How to quickly check how spammy a website is when selling backlinks?

If I want to sell backlinks on one of my websites, I probably want to avoid linking to "spammy" sites.

Is there any tool, oder metric, or other things I can use to quickly check if it is safe?
Is the MOZ spam score any good?

How do you decide if you want to accept a niche edit or guest post?

well, if you're going to link out to sites in your niche (which is the recommended way of selling guest posts anyway) it means that you're at least slightly familiar with that niche so you can probably tell from a first glance whether the sites that you're linking out to are good or bad. At least that's what I did when I sold guest posts on my sites and I never had problems. I looked at the site design and quality of the content and since those sites were in the same niche as mine I didn't need a second opinion.

The spam score is not very important. I mean, if you're looking to buy an expired domain and you're checking its backlinking profile and see a 97% SS (so, lots of low value backlinks) and it has 1000s of backlinks then you might be bothered by the SS because you'd have to disavow a lot of links and / or build new ones to dilute that SS. But most of the time SS is not a harmful metric (and google doesn't care about it anyway, I've seen sites with high SS ranking just fine)

I'd say a quick check of the page by eye is probably enough to work out if you're happy to link out.

You can always run the url through safebrowsing too: https://transparencyreport.google.com/safe-browsing/search

Steptoe said:

You can always run the url through safebrowsing too: https://transparencyreport.google.com/safe-browsing/search

Click to expand...

Thank you for this suggestion.

tazarbm said:

you can probably tell from a first glance whether the sites that you're linking out to are good or bad.

Click to expand...

That is true. Being an owner of a website in particular niche gives you an authority to identify the kind of content on other peoples site. So you can easily judge the quality of website willing to buy a link from you.

You should do a little background verification of that site. You should take a quick look at - what is the tld (never link to xyz, ru or similar sites), site age, their existing backlink profile, the page they want you to link to, you will get a fair idea about whether they are a legit site or not.

While DA and DR are third party metrics but when it comes to guest posting, people consider it too. So my suggestion is to check the DA, DR of the site in question. If these metrics are too low then you can think twice linking to those sites.

As far as niche edits and guest posting is concerned, its up to you to decide, because niche edits takes very less efforts. All you need to do is to insert a link and that's all.

You can offer them a guest article writing service for few extra $$.

Steptoe said:

You can always run the url through safebrowsing too: https://transparencyreport.google.com/safe-browsing/search

Click to expand...

Thanks! Didn't know that tool.