How to vet a donor site before it sits beside your brand
Authority numbers get a donor onto your shortlist. Reading it gets the donor off again, or keeps it there. This page is the reading.
RoyalSEO editorial team ·
The rule we apply
If you would not frame the page, do not take the link
A donor for a premium brand passes two tests. Its pages read like something a client could stumble on without wincing, and its audience overlaps with yours. Metrics come third.
Read three recent articles, not the homepage
Look at what sits beside the link
Check the language and the country of the readers
The six-step path (a decision tree in prose)
01
Is the niche adjacent to yours?
If yes, continue. If it is a general news or lifestyle site, continue only when the section you would appear in is relevant and tidy. If it is unrelated, stop.
02
Does the site have readers?
Compare the organic traffic on the row with what the pages feel like. A tiny audience on a high rating is a warning that the rating came from elsewhere.
03
Does anything on the site sell links openly?
Look for a page titled "write for us" with a price list. A handful of those is common, but a whole site built around them is not the company you want.
04
What are the neighbouring articles?
Read the titles around the one you would be near. Casino, pills, loan-shark language or auto-spun text means no.
05
Does the writing hold up?
Read one article aloud. If a managing partner would stop at the first paragraph, the link is wrong for you.
06
Can you say why in one sentence?
Write the reason into your notes. If you cannot, close the tab.
Red flags, and the milder reading of each
A hypothetical review guide for a firm choosing donors for a single money page.
Red flag
Milder reading
How we would act
Every article links out to a different industry
A blog that sells guest posts widely
Pass for a brand page
Domain Rating high, organic traffic near zero
An old site on a redirect, or links bought in bulk
Pass unless the content is clearly alive
Articles published in several languages with no editor
Automated translation
Pass
Author names that change daily
Contributor churn
Read two articles before deciding
Sudden traffic cliff in the last 12 months
Algorithm trouble, such as after the March 2024 core and spam updates
Pass or wait
One niche, tight editorial standards, modest traffic
A trade title with loyal readers
Often the best fit
Why metrics only start the conversation
Domain Rating comes from Ahrefs, and Domain Authority comes from Moz. Both are estimates built from link data. Neither is a signal Google reads.
That matters when you buy high authority backlinks for a firm with a small client list, because the damage from one poor neighbour is larger than the gain from one extra point of rating. A site can score well and still publish content you would not want beside your name.
Our own crawler and our own index supply the figures. We show Domain Rating, traffic and referring domains because buyers ask for them. Limits exist, though. Each term is unpacked in the glossary, and a few more caveats sit there.
A worked example (hypothetical)
A hypothetical boutique employment-law firm shortlists three donors for its guidance page. One is a national business magazine, one a regional chamber's news site, one a general lifestyle blog with the highest rating. After reading three articles on each, the firm keeps the first two and drops the lifestyle blog, despite the rating. The numbers here are invented for illustration.
Notes to keep for every donor you accept
Donor domain and the URL of the article you read
Its Domain Rating and traffic on the day you ordered, as shown in the catalogue