What's your go-to method for vetting a guest post site before paying?

Hi everyone,

I've been doing guest post outreach for a while now (mostly SaaS, Tech, and Digital Marketing niches), and I wanted to get the community's input on something.

Before committing to a placement, I usually check:

- DR/DA and organic traffic (via SEMrush/Ahrefs)
- Indexing status of recent posts
- Whether the site has a healthy mix of ********/nofollow links (red flag if 100% ******** on everything)
- Niche relevance and whether the content actually looks human-written

But I keep running into sites that look fine on paper (decent DR, decent traffic) and still don't move the needle for clients after placement.

For those of you who've been doing this longer, what other checks do you run before trusting a new vendor? Anything you wish you'd checked earlier in your journey that would've saved you from a bad placement?

Would love to hear how others approach this.

Thanks!

1) not a link farm but a niche site
2) high dr
3) real traffic
4) ranks for real keywords
5) ranks for branded and non branded keywords
That's it these 5 criteria is all I need.

i check real ranking pages not just dr and traffic numbers
if site has traffic but all posts are random topics i skip it
also i look if old guest posts still indexed or already dropped