Documentation

What OrchardRank does

OrchardRank plans, writes and publishes SEO content for your website.

It does three jobs, and you pick the one you need: 1. Building a new site — it maps your subject into a plan (pillars and clusters), then writes the articles from that plan in the right order. 2. Writing a lot at once — you paste a list of topics and it writes them all. 3. Fixing a site you already have — it reads your existing pages, finds the weak ones, and upgrades them.

The part that makes it different: every article is graded before it can be published. If a draft would hurt your site — too thin, too similar to a page you already have, obviously machine-written — it is blocked and you are told why. You approve everything. Nothing reaches your website on its own.

Your first hour, step by step

1. Sign in and finish the short walkthrough. It takes about five minutes and covers the eight things that decide whether this works for you. 2. Connect your website under Publish → Connect a site. For WordPress you need your site address, your username, and an application password (see the article on WordPress application passwords). 3. Go to SEO Plan and enter your subject and your country. You get a plan of what to write. 4. Press Write on the first article. Watch it in Create. 5. When it is finished it appears in Review. Read it. Press Approve if you are happy. 6. Go to Publish and send it to your site.

If you have an existing website instead, start at Upgrade rather than SEO Plan.

Using it without a website

You do not need a website to use OrchardRank. You can write articles and download them as Word, HTML, Markdown or plain text from the Review screen, then paste them wherever you like.

Connecting a site only adds automatic publishing, internal linking to your existing pages, and the site audit.

What each tab is for

Home — what needs your attention today, and the three doors: plan a new site, write in bulk, or upgrade an existing site. SEO Plan — decide what to write. Turns a subject into pillars and supporting articles. Create — the writing queue. What is being written now, what failed, and a Retry button. Bulk — paste many topics or URLs and write them all in one go. Review — read what was written, see its score, approve or send it back. Publish — connect sites and send approved articles to them. Upgrade — for a site you already have: read it, audit it, fix and improve the pages. More → Internal links, SEO Tools, Silo structure, Site network, Automation. The bell — alerts. The person icon — settings, team, affiliate, sign out.

Why my menu looks different from someone I know

When you signed up we asked what you came here to do. The menu and your home page show the workflow you picked and hide the parts belonging to the other two, so you are not choosing between twenty things when five of them are yours.

The three are: building a new site, publishing at volume, and rescuing a site that stopped growing.

Nothing is taken away. Change it any time from the picker at the top of your home page, and pick Everything to see the whole product at once. There is also a "Show everything" link in the menu whenever anything is hidden.

The OrchardRank blog, and who writes it

There is a blog at /blog covering how people actually earn from a website — starting out, affiliate income, ads, local business, rescuing a site that stalled, buying and selling sites, and what is true about AI writing.

Worth knowing, because customers ask: those articles are written by the same engine you are paying for, and approved by a person before they go up. We would rather show you the output than describe it. If an article is thin, that tells you something real about the tool — which is why we publish it that way rather than hiring writers for our own marketing.

Articles state what they can honestly claim and no more. You will not find invented statistics or promised earnings, because that is exactly what the product is built not to produce.

What SEO means (and the words around it)

SEO means search engine optimisation: writing and organising pages so that Google and Bing can understand them and show them to people searching for that subject.

The words this product uses: - Keyword — what somebody types into Google. - Ranking — where your page appears in the results list. - Indexing — the search engine has read your page and is willing to show it. - Traffic — people arriving on your website from those results.

You do not have to know any of this to use the product. It makes the decisions; the words are only so the screens make sense.

Pillars, clusters and silos in plain words

A pillar is one big article about your main subject. A cluster is the smaller articles around it, each covering one narrow part. A silo is a pillar plus its cluster, linked together.

Why it matters: a search engine works out what your website is about by looking at how pages link to each other. Twenty scattered articles look like twenty subjects. One pillar with nineteen supporting articles looks like one subject you clearly know well.

The SEO Plan screen builds this shape for you. You do not have to design it.

Thin content, cannibalisation, schema — what the warnings mean

- Thin content: a page too short or too shallow to be useful. Search engines lower a whole site that has a lot of it. - Cannibalisation: two of your own pages competing for the same search. They split the score and both do worse than one good page would. - Schema: hidden labels on a page that tell a search engine "this is an article, this is the author, this is the FAQ". It is what produces the fancy result boxes. - E-E-A-T: experience, expertise, authority, trust — the things Google looks for to decide if a page deserves to be believed.

When a draft is blocked, the reason is written in these words, and each one links back here.

The Review screen and what the score means

Every finished draft lands in Review with a score out of 100 and a band: good, fair or blocked.

