The Site-Vetting Checklist That Saves Our Clients Thousands

The most expensive links in this industry are the cheap ones. A $60 placement on a site that exists only to sell placements does not just fail to help — it sits in your profile as a flag, and cleaning it up later costs more than doing it right would have. After watching new clients arrive with profiles full of those flags, we made one rule non-negotiable: no site gets a link until someone has checked it by hand.

The checks every prospect passes first

• Relevance: the site covers your industry, and the article is about the same subject as the page it links to.
• Real traffic: at least 1,000 organic visits a month in Ahrefs and Semrush, not the seller's number.
• The keywords behind it: topic-matched searches, not spam, adult, casino or 'net worth' terms.
• A healthy trend: 12–24 months steady or growing, no spikes or collapse after a core update.
• The right audience: most readers in the countries you sell in.
• Authority that holds up: DR backed by real traffic and editorial referring domains.
• Indexing: its recent articles are actually in Google's index.
• A real publication: named authors, edited content, no public link price list.

Then we open the keywords

This is where most sites fail. A traffic number tells you nothing until you see what it ranks for. We have rejected techbullion.com because its keywords were mostly irrelevant or spammy and much of its traffic came from markets the client does not sell in; dsnews.co.uk, a DR 70 site pulling only 1,000–2,000 visits a month; and entrepreneursbreak.com, a business site ranking for adult terms and openly selling guest posts. Roughly one in five sites we find gets dropped at this step.

A link you would be embarrassed to show your client is a link you should not build.

What this costs us — and saves you

Checking every site by hand is slower. It adds days to every campaign and kills placements we could have billed for. It also means our clients never have to defend a link in their report. In a business running on trust, that trade is not close.

Talha Mahmood

Founder of Editorial HQ. Writes up what the team learns from placing links and PR for clients.