Things I check before adding ANY site to a guest-post list (learned the hard way)

Been doing link building/guest post sourcing for a while now, and wanted to share a few checks that have saved me from bad placements more than once. Curious what others have run into as well.

1. DA and DR don't always agree - and when they don't, that's a red flag, not a rounding error. I've seen sites with DA in the 50s but DR in the single digits, paired with basically zero real traffic. Usually means the authority score is inflated somehow.

2. "Traffic" numbers from different tools can differ by 10-20x for the same site. If one tool says 500 visits and another says 10,000, don't average them - dig into why they disagree before trusting either.

3. Domain age claims are sometimes just wrong. Cross-check against what the site itself says publicly (About page, Wayback Machine) rather than trusting a marketplace listing at face value.

4. Watch for pricing that's wildly out of line with comparable sites - sometimes it's a premium site, sometimes it's just a typo in the listing (extra zero, decimal in the wrong place). Worth a sanity check either way.

5. "Sponsored" vs "Advertorial" vs no label at all - these are different disclosure requirements and it's worth knowing which one you're actually getting before you commit.

What other checks do you run before trusting a new site? Always looking to tighten up the process.

I would also check whether the site is actually ranking for relevant keywords and if its pages are getting indexed normally. A site can have decent metrics but if it is losing visibility or barely indexed then i would think twice before placing a guest posts there.

i would also check how many outbound links the site is selling. good metrics mean nothing if every second post is a paid guest post.

One thing I always look at is how often the site publishes guest posts. If almost every article is sponsored, I usually move on.