How we select donors: 14 metrics before placement

3 April 2026·6 min read·Wowseo.ai team

DR can be inflated, traffic can be fabricated. That's why every site goes through our 14-parameter check, and only about one in six makes it to placement.

Basic filter: metrics

DR/DA within niche range and live organic traffic — at least 1,000 visits/month from search.
Traffic dynamics over 12 months: sites in decline after updates are filtered out immediately.
Spam score and outbound link profile: share of 'for sale' external links, proximity to gambling/pharma sites.
Ratio of inbound to outbound links — link farms always have a skewed ratio.

Manual review

Then we look manually: a real editorial team and authors, publication frequency, comments and social activity, quality of recent content. We check the web archive — did the domain change its niche, was it an expired domain with a dirty history.

Topical proximity

A link from a trusted but irrelevant site works weaker than an average-metric but topical one. We assess relevance at section level, not just domain level: a fintech article on a general news site must appear in the relevant section.

After placement

Donors remain under monitoring: link indexation, dofollow preservation, platform traffic. Degraded sites go to a blacklist — shared across all our projects and updated weekly.

Result: out of ~6,000 platforms we keep roughly a thousand active donors. Slower than 'buying 100 links on a marketplace' — but that's exactly why these links deliver weight, not risk.

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