Link Building

How to Vet a Publisher Site in Under Five Minutes

A repeatable checklist that catches most bad placements before you pay for them — no tooling beyond a browser required.

Daniel Reyes SEO Analyst 6 min read

Start with the homepage

Open the site and look at what it links out to. A genuine publication links mostly internally and to sources. A site built for placements links out constantly to unrelated commercial domains.

Check whether there is an actual publishing cadence. Three posts in one week followed by silence for four months is a site that publishes when someone pays, not a site with an audience.

Check the traffic story

Compare the authority figure with the organic traffic. A high authority score paired with negligible traffic almost always means links were acquired rather than earned.

Look at whether the traffic is in the topic area the site claims. A technology blog whose traffic is entirely to one viral recipe post is not a technology blog for your purposes.

Read two articles

Not skim — read. Content written for search engines rather than people is obvious within two paragraphs: repetitive phrasing, no specific detail, no evidence anyone with domain knowledge was involved.

If both articles you pick read as though a person who knows the subject wrote them, the site is probably worth the placement. That five-minute check is more predictive than any single metric.

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