A link marketplace picked ten "high-authority" sites for my product. I checked all ten.
A few days ago a link-building platform sent me a shortlist for inputprobe.com: ten gaming and tech sites, DR 55 to 80, €92 to €631 each, dofollow, most of them "permanent". The platform's senior SEO strategist had reviewed the list and called the fit excellent. The total came to about €2,700.
My product measures things for a living. inputprobe is a set of browser tools for mice, keyboards and controllers that publish how accurate each reading actually is, so checking a claim before trusting it is the day job. I gave each site about ten minutes. Here is what came back.
Three were real publications. A PlayStation news site with named editors, daily reviews, and a news-tip address kept separate from its advertising address. A print gaming magazine with published editorial and ethics policies. A streaming-analytics company whose reporters publish sourced, same-day stories. None of them sells guest posts, which is exactly why they are worth something, and exactly why no marketplace can sell you a link on them that survives.
One was a legacy tech brand that was sold years ago and now mostly rewrites Apple rumours and "$4 off AirPods" deals.
One was my direct competitor. It runs the same kind of browser controller tests I do, and its blog is already publishing articles aimed at my keywords. It was listed at €501 as a "perfect topical match". It is. That's the problem.
The other five were link farms, and none of them was subtle once I knew where to look.
Three "different" sites had byte-identical robots.txt files and the same Cloudflare nameserver pair. One of them had a guest-post page telling submitters to mention a fourth domain name in their email. They had copied the page from another site in the network and never changed it. The same page said, twice, that free guest posts are not accepted, listed "great backlinks" as the first benefit, and then accidentally published the operator's own list of Google search operators for finding guest-post sites.
Four of the ten block AhrefsBot in robots.txt while letting every other crawler in. That hides their outbound links from the one tool a buyer would use to see how many paid links each page already carries.
The "DR 80, 86K traffic" gaming site, the cheapest on the list at €92, turned out to be a team-name generator from 2022. Its last thirty posts were CBD capsules, kratom, betting, Czech tax advice and junk-car removal. The WordPress API lists exactly one author account for some 1,400 posts, and not one comment has ever been published. It was cheap because the market has already priced it as dead. The DR number just hasn't caught up.
Another listed a street address that doesn't exist, had a "Gambling" category sitting next to Minecraft in its menu, and credited its articles to a writer whose name looks generated. It had even published a profile piece about that writer.
Every money link I sampled on the five was dofollow with no rel="sponsored": casinos, CBD, and an Amazon SEO tool that got five links in a single "comparison" post.
If you get one of these offers, the checks that did the work:
- Read /robots.txt first. Blocking AhrefsBot specifically is a tell.
- Pick two sites from the same list and compare their robots.txt and - nameservers. Networks reuse both.
- On WordPress sites, open /wp-json/wp/v2/users. One account behind a thousand posts is a farm.
- Scroll the last thirty posts, not the homepage. The homepage is dressed; the archive isn't.
- Find the "write for us" page and read the small print. "No free posts" is a price list.
- Check whether the "perfect match" is your competitor.
I didn't buy any of it. The one useful thing to come out of the exercise was an editor's news-tip address at a site that doesn't sell links at all, which is the only kind of link I actually want.
If you've been sent a list like this and want a second pair of eyes on a specific site, ask in the comments and I'll say what I'd check.
