How to Vet a Guest Post Site: The Complete Checklist

Why Site Vetting Is the Foundation of Safe Link Building

The difference between a link building campaign that drives rankings and one that triggers a Google penalty often comes down to site vetting. Not all publishers are created equal — and the time you invest in evaluating sites before placement saves you from damage that can take months to undo. Here's the complete checklist MMU uses to evaluate every site in our network.

The 10-Point Guest Post Site Vetting Checklist

1. Is the site topically relevant to the target niche? The site should cover topics your target audience would genuinely read.
2. Does the site have meaningful organic traffic? Verify at least 500–1,000 monthly organic visitors via Ahrefs or SEMrush.
3. What is the Domain Rating / Domain Authority? Check both Ahrefs DR and Moz DA as baseline quality indicators.
4. What is the site's Spam Score? Use Moz's Spam Score checker. Anything above 30% warrants deeper investigation.
5. Is the site indexed in Google? Run a site: search and confirm the site's pages are actively indexed.
6. Does the site have real, original content? Manually browse several articles — are they substantive, well-written, and genuinely informative?
7. Are there identifiable authors with real profiles? Sites with named authors and credible bios signal legitimate editorial operations.
8. What does the site's outbound link profile look like? Check for patterns of gambling, pharma, or payday loan links across the content.
9. Is the site's backlink profile clean? Use Ahrefs to review the site's own backlink sources for spam patterns.
10. What is the site's history? Use the Wayback Machine to check if the site was recently purchased and rebranded — a common tactic for DR laundering.

Bonus Red Flags That Should Disqualify a Site

• The site explicitly advertises paid links or dofollow guest posts on a Write for Us page
• No About page or identifiable team members
• All published content is from the past 90 days and the site's DR is already high
• The site's niche shifts dramatically from page to page — finance, health, travel, gaming all mixed together

If you'd like to go deeper here, Moz's guide to Domain Authority is worth a look: read more here. And if this was useful, check out our post on Link Building for E-Commerce Sites: A Practical Guide.