Not every site that accepts guest posts is worth publishing on. A bad placement wastes budget and can attach your brand to a poor neighbourhood. Run through this checklist before you pitch or pay.
The checklist
- It is relevant to your niche. The site covers your industry or a close neighbour. Relevance beats raw metrics.
- It has real organic traffic. Check the traffic history in a third-party SEO tool. You want a steady or growing trend, not a cliff or sudden spikes.
- It has a genuine editorial history. Real articles by real people, published regularly over a meaningful period.
- The content is good. Read three or four recent posts. If they are thin, spun or full of obvious ads, move on.
- It does not publish everything. A site that accepts any topic from any payer is a link farm in disguise.
- The outbound links are clean. Look for links to gambling, adult, pharma or other spammy areas. Those are bad neighbours.
- It has a real audience. Comments, social shares, an active brand or newsletter all suggest real readers.
- It matches your target market. Check the audience's country and language if that matters to you.
- The link will sit naturally in the article. The surrounding text should make the link useful to the reader.
- There is a real person to deal with. A named editor or owner who agrees the post and keeps it live.
Red flags
- A "write for us" page that mentions price per post or lists a huge range of unrelated categories
- Dozens of articles published in a single day
- Pages stuffed with exact-match anchor links
- No author names, no about page, no way to contact a person
- Traffic that fell sharply or jumped overnight
A note on sponsored posts
Some reputable publishers do accept sponsored content. When money changes hands, Google expects the link to carry a rel="sponsored" attribute. Be honest about what you are buying and expect those links to be treated accordingly. For the wider picture, see our guest posting guide.
How we apply this
Every publisher we use has to pass this kind of checklist before it is ever shown to a client. You can read our standards on the services page, or ask us for a free backlink audit.
Frequently asked questions
What is the most important factor when choosing a guest post site?
Relevance to your niche combined with a real audience. A site that covers your topic and has genuine readers is almost always better than a higher-metric site that does not.
Should I rely on domain authority scores?
Use them as one rough signal at most. Scores come from third-party tools and can be inflated. Always look at the site itself.
What are the red flags of a bad guest post site?
Many unrelated topics, a 'write for us' page that accepts anything, obvious paid-post language, thin articles, traffic that collapsed or spiked suddenly, and lots of outbound links to casinos, adult or pharma sites.
Khalil is the founder of Serpify Media, a link building and guest posting agency. He writes about honest, research-led off-page SEO. Meet the team.