Link farms: how to spot one before you buy a guest post

If you've ever posted that you're looking for guest posts, you know what happens next. Your inbox fills with lists.

"DR 55, $60." "DR 70, general niche, $85, permanent dofollow." Fifty sites in a spreadsheet, every one with a great-looking number.

A lot of those sites are link farms. Here's how to tell before you pay.

What a link farm is

A link farm is a website whose real product is links. It publishes whatever people pay it to publish, links out to anyone, and exists to look authoritative on paper.

It's a close cousin of a PBN, a private network of sites built to pass links. I wrote about those in What is a PBN? The difference doesn't matter much. Both are sites Google has good reason to ignore, which means the link you paid for does nothing.

Google's spam policies say buying links that pass ranking credit is link spam. A site openly selling "dofollow" posts to anyone is advertising that it's doing exactly that.

The warning signs

1. High authority, little traffic

This is the big one. A site with a DR of 60 should usually get real visitors from Google. If it gets almost none, the authority is probably borrowed: an old expired domain, or links bought from other farms.

2. Traffic that fell off a cliff

Look at the last 12 months. A site that had steady traffic and then lost most of it often got hit by a Google update. The authority score hasn't caught up yet, so it still looks good on a sales sheet.

3. Very few ranking keywords

Real sites rank for lots of searches, even small ones. A site with a big authority score that ranks for 30 keywords isn't being trusted by Google for much.

4. A high spam score

Some tools score how much a site looks like known spam sites. One warning sign on its own doesn't prove much. Several together usually do.

5. Everything and nothing

Open the site. Is it about crypto, dog food, mortgages and Bali, all on the same homepage? Real blogs have a subject. Link farms have a price list.

6. Outbound links everywhere

Read three recent posts. If every one exists to link to a different business, with keyword anchor text, you're looking at the product, not the content.

7. A "write for us" page that's really a menu

Prices for "dofollow," a discount for bulk, "no sponsored tag." That's a site promising to break Google's rules on your behalf.

What a good site looks like

The opposite of all of the above:

• Traffic that's steady or growing, even if it's small.
• Ranks for a few hundred real searches, or more.
• A clear topic close to yours.
• Real authors you can look up.
• Outbound links that help the reader, not every paragraph.

Honestly, a small blog with 2,000 real visitors a month in your niche is worth more than a "DR 70" farm. Readers can click. Google trusts it.

And if you do pay for a post, ask for the link to be marked sponsored. That's what Google asks for, and you still get the visitors. More in Nofollow, sponsored and ugc links.

Checking a list quickly

Checking 50 sites by hand takes an afternoon. That's why I built Link Health Check into DR Buddy.

Paste in the list someone sent you. Each site gets a score out of 100, starting at 100 and losing points for each warning sign: strong authority with low traffic, traffic down by half over the year, a high spam score, few ranking keywords, few sites linking to it. You get green, yellow or red, with the reason spelled out.

It won't make the decision for you. But it'll cut a list of 50 down to the five worth a closer look, in about a minute.