Automated and Cost-Effective Donor Quality Check

Hi everyone! I’m planning to build a two-stage algorithm for automated donor site evaluation (for purchasing permanent backlinks) and would love your advice on how to design it most effectively.

Stage 1 — Ultra-Cheap & Fast Filtering​

Goal: Eliminate up to 80–90% of low-quality sites as cheaply as possible (ideally just a few cents per domain — or even free).
At this stage, accuracy isn’t the priority — speed and low cost are.
I’m considering only basic metrics:

Indexation check: Verify whether the homepage and a sample donor page (usually provided by freelancers as an example of a previous placement) are indexed.

Outbound link count: Check how many outbound links are on the homepage and a typical donor page — if there are too many, exclude the domain immediately. (By the way, what number would you consider “too many”?)

Search visibility check: See if the site ranks on the first page for an exact 7–9 word phrase taken from the donor page content. If it doesn’t even appear there, the site is probably “dead.”

Stage 2 — More Detailed Evaluation

Goal: From the remaining sites, select high-quality and safe donors.
Here, we can spend more time and resources on deeper checks:

Topical relevance of the content and anchor texts.
Backlink profile analysis and link quality metrics.

Questions for you:

• What would you add or change in Stage 1?
• What would you improve in Stage 2?
• Has anyone here already built a similar pipeline? Which APIs or services worked best for you? (Ideally an all-in-one solution — something like DataForSEO, though their backlink API is a bit pricey.)
• Are there any ready-made services that already do this well? (Maybe I’m reinventing the wheel here )

P.S. If anyone wants to collaborate on building this pipeline or test it once it’s ready — I’d be happy to discuss it.

autosasha said:

Search visibility check: See if the site ranks on the first page for an exact 7–9 word phrase taken from the donor page content. If it doesn’t even appear there, the site is probably “dead.”

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this one doesn't make sense to me. There are sites out there that are legit but can't rank for such long tails for various reasons:

- the pages in questions are not optimized for those keywords, so picking those keywords at random can return false positives

- the niche of the site might be brutal to rank in, and if the site doesn't have enough authority or trust with google it will not rank even for those long tails, but that doesn't mean that the site is dead. If it has traffic and / or decent authority it's a quality site even if it doesn't rank for any 7-9 words long keyword that you pick at random...

Which brings me to this point...

autosasha said:

• What would you add or change in Stage 1?
• What would you improve in Stage 2?

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I would do the 2 stages a bit differently, as follows:

Stage 1 checks...

- traffic
- site authority (DR) and - if possible - donor page authority (UR) which can be much more important than the site authority in certain cases
- indexation

When I manually vet websites for backlink opportunities I almost always find myself checking these 3 metrics first, and if one of them is not to my liking I don't even bother checking the site in more details, so for me this is what Stage 1 needs to do

Stage 2 checks...

- OBLs (Outbound Links)
- traffic analysis (basically, which sources the traffic comes from)
- backlink analysis
- social media presence and engagement
- EEAT signals (this one is a whole discussion in itself and can comprise of many things, so I'm not sure how you're going to implement EEAT checks but in certain industries this EEAT crap is important...)

autosasha said:

(By the way, what number would you consider “too many”?)

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ONE (or more, of course!)

If I see a single OBL I'm already freaking out and dismiss that page in 99% of the cases

There is a SEO myth (which I've never tried to see if it's true, but which I personally believe to be true) that says that the first 2-3 OBLs on a page get most (80-90%) of the link juice / authority / link equity (whatever you want to call it, they're basically the same thing) of that page, with the 1st OBL on the page getting the most of it (over 60% from what I've heard but it could be a different number, I really don't know).

And - if this is true - you can see how even 1 OBL could mean that you're getting screwed if you're not aware of this thing. That's why I prefer to get backlinks only from pages with ZERO links on them (internal links excluded, of course), and which is why guest posts work so well in providing authority...

autosasha said:

Are there any ready-made services that already do this well? (Maybe I’m reinventing the wheel here )

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I don't know of any at the moment, but like you said, there has to be some services that are doing this, this looks like standard filtering system for any decent SEO / link building network out there so yeah, I don't think you're doing groundbreaking stuff

autosasha said:

P.S. If anyone wants to collaborate on building this pipeline or test it once it’s ready — I’d be happy to discuss it.

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not interested, sorry! But I'm sure that others will be ... But I think you can't ask for beta testing willy-nilly, you might need to be upgraded member... or to ask in a certain section of the forum (or maybe both conditions), I don't remember the requirement but I don't think you're allowed to ask for beta testers here and now, so be careful with this

tazarbm said:

7-9 words long keyword that you pick at random...

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makes sense, but note that I mean they phrase which is present right into the title of the page (and maybe we could expand number of checked first serp pages

Which set of services do you use to execute 1 & 2 stages? Or this is all in one? Particularly: DR/UR/backlink analysis?

autosasha said:

note that I mean they phrase which is present right into the title of the page (and maybe we could expand number of checked first serp pages

Click to expand...

that might be better

autosasha said:

Which set of services do you use to execute 1 & 2 stages? Or this is all in one? Particularly: DR/UR/backlink analysis?

Click to expand...

none at the moment! I was out of the game for 5 years and last week I purchased a few things so I can get back into SEO, so I got Semrush account which is pretty good, but unfortunately it doesn't show the DR since this is a Ahrefs thing..

To check the DR I will continue using the free DR checker of Ahrefs, just to get a rough idea of what I'm up against, but otherwise I usually know what to stay away from instinctively as I've been doing SEO since 2010, so I kinda know the boogyman (tough niches and keywords) when I see it