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DFY -- Quality Control Checklist (Guest Posts)

Every DFY guest post goes through a comprehensive quality control review before it is delivered to you. This covers three stages: site selection, content review, and technical review.

Stage 1 — Site Selection

Before we place a link on any site, we check:

  • Is the site on our blacklist of known PBNs, guest post farms, resold sites, and other sites that do not meet our standards?

  • Does the site look spammy? We use direct observation — for example, a homepage plastered with unrelated casino links is an immediate disqualifier

  • Is the site categorically relevant to your niche?

  • What type of content does the site publish? Does it feel like a genuine site or a guest post farm?

  • Is there a 'Write For Us' page in the header, sidebar, or footer? We avoid all sites that have one

  • Does the site have current organic search traffic? Google trusts the sites it sends traffic to — we require a minimum of 500 organic visitors per month

  • Does the site have the domain authority needed to be useful for your campaign?

Stage 2 — Content Review

Once a placement is published, we review the content itself:

  • Is the content relevant to your target keyword and well written by a native speaker?

  • Does the article have at least 1,000 words?

  • Is the content formatted well — with headers, bullet points, block quotes, or a table of contents?

  • Is there at least one image in the article?

  • Is there at least one contextual internal link to other pages on the placement site?

  • Is there at least one contextual external link to a relevant page on another site — to help camouflage your link naturally?

  • Is there an author box or any labelling that identifies the article as a guest post or sponsored placement? If so, it must not be present

  • Is the content unique? We run every article through QueText to check for plagiarism

Stage 3 — Technical Review

We then run a full technical check on the placement:

  • Is your link nofollow? We inspect the link directly — a rel="nofollow" tag means no link equity is passed

  • Is your link marked as UGC or sponsored? We check for rel="ugc" or rel="sponsored" tags

  • Does the placement page have a meta noindex tag? We check the page source to confirm the page is indexable

  • Does the placement page have a meta nofollow tag? We verify this is not present

  • Does the site's robots.txt file exclude the placement page? We check domain.com/robots.txt for any rules blocking the page

  • Is the X-Robots-Tag in the HTTP header set to noindex, nofollow, or unavailable_after? HTTP headers are not visible to the naked eye — we use a dedicated tool to check this

Stage 4 — Orphan Check

Finally, and critically:

  • Can you navigate to the placement page from the homepage? If not, the page has been orphaned from the rest of the site — cut off from any internal link equity. An orphaned placement is worthless, and we are one of the very few services that check for this. 


 

If a placement fails any of these checks, we go back to the publisher to request fixes. If they do not cooperate, we replace the link entirely at our own cost.


 

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