Got burned by a DR 71 site last week. 'Premium SaaS publication' my arse - same writer covering CRM, kitchen renovations, payday loans, and crypto in the same week. DR was real, site was garbage. that's the pattern: every time I've been screwed on a placement, the metric looked fine going in, it was something else i should've caught first.
so now DR comes dead last, basically a tiebreaker. i start with these filters:
First: who else does the site link out to. fastest filter there is. open three recent posts, scan the external links. if a 'marketing blog' is sending traffic to a debt consolidation service, a forex broker, and a CBD vendor, you know exactly what that site is. your article becomes the next link in that lineup.
Second: does the page itself make sense for the link. Relevant domain but irrelevant article doesn't help. The paragraphs around the link need to give it a reason to exist. if a real reader hits that section and the link feels dropped in, Google can tell.
third: traffic shape, not volume. A site with 80k monthly visits where none of it overlaps with the client's topic is worth less than a 5k site ranking for things the client actually cares about. The smaller, focused site wins almost every time.
Fourth: is the target page worth the link. Ignored this for years. you can land a strong backlink pointing at a page that's not built to absorb it - no internal links, no depth, no path for authority to flow to the pages that need ranking. fix the target before chasing the link.
DR/DA still gets checked at the end. if everything else clears and the metric is good, great. if the metric's strong but the rest looks rough, i pass faster than i used to. Someone in the thread said you can assume pitched links are shit. true. But if you filter properly, you can spot the ones worth taking
