Donation Backlinks: How to Get a DR 91 Nonprofit Link, and What We Found When We Checked the Page (2026)

In the video below I show you a backlink you can get in about an hour: donate to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and your logo and a link to your site go up on its corporate-giving page. The site is DR 91 in Ahrefs, pulls roughly 48,600 organic visits a month, mostly from the United States, and shows up in hundreds of AI answers. I called it a very, very powerful link. I still think the placement is worth knowing about. But before publishing this, we opened the page and read the HTML, and that changes how you should price it.

Every one of the 33 sponsor links on that page carries rel="nofollow". So this is not a guide to buying PageRank from a nonprofit. It is a guide to what a donation backlink actually is, what it costs, what it still does for you, and how to check any thank-you page before you give.

The site, as Ahrefs showed it in July 2026

The recording is from July 2026, so treat these as that month's numbers. The Site Explorer overview for eff.org read DR 91 and UR 31, 10.4 million backlinks from 79,100 referring domains, 7,100 organic keywords and 48,600 monthly organic visits, with an estimated traffic value of $26,600. The AI responses card showed the domain appearing in 190 AI Overviews and 168 ChatGPT answers.

Two things on that card I did not dwell on in the video. The six-month change columns were negative on the search side: organic keywords were down 5,800 and organic traffic down 1,900, and ChatGPT appearances were down 204. And three quarters of the traffic is American: 36,900 visits, 76% of the total, with the United Kingdom and India next at about 2,500 each. If your customers are in the US, that is the right audience. If they are not, a logo on this page is mostly a brand signal.

How the placement works

EFF's donate menu has a page called Corporate Giving and Sponsorships. It explains who they are, invites organisations to support the work through corporate gifts and event sponsorships, and then says thank you to the organisations who support them, with a wall of logos. That wall is the placement.

The logos are a mix. Fastly, SerpApi, Corellium, No Starch Press, DuckDuckGo and NordVPN sit at the top. Further down you get law firms, a VPN or three, a hardware security conference, an analytics tool, a cheese maker, and an online ammunition store. The point I made on camera stands: you do not need to be a privacy company to be listed, although privacy and security brands obviously fit the room better.

The corporate donation form asks for an organisation name and a contact, which is how the gift gets attributed to a company rather than a person. The one-off amounts offered are $10,000, $5,000 and $2,000, plus an open field. In the video I picked $2,000 to show the flow.

There is also a monthly track on the same form, from $25 a month up to $500 a month, with named levels. We re-read the live corporate-giving page on 15 October 2026. It does not publish a minimum for a logo listing. It says that for donations over $10,000 annually, or for event sponsorships, you should contact the development team by email, and the one-pager it links lists the benefits as discounted memberships for employees, thanks across EFF's platforms, print materials and eff.org, swag, member events and staff presentations. I guessed on camera that there might be a $500 minimum. I still do not know. Email them before you give and ask whether your tier includes the logo.

What we found when we checked the page

This is the part that is not in the video. On 15 October 2026 we fetched eff.org/thanks and read every anchor in the sponsor section. All 33 sponsor links, from Fastly down to the ammunition store, carry rel="nofollow". The only followed external links on the page are EFF's own social profiles, its Charity Navigator listing and a jobs page.

That is exactly what Google asks a site to do with a link that was given in exchange for money. Google's spam policies list "exchanging money for links" and "exchanging goods or services for links" as link spam, and its guidance on qualifying outbound links tells publishers to mark paid placements with sponsored or nofollow. EFF is following that guidance. For you as the donor, it means two things. There is no penalty risk in the placement, because the nonprofit has already told Google not to treat it as an endorsement. And there is no guaranteed ranking credit either.

Guaranteed is the operative word. Since September 2019 Google has treated nofollow, sponsored and ugc as hints rather than directives for ranking purposes, and since March 2020 as hints for crawling and indexing too. A hint means Google may choose to count the link along with other signals, or ignore it. Nobody outside Google can tell you which happens for a given link. So a DR 91 nofollow link is not worthless, but you cannot buy it as a ranking input the way you would buy an editorial link. We made the same mistake in reverse with the $500 backlink that turned out to be a pitch page for writers: the lesson both times is to read the page before you budget for it.

What a nofollow DR 91 link still does

Here is the honest case for still doing it, in order of how much I would weight each part.

