Target Selection · Lesson 1 of 14 · 13 min
What Makes a Good Guest Posting Target the 5 Point Evaluatio
A five-point checklist filters guest post targets fast, keeping your pipeline focused on sites that will actually move the needle.
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Authority pathway
Guest Posting Pro System Target Selection
Stage 1
five checks
Stage 2
Red flags to reject immediately
Stage 3
Scoring targets inside RankLinks
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The five checks
Relevance to your niche, real organic traffic, an active publishing schedule, a genuine editorial process, and a dofollow link policy are the five checks worth running on every prospective site. Relevance matters more than raw authority: a moderately-sized blog squarely in your niche is worth more than a huge general-interest site that will bury your link among unrelated content.
Active publishing schedule is a proxy for a live audience; a site that last published eight months ago is unlikely to have an editor actively reviewing pitches. A genuine editorial process, evidenced by varied author bylines and visible editing standards, indicates your content will sit alongside credible work rather than in a paid-link farm.
- Topical relevance to your niche or an adjacent audience
- Verifiable organic traffic, not just domain authority score
- Published new content within the last 60 days
- Multiple distinct author bylines, not just the owner
- Confirmed dofollow links in existing guest posts
Red flags to reject immediately
Sites that advertise a fixed price for guest posts on the homepage, sites with an unusually high ratio of outbound links per article, and sites whose 'write for us' page reads like it was built purely to attract link-seekers rather than genuine writers should all be rejected outright, regardless of their domain metrics.
Scoring targets inside RankLinks
Add a custom scoring column to your RankLinks prospect list scoring each site 0-2 across the five checks for a quick 0-10 total, and only move sites scoring 6 or above into active outreach to keep your time invested in the highest-probability targets.
Key takeaways
- Score every prospect on relevance, traffic, activity, editorial process and link policy
- Reject sites openly selling guest post placements
- Prioritise niche relevance over raw domain authority
- Only pursue outreach on targets scoring 6 or above out of 10
Practise it now in RankLinks
Build your first 50-site opportunity database inside RankLinks.
3h 8m of material in this course · 14 lessons