How to Vet a Backlink Opportunity: The 12-Point Checklist We Use on Every Site

Most bad backlinks are bought from sites that fail checks you can run in under ten minutes. This is the 12-point checklist we run before any site enters the SaaS-SEO directory. Use it on any opportunity, whether it came from our database, an outreach reply or a marketplace listing.

The traffic reality checks

1. Real organic traffic, not just metrics

Domain Rating and Domain Authority can be inflated cheaply with junk links. Pull the site up in any traffic estimator and check for actual organic visitors. A DR 70 site with 150 monthly visits is a manufactured metric, not an opportunity. Prefer a DR 35 site with 10,000 real visits every time.

2. Traffic trend over 12 months

A cliff-edge traffic drop usually means a core update penalty or an expired domain rebuild. Links from penalised sites pass little value. Flat or growing is what you want; a slow decline is a judgement call.

3. Traffic from the right countries

If you sell to the UK and US and the host site's traffic is 90% from elsewhere, the link still passes some authority but the referral value and topical signals weaken. Check the geography matches your market.

The link hygiene checks

4. Outbound link density

Open three or four recent articles and count the external links. Genuine articles link out a handful of times. Ten or more unrelated commercial links per post is the signature of a link farm.

5. Who else they link to

Casinos, payday loans, essay mills and crypto gambling sitting next to your SaaS link put you in bad company, literally. Search engines judge pages partly by their outbound neighbourhood.

6. Dofollow status, checked, not promised

Hosts sometimes promise a dofollow link and deliver nofollow, sponsored or a JavaScript redirect. Inspect an existing placed link on the site before paying. Nofollow links are not worthless, but you should not pay dofollow prices for them.

The editorial checks

7. Content written for humans

Read one article properly. Unedited AI sludge, spun text or 400-word posts that say nothing mean the site exists for links, not readers. Your link inherits that credibility, or the lack of it.

8. Topical relevance to your product

The site, or at least the section your link will sit in, should plausibly share an audience with you. Relevance is worth more than raw authority for competitive SaaS terms.

9. A real acceptance path

A contact page that bounces, a write-for-us page from 2019 and a dead submission form waste your outreach time. Verify there is a working route in before the opportunity goes on your list. This check alone removes a surprising share of candidates; it removed several from our own first import batch.

The commercial checks

10. Price sanity

A price should be explainable by traffic, authority and audience. Suspiciously cheap usually means a farm; wildly expensive usually means an agency stacking margin. Ask what the fee includes: word count, dofollow, permanence.

11. Permanence in writing

Ask how long the placement stays live. Reputable hosts say "lifetime of the site" and mean it. If the answer is 12 months, that is renting, not buying, and the price should reflect it.

12. The site would survive without selling links

The summary question. Does this site have a reason to exist beyond placements: products, ads, an audience, a newsletter? If link sales are clearly the business model, walk away, whatever the metrics say.

Scoring it

We treat points 1, 4, 7 and 12 as hard fails: any one of them kills the opportunity. The rest are graded and feed the quality score you see on every entry in the directory. If you would rather not run 12 checks on every candidate yourself, that is exactly the work a SaaS-SEO subscription buys: every listed opportunity has already passed this list, and entries that decay get paused.