Check one: relevance
The publication, or at minimum the article, has to relate to your niche or the topic of your target page. A link to your accounting software from an article about small business bookkeeping reads naturally to both readers and search engines. The same link from a pet grooming blog reads like what it would be: a purchased slot with no context. Relevance is judged per placement, not per month, which is why story angles start from your pages rather than from a list of publications we like. The pool spans both US and UK titles, because campaigns run for companies in both markets.
Check two: real traffic
A site that ranks for nothing and attracts no visitors is a site search engines have already discounted, whatever its authority score claims. We check third-party traffic estimates and ranking footprints before pitching any publication, and the bar holds whether the target is a national name like the Daily Mail or a specialist trade title. Publications with real audiences maintain their pages, keep their domains, and stay in the index, which also means your link survives longer. Traffic is the single best filter against the zombie sites that fill cheap link inventories.
Check three: indexation
A link on a page search engines have not discovered or indexed may have limited search value at that point. Before pitching, we confirm the publication itself is indexed and has an established search footprint. After placement, we check whether the hosting article can be discovered and indexed, while recognising that Google decides which individual URLs enter its index. A placement that remains unavailable to search after a reasonable period is treated as a quality problem to investigate, not a metric to hide. Google's own crawling and indexing documentation explains that distinction.
Check four: authority between DA/DR 40 and 95
Every placement sits in the DA/DR 40 to 95 range, and that range is one of the four things we guarantee in writing. The floor at 40 filters out weak and throwaway domains. The ceiling at 95 keeps us honest: promising you a stack of links from the handful of famous sites above it would be exactly the kind of guarantee this industry should stop making. That said, campaign placements have landed on names like Forbes, The Sun, and Yahoo Finance when the story earned it, and each counts as one link toward your month like any other. Domain Authority is a Moz metric and Domain Rating is an Ahrefs metric; neither is used by Google. We therefore treat the range as one screen among four rather than the whole story. A DR 45 publication with real traffic and tight relevance can be more useful than a DR 80 site with neither.
What gets rejected outright
Four categories never carry your link, at any price. First, private blog networks: clusters of sites owned or rented by one operator, existing mainly to pass authority between themselves. They create detectable patterns and can fall within Google's link spam policies. Second, link farms: sites publishing large volumes of unrelated posts where each article exists to hold someone's paid link. Third, marketplace inventory: spreadsheets of placements resold from vendor to vendor until many buyers share the same tired list. Fourth, guest posts and niche edits of any kind, even on decent sites, because we sell digital PR and nothing else. Our placements come from stories we pitch ourselves, month by month, to journalists at real US and UK news sites.
We also decline plans we cannot serve to this standard. If your niche is too narrow for us to find enough qualifying publications to sustain a monthly minimum, we say so before taking payment, not after.