People also ask
In practice
The scale problem is real: a campaign’s prospecting produces hundreds of candidates, each needing the same floor — and the failure modes of scaling are symmetrical (the fatigued reviewer who starts passing on patterns, the rubber-stamp pipeline that qualifies everything, the metric-only screen that misses everything a metric can’t see). The pipeline that holds: automated triage first — the metric floor, the traffic estimate, the basic index and deindexation checks, the tool-level risk scores — which removes the obviously unqualified in seconds per site.
Human review second, codified: the checklist (relevance read, editorial-bar screen, the link-farm pattern test, outbound profile) with a verdict per site and a logged reason — the checklist makes the reviewer’s judgement consistent and the verdicts auditable. Sample audits third: a senior reviewer re-checks a sample of passes monthly, because drift is systemic and only comparison catches it. The record: every candidate carries its checks, verdict and screener — the qualification log becomes the programme’s risk memory, and re-screening (sites decay) runs from it.
The honest economics: human review is the cost the quality floor is built from — roughly minutes per site after triage, which prices the programme’s qualification honestly and explains why the cheap end of the market skips it. The scale that matters is not “how many sites screened” but “how many placements survived the year” — the pipeline exists to make those two numbers converge.
See also: Publisher vetting checklist, Link risk screening, Site-level vs page-level qualification.
Related service: Link insertions.