The score comes from quality gates that check real things — length against what the topic needs, whether it repeats a page you already published, reading level, heading structure, whether claims are supported, and machine-written patterns.

Blocked means at least one gate failed. You can still read it and send it back for another pass. It cannot be published until it passes, and that rule is the point of the product.

How long an article takes

A single article usually takes a few minutes. A bulk run takes longer because articles are written one after another rather than all at once — that keeps quality steady and cost predictable.

You do not have to sit and watch. Work continues if you close the tab, and you get an alert when it is done.

Writing in other languages

Articles can be written in many languages, and the quality checks understand which language they are reading — a Bengali article is not graded with an English reading formula.

You can also make a version of an article for another country or language. The versions are linked to each other properly (hreflang), so search engines understand they are the same article for different readers, not duplicates.

Images in articles

If you add an image provider key under Settings, articles get pictures: a featured image and a few inside the article, each with alt text that includes your keyword.

Without a key, articles publish without images. Nothing fails because of it.

Connecting WordPress (application password)

WordPress needs an application password, not your login password.

In your WordPress admin: Users → Profile → scroll to Application Passwords → type a name like "OrchardRank" → Add New Application Password → copy the code it shows you (it is shown once).

Then in OrchardRank: Publish → Connect a site → paste your site address, your WordPress username, and that code.

If it refuses: - Check the site address includes https:// and no trailing path. - Application Passwords need WordPress 5.6 or newer, over HTTPS. - Some security plugins block the REST API. Allow /wp-json/ for your own site.

Where do I get the key you are asking for?

Every key this tool asks for comes from somebody else's website — WordPress, Google, Facebook — and each one has its own guide here that names the exact buttons to press, in order.

Open the Setup page from the account menu. It shows what you have connected, what you have not, and a link to the guide for each one. The guides are also at /docs/connect and you do not need to be signed in to read them.

The short version of the four people ask about most:

WordPress: Users, then your own profile, then Application Passwords at the bottom. It is not your login password, and you can cancel it on its own without changing anything else.

Bing Webmaster Tools: sign in at bing.com/webmasters, then the settings gear, then API access.

Facebook, X, LinkedIn, Pinterest: each needs a developer account on that platform. They take about ten minutes each, and the guide walks through it.

Google Search Console: this one is genuinely hard — it needs an OAuth client made in Google Cloud. We say so up front rather than letting you find out at step six. Everything else in the product works without it.

Nothing here is required except a website, and that is only needed for publishing.

A publish failed — what to check

Open Publish and read the message on the row. It says what happened in plain words.

The common causes, in the order they actually happen: 1. The application password was changed or revoked. Reconnect the site. 2. A security plugin or firewall is blocking /wp-json/. Allow it. 3. The site moved to a new address. Update it under Publish. 4. The draft was not approved. Only approved drafts publish.

Nothing is charged for a publish that failed, and the same article cannot be published twice — if you press the button again and it is already live, you get the existing link back.

Where else it can publish

WordPress is fully supported: articles, images, categories, schema and internal links.

Ghost and Shopify are supported for publishing articles. Social posting can announce a new article on the accounts you connect.

You can also publish nowhere and simply download the article.

Fixing a site you already have

Go to Upgrade and connect the site. Then:

1. Sync — it reads the pages you already published. 2. Audit — it grades every page and lists the weak ones, worst first. You can download the whole report. 3. Fix — you choose what to improve. It rewrites, adds internal links to your other pages, and fills the gaps the audit found.

Nothing is changed on your website until you approve it. The audit itself changes nothing at all — it only reads.

Watching a job, and what to do when one fails

Every job writes a log while it runs, and you can watch the steps arrive on the card. It stays there afterwards, so you can look at something that failed yesterday.

A failed job costs you nothing. The words go back to your balance — that is true whether it broke or whether the writing was refused.

You do not need to report a failure to us. When something breaks for a reason that is ours we are told automatically, with the detail. If the log says the writing service refused the brief, the brief is usually asking for something the model will not write; medical and legal claims are the common ones. Reword the topic and try again.

How the word allowance works

Your plan includes a number of words per month. Writing an article uses words from that allowance.

Two things to know: - Words are reserved before an article is written and charged at what was actually delivered. If a job fails, nothing is taken. - When the allowance runs out, writing pauses until your next month starts. Nothing is charged automatically and nothing on your website is touched.

The number remaining is shown at the top right of every screen.

Plans and what is in them

Plans differ by how many words you get per month and which features are included. The current list, with prices, is on the Pricing page — that page is generated from the same settings the system enforces, so it cannot be out of date.

