How to Vet a Website Before Buying a Guest Post: 10 Checks
A website is good for guest posting when it has real, stable organic traffic, covers your topic, is fully indexed, links out sparingly and shows no spam signals. You can verify all of this in about 15 minutes with free tools. Here are 10 checks, in order, that tell you whether a placement is worth paying for.
Start with traffic: is the audience real?
Authority scores such as DR or DA are easy to inflate. Organic traffic is much harder to fake, so check it first. A site with a high score and no visitors is a red flag.
The goal is not a big number. It is a believable one that matches the site's age, topic and country.
Check 1: Organic traffic trend over 12–24 months
Open a free traffic estimator or the free tier of a major SEO suite and look at the organic curve. You want a flat or rising line. A sharp drop of 50% or more often signals a Google penalty or a core update hit.
Also look for sudden spikes followed by collapse. They often come from expired domains revived for link selling. Treat estimators as rough guides, not exact data.
Check 2: Traffic by country
If you target French readers and 90% of visits come from another country, the link will bring little relevant value. Match the site's audience to your market. If you plan to build links abroad, see our guide to international SEO and backlinks.
Country pages can help you shortlist, for example backlinks in the United States or backlinks in Germany.
Check 3: Ranking keywords
Look at the keywords the site ranks for. Real sites rank for hundreds of varied, on-topic queries. Sites that rank for unrelated terms such as casino, pharma or loans while publishing general content are suspicious.
Judge topical relevance and editorial quality
A link from a site that covers your subject carries more context than a link from a generic blog. Relevance also protects you if Google reviews the link profile manually.
Relevance does not mean identical niche. A finance brand can sensibly appear on a business or news site. It should not appear on a site about pet food.
Check 4: Read the last 10 articles
Scan recent posts. Are they written by humans, with original angles, images and named authors? Or are they thin, rewritten and stuffed with commercial anchors? If you cannot tell what the site is about in one minute, move on.
Count how many posts are labelled sponsored or clearly paid. One or two a month is normal. Every post is not.
Check 5: Niche fit
Browse categories to see whether your topic fits naturally. Marketplaces usually let you filter by theme. For instance, you can browse business and entrepreneurship backlinks, tech and IT backlinks or finance and investing backlinks and compare sites on the same criteria.
Inspect outbound links and link neighborhood
Every link on a page shares its value with others. A site that links to hundreds of unrelated domains dilutes what you pay for, and exposes you to a bad neighborhood.
Check 6: Outbound links per article
Open three recent posts and count external links. Two to five relevant links per article is healthy. Dozens of commercial links with exact-match anchors point to a link-selling business model.
Click a few of them. Do they lead to real, active sites in varied topics, or to casino, adult and payday-loan pages?
Check 7: Link attributes and disclosure
Google expects paid links to carry rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow". A dofollow paid link breaks its guidelines, so the risk is real. Know what you are buying and make sure the attribute is stated before you order. Our explainer on rel=sponsored vs nofollow vs UGC covers what Google expects, and nofollow backlinks still have value for visibility and brand.
Confirm indexation and spot spam signals
A page Google does not index passes nothing. Technical checks take two minutes and filter out many bad sites.
Check 8: Indexation
Search site:domain.com in Google. If no results appear, the site is deindexed. Compare the result count with the number of pages you would expect. Then search the site's brand name: a legitimate site usually ranks first for it.
Also check that recent articles are indexed by searching a title in quotes. If new posts take weeks to appear, the crawl budget is poor.
Check 9: Spam and PBN signals
Warning signs include an expired domain with a new, unrelated topic, no contact page or author names, identical templates across many sites, and a mix of unrelated categories like crypto, travel and dentists. Check the free backlink data for thousands of links from the same few IP ranges. Our guide on spotting PBNs and link farms goes deeper.
Check 10: Pricing and terms
Price should match quality. If a site shows high metrics but sells for a fraction of the median, ask why. Verify the publication delay, who writes the article and whether the post stays live.
What a fair budget looks like
On LinkBooster, real sponsored article prices (excl. VAT, writing included) give a useful benchmark. For DR/DA 30–39 the median is 257 € (25% of offers at 107 €, 75% at 575 €). For 40–49 it is also 257 €, with a range from 119 € to 699 €. At 60–69 the median reaches 410 €, and at 70+ it is 1,224 €.
Notice that DR 50–59 has a lower median (195 €) than 40–49. Score alone does not set price, which is why traffic and relevance checks matter more than the metric. By country, medians run from 47 € in Ukraine and 105 € in France to 191 € in the US, 238 € in the UK and 731 € in Germany.
See the full breakdown in how much a guest post costs and compare options on the pricing page.
Build a repeatable vetting process
Turn the 10 checks into a scorecard. Give each a pass, doubt or fail. Reject any site with a failed indexation, spam or traffic-collapse check, whatever the price. Accept sites with at most two doubts.
If you buy often, use a marketplace that pre-screens inventory. LinkBooster lists 228,090 verified sites, and payment is held until publication, with a refund if the article is not live within the announced delay (usually 7 to 30 days). You can still run your own checks on any shortlisted site. See how the marketplace works or browse sponsored articles on vetted media.
For ongoing needs, a link building subscription spreads orders over months, which looks more natural than a one-off burst.
No single metric proves a site is good for guest posting. Combine traffic trends, relevance, outbound link quality, indexation and spam checks, then compare the price to realistic benchmarks. Fifteen minutes of free checks can save a budget and protect your site. For the bigger picture, read the complete guest posting guide.
Frequently asked questions
Which free tools can I use to check a guest post site?
Google itself (site: search and brand search), the free tiers of major SEO suites for traffic and backlinks, and a browser to read the site. This is enough to run most of the 10 checks. Treat traffic numbers as estimates.
What organic traffic should a guest posting site have?
There is no universal threshold, but it should be real, stable or growing, and from your target country. A small niche site with 1,000 relevant monthly visits can beat a generic one with 50,000 irrelevant ones.
Is a high DR enough to choose a site?
No. DR can be inflated with low-quality links. Use it as a first filter, then check traffic, relevance and indexation. Prices also show that score does not follow price in a straight line.
How many outbound links is too many?
Two to five relevant external links per article is normal. If most posts carry many commercial links with keyword anchors, the site likely sells links at scale and your link will be diluted.
Should a guest post link be dofollow?
Google asks that paid links use rel="sponsored" or "nofollow". Check the attribute before ordering and choose according to your risk tolerance. Nofollow links can still bring traffic and brand mentions.