Went through a batch of guest posts bought by a previous contractor and noticed a pattern. 11 of the 30 sites:
– same theme with minor colour changes
– same “write for us” page wording
– same 4-5 authors across sites with stock photos
– categories covering everything from crypto to pet food
– posts all published on the same days of the week
– traffic graphs that look nearly identical, all spiking around the same months
Pretty clearly one owner running a network and selling links on all of them. The metrics looked fine on paper, which is presumably the point.
What footprints do you check to catch this before paying? I’m thinking hosting, shared analytics IDs, outbound link patterns, and whether the site has any real audience at all (comments, social). What else?
And for the 11 I’ve already got, would you remove them, disavow, or just leave them and stop feeding the network?
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