If you are not sure which plan fits, tell support what you publish in a month and on how many sites, and you will get a straight answer rather than the biggest plan.

Refunds and cancelling

The refund rules are written on the Refund page, including the trial and the pro-rata rule.

Cancelling stops future charges. Your articles, drafts and settings stay where they are, and anything already published on your own website is yours and is untouched.

Forgotten password

Use "Forgot your password?" on the sign-in page. You get a link by email that works once and expires after an hour.

Setting a new password signs out every other device, on purpose — a reset usually means somebody thinks their account was reached by someone else.

Adding your team

Settings → Team → invite by email. Everyone you invite works in the same workspace and shares its word allowance.

Roles: an owner can change everything, an editor can write and publish, and a read-only member can look but not change. Read-only is the right choice for a client who wants to watch.

The affiliate programme

Every account has an affiliate link already — there is nothing to apply for. Open Affiliate from the person menu.

You get a link, ready-made banners, copy you can post, and a report of what your link did: how often the banner was shown, clicks, signups and commission. Somebody who follows your link is remembered for 30 days, so they do not have to sign up the same day.

The full rules are on the affiliate terms page.

Sub-affiliates: earning from people you invited

Everyone who joins through your link gets their own affiliate link on day one. When one of them introduces a paying customer, you earn a share of that sale too. Your Affiliate page calls this "Your team".

Three things worth knowing, because they are what people usually get wrong:

It is paid by us, not out of their commission. They receive their full rate; your share is added on top. Nobody earns less because of who introduced them.

It is one level deep. You earn from people you invited. You do not earn from the people they invited — that person does. There is no chain running further up, on purpose.

You cannot pay yourself. Introducing your own second account earns nothing, in either tier. The system refuses it and the terms refuse it.

Most people never realise they have an affiliate link at all. If you invited somebody, telling them is usually all it takes — their link is already waiting on their Affiliate page.

Sharing your story

There is a page where customers describe what they did here and what happened — where they started, what they actually did, and the result. You can add yours from Case studies.

We publish it as you wrote it, including the parts that are not flattering. A person checks each one is a real account first; that is a spam check, not an edit.

You choose whether your name appears. It stays yours: take it down whenever you like, without asking us.

The message asking me to review this

If you have been here a while and published real work, we send one message asking whether you would say publicly what this has been like. Once — never again, whether or not you do it.

We are not asking for a good review and there is nothing on offer for one. Say what you actually think.

The short code we ask you to include is so a reader can tell a real customer from a competitor writing about a product they have never used. It identifies you as a customer, not as any particular one.

Reading OrchardRank in your own language

The site is available in English, Bengali, Hindi, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Arabic, Bahasa Indonesia, Urdu, Japanese, Chinese. Pick one from the switcher at the bottom of any page and it stays picked, on this device, until you change it.

Where a page has not been translated into your language yet, that part stays in English rather than showing you a machine-mangled version of it. English is the version everything else is checked against.

You can also go straight to a language by its address: put the code in front of the path, so the pricing page in Bengali is /bn/pricing and in Hindi it is /hi/pricing. English has no code in front of it. Arriving that way sets your language too, so the pages you open afterwards follow.

If your browser is set to a language we offer, you will see one line at the bottom offering that version. You are never sent there automatically — a link somebody shared with you should show you the page they meant, not a different one. Say no once and the offer stops.

Two honest notes. Some screens are still in English while translation catches up; when that happens you see correct English rather than a blank space, and the page still works. And where a legal document is concerned the English text is the version that legally applies — the translation is there to help you understand it.

Can I get help in Bengali or Hindi?

Yes. The help assistant replies in whatever language you are reading the site in, so if you are on a Bengali page, ask in Bengali and the answer comes back in Bengali.

It still only knows what is in this manual — that limit does not change with the language, and it is deliberate. If it does not know something it will say so in your language rather than guess, and hand the question to a person.

A human reply may come back in English. We would rather answer you accurately and quickly than make you wait for a translation.

What the backlink marketplace is

The marketplace lets you buy links from other people's websites, and sell links from yours. Open it from More → Backlink marketplace.

Buying: you browse vetted sites, pick one, and order a placement — either a new guest-post article on their site, or your link added into one of their existing pages. Every site is checked by hand before it can sell, and we add one clear 18% fee shown before you pay. After a link goes live we keep checking it, and if it drops we tell the site owner straight away and ask them to restore it. If it does not come back, we refund that placement.

Selling: you list a site you own, set your prices, and accept orders when they suit you. We take the 18% fee only when you get paid.

There is also a free-exchange option: publishers who tick it accept links at no charge, which is how new sites help each other.

