Guide · Jan 22, 2026 · 7 min read · by Cynthia Madison

How we evaluate a website before placing a link: the 9-point check

Every week someone offers us placements on sites with impressive DR and terrible everything else. Authority metrics can be manufactured; the signals below are much harder to fake. This is the exact checklist we run.

The 9 checks

1. Organic traffic trend. Not the number — the shape. A sawtooth crash pattern means penalties or churned content. We want a stable or growing line over 12+ months.
2. Traffic-to-DR ratio. High DR with near-zero organic traffic is the classic link-farm signature. The metrics were built; the audience never was.
3. Ranking keywords that make sense. A site about home improvement ranking mostly for casino terms has been sold, hacked or rented. Walk away.
4. Outbound link density. Open five recent posts. If every one carries 3+ external dofollow links to commercial pages, the site is a billboard.
5. Content quality on arrival. Read one full article. Would a human finish it? Is it written for readers or stitched from templates?
6. Editorial friction. Real sites have guidelines, reject pitches and edit drafts. "Send anything, live in 24h" is a vending machine, not a publication.
7. Author pages. Recurring named authors are a good sign. A hundred posts by "admin" is not.
8. Site history. Archive.org check: was this domain a Japanese pharmacy two years ago? Dropped-and-rebuilt domains carry baggage.
9. The neighbourhood. Who else gets links here? If the last ten placements are payday loans and replica watches, your brand sits at that table too.

Scoring

We don't demand perfection — real sites have flaws. Two soft warnings are survivable; one hard fail (checks 2, 3 or 9) kills the placement regardless of price. The discipline matters more than the checklist: the moment "but the DR is 70" overrides a red flag, you're building someone else's penalty.