Publisher page checker

How to read the result

Where this fits in vetting

This tool covers what can be read from the page. The rest of the checks, including real organic traffic and the history of the domain, are in how to vet a publisher. For the domain itself, use the domain history checker.

The patterns that give a link seller away are described in link footprints and link seller scams. What a paid placement should cost is on the pages for paid guest posts and niche edits.

After you buy

Once a placement is live, confirm it with the backlink status checker, which reports whether your link is there, followed and on a page that can be indexed.

How to check a site before buying a guest post or link

Check the page your link would sit on, then the site around it, then the people selling it. Most sites on sale fail the first of those. BuzzStream’s 2026 analysis of roughly 257,000 sites selling guest posts rated 96.2% as low quality and found that 39.6% had no organic traffic at all. Only 1.37% met a basic bar of DR 65 or more with 10,000 monthly organic visits.

A page check is the cheapest filter you have, because it needs no paid tool. It cannot approve a site. It can tell you quickly that a site is not worth a second look.

What the tool counts, and how

Knowing how the count is made stops you misreading it.

• It reads the page as the server sends it. Links that a script adds after the page loads are not counted.
• It counts every link on the page, including the menu, the sidebar and the footer. Compare articles from the same site with each other instead of judging one number alone.
• The word count covers all visible text. A page that shows 400 words may hold a much shorter article.
• High-risk links are found by keyword in the linked domain or the anchor text: gambling, CBD, payday loans, essay writing, adult content and vaping. A keyword match can be wrong, so open the flagged links.
• The “dense links” note has a fixed trigger: ten or more followed outgoing links and fewer than 60 words per followed link. That is our own working rule, not a published limit.

Outbound link patterns that mark a link seller

No single number marks a link seller. The shape of the list of linked sites does. Read the table of sites and anchors in the result against these patterns.

Pattern in the result	What a normal article shows	What a link seller shows
Who is linked	Sources, tools and organisations that fit the subject	Shops, service firms and affiliates from unrelated industries
Anchor text	Names of sites, titles of studies, plain phrases	Exact commercial phrases such as “best payday loans” or “buy backlinks”
How links are marked	A mix, or a house rule applied to everything	Every commercial link followed, with selling words elsewhere on the page
Text per link	Long text with a few links	Short text built around one or two commercial links

A September 2026 guide from Setproduct gives a rule of thumb for the anchor pattern: 60% or more exact-match commercial anchors among a site’s outbound links is a red flag, where a normal site’s are mostly editorial. That is one source’s working threshold, not a measured limit. Anchor text and link footprints explain why repeated commercial anchors stand out.

One clean article proves little. Three articles that each link to a different unrelated business with a commercial anchor show how the site earns its money.

What followed, nofollow, sponsored and ugc links tell you

The bar in the result splits outgoing links into four kinds. Each one says something about the publisher’s habits.

Marked as	What the publisher is saying	What it tells a buyer
Followed (no label)	An ordinary link the site stands behind	Normal for editorial sources. On paid placements it means the site sells unlabelled links
nofollow	The site does not vouch for the target	Common as a blanket rule on news sites. A link here may still count, but nothing is promised
sponsored	The link exists because of payment	The site labels paid links, which is what Google’s policy asks for
ugc	A user added the link	You are looking at comments or forum posts, not edited content

Google’s spam policies, last updated on 28 August 2026 when we read them, list “buying or selling links for ranking purposes” as link spam, and say paid links are not a violation “as long as they are qualified with a rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" attribute value”. Link attributes has the detail.

Three readings follow from that.

Selling words plus all-followed commercial links. The site sells placements and labels none, and the risk is shared. Google has a manual action for “unnatural links from your site”, which applies to sites that sell or place manipulative outbound links. If the publisher is hit, the links stop counting. Selling links on your site explains the seller’s side.

Labels on the page. A site that marks paid content is following the rules. Better publishers tend to: ESBO’s September 2026 analysis of 16,625 publishers found that 57% of premium publishers label sponsored content, against 15% of budget publishers. The same analysis found that 39% of publishers with a Domain Rating of 80 or more sell nofollow placements only.

Everything nofollow. This is usually a house rule. Check the attribute before you pay a price that assumes a followed link.

Why links to gambling, loans and similar matter

Gambling, loans, CBD, adult content and essay writing are restricted niches. A publisher with editorial standards keeps a list of prohibited topics, and these are the usual entries. When a cooking blog or a local news site links to a casino with a commercial anchor, nobody on the editorial side chose that link. It was bought, or it was injected.

In our publisher vetting lesson, linking out to unrelated restricted niches is a hard fail whatever the rest of the score says, unless that niche is your own. In iGaming or another high-risk market, the flag means little.

There is a darker case. A casino or pharmacy anchor on a school, charity or council site, hidden or sitting in text that has nothing to do with the page, is one of the consistent signs of a hacked site. Hacked and cloaked links describes how to recognise them. Walk away from those.

Thin content

A page written to carry a link tends to be short, general and interchangeable. The word count in the result is a first test. The second is to read the article: the first step of our five-minute link farm check is to read three recent posts and ask whether anyone would subscribe to this.

Signs that go with thin content, from the same lesson: posts by “admin”, categories that cover every subject, and a publishing volume no edited site could keep up. Setproduct’s 2026 guide puts a small edited site at 3 to 10 posts a week and treats 5 to 15 a day across unrelated categories as a red flag. That is a rule of thumb from one source. Whether a link on an unvisited page helps at all is covered in do links from pages without traffic count.

A vetting routine that uses this tool

1. Check the domain’s past with the domain history checker. A repurposed expired domain ends the check.
2. Check two or three recent articles with this tool. Use the section your link would go in.
3. Check a “write for us” or advertising page if there is one. Look for a public price list.
4. Search Google for the site restricted to its own domain, together with words such as casino, CBD or payday. Sold content shows up at once.
5. Check organic traffic in a backlink tool. Look at the trend over 12 to 24 months, the top pages and the keywords. They should match the stated subject. Compare a second tool, as faked link metrics explains.
6. Check where the site is being sold. A domain that appears on circulated price lists has been sold many times. See seller lists and recycled inventory.
7. Score it with the 100-point scorecard in how to vet a publisher.
8. Agree terms, then verify. After the placement is live, run it through the backlink status checker.

If the site fails the first four steps, stop.

What to ask the publisher

• Can you send a sample of a recent paid article? A seller who will not show one is hiding the pattern this tool would reveal.
• Which attribute will the link carry, and will the article be labelled? Get the answer in writing.
• How long will the link stay, and what happens if it is removed? Most informal deals never say.
• Will another advertiser’s link be added to the same article?
• Will the article be indexable, in the sitemap and linked from a category page? Some sites park paid posts in a noindexed folder.
• Can you reply from an address on the site’s own domain? This confirms the seller controls the site. Link seller scams explains why it matters.
• Can you show Search Console with the property name visible? It is harder to fake than a figure in an email.

Put the agreed answers into the brief. How to write a placement brief has a template, and when a site asks for payment covers the choice between paying, offering something else and declining.

When to walk away

Walk away, whatever the price or the authority score, when:

• the site has no organic traffic
• unrelated articles link to casino, loan, adult or pharmacy sites and that is not your niche
• the page your link would sit on is set to noindex or names another address as canonical
• the seller will not name the site or show a sample page
• the link would be hidden, or placed without the owner’s knowledge
• the domain was dropped and rebuilt on a new subject

A page with nothing unusual in the result has earned the next step of vetting. It has not earned the order. For the whole buying process, see how to buy backlinks safely and auditing vendor deliveries.