Buying a backlink, step by step

1. Open More → Backlink marketplace and browse. Filter by niche, country, price, or free-only. 2. Site names are hidden ("Site #12 — Health") until a publisher accepts your order. That stops the catalog being a free contact list, and the real address is revealed the moment your order is accepted. 3. Press Order a placement. Enter the page you want the link to point to and the anchor text (the clickable words). Choose who writes the content — you, or the publisher. 4. You see the price with the 18% fee as its own line before you commit. Nothing is hidden. 5. Track it on My orders. The timeline shows exactly where it is: Pending, Accepted, Content, Published, Verified, Completed. We verify by fetching the live page ourselves, so "Verified" means the link is really there — not just that the seller said so.

Selling links from your website

Open More → Backlink marketplace → Sell placements.

1. List your site: address, niche, your guest-post and link-insertion prices, turnaround, and an optional free-exchange offer. 2. Verify you own it: place the code we show you anywhere on your homepage, then press Verify. 3. We review the site — usually within 48 hours. If we cannot approve it yet, you get the exact reasons and a resubmit button; fix them and submit again. 4. Once approved it appears in the catalog. Order requests show up on the same Sell page with Accept and Decline buttons, and you get a notification for each one. 5. When you have placed the link, press Mark published and paste the live URL. We fetch the page to confirm the link before the buyer's order is marked complete.

Finding link opportunities

More → Backlink marketplace → Find opportunities searches the live web for sites in your niche that openly accept guest posts, using the same phrases outreach professionals look for ("write for us", "guest post guidelines"). It pulls each site's contact email or contact form where the page shows one, and you can export the whole list as a CSV to work from in your own inbox.

Two honest notes: it needs a SERP key (Serper.dev has a free tier — add it under Settings), and these are sites that ADVERTISE willingness to accept guest posts. Whether they reply is ordinary outreach — the tool finds them and their contact details, the conversation is yours.

Emailing the sites you found (cold outreach)

After Find opportunities gives you sites and their contact emails, Outreach lets you email them — from YOUR own mailbox, one personalised message per site.

How it works: 1. Connect your sending email under More → Cold outreach. Gmail is easiest: turn on 2-step verification, make an app password (Google Account → Security → App passwords), and paste that — not your normal password. We store it encrypted and verify it before you can send. 2. Press "Draft with AI" for a ready pitch, or write your own. Every template must include the {site} tag so each email names the specific site — a blast to strangers gets you blocked. 3. Review the campaign, then Send. It goes out slowly and spaced apart on purpose, up to your daily limit, and stops for anyone who replies STOP or clicks the opt-out.

Why your own mailbox and not ours: cold email has to come from you, both so your name is on it and so your sending reputation is your own. Every message carries a real one-click opt-out because that is what the law and the spam filters require.

Is buying links safe? Fees, monitoring, and what if a link drops

The honest answer: any link building carries some risk, and we build the product to lower it rather than pretend it away.

- Every site is vetted by a person before it can sell — thin, spun, and link-farm sites are rejected. - We warn you when your anchor text looks like the exact-match commercial phrasing search engines treat as a spam signal, and suggest a safer one. - After a link goes live we re-check it automatically. If it drops or loses its follow attribute, we tell the site owner the same day and ask them to put it back. You do not chase anyone. If it is not restored within a few days, write to us and we refund that placement. - The fee is a flat 18%, shown as its own line before you pay. That is well below the 30–50% most marketplaces charge.

Card payment is not switched on yet in this build — orders are recorded and the publisher is notified. When checkout arrives, only that one step changes.

The API: reading your account from your own code

Settings → API keys → Create a key. The key is shown once, so copy it then — we store only a fingerprint and nobody here can read it back to you (or to anyone else). Lost it? Revoke it and make another; that takes five seconds and is safer than any way of recovering one.

Send it as a header on every request:

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer aw_live_YOURKEY" https://YOURDOMAIN/api/v1/ping

What you can read today, all under /api/v1:

* /ping — does my key work, and which workspace is it for * /sites — the sites connected to that workspace * /drafts — recent articles with status, word count and score * /jobs — how much work is queued, running, done or failed * /usage — words used, reserved and remaining this month

Everything answers JSON. The key decides which workspace you see, so there is no workspace parameter to get wrong — and no way to point a key at somebody else's data.

The API is READ-ONLY for now, on purpose: an endpoint that writes articles spends your word allowance from a script, and we would rather ship that with proper limits than quickly. Ask support if you need it and we will tell you honestly where it is.

Limits: 120 requests a minute per key. Over that you get a 429 and a Retry-After header saying exactly how long to wait.

