How to check a guest post site before you pay: the four tests most sites fail
We've reviewed 30,000 sites that wanted to sell guest posts. Most didn't pass. Here's what failed them, and how to run the same four checks yourself before your money moves.
On this page
30,000 sites reviewed
74% failed at least one test
- 38%No real organic traffic
- 17%Built to sell links
- 11%Metrics failed our API check
- 8%Deindexed or penalized
- 26%Passed and got listed
Most guest post sites fail for one of four reasons
Three in four sites that offer guest posts don't hold up. We know because we audit every site before it can sell a single placement through us, and after 30,000 reviews the pattern is consistent.
The failures fall into four buckets. The good news is that you can test for each one yourself, with tools you probably already pay for, in about the time it takes to read a seller's pitch.
| Test | What it catches | Failed | How to check it yourself | Tool |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Real traffic | Sites with authority scores but no actual readers | 38% | Look at 12 months of organic traffic and where it comes from | Ahrefs Site Explorer or Semrush Domain Overview |
| 2. Built to sell links | Link farms dressed up as blogs | 17% | Read the site like a reader, then like a buyer | Your browser |
| 3. Metrics match | DR or DA claims a tool can't confirm | 11% | Compare the seller's number with the tool's number today | Ahrefs, Moz, Semrush |
| 4. Still indexed | Sites Google has dropped or penalized | 8% | Run a site: search and spot-check recent posts | Google search |
One caveat about these numbers. They describe the sites that applied to sell placements through LinkVouch, which is the same pool you're shopping in, but they aren't a census of the whole web. Treat them as the odds you face, not a law of nature.
Test 1: Is the traffic real, recent and on topic?
This is the test most sites fail, and it's the easiest to run. A site can carry a high authority score for years after its readers left, because authority scores mostly count links pointing at the site, not people reading it.
How to run it
- 1Open the domain in Ahrefs Site Explorer or Semrush Domain Overview.
- 2Set the organic traffic chart to the past 12 months, then to all time.
- 3Open the top pages report and see which pages bring the traffic in.
- 4Check the traffic by country against the audience you're trying to reach.
What a failing site looks like
- Traffic that fell off a cliff and never came back, often after a Google core update.
- Traffic concentrated on one or two pages that have nothing to do with the site's topic.
- A sudden spike over a few weeks that looks bought, not earned.
- Visitors from countries the site doesn't write for.
So a marketing blog with 20,000 monthly visits, nearly all of them landing on a single "free movie streaming" page, is not a marketing blog with 20,000 readers. It's a site with one lucky page.
A high authority score tells you who links to a site. It doesn't tell you whether anyone reads it.
Test 2: Does the site exist mainly to sell links?
17% of the sites we reviewed failed on this test, which makes it the second most common reason a site didn't make the network. These sites often look fine at a glance: a logo, a blog layout, plenty of posts. Read five of them and the pattern shows.
Look for these signs:
- A "write for us" page that's really a price list, with rates for "dofollow" and "casino" posts.
- Posts on every topic at once, like CBD, home loans, pet food and crypto on one "lifestyle" blog.
- Articles that exist only to hold links, with three or four commercial links and no real point.
- No named authors, or author pages with stock photos and no other work.
But a site that sells placements isn't automatically bad. Plenty of real publications sell sponsored posts openly. The question is whether the site would still exist if the link buyers left. If the answer is no, its readers don't exist either.
Test 3: Do the metrics match what a third-party tool says?
11% of sites failed our API metrics check, which means the numbers they claimed didn't match the numbers we pulled. You can run the same comparison in two minutes.
Take the seller's claimed score and look it up yourself, today, in the tool it comes from. Domain Rating comes from Ahrefs, Domain Authority from Moz and Authority Score from Semrush. They're different scales, so compare like with like.
| What the seller shows | What to check | Red flag |
|---|---|---|
| A DR or DA number | The same metric, pulled by you, today | It's lower than claimed, or the seller quotes a metric from a different tool |
| A traffic screenshot | The organic traffic chart in Ahrefs or Semrush, with today's date | No date on the screenshot, or the chart doesn't match |
| A referring domains count | The referring domains report | Most referring sites are themselves link sellers or unrelated directories |
| "Real traffic, 50K a month" | Traffic by top page and by country | The traffic sits on one off-topic page or in the wrong country |
Here's a quick tell that combines Test 1 and Test 3. High DR with almost no organic traffic usually means the authority was built with links, not earned with readers.
Test 4: Does Google still index it?
8% of sites we reviewed were deindexed or penalized. It's the rarest failure and the most expensive one to miss, because a link on a page Google won't show sends nobody anywhere.
Search Google for site:example.com, using the domain you're checking. Then search for two or three of its recent post URLs one at a time. A blog with hundreds of posts that returns a handful of results, or recent posts that don't appear at all, has an indexing problem. Google's result counts for site: searches are rough estimates, so look for a gap that's obvious rather than counting precisely.
Manual actions show up only in the site owner's Search Console, so you can't check those from the outside. That's one reason a seller who audits sites for you is worth more than a seller who simply lists them.
What Google says about paid links
Google's spam policies are blunt about buying links to rank. This is the current wording, from the policy page Google last updated on Aug 28, 2026:
"Link spam is the practice of creating links to or from a site primarily for the purpose of manipulating search rankings."
"It's not a violation of our policies to have such links as long as they are qualified with a
rel="nofollow"orrel="sponsored"attribute value to the tag."
So know what you're buying. Ask whether the link will be dofollow or sponsored before you pay, not after. On LinkVouch, the publisher sets it. It's printed on the site card before you order. Nobody selling placements, including us, can tell you how Google will weigh a specific link.
Questions to ask any seller before you pay
You don't need special access to vet a seller. You need four answers, and how a seller answers tells you as much as what they say.
| Ask this | A good answer | A red flag |
|---|---|---|
| When was this traffic number measured? | A specific date, pulled from a named tool | "Recently", or a screenshot with no date |
| Will the link be dofollow or sponsored? | A clear answer before you order | "Whatever you need" |
| What happens if the link comes down in month seven? | A written policy with a time limit and who pays | "That never happens" |
| What's the total price, article included? | One number | A base price, then extras at checkout |
A 10-minute checklist you can copy
The test that saves the most money
If you only have two minutes, run Test 1. It catches more bad sites than the other three combined, and you can do it while the seller is still typing their reply.
LinkVouch editorial team
The people who audit every site before it joins the LinkVouch network. We ran link campaigns for agencies before we built this, which is why we check traffic dates first.