Got burned last month. Paid for 4 guest posts on “DR 60+ real traffic” sites and 2 of them turned out to be link farms selling posts to anyone, every article on the site had 2-3 outbound links to totally random niches.
What’s your checklist before paying? I clearly need one lol
1. Traffic graph over 2 years, not just the current number. Sudden spikes and drops = bought or manipulated.
2. Which countries the traffic comes from. A US blog with 80% traffic from random countries is a red flag.
3. Scroll the last 20 posts. If most have outbound links to casinos, CBD, loans etc it’s a link farm.
4. Does the site have its own content that isn’t sponsored? If everything is a “guest post” skip it.
Also search site:domain.com “write for us” or “sponsored post”. If they have a big public price list, every SEO seller on the planet is already using them.
One more: ask for an example of a post they published in the last month and check if it’s indexed. Lots of these sites have half their posts not indexed, so your link basically doesn’t exist for Google.
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