Most bad guest post buys are not scams. They are sites that look reasonable in a spreadsheet and turn out to be link farms with a content management system attached. The difference is visible before you pay, if you know which four things to look at and in which order.
Start with the traffic shape, not the traffic number
A site reporting 40,000 monthly organic visits sounds healthy. What matters is where those visits come from. Ask for a breakdown, or check the site's visible ranking keywords yourself.
- Branded traffic dominance. If most visits come from searches for the site's own name, the site has an audience but little topical authority to pass on.
- One-page dependency. A single viral post carrying 80% of traffic tells you nothing about whether your placement will ever be seen.
- Geographic mismatch. Traffic concentrated in a market you do not sell to is traffic you cannot use.
- A cliff in the trend line. A sharp, sustained drop usually means an algorithmic correction. Placements bought just after a drop rarely recover value.
On BlogReach, sites with Google Analytics connected can choose to publish real session counts rather than a badge. A publisher who shares exact numbers is telling you something about their confidence.
Read the link profile for concentration, not size
Linking root domains matter more than total backlinks, because a thousand links from one domain is one relationship, not a thousand endorsements. Two ratios do most of the work:
- Followed referring domains as a share of the total. A site whose inbound links are overwhelmingly nofollow has been collecting comment and profile links rather than editorial ones.
- Equity links versus raw counts. Moz separates links that pass equity from those that do not. A large gap between the two is a sign the profile was built rather than earned.
You are not looking for a perfect profile. You are looking for a profile that resembles what a real publication in that niche would accumulate over the same number of years.
Treat spam score as a stop sign, not a score
Moz spam score is a probability estimate, not a verdict. It counts how many of a set of features the domain shares with sites that were penalised. A 2% score means the domain has almost none of them. A 30% score means it has many.
Our rule of thumb, and the thresholds we shade in the marketplace table:
- Under 10%. Normal. Proceed on other criteria.
- 10% to 30%. Worth a look. Read the site. If it publishes on twenty unrelated topics, that is your answer.
- Above 30%. Walk away unless you have a specific, defensible reason not to.
Read three published posts end to end
Metrics describe a domain. Only reading tells you what your placement will sit next to. Open the three most recent posts and ask:
- Does the writing address a real reader, or does it exist to hold a link?
- Are outbound links relevant, or does every post link to an unrelated commercial page?
- Is there a byline, and does that person exist anywhere else?
- How many posts went up last month? A site publishing forty sponsored posts a month has stopped being a publication.
Ask the seller four questions
How a seller answers is usually more informative than what they answer.
- Is the link permanent, and what happens if the post is removed? A publisher who has thought about this has an answer. One who has not will be vague.
- Will the post be marked as sponsored? There is a right answer for the publisher's compliance and a different one for your link. Know which you are getting before you pay.
- How many external links will the post carry? Your link competes with every other one on the page.
- Do you own the site or resell access to it? Both are legitimate. Resellers add a layer between you and the person who can fix a problem.
Put the checks in order
Run them cheapest first so you spend reading time only on sites that survive the numbers: spam score, then link profile ratios, then traffic shape, then read the site, then message the seller. Most rejections happen in the first two steps.
You can run the first three from the marketplace table, which shows domain rating, domain authority, spam score, traffic and seller count side by side, and every metric carries the date it was fetched so you know how current it is.