Quality · Feb 24, 2026 · 7 min read · by Mara Delgado

How we vet a publication before placing anything

Every week someone offers us placements on sites with eye-catching metrics and nothing real underneath. Authority scores can be built; an audience can't. Before we place anything for a client, a piece runs through the same vetting we'd apply to a site for ourselves. Here's the checklist.

The checks

1. Traffic trend, not traffic number. We want a stable or rising organic line over twelve months. A sawtooth of crashes means penalties, churned content or a bought-and-flipped domain.
2. Traffic against authority. High authority paired with near-zero organic traffic is the classic link-farm signature — the metrics were manufactured, the readers never existed.
3. Keywords that make sense. A home-and-garden site ranking mostly for casino and loan terms has been sold, hacked or rented out. We walk away.
4. Outbound link density. Open five recent posts. If each one carries several external links to unrelated commercial pages, the site is a billboard wearing a blog's clothes.
5. Would a human finish it? We read one full article start to end. Written for readers, or stitched from a template to hold links? It's usually obvious by the second paragraph.
6. Editorial friction. Real publications have guidelines, reject pitches and edit drafts. "Send anything, live in 24 hours, any topic" describes a vending machine, not an editor.
7. Named, recurring authors. Real bylines with histories are a good sign. Four hundred posts attributed to "admin" are not.
8. Domain history. A quick archive check: was this domain a foreign-language pharmacy two years ago? Dropped-and-rebuilt domains carry baggage the metrics won't show.
9. The neighbourhood. Who else gets links here? If the last ten placements are payday loans and replica goods, any brand placed alongside them sits at that table too.

How we score it

We don't demand perfection — every real site has a flaw or two. A couple of soft warnings are survivable. But a single hard fail on the traffic-to-authority check, the irrelevant-keywords check or the neighbourhood check ends it, regardless of price. The discipline matters more than any one rule: the moment "but the metrics are great" overrides a red flag, you've started building someone else's future penalty into a client's profile.

Saying no to a tempting placement is the least visible part of the job and one of the most valuable. The links we don't place protect the ones we do.