• A brand mention on a site AI assistants already read. That Ahrefs card showed eff.org in 190 AI Overviews and 168 ChatGPT answers in July. Large language models do not read rel attributes the way PageRank does; they read the page. Being named on a page the models already cite is the mechanism we describe in brand mentions are the new backlinks, and a nofollow link carries a mention just as well as a followed one.
• Distribution, not just the link. The one-pager says thanks go out across EFF's platforms and print materials. It quotes a 500,000-subscriber newsletter and 209,000 Facebook followers. How much of that reaches a $2,000 donor is a question for their development contact, not something I can promise.
• Referral traffic. Small. A logo wall on a page about corporate giving is not a page people click through from in volume, even on a 48,600-visit site.
• The good-deed and tax points. EFF says donations are tax-deductible as allowed by law. Whether that applies to you depends on where you are and how you give, so ask your accountant. The good deed does not depend on anything.

What it does not do is move your Domain Rating the way a followed link from a DR 91 site would. If DR is what you are after, this is how DR actually moves, and the links that move it are followed editorial links on real pages.

Pricing it against the alternatives

In the video I compared the gift with what we charge for manually built links. Here is that comparison with the numbers as they appeared on screen in July 2026. Our order form is an embedded widget, so check the live page for today's prices before quoting any of these.

Option	What you pay	What you get	Follow status
EFF corporate gift	$2,000 one-off was the tier shown; no published minimum for a logo	Logo and link on one DR 91 page, thanks across EFF channels, member perks	Nofollow (verified 15 October 2026)
Manually built links from our backlink service	$490 for 3, $800 for 5, $1,500 for 10 (July 2026 form)	Editorial links on DR 40 to 70 sites with organic traffic, in your niche	Followed
Local nonprofit and charity links	Usually a smaller donation or sponsorship	A partners or sponsors page on a locally relevant site; the method is in our rank #1 on Google guide	Varies; check each page the same way

Read that table as three different products. The EFF gift buys a brand placement on an authoritative page. The built links buy ranking input. The local charity route can buy both, at a lower price, with the relevance signal that matters for a local business, which is why it is link type number one in our Google Business Profile SEO playbook. None of them is a substitute for the others.

How to check any thank-you page before you donate

Five minutes of checking would have changed how I framed the video, so do this for every donor page you are considering.

1. Find the page where sponsors are listed, not the donate form. On eff.org it is the Corporate Giving and Sponsorships page under the Donate menu.
2. Confirm the logos are links. Right-click a logo and inspect it, or view the page source and search for the sponsor's domain. Some sites list supporters as plain images with no link at all.
3. Read the rel attribute. Search the source for nofollow and sponsored. If the sponsor anchors carry either, you are buying a mention and a placement, not PageRank.
4. Check the page, not just the domain. Domain Rating is site-wide. The page itself may have little traffic and few links of its own; a UR of 31 on a DR 91 site is a reminder that the two differ. The way to think about this is in backlink quality vs quantity.
5. Ask the development contact what your tier includes. EFF publishes an email for exactly this. Ask whether the logo is included, whether it links, and how long it stays up.

The verdict

I would still give to EFF, and I would still take the logo. I would not put it in the backlinks column of a spreadsheet. It is a brand placement on a page that search engines and AI assistants already trust, bought with a donation the nonprofit is transparent about, and marked up exactly the way Google wants paid placements marked up. If you need followed links to move rankings, build or buy editorial ones and keep the donation for what it is.

FAQ

Are donation backlinks against Google's guidelines?

Google's spam policies treat links exchanged for money, goods or services as link spam when they pass ranking credit. A nonprofit that marks its sponsor links nofollow or sponsored, as EFF does, has taken the ranking credit out of the exchange, which is why the placement itself carries no penalty risk for the donor.

Do nofollow backlinks help SEO at all?

Since 2019 Google has treated nofollow as a hint, so a nofollow link may or may not be counted, and nobody outside Google can tell you which. Treat its value as the brand mention, the referral traffic and the AI-citation exposure, not as a ranking input you paid for.

How much do you have to donate to EFF to be listed as a sponsor?

As of October 2026 the corporate-giving page does not publish a minimum. The one-off corporate tiers shown on the form are $10,000, $5,000 and $2,000, monthly tiers run from $25 to $500 a month, and the page asks donors above $10,000 a year to email the development team. Ask that contact whether your tier includes a logo.

Is a donation backlink tax-deductible?

EFF states that donations are tax-deductible as allowed by law. Whether that applies to your business depends on your country and how the gift is made, so check with your accountant rather than assuming it.