"Lesson learned: never trust the traffic number in a vendor's catalog at face value"

Shehzlinks · Jul 3, 2026

Been doing guest post reselling for a while now, and one thing keeps happening: a site in a vendor's catalog shows solid monthly traffic, but by the time an order actually goes out, live numbers on Ahrefs/Semrush are a fraction of that.

Learned this the hard way early on - sent a client a placement based on catalog numbers, and traffic had already tanked 60%+ by the time it went live. Client wasn't happy, and rightly so.

Now it's a hard rule on my end: re-check live traffic right before any order goes out, not just at catalog-build time. If it's dropped 50%+ from what's listed, I either go back to the vendor to renegotiate the price or just pull the site from the list entirely.

Sounds obvious in hindsight, but a lot of people (myself included, early on) treat the catalog number as gospel. Vendor catalogs age - sites lose rankings, get hit by algo updates, sometimes just decline naturally. A number that was accurate 2 months ago isn't a guarantee today.

Anyone else build this into their process, or is it more of a spot-check-when-something-feels-off thing for you guys?

HenryObi · Jul 3, 2026

Shehzlinks said:
Been doing guest post reselling for a while now, and one thing keeps happening: a site in a vendor's catalog shows solid monthly traffic, but by the time an order actually goes out, live numbers on Ahrefs/Semrush are a fraction of that.

Learned this the hard way early on - sent a client a placement based on catalog numbers, and traffic had already tanked 60%+ by the time it went live. Client wasn't happy, and rightly so.

Now it's a hard rule on my end: re-check live traffic right before any order goes out, not just at catalog-build time. If it's dropped 50%+ from what's listed, I either go back to the vendor to renegotiate the price or just pull the site from the list entirely.

Sounds obvious in hindsight, but a lot of people (myself included, early on) treat the catalog number as gospel. Vendor catalogs age - sites lose rankings, get hit by algo updates, sometimes just decline naturally. A number that was accurate 2 months ago isn't a guarantee today.

Anyone else build this into their process, or is it more of a spot-check-when-something-feels-off thing for you guys?

Even the numbers of Ahrefs and Semrush should not be trusted on face value. For a few years now, many vendors now manipulate the traffic number by inflating both the brand/site name search and some fictitious keyword. So, you could see a site pulling several tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of traffic from search. When you check the pages, you'll see it's for their very unknown brand name and/or some random useless and meaningless keywords.

These days, never trust traffic numbers, you have to study the site and the potential of such keywords attracting traffic. Depending on the niche, you might want to check the historical performance of both the sites and the keywords pulling in those massive traffic for them.

GeeLark AI · Jul 3, 2026

Always double check before buying, SEO metrics can change pretty fast, so old catalog data isn't something I'd rely on.

Ambiguiltor · Jul 3, 2026

HenryObi said:
ven the numbers of Ahrefs and Semrush should not be trusted on face value.

Agree. Ahrefs organic traffic metrics are garbage.

A site can easily boost it by ranking for several so-called "high-volume" keywords.Not to mention how much actual search volume those keywords really have, metrics obtained through this method have no reference value at all.

I feel like it's a vendor's duty to get the GSC traffic data from the suppliers.

"Lesson learned: never trust the traffic number in a vendor's catalog at face value"

Shehzlinks

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