Publisher vetting checklist

Vetting exists to make qualification repeatable — the same checks, in the same order, by every screener, so the quality floor is a process and not a mood.

The sequence: metric floor first (a DR threshold — 40 in this programme — as the cheap filter that removes the weakest tier without pretending to judge quality); traffic verification (the estimate checked against the site: trend, sources, top pages, geography for international placements); relevance read (site, page and passage level — does this publisher’s actual content sit beside your category); the editorial-bar screen (any “write for us” or “advertise with us” page fails the site outright — the signal that placement is the product); the link-farm screen (the thirty-second scroll: unrelated niches, commercial anchors everywhere, content that exists to host links — plus the network view: shared hosts and thin histories across “unrelated” domains); and the outbound review (what else they link to, how labelled, how frequent — your link inherits their habits).

Each check is recorded per site, with a verdict and a one-line reason, so the vetting log becomes the team’s institutional memory and re-vetting (sites decay) is fast. The two entries most teams skip are the ones that catch the expensive mistakes: the traffic check against the site itself, and the outbound review — because a publisher’s habits with everyone else’s links are a preview of yours.

See also: Quality signals: DR, traffic, relevance, content, Traffic quality of publishers.

Checklist: Site Qualification.

Related service: Guest posts.