How do you tell a slow queue from a dead site?

Ran into this enough times that I started checking for it deliberately.

A site takes your submission, shows you a thank you page, sends a confirmation email, and nothing ever appears. Not rejected. Just nothing. From the outside, it looks identical to a slow moderation queue, so you wait, and eventually you stop thinking about it.

The site isn't hostile. Whoever ran it moved on. The form still works because forms keep working after people stop reading what comes through them.

Four things I check before submitting anywhere now, and none of them need a tool.

Sort the site by newest, and check the date on the most recent entry. If the newest thing on a site is two years old, the queue isn't slow.

Check the copyright year in the footer. Not conclusive on its own, plenty of live sites forget to update it, but stale footer plus stale entries is a pattern.

Email the contact address and see if it bounces. Costs nothing and answers the question directly about half the time.

Look at whether anything else on the site has changed. Blog, news, terms page, anything with a date on it.

Half of these sites will still be sitting in someone's spreadsheet as pending.

What's the longest you've waited before deciding a site was just dead?

this is the main reason i stopped submitting by hand. gsaser , ranker x does the check for you, it submits then goes back later and looks if the link is actually on the page, if its not there it never counts as verified. so the dead ones drop out on there own. i buy lists instead of scraping, ser verified lists and ser links mostly, tried gsa link surge too, all have there ups and downs and a few dead ones still get in but its way less time than waiting on thank you pages

I usually check the latest activity and contact email first. If nothing has changed for months and nobody replies, I stop waiting and focus on active sites.

Denlagoon said:

this is the main reason i stopped submitting by hand. gsaser , ranker x does the check for you, it submits then goes back later and looks if the link is actually on the page, if its not there it never counts as verified. so the dead ones drop out on there own. i buy lists instead of scraping, ser verified lists and ser links mostly, tried gsa link surge too, all have there ups and downs and a few dead ones still get in but its way less time than waiting on thank you pages

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I haven't heard of ranker x, is it good? Also do you have a monthly, yearly subscription or did you buy it for a lifetime for 1k$?