How to check a website before you buy a guest post

Most bad link purchases are avoidable. The site looked fine in a spreadsheet, the price was right, and only afterwards did it turn out the traffic was gone or every other post was a casino link. Here’s what we check before we pay for anything.

1. Is the traffic real, and is it going the right way?

Don’t just look at the current number. Look at the trend over the past year. A site that dropped 80% after a core update can still have a high Domain Rating for months. Also check where the traffic comes from: a Dutch blog with most of its visitors from India is worth a second look.

2. Does it rank for anything you’d care about?

Open the keywords it ranks for. If they’re all brand names of other sites, coupon codes or nothing to do with the topic of the blog, the traffic probably isn’t from readers who would ever see your link.

3. What else links out from it?

Scroll through the last twenty posts. If every one of them is a “sponsored” article with three links to unrelated shops, Google has likely figured that out too. A few commercial posts among real content is normal. A link farm is not.

4. Is the post going to be indexed?

Check a few older guest posts on the site with a site: search. If they’re not in Google, yours won’t be either. Also look for noindex tags on the blog category the posts end up in.

5. Will the link be followed?

Ask, or check older posts. Some sites add rel=”sponsored” to every outbound link, which is fine as long as you know it before you pay. Nofollow on a paid post is usually not what you were after.

6. Who are you actually paying?

A surprising number of “publishers” are resellers who don’t own the site. Ask them to prove it. On Linkbuilding.com every publisher has to add a DNS record or meta tag to their site before it’s listed, which settles this question.

7. What happens if it goes wrong?

Before you pay, know what happens if the post never goes live or the link disappears after a month. If the answer is “trust me”, that’s your answer.

Red flags that make us walk away

• Traffic graph that fell off a cliff in the last six months
• Categories like “Casino”, “CBD” and “Loans” on a site about parenting
• No author names, no about page, no contact details
• Prices that are far below what similar sites ask
• A seller who won’t tell you the domain until you’ve paid