Webhooks: being told the moment something happens

Settings → Webhooks → add your URL, and we POST to it when things happen here, so your systems never have to poll us.

Events you can subscribe to (tick none and you get all of them):

* draft.ready — an article finished and passed its quality gates * draft.blocked — an article finished but a gate held it back * draft.published — a draft went live on a site * job.failed — a job failed after its retries * order.status — a marketplace order changed status

Set a signing secret and every request carries an X-AW-Signature header: sha256= followed by an HMAC of the exact bytes we sent, keyed with your secret. Check it before trusting the request. The secret signs; it is never transmitted, and we never show it back on screen.

Your URL must be reachable from the public internet over http or https. Addresses inside a private network (localhost, 10.x, 169.254.x) are refused — that is a security rule we apply to every outbound request, not something specific to you.

If your endpoint is down we try twice, then record the failure. Settings shows the last twenty deliveries with the exact status code and reason, so "the webhook is broken" is something we can both look at rather than argue about.

Two-factor sign-in, and what to do if you lose your phone

Settings → Two-factor sign-in → Set up. We show a setup key; in your authenticator app (Google Authenticator, Authy, 1Password, Microsoft Authenticator, Aegis) choose "add account" then "enter a setup key" and type it in. Then type the six-digit code the app shows.

Nothing changes until that code matches. A half-finished setup cannot lock you out.

When it is on, signing in asks for your password and then a code. We accept the code before and after the current one, so a phone clock that drifts by a few seconds is not a problem.

LOSING YOUR PHONE. When you switch it on we show eight recovery codes, once. Each one signs you in a single time and is then used up. Keep them somewhere that is not your phone — a password manager on another device, or on paper. If you lose both the phone and the codes, write to support: we will ask you to prove the account is yours, and that takes longer than the codes would have.

Turning it off asks for a current code, so somebody who borrows your open laptop cannot quietly remove the protection.

The website marketplace: buying and selling whole sites

Separate from the backlink marketplace, the website marketplace is where whole online businesses change hands — content sites, SaaS, e-commerce stores, newsletters, channels and domains. Find it under More → Website marketplace, or at /market.

What makes it different from other places to sell a site: every number on a listing carries a label saying how well it is proven — Self-reported, Document-backed, or Verified — and every listing shows a Trust Score out of 100 that you can open and read line by line. Nothing about a listing's credibility is a black box.

You can browse without an account. Making an offer, bidding, watching a listing or selling needs a free account.

Selling a site: the wizard, verification, and the Trust Score

Go to Website marketplace → Sell → Start a new listing. The wizard is nine short steps and saves as you go, so you can stop at step 4 and finish tomorrow. Every listing is reviewed by a person before it goes live.

To sell faster, raise your Trust Score: - Fill in all 12 months of financials, and disclose your risks honestly — disclosure RAISES the score, because buyers trust a seller who is upfront. - After the listing is live, use "Raise your Trust Score" on your Sell page: submit statements for review (Document-backed) or connect analytics (Verified). Verified revenue is the single biggest lift.

You choose how to sell: a fixed Buy-now price, open to offers, or a timed auction with a reserve. A free instant valuation at /market/value gives you an honest price range before you decide.

Buying a site: offers, auctions, and what the labels mean

Browse at Website marketplace → Browse — sorted by Trust Score, the best-proven listings first. Open a listing to see every figure with its proof label, our independent valuation range, the seller's history, and a public Q&A where you can ask anything.

The website address stays behind a short NDA — accept it and the private details unlock.

Then act, depending on the listing: Buy now at the asking price, make an offer (the seller can accept, decline or counter), or bid in an auction. Each bid must beat the current high by a real increment, and the auction closes automatically at its end time — a bid at or above the reserve wins.

Tell us what you're looking for under "What I'm buying" and new matching listings come to you.

Deal rooms, escrow, disputes — how a sale completes safely

When an offer is accepted (or an auction is won), a private deal room opens between the buyer and the seller with a seven-step tracker: NDA → Agreement → Due diligence → Escrow funded → Asset transfer → Inspection → Complete.

The money sits in escrow the whole way: the buyer funds it before the transfer, the seller hands over the asset, the buyer gets an inspection window to check everything, and only then is the money released. If something is wrong, either side can open a dispute and our team decides — release, refund, or a split.

In the current build escrow runs in TEST MODE: every state is real, but no card is charged and no money moves. When payments switch on, only the charge itself changes.

After completion both sides review each other, and those reviews feed the public Trust Score. The marketplace commission comes off the sale price in tiers, shown on your deal page.