Donor and Acceptor: Link Building Terms
Donor and acceptor are a pair of basic link building terms. The donor is the site or specific page where a link is placed — in most English-language SEO guides, the linking page (or source page). The acceptor is the page the link points to — the target page. The linking page "gives away" part of its link equity and trust; the target page receives it. The words donor and acceptor come up constantly in contractor reports, on link marketplaces and in conversations with webmasters, especially in Eastern European SEO, so it pays to know exactly what they mean.
Donor and acceptor in simple terms
Say a review article on blog.example.org/bike-reviews/ links to a store page at shop.example.com/mountain-bikes/:
<a href="https://shop.example.com/mountain-bikes/">mountain bikes</a>- Donor (linking page) — the blog's review page (and, in the broader sense, the whole blog.example.org domain).
- Acceptor (target page) — the store's mountain bikes page.
- Anchor — the link text "mountain bikes"; more in the article on anchor text.
The role depends on the direction of the link, not on the site. The same page can be the acceptor for its inbound links and the donor for its outbound links. The logic is the same within a single site: in internal linking, a blog post is the donor and a product page is the acceptor.
Donors and acceptors in a link cascade
In a tiered structure, the roles shift at every level: a post that was the donor for your site becomes the acceptor for the next level's links.
| Level | Donor (linking page) | Acceptor (target page) |
|---|---|---|
| First | A post on an external site | Your promoted page |
| Second | A second-level post | A first-level post |
| Crowd | A forum or service post | A top-level post |
For example, on the $30 Basic plan, five first-level articles link to your site, 50 second-level posts link to them, and 5,000 crowd signals link to those. Your page is the acceptor only for the first five; everything else strengthens the linking pages. More in the article on tier 1 and tier 2.
How to choose a linking page: 7 signs of a good donor
The quality of a link is determined above all by the linking page. Check the specific page, not just the domain: strong domains have pages that will never make it into the index.
- The page is indexed. A link from a page outside Google's index passes nothing, however strong the domain. Check it with an index checker or the
site:operator with the full URL. This is the first thing we measure for every site. - The link passes equity. Look at the
relattribute:nofollow,ugcandsponsoredtell Google not to treat the link as an endorsement. Check both the raw HTML and the rendered page: they can differ — on some platforms the attribute is added or removed by a script, and it is not always clear in advance which version Google takes into account. - Domain authority. DR, the number of referring domains, organic traffic. A high DR with no traffic and no indexed posts is a red flag.
- Outbound links. If a page has dozens of external links to unrelated sites, the equity is split among them and the page itself looks like a link farm. Count a page's external links with the link analyzer.
- Topical relevance. When the linking and target pages cover related topics, the link is worth more and the profile looks less suspicious. On public platforms the site's topic is often neutral: what matters is the topic of the post itself, not the whole service.
- Link placement. A link in the main body with surrounding context works better than one in the footer, sidebar or a "partners" list.
- A real, active site. Does it have third-party content and an audience, is it updated, or was it built only to sell links?
How to vet a linking page before placement: step by step
- Open the page where the link will go (or already is) and make sure it returns a 200 status code and is not blocked with a noindex meta tag.
- Check whether that page, or other posts in the same section, are in Google's index. If a site's posts are widely not indexed, yours most likely won't be either.
- Find your link in the rendered page with the browser's "Inspect" tool and check its
relattribute. - Count the external links on the page and see where they lead: to relevant resources or to anything at all.
- Assess the domain: DR, number of referring domains, whether it has organic traffic and fresh content.
- Check again in two to four weeks: the page is still there, the link hasn't been removed, the page is still indexed.
Types of linking pages
| Donor type | What the link looks like | Things to know |
|---|---|---|
| A guest post on a niche site | A link in the body of the article | Strong context, but expensive and slow |
| Web 2.0 site | A post on a blogging platform or site builder | High DR for the service; indexing of posts varies widely |
| Forums, Q&A, comments | A link in a post or reply | Often nofollow or ugc; works as a crowd signal |
| Directories and profiles | A link in a listing | Weak context, useful for variety |
No type is good in itself: what decides it is how the specific page scores on the list above. A natural link profile benefits from a mix of donor types rather than all links coming from one kind of site.
Good vs bad linking page: comparison
| Sign | Good donor | Bad donor |
|---|---|---|
| Page indexing | The page is in Google's index | The page is not indexed or is blocked with noindex |
| Link attribute | No nofollow in the rendered DOM | nofollow, ugc or sponsored |
| Outbound links | A handful, on topic | Dozens, to anything |
| Traffic and audience | Has organic traffic | Links only, no visitors |
| Context | The link sits inside meaningful text | Footer, sidebar, list of links |
The acceptor: how to choose the target page
Links point to a specific URL, so the target page has to be chosen deliberately. Before placing links, check that:
- the page loads and returns a 200 status code, with no redirect to another URL;
- indexing is not blocked — neither in robots.txt nor by a noindex meta tag;
- the canonical URL points to the page itself, not to a neighboring one;
- the content answers the query you want to rank for: links strengthen a relevant page, but they don't make an irrelevant page relevant.
Otherwise, the equity will go to a different page or won't arrive at all. Links work best on pages already ranking in positions 4–20: they don't have far to go to reach the top. How to find such pages is described in the article on choosing a page.
Common mistakes with linking pages
- Judging a donor by domain DR alone. A strong domain with an unindexed page is useless for your link.
- Getting many links from one donor. A second and third link from the same site are worth much less than the first.
- Pointing links at a page with a redirect or someone else's canonical. Equity is partly lost or goes to the wrong place.
- Repeating one commercial anchor. Identical exact-match anchors from different donors look unnatural.
- Not rechecking donors after placement. Posts get deleted and pages drop out of the index — without a recheck, you won't know.
Donor base
This is the list of sites available for placement. In our case, as of September 2026, it is 72 vetted platforms, 45 of which are in active rotation: the lineup changes based on measurements, not agreements. First-level platforms include WordPress.com, Telegraph, Ameba, PIXNET, Notion, Blogger and others, with an average DR of about 85. About 61% of first-level articles get indexed by Google, so reports only count verified placements.
How many links from one donor
Value is determined by the number of different referring domains, not the total number of links. That is why variety of platforms matters more in a cascade than the number of posts on any one of them — and for the same reason, each platform has a cap on placements per project.