Start with relevance
The most important question is simple: would your potential customers read this website? If the answer is no, no metric will make the placement valuable.
Check real organic visibility
Third-party scores such as Domain Authority (Moz) and Domain Rating (Ahrefs) estimate backlink strength. They are useful for comparison, but they can be inflated. Look at whether the site ranks for keywords related to its niche, and whether that visibility is steady over time.
Read the content
Open five recent articles and ask:
- Are they original, specific and readable?
- Are authors named?
- Do they cover one subject area, or everything?
Inspect outbound links
Link farms give themselves away. Warning signs include many commercial links per article, unrelated niches mixed together, and pages that exist only to link out.
Confirm the terms
Before you pay, confirm:
- The link attribute (dofollow, nofollow or
rel="sponsored") - Whether the post will be labelled as sponsored
- The turnaround and how long the post stays live
- Prohibited topics and word-count rules
A quick scoring checklist
- Relevant to my audience
- Steady organic visibility
- Original, recent content
- Clean outbound-link patterns
- Clear, written terms
If a site fails the first point, stop there.
