People also ask
In practice
The thirty-second test remains the most accurate instrument in the industry: open the site and scroll — if you’re jumping from crypto to health to SaaS to home improvement, with commercial links dropped into everything, the site was built to sell links, and no metric rescues it.
The systematic version adds the checks a scroll can miss: the article template test (are the posts the same skeleton with swapped keywords — a farm’s production line), the outbound profile (commercial anchors repeated across unrelated targets — a farm’s invoice list), the topical history (a site that changed subjects wholesale after acquiring its domain — an equity costume), the traffic shape (tool estimates with no corroborating engagement, comments, community), and the network view (shared hosts, shared templates, shared registration fingerprints across “unrelated” sites).
The screening’s placement in the pipeline: after the metric filter and traffic check, before the pitch — because the pattern disqualifies regardless of what the metrics say, and the check costs minutes. The scale version: screening hundreds of sites per campaign means the test is codified — a checklist with a verdict per site, logged — so the screener’s judgement is consistent and the rejects are remembered (farms resubmit under new branding). The stakes justify the rigour: a link from a farm is worse than no link — it spends budget, installs a pattern, and dies in the next devaluation sweep with its whole network.
See also: Site risk at scale, Link neighbourhood, PBNs.
Checklist: Site Qualification.
Related service: Link insertions.
