are asked to promise the link: agree now, and once the article is published, checked, and genuinely matches what was asked for, you add a paragraph citing it and the link goes live.
Promising a link before the article exists earns an extra 15 bonus tokens on top of what the placement already earns, credited the moment the link verifies.
The writer has 30 days to publish. If they don't, your promise is cancelled and nothing is taken.
Every other kind of link on this page is decided by what a paragraph says. This one is decided by where two businesses actually work. A roofer in Nashville and a landscaper in Nashville are not competitors, and a genuine local write-up mentioning both is exactly what happens in real neighborhoods. So when a business near you, in a different trade, joins the network, you might get offered a mention.
These links always point at the other business's home page, and the anchor text is always their business name, nothing else. Never a keyword, never "best plumber near me". You add it to the body of one of your own articles, the same as any other citation. You can hold 5 of these offers open at a time, and once you are carrying 3 live local links, new offers simply stop coming until one of them expires or drops off. Once a pair of sites has linked in one direction, that exact pairing never repeats in that direction again.
Sometimes your page is one of the closest answers to a search and still does not get picked. We do not just let that disappear. If another site's draft came close to citing one of your pages, we tell you: the subject they were writing about, how close it was, and what was missing. You never find out who they were, and you never will. That is the point: this page is about your writing, not about the other site.
Next: How tokens work →