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In practice
The manufacture is well-understood because the metrics are public formulas: expired domains inherit equity (a defunct magazine’s DR arrives with the domain), link injections from a network lift a target cheaply, 301-sculpting routes equity through chains, and traffic estimates are inflated by keyword-scraped pages or outright bot patterns. The result is a market segment whose entire product is the number — sites with impressive metrics, no audience and no editorial life, selling placements to buyers who screen by metric. The defence is reading what the metric cannot fake.
Traffic against substance: the estimate checked against the site — does real content hold real readers, do posts get engagement, does the audience match the claimed market. History: Wayback shows what the domain was (a gardening site suddenly publishing SaaS reviews is wearing someone’s equity). Link provenance: where did the equity come from — a natural profile’s sources, or a sudden injection? Topical coherence: the content’s subject line across time — fraud often shows as a topic migration following the acquired DR.
The systematic version: the qualification floor (metric filter, then human checks) exists precisely because metrics lead the unwary; and the portfolio rule — spread placements across genuinely independent, substantive publishers — limits the damage any single fraud does. The buyer’s heuristic that survives everything: metrics are an invitation to look; they are never the reason to buy.
See also: Domain Rating, PBNs, Traffic verification.
Related service: Link insertions.
