Every link supplier says they vet their sites. Almost none of them will tell you what the test is. If a vendor cannot give you numbers, the vetting is a feeling, not a process.
Here is the standard we publish, and what each line is actually protecting you from.
Below DR 40 you are usually looking at a site with very little of its own authority to pass on. It is not a hard law, but as a floor it removes a lot of noise cheaply.
This is the single most useful filter, because it is the hardest to fake convincingly. A site with authority on paper and no organic audience is usually a site built to sell links. Real visitors mean Google is sending traffic there, which means Google considers it worth showing.
A high spam score usually means the site has been linking out to bad neighbourhoods. Your client's link ends up in that company whether you knew about it or not.
This one gets skipped most often. A page buried in advertising is a page built for ad revenue rather than readers, and it tends to be a page that has been sold to a lot of people before you.
A DR 70 site in the wrong niche does less for your client than a DR 45 site their audience actually reads. Relevance first, authority second, every time.
Obvious, and still worth checking. A deindexed site passes nothing at all. This takes ten seconds and catches placements that would otherwise be pure waste.
Read what is already published. If the existing articles are thin, keyword stuffed, or clearly written for search engines rather than people, your article will sit in that context and be read the same way.
Shared hosting patterns, near-identical templates across supposedly unrelated sites, the same handful of outbound link targets. A network is usually easy to spot once you look for the pattern rather than the individual site.
You do not need us to run this. Take your last ten placements, check them against these eight lines, and see how many pass. That result tells you more about your supplier than any sales call will.
We'll take a look and tell you honestly what's actually holding rankings back.
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